The Swimmers

by Marian Womack

  * * *

  After my storytelling I went to see Savina.

  She had decided to celebrate my visit, and the table between us was laid with an impressive assortment of delicacies. I could also see a steaming jug of pure green herbal drink. While I looked at it, the delicately moving liquid turned turquoise, yellow, back to green. Rainbow leaves. Precious, expensive, delicious. I could feel my mouth watering already.

  ‘Please, Pearl, eat! I cleaned your bú when you were a baby, and still you are waiting to be told to serve yourself some food at my table!’ Was she mocking me? It certainly felt that way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, while serving myself some mango-bread and spreading grease over it.

  ‘No, please, no need to apologise. Not to me, child.’

  I looked confusedly at the scene, as if from the outside. What was I really doing here? Why had I sought out Savina, of all people?

  My findings at the cabinet room had affected me deeply. I had acted as a vessel, I had communicated. I was obviously better suited for storytelling than I had anticipated. However, immediately after the observance I had suffered one of my episodes; and, together with the one in the repository, that meant I had suffered two in rapid succession. I hoped this was normal: the effort of performing, and doing so for the first time, had to be accounted for. Everything felt so strange, so unreal. I needed someone to ground me again, and Savina was the closest thing I had to a family.

  ‘It is good to see you, child,’ she said, pouring some herbal drink into my mug.

  ‘Tell me about my parents.’ It wasn’t a question; I didn’t frame it as a question. It was a statement. It came out of my mouth without me thinking. The pictures in the Benguele house.

  Silence cut through the room, and I started cleaning my fingers, sticky from the mango-bread, with one of the white napkins, in preparation to leave. Just as I was getting up, Savina spoke.

  ‘What exactly do you want to know?’

  What kind of question was that? She knew exactly what I wanted to know: everything. It was difficult to explain this to her, or anybody. Those images, the hiking sticks, the Jump dresses, kept dancing inside my brain, creating a narrative that I needed to order. But I could not do this without her help. There was no one else left. I said:

  ‘Why did Mother take us to Gobarí? She must have known it was dangerous to live up there.’

  Savina’s mouth twisted as she rolled her eyes, a sign of her displeasure with me that took me back many years, down into the dark well of childhood. She got up slowly, and went towards her makeshift sink. Savina’s house had no running water, but a clever system of pipes brought some in from a nearby well that belonged to a neighbour. I wondered if the arrangement was legal.

  ‘How are things up on the farm?’

  She didn’t answer my question, but asked one of her own. I wasn’t sure how much she knew about Eli’s plans, if she knew anything. I decided that the best approach was to be as vague as possible.

  ‘Everything is good. They have been successful with some crops, and are working hard to develop others.’

  ‘Good! Let them do that.’

  What could she possibly mean? It sounded as if Savina was dismissing Eli, and all her efforts. She resumed chopping some herbs that had been on the counter, and I said nothing. Suddenly, the display of food was not so appetising anymore. I sipped my drink; it burnt my mouth. She turned back to face me, the little knife still in her hand.

  ‘I am their storyteller now,’ I announced proudly. To my dismay, she snorted. I had expected her to be a little bit more impressed.

  ‘You know nothing, all of you. You are children playing houses. What is Eli doing? She is bringing back to life the same things that caused it in the first place!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Those crops! Those vegetables! Growing them was partly responsible, child, growing them without thinking, growing them in oversized proportions,’ she resumed chopping furiously, ‘putting things on them so they would grow faster and faster.’

  Not so long ago I would have believed every word that came out of her mouth; now I knew a different reality, a new reality. If she ever knew what the green winter meant, how it had come about.

  ‘Why are you chopping that?’ I asked, hoping to make amends. ‘Are you going to do some magiks? Can I help?’

  Her eyes opened wide and she stared at me as if had gone mad. For one second I imagined this was possible.

  ‘Magiks?’ she said. ‘Magiks?’ she repeated, obviously alarmed at the idea.

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought that…’

  ‘You thought what, child? What do you think I am about to do? Tell me, tell me right now, what you think I am going to do.’

  I was confused; what exactly had I said to make her so mad at me? I tried to explain myself:

  ‘Well, sometimes you chopped herbs for our recipes…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Our shuvaní recipes…’ Was my meaning not clear?

  After I said this, Savina held the kitchen counter with both hands, and let out a long sigh.

  ‘Oh, child. Oh, child,’ was all she kept repeating.

  I felt worried now; she suddenly looked old to me, as if she were shrinking before my eyes. I got up and went to comfort her.

  ‘Savina, whatever is the matter?’

  She looked up at me, and she looked so tired.

  ‘Who told you that I was doing magiks? Who said such nonsense?’

  ‘We, you and me, did some, when I was younger…’

  She shook her head, left and right.

  ‘And why did you think that was magiks? Why do you call it magiks? They are recipes! They are cures! They are ways of extracting the properties from the plants around us! There are no magiks here, child!’

  I waited, until the notion sank in. No magiks? The mixing of herbs and other things had been simply medicine? I remembered now her big, oversized stone mortar, where she would turn everything to dust.

  ‘But,’ I started, ‘you used to sing while you put things in the mortar, and said words while you crunched them…’

  ‘That is only to “help” the process, old wives’ tales, superstitions my mother used to have. I repeat the same things she did because that makes me feel closer to her. But those words are not magiks of any kind! They are simply said to pass the time!’

  ‘And the cards, the reading of the cards? You taught me to read them!’

  ‘That is a game, child! You cannot possibly believe that people look at the cards for guidance! Everyone knows it is a game!’

  ‘Some shuvaní do not take it as a game, I’m sure of that!’ I childishly protested; to which she replied, making me blush:

  ‘And some techies give their babies to the ringers, don’t they? But that doesn’t mean that all of you do! Do you not think that there could be many kinds of shuvaní? Some who believe in the cards, some who don’t; some who will be good cooks, some who aren’t? We are exactly like you! You understand nothing! You are looking at us with the same glasses as everyone else! And you, with your shuvaní blood and all!’

  I sat there quietly, my head bent. But I had to ask again.

  ‘And what about mullos? Are they not real either?’

  ‘Pearl, really? Those are only stories to frighten children.’

  I had grown up so terrified of them, of my father, coming back to get me.

  ‘Very well,’ I said coldly. ‘Thank you for clearing all this up.’ If I sounded ironic, I could not help it. ‘Now, could you please tell me about my father?’

  She sighed again, and looked at me with much eye-rolling and head-shaking. But eventually she left the knife on the counter, and came back dragging her feet on the earth floor to sit down again. She considered the herbal tea, and said:

  ‘We are going to need something a bit stronger.’ She got up and produced from somewhere cranberry liquor and two glasses. She drank her first glass in one long swig, and served herself some more before sta
rting to speak.

  * * *

  My father was scared of my mother, of what she could do to me. He feared that she would send me on a Jump. He knew she was friends with the Benguele woman; she had enough contacts to put me in a vessel if she so wanted.

  I state all of this, again, not a question in sight. To my surprise, Savina simply replies:

  ‘No, child. Nothing like that.’

  I realise I am still looking for reasons for my father to have protected me, for I feel that he intended to do so. But protect me from what, exactly?

  ‘No,’ she is saying. ‘No one was going to send you up.’

  Savina starts talking, and I am transported to another country, the past. I am playing with my little brother on the floor. I vaguely recollect that carpet, beige and brown, orange, with striking geometric patterns. My parents are shouting upstairs, and I try to get my brother to concentrate on the game. I am protecting him from the shouts, and the slamming doors, with all the ease of a person who does this regularly.

  My parents are arguing about me.

  It is difficult to follow, and I don’t really want to follow the conversation, perhaps because I know what it is about, I have already sensed what this is about another time, perhaps before I was born, while I was inside Mother’s belly, and she tried to swim away with me.

  ‘She felt responsible, or as if she had done something wrong.’

  ‘Very well. But that didn’t necessarily mean that she was going to hurt me. Or that he had to take me away. Because that is what he did, right? He could have asked to dissolve the union with my mother.’

  ‘You see, child; things are not always so crystal clear, are they? There was a lot in that union that wasn’t right, although nobody knew at the time… Oh, but I knew. I was there. Your father did terrible things, terrible.’

  ‘Like what, exactly?’

  ‘Nothing that can be put into words… Things that he did again and again.’

  ‘Did he beat Mother up? Did he hurt her?’

  ‘No, nothing like that…’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Nothing exactly like that… But he hurt, oh yes, he hurt her… He knew exactly how to do it.’

  Words, actions. Nothing as bad as bruises, nothing as terrible as broken bones. Or were they as bad as bruises, as terrible as broken bones? For those words, those actions, had broken my mother: not her bones, but her spirit. This was the second side to the story, the darker side. The unknown occurrences that take place behind the walls of a house; the privacy of locked doors, the hidden rooms of a union. It was more common than would be expected: more people than cared to admit possessed some ‘hidden’ shuvaní blood, even among the techies it was possible to trace some shuvaní descendancy, especially in towns like ours, where Jumps took place, with its long tradition of cultural melting pots. In short, there were more shuvaní-related techies than not in Old Town. But these families tended to obscure the fact, subtly, by letting their techie identity be the one covering it all, by carefully avoiding the performance of anything that could be constructed as a shuvaní trait. The question of the blood, once revealed, opened a wound within my family.

  ‘Your family needed to trace back their genealogy for three generations, in order to keep Gobarí.’

  ‘Gobarí?’ So it had been the house, of course.

  ‘He went to the Registry, did all the necessary research. Hired a curator to dig up the most obscure bits.’

  Yes, they could trace the ownership of the house long enough, but other things were also unearthed.

  ‘Your mother always swore she didn’t know. It was a cross-marriage, more than a century ago; it was more common then. But, he claimed, it always stays in the blood, a hundred or a thousand years.’

  I cringe. ‘Yes, you had already told me about this marriage, many years ago, Savina. But I would never have imagined that was the reason behind it all.’ She looked at me, raising her eyebrows, as if I was stupid, or as if I should have understood it all much earlier. Should I have? Had I willingly ignored this about my family as well? I hardly ever spoke about my shuvaní lineage, not even Laurel knew. What did that make me? The shuvaní caste was, without a doubt, the most hated in the Three Continents, the one that suffered the most. Was that the reason why I had kept quiet about it myself?

  More importantly, was my father really so shocked by this, to the extent that it eroded the marriage? I hated what I was beginning to feel now, embarrassment at my own father, at myself. If he had those beliefs, what did that make me?

  ‘He felt deceived,’ Savina continued, ‘developed his own ways of manipulation: once he drank a whole bottle of alcoholic milbao and lay there semiconscious; your mother saw him turn white and blue, thought he was going to die. He did this because she had announced that she was going to leave him. And this went on and on and on: she could not take his behaviour, and every time she said that she was leaving, he would pull some silly stunt like that.’

  ‘I don’t understand. She was going to leave him, and he reacted that way? I thought he was disgusted with her, and would have wanted to leave her himself!’

  ‘No, no, no, child. You don’t understand. He was not interested in leaving her. He wanted to punish her. He had no intention of leaving. What he wanted was to make her as unhappy as possible, for as long as possible.’

  Those last words were the ones that did it. They opened up the horrid possibility; and, for the first time, I could see—no, not exactly see, but maybe start to glimpse how it may have looked to others, recognising their narrative of what may have happened with me as a possibility.

  The father that Savina’s words evoked in her kitchen was an alien creature, someone who had fallen from the stars beyond the ring or even farther beyond. I did not recognise him. Then again, I never knew my father, not really.

  I feel it then, finally: the waves welling up around me. But they are not taking me up, even if I make it to the horizon, these interstellar waves, ebbing and swerving; they will never help me become one with the cosmos. Instead, they are swallowing me into a big dark mouth that opens beneath me, as I descend into the unknown.

  The ocean water beyond the wall must be colder than any I have ever experienced, colder perhaps than I can imagine. But I can intuit how it must feel to swim in it: I know well the refrigerated chambers in the Registry, where some bacteria specimens are kept. I have stayed inside them at times a tiny bit longer than I was expected to, enjoying how the cold chipped away, little by little, all my senses, numbed my fingers, until I was nothing; not Pearl anymore, not the junior curator, but simply a mass of bones and flesh gripping at her existence with desperate fingers. Now, I imagine that must be what ocean-swimming feels like, except that, once numb, surely you stop moving; and, once you stop moving, surely you stop managing your flimsy grip on the water. And, once that happens, all that remains open to you is to allow yourself to be swallowed up whole by the vast immensity of black, where no past, no present, no future, could possible exist. Only the enormity of the ocean and yourself.

  ‘Look, child, the story I am telling you is not special; it is as old as life itself. It is we who pick up the pieces, again and again. As if we weren’t already doing enough!’

  ‘Do you mean the beanies?’ I asked, not wanting to mention the shuvaníes again.

  ‘No, child! I mean the rumí!’ By which she meant us women.

  ‘Is that why he killed Verity, then? Because he wanted to punish Urania? But how were those two things related?’

  Savina shook her head.

  ‘No, child, your father did not kill the little girl…’ But she would not say more. She got up, turned her back to me, and for a moment I thought she was crying. I had never seen Savina cry before, but I was elated by her answer.

  ‘Savina,’ I started, ‘do you think they marry us to upper-settlers because they can’t have babies up there?’

  She pulled one of her faces, eyes wide open, and said:

  ‘Don’t get me started o
n the ringers! Besides, why can’t they leave us in peace? Tell me, where do they come from? Are you sure there is a ring, that it is not a drawing they have put up into the sky? Are you sure there are people living up there? Because I am not, child,’ she said, her face a sad, angry mask. ‘There could be, or there could not be. Perhaps it is only something planted in our heads, and it has been like that all this time.’

  Time? What time, exactly, was she referring to? But I could not dispel the similarities with my own conversation with Arlo. Savina did this often, acted as an echo of my own anxieties. It was as if she could read my mind, exactly as Alira might have done.

  ‘Savina, you know why I have come here.’

  I said this because she had looked me up and down when I arrived, pausing her eyes on my belly for just a slightly longer second. But, oh, she knew, she knew. Just by looking at me, she knew. She turned to me now and looked at me, frowning, clearly enraged at my words.

  ‘I can’t do it, child.’

  ‘Even if it is not a spell, or a potion… Even if it is only medicine: I know you can. For if you can provoke the opposite, and I have seen you do that many times, there must be way of doing this as well. It is the other side of the same coin, is it not?’

  ‘You don’t understand me. It is not that I can’t. It is that I won’t. What you are asking me to do is to poison you.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you poison yourself, if you knew the fate that awaited you?’

  ‘Don’t ask such blasphemy, child, for I would not do it. How can you ask me such a thing?’

  She knew what I wanted and I would not leave until she gave it to me. I decided to try another approach.

  ‘Look, I need to go up there, I need to go into the ring. And I am not asking you only to do that, not exactly.’ I touched my belly, an unconscious gesture.

  She looked at me, horrified.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, her face contorted somewhere between disgust and pity for me. ‘No, child, I will not make you infertile.’