Read Online The Disappearance of Irene Dos Santos by Margaret Mascarenhas - Free Book Online Page B

swimming like a fish by the time I was three. If Efraín is going to learn at all, he needs to start now. So,
     are you coming with us or not? We’re wasting a lot of good waves.”
    “The view is better from here,” said Manolo, grinning. “Besides, no man likes to be bested by his woman in any sport.”
    “Vamos, take my hand, Efraín, we’ll go into the sea together, you and Mamá, and leave this scaredy cat to tremble on his towel
     all by himself.”
    Manolo pretended to shake in fear, then shouted, “But afterward I challenge you both to a game of football—two against one.”
     Manolo was crazy about football and had tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Efraín that football was at least as good a sport
     as swimming, if not better. Efraín giggled and took his mother’s hand. Together, they ran naked to meet the blue-green sea.
    “Let’s live on the beach, Mamá,” said Efraín afterward, his lashes crusted with salt.
    “Manolo is the boss of where we live; you’ll have to convince him about that,” said Coromoto.
    As it turned out, only a few weeks later, Efraín’s family and other Guajiro farmers were accused of supporting members of
     the revolutionary armed forces and forcefully evicted from their lands by the government. By the time he was seven, they had
     been living in a beach town near Santa Marta for two years. Coromoto and Manolo helped run a small restaurant-cum-hotel called
     Lugar Perdido, part for pay, part for room and board. Efraín had always been a happy child, but he was even happier here than
     he had been on the farm, for here he had more children of his own age to play with. Still, he longed for a brother.
    “Can I have a brother?” he asked his mother.
    “Soon, mi amor,” said Coromoto, “when we are settled in a house of our own, you will have more than one brother or sister.”
    “Yes,” said Manolo, “we will have our own football team, why not?”
    Coromoto was an exacting swimming coach, and Efraín could soon swim with a speed and strength that had her jumping up and
     down in the shallows and clapping each time he splashed his way out of the surf. Every day, after battling the waves for an
     hour, they would make their way back to the beach, where they would throw themselves on the wet sand, spent but exhilarated.
    “I’ll never be as good as you,” he said. “I’m scared of the big waves and I sometimes get swept by the undertow.”
    “Your body is still much smaller than mine, corazón. You will grow bigger and stronger,” said Coromoto. “Remember that with
     ocean swimming, respect for nature and your own natural instinct is even more important than strength. We’ll try another way.
     During high tide, we’ll start by going out into knee-deep water, then turning and facing the shore. As the waves pass by,
     I want you to jump into the white water and try to feel the wave pushing you along, without fighting it. Catching waves has
     a lot to do with being able to sense the right time to drop your body into the wave. By practicing, you train your body to
     sense the right time.”
    They had practiced for a week together before Coromoto said, “I think you have mastered the small waves. We will move out
     to waist-deep water and start again.”
    By the third week Efraín had progressed enough to swim outside the surf line, where his mother taught him to drop into waves
     by shooting out of the water like a dolphin and then, in a split second, turning his body and riding forward in the cup of
     the wave just before it broke.
    When Efraín was eight, Manolo said to Coromoto, “Don’t you think he’s spending too much time splashing about in the ocean
     and less time doing something productive, like helping us peel the potatoes for the mondongo?
    “Escúchame bien, amor,” said Coromoto in her truth-is-on-my-side voice. “Learning how to swim is practice for learning how
     to live. Efraín is confident that no matter where he is, in a backyard pool, in