The Bathers

 

 

The bathers, all of them women, would arrive with the first days of November. The month of November isn’t always the same: the sun isn’t always shining or the sand dunes shuddering. Some Novembers are airless and leaden, the clouds low and gray, and it isn’t exactly hot. Other Novembers are breezy and full of light; the sun gives the sand along the water’s edge a golden hue and just a few yards out from the shore fish jump, lustrous in the shimmering waters. In places, the water is clear and you can see the outlines of small fish that swim amid the floating manes of moss and green weeds and that grow up there, protected by the rocks at the bottom. It’s very hard to tell those fish apart from one another: leaning over the jetty, I would try to predict which ones would survive. It was a pastime doomed to failure: if I managed to identify one fish because of a certain pattern on its tail or by the shape of its fin, the next day I had no way of knowing if that particular fish had disappeared, swallowed by a larger fish, or whether it had simply left for other waters, having chosen another part of the sea to grow in. Knowing that this was a melancholy activity doomed to failure didn’t prevent me from observing the fish for hours on end and running down the jetty when they suddenly decided to swim away. I found the water nearly as fascinating as the sudden movements of the fish. (Later, with time, I would discover other melancholy activities certain to fail; I met men and women determined to carry out impossible tasks, which to me seemed like the only really worthwhile ones.) The little fish swam in schools. Only the bigger ones dared to lead solitary lives and, although they were harder to spot, I was also interested in them. I was captivated by that secret, mysterious underwater world, by its silence, its continual movement, its hidden currents, and I think that was when I perceived, when I came to understand, that parallel universes exist, that the life we lead is only one among various possibilities and while ours - that of my family, my friends, the bathers - was lived on the surface and subject to certain rules and constraints, a lot of other completely discrete worlds also existed, even though we know nothing about them. This realization dominated my childhood and made me alternately happy and unhappy. As the little fish glided through the water experiencing stages of a life I couldn’t fully observe or understand, I would wonder how many parallel worlds existed, even if I couldn’t find a trace of any of them in a drop of water, a reflection, a fluttering wing, or a sudden gust of air.

Major changes in sensibility are rare. It is unlikely that more than three or four instances in the course of human history could be identified. For me, life next to the sea was the source of my emotions, of my feelings, the origin of my reflections, the only form of anxiety-free solitude I ever experienced. When I recall some of those summers - the strange, unpredictable month of November always foreshadowing the very different, inebriating light of January and the reddish explosion of February with its chattering crickets and pine trees scorched by the sun - I think that was the only time in my natural life when I was truly in touch with the elements: I crawled like an iguana, imitated the call of birds (they answered me from high branches), familiarized myself with the ways of crustaceans and mollusks, and collected bones, driftwood, and seaweed. I only had to raise my head to smell the storms, I recognized the sound of the wind from a long way away, and I slept among the rocks, like a crab. I knew when the corbinas would be in heat and discovered the iridescence (the illuminations) of bacteria.

What I liked about the month of November was its unpredictable nature. At the beginning of the month, I would see the schools of corbinas swimming by in search of warmer waters where they would couple and reproduce. It was the easiest time to catch them, especially the big ones. They would come close to the shore, I could see their silver backs rising and then submerging as they played, hear the slapping of the water, follow their successive leaps. I thought it was cruel and tragic that it was easiest to catch them when they were in heat, just as they were innocently playing their nuptial games. Later I discovered - and was able to confirm through personal experience - that being in heat isn’t the opposite of dying and that there may even be a mutual attraction between these activities. But at the time I didn’t know anything about Greek mythology.

The corbinas would swim past and sometimes, also in November, sea lions would wash up on the beach. They were big and had shiny black skin. There was something moving about their slick, clumsy bodies; it wasn’t just their obscure desire to come and die on the shore. As the seagulls and all the other birds squawked and fluttered about, they could be on the verge of death for days. They had a hard time dying. Even though they could only move their heads, which they would drum against the sand, death came to them very slowly, in stages, and they waited for it lying down, as if they didn’t know what to do with their bodies, as if they were being crushed by a heavy weight.

This cruel, inexplicable spectacle disturbed me. In the bluish loneliness of the beach (those November days were opaque) I sensed a secret harmony among the giant dying sea lions, the lilac-colored clouds, and the ocher sea foam that drifted gently toward the shore. The throes of death, the squawking of bluebirds, the sound of the wind in the forest.

In the middle of November, the bathers would arrive. They would get off their shiny rented bus, chirping like confused birds, and hurriedly put on their bathing suits and caps. They exchanged creams, towels, and sandals, and bounded across the sand in play.

Their arrival that first time felt like a barbarian invasion. A blind rage, like that of the savage against the colonizer, welled up inside of me. I had never seen a group of people arrive at the beach. At first, I would hide behind the rocks and watch them suspiciously, hoping that the rain, an unexpected storm, or an accident (someone had told me about a gigantic wave that had once swept across that very spot and whose aqueous embrace covered the entire beach) would make them flee like a retreating army, abandoning stores and ammunition.

When I would walk alone along the shore, collecting shells and fossils, finding the small holes dug by clams, or searching for pearly talismans expelled by the sea, I had never felt the place belonged to me. It was such a vast expanse of sand, with pine trees mixed in among the eucalyptus further back; the sea stretched so far, to the East and West; there were so many trees, so many dunes, so much kelp; the jetties extended into the sea in such a lonesome way; the purple and brown rocks provided so many invincible barriers washed over by the waves that I didn’t feel the need to possess the place. I was part of the landscape and subject to its allure.

But the presence of the bathers disturbed me. They represented an unmistakably human element in what, until then, had been only water, wood, rocks, mollusks, sounds, and movement. It wasn’t just the animal instinct of territoriality in me that had been offended; it was the painful feeling that the harmony of the landscape had been disturbed, that the secret structure governing the maritime and vegetable kingdoms had been undone.

What I hated most that November when the women bathers showed up was the unexpected, imposing way they appeared. I felt betrayed for not having foreseen their arrival and also for being defenseless in the face of it. Before, the occasional visitors hadn’t bothered me. I saw them in the distance, slowly walking along the beach, sometimes drawing in their limbs from the wind, and they were like those tiny, dark boats that would appear some afternoons, distant and austere, in the vastness of the sea. They fit in harmoniously with the landscape, like fossils, like Venus’ belly button, like petrels seen in silhouette.

With the bathers, it was different. Laden with bags, picnic baskets, hats, towels, and suntan lotion, they arrived on a rented bus. This implied an intention to stay, in contrast to the comings and goings of the boats or the occasional, almost illusory strollers.

Like the ruler of an invaded country who knows he lacks the means with which to retaliate, I hid among the rocks and resentfully observed the activities of the barbarians.

The November days came and went, and with the beginning of December the situation remained unchanged: the bathers would arrive on their rented bus, file off of it laughing and playing and carrying their bags and bathing suits. They rubbed oil on their skin and passed the days strolling, taking dips in the water and dozing on the sand, eating and drinking. I had no interest in knowing who they were or what they did. Like a suspicious peasant, I watched them from a distance, never coming close or betraying my presence.

In vain, I awaited the gigantic wave. Although I’d never seen one, I looked for the hint of such a wave on the horizon, tried to feel its birth in the depths of the sea where the ocean currents stir up stones and beds of grass. I was certain it would be swift and overwhelming, a torrential pyramid of water crashing down, rushing across the sand, the rocks, and the timid corral reefs. Its onslaught would change the structure of things forever. Sand would be lost, trees smashed, rocks displaced, slate platforms inundated, dunes destroyed. But that November the wave never struck, nor did it in December. The former order it was to have restored - through its very violence - was not obtained.

At the end of December, they stopped coming. Like primitive man, I discovered there were accidents and cycles over which neither my will nor desire held any sway. January came with its intense heat, the rustling of the pine trees, the chatter of the cicadas, the glimmer of the sand, the phosphorescence of the water, and I forgot about the bathers, like one can forget a storm, a bolt of lightning, or a squall.

The next year, in November, they were back. Although I was unhappy about this, I was less perturbed and saw that their presence was part of a cycle I would have to accustom myself to, just like fish, stars, insects, and plants adapt to things. This allowed me to feel a little more comfortable with their presence. At most, their interference would last a month or two. So I stopped hiding and although I didn’t go near them, they must have noticed me often enough, even though they paid no attention to me. To them, I must have seemed like part of the landscape, like a tree trunk in the forest, a rock in the shape of a tower in the water, the glimmering lights that appeared in the sea at dusk, a cliff, or seashells calcified by the sun.

Just before the arrival of the fourth November, I discovered, to my surprise, that I was awaiting their arrival somewhat anxiously. Little had changed around me, so the change must have occurred within me, without my even noticing it. During the winter prior to what would have been the fourth November with the bathers, I began to feel slightly restless, uncomfortably lonely, and I avoided taking my usual strolls along the beach to contemplate the sea and the birds in flight. I was making more frequent trips to the city. I would walk the streets, look at shop windows, see a movie, or have a cold drink at a neon-lighted cafe whose secret charm had only just been discovered. I felt lonely in the city too, but contemplating the cars (I’ll never forget the elegant, sinuous way the Buiclcs, which appeared for the first time that year, made their way down the city streets); the hiss of the espresso machines; the captivating music on the radio, those dark boxes where in exchange for a coin you could select a melody by pushing the keys of a shiny alphabetical code; the marquees advertising foreign films; and the platforms full of passengers, smoke, and used tickets made me forget that inside I was vaguely ill at ease.

November arrived with the imperious precision of the tides, of storms, of bouts of depression. It was a melancholy November: winter had gotten a late start and now it was lingering on as an unpredictable, cold, heavy spring. The wind was making the dunes tremble and I could see the mountains of sand shifting, like part of a barren lunar landscape. That year no sea lions came to die on the shore, and the only interesting thing I found was an old abandoned boat, in the bottom of which, motionless, were some rotting nets, ropes, and reddish floats. A sea gull (I don’t know if it was always the same one) would perch on one end of the boat. Serene and impervious, like a figurehead at the prow, it would watch over the horizon.

One afternoon, while contemplating the hypnotic calm of the slate-gray sea and a few lilac-colored clouds strewn across the horizon, I realized that I was somehow awaiting the arrival of the bathers. I was doing nothing else as I walked over the mountains of sand, poked around in the forest in search of a late mushroom, or carved on tree trunks the outlines of birds swooping down over the water to swallow a fish. The tall trees shuddered in the wind, and the color of the sky vaguely augured storms.

Toward the end of November I began to suspect that, unlike in previous years, the bathers wouldn’t come. The feeling that a cycle had been interrupted, broken by some mysterious chance event, left me bitterly uneasy. The good thing about the cycles is that they diminished my sense of vulnerability, of instability, offering me guidelines, a certain feeling of order I could cling to. There was something naive and obvious about them. The breaking of the cycle, on the other hand, introduced an element of chaos, an incomprehensible phenomenon that perturbed me and, worse still, excluded me, giving me no chance to intervene.

I decided to go to the city to look into this. I didn’t know anything about the bathers, just the time of year they arrived, when they left, and that they came and went on a rented bus. In the city, I went to the bus company. It was a company that organized day trips to different places. They had no fixed schedule, and the destination was determined by the passengers themselves and the price negotiated. After a lot of pleading, I was able to see the records from the previous year, which included several excursions to the beach. But there was no mention of the names of the bathers, what they did for a living, or even where they came from. I found it very strange that there was no sign saying ‘Bathers’ Bus,’ or something to that effect. I couldn’t ask for them because I didn’t know who they were. It was as if the city had scattered them like petals in the wind. I was so devastated that outrageous ideas occurred to me. I thought the bathers might have all grown old and that they no longer thought it looked good to go to the beach. With my prior lack of interest in them, I hadn’t even noticed the age of the women. I gave it a try: I pictured them at the moment they were getting off the bus all loaded down with bags and towels, and they seemed like a choir of boisterous girls. Yet, as I recalled them happily jumping into the water - splashing one another like birds in a fountain - or sprawled under the sun, motionless like lazy reptiles, their ages seemed to vary. Could they have grown old so rapidly, been struck by a strange disease? I tried to find more reasonable explanations: some of them might have gotten married, others changed jobs, two or three of them moved from the city so there weren’t enough of them left to fill up the bus. Although this explanation was more plausible than the first, it still left me in a state of paralyzing dismay. I couldn’t accept the idea that the group had broken up. I refused to recognize the individuality of its members. For me, they constituted a group, a unity with an indivisible, collective fate. They arrived at the beach together on the bus before noon and left together at dusk, without any of their trivial personal activities - combing their hair, using their towels to dry off their backs, applying suntan lotion - endowing them with individuality. I couldn’t accept the idea that one might have gotten married, betraying the rest of them, or that another might have left her job. I’d never stopped to think what they did when they left the beach or during the winter, but I secretly imagined that they stayed together, that they worked at the same place (that maybe they were all teachers at a school in the outskirts of the city or that they were typists at the same firm), that they were all of about the same age and lived together. If not all in the same house (such big houses no longer existed), at least in groups of four or five and in the same neighborhood. It was extremely upsetting to imagine the appearance of a foreign element in the group, a man for instance, a dog, a trip abroad, or a change of profession.

Suddenly, I realized that the assumptions I’d taken for granted must have been wrong and that instead of reflecting reality, they reflected my own fantasies about the bathers. This disturbed me and ushered in a period of new reflections about the tendency to substitute imagination for analysis. From then on, I began to feel insecure every time I thought I knew something.

That November, walking along a beach that felt completely deserted, whose loneliness distressed me, I began to experience self doubt. I was certain I would betray myself more than once. I would have given anything to see that bus pull up one morning with the light glinting off its shiny metal body, to hear the confused chatter of the women’s voices, to see them venture into the water amid their shrieks of surprise and halting jumps.

They didn’t come. The cycle had been broken, and I was uncertain whether it would ever be restored.