The Sea

It was in a fishermen’s village close to the port. The hamlet of gray tin gleamed in the afternoon; a woman, placing her hand like a visor over her eyes to shield them from the sun, looked out over the empty stretch of beach. The beach in that place resembled the sea itself; it was wavy, and the transparent water reflected the changing sky. The tamarisk shrubs advanced toward the sea like slow processions of hairy green caterpillars.

The woman bit her chapped lips. The beach, as far as her eye could see, was deserted. The cowbell chimed as the dairy cows crossed the road; the white one wore the bell. The woman stopped biting her lip. Two tiny black dots appeared on the horizon and slowly got bigger: two men were arriving on foot.

The woman knew those men. She knew how they were dressed, she knew by heart which button was missing from her brother’s shirt and the patch on her husband’s pants. She watched them arrive from a distance, their flame-colored scarves blowing behind them like small flags in the wind. After tilting her head from side to side two or three times, as if that movement would ensure the two men’s safe return, she went back into the house.

That house stood out in the hamlet because it had a tiny garden with flowerbeds surrounded by stones and seashells, with a swing hanging between two thick wooden posts.

All the children from the neighboring houses would swing in that garden, and so they called it the House of the Swings.

The kitchen was filled with smoke, the walls dripping with black coal residue, but everything was as perfectly in order as it would be in a recently scrubbed room while the woman cooked.

On the dirt road the two men were getting closer. The taller one had a darker complexion and asymmetrical eyes, the other had very deeply set gray eyes; the sun obscured one and illuminated the other like a wheat field. The door was still open, and they walked directly into the kitchen. The table was set. After taking off their jackets they sat down. The woman came and went: she took the pot off the fire and searched for salt on the shelves until everything was ready, and she brought the dish to the table and sat between the two men. No one spoke. The only sounds were utensils against plates, and jaws and teeth chewing in silence.

After a while the darker man spoke. He spoke of fishing boats, and the names of silver fish flashed across the table. The woman protested that they never brought anything back—not one hake, not one sea bass—but sold it all and always threw the leftover fish back into the sea. The blond man laughed: fish was food for cats, and if it were up to him he would starve to death before trying calamari or lobster. The other man spit on the floor: it was all the same to him, pheasant or pejerrey, beef or horsemeat. The silence returned; they opened the door and saw that it was a moonless night. They surveyed the darkness from sky to ground and closed the door.

After washing the dishes, the woman, exhausted, sat on the bed to undress, and the men watched without seeing her through the crack in the door. In and out of dreams she heard the men’s voices, carrying her down a very long road, at the end of which, rocking her son’s cradle, she fell asleep.

The two men were still sitting in the kitchen. It was just turning one o’clock in the morning when they left the house; they took a gun, a lantern, and a bunch of keys. They had chosen the house they were going to rob a month earlier. They had roamed the neighborhoods for many days, watching to see what time the lights went out and what the locks were like. They tried to befriend the dogs, asking the gardener several times for permission to drink water from the spigot. They slyly chose the darkest night.

The two men put on their jackets. That night they only walked along paths in the hills, far from the sea. They had to walk more than fifty blocks. The houses were dark on that windless night, and the men walked slowly. They hiked through bushes, clearing a path as they went. It took them more than an hour to arrive, through weeds rising in waves that broke at the height of their knees. Every now and then they lit the lantern. When they were about seventy-five feet away, the dog began to bark and they hopped the fence. The dog kept barking as they approached, until it recognized them and quieted down, nestled against them, stretching out and wagging its tail. It was a big house. They checked the front porch windows: the shutters were all closed. There were no porches on the sides of the house, so the two men slid along, pressed against the outer wall, until they noticed that one of the shutters was open: a faint light shone through the curtain, and the window was also wide open. They climbed slowly onto a rainwater tank, where they could peek into the room. The light was on. In front of a mirror a woman was trying on a bathing suit. She moved closer, stepped back, and moved closer again to the mirror as if performing a mysterious dance. She looked at herself from the front and from the side. One of the men shut his eyes.

The woman took off the suit, grabbed the nightgown that was laid out on the bed and put it on. Then she folded the bathing suit and left it on the chair by the window. The two men held their breath. They didn’t move for what felt like a half-hour until the woman fell asleep.

Then one of the men, intensifying the silence, stretched out his arm and snatched the bathing suit and a cardboard box that was on the chair. They took off running; they’d heard a knock on a door. They walked for a long time in the hills, retracing paths, feeling cheated by that robbery that didn’t require a skeleton key or lantern, in which they hadn’t penetrated the dining room to comb through the silver, with their revolver pointed at the doors. The two smelled the perfume emanating from the bathing suit as they pulled leaves from the hedges until they arrived at the house.

They entered after knocking and suddenly saw, as if for the first time, the woman sleeping in the next room, one bare shoulder visible above the sheet.

The birds were singing as they went to sleep.

The next day, when the woman returned from the dairy farm, they showed her the bathing suit and a light blue dress they’d found in the cardboard box. The woman threw her arms in the air: this is what you left at one in the morning for—what I lost a night’s sleep for! She examined the fabric of the dress, shaking her head: it wasn’t even enough to make a pair of short pants for the little boy, though the bathing suit’s fabric was a bit thicker. The men replied that she should put the suit on, since they had brought it for her, they would take her to the beach so she could swim. They always swam on very hot days—why didn’t she swim too? The woman shook her head again: rather than a source of pleasure, the sea had always been a cause of endless torture. The neighbor always encouraged her to go for a swim; when her neighbor had the morning free she would go to the beach in an old black silk bathing suit, swim near the shore, and come back covered in small seashells and pebbles, with algae tangled between her toes. She said that it was good for your bones.

The men insisted until the woman agreed, thinking that they had both gone mad. She left dressed as she was with her headscarf on. The men were on either side of her, walking hurriedly. The morning was very quiet; it was Sunday. They arrived at the beach, and the woman, after thinking it over for a long time, undressed behind a boat. Those men who never brought her with them, who never paid her any mind except to ask for food or something else, what was going on with them now?

The woman forgot the shame she felt in the bathing suit and her fear of the waves: an overpowering joy drew her toward the sea. She wet her feet first, slowly, while the men reached out their hands so she wouldn’t fall. That woman, who was so strong, grew flimsy cotton legs in the water as they watched her, amazed. That woman who had never put on a bathing suit looked so much like the swimmer in front of the mirror. She felt the sea for the first time against her breasts and leapt into water that from afar had frightened her with its big waves, its small waves, and its undertow, crashing over the breakwater, sinking ships. She felt that she would never be afraid of anything again, now that she was no longer afraid of the sea.

As they returned, from far away they could already hear the little boy’s crying that awaited them. The woman cradled him in her arms. The men didn’t leave the house that day. Circuitous arguments took over; an obscure hatred began to invade them, growing, rising gradually like a high tide. They lived in a knotty tangle of gestures, words, and mysterious silences.

After some time passed, it was believed that dark spirits had taken hold of the House of the Swings. The swings rocked back and forth on their own. One night the neighbors heard screams and thuds; after a long silence, they believed they saw the shadow of a woman running with a small child and a bunch of clothes in her arms. She was never heard from again. At daybreak the next day, as usual, the two men left with a fishing net. They walked one behind the other, one behind the other without saying a word.