Authors: Mario Vargas Llosa
“I’m fresh as a daisy,” Miguel asserted, trying to hold back his dizziness and nausea.
“Cheers,” Rubén repeated.
When they had finished the last beer, his stomach felt like lead; the voices of the others reached his ears as a confused mixture of sounds. A hand suddenly appeared under his eyes; it was white with long fingers; it caught him by the chin; it forced him to raise his head; Rubén’s face had gotten larger. He was funny-looking, so rumpled and mad.
“Give up, snot-nose?”
Miguel stood up suddenly and shoved Rubén, but before the show could go on, the Brain stepped in.
“Hawks never fight,” he said, forcing them to sit down. “You two are drunk. It’s over. Let’s vote.”
Against their will, Melanés, Francisco and Tobias agreed to a tie.
“I’d won already,” Rubén said. “This one can’t even talk. Look at him.”
As a matter of fact, Miguel’s eyes were glassy, his mouth hung open and a thread of saliva dribbled off his tongue.
“Shut up,” said the Brain. “We wouldn’t call you any champion at beer drinking.”
“You’re no beer-drinking champion,” Melanés emphasized. “You’re just a champion at swimming, the wizard of the pools.”
“You better shut up,” Rubén said. “Can’t you see your envy’s eating you alive?”
“Long live the Esther Williams of Miraflores!” shouted Melanés.
“An old codger like you and you don’t even know how to swim,” said Rubén. “You want me to give you some lessons?”
“We know already, champ,” the Brain said. “You won a swimming championship. And all the chicks are dying over you. You’re a regular little champion.”
“He’s no champion of anything,” Miguel said with difficulty. “He’s just a phony.”
“You’re keeling over,” Rubén answered. “Want me to take you home, girlie?”
“I’m not drunk,” Miguel protested. “And you’re just a phony.”
“You’re pissed because I’m going to go steady with Flora,” Rubén said. “You’re dying of jealousy. Think I don’t understand things?”
“Just a phony,” Miguel said. “You won because your father’s union president; everybody knows he pulled a fast one, and you only won on account of that.”
“At least I swim better than you,” Rubén said. “You don’t even know how to surf.”
“You don’t swim better than anybody,” Miguel said. “Any girl can leave you behind.”
“Any girl,” said Melanés. “Even Miguel, who’s a mother.”
“Pardon me while I laugh,” Rubén said.
“You’re pardoned, your Highness,” Tobias said.
“You’re getting at me because it’s winter,” Rubén said. “If it wasn’t, I’d challenge you all to go to the beach to see who’s so cocksure in the water.”
“You won the championship on account of your father,” Miguel said. “You’re just a phony. When you want to swim with me, just let me know—don’t be so timid. At the beach, at Terraces, wherever you want.”
“At the beach,” Rubén said. “Right now.”
“You’re just a phony,” Miguel said.
Rubén’s face suddenly lit up and in addition to being spiteful, his eyes became arrogant again.
“I’ll bet you on who’s in the water first,” he said.
“Just a phony,” said Miguel.
“If you win,” Rubén said, “I promise you I’ll lay off Flora. And if I win, you can go peddle your wares someplace else.”
“Who do you think you are?” Miguel stammered. “Asshole, just who do you think you are?”
“Listen, Hawks,” Rubén said, spreading his arms, “I’m making a challenge.”
“Miguel’s in no shape now,” the Brain said. “Why don’t you two flip a coin for Flora?”
“And why’re you butting in?” Miguel said. “I accept. Let’s go to the beach.”
“You’re both crazy,” Francisco said. “I’m not going down to the beach in this cold. Make another bet.”
“He’s accepted,” Rubén said. “Let’s go.”
“When a Hawk challenges somebody, we all bite our tongues,” Melanés said. “Let’s go to the beach. And if they don’t have the guts to go into the water, we throw them in.”
“Those two are smashed,” insisted the Brain. “The challenge doesn’t hold.”
“Shut up, Brain,” Miguel roared. “I’m a big boy now. I don’t need you to take care of me.”
“Okay,” said the Brain, shrugging his shoulders. “Screw you, then.”
They left. Outside, a quiet gray atmosphere was waiting for them. Miguel breathed in deeply; he felt better. Francisco, Melanés and Rubén walked in front; behind them, Miguel and the Brain. There were pedestrians on Grau Avenue, mostly maids on their day off in gaudy dresses. Ashen men with thick, lanky hair preyed around them and looked them over greedily. The women laughed, showing their gold teeth. The Hawks did not pay any attention to them. They walked on with long strides as the excitement mounted in them.
“Better now?” asked the Brain.
“Yeah,” answered Miguel. “The air’s done me good.”
They turned the corner at Pardo Avenue. They marched in a line, spread out like a squadron under the rubber trees of the promenade, over the flagstones heaved up at intervals by the enormous roots that sometimes pushed through the surface like grappling hooks. Going down the crosstown street, they passed two girls. Rubén bowed ceremoniously.
“Hi, Rubén,” they sang in duet.
Tobias imitated them in falsetto: “Hi, Rubén, you prince.”
The crosstown street ends at a forking brook: on one side winds the embankment, paved and shiny; on the other a slope that goes around the hill and reaches the sea. It is known as the “bathhouse path” its pavement is worn smooth and shiny from automobile tires and the feet of swimmers from many, many summers.
“Let’s warm up, champs,” Melanés shouted, breaking into a sprint. The others followed his example.
They ran against the wind and light fog rising off the beach, caught up in an exciting whirlwind: through their ears, mouths and noses the air penetrated to their lungs and a sensation of relief and well-being spread through their bodies as the drop became steeper, and at one point their feet no longer obeyed anything but a mysterious force coming from the depths of the earth. Their arms like propellers, a salty taste on their tongues, the Hawks descended the slope at a full run until they reached the circular platform suspended over the bathhouse. Some fifty yards offshore, the sea vanished in a thick cloud that seemed about to charge the cliffs, those high, dark breakwaters jutting up around the entire bay.
“Let’s go back,” said Francisco. “I’m cold.”
At the edge of the platform is a railing, stained in places by moss. An opening marks the top of the nearly vertical stairway leading down to the beach. From up there the Hawks looked down on a short ribbon of open water at their feet and the strange, bubbling surface where the fog was blending with the foam off the waves.
“I’ll go back if this guy gives up,” Rubén said.
“Who’s talking about giving up?” responded Miguel. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Rubén went down the stairway three steps at a time, unbuttoning his shirt as he descended.
“Rubén!” shouted the Brain. “Are you nuts? Come back!”
But Miguel and the others were also going down and the Brain followed them.
From the balcony of the long, wide building that nestles against the hill and houses the dressing rooms, down to the curving edge of the sea, there is a slope of gray stone where people sun themselves during the summer. From morning to dusk the small beach boils with excitement. Now the water covered the slope and there were no brightly colored umbrellas or lithe girls with tanned bodies, no reverberating, melodramatic screams from children and women when a wave succeeded in splashing them before it retreated, dragging murmuring stones and round pebbles. Not even a strip of beach could be seen, since the tide came in as far as the space bounded by the dark columns holding the building up in the air. Where the undertow began, the wooden steps and cement supports, decorated by stalactites and algae, were barely visible.
“You can’t see the surf,” said Rubén. “How’re we going to do this?”
They were in the left-hand gallery, in the women’s section; their faces were serious.
“Wait till tomorrow,” the Brain said. “By noon it’ll be clear. Then we’ll be able to check on you.”
“Since we’re here, let’s do it now,” Melanés said. “They can check on themselves.”
“Okay with me,” Rubén said. “And you?”
“Me too,” Miguel said.
When they had stripped, Tobias joked about the blue veins scaling Miguel’s smooth stomach. They went down. Licked incessantly by the water for months on end, the wooden steps were smooth and slippery. Holding on to the iron railing so as not to fall, Miguel felt a shivering mount from the soles of his feet up to his brain. He thought that in one way the fog and the cold favored him: winning now did not depend on skill so much as on endurance, and Rubén’s skin was purplish too, puckered in millions of tiny goose bumps. One step below, Rubén’s athletic body bent over: tense, he was waiting for the ebb of the undertow and the arrival of the next wave, which came in noiselessly, airily, casting a spray of foamy droplets before it. When the crest of the wave was six feet from the step, Rubén plunged in: with his arms out like spears and his hair on end from the momentum of his leap, his body cut straight through the air and he fell without bending, without lowering his head or tucking his legs in; he bounced in the foam, scarcely went under, and immediately taking advantage of the tide, he glided out into the water, his arms surfacing and sinking in the midst of a frantic bubbling and his feet tracing a precise, rapid wake. Miguel in turn climbed down one more step and waited for the next wave. He knew that the water was shallow there and that he should hurl himself like a plank, hard and rigid, without moving a muscle, or he would crash into the rocks. He closed his eyes and jumped and he did not hit bottom, but his body was whipped from forehead to knees and he felt a fierce stinging as he swam with all his might in order to restore to his limbs the warmth that the water had suddenly snatched from them. He was in that strange section of the sea near the shore at Miraflores where the undertow and the waves meet and there are whirlpools and crosscurrents, and the summer months were so far in the past that Miguel had forgotten how to clear it without stress. He did not recall that you had to relax your body and yield, allowing yourself to be carried along submissively in the drift, to stroke only when you rose on a wave and were at the crest in that smooth water flowing with the foam and floating on top of the currents. He did not recall that it is better to endure patiently and with some cunning that first contact with the exasperating sea along the shore that tugs at your limbs and hurls streams of water in your mouth and eyes, better to offer no resistance, to be a cork, to take in air only when a wave approaches, to go under—scarcely if they broke far out and without force or to the very bottom if the crest was nearby—to grab hold of some rock and, always on the alert, to wait out the deafening thunder of its passing, to push off in a single movement and to continue advancing, furtively, by hand strokes, until finding a new obstacle, and then going limp, not fighting the whirlpools, to swirl deliberately in the sluggish eddy and to escape suddenly, at the right moment, with a single stroke. Then a calm surface unexpectedly appears, disturbed only by harmless ripples; the water is clear, smooth, and in some spots the murky underwater rocks are visible.
After crossing the rough water, Miguel paused, exhausted, and took in air. He saw Rubén not far off, looking at him. His hair fell over his forehead in bangs; his teeth were clenched.
“Do we go on?”
“We go on.”
After a few minutes of swimming, Miguel felt the cold, which had momentarily disappeared, invade him again, and he speeded up his kicking because it was in his legs, above all in his calves, that the water affected him most, numbing them first and hardening them later. He swam with his face in the water and every time his right arm came out, he turned his head to exhale the breath he had held in and to take in another supply, with which he scarcely submerged his forehead and chin once again so as not to slow his own motion and, on the contrary, to slice the water like a prow and to make his sliding through it easier. With each stroke, out of one eye he could see Rubén, swimming smoothly on the surface, effortlessly, kicking up no foam now, with the grace and ease of a gliding seagull. Miguel tried to forget Rubén and the sea and the surf (which must still be far out, since the water was clear, calm and crossed only by newly formed waves). He wanted to remember only Flora’s face, the down on her arms which on sunny days glimmered like a little forest of golden threads, but he could not prevent the girl’s image from being replaced by another—misty, usurping, deafening—which fell over Flora and concealed her: the image of a mountain of furious water, not exactly the surf (which he had reached once, two summers ago, and whose waves were violent with green and murky foam because at that spot, more or less, the rocks came to an end, giving rise to the mud that the waves churned to the surface and mixed with nests of algae and jellyfish, staining the sea) but rather a real ocean tormented by internal cataclysms whipping up monstrous waves that could have encompassed an entire ship and capsized it with surprising quickness, hurling into the air passengers, launches, masts, sails, buoys, sailors, portholes and flags.
He stopped swimming, his body sinking until it was vertical; he lifted his head and saw Rubén moving off. He thought of calling to him on any pretext, of saying to him, for example, “Why don’t we rest for a minute?” but he did not do it. All the cold in his body seemed concentrated in his calves; he could feel his stiffened muscles, his taut skin, his accelerated heart. He moved his feet feverishly. He was at the center of a circle of dark water, walled in by the fog. He tried to catch sight of the beach or the shadow of the cliffs when the mist let up, but that vague gauze which dissolved as he cut through was not transparent. He saw only a small, greenish-black patch and a cover of clouds level with the water. Then he felt afraid. He was suddenly struck by the memory of the beer he had drunk and thought: I guess that’s weakened me. In an instant it seemed as if his legs and arms had disappeared. He decided to turn back, but after a few strokes in the direction of the beach, he made an about-face and swam as gently as he could. “I won’t reach the shore alone,” he said to himself. “It’s better to be close to Rubén; if I wear out, I’ll tell him he beat me but let’s go back.” Now he was swimming wildly, his head up, swallowing water, flailing the sea with stiff arms, his gaze fixed on the imperturbable form ahead of him.