The Pool
The black haired man in a short-sleeved shirt must have been around forty, and at that moment he was laboriously standing on the roof of the building across the street, eight or nine floors above the ground. Gloria watched him from the living room of her apartment, remote control in hand, half-reclined on the couch. Intrigued, she stopped on some random channel. She had already gone through the whole list twice anyway, and stayed there, staring at the man. He, from the roof, brought his hands together, tucked his head between his shoulders, and hurled himself down onto the pavement. Below, the parking lot floor made all his bones burst.
Gloria turned her eyes back to the television and kept flipping through the channels, though she no longer stopped to see what was on. Every now and then, she glanced sideways through the window, but a sort of guilt forced her to focus her senses on what was happening inside her own four walls. Still, she needed only a few looks to notice that people were beginning to gather around the man’s body, and it became harder and harder for her to concentrate on her reduced square meter, where everything was the same as always. Especially when she heard the spectators of the strange event applauding. They were also smiling and making little joyful hops.
Unable to hold herself back a second longer, Gloria turned off the television and went out into the street, where at least fifty people had gathered to watch, and more and more were still arriving. She rose onto her toes to see past the heads blocking her view, but she was distracted by the dilated eyes and exaggerated smiles that turned to look at her instead. After she had grown used to the collective fervor, when she even believed she was beginning to catch it, she found the man from the roof, reduced to a mush of meat on the asphalt. Those closest to the parking lot fence, far from wanting to move away from the smell or from the sight of bones escaping through torn tissue, raised their arms and shouted between jumps:
“My turn! My turn!”
“Why are they celebrating?” Gloria asked the young man beside her.
He had hair full of curls and a thick dark beard. He looked at her with a smile that stretched from ear to ear and placed one hand on her shoulder before answering.
“We’ve never had a pool in this neighborhood before,” he said.
Another person appeared on the roof of the building across the street. This time it was a woman who, from where Gloria stood, looked the size of a doll. After giving herself a small push, she made an agile leap that lifted her half a meter into the air, grabbed her knees, and spun a few times before dropping headfirst. Then all the bones in her spine broke at the same time. It was the back of the woman’s neck that received the impact against the ground. The girls in the front row screamed and turned aside, their faces protected. Then they burst into laughter again as they shook their bodies and wrung out their hair.
Gloria looked around. Only one person in the entire crowd was keeping himself from joining the others’ euphoria. They both stared at each other for a long while, without daring to articulate a single word, though that did not stop them from telling each other exactly what they were both thinking. Nothing managed to pull Gloria’s gaze away from those controversial brown eyes. Not the constant shoves from the people beside her, not the backs of heads and shoulders of the enthusiasts who wanted to see the imaginary pool from up close. Finally, once they had said everything, Gloria gave the young man a nod, and he answered with an almost imperceptible smile. They both moved forward, where a group of friends were still wringing out their dresses. The young man stood with his back to the parking lot and asked the spectators:
“Why are you doing this?” His voice echoed between the buildings and generated a constant murmur among the masses. “You are completely free to express what you really see. You are not the only ones. I see it too.”
From the middle of the crowd, which now stood on tiptoe with raised arms and throats reddened from so much shouting, a tall woman appeared. She had dark hair, slightly wavy and very shiny. The features of her face were firm, her gaze decisive, and her lips as red as the blood silently advancing between the parking lot tiles. People stepped aside to let her pass, and within a few minutes everyone fell silent.
“What is it that you see?” she asked the young man. “And what gives you the right to question what others see?”
“That wasn’t what I was doing.”
“People are not stupid,” the woman continued. “They don’t need someone to tell them whether what their eyes interpret is true or not. You are the one who needs to stop imposing visions and admit that behind that fence there is nothing but a recently built pool and two people swimming.”
Suddenly, everyone present raised their hands at the same time and waved toward the dead bodies.
“If you jump into the pool, I’ll admit whatever you want,” the young man said.
The girl with red lips smiled.
“I don’t know how to swim,” she explained, and shrugged. “In fact, I envy those who dare to jump in. But I have a better idea. Why don’t you jump in?”
Four of them grabbed the young man and, against his will, dragged him toward the building across the street. He screamed for help and tried to resist, but the laughter and applause drowned out his laments. Once they entered the building, no one saw them again until they appeared on the roof two minutes later. With the unfortunate help of his captors, the young man stumbled toward the edge of the building, and then went flying into nothing, propelled by the four pairs of hands that accompanied him. His body fell clumsily and heavily, without the grace the other two had had, but below, the result was the same.
Once more, those in front covered their faces amid laughter and cries of jubilation. The others broke into applause and words of encouragement.
“You did it!”
“We knew you could!”
“Is there anyone else still refusing to see the beautiful gift we have before our eyes?” the girl with red lips suddenly asked. Everyone began shaking their heads from side to side, but her eyes were fixed on Gloria, who quickly joined the others and started saying no. “Then I invite you to go,” she said. “Enjoy this wonderful pool.”
Like cockroaches, they all rushed toward the building at the same time. Some went up the stairs, others climbed through the windows and up the outer walls. The woman with red lips kept staring at Gloria while the crunch of bodies being crushed against the floor echoed both in her ears and in her stomach.
“I don’t know how to swim either,” Gloria said, but she did not hesitate to join the praises of the few who had not yet thrown themselves into the pool.
After watching them a second time, she noticed there was something strange about their smiles and the way they applauded. Their cheeks were flushed and wet, and their eyes seemed to be slowly sliding down the sides of their faces, as if they were melting from the inside out. Their hands, striking against each other, seemed to have acquired a life of their own, and many times their movements were so uncoordinated that they failed to meet. Even the elasticity of their arms did not seem to belong to a human being. Then Gloria looked down at herself and discovered she was replicating the same movements as everyone else, and that from her drooping eyes escaped tears that had nothing to do with happiness.
The weeks passed, and the swimmers increased in great numbers. There came a time, after a torrential rain, when people were truly able to swim among the waters of skin and limbs, and not everyone who dove in died below anymore. Every day, Gloria watched from her window as people played in the depths of the unconventional pool, and instead of spitting out water when they brought their heads to the surface, they spat out locks of hair and a mysterious brownish liquid whose origin Gloria preferred not to know.
The woman with red lips appeared from time to time. As days went by, she did so less and less often. She always sat facing the pool, on a beach chair and under the shade of her parasol, watching through her internationally branded sunglasses as people enjoyed themselves and had fun. She never got involved, unless some unfortunate soul questioned the existence, or even the hygiene, of the pool. Gloria had been tempted to do so several times, especially when the woman with red lips appeared, but she knew exactly how it would end, and that discouraged her. So she always ended up choosing to keep watching, and settled for grumbling from the comfort of her couch and the monotony of the television.
The only time it became impossible for Gloria to ignore what was happening across the street was when she began to see that the limbs and viscera among which people swam were taking on a platinum and bluish tone, almost transparent. So Gloria opened the window and leaned her torso through the frame to see the parking lot more clearly, and the only thing she saw was water, except for a solitary head turning from side to side, rocking to the rhythm of the delicate currents generated by the people swimming. Despite the swelling of his face and the strange color of his skin, Gloria recognized the young man with brown eyes who had been forced to jump a month earlier.
Taking advantage of the fact that the woman with red lips was not present, Gloria went to the building across the street and approached the pool. The head now floated near the most remote corner. Fortunately, that afternoon there were few people swimming. Gloria ventured along the edge—which she did not believe she had seen before—with extreme care, since it was narrow and slippery. When she was facing the head, she stretched out her arms and took it by the ears. It weighed more than she imagined and dripped in torrents. She tucked it between the right side of her body and her arm, and took it away. She thought of taking it home, but her feet carried her in the opposite direction, and for hours she did nothing but move farther away from the pool, the water, and that wave of shared blindness.
Gloria entered the café after the sky had gone dark, so the lights of the place reproduced themselves infinitely in the blackness of the window. There was only one person inside, a young woman in a green coat and a wicker hat who did not take her eyes off her cup. She sat with her back to the window, at the table closest to the heater. The woman’s red lips frightened Gloria for a second, but after a while she knew this was not the woman that guarded the pool. Still trembling, she went to the other end of the place and, like the lady in green, chose a round dark-wood table for two. On the marble surface, she placed the head, which, besides dripping, now smelled of rot, and she smiled.
The woman in the green coat pushed her chair back and, after almost knocking over the fruit vase decorating the window frame, stood up and walked over to where Gloria was sitting. Her legs and hands were trembling, and her teeth, chattering. Now that she saw her standing, Gloria noticed the woman was wearing a red bathing suit under the coat. On her feet, nothing but sandals.
With a hard smile that seemed to hurt her cheeks, she said:
“I’m on my way to the pool. Can I take that beach ball?”
Gloria let out a sigh and looked at the face, which she now held by both cheeks. His eyes were nothing more than slits behind those two fat purple slugs.
“Do you really believe the pool is real?”
The woman in the green coat wrinkled her brow and nose, though they were barely visible beneath the shadow of her hat.
“Are you one of those people who refuse to believe the pool is real?”
Gloria did not answer, but she did not stop her from taking her friend’s head either, or from leaving the café while bouncing it against the tiles.
When they had both disappeared, Gloria asked the waitress for a pencil and wrote across the menu:
The pool does not exist, the pool does not not exist, and the pool never existed, but now it is real.
Gloria wondered what kind of eyes would find her words, and wondered whether people’s eyes would be less foolish than their ears, or whether they too had fallen under the hypnotic spell of dangerous red lips. Finally, she felt almost certain that where she saw letters, others would see vipers.
Finally, the one I was begging for and it was better than I hoped oh my goodness.
To be honest all I could think was a terrible thought: in times of mass delusion, speaking up is useless, violence is not.
For all the countries turning to far right to "make a pool" maybe the greatest delusion is believing that by "speaking" up to unjust fascist governments is enough. And that saddens me. It is not. We will all end up in the pool or silent...