“There’s a bit of a breeze coming up. Here we thought summer was done, after how cold it’s been these last few days, but it looks like we’ve got a bit of a reprieve before winter.”
“Yeah, suddenly it’s almost muggy out.”
“Yes, but what timing; we always did enjoy sitting out on the terrace.” Before Jonás can react, Sergio has piled up all the plates. “Don’t even think about it. I’ll go get the bottle and some glasses.”
Jonás nods and sits back in his seat. The sky is completely clear. The breeze caresses the back of his neck and he feels bundled up in his shirt. It’s been a long while since Jonás found himself alone there, in the balmy night air. The last time was when he left the apartment he had shared with Ada to look for a new rental. In those days of transition, he could have stayed in a hotel, but the only place where he felt like he could manage was that house. He didn’t even have to ask: the day after Jonás told him, over lunch following their swim, Sergio called him up to say he’d gone to the mall that morning and bought an inflatable mattress—It’s really comfortable and all you have to do to blow it up is plug it in, why don’t you come stay with us as long as you need until you can find a place—in a scene exactly identical to the one he finds himself in now, with the only difference being that back then Paula wasn’t the beautiful little girl she is now, because Martina was only recently pregnant. Sergio also didn’t go off in search of a bottle of eighteen-year-old whisky, instead using the lull after dinner to set up the inflatable mattress in the bedroom now occupied by his daughter, covering it with blankets and leaving a package wrapped in gift paper on the pillow. Jonás could almost swear this is the same night, that time has brought him back to the same space and even the same moment, gravitating tirelessly around it.
Sergio returns with two tumblers and a caramel-colored bottle with a yellow label. He uncorks it in front of Jonás, who picks out the sharp and penetrating aroma, intense and physical, of a sherry-smelling oaken barrel, a succession between brandy and whisky.
Like so many times before, they drink the first glass in silence. Jonás had closed the door to the room, sat down on the inflatable mattress, which he found comfortable, and picked up the package on the pillow: it felt like a book, quite voluminous. As he slowly removed the wrapping paper, he discovered a tome with over five hundred pictures analyzed by different experts on street photography. The table of contents listed several essays by Sebastian.
“Will you stop thinking about it already?”
Sergio tops up two more glasses. Jonás looks out beyond the roof tiles.
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. Leave the past where it belongs and quit blaming yourself. If I hear otherwise, you won’t be getting any more dinner invitations.”
“Some things can’t be helped.”
“Yeah, I know. But with all that’s going on right now with you, I don’t think you need to be tormenting yourself over that night.”
He smiles. The first sip of the second glass tastes even better.
“Was I that bad?”
“Devastated. Destroyed. Like you’d been hit by a freight train.”
“Speaking of freight trains, Australia hasn’t been back to the pool. Bongo wasn’t there yesterday either. I miss his locker room lectures.”
“I bet. I should be a little bit freer this week, we can get back to our swimming and lunch schedule. I’ve just been under so much pressure lately. It’s the same old stuff, but it’s like we’ve had to work twice as hard, sometimes more. Like each of us was doing the job of four people.”
Silence. Jonás runs his hand over the tablecloth, with various stains in deep red semicircles.
“What was Paula talking about when she said some of the kids are on vacation with their parents? It’s fall already.”
“Jonás.” Sergio tips his glass slightly and observes the movement of the whisky. “She was talking about just that. The day before yesterday I didn’t go to the pool because I had a meeting with the director. Some of the kids have stopped going to daycare. The parents haven’t shown up, and now there’s a problem: the spots aren’t vacant but they’re not being paid for. She called me up to ask for advice.”
“And?”
“What Paula said. They’re on vacation. That’s the official explanation. Can you imagine that woman having to go door to door because no one is answering her calls or her emails? Legally, there’s no problem: when they stop paying, the slots open up and the daycare keeps the parents’ security deposits. The law doesn’t have a solution for everything, though. We’ve kept sending Paula there, but we’re starting to think about changing schools; she’s got practically no classmates.”
Jonás finishes his second glass. It’s starting to cool off. While Sergio refills it, he puts on his sweater. They take a brief sip, in unison, with a meditative slowness.
“You remember my friend Oliver? You met him once. At my second exhibition.”
Sergio nods. Jonás tells him about his dinner with Sebastian, his encounter the previous day with Ingrid, and his conversation with his father. He leaves out the part about the greenhouse.
“You know, there’s always the possibility that we’re starting to read too much into things. That your mother—sorry if it hurts to hear this—has decided to disappear, and your photographer friend too. After all, based on what you’ve told me, he seems to drop off the face of the earth pretty frequently. And maybe some of the parents have decided to stop paying for daycare because it was just too expense; maybe they didn’t feel like showing up and doing the paperwork. That’s all possible too. I’m just saying we shouldn’t rule out the idea that everything might be normal.”
It is Jonás who serves the third glass. He makes the inward decision that it will be the last.
“Partisans of normalcy. Sounds good. Especially seeing you. And your daughter, who’s absolutely lovely. And Martina. I like the way she treats you. She’s very elegant. It’s not that she says or does anything special, but it shows the bond you two share and it’s a feeling that fills the house. That was what I thought when I slept over.”
“Alright, alright. Yes, I have a good life.” He picks up his glass. “And I have friends who are glad for me. Even so, I wonder sometimes if there’s not more to all this.”
“More to it?” Jonás sets down his glass. “What else do you want?”
Sergio gets up from the table and leans on the handrail. The creepers extend below his feet, climbing down a blackened brick façade that’s embellished by the stretching foliage of the pines, and descend to the lawn. The carefully tended garden surrounds the pool, covered now with a tarp; each terrace in the development is lower than the one before, like the stairs of a miniature amphitheater, silent in its placidity.
“Look, I can’t really explain it. But if anyone can understand me, it’s you.”
“Alright.” Jonás leans on the balcony with his back to the gardens and crosses his arms.
“We’ve known each other since college. You dropped out to pursue your photography, but I kept going. Course after course. Second in my class, with only one exam I didn’t ace. Then the law firm, an incredible first job, in communications. And Martina. Right after that, a management position at the biggest insurance company in the country. The youngest member of upper management in the history of the firm. I get married and then comes Paula. And here I am.”
Jonás nods. For a moment, he considers saying something, but he keeps quiet.
“This may be hard for you, but you have to understand: I’m thirty years old, I’ve got a wife and a daughter. You could say I’m happy, but the thing is that I really am. In fact, jobwise, things couldn’t be better. And yet, there’s something I don’t quite get…”
A sudden gust of wind stirs some of the dead leaves piled up on the tarp covering the pool; it rises up to the terrace, and the napkins still lying on the table start to flutter. Sergio swallows his saliva and looks at Jonás with an unfamilia
r intensity, his eyes glassy; Jonás wonders then if they haven’t had too much to drink, although his friend’s face has never looked so lucid.
“For real, this is it?”
Jonás notes a slight trembling in Sergio’s arms, but he decides to ignore it. “I’m aware of how fortunate I am. It’s just that sometimes, when I think about it, I get the impression that out there, somewhere else, far away from this house, someone else is living my life for me.”
Chapter 38
He didn’t stay the night, nor did he let Sergio take him home. It was almost six, and he had just half an hour to wait until the local trains started running. Sergio lives on the outskirts, eight stops from the central station and another forty minutes on the subway, which under normal circumstances would be little more than a peaceful moment in transit; but at six thirty in the morning, after spending the whole night talking, it was an eternity. Sergio was very insistent about driving him home, but between the two of them they’d finished the bottle; Jonás—despite the continuous buzzing in his head, like a walking beehive that someone had rattled—was able to pull together enough common sense, and the necessary conviction, to make sure Sergio stayed home.
During the entire trip back, from the moment he crossed the development with its pine trees, garden, and tall hedges until he exited at Arco del Sur, Jonás thought fondly of his favorite Sundays. As he watched the dawn break through the glass windows of the local train, he reminisced about how much he used to like waking up in his old apartment, with a subtle pecking sensation between his temples: those were his perfect hung-over Sundays, watching movies without even getting out of bed. She wasn’t usually hung over because she almost never drank. In truth, Jonás wasn’t usually either, because his body was indebted to him, and after a night of partying it tended not to rebel, instead responding only a bit sluggishly. Ada—if she had to correct exams or write an article for the research chair—would bring her work to bed; after an entire day of lounging, ordering in, and naps spaced out over morning and afternoon, fitted close against each other, seeking to accommodate their bodies into the spaces offered by the other’s position, the night was a blanket of indolent half-dark, and Monday they would wake up without any need for an alarm clock, invigorated by their time of tender rest together.
When he walked into the apartment, he lowered the blinds completely on the view of the church turrets, caressed by that first sleepy glow, with its soundless clarity, so that not even the cracks might allow a single particle of light to pass. After brushing his teeth, he let his clothes fall to the floor and pulled the covers up to his head, in case some drop of luminosity managed to filter through an undetected and minuscule opening. Before going to sleep, he replayed those Sundays in his mind, and so he awoke, when it was nearly night out, with the confabulation that he had been not there, but in another house, with blue walls, watching three or four movies in a row and having meals delivered, with the trace of a sweet, soft smell on his neck like a palpable memory, the caress of an invisible touch.
Now, the following day, as he walks into the locker room at the pool again, he sees Sergio’s white and blue backpack hanging from a hook. His friend has had more than a day to recover, and surely he’s swimming now at an appreciable pace. Jonás was surprised, as he walked by the school, to discover much less agitation in the entrance, despite the fact that classes had just let out. It might be excessive to say that the kids had stood there looking at him, but Jonás felt that way.
As he strips down, he thinks of Marius. He hasn’t seen him since taking his brother’s picture. Jonás wonders how two men so physically identical—with the same features, but also similar bodies, sinewy and slender, though the doorman’s is much more hunched—can exhibit such different attitudes: dominance and submission, control and servility, although perhaps it’s precisely because of this, because they both inhabit the same face.
During his fifty-minute swim he can’t stop thinking about Sulla Montesinos or the girl in the photograph; he wonders whether this man’s preoccupation—so powerful it drove him to invite Jonás to his house, hire him, and put on that whole suffocating show in his jungle of orchids—is all that different, in truth, from the preoccupation he and his father feel for his mother.
He gets out of the water at the same time as Sergio. In the end, he has swum at a considerable rhythm, though his friend was faster. The pool is half-empty: just the lifeguard and a familiar face or two. When they enter the locker room, they have their choice of benches, because the only one there is Pongo, drying off his smooth, rubicund torso without haste, his expression perplexed and far-off, like all of them when they finish.
“Hey.” Sergio shakes his hand, while Jonás merely waves hello, seated now and drying off his legs.
“Today was good, huh?”
“Yeah, but it’s strange there were so few people.”
“Who knows? Other days there are three or four of us to a lane.”
“That was before. By the way, what happened to your buddy, the one who always swims with you?” Pongo has finished toweling himself off now. He starts to button up his shirt after applying a stick of deodorant. He seems somewhat anxious as he tries to put on his pants, almost losing his balance while standing on his left foot; as if unaware of his own weight until that very instant, he sits down on one of the benches.
“You know, I have no idea. It’s been a few days since he’s come. I called a couple times but he doesn’t pick up. I mean, I’m not going to beg him. Maybe he took a trip, or he had another convention.”
Pongo finishes adjusting the knot of his yellow tie and gels up his hair, with its short curls. He runs both hands through it several times as he contemplates himself carefully in the mirror. Sergio and Jonás, meanwhile, have nearly finished getting dressed.
“Anyway, it’s better like this, don’t you think? Now we can really stretch out when we swim.”
When Pongo leaves, they’re alone.
“Whoa,” mutters Sergio as he smooths out his jacket and picks up his bag. “He doesn’t seem to miss him at all.”
“Yeah, that’s one way of looking at it.”
After leaving the locker room, as they head down the hall to the exit, they almost collide with the pool attendant, his dark gray suit impeccably ironed and his tie fastened to his shirt with a pin.
“Man! The two brothers! I hadn’t seen the two of you around here for a while now. I actually thought,” he turns to Sergio, “that you’d stopped coming.”
“My brother and I were just talking about that,” responds Sergio, with a half-smile, “how the pool seems emptier and emptier all the time.”
He adjusts his sunglasses, which are resting on the tip of his nose. At the end of the corridor, behind the glass door, the noontime clarity shines through in soft bursts.
“The same thing happens every year. You know how hard it is to stay disciplined. There are always people who stop coming and then we never see them again.”
Chapter 39
When he walks into his apartment, he thinks the noise has remained outside, but that’s not the case: he’s simply grown used to it. Through the window he greets the turrets and peeks out at the street. The same shouts come from the club a few meters up, as well as the sirens from the fire station or the din of the garbage trucks that halt next to the piled-up containers. The sounds enter, sometimes waking him. It was worse at the beginning, when he first moved there, but these last few years have witnessed the mitigation of that destabilizing effect, the consequences of which were also felt at work: he would get a call to cover a story, and after having spent the night lying awake, he would sleep so soundly he didn’t even hear the telephone. He recalls this as he leans out on the narrow balcony and thinks to himself that ever since the student protests, he hasn’t received a single assignment from the paper. Sometimes three or four days go by between stories, but crossing that weeklong threshold is alarming. He should ask what’s going on, he thinks, as the wind envelopes his neck and face li
ke a handkerchief of air, and he watches the green lights of the nightclub.
He feels a vibration and takes his cell phone from his pocket.
“Dad. I was just going to call you. Have you found out anything about Mom or Thibault?”
For a few seconds, he hears only his father’s breathing. He stares at the bus that has stopped across from his window, the screech of its brakes accentuated in the night, like a southbound metallic wheezing. Immediately he thinks of Leopoldo, of their most recent conversation and his anguished search; the final twenty-four hours have passed, and now he’ll be able to file his report. Jonás remembers how he shook, his terrified expression, his steely features and compact body, with its clear-cut ruggedness, restless and vulnerable, walking away up the street with his limp perhaps more pronounced, to hand out the stack of flyers with the faces of his daughter and granddaughter.
“Nothing. No sign of Thibault,” he sighs. “As for your mother, I was looking at the video and one of the photos, the one from the water park. I went by there, and it’s completely abandoned, almost in ruins. The strange thing is they haven’t torn it down yet, even though there are demolition notices all around. Maybe she thought about visiting it at some point, but it’s completely deserted now.”
“There was another new frame, with a photo of the three of us at the beach.”
“That’s the only lead I have left. And that’s being optimistic, because it’s really not even a clue. I sent your mother’s picture to the police station there. Back then it was a tiny coastal village, but now, after twenty years of tourism and urban development, it’s practically a city. I’ve thought about going myself, because I know all her possible itineraries, if she’s decided to go hide out there.”
“Hide out? Who would she being hiding from at this point? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“From me. From you. From herself. Who knows?”
“Alright, so what are you waiting for? Why aren’t you on the road already?”
The Swimmers Page 16