The Swimmers

by Joaquin Perez Azaustre

  He calms down when he sees the girl come back, agitated, with his trench coat in her hands.

  “You leave this. You need it. I think it’s raining lots.”

  They hear the same racket as before, but louder now. She wraps him carefully in his trench coat and starts walking agilely up the steps with him.

  “I keep you company only these stairs. They cannot see me here with you. Hurry.”

  He tries to send his entire musculoskeletal system a persistent nerve impulse, but all he achieves is a tired trod, although more dynamic in appearance. He hears a strident voice, and turns to see another woman, thickset and authoritarian, decked out in a leather jumpsuit up to her chin, as she hauls along a pair of children who she holds by the hand: they are knee-high and dressed in shorts with little white shoes. The woman and children move off, and he walks up the two flights with the girl; she frees herself slowly from Jonás’s body, while he continues to hold on to her. As she untangles her arm, which has remained positioned beneath his shoulders the whole way up, she gives him a peck on the palm of his hand and then touches his face.

  “Come back when you better,” she smiles, disappearing nimbly down the stairs.

  With difficulty, he heads for the room with the bar made of mirrors. On the far end, propped up on the edge, he makes out Humbert’s unsteady silhouette leaning on his elbows.

  “Kid!” he exclaims when he sees Jonás appear. “Where’d you go?”

  He finds it exhausting to walk from one end of the bar to the other without showing any sign of that involuntary sway in his steps, but the visual reference in the mirror, behind the green and blue bottles, helps him keep his balance. When Jonás reaches Humbert, he practically hangs off the lapels of his jacket, stained and already wrinkled enough as it is.

  “Humbert, I’m begging you.” He feels a sudden surge of nausea. “Get me out of here.”

  They look into each other’s eyes for a few seconds, and the news anchor nods with overdramatic determination. He seems less haggard than before.

  “Tonight you’re gonna give one hell of a newscast,” he laughs, choking back a dry heave, while Humbert discreetly puts his hand around his hip.

  “Let’s take it nice and slow, kid. Something must have disagreed with you.”

  The moans behind the folding screens have grown considerably more audible, crossing the corridor to the spiral staircase. As soon as they’re alone, having left the room behind, Jonás collapses completely, and Humbert has to muster up the rest of his strength to support him and keep him from falling face first into the carpet.

  “Whoa, you’re in real bad shape! I mean, I’m plastered but you… What’d you have to drink?”

  His voice reaches Jonás like a transistor radio with failing batteries.

  “Just a bit of whisky, I swear… I don’t know what the fuck they put in it.”

  They start to make their way up the stairs. The concentric structure dizzies him, but he tries to focus all the pressure into the fingers of his left hand, grasping the railing, while Humbert practically pushes him upwards with a gargantuan effort. When they reach the top, they fall onto the maroon sofas. Humbert looks over at the wooden bar with the stuffed leather lining, next to the main door, visible at the other end of the hallway. There are two bone-colored boot tips visible, which Jonás recognizes next to a pair of black high-heeled shoes. Humbert, his face flushed from the exercise, his breathing labored, becomes suddenly excited and gets up awkwardly.

  “You rest here; you’ll start to feel better, you’ll see. I’ll be right back.”

  By the time Jonás manages to get his lips unstuck, Humbert has left the lounge and is halfway down the hall. As soon as he makes it to the other end, he rejoins the couple from before, and they start to converse with loud voices and laughter, as if they’d been waiting for him ever since he’d gone downstairs. For a few seconds, Jonás shuts his eyes and tries to recover his respiratory rhythm, too agitated now: like when he used to have panic attacks, disguised as asthma, rendering him useless, suffocated by the obstruction of an almost strangulated trachea.

  He picks up the aroma of orchids, not pleasant but instead enveloped in a kind of subtle putrefaction, generated perhaps by his own palate, dry and furry. Jonás tries to shake his head, but the base of his neck is asleep. From the bar comes an increasingly loud uproar and the presentiment of chaos. Little by little, very clumsily, he gets to his feet. Leaning against the scarlet, paper-covered walls, he crosses the hallway and comes out into the piano room, with the long tail no longer empty; clients are leaning on it now, most of them with drinks in hand as they listen to the pianist, who lets his fingers fall limp and subdued on the keyboard, insinuating a tune with a remotely cloying timbre, but one also full of volume. The cigarette smoke stings his eyes, and that’s when he thinks to himself that he’s starting to recover his capacity for perception, beyond hearing and sight, as he tries to play down the profound exhaustion of his ballasted body.

  He walks as best he can through the audience that’s gathered round the pianist. The majority of them are wearing suits. The women are smartly dressed, the younger ones with lots of makeup, although some, of a certain age, display an elegant bearing. The faces seem familiar to him, but he’s leaned so far up against the wall, still his constant walking stick, that he never quite gets turned around enough to observe them fully.

  Back next to the bar, he again notes the large size of the man in the sky blue sports jacket, jeans, and crocodile boots. His countenance still exudes a wholesome, athletic amiability, although the intermittent inclination of his chin, nodding and resigned to the drawn-out monologue as he gives Humbert a few pats on the back, tempts Jonás to leave on his own; as soon as he takes a few consecutive steps, however, without the wall as a reference point, he realizes it will be exceedingly difficult for him to make his own way in the street, in the rain, until he can find a taxi to take him home. He remembers Sebastian, alone in his hotel. He wavers and nearly falls.

  The woman with her legs enveloped in black silk gets agilely up from the stool and heads toward Jonás, who can barely take his eyes off the foreshortened figure of her heels.

  “Hey, are you alright?” He lifts his gaze and finds her chestnut eyes, slightly sunken cheekbones, and thick lips made up in red. “You should sit down.”

  Humbert notices him because his eyes are glued to the tight curve of her midsection, beneath an exquisite dress, sleeveless with a shallow neckline revealing a string of pearls. Her companion seems unbothered by the fact that Humbert is watching her so openly.

  “Thanks.” Now she seems surprisingly young, more so than before. “I just need some fresh air. To take a walk. Maybe my friend can keep me company.”

  From that moment on, everything happens at an accelerated pace. The chauffeur appears from behind the curtains, stares Jonás down, and charges from behind at Humbert—who is still holding a glass in his hand—as if trying to knock a door in: at full bore, tilted forward, nailing his shoulder squarely into Humbert’s back without giving Jonás time to warn him. The glass of whisky goes flying into the bottles on the counter. It seems as if Humbert is going to collide with the girl, when the three from before—one of them with his tie still knotted around her neck—appear from behind the drapery next to the bouncer and scream, “That’s them!” Jonás tries uselessly to draw closer while the man in the designer jeans grabs the girl by the arm, pulling her from Humbert’s path as he plunges to the tiled floor in a spectacular head-first fall against the stools, the metal legs striking him in the ribs.

  Chapter 44

  An intense odor of wet earth. Not only is his forehead sunken into the bushes, but also his nose, cheeks, lips, and chin. He tries to move his arms, but he can barely feel them: they’ve fallen asleep. He doubles over as he receives a blow to the stomach, a pain so deep and concrete it can only be a kick. His mouth fills with bile and everything still seems relatively far off, as if it were happening to someone else. The second jolt sen
ds him spinning, rolling across the grass, and it is then that he spots the high three-laned waterslide, emerging from the immense starfish-shaped pond, filled now with rainwater. Tree roots have cracked open the old pool tiles. He sees trash bags piled around one of the rubble heaps, covered by large black tarps and steadied in place from above by rocks, to keep the wind from sweeping them away, as he feels the third impact.

  He tastes a mix of blood and muck. Huddled there, he manages with great difficulty to turn his head and glimpse his aggressor, concealed by a thick curtain of water. He can’t see the man’s features against the moonless sky, only the tremendous structure of his exorbitantly hypertrophied appendages, especially the neck, exaggerated in its breadth. Jonás attempts to move, but he feels the pressure of a boot incrusted in his chest, and he knows he is too weak to even try and resist. It is then that he sees the man take something out of his pocket: a dark, slender tube, similar in length to a cell phone, but narrower. The man shakes it with a quick flick of his hand and it opens with a metallic, twangy sound, a chain of successive cylinders, taking on the shape of an expandable baton.

  The man lifts it slowly above his shoulders, describing an arc as he leans back, allowing a glimpse—despite his strapping physique—of a bulging belly. Jonás tries to free himself from the leg, but it is as sound and secure as a telephone pole: he hears the man panting for breath, with a trace of asphyxia, after dragging him all this way, as if trying to pull himself together before he starts to beat Jonás for real. Jonás begins to feel as dizzy as he did before he reached the piano room, and when the man’s arm starts to come down, without haste, he thinks about closing his eyes, but a split second prior he seems to spot the fleeting glimmer of a shadow lurking in the piles of rubble; he hears a crunch but feels nothing, he hears a holler and it isn’t his, and suddenly the hulk turns his back on Jonás and raises the club again, but not against him: he’s searching for a silhouette that barely moves, that observes the man with determination, feeling him out, his legs flexed and his guard up, turned slightly sideways; it is then that the figure launches a cloak at his attacker’s eyes and Jonás discovers that it is his own trench coat, used by the newcomer as a distraction while he charges, his foot outstretched, connecting with the outside of the right knee, crushing it brutally. The aggressor emits a hoarse shout, tries to defend himself with the expandable baton and nearly grazes his adversary, leaning so far forward he almost falls, though he regains his balance with a great deal of effort; but just then the mysterious mastodon comes back toward Jonás, avoiding the third man: he picks him up from the ground with ease, advances to the edge, and throws him, like a sandbag, into the pool.

  Thick, icy, and putrid. Jonás starts to sink, he tries to kick out but he can’t, his arms still inert as he is sucked beneath the floating remnants on the surface, it’s almost seventy kilometers per hour from up above; he thinks of the angle at that height, but don’t be afraid, I’ll be out here: that’s much better, you can always push off with a strong kick, it’s real deep, never inhale underwater and no, he can’t do anything now, because as soon as he thinks he’s reached the bottom he can’t find it. It’s a shadowy, waterlogged jumble of garbage, there is no tiled bottom he can use to kick off, or else it’s beneath those plastered dregs, and anyway his legs aren’t springs, just limp and undulating prolongations, gelatin without nerves; all the same he tries to bend them, succeeding only in losing them in the dark morass, the heavy mire of waste and branches, bricks and tree trunks, plastic and wire, bottle caps and crockery, a formless mass that engulfs him, imprisons him, and he starts to fear that the water will flood his lungs.

  Almost unconscious, he thinks of the leopard next to the poolside ladder, the lion, the wolf, the minotaur, those lawn sculptures, exactly where the hammocks use to hang, near the other pool, much shallower, where the smallest children would play; he remembers passing by there just a few minutes or perhaps thirty years ago, in the shadows of his subconscious, after crossing through a gap in the barbed wire, it’s all a wasteland of hoarded baubles, wooden chairs from one of the cafés between the sinister piles of rubble, the leanness of a stripped tree trunk on the sterile grass, the dulled night air taking hold of the covered pit too, the sole of the army boot still outlined against his thorax, a giant leg that pins him to the bottom; he reads dark-colored words beneath the front gate, water park and rust-eaten chains, the padlock like an iron fist, the air starless, the sand beneath the artificial waves in a break in the sky. He spots another figure floating above him; he sees a form that plunges suddenly and falls, a body descending, diving down until it grabs hold of his hand, a steely grip to tear him from that pit trap, a haze of shapes tangled with his sunken legs: how can he escape without breathing, he’s reached a place where light is just a bleak and silent pulse, the swamp is a lapful of blackish bones, he can’t extricate himself and they’re pulling at him, aren’t you gone already? The pool is a canvas from that vantage point above the roofs, he tries to free his feet from the rockslide, the mud bogged down in sleeping circles, filthy from the rain: interior underbrush, hidden escarpment, there are no green fronds above, only a granite thickness in his chest, his mother’s fingers apply the last brush stroke, the junk room air, the sheet hung over the easel before filling in the two faces, their bodies intertwined, sunken forever in that lacuna.

  Chapter 45

  In his cozy slumber, covered to his chin by the comforter on the sofa bed, he seems to hear a brusque splashing in the bathroom which he quickly identifies: it is his father’s razor, shaken in the water-filled sink. He can almost make out the badger-hair brush, with its ivory handle, and the blue bottle of shaving cream. His eyes are still shut, but he’s left behind nightmares so distant he can barely recall the sensation of drowning in his esophagus. He pulls his legs up tight against his chest and feels a slight pinch in his back: he seeks it with his hand, suspecting a strained position during the night, and finds himself covered with a thin oily layer, almost absorbed now by his skin, with a pungent odor that seems to him familiar. He brings his fingers to his nose, his eyelids still squeezed tight, and the smell brings him to open them: it’s his father’s anti-inflammatory ointment, the one Jonás used to rub on him sometimes, many years ago, when he would come home after making a tough arrest, bruised but not in need of medical care, and a young Jonás would apply the ointment to his back, marked by moles, admiring its breadth and those pronounced and rocky shoulders, unsuspected under his father’s jacket.

  He thinks then that it’s been a little while since he heard the watery sound of the sink. He yanks off the comforter and sees that not only does the sofa bed have clean sheets, but he himself exudes the perfumed odor of gel on his body: a recently-washed softness, the intimate and subtle fragrance of his shampoo. He doesn’t even remember putting on his pajama bottoms, or sticking that rectangular patch on his stomach; as soon as touches it, he recognizes it: it’s an anti-inflammatory poultice. Like inconclusive photo stills, his mind is filled in bursts by several immersions and the taste of grass in his gums; he quickly pushes them away and clears his head. He gets to his feet with a slight and evanescent faintness, in a sudden and fleeting glimmer, like a hangover slept off.

  He crosses the living room/bedroom of his tiny apartment and goes to the bathroom. He looks at the illuminated mirror and discovers himself, just like any other morning, except for the poultice on his abdomen. He splashes his face with water and then it hits him: the refreshing odor of aftershave that came to him in his half-sleep, in that daydreamed shaving scene that took place in his head. And yet the smell is there: in the untouched, immaculate sink, faucet glinting, with its smooth and dazzling whiteness.

  He looks in the shower and observes the bottles in their habitual positions. Where are his clothes from the night before? He goes to the kitchen, where the washer sits next to the oven. He opens it: completely empty. He pulls on the door where he keeps the garbage can, lifts up the cover, and finds it without a bag. He can’t even re
member what he was wearing.

  He goes to the closet. There he finds his backpack with the towel folded inside, the swimsuit and the cap. Normally he hangs the towel on the glass partition of the shower. But here it is: it must be still damp, not completely dried.

  His wallet and his cell phone are sitting on top of the ceramic ashtray where he leaves his keys, on the white table in the living room with its wings folded up beneath the mirror. He grabs the phone. There are no messages and no missed calls. He dials his father’s number by memory. A nasally voice tells him that the number he is calling has been disconnected or has no reception. He calls again. He desists and tries Sebastian, but the same thing happens.