The Swimmers Read online

  The first morning, still half-asleep, he went to the café in the Hotel Ángel. He vaguely remembered seeing it from the street; he’d noticed it when the realtor had shown him the apartment, and after his initiation into those internal exercises in conquering sounds, he needed a double espresso. At that point he didn’t have a thing in the kitchen: it was still just an empty space inside a closet with sliding doors, like an untuned accordion. He washed his face, combed his hair, and went straight down to the hotel café.

  He remembered its pastel colors, with a television hanging on the wall, next to the bar with the baked goods in the display case, generally new in appearance and visibly comfortable. And so it was, with wooden chairs covered in soft blue upholstering. The tables were new and too high, which disconcerted him at first. Then, when the waiter brought him his coffee, an orange juice, and two slices of toast, it seemed to him the table was shielding him, that it was just the right height; its large size gave the pleasing impression of shelter, and he enjoyed the spaciousness as he sat facing the street, contemplating everything, yes, but protected not just by the knowledge that he was sitting in the hotel café: he was also set apart by a table which, in the movies, would have been overturned in an instant if there had been a shootout.

  That first morning, this was how Jonás felt, as if someone he couldn’t see was shooting dozens of tiny bullets at his eyes: not only because he’d been awake the whole night learning to differentiate all the sounds made by the range of heavy vehicles that passed along the pavement, leaving his eyes sore and half-open, but also because he was once again exposed, recognizing himself in an inevitable position that was all too familiar, without making it any more comfortable. His job itself was already solitary enough: photographers don’t leave the office to eat breakfast mid-morning, or go out for lunch together, or argue; the closest thing they have to a coworker is that faint voice on the other end of the line with an address and a story and an order to cover it. Not even with Ingrid, the art gallery director, did he have continual contact; and so, as he buttered his toast and looked at the street, Jonás thought of existence like an immense aquarium which he had never really managed to enter—that he was, at best, the man on the outside observing the lives of all those fish.

  Chapter 9

  That was how he met Leopoldo, looking out at that fish tank in the street. He noticed him before thinking—several weeks after that first morning in the café in the Hotel Ángel—that this man, no more than sixty, the leathery skin of his jaw lined with tiny wrinkles, like nicks in a well-worn doorknob, an indeterminate chestnut gaze, and white crew cut hair, was the closest thing he had to a breakfast companion, sitting at the next table over each morning, also beside the picture window, and he gave him a smile and a nod by way of greeting, as if they’d met before. Jonás had that impression from the start: they had seen each other somewhere, although he would have remembered a man who seemed to have sailed all the oceans and was in no hurry to tell of it, who came there each morning and paid no attention to the newspaper or the television screen, who seemed to be looking much further off as he monitored the harried gait of the pedestrians through the glass, like something was about to happen that required his attention and he was keeping an eye out for signs of normalcy.

  “Don’t sit there all by yourself; pull up a seat and we’ll have breakfast together.”

  Jonás hesitated before picking up his bag and changing tables, as the man observed him with an extraordinary openness and notable self-assurance, like he’d spent his whole life inviting strangers to sit down for breakfast with him.

  “I’ve seen you around here a few times now. You look familiar.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, that I’d seen you somewhere.”

  The waiter came over, tall and completely bald, with a tentative expression, and served Leopoldo a coffee, with one for Jonás alongside his orange juice and two slices of toast.

  “I know where I’ve seen you. You used to go swimming with another guy. On the north side, right? By the stadium.”

  Leopoldo was looking at Jonás’s backpack; maybe that had triggered a spark in his debilitated memory of the brief period when they had known each other. Jonás recognized him then too, though he was forced to salvage his image from the fog of the early days, when he and Sergio first started going to the pool, the same period when he signed the lease on the apartment with Ada and Sergio met Martina. Then he remembered: they had respected him for his distinct swimming style—like a block of steel that was inexplicably afloat, despite his bad leg and his age—which gave the impression of a sober, reserved strength, as if he’d already proven all he had to prove and the only thing left was to swim a few laps a day to stay sharp. But whenever a younger swimmer would pass him by, trying to intimidate him or set a faster pace, to chase him from his lane out of some kind of supposed superiority, Leopoldo would let loose with his short, muscular legs, exploding abruptly like the fins of a fish emerged from the ocean floor: he would switch from the breaststroke to the crawl and his arms would enter the water like sharp blades cutting through heavy air; he would continue swimming like this until he had three or four laps on them, and then he would wait there at the edge of the pool, his goggles pushed up on his forehead like a visor, with an odd smile.

  Jonás and Sergio witnessed once a particularly spectacular incident, taking in that exhibition which was surely not the only one of its kind: their attention was attracted by the aggressiveness with which one of the swimmers had passed next to Leopoldo, who stood out for his elegant, almost self-absorbed movements, as if caressing the water with his body. The spastic swimmer in question was Australia, lately gone missing from the pool, who seemed at the time intent on being the last man standing, employing violent strokes and shoves, occupying the center of the lane with his out-of-control chopping. But he hadn’t planned on that small man, surely the oldest in the pool, with his dark skin, swimming amicably along; it was a style more intimate than flashy, immutable and monotonous. Almost without batting an eyelid, Leopoldo passed Australia by in an instant, and then twice more, and continued swimming like that for the whole next hour with no sign of tiring, passing him again and again. Jonás didn’t know then that his name was Leopoldo, or that they would end up being practically neighbors on the far south side of the city.

  “I remember you now. But you stopped going.”

  “I moved from one end of the city to the other. My daughter lives here in the neighborhood, and I decided to head over this way. Then I became a member at the municipal sports complex right down the street. You still go to the same pool?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you cross the whole city just to swim there?”

  Jonás nodded.

  “I go with a friend. It works for him and I’ve got time to spare.”

  Leopoldo looked at him as if he had suddenly abandoned the conversation, while he watched a young woman walk by the picture window outside the café, wearing a long dress and holding a small child by the hand. Her chestnut hair was tied back and she seemed in a hurry. She had very pale skin, a clarity that contrasted with Leopoldo’s brown face, which had slowly started to burn out, although his gaze still had a spark to it, dimly lit.

  “Breaststroke, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But there was another guy who was faster than you.”

  “That’s right. Aquaman.”

  “Yeah, he sure seemed like it… Although your technique wasn’t bad, either. If you’ll pardon my saying so, you might try to adjust your stroke—I mean the way your whole body moves—so that it isn’t so short, so you don’t always end up falling a bit shy of your potential. If you moved your whole body together, like he does, you could be just as good.”

  “Sounds like you’ve done your share of the breaststroke.”

  “And my kneecap’s destroyed. You know how it is: the breaststroke swimmer’s weak point.”

  Leopoldo set his hand on his right knee. Jonás remembered then
how he and Sergio had watched the man as he left the water while they remained in the pool, intrigued by his corpulent build, like a heavy weight compressed inside an empty gasoline drum. Leopoldo had the look of an unsanded wooden wedge, rough to the touch and solid through and through; his limp became evident only out of the water, as he slipped on his bathrobe and walked off with his shorter leg throwing him slightly off balance.

  Jonás started to call the waiter over, but Leopoldo halted his gesture, grabbing his wrist.

  “It’s on me. We can talk more some other day about how to improve your stroke. People think it’s all in the arms; yours are fine, but your stroke is only the continuation of the primary movement. If you see that guy again, take a look at his legs.”

  They’ve continued to see each other almost every morning. They almost never talk about swimming now, and sometimes they don’t talk at all: they sit looking through the window while they eat breakfast, or Leopoldo shows him pictures of his granddaughter; despite their age difference, they’ve achieved a silent sort of brotherhood, where keeping each other company does not always require conversation.

  After saying goodbye, Jonás makes sure he hasn’t left his camera upstairs and raises the collar on his jacket. It doesn’t look as if it’s going to rain yet, but the sky is covered by a steel gray blanket. He puts on his winter hat, glad he’s decided on such a warm sweater; that will save his father, with whom he made plans yesterday to meet up this noontime, from repeating to him how he shouldn’t go out dressed like this on a rainy day, that he doesn’t take care of himself, that much is obvious if you just look at how things are going for him, a life frittered away like his can’t end well. How easy it would have been to agree to meet up without speaking, but with both of them on the same side of the glass, like two fish gazing at each other, wanting only to inhabit their fish tank.

  Chapter 10

  And yet, that doesn’t occur. As soon as he sees his father, he realizes that things will be different this time. Something has happened to him, or stopped happening to him. There’s nothing in his appearance that might give away any sort of change: he waits for Jonás while leaning on the bar, staring off into space, but not like Leopoldo; not cutting through the semi-circle of figures, but involuntarily analyzing differences that would be practically imperceptible to the average observer. Jonás knows that even ten hours later his father will be capable of detailing the outfits of the men and women who passed by that café in the city center, he will recognize their faces, their features, and the moods of each one of those hundreds of gazes, the rhythm of their steps, whether they were confident or distressed, animated or undecided, or in agonizing pain: after forty years on the job as a police investigator, a one-time homicide detective, now retired, he never stops noticing the details, he hasn’t abandoned his habits, all those skills sharpened by the accumulation of pain and fear.

  And yet today, Jonás is not going to find the same man. He knows this because after so many years of accompanying his father to the pool, leaving his spine in the care of the water each afternoon, he has also learned to understand exactly what he’s looking at: that range of nuances that is its own mute language, almost an epidermal instinct sustained over time. He could even swear his father hasn’t noted him yet, despite the fact that Jonás is only a few meters from the revolving door: his father is casting his gaze about the street without catching anything, he is no longer in control of his own vision, he displays an absent gesture, of having lost his grip on the reality surrounding him, almost as if all that training keeping track of others’ lives had been emptied into his coffee; so much so that Jonás becomes alarmed, he speculates over a possible medical checkup with an unfavorable diagnosis, but not even that would bring his father to this point, Jonás recapitulates, like a fifty-seven-year-old child, incapacitated after two angina attacks, with this neglect evident in his cheeks, surprisingly unshaven considering the parsimonious perfection with which he’s always carried out this task—nothing better than a good shaving cream applied with a brush. His jaw is still muscular but covered by three or four days’ stubble, confirming that Jonás has cause for alarm, though the still-graying hair seems to be properly combed. No, today he will not find that rigid gaze, nor that stiffness which eludes physical contact: sometimes, when he would get home at night, he wouldn’t let Jonás or his mother come near him, he would walk in with his face bruised and his clothing filthy, as if he had spent the day in a mud flat, don’t touch me, he would head straight for the bathroom and ask Jonás’s mother for bandages, rubbing alcohol, and surgical tape, really it was nothing, but don’t touch me until after I’ve showered, I have to get this off of me, these clothes ought to go straight in the fire. And then he would fall asleep: the tiredness and desolation were immense; you can’t stumble suddenly into paradise after dredging through the deeps, there has to be a transition, but there was never time. He would come home demolished, if he came home at all; there were too many nights spent in the bathroom or on the street, and because of this he has never been a man who was affectionate with his own, later not even with his wife: she ended up leaving him after years of waiting for a different life, and he went to live somewhere else. Jonás clasps his father’s hand without much resolve, doubting for an instant whether he should hug him, but his father is quicker and embraces him with a sober warmth.

  “Have you heard anything from your mother?”

  His voice sounds tremulous, muted, a voice that is hiding something—perhaps too distant, as if coming from the end of a poorly-lit hallway, although his face attempts to express tranquility; he’s asked the obligatory questions, those questions with no aim of finding anything out, internal protocols before getting to the heart of the matter.

  “No, actually. The last time I talked to her was several weeks ago.”

  Jonás orders a bottle of soda water. He leans his elbows on the metal surface, involuntarily imitating his father’s position.

  “What’s going on with you and Mom now? You haven’t had enough of all this?”

  It’s an indiscretion on Jonás’s part. His father’s eyes look down at his hands, which are slowly rubbing together, trying to find something in his palms, a dormant signal between the cracks, between those lines which can’t explain his life, or in the fingers furrowed by numerous scars hidden beneath the still-abundant hair; those knuckles have been split open too many times, though they remain pronounced and bony, the hands of a gymnast without the talcum powder, motionless and threatening, as if still capable of lifting those old weights.

  “It’s been two months since I heard from her.”

  Jonás notices his eyes: When did they go out? He tells himself to measure each word carefully; he’s never seen him so tired.

  “Dad, it’s normal. I don’t talk with Ada every day, either.”

  “But you know where to find her.”

  “And she knows where to find me, even if she tries not to. What’s all this about?”

  His father looks down at his hands again and then lifts his gaze suddenly. There’s something new in his expression that Jonás hadn’t noticed until just now: a sort of unease, a pale shadow in the sunken bags under his eyes.

  “Your mother and I talked on the phone every Sunday night.”

  “Every Sunday? After the divorce?”

  “Yes. Not about anything in particular. We would talk about how our weeks went. It’s strange: I don’t remember ever talking so much with her. Maybe before we got married.”

  “So when did this all stop?”

  “I already told you, two months ago. One day we just lost touch.”

  “What do you mean you lost touch? Did you stop calling her, or did she stop calling you?”

  “She did. At first I waited. Out of respect. Then I called her cell phone. Then her landline. Nothing. Like she’d fallen off the face of the earth.”

  “And so you waited two months to tell me about it? It never occurred to you to report her missing?”

  “Aft
er a divorce like ours? I know what they would have told me: She must have started a new life, don’t obsess over it… What do you think, I haven’t been mulling this over? I even went back home.”

  “To Mom’s?”

  “Our home. It was mine, too.”

  The sound of coffee cups clinking mixes with the jangle of spoons. Jonás tries to soften his tone of voice.

  “Of course. Could you get in or ring the doorbell?”

  “Yeah. Empty. Then I decided to do round the clock surveillance. I even asked an old colleague of mine to cover for me a couple of nights.”

  “And?”

  “She hasn’t been back.”

  “Dad, have you stopped to think that maybe she doesn’t want you to find her?”

  “Several times. But in that case, wouldn’t it be more like your mother, especially since we talked every week, to be straight with me, to tell me, ‘Don’t call me anymore after this,’ or to be in touch with you?”

  “Not necessarily. I haven’t seen her much since Ada and I split up.”

  “How’s Ada doing?”

  “Fantastic, I think.”

  “Is she still living in your old apartment?”

  He nods.

  “And you’re still swimming. That backpack’s lasted you.”

  Jonás remembers the last birthday they all celebrated together, his mother’s eager expression as she gave him his present in its flashy wrapping paper.

  “You look healthy. You still going with Sergio?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are things good with his wife?”

  “It seems like it. His daughter’s four now.”

  “He’s a great kid. He’s always been so self-assured.”

  Jonás furtively stretches his wrist, draws back the red sleeve, and checks his watch.

  “Dad, I’ve got to go.”

  “Sure.”

  Jonás smiles ever so slightly, more a sigh than a smile, though not an ounce of air escapes, while he slings his bag over his back once more.