Drowned
He wasn’t one to sell or make a lunch of what he caught. He fished mainly to practice the art of waiting, of allowing time to pass without anxiety, without irritation. He could reel something in or leave without so much as a nibble, and he’d head home feeling the same way as when he’d left that morning. That wasn’t what mattered; what mattered was to let himself ease into a feeling of calm (to feel and to be, in this case, were the same thing), and to that end he always avoided that bit of riverside beach where everyone else went, not far off from the swimming spot where the river, obeying a curve, offered a little back tide area and the water was deeper—obviously a better spot to fish, but he preferred to be alone, risk coming up empty. So he went a ways further downstream, where the river was more rock-strewn and where the currents quickened, a place where he’d never run into another soul. Not even the town’s stray dogs ventured out that far.
There was no beach there, just piles of large rocks. That summer afternoon he scampered along them and fit himself comfortably into a nook, threw back the rod and cast out into the water, then gazed peacefully at the clouds and the mountains (which might as well have been like gazing at his bedroom wall, having seen those clouds and those mountains every day for essentially his entire life). The river was more murky here, in general, running over weeds and sediment, but it wasn’t difficult that particular afternoon to make out the figure, drowned and carried through the water till a procession of rocks intercepted it, and it had become entangled there, stopped from floating further downstream. In point of fact, he’d seen it as soon as he’d approached the river and began debating the best spot to situate himself: first a single shoe (so alone, so discrete he thought at first that it was just that: a shoe fallen into the water and lost. Nothing of the least importance). And then above the shoe he saw the strangely bent leg, then the entire body and, finally, the face. Only when he’d seen the latter did he understand: it was a person, a dead, drowned body.
It was puffy, had an unreal color to it, and was still mostly submerged, distorted by the current. Despite this, despite the whole mess of it, he was able to make out who it was: the youngest son of the Peraltas, the couple who ran the town pharmacy. A boy so timid and silent that even death (a horrible, disfiguring death) seemed to have simply left him in his perennial state of indifference—the Peraltas’ kid had drowned like any other thing that could have happened to him, or no other thing at all.
He remained there a moment, staring at the corpse, less out of curiosity than out of fear—he had the urge to run off screaming, and to keep running till he reached town, and when he reached town to make a beeline to the pharmacy, there to inform the Peraltas of his horrible discovery. But he held back this impulse and regained his composure: Why, he thought, should he get himself tangled up in this? Why was he meant to be the bearer of such terrible news? There was not another soul within a mile of him or the dead Peralta boy. Someone else, anyone else, could take on the responsibility of listening to a mother wail in pain, could deal with the nuisance of filling out police forms, be compelled to witness the perverse complications of fishing a dead body from a swift-moving river.
He glanced around, shrugged his shoulders, left. He took the longer route back home, the one that went around the town. Once at home he changed clothes and then did nothing much but wait for night to come. When night fell, he left for downtown, prepared to hear news of the death and the talk that would come of it. These types of things, when they happen, they take over the town, they’re discussed for days on end. But in the streets and in the bars the topics of conversation were as trivial as always; he heard not one word about the Peralta’s youngest, nothing about someone having drowned in the river.
And this state of affairs did not change in the days that followed. He stopped going fishing, he didn’t go near the river; he was constantly itching to hear that someone else had discovered the body. It didn’t happen. Nothing happened. There was nothing about anything, even into the next week. He’d begun to have trouble sleeping, to suffer excruciating stomach pains. It felt like he was being ripped apart. Was this an excuse or a reason to head to the pharmacy? Didn’t matter; he went. There the most humdrum normality reigned. The Peraltas chatted with him, gave him some instructions to relieve his stomach pains, a few purple pills he should take. But not a word about the boy.
A few days later he cut a finger trying to fix a piece of furniture. He was out of gauze and antiseptic; he couldn’t stop the bleeding. Reason or excuse? He went to the pharmacy with his hand wrapped in a kitchen rag. No news (except for the cut on his finger) while he paid at the register. He couldn’t hold it in anymore. So, he asked.
“And Marianito, how’s he doing? Been days since I’ve seen him.”
The Peraltas shrugged their shoulders.
“He’s around,” one of them said.
“He’s around,” said the other.
They didn’t look worried. It didn’t seem like they were pretending everything was fine. There was no reason to doubt their equanimity, their sincerity. More days passed, too many days. Almost a month went by. He returned to the pharmacy on one other occasion, to buy alcohol or aspirin, to weigh himself on a scale, to chew the fat a bit at the counter. The Peraltas were the same as always: friendly, serene, smiling. No news on the youngest.
“Must be around here somewhere. Doing his own thing, like always.”
He thought about going back to the river, the part he knew well, to see if the body was still there or if someone had fished it out, or if the river itself, in a burst of current, had broken it off from that string of rocks and had taken it far off. Far enough off. He dismissed this idea immediately, of course. What was the point? He’d seen what there was to see. And what there was to know he was the only one who knew it.
But in these small towns people notice the little changes. They talk about them. The Peraltas’ youngest hadn’t been seen for a while now. In the pharmacy they overlooked it, yes; but one night he sat down at a bar to have a beer while dusk fell and the brutal heat choked the air and there he heard some people discussing it. He nibbled on some tasteless nuts with his glass half-drunk, said nothing directly but expressed some interest in the conversation taking place. He raised his eyes and made a gesture from where he was sitting at his table to those sitting at the other. Soon he was part of the conversation.
At the table next to them sat Andrada, from the newsstand.
“The Peraltas’ youngest,” Andrada said. “Been a while since we’ve seen him around.”
A few steps away was Enrique, an occasional, informal member of the wait staff. His white button-down was soaked in sweat.
“Marianito, right? The youngest of the four. No sign of him for days.”
He knew he had to sound vague, neither anxious nor disrespectful of the situation; that he had to answer sensitively, pertinently, to come off neutral. He could say anything, offer a banality, nothing that would draw attention, something easy to forget. He heard himself speak as if it was someone else: “Must be around here somewhere.” And he heard himself add, afterwards: “Doing his own thing, like always.”
And even though the response was adequate and though it fit neatly into the flow of conversation, he suddenly felt so terrible, so suffocated and miserable, that he had to excuse himself, pay up as quickly as possible and leave. The bottle of beer he’d ordered hardly drunk, the nuts hardly touched; the night and the heat so overwhelming and so nauseating, like the heat always is in summer.
The Mourners
The news spread like wildfire, they all noted, from one end of the school to the other. That quiet kid in second year, Pablo Quiñonez, his mother was doing very badly; she was more or less on her deathbed. It was a matter of minutes before the principal and teachers, the administrative staff, students from every year knew what was happening: a sneaky, sudden illness had overtaken her. How much longer would she be alive, how much longer would she exist on this earth? A few days more? A couple months, if she was lucky? Her body was failing and it was an agony without hope or reprieve. In town, word of the tragedy was murmured from mouth to mouth: Quiñonez’s wife was dying. But in the school it sounded more like a rumbling of anguish, of shock.
No one was sure how to act around Pablo Quiñonez, how to look at him, what to say (not that there was anything that could be said, it was horrible what was happening, simple as that). His teachers took pains to pat his head or lay a hand on his shoulder. The gym teacher gave him a big hug. His classmates tried to be close, they sat next to him or hovered nearby, in case he needed anything. The director called him to her office; once there, between the colored plate of San Martín and the wooden crucifix, she offered him some water and talked to him about God.
Diego Montoya, Pablo’s best friend, was more upset than anyone else, almost as much (or maybe almost as much) as the dying woman’s own son. Faced with the news he was inconsolable, and after some time had passed he still hadn’t been able to calm down. Everyone more or less understood his reaction, the teachers and staff, or they thought they understood it—Diego Montoya, Pablo’s best friend since forever, was over at the Quiñonez house more than anyone else. Leticia had opened her home to him a thousand times.
Everyone at school was shocked by the news and they even suspended classes, but the students lingered there, musing over the day’s events or idling away the time. Only Diego Montoya left early, taking advantage of one of the many unobserved lulls to escape out to the street through a bent section of fence at the back of the campus. He passed through a vacant lot, from the vacant lot through the Pozzi’s scrap yard, and from there to Catamarca Street, which led directly to the town’s main square.
Diego Montoya crossed the town at a trot, not caring who saw him (or who saw him crying). When he finally reached the Quiñonez residence, he banged on the steel plate door with an open hand; then made half a fist and banged on it again. After a brief moment (an eternity for Diego Montoya), the girl they called Moni, who’d started working in the house only a few months ago, opened the door.
“I’m here to see Leticia,” Diego Montoya said.
The girl shook her head. “Mrs. Quiñonez is resting.”
“Just go see if she’s up, hurry, tell her I’m here,” Diego Montoya said, waving the girl back into the house.
The girl they called Moni assented, closed the door, left him standing outside while she went to check on Mrs. Quiñonez and, perhaps, to tell her Diego Montoya had come to see her. She wasn’t long in coming back, though it took her a moment to say what she wanted to say.
“Mr. Quiñonez says to leave,” she said. “And not to think about coming back.”
Leticia Quiñonez died three days later. In terrible pain, per the rumors around town, the morphine Dr. Arizu administered having made hardly a difference at all. A priest traveling down special from Luján was able to give her the last rites so she could pass on at peace with God. The service was held at Rispo’s, the only funeral home in town. Pablo Quiñonez appeared bewildered, absent, incredulous, as if he couldn’t understand (not admit but simply understand) that his mother was no longer with them, that he would never see her again. It was a closed casket, so as to avoid the disturbing expression death, when it finally came, had provoked in her. This latter circumstance reinforced the general impression that all that had happened had not actually happened.
Diego Montoya spent the night at Pablo Quiñonez’s house and, as can only happen with friends, neither said a word to the other. Sometime more or less near dawn, he thought about approaching the large casket where in a way Leticia was still with them. But before getting up the nerve to do so his gaze fell on Mr. Quiñonez. Pablo’s dad. It was as if Diego Montoya could see the man’s intention written on his face—the latter stared at him from one end of the room to the other with that indifferent fixation of someone who has nothing else left in the world, then made a dry, precise movement with a portion of his head (not even his entire head) and with the bottom portion of his face (not even his entire face), an eloquent, savage gesture that couldn’t possibly have been interpreted as anything other than a demand Diego Montoya leave. The latter sat there, appearing to not understand, but Quiñonez immediately repeated the gesture, more definitively than before: he wanted Diego Montoya out of his house. He wanted him gone.
Diego Montoya gathered himself and left without a goodbye to his friend. That night he didn’t sleep a wink. In the unyielding insomnia that came over him he couldn’t cry, and at some point he came to the decision that he wouldn’t be attending Leticia Quiñonez’s burial. He’d come up with an acceptable excuse. He wouldn’t have to, however: at dawn his mother came to wake him and found him running a fever of nearly 104; it was hardly morning yet, he was burning up, the bed was damp with sweat, his eyes were small and far away, drawn and dark, pinholes. So no, he wouldn’t be attending Mrs. Quiñonez’s funeral. And no one could blame him for it.
He spent the next few days in fear of the elder Quiñonez. Everyone in town talked about how terrible the latter was taking it. They said he’d gone off the deep end, that he was half mad. He’d sent his son to the kid’s aunt and uncle’s and then it seems he locked himself in his own house, refusing to see another soul. A week went by, ten days, a couple of weeks. Quiñonez did finally emerge and once he did he appeared more at peace with things—a lot older, yes, more coarse and gloomy than before, but composed. Pablo came back to live with him. They began to reestablish some type of normality, a normality suffused with their pain, that would allow them to move on. They weren’t ones to attend church often, they never had been; but now they both showed up, together, every Sunday, attended each mass, to look for and maybe to find some type of acceptance.
One Thursday afternoon Diego Montoya was crossing the main square heading toward the Heredia’s hardware store to buy, on his father’s orders, seven meters of wire and six washers. After leaving the square and crossing over the main avenue, he passed by the corner bar and thought he heard his name. His name? Yes, his name. Was someone calling him? Yes, someone was. He poked his head in to see who. It was Quiñonez. Quiñonez sitting at a table that gave onto the street. Quiñonez saw him passing and had called to him. With a quick wave and maybe a slant of his forehead he invited him to sit down. Diego Montoya hesitated, but Quiñonez pulled a chair out and signaled him to take it.
“Are you drinking gin yet?” he said. “A little chilled wine, maybe? A beer?” he said.
“A beer. Yea. A beer.”
Quiñonez turned toward the waiter and ordered a liter for the two of them; Uriarte brought it cold, along with two tall glasses. Quiñonez poured: first Diego’s glass, then his own. They stared at the foam in their glasses, at the street, the square, the trees surrounding it, the branches of those trees. Diego Montoya was nervous thinking about what Quiñonez was planning to say to him, but he soon realized there was no reason to be nervous. Quiñonez wasn’t going to say a thing.
The two of them were just going to sit there, at that table in Uriarte’s bar, sharing a beer and maybe another after that, watching the afternoon expire outside and after that the night as it fell, without a word between the two, without a glance in each other’s direction. Each in his own world, in his own age, one owing to twenty years of a shared life and the other the unthinkable madness of one summer afternoon. Both dealing with the same thing. Both mourning the same absence.
The Siesta
It’s a rather isolated curve of beach along the river: hardly a sliver of dark sand between heaps of enormous rocks. Almost no one ever gets out that far; everyone normally stays around the municipal swimming area, though a few may occasionally venture a bit further beyond its borders. So Mara can’t help noticing the man who, perched on a sufficiently flat rock not far from where she’s laid out, raises his head to glance at her. He has the absurd air of an idol in bathing suit and flip-flops, but he seems unaware of this: he sticks his chest out and slips on a pair of sunglasses, maybe even gives her a little grin. Mara doesn’t return the gesture, of course; she immediately turns her gaze away from his. Too late: given that he’s on his way over, he must have read interest or even an invitation in that brief shared glance. He traipses over one rock, then another, then another. The afternoon is woozy with the heat.
“Nice spot you found,” he says when he’s close enough to be heard.
Mara doesn’t answer.
“You from around here?” he asks. Then more precisely: “From this town?”
“Yes,” Mara answers, her face turned toward the sun.
“That’s great,” he says, for some unknown reason. “What’s your name?”
Mara pauses for a second.
“Mika,” she says.
“Mica?” he answers. “Micaela?”
“No,” she replies. “Mika.”
“I’m Alberto.” Mara didn’t ask.
Alberto spreads his colorful beach towel (Mara thinks she can make out a motorcycle print) fatally close to her own, and only after doing so does he ask Mara, or Mika, if he can join her. He shakes off his flip-flops, plops down a bottle of tanning lotion with palm trees on the label, a rolled-up tee shirt, a hand towel, all before she’s had a chance to answer.
“So you live here then?” He lies back.
“Yes,” she says.
“Near where?” He props himself on an elbow, stares at her.
“Near the bus station,” she says.
It’s a small town: nothing is far from anything else. If one wanted to meet up with someone, or run into them randomly, it wouldn’t be difficult to do so.
“I’m on vacation,” Alberto answers the question Mara didn’t ask. “I’m in the Colonial Hotel, across from the post office.”
This clarification is useless; it’s obvious Mara knows the hotel and knows where it is. So Alberto, instead of letting a silence settle between them, starts chattering on again.
“The air here is something else,” he says.
Mara doesn’t respond.
“You go dancing? What’s the nightclub here called?”
“Caprice,” Mara says.
Alberto nods.
“And you like to go out dancing, huh?”
“No,” Maria replies curtly.
A silence does settle. Mara knows it won’t last long. Alberto seems uncomfortable with it.
“You like the river?” he says and looks out toward it, the dark and turbid river descending from the mountains, flowing fast at the moment, after a rain.
“Yes,” Mara says.
“You know how to swim?” He corrects himself: “Do you like to swim?”
“Very much,” she says.
Alberto perks up—as if he’s become the topic of conversation, not the river.
“Me too,” he exclaims.
Mara doesn’t acknowledge this.
“Might sound a little arrogant coming from myself, but I’m a great swimmer. I do twenty laps every morning. I don’t skip a day at the club for my life.”
Another silence descends. This one lasts a little longer. The river’s flow can be heard as it passes by, the complaints of the insects boiling in the sun. Curiously, it’s Mara who breaks the silence.
“The pool isn’t the same as a river,” she comments.
Alberto laughs, shrugs his shoulders.
“Water is water,” he replies.
“It’s different in the river,” Mara adds. “You have to know how to follow the currents.”
“Water is water,” Alberto specifies, as if saying it for the first time.
Mara opens her eyes, stands, ties her hair, stretches a bit.
“Let’s swim, then,” she says.
She takes a couple strides, maybe only one, and leaps toward the water. She goes in headfirst, hardly makes a splash, then emerges again with a decisive, maybe even defiant air. Alberto follows her in. They swim.
It’s true what Mara said, and Alberto, swimming behind, is the proof: in the river, the water pulls from one side to another, lines of force that suddenly compel a swimmer’s advance, more quickly, more easily. And it’s true the other thing she said: that when swimming in the river, you have to know how to follow those currents. Although there’s one current in this river that Mara didn’t mention, that breaks suddenly to the left and sucks a swimmer down; that current doesn’t just pull, it also encloses. It curls around the swimmer and wrests him to the bottom. From there, there’s no way back up.
As soon as you feel it approaching, you have to wiggle away; but Mara didn’t say anything about that. Instead of folding into it, giving in to it, you have to do the exact opposite: kick and paddle in the opposite direction, before the water’s will overpowers, before it traps and swallows, before it knots in and drowns you. This is what Mara does, she swims away from the black, threatening whirlpool that outsiders to this little town know nothing about. Alberto follows behind; she didn’t touch on the topic at all.
A little farther up she pulls herself out of the water. Her body glimmers under the sun. She skips back over the length of river she’d just swam through on lithe steps, along the sand, between the rocks. She gathers the few things she brought with her (the blue towel, the sandals, the book, the sarong) and heads off toward her house.
Her house is, it’s true, very near the bus station. She tries to make as little sound as possible as she opens her front door: it appears neither Mario, nor the kids, have woken up yet from their afternoon nap.
