Infinite Swimmer

by Socorro Venegas, translated by Toshiya Kamei

Thanos Pal

nothing, nothing can be more bitter

than the sea I carry inside, alone and blind,

the ancient Oedipus sea groping me

for all ages,

when my blood wasn’t yet mine,

when my skin grew on someone else’s skin

when someone was breathing for me as I wasn’t yet born.— Xavier Villaurrutia

The postmark told me the letter took only a week to reach me. Inside was a photo of Álvaro’s painting. On the back it read, “Come.” I stared at the image for a long time: a twilit sea with the dying sun shining on small wave crests. It wasn’t at all a typical landscape to promote tourism. In the center of the canvas, a stout tree sprouted in pitch-dark waters—as if they were contaminated.

It wasn’t just any tree. A ceiba born and grown among the waters, with tall branches soaring heavenward. A sacred symbol native to my old lover’s hometown. An island surrounded by a strange black ocean. According to ancient beliefs, the ceiba was a portal to thirteen heavens.

My fingers traced the letters beckoning me: “Come.” The caress woke something deep inside me.

I put away the photo without even planning a trip. As I languished in the eighth month of pregnancy, the same malaise ran through me every day. Two beings were brewing inside me, the child and the stranger I became. I stood in front of the mirror to scrutinize my reflection. Every month, something changed. Something became different. Something was left behind. I lived incognito in an uncertain body.

***

I met Álvaro years ago when he came to exhibit his paintings. Our affair lasted during his few days’ stay in Mexico. Afterward, we wrote to each other. I promised him I’d make a trip to his island. He assured me he’d return—we made efforts to turn the sea separating us into a retractable space, as if we could adjust its size for our benefit.

Álvaro once told me the Caribbean wasn’t the same in his village. It scared him there. I chuckled incredulously. For me, the Caribbean meant the turquoise waters of Isla Mujeres or Tulum. He insisted it wasn’t the same and glanced at me as if he knew something I didn’t.

That sea ended up lingering between us.

After the initial photo, a more palpable sample of the painting came in the mail. A piece of canvas with the ceiba bursting. From then on, every three or four days, more pieces arrived.

I began wondering why he sent these. Perhaps I’d brought it on myself: I’d beckoned my old lover. I spent my time longing to be purely one and indivisible. Freedom had that brown face and hands scented with the aroma of sea. As landscapes with palm trees crossed my mind, I recalled the smell of oil, the sound of the breaking waves. Fragments of Álvaro’s love.

My OBGYN had told me I could keep working and do my normal activities. But after a sneeze, I couldn’t hold my pee. I didn’t feel like going out.

I thought about Álvaro and his island to get away from myself, from my house, from my husband’s cheesy requests. Apparently undaunted, he endured my mood swings with the condescending smile of a husband who tolerates his pregnant wife’s temporary insanity. At night, I rolled over to my side with my back to him and hugged a long pillow which I placed between my legs. Something grew between us. A darkness. A silence.

Sometimes the swimmer in my womb made a movement like a delicate wave or a precise nudge. Then we were a larva together, waiting for the moment when my baby would break out of my body.

***

When I began locking myself in the nursery, my husband thought I was finally waking up from my lethargy. He’d already reproached me for my indifference, my lack of interest in preparing that space. I told him that the packages I received were for the nursery’s decoration and forbade him to come in. He happily promised he’d not intervene in my creative work. “Surprise us,” he said. He said “us” to refer to him and our baby, even though he knew how much it bothered me when he talked like that. They had an autonomous existence, foreign to me. They’d already pierced the walls of my uterus.

I shoved the cradle aside and piled up the baby shower presents, toys, and everything else in one corner. Sometimes my husband knocked on the door and tried to peek inside, but he was content to give me new gifts, which I put where they didn’t get in the way.

He’d say, “We’ve got our first swimsuit” or “We bought a sterilizer.” He cast his curious look. I snatched the gifts from his hands.

I began putting together Álvaro’s marine puzzle on the floor. I followed my instinct. I wasn’t interested in reproducing the painting in the photo. Instead, I wanted to create my own landscape from those black waves, barely touched by the sun. I scanned in all directions, trying to guess where the ceiba would sprout.

Piece by piece, that dark tide continued to arrive in the mail. I didn’t expect the painting to be so large. I was no longer able to guess where the shore or limit would be. I lost myself at sea, with my legs sore and swollen from my baby’s weight. All my joy was in the shady nursery, in the reflections of the ocean light climbing up the walls. I needed every corner, even the windows, for the ceiba’s arrival. The same thing happened to my baby. In the last days of the ninth month, its movements were less frequent: it ran out of space.

One afternoon when I was alone, I called the apartment super. I handed him lots of toys and clothes.

Álvaro’s shipments ceased. Nothing of the sacred tree. Maybe the thirteen skies wouldn’t open for me, but I’d built the arteries of that sea, its new, burning heart. Its sway was lulling me. I was able to alleviate my anguish of not belonging to my own body or its fruit. I dozed off in the last rays of the afternoon sun and the warm breeze that brought salty aromas.

I left the bedroom to do an online search for that exact place where a clean, dark sea was located. I needed an explanation from a marine biologist. I’d postponed the search until now, but I really wanted to know. Images of beaches with black marble benches appeared on the computer screen. That was why the water seemed contaminated. Wide waves looked tainted with oil, but they were clean. As my curiosity was sated, almost immediately I was paralyzed by an electric bite. The pain ran down my back and tortured my groin, opened a canal with a thousand daggers.

Like a tree beset by the storm, I arched my body, picking up my sap and tying my branches in a trembling embrace to contain myself.

The swimmer in my womb began kicking and breaking through with a painful need for air, for space. He fought to break the dikes that had contained him without love all these days. The source of his life was broken. He reached the end of his journey and opened a lightless portal in the middle of a marble night while liquid dripped between my thighs swirling in dark waves.

---

Socorro Venegas is a Mexican writer and editor. Her latest book is a short story collection called La memoria donde ardía (2019). She was a resident writer at The Writers Room in New York and received a fellowship from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes y del Centro Mexicano de Escritores. She has managed editorial projects for the Fondo de Cultura Económica and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Translations of her short stories have appeared in various venues, including Bodega, Compressed, and Sudden Fiction Latino.

Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His recent translations have appeared in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Samovar.