Sofia steals a golden seabream

Sofia Papastergiadis’s theft of a dorado turns a practical exercise prescribed by Dr Gómez into a test of attention, shame, and self-command. She enters the market thinking like an anthropologist, chooses a fish after rejecting other possibilities, and gets it out by distracting the cashier. The act gives her a new sense of purpose, but its narrowed focus leaves her uncertain about what that purpose costs; later, preparing the fish for Ingrid Bauer makes the theft part of a deliberately bolder beginning.

The exercise and its setting

The theft begins with Dr Gómez’s suggestion that Sofia steal a fish to acquire more courage and purpose. She treats the proposal as an anthropological experiment, though she recognizes that it edges towards magic or magical thinking. The assignment makes an ordinary market visit into an inquiry about how boldness is performed and what it feels like from inside. Her search for instructions on gutting fish produces more than nine million results, a comically vast body of expertise that cannot tell her how to carry out the actual experiment.

The market is tucked into the basement of an apartment block near a Romanian pizzeria, away from the tourist routes. Women from the village are already buying the day’s catch. Sofia is not entering an abstract laboratory: the fish represent a livelihood, and the cashier watches the customers while weighing mackerel on an old-fashioned brass scale. The practical and ethical stakes sit alongside her private experiment. Sofia knows that the catch is the fishers’ hard-won bounty and that the cashier’s sales support them, but she tries not to dwell on that as she decides what to take.

Her body keeps registering the consequences of an earlier danger. The basket’s leather straps chafe the raised welts left by jellyfish stings, described as a sprawling web of venomous tattoos. This discomfort accompanies her attempt to remain inconspicuous, making the act less like a clean experiment than an action undertaken in a vulnerable, irritated body.

Choosing and taking the dorado

At first Sofia considers a monkfish, whose gaping mouth and rows of sharp teeth make it seem almost monstrous. She touches its mouth, then realizes that she has already drawn attention to herself. The encounter shifts her attention from the fantasy of being an unseen thief to the difficulty of acting while watched. A pile of octopus offers another possibility: its soft, shapeless body seems easy to steal. But the thought of its ability to change identity and imitate a predator unsettles her. She connects its changing skin to human expressions of excitement, humiliation, fear, and shame, and looks away from its dilated eyes.

Then she sees the dorado. Its furious-looking eyes make the fish seem to meet her gaze, and she decides it is meant to be hers. The choice is not simply tactical: the fish’s apparent anger gives it a distinct presence in her imagination. Sofia also distinguishes boldness from mere audacity. A woman in the market commands attention by raising her voice, but Sofia questions whether that kind of force is the quality she wants. The theft becomes a more specific trial: she must conquer her fear of being discovered and shamed, rather than simply imitate someone loud.

She still uses misdirection. Sofia relaxes her muscles and moves slowly towards the fish, comparing her stillness to a leaf and then to a tea leaf, cockney rhyming slang for thief. With her left hand she touches the price tag on the langoustines, drawing the cashier’s attention away from her right hand as it slides the dorado into the basket. The dexterity of the act depends on dividing attention: one hand offers a visible distraction while the other does the hidden work.

Purpose, cost, and aftermath

Sofia walks straight out instead of lingering. She registers a new sense of intention, forceful enough to shut out her other senses. Purpose, in her account, is not an uncomplicated gain: it requires losing some things in order to gain others, and she remains unsure whether the exchange is worth it. The episode therefore gives the theft a double result. She has done what she set out to do and discovered that she can act under pressure, yet the single-mindedness that makes the action possible also narrows her awareness of everything else around her.

At the beach apartment she holds the fish by the tail and finds it still heavy, plump, shiny, and, in her imagination, furious. She takes off her shoes and spreads her toes on the floor before scaling it with a blunt knife and cutting it open from tail to head. The work is physical and messy: the guts are white and slimy, and blood drips from her hands. As she cleans the fish, she draws on both sides of her family. She imagines the Greek side from Thessaloniki needing no internet search to gut a fish and evokes ancestors catching plaice in the shallows of the Aegean; she sets this against the Yorkshire side, associated with buying fish from trawlermen who endured raw winds and Arctic seas. The stolen fish becomes a point at which her divided family inheritance meets in practical knowledge, memory, and bloodied hands.

From theft to a bolder life

Sofia grills the dorado and prepares a terrace feast for Ingrid Bauer, laying out matching plates, cutlery, and wine glasses, with watermelon and mint chilling in the refrigerator and a homemade bittersweet amaretto cheesecake for dessert. The care invested in the meal changes the theft’s immediate purpose: the fish is no longer only proof that Sofia could evade the cashier, but the centre of an evening she has arranged and made generous. When Ingrid arrives, Sofia offers wine, but Ingrid wants water; Sofia has water ready because she keeps it for her mother, and recognizes it as the right sort for Ingrid. Ingrid sits close, then closer. The scene identifies the theft as the beginning of a bolder life, linking the experiment in courage to Sofia’s capacity to prepare, invite, and move towards intimacy. The fish has not resolved her doubts about purpose, but it has carried her from imagined daring into a tangible act of hospitality.