Chapter 9
There was a scattering of cars in the dusty graveled lot.
At a grayed wooden shack bordered by tall bamboo fencing, we paid and were given a paper ticket.
Stepping through the gate was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when the world turns from black-and-white to color.
The grass was impossibly green, intersected by damp stone paths.
The sound of water was everywhere. In a small shop inside the main entrance—more a stone hut than a shop, selling a few each of nose- and earplugs, plastic sandals, bottled water—I bought a bathing suit.
They were not displayed, but sealed in clear plastic and stacked on a shelf, on the edge of which was written, in black lettering, MALE, FEMALE, YOUTH, all sewn from the same navy-blue fabric.
The shopkeeper wearily drew down a bag, squinted at me, then replaced it with another.
I wondered if she had made them herself.
“Cincuenta pesos,” she said in a bored voice.
Outside, Louise pointed to an arched doorway with a hand-painted sign beside it that read VESTIDOR.
“We’ll change in there.” The room had a smell of wet stone, a single long bench fashioned roughly out of mesquite wood.
Leaning her cane against the wall, Louise asked if I would help her.
Her legs got stiff, she explained; it was difficult to bend them.
“Yes, of course.”
“The look on your face,” Louise laughed.
I quickly lowered my gaze, uneasy, horribly curious.
I’d rarely been naked in the presence of another woman.
Even as a young girl, before she abandoned me, I had assiduously hidden myself from my mother.
Her physical immodesty repelled me, the way she would use the toilet with the door open or walk through the house naked in the morning, her untrimmed pubic hair extending toward her thighs, her hideous birthmark exposed.
“Don’t be so terrified, I already have my suit on.” She’d undone the clasp and zipper of her slacks. “Just slip them down for me so I can step out.”
I crouched beside her. Her hand gripped my shoulder tightly.
I’d reflexively turned my face away, and as I slid the pants down, my hands read an unevenness that ought to have been smooth; an inelasticity about her skin that could only be scarring, with hard, raised cords of flesh.
She stepped free, first one foot then the other.
“Thanks,” she said.
Only as I stood did I see the full extent of the damage. One leg was noticeably shorter than the other, so that her hip bones jutted from her suit at uneven heights. There obviously had been some plastic surgery to repair the skin, now a patchwork intricately crisscrossed with scars.
“One bone came through here,” said Louise, indicating a pale oval on her outer thigh several inches long.
“And here”—she gestured below her knee. “Here, here”—motioning above her hips and pelvis, which were hidden within her swimsuit, a handsome burgundy one-piece, finally gesturing to her face, the asymmetry of her nose and the bones around her eyes, the scar that rose along her jaw.
“I was cracked to bits.” What kind of accident could have wrought all of this? I opened my mouth to ask.
“It’s not something I like to speak of.”
“No, of course,” I said quickly. “I’m so sorry.”
“What the hell are you doing?” In my nervousness, I had begun to fold Louise’s pants. Flushing again hotly, I handed them to her. “Now you, slowpoke.”
“Gosh, I hope it fits.”
“Here, let me do it,” she said impatiently, removing the suit from its plastic and then smoothing it against my clothed body, cupping it against my breasts with the disinterest of a seamstress. I tried to hold her gaze and, for a moment, did, saying in a high voice:
“What do you think?”
“It’ll do.”
We set our belongings on side-by-side lounge chairs near a small tiled pool.
There seemed to be few people about. A man dozed across from us, a towel draped over his eyes.
Mist rose off the surface of the water. I dipped my feet in.
It wasn’t as hot as I had anticipated. Louise waded in ahead of me, after perhaps six steps diving in a single swift motion, her head slick as a seal when she surfaced near the mouth of a narrow tunnel.
“Aren’t you coming?”
I stroked forward tentatively, as through something slightly viscous.
On my lips, a faint salt taste; the minerals, I supposed.
Some air had trapped in my suit, making a bubble, and I reached back to release it.
In the changing room, I had turned away primly, exposing only my back to her as I hurriedly pulled it on, although it was as much to keep my eyes from dwelling on the mess of Louise’s legs.
As I neared her now, she turned to face me.
The water was over our heads, and I noticed a slight current.
I kicked in jerky motions. Louise fluttered her arms and legs, staying afloat with little effort.
The water made her more graceful than she could be on land.
In the strong sun, the scars at her jaw and hairline were nearly invisible.
“Sally,” she said a little scornfully. “No, that name doesn’t suit you at all. It’s obvious your mother didn’t know the first thing about you.”
A laugh escaped me. It was the most wonderful thing anyone could say to me.
“I’m glad you came,” she said.
“Me, too.”
A few beads of sweat clung above her lip like glass.
She seemed to me again very beautiful, as she had at the café.
For a serene moment, we continued to face one another, smiling, treading water.
Then, without warning, she turned and dipped beneath the surface, stroking ahead into the darkened tunnel, and a second later, I followed.
The tunnel was maybe thirty feet long, and hotter than the pool, its whitewashed brick ceiling dripping with condensation.
I stared fixedly ahead of me, swimming in mincing little dog strokes toward a small half circle of grayish light that seemed to hover in the darkness.
I had only come halfway when Louise dove again and I heard her surface, splashing into the opening beyond the tunnel.
A few seconds later, without warning, there was a deafening crash.
“What is that?” I called, unable to keep the panic from my voice. “Louise?”
“The chorro,” her voice echoed back, blurred within the crashing noise that continued to build, as if an immense wave were funneling toward me.
Resisting the urge to retreat, I dove for the first time, pulling myself forward until my hands described a step, another.
Rising, my body briefly heavy out of the water, I stepped through an arched doorway, then descended, wading into a round room where small holes in the domed ceiling let in beams of light, filled with steam.
Peering through them, I found the source of the noise: a thick gush of water, cascading from a two-foot-wide opening high up on the far, rounded wall.
I began to make out figures in the steam; voices.
One in particular, a man’s voice, rose above the others.
It’s Tom, I thought nonsensically, seeing him stand up and move toward me, his broad chest, the comforting solidity of his features.
It was shallower in this room. Half swimming, half springing from my toes, I fell in line behind Louise and the six or so other people who were queued along the curving wall.
There seemed to be an unspoken rule of silence.
Taking turns, bathers swam the short distance from the wall to where the chorro battered the surface.
People had their own style beneath it. A bald man rose into it from underwater, standing erect, his hands palm down and quaking slightly beneath the force.
A squat man stood facing inward with his arms crossed before his chest, letting the chorro pummel him matter-of-factly, like a wearied boxer caught against the ropes.
The oldest and seemingly frailest of the women braced her hand at the wall behind and lifted her leg.
While the water struck her thigh, she allowed a snaking breast to slip briefly from her swimsuit, before calmly replacing it with the modesty of indifference.
It was as I was watching her that I felt someone brush against my back.
I turned to discover the man I’d mistaken for Tom.
He smiled guilelessly. I tilted my head; despite my annoyance, an almost shy gesture: Can I help you?
He began speaking to me just above a whisper.
I couldn’t make any sense of the Spanish.
Yes, he said now as a question, repeating it several times, “?Sí? ?Sí?” As I stared back my incomprehension, he took hold of my wrist beneath the water with casual authority.
Even as I pulled back my wrist, I took care to keep my expression neutral—as if, though his touch disgusted me, I was unwilling to relinquish my attractiveness to him, make myself rude or brittle.
He had a look on his face—mischievous and self-satisfied—that I’d seen on Henry when reaching to take a toy that didn’t belong to him, gesturing with his chin as he said in thick English, “You come, under the chorro.” Slowly he brought a hand to my face and lifted a strand of wet hair from my cheek.
I stiffened, even as a flurry of splashes startled me from my stupor. Louise had inserted herself between us, her hands on the man’s chest. “Get away from her,” she commanded in her blunt Spanish. “Want to find out what happens to boys like you?”
I waited tensely for him to lash out at her. But he was completely chastened, his face clouding with shame. “I’m sorry, senora,” he stammered. “Please forgive me.”
“Veté,” she commanded him; go. To my amazement, he did. I watched his retreat, the heavy slap of his limbs and the brimming surface. “I see I can’t leave you alone for a second,” Louise laughed. “You’d better stick close to me from now on! Come, it’s our turn.”
We swam side by side. When we reached the chorro, we stood facing one another, me with my back to the pounding water.
The sound was too deafening to speak. With her eyes, Louise directed me to edge back.
The force was tremendous; to keep myself from toppling forward, I had to take Louise’s lifted hands, interlacing my fingers in hers, Louise leaning her weight into me, my own arms trembling slightly with the effort as, slowly, like a birth in reverse, my head was encased by warmth.
Months later, when it had become a regular thing to go to La Gruta with Louise and sometimes with Tom and the children, I watched two young lovers do it the same way.
The woman’s face was obscured by the water fluting thickly around it.
The man held his head slightly back, watching her.