The Swimmers Read online

  Whatever the case, he knows the photographer he could have been—disregarding his purely professional work at the paper—has remained stranded in that happy age. Jonás has been forced to go on living without him, meanwhile bearing witness to the consecration of other new artists who have carved out their own spaces in the galleries, contracts, collectives, catalogues, and critiques as he stood to one side, silent and dignified; because he had stopped believing in photographs, not as a trade that allowed him to pay his bills, but as something to live for.

  He’s unsure if that loss matters; if there’s a lesson he’s learned, it’s that talent is one thing and having something of substance to offer is quite another. Jonás feels empty, and he doesn’t much care whether he truly is or not, though he is moved by Sebastian’s efforts to recover from him—from his vacant lot—the boy still hibernating in that other apartment, in that enormous bed he and Ada had bought together, who still hasn’t revealed himself in this other: in this new Jonás who has kept on swimming each week with Sergio, in the same pool, living at the other end of the city and neglecting his one-time passion, while he tries unconsciously to feign that his life and his moods continue to be the same, that he will regain that urge to create, when he knows that something is broken in him, that the sunniest Sunday cold would be just a glimmer in that barren landscape.

  Chapter 23

  While changing lines at Matheson, he realizes the subway is much emptier than usual. He tries to recall whether today is a holiday, since his work conditions result in a somewhat peculiar calendar, wherein he works every day, and yet every day could also be considered a day off of sorts, unless his routine is interrupted by a lengthier assignment, such as covering a party convention. But today is no holiday, and he finds the subway much less trafficked than normal at that time, around 1:30 in the afternoon, with all those thousands of parents headed to schools and daycares to pick up their kids, or leaving the office to enjoy a semi-palatable prix fixe lunch. These are pursuits which escape his comprehension, though he knows they exist, that all this human matter and its temporal framework are what the city feeds on: what would happen if all these people suddenly vanished into thin air, if the children never went back to school and their parents failed to appear punctually and whisk them away; what if the teachers never left home, for no good reason, if they had the same thought as his mother and they disappeared; what will it be like to barge into her apartment this afternoon and search through it, he wonders as he listens to the metallic jangle of the keys inside his backpack and begins to climb the escalator, lost in thought, as a sort of warm-up before his swim: he would be left all alone, looking through the windows of the subway car at the deserted platforms.

  This could be an idea for new photographs, he thinks to himself as he exits at Estadio and contemplates the splendid construction which houses football matches every other weekend; he would just have to wake up early, before it gets light out and there is still no one in the streets, and wander the city’s different neighborhoods. He could call it Reality without Actors or something like that, he could try to capture the settings separated from the cast: when the performance is done the stage so often continues on, defiantly, still bearing the traces of its protagonists. It’s not the most promising start, but at least he could tell Sebastian, use it as a point of departure and see if he can pull something together for that group show, maybe a couple decent compositions.

  The glass-encased terrace where he and Sergio usually eat lunch offers a perfect view of one side of the stadium. The rooftop of the restaurant is covered by a false wood ceiling, painted green, the same color as the furniture, with somewhat sparse creepers drooping timidly over the cornice. Looking at the empty tables, each surrounded by four stuffed chairs and set extremely close to one another, Jonás wonders how they ever managed to achieve that degree of intimacy they sometimes share, despite practically sitting beside the restaurant’s other occupants. The best part of those meals usually comes with the glass they both order after eating—whisky with a dash of water for him, on the rocks for Sergio—and it is at that point in the conversation, from four o’clock on, when the restaurant dies down a bit. They’ve even stayed long enough on occasion to see the first dinners served, failing to notice as night fell.

  He is crossing the avenue when the school’s front doors open and the students appear. Since boarding at Arco del Sur, less than an hour and a half ago, he’s had the impression he was alone in the streets: that solitude has accompanied him in the subway and then as he passed by the restaurant, this time rather empty. Finding himself in front of that mass of boys and girls, all so serious in their uniforms, varied in age, taking up the sidewalk and also the crosswalk he has just traversed, gives him a welcome sensation of normalcy: the laughter and games, those cigarettes smoked slowly with studied conspicuousness while several older couples display their exhibitionistic abilities, help Jonás sink his way back into a more recognizable environment, something that slips through his fingers at times; surely that’s why he swims with Sergio, to recover that normalcy, or what’s left of it. He feels glad, slightly quickening his step when he spots his friend fifty meters ahead in his charcoal gray suit, his stature unsullied and his broad shoulder bag hanging behind his back, speaking almost violently into his cell phone and gesticulating with a hard-edged sobriety next to the complex door, mussing his hair with his free hand, his expression still irritated as he hangs up.

  “Sorry, but I’ve got to go; my secretary is an idiot. I had a meeting scheduled for the day after tomorrow, but they moved it up on me and he just barely thought to let me know.”

  “Well, what can you do?”

  With an agile movement of his right hand, Sergio quickly consults his agenda for the rest of the week with a fleeting look of introspection.

  “Let’s see. Tomorrow’s no good. The day after either. How about dinner at my place this Saturday?”

  “Alright.”

  “Problem solved, then.” He takes out his key fob, pushes a button, and the locks in all four doors of his family car, parked next to them, pop up remotely as the front and rear lights blink. “Even better, actually. It’s been so long since last time; Martina will be excited and this way you can see Paula.”

  They say goodbye with a haste carried over from Sergio’s phone call, or perhaps from much before; Jonás isn’t worried, though: his friend can handle his emotions, the pressure and the urgency; it’s in those moments when time is short and expectations high that he so often shines. He waves at Jonás as he starts the car, enormous and copper-colored, designed to transport not just a family, but all the accessories Paula needed when she was a baby: the carriage, stuffed animals, baby bath, sets of towels, diapers, oils and shampoo, moisturizing soaps, protective creams, clothing, baby food, and doubtlessly many other items which Jonás is unable even to imagine, inevitably rendering Sergio’s pure and stylized metallic blue convertible coupé, with its elegant curves and automatic top, too small.

  It has done Jonás good to see his friend. He notices it in his step, suddenly brisk and energetic as he walks through the locker room door. He doesn’t take long to don his bathing suit, close the locker with his belongings inside, and head straight for the pool. The humidity in the air refreshes his nostrils; he can practically feel it hydrating his skin. In the middle lane he makes out the practiced and powerful movements, paired with a deep and enduring respiration, of Aquaman, today unrivaled; not even the other swimmers, though they carry on at an appreciable pace—most of them doing the crawl or backstroke, his only company besides the lifeguard with the same yellow tank top as always, and a red bathing cap, sitting distractedly in a chair as he leafs through a magazine—are any match for him today. He is an arc of flesh, growing tense and going slack, and every time he slackens he advances twice as much as the others, as if the water itself were too small for him and his true element was air.

  But today Jonás too feels sure of himself, having overcome the morning’s initial mood
. He dives into the water and begins to glide slowly; he soon realizes he’ll have no problem, within the next five or ten minutes, in matching the other swimmers’ pace. This is how Jonás swims: little by little, gaining ground over time; he is cut out for long distances. He’s never been explosive, in swimming or in anything else; he doesn’t worry when the other swimmers pass him by, lapping him several times over, because his body hasn’t yet warmed up enough. Surely Sergio would have taken off at the same speed as them, but he would have had to stop sooner, unlike Jonás, who never rests, who starts and finishes without a single pause because his limbs require that combustion, they become greased as the minutes pass, with the laps and the fatigue; Jonás is unconcerned by the swimmers doing the crawl and the backstroke: today he thinks only of matching the movements of Aquaman’s arms. He is so unconcerned with the others that he has just now noticed that one of them is Pongo, the shortish redheaded guy who listens patiently to those lessons on economics and life which Bongo, taller and more slender, offers so generously—not just to his companion, but the whole locker room. Jonás doesn’t see Bongo, and inwardly he is grateful.

  As expected, he overtakes them all a quarter of an hour later. It seems remarkable that today the two fastest swimmers in the pool are swimming the breaststroke. Jonás is well aware, nonetheless, that he is still far from matching him, though if he’s ever been close it’s precisely in this instant. Jonás feels almost like a breath exhaled: he notes the movement of the water in the wake of his powerful kicks, finely synchronized with the wedge opened by his fingers. Swimming like this, as if breaking out of his own body, he can meditate on any matter, and he thinks even of Leopoldo: he wishes he could contemplate the sight of that oneness, a body modulating its course; he feels it as he displaces the weight of the water, and it is then, as he draws near Aquaman, swimming in the next lane over, after proving that he can maintain the same intensity, that the other exits the pool at a leap, stretches quickly on the edge and walks with celerity toward the locker room.

  Jonás leans on the opposite edge, panting, and wonders whether he could have kept up for another half hour. He continues swimming, though less interested now in maintaining that velocity; he simply locks into a rhythm slightly superior to that of the others swimming the crawl. As the speed of his strokes diminishes, his consciousness likewise grows calm, his perception broadens, and it is then that he remembers that this afternoon he will go to his parents’ apartment—only his mother’s for some time now—to look for any kind of clue as to her whereabouts: whether she’s taken off on some sort of journey of initiation as secret as it is belated, or whether she’s just vanished. This is a possibility he hasn’t truly considered, because no one escapes from life just like that, without a trace, he thinks as he scans the wide indoor windows of the hall and spots the shadows, evidently talking amongst themselves, tall and wavering like almost always: he’s not even sure they aren’t just a reflection of the light on the water. If his mother really did decide to disappear, she has to have gone somewhere.

  Chapter 24

  The taxi leaves Jonás at the end of the street; he prefers to walk the rest of the way on foot. He wants to gradually reacquaint himself with the old apartment block. As he walks down the opposite sidewalk, it comes into view, there at the intersection: the bare brick façade sitting on the corner, with its paired-off balconies, elongated so as to connect two rooms—the living room and his parents’ bedroom, in this case. He is unsurprised to find the physiognomy of his street has changed: one-way, narrow and bustling, or at least that’s how Jonás remembers it, full of bright and lively businesses, yet more silent now. When he passes by the old butcher shop, he finds it closed. His mother used to take him there each Saturday after his father brought him back from practice or tournaments. He walks over. There is a worn-out sign hung on the inside, half-paled from the sun, advertising a sale that seemingly has yet to come. He peeks through the dirty windows, marked by the rain and a nearly opaque crust of abandonment, and discovers the work surface still on the counter, and the display cases too; the hooks can still be distinguished along the white tiled wall where pieces of meat once hung, and to one side of the wooden cutting board, now grown dark, where the enormous knives were kept. It was already an old butcher shop when Jonás was a child, containing a pair of rickety chairs for the eldest among the women who patronized the establishment, with a contrite expression of patience or of tyrannical terseness which would soften when they met with his look of fear and awe; it seems to him now even more desolate, and for a moment he feels tempted to retrace his steps. He’s lost the resolve to continue on the path that will culminate in his parents’ old apartment, discovering that the butcher shop—where he later learned to delight in the contemplation of rabbits which looked almost alive, the plucked and uncut hens and broilers, piled up, and the laminated drawings of cows and pigs with tiny signs still intact along the top of the wall, discolored and absent like the shadow of a snowflake, that strange mystery and life lesson proffered by the Saturday morning clientele, disparate and chattery, gathered round the scale, hypnotized by the half-circles marking the weights of the different packages or the painstaking efficiency of the filleting machine and meat grinder—is only a preview of what he’ll find in his home, of that same quietude trailing off down the dark, gray hall where the butcher once showed him, after a great deal of pleading, the cold storage chamber.

  He moves away from the glass and continues on his way. He adjusts the backpack on his shoulder: he normally does this involuntarily, a gesture of distracted resolve when he’s headed to the pool and isn’t especially up for a swim; now too he feels that lack of energy necessary to face the rest of the street. It’s not particularly hard for him to come back, but it’s taken being here to realize he’d rather not; he’s expended a great deal of energy in putting together, from the inside out, an identity he has then polished with the conscious intent of an escape artist, and he now has the feeling that all that work has been for nothing.

  His willpower falls away like a shell as soon as he spots a man in the bar across the way, looking at him intensely; he has an aquiline nose, and the expression in his eyes reveals a mesmerized obsession that frightens Jonás, who has suddenly recognized him: that man, sitting bolt upright like a totem pole, observing him from the door of the bar once frequented by the mechanics from the garage, is not directing at him the steely expression of those eyes, cracked and barren, lost, set above an iron chin and frail cheekbones; he is staring at the store with its FOR SALE sign, because that old man is the same butcher who once showed him the secrets of the cold storage chamber: It’s like the insides of an iceberg, he can remember him saying, or the lungs of a frozen whale. Jonás also recalls a previous conversation with his mother, years back, when she told him the butcher was ruined: he’d had to leave his shop, and ever since he’s spent his afternoons sitting expectantly in the bar, drinking a single coffee and watching over what had once been his life.

  The recognition isn’t reciprocal. Jonás picks up his pace. He leaves behind several buildings until he reaches an apartment block of gray-brown bricks and rows of granite-colored balconies. He counts four stories up from the ground and takes note of the plants, still luxuriant on the railings, with their green overgrowth splashed above the third-floor balconies. Before crossing the street, he turns and contemplates the display window of the stationery shop, his favorite store in the neighborhood until a modest photography studio opened two blocks further down. The shop is exactly the same: with the same notebooks; the same metal boxes, somewhat dusty, containing watercolor pencils; the eternal drawing pads; the orange, green, and blue reading flashcards; those great obsolete atlases that haven’t yet been updated to reflect the borders of the new nations; and a globe in its box, with large, arresting letters, now washed out, proclaiming its novel light-up features. He cracks open the door and recognizes the smell of paper, of time moving slowly; a doll placidly exhibits its skeleton beneath the relief of muscle
tissue, a smile on its face, its plastic hair parted down the middle. Jonás thinks about leaving; his father has already told him there’s no trace of her there. Night is beginning to fall and the chatter of birds resonates around him.

  Chapter 25

  The lock turns hard and dry. He would have liked to get it right the first time, but it’s taken him three attempts. He sticks the key in, and just before it touches the back of the slot, he turns it rapidly to the right. He finds it incredible that no one has taken the trouble in the last few years to fix the front door, heavy as ever, painted a brown not so different from the rest of the brick façade, though certainly shinier. Or maybe they have changed it, but it’s still the same sun, and the same cold, and the same rain that have kept on battering it; it’s most likely not neglect but a lesion that’s endemic to that enormous door—tired now, with a wide metal band in the middle and bars at the top and bottom—like Jonás’s muscle contracture, with all the coming and going, recoveries and relapses. He remembers how his mother always had such trouble opening it, heavy as a dolmen; after walking up the three front steps to the entryway, it would slam closed so hard it could be heard from upstairs.

  He keeps the door from shutting thunderously and slowly eases it into the jamb, holding on to the inside knob. The walls are lined in light-colored wood, as is the stairway railing, cut from a single piece, next to a room which has still gone unused, as Jonás recalls, surely conceived of as some sort of enclosure for a doorman who, after the installation of the intercom, was never hired. Inside there will follow the water meters and fuse boxes, and then the emptiness of a space that is old now and never has been and never will be occupied. Several images come to mind: his mother and him loaded down with shopping bags, his mother and him returning from school, his mother and him crossing the entryway in the afternoon, one of those days when his father has come home early to pick him up and surprise him. Jonás was fascinated by the police station, but his father preferred to keep those two worlds separate; after a few tries, they never went back.