Before the July of your tenth birthday, we spent all our summers by the pool, at the private country club my parents and yours belonged to. Above us the gliders flew silently, carried by wind.
My dad had explained that gliders took off tied to a regular airplane and that later, at the perfect height, they separated themselves from the cable and flew alone in the wind. The runway must have been far from the pool because we never heard a sound. What you and I saw – lying on the boiling tiles, eyes squinting against the sun – were gigantic iron birds that crossed our slot of sky. They passed in silence, defying the world’s laws which dictate that anything heavier than air must inevitably fall to the ground. But not them, they were in the wind. And we asked ourselves, remember, where they went after they had left their shadows on our eyelashes.
You and I had fun with small things, but at the time they didn’t feel like small things: ants lined up carrying the crumbs of our lunch, wasps wriggling in the puddles, the waitresses and their short white dresses, the way they balanced our parents’ colored drinks on trays. Because of the chlorine my hair first turned platinum blonde, then greenish, almost transparent, and I started to feel like a mermaid. Your hair, curly and dark, brightened with auburn streaks, your features sharpened as summer went by, and I couldn’t help but spy on you when you weren’t looking. We played in the water during those long summer afternoons, you and I, competing to see who could stay under the longest without coming up for air, swirling and turning and improvising handstands, our little society of two within the exclusive society of the club.
When some other kid wanted to participate in our games, we welcomed him by word only. From our distracted families, always on their phones, and from the private schools we had learned that we didn’t need much, I needed you and you needed me, and it felt like no small thing. So, when another kid asked to play with us, we made up the most peculiar and dull games: you made me laugh until my belly twisted and hurt when you proposed to kick the gravel on the path that led to the restaurant, you created a big cloud of dust and ran through it with your arms open, eyes shut. I claimed my favorite activity was braiding flower bracelets and getting my fingers sticky with resin until my hand was glued up, and the intruder was out of the game in an afternoon, leaving us to our secret understanding.
You and I, champions of that pool for years, and between us we didn’t add up many years. The adults had started to call us the merfolk, people of the water, because that was where we belonged. But the little girl turned us into minor characters, mere extras, and took those summers away from us. And took you away from me, you who I never saw again after that 10th of July. Your mother felt sick when she first saw the girl and had decided to banish the afternoons at the club. My parents got scared too, but they were good friends of the president and of his wife, so they maintained appearances for a couple of times more – out of kindness – but gradually drew back from the club, and I never got to go back.
«When one dies, one goes up in the skies» you told me once. You had heard it at school, when one of your classmates lost his grandmother, but we both couldn’t grasp what it meant. We thought, remember, that if we stayed long enough underwater, holding our breaths, we would fly up in the wind.
We had spent afternoons looking in each other’s eyes as we floated without weight and far from the muffled noises of people – women in white bikinis, men with sunglasses shaped as water drops – people lying around the pool. We felt beyond the world’s laws – from gravity, sound, from our parents’ drinks that were more and more colored at every round – compressed in the liquid body that surrounded us. At night, we went to sleep with our breath short and our eyes red and stinging with chlorine, but we went to sleep knowing we would try again the next day.
That 10th of July before your tenth birthday a girl reached our goal: she fell in the water and never came back to the surface. She fell convinced, and you and I, lying on the boiling tiles to catch our breath, we watched her fall. We watched her with admiration, remember. We were experienced swimmers from the beginning of the world: our mothers had both given birth in the water, as the craze demanded. But I did not move, I left my back and my bony legs adhering to the hot stone, the water around my silhouette evaporating imperceptibly. I did not move because I wanted to watch, I wanted a concrete proof that she would fly to the sky like the glider that in that precise moment threw a silent shadow on the pool. I don’t know why you didn’t move; maybe you blindly believed in our game, maybe you thought you were dreaming, maybe you realized that the next day you would turn ten, and that ten years old feel too small a thing to save a little girl, but they aren’t.
She was in the water, she was in the wind, nobody’s daughter. And as I watched her float, passive, carried against the world’s laws that make our lungs work only on wind – not on water – I wished we were in the wind, we were in the water, nobody’s son and nobody’s daughter, as gliders.