The water returns
What doesn’t belong to it.
Alicia Genovese, Aguas
We learned to swim in that river.
It was a couple of summers before the Loa flooded and carried off Muñoz’s cousin, and also a whole family that we never even got to know: a young couple, the wife pregnant with twins, apparently. They’d come to make a fresh start, but they were swallowed by the water instead. After the catastrophe, we had to accept that we were forbidden to go near the water. We had to find other places where we could kill time or shorten it; anything to avoid the boredom of summer, on those dirt roads, the dust that stuck to our bodies – that’s how Calama was, the dust, the heat, and the sun beating down on us as if we’d done something to it.
But first we learned to swim there, in the river, with the trout and those waters that grew more intense in the February heat: the snow melted and flowed down in a torrent and made the water level rise, and we made the most of that surge, that snow, that Bolivian winter we never saw and for us meant only that: a little more water to swim in, a little more water in a river that almost all year long was a swampy piece of land, a crack in the middle of the desert.
We swam in the deepest areas, amid the rock beds that formed little wells where we could sink and disappear. It was in there, one afternoon when we were alone, that we discovered that Martínez was able to hold his breath underwater for a time that at first seemed astonishing to us, and later, supernatural.
It started as a game, who could stay underwater the longest. Then it turned into a fierce competition: take a deep breath, hold our noses, and go under until it became impossible to hold it any longer, underwater, in the dark, our eyes closed. We looked ridiculous in that scene, but we were very serious, since no one wanted the humiliation of being the first to surface.
The first time we did it, the six of us went under – Parra’s little brother stayed on the surface to keep time out loud. Castro held out the longest – a minute and twenty-two seconds – followed by Molina – a minute seventeen – and then Rojo Araya – a minute eleven seconds. The rest of us couldn’t hold out very long: when you’re under there it’s as if time stopped, the sound isolates you and you hear only the water flowing in the distance, far away, as if you’re suspended in a vacuum. Only the sound of the bubbles as they rise to the surface distracts you. Stopped time was the pressure of the water in your ears, the fear of opening your eyes, and the real feeling, for the first time, of death converted into the air that filled our lungs. That was death: the awareness that it could all end, that as soon as the air ran out you’d be lost in a place you would probably never come back from.
Opening your eyes underwater was to understand that you were going to die, but none of us were capable of putting that into words. Parra was so annoyed at losing he suggested we try it again – ‘I didn’t take a big enough breath,’ he said – and that’s when we found out about Martínez.
We took deep gulps of air, held our noses, and went under at the same time, obsessed with humiliating Castro above all, never imagining that when we returned to the surface, when we all emerged almost suffocated by lack of air and the fear of being submerged forever, Martínez was going to hold out over three minutes. That’s what Parra’s little brother counted, 180 long seconds that seemed to us an impossible eternity for a body that by then we were seeing float, face down, with its arms completely outstretched, like a corpse the river spat out at our feet.
I think it was Rojas who couldn’t stand it any more, and when the count was at 200 seconds he grabbed Martínez by the shoulders and quickly lifted him up. Martínez opened his eyes and took in a long, really long breath. He looked at us, and with fresh air now filling his lungs, he started to laugh, hard. They were peals of laughter that none of us understood, until Torres splashed water in his face and told him not to be an arsehole, that he’d scared us, we’d thought he was dead.
Martínez went on laughing for a while and then went to swim further out in the river, alone, as dusk fell. We played a couple more times, without him; he watched us from afar.
The next day, when we got to the river around three in the afternoon, Martínez had already been swimming for a couple of hours. After a while he asked us if we wanted to play the game again, the one where we held our breath underwater. None of us were very convinced, except for Castro, who wanted to compete with him. And Martínez did it again. He even held out longer: 250 seconds, and without too much effort. He lifted his head, smiled and went on swimming and going under, while the rest of us looked at each other incredulously; we couldn’t understand what he had in his lungs to let him stay so long underwater. We felt like it was a supernatural power, and we wanted to use it. There was no longer any point to competing among ourselves. It was boring. We needed everyone to know about Martínez’s talent.
It was probably Molina who spread the word. A couple of days later it was a Sunday, and we weren’t alone at the river – several families had come from town to swim and picnic. Molina’s older brother showed up with some friends, all ready to compete with Martínez.
They were a lot older than us, sixteen, seventeen years old, and they had already been to the ocean. They had swum at the beaches of Antofagasta and Iquique. It was an unequal competition, but we believed in Martínez. We’d seen him stay under for over four minutes – no one could beat him.
The first match was a tie: they stayed under for 211 seconds, and Rodríguez, who was the son of fisherman divers, came up with reddened eyes and coughed for a good while, while Martínez breathed deeply and tried to stay calm. We encouraged him with slaps on the back.
The second try was a trouncing: Rodríguez stayed underwater over four minutes, while Martínez only held out a little over two. He surfaced, in fact, coughing hard, choking, spitting, frantic. We were worried: Martínez was struggling to recover and Rodríguez was still floating face down, arms outstretched, motionless, as though on endless pause.
There was still the third attempt. If Martínez won, there would be a tie-breaker. If not, all was lost.
They were about to start when we heard the screams.
It was a neighbour of Martínez’s and she was screaming hysterically, but we couldn’t understand what she was saying. A man was trying to calm her down, but she kept screaming, frantic. It was a stammering jumble of words that one woman, eventually, managed to decipher: the neighbour’s son was gone. A boy younger than us, and she couldn’t find him on the shore, he was lost, where was he, screamed the woman as she pointed to the river.
We started searching everywhere for him. The older kids jumped into the water and the rest of us started combing the shrubs and rocks, but we couldn’t find him, not anywhere, and then we saw Martínez go underwater and stay there for a long time, swimming along the river bottom, and finally he surfaced with the body. The boy was unconscious, pale, almost violet; I remember his body dark and rigid, and Martínez carrying him and laying him gently on the shore, as though apologizing for not having found him sooner.
Someone gave the boy mouth-to-mouth and hit his chest over and over, trying to reanimate the small body that we were losing. Everyone gathered around him, encouraging the adults who were trying to bring him back. The mother wasn’t screaming any more: she’d started to vomit at the edge of the river, while someone else had gone to the town to look for a doctor. But the life was there and dependent on those first hands, right in front of us, that boy and death, the blows to the chest, the mouth-to-mouth, the blows to the chest and his lungs full of water, that water he spat out when we already thought all was lost, the water from the lungs and the lungs full of fresh air, alive and noisy, and a heart that seemed about to explode – we heard it with our own ears, amid the shouts and the celebration for having brought him back to life. The heart. The blows.
I think we all felt that that boy was us, that it could have been any of us lying there on the river bottom without anyone noticing we were gone. We felt it, I’m sure, even though later it would become just another summer anecdote, one of those stories that sometimes, bored, we would tell in lurid detail, a story that would grow misshapen with time, though it would always maintain intact that splendid moment when Martínez emerged from the water holding the lifeless body. Because the doctors told us later how in that precise moment, the boy in Martínez’s arms was dead, clinically dead, though we didn’t know it, we didn’t want to believe he was dead. And that’s how it was, those lungs full of water that burst out to make room for new air amid our shouts – we would remember that forever, our cries of happiness and the mother sobbing with her son in her arms. She kissed him all over his face, on the cheeks, on his eyes, mouth, she kissed him frantically, as if he were all she had in the world.
Martínez would be tasked, over the years, with snatching many bodies from the river and others from the ocean.
But he was also going to lose many times.
Life, then, was to be about that: living with those failures for the rest of his days.