The Swimmers Read online

  Before he can reconsider, he tries to leap from the bed and ends up kneeling on the ground. It could have been worse, he hears his own voice without unsticking his lips, but he can’t congratulate himself yet: his gamble hasn’t completely paid off, he still has to stretch his arm a bit further, and he does, and it’s then that he knocks over two empty bottles and glimpses another. They roll away after bumping into his hands, which advance clumsily, though the third remains reassuringly static beneath the blue cloth of the curtains. As best he can, he pieces together the two moments, those two circumstances that have brought him to this humiliating position on the ground: three empty bottles of whisky and only two glasses, one of them filled just over halfway with a slightly ochre liquid, probably melted ice, and maybe a trace of violet lipstick, next to another glass, empty, transparent and empty: his own glass; the telephone growls, Lunge! lunge!, vibrating still, and outside the picture window that looks out over the two turrets of the church, what was dusk just moments ago bears down with its golden wind. How much can a man drink without dying, how long can a cell phone moan without stopping, he’s sure there’s only one person capable of calling without interruption for an entire morning and half an afternoon, especially now that he knows Jonás doesn’t live with anyone; he certainly wouldn’t have continued trying, he wouldn’t want to bother anyone else, but now he can keep calling. He’s watching him on the other end of the line, dialing again and again or hitting the redial button in desperation: he must think something’s happened to Jonás, and he’s right, but Jonás won’t tell him that; how could he tell him, Yes, you have reason to be worried, I can’t even remember where I ended up yesterday, but it couldn’t have been good, you wouldn’t have even gone down those stairs with their white and fuchsia lights unless you were working a case. The image appears suddenly like a vague flash, almost a jab to the gut: how can I tell you I’ve been slowly wasting away these last few months, do you really want to know? I don’t think you really do, you’d tell me that a man can’t afford to be so fragile, that life with Ada made me too soft, that I wasn’t like this before, I was a perfectly trained mass of flesh, but that wasn’t me, you didn’t know it then and you don’t want to know it now: I was never any of that, I was just what I am today, desperate to drag myself over to the telephone and hear your voice, Dad.

  It wasn’t always this way. Just as he has thrown himself from his bed, with a shred of faith that his ankles will bear his weight on the parquet, and even hold him there for a few steps, just as he was unsure he could do it, he once dove into the pool with the very same fear, fear of the water and its abyssal depths, the infinite blue with its hydrochloric profundity, from the rounded granite ledge on which the other children, all older than him, shrank back. But he had to learn to swim at an early age, or else his spine, still soft and malleable, would have continued to grow on its deviated course and solidified there: then he would never have been able to walk upright, like any other man. He needed two strong dorsal muscles in his back, powerful and hardened, to adjust his twisted vertebrae and hold them there, as if suspending them from the wall bars in a gym: that will come with time, the doctors had diagnosed, and so it would. My son will walk erect, and if he has to swim year round, he’ll do it, I’ll go with him if need be, but he’ll stand up perfectly straight, without the slightest hunch: he hadn’t told Jonás then, but they swam thousands of kilometers, and that’s why the first time, at age four, he had jumped in terror: because he had gone under. The sky faded away above the water, and his tiny body dragged him down to the deep end, near the grate, perhaps sucking at him; he moves forward now, nearly dislocating his shoulder as it temporarily bears the weight of his body, until the other hand grabs the cell phone and he recognizes the number: don’t worry, you’ll be fine—keep kicking, and if you sink, just push off against the bottom and it will bring you right back up to the surface.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning, the pure white sky looks like glass. He gets up slowly, with his body at ease, feeling like freshly-baked bread as he washes his face, an inner warmth that still glows after twelve hours of sleep. Outside, through the window, the clouds appear quartz-like above the twin turrets of the church. He likes these days of biting winds and the feeling of going out into the street protected, his hands gloved, the scarf around his neck, a wool hat shielding his temples, which had tended, ever since he was a boy, to develop migraines on the darkest days of winter.

  He shaves slowly for once, with a brush, while he scrutinizes his chin in the mirror: it doesn’t look all that much like his father’s, but it’s already the same or it will be; he has internalized the sunken, pronounced cheekbones and the cleft tip of his chin, he’s seen his father so often in that same painstaking pose that he now discovers how those brusque movements, apparently identical in all men, reveal in his face—the singularities of his face—a certain shared mechanics: it could be the same one he observed early each morning for years, when the only time he could spend with his father was precisely while he shaved, well before Jonás had to be up for school; even so, he got up, he abandoned his mattress around six without anyone waking him, since even his mother slept in until seven. Now, everything becomes concentrated in that brush swabbed in shaving cream as it runs across his face, dips into the steaming hot water, the pores of his skin open to the subtle skimming of the blade, though he’s unable to explain what made him take out the shaving kit: his parents gave it to him in his teens, perhaps, he’s never used it before because he prefers disposable razors, he’s always eluded the liturgy of that clean morning shave, and precisely this morning, he inexplicably recalls and extracts it from the back of the bathroom cabinet, still brand new. He tears open the transparent plastic and removes the black case, opens the zipper and holds the brush: the handle seems to be made of ivory or mother of pearl, the label claims the brush is badger hair, and he lathers up his face, analyzing it in the mirror and comparing it with the deserted, weather-beaten face of his father. How can two people be so similar, how is it possible to anticipate his future fatigue in his father’s wrought iron face, how can his own face be so like his forebear’s, young then, when Jonás was no more than four or five, his father’s smooth features blurred by the steam, his cheeks covered with shaving cream, the muscular torso under the white T-shirt and suspenders, as if he were a heavyweight and Jonás a featherweight, his self-assured smile in the mirror, in a tiny bathroom where the intermittent noise of the world entered only through the radio.

  Time freezes for an instant, encased in liquid gold, as he recalls his mother’s hair, her wavy blonde mane, and her blue eyes in the Nordic portraits from thirty-five years prior, with a thick wool sweater bunched up around her neck. Maybe that’s what drew him to Ada, that similarity—what had been in his mother the promise of a better life, placid weekends in the grass, and had turned ultimately into a vague earthly absence, as if some other life awaited her far away from there, enveloped by the vividly colored brushstrokes of a reality she had depicted with even greater intensity. He remembers his mother’s eyes, their exhausted sky-blue sadness, weakened greatly by her efforts to touch the darkened heavens of a warmer life; her hair is abundant still but falls no further than her shoulders, the decaying of her beauty just a crack in the veneer.

  The encasement has already diluted into a golden vapor by the time he pulls on a pair of gray pants, a black turtleneck sweater, and grabs his red raincoat. The backpack has been left untouched for two days; he quickly removes the towel, which leaves the musty scent of rain inside, hangs it on the sliding shower doors, and replaces it with another, yellow and dry. The bathing suit and cap he leaves, since they’ll just get wet again in a few hours’ time.

  As he walks out of the elevator, he runs into Marius, his building’s doorman. Marius always wears a blue bowtie and divides up his workday among three main duties and two secondary tasks: sitting inside the doorman’s office, tiny with a sloped ceiling, since it occupies the space beneath the stairs, where h
e ceaselessly reads novels, typically about voyages or sometimes mysteries or detective stories, although he much prefers science fiction. Approximately every two hours he leaves his post, built into the wall, which looks more like a closet when he shuts the wooden door—divided vertically into two leaves—and makes use of the marble stairs in the entryway, if there’s no one around to catch him, stretching his legs and arms so they don’t go numb from spending all day in his chair, reading and greeting people, the tenants’ guests, the tenants themselves, or couriers delivering packages. He exhibits a surprising agility and striking thinness, accentuated when he stands on one leg, slightly bent, and lifts the other as high as his head, resting it against the mirror on the wall, like a ballerina doing a split. On his next break, which he’ll take in another two hours’ time, he goes out for a twenty-minute stroll along the driveway to the building’s parking garage, his hands behind his back and his gaze pinned to the two doors, the one for the cars and the other in case his assistance is needed: then, like a slightly-bent blue buck, he dashes over. After almost forty years as a doorman—and despite all his efforts to keep his joints from stiffening and to conserve his flexibility—Marius has been unable to prevent that decline in his posture: although his hunched back is tough and sinewy, his curve is a curve made to fit, holding him up with its elasticity. The two secondary tasks consist of scrubbing down the foyer and the rubber floor of the elevator as soon as he arrives at eight in the morning, then covering the rubber with newspaper pages; and taking the trash cans out to the street after dusk has fallen, just before he leaves.

  “Good morning, Marius. What are you reading today?”

  Jonás peeks in through the wooden door, of which only the top half is open, and looks at the doorman’s legs, always drawn together tight under a blanket that’s barely visible from outside; in fact, Jonás only noticed it after several months of observation: Marius is bashful about his intimacy and considers the cold, like any other sensation that might provoke a hint of vulnerability, to be personal, and he is there only to act as a filter for visitors. Surely this is why he abruptly halts his reading when he hears the footsteps of someone approaching, unless it’s Jonás or one of the few other neighbors with whom he’s on speaking terms; unlike with other residents of the apartment building, who leave too early and return too late to run across Marius, phantom tenants whom he knows only by the name on their mailboxes, lacking knowledge of their peculiarities, such as the precise steps he recognizes Jonás by: this is how he tells him apart from the others, but the rest no, that’s not what they pay him for. Nobody needs to know whether he’s cold or whether he does stretches and why, or if he prefers to read certain novels over others, not even whether he likes to read; here he’s just an unobtrusive body who responds when someone asks him a question.

  “The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.”

  Whenever Jonás asks him this exact same thing, Marius responds automatically, but he never returns the question, he never asks him, for example, “Have you read it?” or “Have you heard of it?”, because he really doesn’t care whether Jonás has read it or heard of it: his only concern is that such interruptions last more or less thirty seconds, or a minute if Jonás stops to check his mail; that’s the time it typically takes Jonás to cross the foyer and leave the doorman behind, once again absorbed in an alternate universe, observing Jonás without giving him much thought or abandoning the pages of his books: he can almost look at Jonás and speak to him without ceasing to read.

  Sometimes it seems to him that Marius has no face, because his smile isn’t real; in fact, Jonás suspects that if he were to run into him one day and he wasn’t wearing his blue bowtie or sitting with a book in his lap or stretching or pacing with his hands fidgeting behind his back, he wouldn’t recognize him, because Marius’s expression, that distantly pleasant face with its thinning hair, cropped close around his parietals, and the shiny skin of his incredibly brown forehead advancing toward occipital baldness, is merely a mask interposed by his apparent inactivity. Jonás has always believed Marius to be happy with his job, surely he’s the happiest man he’s ever met, because he demands nothing of himself other than being there, with his half-read book, his morning gymnastics, and his short walks; the rest is just being there, and Jonás has never found him gazing out at the street because it doesn’t interest him in the least, his life is there inside, they pay him to read for eight hours a day.

  When Jonás makes it outside he finds he was right to bundle up, and he pulls his wool hat down even further, covering his ears. It could rain any minute now, that’s why he’s wearing his red raincoat: he’s never been able to stand umbrellas, he can’t conceive of carrying one, it makes him feel stupid, especially if the sky clears up in the end; and even if it rains, he prefers to slow his step and reconcile his spirit to the water—he’s never caught a cold from the rain because he’s always used raincoats. They come in all sorts of colors now, with designs and cuts for all tastes; it’s not like when he was little, when he looked like a sailor covered in a green hooded cloak, standing on the stern of a fishing boat, tied to the wheel as if in a strange dance, with the salt splashing his eyes, the foggy landscape whipped by the waves which seemed to him, as a child, to represent the perfection of the sea.

  It doesn’t look as if it’s going to rain, not even that slight rain that dampens the air as you breathe it in, and he walks over to the café inside the Hotel Ángel to eat breakfast. He likes the Hotel Ángel because it’s not a large place and it has an agreeable café where breakfast is cheap and peaceful. Also because it’s only a few meters from the building where he lives—right next door in fact—and because there he often meets Leopoldo, his only friend in this new neighborhood, which he continues to designate as new, though it no longer is. For Jonás, everything is still transitory: the decorations, the apartment itself, and especially the area; he still hasn’t called his previous acquaintances who live around here—in truth he avoids them, because he doesn’t want to institutionalize the change or strengthen his bonds to it, and maybe that’s why he hasn’t become a member of the sports complex just five hundred meters further down the street, with a good pool. It was Leopoldo who told him about it, because he too was a swimmer once, but Jonás prefers to cross the entire city and return to the same pool as always with Sergio; this suits Sergio because he still works in the highest building on that long block of offices next to the stadium, though for Jonás, in all honesty, it would be much more convenient to change to the sports complex near his home and get a season pass: his swimming sessions would cost next to nothing and he’d save himself the hour-long subway ride to the north side of the city, but he hasn’t given even a passing thought to this option: he’s not interested. Over these last few years his only consistent habit has been going to this pool, and he doesn’t want to change it for another, he doesn’t want his move to be made complete. Simply put, he likes swimming there.

  Chapter 8

  He had seen Leopoldo often: seated always at one of the tables next to the café’s great picture window, looking through it at the constant bustle of the street. It’s a street with heavy traffic; Jonás knows this well, because when he first moved there he had to sleep with earplugs, until he adapted to the never-ending noise, not only from the cars in the early morning, but all the buses and vans, and even fire trucks from the station two blocks down, which come thundering out, waking the street like nocturnal cyclopes. In the living room, the orangish lights from the trucks cast friezes on a wall as fine as a painter’s canvas, shaking the rickety construction while the windows rattle and even the feet of the table tremble, moving the spring mattress and jolting Jonás from his sleep until he grew used to it, converting the first nights into a permanent state of insomnia where sleep came only with the dawn.

  When Jonás moved in, he knew nothing of this aural inferno, as he termed it, which made him a specialist on every variety of earplugs to be found by the end of the first few weeks: he, who doesn’t even
use them to swim. The majority, and those that proved most effective, were made from foam rubber. He bought short ones and long ones, yellow, pink, blue, and other shades, even ones with abstract or multicolored designs, earplugs made of some kind of silicone that adapted well to the shape of his ears, but which let through that nocturnal din. During the day, the noise was compounded by other noises, with the bells of the church across from his apartment or the shouts of the truck drivers unloading at the market three streets over; but at night it sounded as if the fire truck sirens were blaring inside Jonás’s pillow, the buses were refueling beneath his bed, and the sharp howl of a motorcycle seemed to speed along his asphalt sternum.