The Swimmers Read online

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m a photography aficionado. I’ve taken thousands of pictures; I’m always looking at the latest shows in the galleries. I’ve been following your work. Yesterday I went to the exhibition and I knew it was you; I mean, I knew you on one hand as a swimmer, and on the other as a photographer, but I didn’t realize you were the same person.”

  “That’s me. So did you like it?”

  “More than the first one. I even bought a photo; I hung it up in my living room at home. One day I’ll bring it in so you can sign it for me. Well, it’s already signed, but I mean a more personal dedication.”

  “Sure. Which one is it?”

  “It’s the one with the girl wearing a pea jacket, talking on the phone in a really weird booth. With the light blue door. She’s sitting behind an orange-tinted oval window.”

  “Call Shop.”

  “Yeah, that’s the title. I gave it to my wife as an anniversary gift; she likes the photo a lot too. I almost always take her picture.”

  When Jonás told Sergio later, in the pool, he couldn’t believe it.

  “These things only happen to you. So the pool monitor has a picture of Ada dominating his living room… Just for that, he deserves to have you take his picture inside his booth.”

  As he relives those days, when it was almost impossible to imagine there would be no more exhibitions or inspiration, Jonás comes up to street level and passes by Marius as he approaches the front door. He almost doesn’t recognize him without the blue bowtie, without his doorman’s uniform, dressed in his street clothes with a brown overcoat; he almost can’t imagine him doing anything other than reading science fiction novels behind those wooden doors or engaging in his stretching routine, raising one of his legs neck-high and leaning against the wall with the elasticity of a ballet dancer who has abandoned the stage but retained his abilities, exhibiting them quite modestly, yet without hiding the vanity of knowing himself still able to execute those movements.

  Marius doesn’t recognize him and walks by with a determination atypical in its tranquility; Jonás watches him move off toward the bus stop, where he’ll head home to someplace Jonás doubts there will be a doorman, although who knows; if the concatenation of doormen and buses were suddenly to turn into a hall of mirrors, with new parallel or alternate realities, there may be a life even further south, where Marius is his building’s Jonás, where he too spies on the routines and reading material of the doorman as he walks by on his way to go swimming in another pool.

  Chapter 18

  He gets on the elevator and looks at himself in the mirror. Tired—though he hasn’t yet fallen into an exhaustion that might transform or even slightly disfigure his face: there are no bags under his eyes, no bloodshot gaze or swollen cheeks—after several days of not only keeping up with his swimming and conscientiously abusing the short-lived lethargy of drink, for reasons unforeseen or otherwise, but also because he seems lately to have gotten used to going to bed without ever really feeling at ease, he finds it impossible to attain that level of lank fulfillment where consciousness abandons him: his head droops in a state of sleeplessness, perpetually alert, as though waiting for a phone call, an unexpected knock at the door, or any sort of cry for help or emergency, and he doesn’t want to let himself fall too deep asleep, as if he had to watch over those he knows, those who form part of his life, and he too was afraid of disappearing.

  His home is laid out so as to harbor him, to accompany him in that vigilance; the white shelves without all that many books, a few images hung on the wall, and the sofa bed positioned so that when he lays down he can see the turrets standing out against the darkness; he’s organized it as if to swaddle himself, like a caress produced by the solitude of this cubicle, suddenly luminous, embellished by the abrupt nocturnal blackness that appears through the blue curtains, which are always parted so that the window can achieve its fullest intensity, notable even at night. The turrets languish and still they remain visible; sometimes there’s a thick fog at dawn that slides slowly away over the roof tiles, and it is only upon coming back to this view after a whole day without capturing a photo or receiving an assignment from the newspaper, not a single instant in which he’s experienced the satisfaction of framing that decisive moment, that he feels he has at last come somewhere he can withdraw, even if he stays on edge, at least reconciling himself to the tiny kingdom of his space—a fifth-floor studio that amplifies strange sounds, recognizable now, relaxing, but not during those first days; and that slow mystery of lying down without being able to sleep, enraptured by the outline of two turrets which—from his mattress, with his arms at his sides and his legs stretched as far as the sheets will allow—impress upon him a subtle effect of placidity.

  He’s always thought that dying must be something like falling asleep, even when he was very little; maybe that’s why he can remember getting up early from such a young age: he didn’t just want to start the day with his father, before breakfast; it wasn’t only contemplating him there next to the water-filled sink, his chin covered in shaving cream and the badger-hair brush applying it slowly and gently, it was also the perception of overpowering that hibernation, that unexplainable oblivion that followed the state of sleep. What happens to us in the meantime, he had asked once, to our body, we go eight hours without living; and his father perhaps looked at him with an expression of vague comprehension, as if his son’s thoughts, spoken aloud, had brought him back to a moment that had been hidden or voluntarily locked away, when he was still a child and he too was afraid of falling asleep: because that same tenebrous emptiness he saw now in his son’s eyes had also appeared to him then. In his father’s case, though, all of this was a harbinger of destiny, or a preparation for it; how could he sleep, really, after having seen death in all its most atrocious variations? Faces enveloped in a far-off fog, his murky companions in his quotidian darkness, blurring into one another, clamoring sometimes for salvation; he can see the lab tests and cordoned-off crime scenes, especially at the beginning, when he thought he’d never rid himself of them, that they were—more than a burden embedded inside his skull—dead weight inside his eyes, well before he understood that they become in the end a part of any emotional geography: you have to live with them and make room for each one, even if it’s impossible, even if only in your dreams.

  Perhaps for this reason his father understood him, and Jonás still remembered how some nights he had slunk slowly, walking down the hallway of the house without turning on the lights, vanquishing the influx of shadows with their shapes and faces standing out against the dark, furniture which he used by day for a wide array of games with his mother; when night fell, however, all this was rendered phantasmagorical. He would advance barefoot toward his parents’ bedroom, the cold beneath his tiny feet helping to establish a fragile bond with the recognizable world, with the long corridor that seemed at the time a deep cave, the sleepy insides of a great fish like the one he had seen in the illustrations of adventure stories his mother would read to him after dinner, before his father had gotten home yet and the two of them would wait. The smoothness of the freezing tiles in winter would imbue him with courage, and he would open the door and slip between the two of them, meeting at first with disapproval, later converted into the embrace of three very young beings under the blankets. It occurred to Jonás, years later, how hard it would have been to say which of the three was seeking refuge.

  How fear imposes its tenuous gradations, how a person’s body, his restraint, slowly give way to its evolutions. Young Jonás gradually learned to sleep alone at the other end of the house, well beyond the harrowing shadows of the hallways, first with the lights on and then turned off, later with the coppery glow of a small lamp on the nightstand and a tiny nightlight, smaller than a bulb, which gave off only an orangish glimmer; how Jonás succeeded in finding safety inside that fear, with his sheets pulled up to his eyes as he stared at the minute orange pearl of light plugged into the socket, so diminutive
that many years later, when his mother brought that very nightlight to his new studio apartment one day on the south side of the city, he took it in his hand and closed his fist around it, hiding it. Perhaps Jonás saw then the half-recalled embers of that same warm light in the depths of his mother’s eyes, that reciprocal shelter, when the darkness was the same for the two of them and they both waited for the sound of the key in the lock in the middle of the night, his father’s footsteps, recognizable in the midst of the silence, with the inner calm that caressed Jonás’s sleep, a sleep that came easily then, just as the door squeaked closed.

  Now he imagines that house empty, the master bedroom empty, the long hallway and his own room empty, and he can almost feel that same cold against the soles of his small feet in the middle of the night as he tiptoed down the corridor, feeling his way along the walls; but he’s too exhausted now to think about it, to conjure up the layout he knows by heart, without feeling an intense vertical weight between his shoulders, as if it were no longer a site to which he can return since his mother has apparently left and his father lives elsewhere: as if his own life’s experiences hadn’t happened either, but were enveloped instead in that subtly distorted limbo of his earliest memories. Now he opts to cover himself only as far as his chin, knowing that at least he has his own small space; he looks out the studio window and contemplates the turrets once again, with a chestnut glow slipping between their tips, the sky turned gloomy under a dark blanket of gravity: vaguely violet but sustained now by an extensive influx of blackness, depicted with bold imposing lines of opaque majesty, as if they were the work of a gigantic painter hunched behind the still-visible clouds, and Jonás were trying to spot him in a vain attempt to drift off to sleep.

  Chapter 19

  “Jonás! It’s me, Sebastian! I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  The voice emerges from the depths of his slumber, achieved only around six o’clock when he became so tired he collapsed from exhaustion, while the outline of the turrets through the window started to brighten slowly, as if a fine and glittering transparent dust had strewn the roof tiles with a lukewarm clarity. He can’t yet distinguish what the day will be like, whether cold or warm; the fire of the light burns Jonás’s eyelids, still closed in defeat, while he holds his cell phone at a distance from his ear, as if inexpert in its use, barely able to hear someone telling him, It’s me, Sebastian, I didn’t wake you, did I? There’s no alarm in the voice, however; as Jonás opens his eyes he realizes it must be almost noon; he should have gotten up a while ago, but how can he change the sinuous rhythm of his sleeping habits if, as soon as he lays down to rest, he finds himself unable to sleep. Sometimes he feels a suffocating remoteness in his chest, a sort of asthma that overcomes him exclusively at bedtime; it passes without incident, but leaves him tense. From then on, he is unable to sleep: he spends hours without ever quite relaxing, pondering nothing in particular, only a succession of images, past and future, of traffic-free avenues, silent restaurants, and even the pool, completely deserted but not abandoned; likewise with the shop windows when they come to him in his vigil, and the streets—it’s not a ghost town, but rather a theater where the actors have disappeared or vanished into thin air, though the set remains, as if the characters might come back at any moment, but they won’t; as if that emptiness were an intermission excessively prolonged into the depths of Jonás’s sleep, into his restful breathing under nocturnal waters.

  “You didn’t wake me. Actually, I couldn’t sleep a wink all night.”

  “I can tell. I just had a couple questions for you. The first one—and I think I already know the answer—is how things are going with the photographs lately. New ones, I mean. I’m putting together a group show and I’d like to include you.”

  Jonás always admires Sebastian’s powerful voice, a voice that gives off the great consistency of a man without a country, capable of striding forth with the same enthusiastic resilience through the airport or along the boulevards of any city in the world, of entering the best restaurants—as he likes to say—and being recognized as a genteel client who will later prove adept at tracking down the place with the most vibrant live music, even if it’s a dive, drowning in expressionistic shadows, one of those places where you risk your life just by being there after a certain hour. Sebastian will pick out the most civil and friendly of the waiters, who will serve him the best dry martini or vintage whisky—lately he’s been avoiding malts of less than eighteen years—and he’ll do it with the same confidence he would exude when receiving a small group of friends in his own living room; or with a natural air analogous to that he might give off on passing through—walking slowly but paying close attention—the halls of a museum, come to interpret a temporary painting or photography exhibition in preparation for a new catalogue or critique, or even to assemble the inner workings of his own collection into a new installation: with an exact and cohesive mixture of agreeability and authority, courtesy and judgment, sufficiently reasoned so as to accept very few divergences—though he knows how to appreciate other persuasions when he discovers in them a subtle and audacious sign of brilliance, the same way he’s willing to visit a city he’s never been to, any new environment, any emerging artist whose name he hears mentioned, whether once or everywhere, to study the artist’s discourse and try to understand it, with the same elegant discretion he exhibits upon crossing a luxurious lobby after an especially strenuous flight, perhaps hours-long without a layover, preferring—before settling into his suite and taking a bath, never excessively prolonged—to stop by the hotel bar and have his extra dry vodka martini.

  This is Sebastian’s world, a world Jonás was once a part of; and now he’s back with that particular dynamism with which he always imbues each one of his activities, whether taste testing whiskies or taking in a good documentary, always with the same unshakeable passion, the same joie de vivre which—accompanied as ever by a theoretical framework—succeeds in squeezing the maximum splendor from each of life’s minutiae. And for this reason, hearing Sebastian’s corporeal voice on the other end of the line after a bad night, even if he’s woken him up, is a good start to this new day, despite the doleful undertaking that awaits Jonás: the plan is to return to the family apartment, which became his mother’s after his parents separated, home now to no one. Perhaps this is why Jonás didn’t feel much like sleeping yesterday. But now Sebastian is on the phone, and the vigor in his voice has stung Jonás’s tympanum like an electrical shock. By asking if he’s got any new photos—though he already knows the answer—Sebastian has given him back a palpable degree of self-confidence, because Sebastian’s world could have been his too, and this new presence, even in the form of a few words during a brief conversation, has helped Jonás recover a drive he’d forgotten; he suddenly finds himself standing, facing the mirror with a barely perceptible cloud that crosses his eyes when he thinks of the eternity it’s been since he took any new photos, how everything ended after the move. Sebastian knows this, and Jonás always alleges that he just needs to get started, that as soon as he takes the first one, when he finds his photo, he’ll have discovered that new direction for his gaze. He tries to transform his initial discouragement into this new and surprising momentum, his old initiative now peeking out from its hiding place: he recognized it as soon as he heard Sebastian’s singular voice, so swollen with faith in himself and others, but also in everything that chance may bring their way. And that’s why Jonás doesn’t want to say no, instead offering him a maybe—maybe there will be new photos and I could put something together on time, but I can’t guarantee you anything—all this caused by a voice, done by a voice that clears that fogged-up glass inside Jonás, returning to it at last, if only for an instant, its once pristine reflection.

  “It would do you good to get involved in this; you should try your best. It’s going to be a traveling exhibition. I’ve got a couple cities confirmed already, and you’ll be presented as the most promising new visual artists under thirty-five. I think thirty
-five’s a reasonable cutoff, as far as a criterion for what young means. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it should have been thirty, but I’d prefer to err in the other direction. There’s just one catch: whether it’s photography, a film short, video art, or any other medium, it has to be the first time it’s been shown. But we can talk about that tonight; and here’s the other reason I’m calling: I’ve discovered a Scandinavian restaurant with the best dry martini I’ve had in a very long time. And the food’s good too, especially the smoked salmon. Can you do dinner tonight?”

  Jonás hears his own voice again, but livelier this time, perhaps revitalized by a new energy he barely remembered, something that had all but dissolved.

  “Tonight would be great. I’ve got a bit of an odd day; I’ll tell you all about it later. But I should be free around ten. Do you want me to pick you up at the hotel?”

  Jonás imagines him, after hanging up, spending the whole rest of the morning on the telephone, filling up his agenda for his stay in the city; he’ll speak with several gallery owners and the curators of exhibitions he wants to see before he leaves, and maybe a few critics from the big newspapers and journals, though not too many, occupying the majority of his day contacting other artists: not the relatively recent ones, like Jonás, but also those who Jonás himself considers masters, whose friendship with Sebastian dates further back. Perhaps because Sebastian knew from the start that he didn’t want to make art, but rather to study it, to establish an overarching theory on recent works—not only photojournalism, but the artistic obsession with images understood as an intuitive instant’s prey—he is one of the cultural promoters most noted for his discovery of new talents, as well as the systematic analysis of already-established artists, from his tribune in the periodicals, whether in the form of a more extensive essay or that of a simple opinion piece or review. He has also provided countless possibilities for the laying of institutional foundations, organizing major exhibitions, all in search of a fresh discovery: trying to bring photography closer to the general public, as if he were seducing them, impregnating his pieces, at times, with his own opinions, but always with a carefully concealed touch, never conditioning artistic value upon ideological belief but instead picking up on any trace of ethics in an already consolidated oeuvre and potentiating its message. He’s also been a judge for countless photography and painting competitions, actively participating in putting together all types of congresses and scholarship programs for artists. He has always postulated that the only truly conscious gaze is that achieved through contrast; that there cannot be just one reality, and if there is, it is due essentially to the fact that we know no other; and this oneness of form and criteria results, especially where images are concerned, in a tightening of the focus.