The Swimmers Read online

  The Swimmers

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  About the author

  Copyright

  The Swimmers

  Joaquín Pérez Azaústre

  Translated by

  Lucas Lyndes

  Dedication

  For María del Mar Roca

  Epigraph

  If that is so, it is a mystery we cannot understand; and if it is a mystery, we have the right to preach to man that what matters is not freedom of choice or love, but a mystery that he must worship blindly, even at the expense of his conscience.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  Chapter 1

  The swimmer contemplates his future. He can’t see it, not at first, when he sets out from home or the cubicle he perhaps calls home, grabbing the backpack prepared the day before. Not when he sets the rubber flip-flops beneath the carefully folded bath towel; not when he checks to make sure he’s got his bathing suit, his swim goggles, and the red cloth cap he will pull snugly round his head, squeezing tight as he dons it. Not even when he walks out the door with the bag slung over his shoulder and his sunglasses on, to protect his eyes from the glaring light outside, from the noontime rain withered by the sun’s whiteness, not on his route to the sports complex, past the intersections and crosswalks he knows by heart. He can’t see it when he walks through the door of that school, with its state champion junior swim team, and pays for a ticket and heads to the locker room and says an absurd hello, a hello no one actually hears, but one he says even if there’s nobody there, not even a lingering shadow, not the tiniest puddle on the floor; nor when he drops the coin into the slot in the locker, stores his things inside, and turns the key; nor when he hears it echo as he closes it.

  The swimmer contemplates his future only after his first few strokes. It’s not enough to walk, with the slow gait of a strange and graceless duck, dragging his flip-flops over the wet surface, or to leave the towel hanging on a hook under the wall clock, or even to quickly stretch his arms and legs or choose a lane—empty, if he’s lucky, or perhaps just the one that’s least busy. It’s when he comes into contact with the water and his body gains definition as it adjusts to the temperature of the pool, as he begins to sense his shoulders and back, his hands and feet, stimulated by the pressure, that his head begins to slowly clear. As he counts off the meters and time, another, deeper kind of time begins to swell up inside him, a time that moves in every direction at once: north and south of him, east and west of him, in a succession of dormant images which awaken then, only then, after this surreptitious contact with the water, and attach themselves to a meaning, falling into a sequence and gaining lucidity.

  All day long the pool is occupied by the school swim teams. But the lunch and dinnertime slots, when the children are absent, are opened up for free swim, whether with a day ticket or season pass, during the specified hours: in the afternoon, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., and at night from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. The swimmer, who we’ll call Jonás, normally comes several days a week. Whenever he comes in the afternoon, as he does today, he is almost always accompanied by Sergio, who alternates between the crawl and the breaststroke, unlike Jonás, who only does the breaststroke. And so, over the course of the same session, fifty minutes a day for the last three years, Sergio leads by at least 500 meters for every 2,500 meters Jonás covers. Not because Jonás doesn’t swim a fast breaststroke (he’d be the fastest around if it weren’t for a guy he and Sergio call Aquaman, who seems to breathe with gills and has the most powerful kick in the pool, as if he had been born in the water, his legs like a frog’s topped off with fins), but because the distance Sergio loses when they both swim the breaststroke is recovered twice over when he switches to the crawl.

  Jonás is a power swimmer. Jonás doesn’t glide through the water, Jonás thrusts. Just as his chosen style (though it wasn’t precisely chosen by him, but rather his doctors, twenty-five years ago, to correct the incipient deviation in his spine)—the breaststroke—has shaped his body, the way he swims also goes a great way toward explaining his personality. Jonás doesn’t flow, like Aquaman. Aquaman might as well be one of the countercurrents generated by the swimmers as they move. Aquaman could be a torrent of water. Sergio, in some ways, also gives the impression—especially when he swims the crawl—of being made of water, becoming one with it, never breaking from the surface, maintaining that horizontal line. Jonás, on the other hand, has never glided in his life, whether in the water or out. Jonás simply thrusts, Jonás swims in bursts, lunging with his shoulders, his back; Jonás lunges with his arms and, to a lesser degree, his legs—his lower body is not as powerful and weighs him down. Sergio, however, has a strong kick, maybe because he has always played football: he even goes to the stadium on the occasional Sunday, if there’s a big game and he manages to get box seats.

  That’s not to say that Sergio has no upper-body power. He has, but he doesn’t need it. He knows how to glide. Jonás, on the contrary, only knows how to lunge. When he swims, sometimes he hears a voice in his head, shouting, Lunge, lunge. It has long since ceased to be his father’s voice and become his own. And he lunges. It’s the only thing he knows how to do. Lunge and lunge. In the pool and out of it. Thrust and thrust. And bring his shoulders in tight. And lengthen his stroke. And loosen his legs, and tuck his head down, trying to coast the next meter on his previous stroke. He has never succeeded in accumulating momentum; he’s always had to swim stroke by stroke, covering the distance not with the kinetic energy created by impetus itself, but with an effort that fizzles at its inception, which is born and dies that very instant.

  Because of all this, Sergio always finishes a few minutes earlier. He even extends his swim sometimes, so Jonás can have time to do the 2,500; stopping shortly thereafter, Jonás takes off his goggles, sets them on the edge of the pool, and catapults himself out with a graceful movement of the arms. He pauses to take two or three deep breaths, raising his eyes toward the enormous horizontal picture window on the second floor, behind which he can make out several elongated silhouettes, not quite still and apparently absorbed in watching the swimmers, standing on the opposite side of the window from the translucent water.

  “Take your time. I’m going to go take a shower.”

  Jonás tends to enjoy that moment when he is left alone, watching the wi
ndow.

  Chapter 2

  Does the body have a memory? Jonás once read something about muscle memory, how the muscles learn and retain different movements, any act of reflex, which ceases to be a command from the brain when it’s repeated enough, instead becoming an even quicker response, the sort of unfettered reaction which is triggered even before a nervous impulse. But it is not this type of corporeal memory that Jonás is thinking of, which is more immediate than remote in any case, perhaps a cumulative memory. Does the body have a deeper memory, one that begins at the point where recollection ends? Because muscle memory, it would seem, is born of continuous use, of daily habit. All this is memory, all this is recollection. All this is accumulation. But there, where accumulation, memory, recollection end: might there persist some small remnant?

  This is what Jonás feels after he has been submerged for a time. If his breathing is right, if his body adapts to the rhythm of strokes and kicks, he falls into a sort of strange placidity, despite the intense effort. He notices it especially if he rests, if he closes his eyes and lets himself sink, as if a dead weight were dragging him down, his back up against the wall, until he is sitting at the bottom of the pool. His lungs are full, concentration comes naturally: concentration converted into perception, the capacity to see it all and understand it. But if he also shuts his eyes just then and lets the effects of the oxygen dissipate, the water becomes darkness, and he can no longer see the fluttering legs of the other swimmers, their thrusts, slow or fast, gliding along, nor can he perceive the deafness of the water: he hears and sees nothing, except the vigorous and steady thud of his own heart, in that darkness where the world cannot listen in.

  It’s another way of being alone: reducing himself to a pulse. Jonás always does this after finishing his laps. Sometimes he even thinks that he swims to reach this point, to let himself sink, listening to his body quiver, the tiny thud beneath his chest in that obscurity if he closes his eyes tight, and then rise to the surface like a newborn. In his wake he leaves a pearly blue amniotic fluid on the tiles, a sort of return to the primogenital light, that first intake of breath, when the muscles do not yet have any memory. Perhaps leaving the water, in its own remote way, is like being born.

  “Martina’s pregnant.”

  Jonás opens his eyes wide and stares at Sergio: radiant, full of the life he has chosen, the confirmation of his own success. Jonás practically leaps up from the table, embracing him in his blue suit, with its almost youthful classic cut: he’s never been so happy to pat someone’s back. He and Sergio have known each other since college; he remembers the countless nights and trips, Sergio’s drawings in his notebook, how the best law firms in the city fought over his friend after he finished his double major; and when Sergio started working for one of them, how he told Jonás, a few months later, that he had started seeing one of his coworkers, Martina; and the bachelor party and the wedding, especially the wedding, and a series of other instants suddenly appear, because Martina is pregnant and Sergio has waited until they got to the restaurant to break the news.

  That moment comes back to Jonás now as he sits down across from Sergio again. It happened in this very place, almost certainly at this very table. Paula is four years old now. Since then, every time they’ve gone swimming together, normally three times a week but occasionally twice, once on an exceptional basis, depending on Sergio’s business trips and his seminars and conferences, Jonás has reminisced about that instant, at that table next to the glass wall where he could see, in the distance, one of the façades of the stadium: on the glassed-in terrace of the very same restaurant, with its particularly cozy atmosphere on stormy days. It was an incredible feeling to swim and sense the water bearing down on him, first in the pool and then in the street, but protected now by that transparent surface.

  He remembers that moment every time they go to the restaurant, but not just because of the news of Sergio’s impending paternity. It was also the day Jonás had decided to reveal that Ada had left him; how one night she had sat down across from him at the kitchen table and said, after two glasses of wine, that he already knew her reasons and she wasn’t going to repeat them: she would live with a friend of hers while he found an apartment, or she could look for a new place. But as Jonás hugged Sergio, he thought to himself that this wasn’t the time to tell him; his friend was going to be a father, and Jonás didn’t want to ruin his day by forcing him to be his confidante, to console him and cheer him up with phrases like, There are lots of people who care about you.

  Unfortunately, reason is not always aided by willpower: after a couple beers, a Caesar salad with prawns on a bed of sliced avocados, and two sirloin canapés topped with melted brie cheese, they kept on toasting, and with each new toast Jonás continued gently along his downward spiral; the more elated he saw Sergio, the greater the glow of his blond hair and paternal eyes, in a man who wasn’t yet thirty, the more exposed Jonás felt, especially so on that stormy day, as if there were no picture window to protect him, as if he were out there in his bathing suit, in the rain, trying to seek refuge, soaked and barefoot in the middle of a street with wet sidewalks, under the shelter of the occasional cornice, as if a series of minute and volatile waves were roiling around in the circular mold of the tumbler, with a dash of diluted water that he contemplated as it spread through the whisky, liquefying into an amber-colored rain.

  “Aquaman was on a tear; did you see him? I was in his lane today; I had to change to the crawl just so he wouldn’t pass me.”

  “I only kept up with him doing the breaststroke for a couple laps. Then I let him go.”

  “The best thing about trying to match his pace is that you break your own records: I think today was my fastest time this month.”

  Jonás nods and then stretches out his arm. They look steadily at one another for a few seconds. They’ve toasted together so many times they no longer need a reason.

  “How’s Paula?”

  “She’s a riot. She spends all day chattering and laughing. Martina and I are so used to going everywhere with her that we can’t even remember what it was like to go out just the two of us. We’ve tried a few times, going to dinner and a play, but I don’t think we know how to have a good time without her anymore.”

  After smiling, Jonás lowers his eyelids and focuses on the sirloin. He starts to slice it very slowly into tiny pieces, moving the metal blade and handle without haste, as if it were suddenly difficult for him to raise his eyes and meet Sergio’s vibrant gaze in all its plenitude.

  Chapter 3

  When he leaves the water he is overcome by a sense of defenselessness. Before, during the last few laps, with his breathing matched to the rhythm of his body, with his kicks perfectly synchronized in the wake opened by his arms, he achieves a sensation of sustained force: just then, there is an instant where Jonás knows he could go another half hour beyond his usual fifty minutes, even an hour, or maybe two, because when his breathing is right and his blood is circulating with such brio, he can swim all day, not too slow, not too fast, until the sun sets and even later, when the lights in the complex are shut off; Jonás could go on even in the dark: and it is in that instant of realization, when his forward movement no longer costs him effort, that he gets out of the pool.

  After feeling that inner strength, so highly combustible, he leans his back against the edge of the pool and hoists himself up with his shoulder muscles and a bit of help from his forearms, though all the tension is focused in his wrists, pushing his triceps up until his torso resurfaces from the water; his thighs folded against his chest allow his heels to pull even with the edge, and he rises nimbly to an upright position. It is then that he is overcome by this defenselessness, as he tries clumsily to put his flip-flops on; his muscles are not yet used to the air, and suddenly there’s the cold, exciting the pores of his skin, and his downy hair lit up with a heightened clarity, curling in upon itself even after he dons his bathrobe; he has to walk into the locker room and set foot on that flooded fl
oor, which is covered with some kind of thin rubber material that’s supposed to provide traction. Anyone might slip there, and the vigor he felt in the pool abandons him until the next day: everything in between is transience, even after the shower, when he has thoroughly dried his toes and covered them, put his shoes on, and combed his hair while peacefully gazing at his face in the mirror, with the lines of the swimming goggles forming temporary bags under his eyes. Once he’s outside again, on his way to the restaurant with Sergio, he will regain control of his footsteps, he won’t slip; but something will tell him he’s no longer safe, that he has left that security behind.

  “Have you heard anything from her?”

  “From who?”

  “Who else? Ada.”

  He hadn’t been able to contain himself. That same afternoon, now remote, when Sergio revealed to him in the restaurant that Martina was pregnant, Jonás had confessed that he’d been looking for a new apartment for several days, though he hadn’t quite accepted the idea; he would need a smaller place because he was alone now.

  “You’re not alone; you’re just not with Ada. That’s not the same thing.”

  Jonás was unsettled by Sergio’s lack of surprise. He seemed more dismayed than anything; he commiserated with him then, though Jonás wasn’t so sure he was genuinely upset, that he was truly sorry, that he really thought Jonás had lost something, or whether, on the other hand, it was simply empathy he was feeling, the perverse result of turning his own happiness on its head, the better to understand Jonás: the difference between one life, Sergio’s, capable of engendering a brand new life with a willing companion, and Jonás’s, unfocused, a life that had engendered nothing more than a feeling of being set adrift.

  “It isn’t that I’m not surprised. It’s just that you two were never very conventional. At least, it didn’t seem so from the outside looking in. You gave the impression that each of you was leading your own separate life.”