Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith Page A

could not tell its direction—or see its lights, if it had any—but he decided it was on his left, away from Venice, and he bent his efforts in that direction. His progress could not have been called swimming. It was a series of jerks of legs and body and arms, and these he made with caution, not wanting to exhaust himself. He was a fair swimmer, only fair, and clothed and in icy water he was a rotten swimmer. He realized, very profoundly, that he was probably not going to make it.
    “Help!” he yelled. Then, “Aiuto!” wasting valuable breath. The bell sounded closer, but his strength was going faster than the bell was coming. Ray rested, anxious about cramp. He felt it in his left calf, but he could still move the leg. Then he saw the buoy, a light grey blob, closer than he had dared hope. It had no light. The wind was blowing the sound away from him, and Ray hoped blowing the water towards the buoy. Now Ray stayed afloat, and tried only to steer himself, progressing by inches.
    The buoy rose like a smooth teardrop that had half fallen into the water. He saw no handhold, and the top—a mess of bars enclosing the bell—was too high out of the water to be leapt for. Ray touched the buoy with his finger-tips, at last felt its fat, slippery body with the palm of one hand. It took energy to cling to it, arms outspread, but it was immensely encouraging to his morale to have reached it. It warns ships away from it, Ray thought, and found a macabre amusement in that fact. He groped hopefully with his feet for some kind of hold, and didn’t find any. The water was at his neck. The metal bars were twelve inches above his finger-tips when he reached for them. With one hand—the other pressed gently against the inward sloping buoy—he loosened his tie, removed it, and tried to fling one end of it across a bar. The bars were nearly vertical, but bowed out slightly. He tried from a direction in which the wind would help him. On the fourth or fifth try, one end of the tie went through, and Ray jiggled it patiently. When the two ends were even, he leapt for it, and it held. Cautiously, he put his weight on it, letting himself be borne as much as possible by the water, then grabbed for the metal bar and missed, released the tie so as not to break it, and went under. He struggled up, waited for a few seconds, to recover his breath, then tried again. Using knees against the buoy and careful tugs on the tie, he lunged again for the bar and this time caught it. He half knelt against the buoy and locked both arms around the bar.
    Now, he supposed, it would be a test of muscular strength, a test of how long he could stand the cold before fainting or freezing or falling asleep or whatever people did, but at least he was out of the water, and he was also in a better position to see a ship.
    He saw one, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, a boat that looked like a cargo barge with a motor at its stem.
    “Aiuto!” Ray shouted. “ Soccorso!—Soccorso! ”
    The boat did not change its course.
    He yelled again. But it was evident whoever was aboard did not hear him.
    It was a disappointment to Ray, because he felt that this was the only boat destined to pass him. He also had a strange feeling that he did not very much care, not as much as he would have cared five minutes ago, when he had been in the water. But he supposed that now he was just as much in danger of dying. The idea of removing his trench-coat and somehow tying himself with it to the metal bars was too complicated to consider. But the barge’s oblivious progress away from him seemed a blatant rejection, a shameless (because there was no need for the barge to have shame) denial of his right to live. For several seconds, he felt drowsy, bowed his head against the wind, but set his arms hard to hold himself. The ache of cold in his ears grew worse, the bell’s clangour fainter to him.
    Ray lifted his head and looked around again, saw what he thought was a bobbing light far away