by Tom Michell
It came as no surprise, therefore, that Diego really enjoyed the company of Juan Salvado and spent as much time with him as he could. While on the roof terrace he was out of sight of most of the college and could relax. Diego was not entirely without friends, but they were boys like him who had similar problems conforming to the ethos of the school. The boys who did not enjoy a daily surfeit of rugby were sometimes considered to be “weaker brethren.”
The responsibility for looking after Juan Salvado was good for those boys. They were unfailingly dutiful in getting supplies of sprats from the market, in maintaining the cleanliness of the terrace, and in keeping Juan Salvado company. Even more pleasing was how much genuine fun they seemed to have in the process. Daily life must have been ridden with anxieties for the unhappiest amongst them, and it was a relief to see them enjoying the penguin, free for a while from the constraints of classrooms, social hierarchies, and worries about their families far away.
—
The education offered at St. George’s had more novel features than just a penguin living on the terrace of one of the assistant masters. The swimming pool, for example, was unusual because it was completely devoid of any filtration plant or chlorination system at all. This deficiency was compensated by emptying the pool completely once every fortnight, by which time the water would be a fairly opaque green and often had a large colony of toads living in its depths. Today’s readers might be daunted by this thought, but at that time all the pupils would have bathed habitually and without adverse effects in the warmish, languid, silt-laden, swampy-banked rivers teeming with the abundant wildlife, that meandered across their homeland. Nowadays many would mistakenly believe such waterways to be “polluted” simply because they were toffee brown in color. Be that as it may, the less than pellucid pool at St. George’s hardly merited comment at the time.
Once the temperature in Buenos Aires began to rise, the college swimming pool was drained of its stagnant winter contents, scrubbed clean and filled afresh with water pumped from our own wells fed from aquifers deep underground. Following the pool’s commissioning, the cleaning cycle continued every two weeks until the end of the season.
The possibility of letting Juan Salvado free in the pool had occurred to me, of course, but when he first came to live at the college during the winter months, the water was foul. I reasoned that by the time his feathers had become waterproof again, the swimming pool would be in operation.
The majority of the boys were generally enthusiastic about swimming, but, as with tennis and paleta (an Argentine version of squash, played in an open-air court), it wasn’t a major sport—mainly because it wasn’t rugby! However, it was greatly enjoyed as a recreation on summer evenings after prep, when the water was clean and the weather warm.
It hadn’t been a notably warm start to the season that year, so by the end of the pool’s first fortnight in operation, the water wasn’t particularly inviting, but neither was it particularly green; indeed, the lane markers painted on the bottom were still plainly visible. Only a small number of intrepid boys wanted to swim after prep that evening, and after twenty minutes even the hardiest had exited the water and gone back to their houses for a hot shower.
As soon as the swimmers had departed, I signaled Diego and two of his friends who were exercising Juan Salvado on the playing fields nearby to bring him to the enclosure so that we could see if he would swim.
I had purposely waited for this particular evening, when the pool was scheduled for routine maintenance, so that I could address the remaining reservations I had about letting Juan Salvado use the swimming pool. No one would object if he fouled the water just before it was drained, and if he refused to get out when I wanted him to, I would certainly be able to collect him once the pool was emptied.
Juan Salvado had been living at the college for several months by then, and in all that time he had never been able to swim freely. His gray-stained tummy feathers had become steadily whiter, and now he looked fit and normal for a penguin, so I judged that this was the window of opportunity I had been waiting for.
Although he knew much of the college grounds, Juan Salvado hadn’t yet visited the pool enclosure. Diego placed him next to me, and as I walked to the water’s edge, Juan Salvado followed in my footsteps. He surveyed the still water in the pool without apparently comprehending its nature.
“Go on!” I said, miming a dive into the pool and gesticulating with a swimming action. He looked at me, then at the water. “It’s all right, you can swim!” I said, bending down and splashing a little water on him. Juan Salvado looked me straight in the eyes and asked, Ah! Is this where the fish come from? Then, without further encouragement, he launched himself from the edge. With a single flip of his wings, he flew like an arrow from a bow straight across the pool and collided headlong with the wall on the opposite side, face first, while traveling at considerable speed. The impact was palpable. There was a groan and a sharp intake of breath from the watching boys. Juan Salvado rose to the surface spluttering and dazed. He paddled about giving little jerks of his head. I thought he might have broken his neck, but after a moment he gave a vigorous shake in characteristic penguin fashion and ducked below the surface again.
I had never before had the opportunity to study a penguin in the water at such close range. I had become thoroughly familiar with Juan Salvado’s clumsy and amusing bipedal progress on land, but now I watched in awe. With his legs and feet trailing astern he swam with his wings. Using only a stroke or two, he flew at great speed from one end of the pool to the other, executing dramatic turns before touching the sides. It was a bravura performance of aquatic acrobatics, a master class, as he passed within a hair’s breadth of the sides of the pool without so much as brushing against them, let alone suffering another impact. Using the full volume of the twenty-five-meter swimming pool, he looped the loop and leapt out of the water. Then, falling back, he dived to the bottom and raced from one end to the other before turning on a sixpence and corkscrewing back. The only comparison that could be drawn with this exhibition of total mastery of three-dimensional space would be a bird in flight, although the speed of an expert ice skater on a rink is a good comparison for such skill in spatial awareness. It was clear to me now how badly he needed to use those great wing muscles that had been idle too long. Juan Salvado had finally found some freedom to express his true nature, his independence, and to show us all just what it meant to be a penguin.
Possibly the joy of flying described by Jonathan Livingston Seagull in his story is the nearest one can get to the obvious exuberance Juan Salvado showed that evening. All the watchers were spellbound. A gymnast’s floor exercise, by comparison with Juan Salvado’s exhibition, would have seemed leaden and two-dimensional.
The sheer enjoyment that the penguin appeared to derive from his superlative control in the water communicated itself to the spectators. Juan Salvado could fly through the water many times faster than the swiftest Olympic swimmer—a length took him a couple of seconds, a distance that would take a human at least fifteen. Juan Salvado alternated his subsurface demonstrations with intervals swimming on the surface, preening himself and splashing about.
On the surface, penguins swim like neckless ducks, propelling themselves with their feet. They bob about competently but not elegantly—hardly compelling viewing. But underwater, penguins show a consummate mastery of their element that can transfix an audience.
Diego and the other boys were as bewitched as I was. “Look at him go!” they shouted. “Ooooh!” and “Ahhh!” they cooed, as though they were watching a fireworks display.
After a while Diego came over to me and asked quietly, “Can I swim with him, too?”
“What? And it’s ‘May I swim,’ ” I corrected him.
“Sí. May I swim? Oh, please! Five minute only.”
I was astonished! He had never gone near the pool before, and I didn’t even know if he could swim. Indeed, I had never known Diego to actively want to do anything, apart from
seek out the company of Juan Salvado and avoid the rest of the college.
“Can you swim?” I asked.
“Sí, what I ask you!” he said, confused for a moment. “Oh, yes. Please, can I, can I swim?” he begged, mechanically repeating my words.
Aware of the frustration he must be having with the complexities of English, I decided the lesson could wait. The boy was actually showing an interest in something at long last.
“But the water is cold, it’s going green, and it’s getting late now! Are you sure you want to go in?”
“Please!”
“All right then,” I said, “but be quick!”
I had never seen him so animated before. His eyes were sparkling and he seemed to be truly alive for the first time since I had known him. He actually ran back to the house to get changed into his swimming kit and reappeared in no time. Without hesitating or pausing for final confirmation of permission, he dived into the cold greenish water. I had more than half prepared myself to jump in and rescue him should it transpire that he couldn’t swim after all, and part of me suspected he might sink to the bottom like a stone.
But for the second time that evening, I was astonished. Not only could Diego swim, but he swam magnificently! He chased after Juan Salvado, and though with anyone else it would have looked absurd, Diego swam so elegantly that their pairing wasn’t ridiculous at all. As Diego swam, Juan Salvado spiraled around the boy. They appeared to be synchronizing their movements and swimming in unison. I had never before seen such interaction between two different species. The demonstration gave all the appearance of having been choreographed to highlight the skills of each, as in a duet written for violin and piano. Neither was principal nor subordinate. Sometimes Juan Salvado took the lead and Diego swam as though chasing him; Juan Salvado allowed Diego to get close behind him, and then off he would fly again. At other times Diego appeared to lead and the penguin swam around the boy, making figure eights as though he were spinning a cocoon or weaving a spell. Occasionally they swam so close that they almost touched. This was a sublime pas de deux, and I was entranced. Words cannot describe the magic that was in the air and the water that evening, magic that was operating on so many different levels.
—
I had been wondering vaguely if Juan Salvado would get out of the pool soon, because it was clear that he would not come out unless of his own volition. However, while Diego was swimming with him the concern remained at the back of my mind.
Diego was as good as his word. Unbidden by me, and after only a few minutes, he swam to the edge and in one graceful movement sprang out of the pool and stood with water streaming from his hair, over his shoulders, and onto the floor. Next, skimming through the water, came Juan Salvado, like a homing torpedo. With a flick of his wings at the critical moment, he rocketed out of the water and came to a gliding halt on his tummy by my feet. We all laughed out loud.
There, that’s how it’s done. By Jove, I needed that swim! You’re wrong about the fish, though—I searched everywhere and couldn’t find any!
I was almost speechless. I had witnessed an acrobatic (or should that be aquabatic?) display the likes of which I had never seen before. For technical merit and artistic interpretation it would have scored full marks from any judge, but that was not all. Standing quietly by the pool’s side, watching the penguin and chewing the corner of his towel, was a well built, lithe youth who, I was confident, could outswim almost anyone in the college. It was simply a revelation. He wasn’t the sad little chap we had become used to, but a very normal boy with a very special talent, and nobody in the college had realized it until that moment.
“Diego! You can swim!”
“Sí, I can swim, thank you.”
“No, I mean you are able to swim really well. Brilliantly, in fact!”
“You think?” he asked without looking directly at me, but I saw just the first flicker of a smile on his face—the first, I believe, that had touched his lips since leaving Bolivia.
“Where did you learn to swim? Who taught you?”
Diego was looking at the bird. I followed his gaze and saw Juan Salvado preening his feathers with his beak as though absolutely nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all. I also observed, with huge pleasure, that he was as dry as a bone. His waterproofing was at last fully restored.
Intriguingly, the other boys only had eyes for the penguin and hadn’t apparently noticed anything special about Diego. They had seen only that the penguin was a far better swimmer than Diego, and were absorbed in talking about that.
As we returned to School House, Diego told me that his father had taught him to swim at their home on the river, although he had never swum competitively. He also spoke quite freely and without reserve about other things he enjoyed at home in Bolivia. It was the first time I had known him to open up like this and appear willing to talk about himself, his life, and his home. It was as though I were with a different boy. I listened in silence, without making any corrections to his English, as he talked nonstop all the way back to the house.
Shortly afterward, as I was passing, I called in on Richard, the housemaster, and mentioned that I thought Diego might be “rounding the corner.” I didn’t explain further. That could wait. He was delighted to hear that I thought there were hopeful signs. “Oh, I do hope you’re right,” he said.
I went back to my rooms, picked up a glass and a bottle of wine, and went out to sit on the terrace with Juan Salvado. Darkness was falling quickly, as it does in those latitudes, and the stars were coming out. The rotating stars of the Southern Cross show the passing of the seasons in the same way as the Plow does in the Northern Hemisphere as it revolves around the lone pole star.
I always made sure I kept some sprats in reserve, and I gave them, one at a time, to Juan Salvado, who ate them greedily after his evening’s exertion and then settled to sleep by my feet. I sat near the parapet, looking out over the darkening fields. The cicadas were chirruping their evening song in the great eucalyptus trees, masking all other sounds. I poured some wine into the glass. It was as though I were pouring a libation in thanks to the gods that look after these things, and I drank to their health.
—
The events of that evening represented one of those extraordinary seminal moments that make teaching so worthwhile. I had witnessed something akin to an initiation ceremony, or perhaps more like a primeval rite of passage—like a baptism or bar mitzvah, but more intimate, corporal, more original and fundamental; a real change had taken place, not just an allegory. It was like an enchantment, because of the trance-like quality that left me questioning and evaluating what I had actually seen. A child had gone down to the water to swim with a penguin, and shortly afterward, a young man had emerged. There had been a rebirth, a new beginning. The ugly duckling had become a swan; the caterpillar had metamorphosed into a butterfly; the fish had found its way back to the water. Possibly the most astonishing part was that the boy himself hadn’t yet perceived that his life was on the cusp of a radical change that night (any more than the ugly duckling knew he had become a swan). By serendipity I had seen something happen and recognized its significance, even if I couldn’t explain it. Diego had done years of growing up in just a few short minutes, and Juan Salvador, the penguin extraordinaire, had had something to do with it.
Later that evening I went to see Danny, my fellow gaucho, now head of house. He was a cheerful, decent lad of eighteen summers who was better at rugby than at lessons but who gave his best to everything he did and was universally liked and respected. He was in his study with his deputy, Jack, the same studious and serious boy who had joined us in Paraguay, who actually thought deeply about things but said little.
I asked about our chances of winning the interhouse rugby tournament that year, and Danny replied that it would be a finely balanced contest. The other houses had some very good players, and at all levels, too.
There were house competitions in all the minor sports (i.e., every other sport apart f
rom rugby). Their results were added to those of other house competitions to decide the annual award of the interhouse sports shield.
I told Danny that I thought it was about time he started to organize the house swimming team. Now that the pool was open there was no time to lose. I added that he should be sure to include Gonzales in the trials. He began to argue, but I said we had a responsibility to keep trying to get him involved in house activities. However, Danny, as head of house, would select the house team on merit alone, I promised, with no interference from me.
The pool was cleaned and refilled by the second evening, and a day later Danny and the other prefects organized some races. I decided not to be present.
A breathless head of house and his deputy knocked on my door later that evening.
“Come in.”
“I can’t believe it! Nobody can believe it,” Danny blurted out. After a short pause he added, “But you knew what would happen, didn’t you? How did you know? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Slow down, slow down! I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about,” I lied. “You haven’t told me what you can’t believe yet. From your tone I can only imagine you have won the lottery. Do take a seat. Now, tell me what’s happened, from the beginning.”
Danny and Jack pulled up chairs, and Jack handed me a piece of paper with names and times recorded on it in a poolside scrawl.
I stopped teasing the boys and listened in silence while they enthused.
“Well, we asked for volunteers for swimming heats, just as you said, and organized some races. Just one length, but that fellow Gonzales simply beat everybody hollow, and in all the strokes! If it had been official timing he would even have demolished the college swimming records! I still can’t believe it!”
I couldn’t have been more pleased. Rehabilitation achieved! A day earlier he would have referred to “that drip Gonzales” or worse, but today Diego was elevated to “that fellow.” I have said that both Danny and Jack were decent young men, and I mean it. They were motivated not by prejudice against Diego but by the simple rule that life is what you make of it. This mantra had been instilled in them from birth by their parents and by the college that had been chosen for their education. Until then they hadn’t seen Diego make any effort to improve his own lot. The college motto was Vestigia nulla retrorsum, which translates loosely as “No going back.” I knew there wouldn’t be.