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IV
I woke into twilight. I did not know where I was or what time it was. I tried to focus my attention, like someone trying to orient myself. I remembered: I was in my room in the Central Hotel. Then I heard the sea.
 I turned on the light. I saw by my watch -- which was lying on the bedside table along with my volumes of Chiron, Kent, Jahr, Allen and Hering -- that it was 5 p.m. Torpidly I began to dress. What a relief it would be to see myself freed of the rigorous attentions to dress which the conventions of urban life impose upon one! In a flight from fashion I put on a plaid shirt, wool slacks, denim coat, pleated Panama, and old yellow shoes, along with the cane with the dog's-head handle. I bent my head and used the mirror to study, with no attempt to hide my satisfaction, the broad forehead of the thinker, and once again I concurred with so many impartial observers: the resemblance between my features and Goethe's is undeniable. For the rest, I am not a tall man; to put it more succinctly, I am precise -- my humors, my reactions and my thoughts neither extend nor blunt themselves on a distended geography. I pride myself on having a mane of hair agreeable both to see and to touch, a pair of small attractive hands, and slender wrists, ankles and waist. My feet, "frivolous travelers," do not rest even when I sleep. My complexion is soft and pink; my appetite, perfect.
I hurried. I wanted to take advantage of my first day on the beach.
Like those recollections of a trip that are erased from the memory and then found in a photograph album, the moment I loosened the straps of my suitcase I saw -- for the first time? -- the scenes of my arrival at the hotel. The building, white and modern, seemed to me picturesquely situated in the sand: like an ocean-going vessel or an oasis in the desert. Compensating for the lack of trees were the the various splashes of green capriciously distributed -- dandelions which seemed to be advancing like a multiform reptile, and rumorous stalks of tamarisk. Toward the background were two or three houses and a hut.
Already I was rested. I felt the ecstasy of retirement. I, the doctor Humberto Huberman, had discovered the man of letters' paradise. In two months of work in this solitude I would complete my adaptation of Petronius. And then. . . A new heart, a new man. The hour for seeking other authors, of renewing the spirit would have sounded.
I went forward furtively by dark paths. I wanted to avoid the possibility of a conversation with the hotel owners -- distant relatives of mine -- which would delay my encounter with the sea. Luck, fortunately, let me leave the shadows without being seen and being my stroll in the sand. It was a difficult peregrination. Life in the city weakens and enervates us to such an extent that, in the shock of the first moment, the simple pleasures of the country oppress us like tortures. Nature did not wait to persuade me of the inadequacy of my attire. With one hand I pressed my hat firmly onto my head so that the wind would not take it and, with my other, plunged the cane into the sand, uselessly seeking the support of several planks that appeared from time to time like strata in the sand, signaling a path. My shoes, laden with sand, were nothing more than impediments to my progress.
At last I entered a zone of firmer sand. About eighty meters distant, to the right, a gray sailboat lay on its side on the beach; I saw the rope ladder hanging from the deck and told myself that on one of my subsequent walks I would climb it and explore the boat. Closer to the water, next to a group of tamarisks, two orange umbrellas trembled. Against a backdrop of irreal luminescence, made of sea and sky, as sharply defined as if seen through a lens, rose the figures of two girls in swimming suits and a man in blue wearing a captain's hat and rolled-up pants.
There was no other spot sheltered from the wind. I decided to approach, going behind the umbrellas to the tamarisks.
I removed my shoes and socks and threw myself onto the sand. The sensation of pleasure was perfect. Almost perfect: moderated, to be sure, by the inevitable knowledge that I must return to the hotel. In order to avoid any involvement with my neighbors -- besides those I have mentioned there was another man hidden by one of the umbrellas -- I called on Petronius and feigned an immersion in reading. But my only reading in those moments of irremissible abandon was, lilke that of the augurers, the white flight of a number of seagulls against the leaden sky.
What I had not foreseen when I neared the umbrellas was that their occupants might be conversing. They were talking with consideration neither of the evening's beauty nor of their weary neighbor who had vainly hoped to lose himself in his book. Their voices, which had at first been indistinguishable from the chorus of the waves and the cry of the gulls, now became disagreeably and energetically distinct. It seemed to me that I knew at least one of the female voices.
Moved by natural curiosity, I turned toward them. I could not immediately see the girl whose voice I found familiar: the umbrella blocked her fromview. Her girlfriend was standing: she was tall, blonde -- dare I say it? -- very beautiful, with a skin of impressive pallor and rosy highlights ("the color of raw salmon," as Dr. Manning would later delineate). Her body was too athletic for my taste and one noticed in her, as a tacit presence, the animality which attracts certain men about whose affinities I prefer not to comment.
After listening for some minutes I assembled the following facts: the blonde girl, a dangerous melomaniac, was named Emilia. The other, Mary, translated or copy-edited crime novels for a prestigious publisher. Two men accompanied them. One of them -- wearing a blue hat -- was a Dr. Cornejo: he impressed me with his charitable features and his intimate knowledge of the sea and meteorology. He was about fifty; his gray hair and thoughtful eyes conferred upon him a romantic expression, not deprived of vigor. The other was a younger man, of mixed blood. Despite a certain vulgarity of speech and an appearance which recalled posters of the "tango in Paris" -- lank black hair, lively eyes, aquiline nose -- it seemed to me that he exercised over his companions -- none too brilliant, to be sure -- some intellectual superiority. I learned that he was named Enrique Atuel and was Emilia's sweetheart.
"Mary," he said in a rhythmical voice, "it's too late to take a swim. Besides, the sea is rough now, and you can't fight against the current."
The voice I knew responded happily. "I'm a little girl who is going to get in the water."
"You're a spoiled little girl," Emilia answered with affection. "Are you trying to commit suicide or to frighten us to death?"
Her boyfriend insisted, "Don't try swimming in this current, Mary. It would be foolish."
Cornejo consulted his wristwatch. "The tide is rising," he pronounced. "There's no danger. If you promise not to go far, you have my permission."
Atuel turned to the girl. "If you can't make it back in, his permission won't count for much. Listen to me, and don't go swimming."
"Into the water!" Mary cried with pleasure.
She jumped up, adjusted her bathing cap, and repeated, "I'm a little girl with wings! I'm a little girl with wings!"
"Then I'm finished here," Atuel said. "I'm going back to the hotel."
"Don't be silly," Emilia told him.
Atuel drew away without listening to her. But before leaving, he noticed my presence and looked severely at me. For my part, I confess that Mary's graceful form drew my attention. Truly she was a little girl with wings. Meeting each wave she raised her arms as if playing with the heavens.
"Mary? Miss María Gutiérrez?" I asked myself. It is too difficult to recognize someone in a swimming suit. . . The girl who visited me in my office this year and to whom I recommended a holiday at Bosque del Mar? Yes, surely it was. The girl delicately lost in her fur overcoat. There were those darkly circled eyes, now mischievous, now dreaming. There was the accrochecoeur on the forehead. I recalled telling her warmly, "We are kindred souls." Hers was, like mine, a case for arsenic. There she was, leaping into the sea, the invalid who just this winter had lain still on the comfortable examination table in my office. Another miraculous cure for Dr. Huberman!
Several worried exclamations woke me from my reverie. In short, the remarkable swimmer had gone far out with astonishing facility.
"She has gone so far by swimming very ably," Cornejo objected in a calming tone. "She is not in any danger. She'll come back."
"She went that far because the current took her," Emilia declared.
A series of shouts made me turn the other way.
"She can't come back!"
It was Atuel who came up gesticulating. He confronted Dr. Cornejo and demanded, "Did you get what you wanted? She can't make it back."
I judged that the time to intervene had arrived. In fact, a favorable occasion had presented itself for me to display the efficacies of the crawl stroke and water rescue -- so easily forgotten -- that Professor Chimmara, of Obras Sanitarias, had inculcated in me.
"Sir," I said with resolution, "if someone will loan me a swimming suit I will rescue her."
"I reserve that honor to myself," Cornejo stated. "But perhaps we could indicate to the girl that she cut at an angle, northeast to southwest. . ."
Atuel interrupted. "Enough with angles and stupidity! The girl is drowning."
An instinctual movement, or the desire not to witness a dispute, drew my gaze away, toward the sailboat. I saw a boy descending the rope ladder and then running toward us.
Atuel was undressing. Cornejo and I argued over bathing trunks.
The boy was shouting, "Emilia! Emilia!"
Before our astonished eyes, Emilia ran toward the ocean, swam out to Mary, and returned with her.
Jubilant, we gathered around the swimmers. In her pallor Mary seemed to me more beautiful than ever. She said, with a forced nonchalance, "You're a bunch of alarmists. That's what you are: a bunch of alarmists."
Dr. Cornejo tired to convince her otherwise. "When the wind is kicking up the waves, you oughtn't let them strike you in the face."
The boy was crying. Mary, to calm him, held him in her beautiful wet arms. Tenderly she said, "Did you think I was drowning, Miguel? I am a child of the sea; the waves and I have a secret."
Mary demonstrated, as always, her exquisite grace, but also that dark vanity and fatal ingratitude of swimmers who never recognize having been in danger and thus deny the heroism of those who save them.
Among the characters of this episode, there was one who most impressed me. It was the boy, a nephew of Andrea, the mistress of the hotel. He looked to be about eleven or twelve years old. His expression was noble: the lines of his face were regular and sharp, but there was a mixture of maturity and innocence in him which disgusted me.
"Dr. Huberman!" Mary exclaimed with surprise. She had recognized me!
Conversing amiably, we undertook our return. I looked toward the hotel. It was a small white cube against a sky of gray clouds tattered and twisted. I recalled an illustration from the catechism of my childhood, entitled "The Divine Wrath."
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