clean. It had a Citroën-green tinge, and the surface of the water and bottom of the pool were covered with leaves that had fallen from the trees. Getting the leaves off the surface was easy. There was a net with a long handle specially designed for the purpose. The leaves on the bottom of the pool were a different matter; they had rotted into a slimy gloop we had to walk on.
As soon as we arrived, I asked papá if I could go for a swim. Papá, obviously, glanced at mamá. She made a disgusted face. What the swimming pool contained was not water, but something like a soup of bacteria, microorganisms and decomposing vegetation. But that afternoon, the April sun was still beating down and mamá owed me one because of the whole Bertuccio thing.
I didnât have a swimsuit with me, but I dived in anyway â in my underpants. The water was cold and slightly soupy. When I tried to stand on the bottom, my feet slithered around as though the bottom was covered in cream. It was better to keep swimming, even if all I could do was doggy paddle.
I had never really been interested in style. Most boys learn the front crawl so they can race, or they learn something showy like thebutterfly so that they can splash people on the side of the pool. But what I liked best was staying underwater. Iâd hang on to the bottom of the ladder and exhale all the air in my lungs, bubble by bubble, until there was nothing left and then lie on the bottom with my tummy pressed against the tiles for a few seconds before shooting back to the surface for air.
The things my mother thought were disgusting about the pool were exactly the things that most fascinated me. The green tinge, the shifting rays of light, made it easy to pretend that I was at the bottom of the ocean. The leaves and the branches suspended in the water gave a sense of depth to my underwater adventure, the long-legged insects diving like me but with more grace. There were curious formations all along the waterline, countless clusters of tiny translucent eggs. And the dark slime at the bottom â a mixture of moss and decaying leaves â added to the feeling of being at the bottom of the sea.
People say that being underwater stirs memories of the place where we were conceived and spent our first nine months. Being surrounded by water rekindles sensations we first felt in our mothersâ wombs: the weightlessness, the languid, muted sounds. Iâm not about to argue with this reasoning, but I prefer to believe that the pleasure of being underwater has another explanation, less Freudian and more in keeping with the history of our species.
When, at the dawn of life, our ancestors left their aquatic environment, they took the water with them. The human womb replicates the water, the weightlessness, the salinity of our erstwhile ocean habitat. The concentration of salt in the blood and in bodily fluids is the same as that in the oceans. We abandoned the sea some 400 million years ago (by my chronology), but the sea has never abandoned us. It lives on in us in our blood, our sweat, our tears.
21
THE MYSTERIOUS HOUSE
When he said the house was âmysteriousâ, papá set my imagination racing. I had imagined a dark, dank, two-storey English manor house, walls shrouded in thick ivy, hiding thousands of longlegged spiders. I imagined looking up as we arrived and noticing a boarded-up window high up near the chimney stack â a secret room that no staircase in the house led to. I imagined a neighbour nodding sagely and confessing that the window was a mystery, then asking ominously if I had heard what had happened to the previous tenants, a strange family â¦
The actual house was very different. It was a simple, low-rise square box with a tarred roof. It looked more like a compromise with reality than with architecture. The walls had been whitewashed, though the job looked half-finished.
I wandered into the house half-naked, wrapped in a huge towel with
As soon as we arrived, I asked papá if I could go for a swim. Papá, obviously, glanced at mamá. She made a disgusted face. What the swimming pool contained was not water, but something like a soup of bacteria, microorganisms and decomposing vegetation. But that afternoon, the April sun was still beating down and mamá owed me one because of the whole Bertuccio thing.
I didnât have a swimsuit with me, but I dived in anyway â in my underpants. The water was cold and slightly soupy. When I tried to stand on the bottom, my feet slithered around as though the bottom was covered in cream. It was better to keep swimming, even if all I could do was doggy paddle.
I had never really been interested in style. Most boys learn the front crawl so they can race, or they learn something showy like thebutterfly so that they can splash people on the side of the pool. But what I liked best was staying underwater. Iâd hang on to the bottom of the ladder and exhale all the air in my lungs, bubble by bubble, until there was nothing left and then lie on the bottom with my tummy pressed against the tiles for a few seconds before shooting back to the surface for air.
The things my mother thought were disgusting about the pool were exactly the things that most fascinated me. The green tinge, the shifting rays of light, made it easy to pretend that I was at the bottom of the ocean. The leaves and the branches suspended in the water gave a sense of depth to my underwater adventure, the long-legged insects diving like me but with more grace. There were curious formations all along the waterline, countless clusters of tiny translucent eggs. And the dark slime at the bottom â a mixture of moss and decaying leaves â added to the feeling of being at the bottom of the sea.
People say that being underwater stirs memories of the place where we were conceived and spent our first nine months. Being surrounded by water rekindles sensations we first felt in our mothersâ wombs: the weightlessness, the languid, muted sounds. Iâm not about to argue with this reasoning, but I prefer to believe that the pleasure of being underwater has another explanation, less Freudian and more in keeping with the history of our species.
When, at the dawn of life, our ancestors left their aquatic environment, they took the water with them. The human womb replicates the water, the weightlessness, the salinity of our erstwhile ocean habitat. The concentration of salt in the blood and in bodily fluids is the same as that in the oceans. We abandoned the sea some 400 million years ago (by my chronology), but the sea has never abandoned us. It lives on in us in our blood, our sweat, our tears.
21
THE MYSTERIOUS HOUSE
When he said the house was âmysteriousâ, papá set my imagination racing. I had imagined a dark, dank, two-storey English manor house, walls shrouded in thick ivy, hiding thousands of longlegged spiders. I imagined looking up as we arrived and noticing a boarded-up window high up near the chimney stack â a secret room that no staircase in the house led to. I imagined a neighbour nodding sagely and confessing that the window was a mystery, then asking ominously if I had heard what had happened to the previous tenants, a strange family â¦
The actual house was very different. It was a simple, low-rise square box with a tarred roof. It looked more like a compromise with reality than with architecture. The walls had been whitewashed, though the job looked half-finished.
I wandered into the house half-naked, wrapped in a huge towel with
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