The great promise of other people's pools
BarcelonaIt is said that the painter David Hockney's obsession with swimming pools began when, on a flight from London to Los Angeles, he was surprised by the number of blue spots breaking up the greyness of the city. The Californian sun hit the water patches, which shimmered upwards. That blue and shiny beauty fascinated him, but it also led him to think about his country. In the sixties, in England, having a private swimming pool was a great luxury. In the star city of California, it seemed like a normal thing. Swimming pools presented themselves to him as clear evidence of the American dream. A socioeconomic indicator, but also a promise of the freedom and enjoyment that he, as a homosexual person, had not found in the country where he was born.
Hockney left us last week, but his swimming pools have been forever imprinted in some iconic corner of our minds. The most famous is A bigger splash (1967), the mythical pop art canvas that depicts a house, a palm tree, a swimming pool, and a diving board with very straight lines, and in the middle of the scene, splash!, the spray made by someone diving into the water. Often, people appear in the Briton's paintings, but this is not the case, and this is part of the work's success: everything is so still and so deserted that the mystery of the spray that occupies the middle of the painting makes everything possible. What must have happened, just before the drops disturbed the peace of the painting? And just after? Who is under the water? And above all, what dreams does he have?
The artist's death made me rummage through my home bookshelf in search of a story I read a few years ago: The Swimmer
, by John Cheever, translated by Esther Tallada. It was easy to find because it is a small volume, with a spine half yellow and half blue. It is one of Cal Carré's editions with quality and, it seems to me, a sense of humor. They are short stories, perfect for carrying around and reading on public transport, at any brief moment of waiting, or, of course, by the pool, "on one of those mid-summer Sundays when everyone is lounging around in their chairs saying: 'I drank too much last night.'" This is the first sentence of the story that now, more than ever, seems to me a very plausible continuation of Hockney's painting.
The other side of the American dream
The Swimmer explains the adventure of an American father who decides to swim across the county. The protagonist jumps from pool to pool and, thus, through the description of his neighborhood, portrays Yankee society. Judging by the ability to cross an entire territory through private water perimeters, we quickly arrive at the same socioeconomic conclusions that David Hockney reached. However, the charm of Cheever's book is that it shows us the flip side of the American dream. In the book, seemingly innocuous descriptions and conversations end up becoming ominous and suffocating. In reality, the writer and the painter use the same strategy: to portray situations that seem superficial, but are not. If Hockney shows us the American promise, Cheever tells us about its downfall. And in fact, once we have read the story, we would advise the person in the painting never to get out of the water.
Joan Vinyoli has a poem called Pool —included in Vent d'aram (1976)—, which proposes a better ending to Hockney: “Not every morning, / not even on Sunday, / can we open ourselves to life, / know all at once that it is not just / frustration, work, but a slippery springboard / from which, erect, the body jumps and falls / into the oblong pool / from which it seems it can never emerge. / It emerges, however, smiling, / dripping, luminous, / and abandons itself to sunbathing”. Always so sexual, Vinyoli; I truly think the British painter would like it.
As for Hockney's painting, I find it amusing to think that perhaps under that splash there is no person, but some different animal, like a dog. But perhaps it's just that I'm an inland Catalan and that in the garden I've trodden the most in my life, which is my grandparents', there is a mimosa that only blooms once a year, a single and wonderful time, and the rest of the time it rests skeletal; a dark plum tree, blood-red in color, and a dry pond of irregular stones that was once covered with a floor full of moss (i.e., highly slippery) on which only orange fish could swim. Perhaps Hockney would have also been affected by these rather thick tones, with their particular sparks of color. What I do know is that, sometimes, a personal dream saves you from many slips in other people's pools.
