For Ramón Báez,
who swam with Tarzan
and told me this story.
It’s easy these days to make fun of Tarzan. To recall the man who, with a monkey on his back, swung from lianas and made crocodiles smile. We got to know about him through books, magazines, and the cinema, together with the wide-eyed Jane and Tantor the elephant. How could we fail to be dazzled by him when, from the balcony at matinees in our local movie houses, he leapt from a branch, arms outstretched and lion-chested, then joined his hands, jack-knifed and plunged into the river like a needle into a silk dress. None of us could help but imitate the yell of the man lost in the jungle, a cry that mingled boastfulness and solitude. But I for one can’t make fun of Tarzan, and find it hard to bear what the newspapers are saying about him.
He knew that his yell went far beyond anything produced on earth, and I can almost hear him beneath the jeers of my friends in the bar, who cackle at his efforts and ask me to imitate him the way I used to do. Because I swam with Tarzan, and none of these guys—hard-working men who wouldn’t hurt a fly—is ever going to hear that yell from my mouth ever again.
I was nineteen and working on the docks in the port of Montevideo when I heard that Tarzan had come to train young swimmers in Rosario de Santa Fé in neighbouring Argentina, invited by General Perón. I was told this by a buddy I loaded sacks onto the boats with, as we had done with riverbank water hyacinths years before. Julio was ten years older than me back then, when anybody who didn’t dare swim across the Delta was chicken. I had watched them use the current to float over from Uruguay to the long, low green strip of the Argentine shore astride the lily pads. And seen them return with the evening current, laughing and joking. They would spend the day on Juncal Island, eating fruit from the trees and returning full of stories, the sun tattooed on their backs.
Of course they mocked me for being a coward, and I deserved it. Until my sixth birthday I’d never wanted to go with them. After that I’d never been so happy as when I allowed myself to be carried across on the current, lying flat as I gazed at the green horizon that effortlessly drew closer, as if pulled on a string.
I became a swimmer first out of pride, and second, to keep faith with the gang of kids that Julio led because of his age advantage that, after my first crossing, was reduced to the unavoidable two years.
Years later, I competed in the twelve-mile swim at Palmar, the Carmelo twenty miles, and the thirty miles of Uruguay’s national championship, convinced I was the best long-distance swimmer in the region thanks to the medals I won and then lost somewhere or other. But I do recall the shouts of encouragement from people scattered along the riverbank with their barbecues, recliners and picnics as I swam past, arm, leg, arm, cap down over my eyes, goggles fogged up, head in, head out of the water, as if I was being photographed at each stroke. I had learned to listen to my muscles in the water, to search for the strongest currents, and to use a safety pin I always took with me to prevent cramp. Whenever I felt the stab of lactic acid in my calf I would jab the pin into my leg and for the few seconds it took the acid to mix with the water, I would think of Julio, or Julio’s mother; it hurt like hell, and thanks to her secret I could swim on downriver as agile as a fish.
Back then I would watch every Tarzan movie. I studied his style, the elegant way he swam down the rivers of Africa to confront or flee wild beasts, man not excepted. I didn’t choose the movies for their plots, but because of the number of times he swam or dived off a cliff in the jungle. More than once I found myself in the empty cinema with the lights up, trying to retain Tarzan’s movements in the water on the blank screen, while old Lucanor swept up all the candy papers strewn all over the floor.
In those days I was young, my father was a vague memory in my mother’s eyes, and I was learning that it’s impossible for a man to get everything he wants. The need to work was lesson number one. But when, bent double under a sack of wheat, Julio told me Tarzan was in nearby Rosario, I stopped breathing, and a crane hook almost crashed into my head.
In no time at all, I rolled up some banknotes, packed a few clothes, and boarded the bus to Rosario. You had to pay to get on the course: lots wanted to join, most of them Argentine swimmers, members of a posh club, with several pools and changing rooms the likes of which I’d never seen before. But they practised in the River Paraná, and so I camped out on the riverbank to await my opportunity.
One morning I saw him appear amid a gaggle of youngsters. He was wearing black swimming trunks with a red towel ‘round his shoulders. We all know that in movies everything looks bigger, but close up, Tarzan was really impressive. Of medium height, his back was wide as a door, and his arms and legs looked like the oars of a boat that never ran aground. I was taken aback at seeing the bags under his puffy eyes and some white strands in his hair, but he still had that black, rebellious quiff on his brow, a sign of the race of heroes.
No sooner had he glanced my way over the heads of the youngsters than I plunged into the water and began to swim. I swam to the centre of the river, came back, and dived in again, while all the time he was giving instructions to the others, helped by an assistant who translated for him. When I reached the bank for the fifth time, he was right in front of me, his legs dangling in the water. He was looking at me in a way I couldn’t interpret, and was saying something in English. Whatever it was, I couldn’t understand a word, because all I was able to say in English was good morning, but I went closer and he put a hand on my shoulder and repeated what he had said with those thick, taut lips of his. I must have stood there paralysed, because he shook me a little and pointed at the other students. I shrugged and nodded—how could I do anything else but agree with Tarzan?—and he turned to go back to his assistant, a little pot-bellied guy who at first looked disconcerted and then abruptly told me that Johnny was inviting me to join in the training as his special guest. My legs trembled when, with a gesture I often saw him repeat in the following days, he ruffled my hair, just as the wind did to his mane in the jungle.
And so I became part of the team, surrounded by Argentines with manners and tastes that were foreign to me, and was put up in the club for the ten days of Tarzan’s visit. The next morning during the training session he explained that the secret to the start was to stay underwater for as long as possible, because the body travels faster submerged than on the surface, and he got us all to practise the starting dive from a small jetty. Then he nodded in my direction, challenging me to swim in the open river. We went down the middle of the River Paraná with a gentle cross-breeze from the pampas; I stayed slightly behind him, trying to maintain my rhythm and deny my body the excitement of swimming with Tarzan down a muddy river whose waters soon mingled with other rivers and then out to the sea, where I was going to carry on swimming with the king of the distant, silent jungle, in that profound way underwater secrets possess: the heartbeats, the lungs, the respiration of everything created from the beginning of creation, disturbed now by the passage of two bodies across the softly rippling surface, on and on to a fixed, unknown destination.
All of a sudden I saw him alongside me, creating a wave that opened a triangular furrow. He began flapping his raised hand at me, and I eventually realised he was pointing towards the right bank, where several people were watching us, and others were running along the shore. At first I didn’t understand, or didn’t want to. I looked him in the eye and realised he was asking me not to overtake him in front of these spectators, that I should slow down and stay behind him. For a moment I wanted to ignore him, to imagine the moment when I could boast I had beaten Tarzan. But there was something more in his eyes—a resignation born of a more profound defeat. And so, more out of fear than altruism, I let him carry on ahead of me.
When we reached the shore he hugged me to him, ruffled my hair again, and seemed lost in thought. I knew he was looking back to another time, recalling something precious from his youth. His gaze became soft and sweet, like a little child’s.
It wasn’t easy for me to accept that Tarzan was Romanian, and that his real name was the unpronounceable Johnny Weissmüller. When I heard what the others had to say about him, my head began to spin. I learned that, as a boy, Johnny had contracted polio, and that the treatments led him to water, where his barrel chest, strong arms, and biceps compensated for the weakness of his legs. Overcoming this obstacle had led him to become the Olympic hundred-metre champion, and he had just filmed his last movie as Jim of the Jungle. After years working in the movies, Hollywood had sidelined him, and ever since, to survive and pay for his drink, he had travelled the world as a swimming coach.
Because Tarzan hit the whisky bottle from early morning, and it was painful at night to see him groping along the walls leading to his cabin, eyes blank and stumbling over his own feet. My greatest surprise, though, was to learn that he was allergic to monkeys and hated Cheeta more than anything in the world. A mangy creature, Johnny said when we were all chatting, translated by his assistant. Mangy deep in his soul, he went on, responsible for metre after metre of film being thrown into the garbage can because of his insufferable whims, and for an endless number of risky scenes Johnny had been obliged to repeat over and over, in which more than once he almost split his skull open. On screen, Jane also projected the idyllic lie of what had been a stormy relationship. Maureen O’Sullivan hated Cheeta. And, in return, Cheeta hated them both, and never missed an opportunity for revenge.
From the very first days of the course, everyone wanted him to repeat Tarzan’s yell. Johnny simply smiled and shook his head silently, accustomed to hearing this insistent demand from one club to the next, all over the world. In response, he would ask the students to try to imitate it, and then the hopeless cries and laughs would start, a stream of failures that he found highly amusing. I had practised the yell hundreds of times, and was proud of what I could do. Egged on by the others, one night I filled my lungs with air, controlled my breathing and clenched my neck muscles to rend the air with an anguish I could not identify back then, but which over the years I learned first to intuit, then to fear, and finally to respect. Something left unspoken except in the gurgle of water against the submerged body freed to the solitude of advancing through tide and waves with unshakeable desire.
When I finished, the others laughed again, but this time Johnny didn’t smile. Fixing his eyes on me, he said that Tarzan’s yell was not human, but a mixture of raucous animal cries and a human voice, recorded in a studio. A strange silence followed, and I understood or seemed to guess that in confessing this, as though it was a service to mankind, Johnny had lifted a weight from us but left himself exposed to a humiliation he didn’t deserve.
That night he went to bed early. We saw him pick up his bottle of whisky in a languid way that brought more laughter from the other swimmers. Until that moment nobody had dared say out loud what was in everyone’s mind and needed this final confession to rise to the surface: that Perón had invited a worthless drunk in free fall, who not only destroyed the illusion he had created among the public with Cheeta in his arms, but was not even capable of producing Tarzan’s yell.
“I don’t mean he has to do it exactly the same,” someone said as we were going to bed in our dormitory. “But he lined his pockets over the years, and you can’t tell me he couldn’t at least learn to imitate it. Why didn’t he at least try, to see what he could do?”
“It’s always the same,” somebody else said. “They come to Argentina when they’re washed up and on the way out. Before, we didn’t even exist, we were the fuzzy-wuzzies down south. Now they come to stuff their faces, just like him. They’ll do anything for a thick steak or two. How do you reckon a sportsman can set an example, clutching a bottle like that?”
“You know what?” a blond kid with a short fringe butted in. “Tarzan wasn’t King of the Apes. He was king of the topers. Of tipples.”
At that, eyes bloodshot and my head a jumble of candy papers and screens, I leaped to my feet. I rushed over to the blond kid and knocked him flat. Five or six of them jumped on me. “What are you doing, Yoruba! We put up with you, and you start hitting us!”
There was an almighty scrum and I ended up buried beneath a mountain of arms and legs, my blood boiling. We were still struggling when the door opened and in came Tarzan, his quiff dishevelled, with an expression that froze us all. He was wearing trousers but was bare-chested, his face slack from the whisky, but ready to launch himself on his quarry. I took advantage of the distraction to land a punch on the kid who had bitten my ear, and just as I was turning back I felt Johnny’s hand on my shoulder and then on my neck, about to throttle me. He shook me hard and told me to gather my things and get out of there, that he hadn’t asked me to join to cause trouble. He said this in English, but I only needed look at his face to understand. Drying the blood from my ear and nose with the sheet, I got dressed and put my stuff together, with Tarzan keeping a close eye on me and the others watching on silently. When we were outside, he shouted again for me to leave, and headed back to his cabin, belching and closing the door.
I rummaged in my bag by the side of the swimming pool, trying to decide what to do. How could I explain when the gringo only spoke English or German? I walked to the club entrance, then turned round, still in two minds. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was leave, now that the spell had been broken for me and possibly for him as well. In the end, I sat on his cabin’s porch. Surrounded by darkness, I spent an hour in this limbo, listening to tangos by Gardel and Tita Morello on Johnny’s radio, until finally the door opened and he appeared, leaning on the doorframe, still clutching the whisky bottle, and lit from behind by the bedside lamp. A gloomy light that magnified the right side of his face up to his eye, an eye made to stare at the night, a night made for the two of us, if only the others had not spoiled everything.
He soon spotted me in the gloom, but looked again up at the stars, then at the pool, lit by white lights that made the water icily transparent. Then he sat or collapsed beside me and began to talk, polishing off what was left of the whisky.
I’ve no idea what he said, but he went on for a long time with a doubt that leapt from his chest, stretched as taut as a drum, while I studied his eyes, the way his lips moved, and his square face. I sensed he was repeating a meaningless question out of a distant past. At one moment he raised his hands to his mouth and I thought I understood, or perhaps I merely imagined, that he was talking about the yell that had been invented for him, and which he could never utter beyond the illusion of the screen: a piercing, mournful yell that, like all the rest of us, had remained engraved on his memory after hearing it for so many years, but which he could no longer disown without an unbearable sense of defeat.
That night I slept on an armchair in his room. The next morning he took me back to the group, and was careful to tell them nobody should say a word. That is why now, when I read in the newspapers that Johnny Weismüller died insane in a hospital in Mexico, trying to give Tarzan’s yell, there is no way I can satisfy the guys in the café, just as I did not dare, that time in the river, to swim ahead of him. Because we both knew the yell wasn’t human, that it came from the chest of an impossible beast, a beast against whom mankind had learned to stand upright on two feet, to be more powerful than his muscles, and to dream he was other: a never-ending struggle.
Translated by Nick Caistor
