As soon as we arrived at the diving spot, they all leaped into the water equipped with nothing but goggles, fins, a kaigane for scraping mollusks from the rocks, and a basket to collect the quarry, which also served as a buoy to help them rest between dives. The fastest way for the divers to reach the bottom is to carry iron or stones, and to return to the surface they tug twice on a cord tied to their waists like a lifeline, and the ship’s captain, the only man on the expedition, pulls them up to facilitate their ascension.
I watched from the boat how the divers went up and down, grabbing on to a single basket, throwing their catch into it while preparing to go back down. Between dives they would make a noise when they breathed that was so beautiful, it alone was worth all the sacrifice to be there. They breathed in a special way in order to fill their lungs with more air, which produced a kind of whistle. To hear one of them is remarkable. But to hear three or four at the same time is astounding, because each one emits a different tone in their whistling. I counted Tokumi’s dives between one whistle and another, and tallied up to forty, which was more than she had done in the morning.
Those sounds, the sounds of a body submerging itself every few minutes, the smell and taste of green tea that spilled from the pot the captain would refill whenever it was empty, and the slight bobbing of the boat brought pleasure to four of the senses: sight, sound, smell, and taste. Each one of these networks had been activated, except for the sense of touch. And yet I didn’t need to touch a thing or be touched by anybody in order to feel sexually aroused after such a long time. I felt excited and attracted to the cluster of women or, more precisely, to the women who were in the water at that precise moment. So I got up, grabbed a pair of goggles that had been left in the boat, undressed, and jumped into the sea. The captain said something, but I didn’t understand and he didn’t get in my way. The water was a lot colder than I had expected. I started swimming away from where the divers were in order to warm up, trying not to disrupt them at work. Once I got used to the water, I returned to where the group was and looked for Tokumi. Seeing all those nude women swimming about with fins seemed like the utmost freedom within the enslavement that is work. Natural bodies, each one in its own shape, not being hidden but not flaunted either, in a group where nobody lorded over anyone else, each one restricted by nothing more than the capacity of their lungs. It was the freedom that excited me. I knew the importance of being able to take off one’s clothes without fearing reprisals. If only I could become like one of those women, I think now, after all the identity that was denied me, the operations that were never completely successful; if someone were to give me a normal body, my body, I would look for an occupation that allowed me to be naked most of the time. I’d show up at the bank to receive your life insurance payout, naked. Did you ever notice how dull and gloomy the employees are at our bank branch? All that time counting money they can’t spend mustn’t be very good for them. I would waltz in bare naked and make myself a tanga with those dollar bills right on the spot; oh, so sorry, I mean a clitanga. Clitanga… Oh, look at that, I didn’t mean to say the name of an animal. Everyone would be staring at me by then. “What’re you all looking at?” I’d say. “Has nobody ever seen a clitanga before? Clitangas are pets from the Pacific regions; they feed off small crustaceans.”
My fake breasts didn’t change shape when I submerged myself in the water. The other women’s breasts lifted, were ductile, as alive as any other marine creature. I didn’t want to break the group up, creeping like spiders along the marine floor with their knives, so I decided to take advantage of the day to do my own set of immersions.
By the length of the cables I gauged that the amas were working at around sixty feet, but one group was busy in a basin just a little farther down whose intense color of blue, a blue verging on black, gave a sense of increased depth. I positioned myself where the surface coincided with the opening of the basin and began to descend, a few feet more with every new immersion. When I would surface and breathe, I’d grab on to the boat for a few minutes and then dive again. Fully relaxed, I crossed beyond the level where the group of amas worked and lost myself in that black hole. I wasn’t sure exactly how many feet down I was reaching, but for at least half of the descent I didn’t need to move in order to fall, since the body starts falling on its own as the depth increases. The effect triggers at fifty to sixty-five feet, so back at the surface, when I could think clearly, I calculated the depth of my dive at somewhere in the area of 115 feet. This was unquestionably too much for me, especially since I didn’t have a spotter, but the call of the depths, which had always enthralled me, was powerful and I felt compelled to dive again, to gain if only a few more feet with each plunge. The pressure squeezed my lungs, and my body, free of breathing, was so receptive that I felt a sense of the whole in each of the parts; in my fingertips, in my belly button, in my throat. I was alive again. My heart put distance between one beat and another, and allowed me to slip into that space where you hear the pulse descend like an echo saying goodbye, growing weaker and weaker. The sound of a heart in repose. Silence, I told myself, don’t think, your heart is at rest. The last echoes were almost inaudible, but I remained motionless several feet down because I know that before the echo gets lost completely, the human angel would appear, warning me that it was time to surface. Usually I could feel it tickle softly the nape of my neck, the breath of life that called me back upward. But for some reason the angel didn’t show up that time or I didn’t hear it. The lack of oxygen and the pleasure of it lured me into that most dangerous state: the feeling that I could live without air. And so I fell into the abyss, with a pleasurable feeling of immense serenity.
I felt warmth in my skin and a hot liquid in my mouth. I opened my eyes to see Tokumi’s face. She was holding my head to raise me up and give me some tea to drink. I understood. I had passed out while diving. But that’s not all. Before passing out, I must surely have experienced what divers know as the narcosis of the deep, they said. I forgot to surface because I was experiencing the kind of euphoria certain narcotics produce, which occurs when nitrogen is exposed to high pressures. I told the amas exactly what had happened, how at first I felt a sort of happiness that made me think I didn’t need air anymore, I belonged there now, in that aquatic environment. So I just continued diving, not even considering surfacing, completely oblivious to the state I was in.
The next thing I remember was seeing, as I was falling to the bottom of the basin, all of them, the amas, around me. At first I thought it was so strange, but as is true when you are under the influence of certain drugs, you don’t question what you are seeing. In the space of a minute’s time I lived in a much vaster world, like in a dream. At one point I saw my new companions looking at me with expressions of wonder through the glass of their goggles. They opened their eyes, as if trying to say there was some sort of danger behind me. So I looked around and saw a huge whale vagina. It was astonishingly beautiful, so much more than human ones, a slightly paler shade of pink, and more slippery in texture, like fresh ice. I wanted to gesture to the amas so they could observe it with me, but they were unperturbed, floating like creatures from this underwater world daunted by nothing but the danger I was in. I stared at the vagina, which was like a huge heart beating as it engorged; she’s in heat, I thought, and when I looked back at the amas, it was me this time who had to alert them with my eyes and point with my finger for them to look behind them. A male, about a hundred meters away, was speeding toward the female just behind me. The amas darted, disappeared, and I had to swim with every ounce of strength from my position between the male and the female so as not to be crushed in the heat of those two cetacean bellies. When I finished telling my story, still caught in the emotion of the scene, it was hard to accept that it hadn’t really happened. It’s true that hallucinations happen rather often at certain depths and under certain conditions. It’s also true that I’d once heard Jacques Mayol mention this same danger of being flattened by the desire of two cetaceans. Still to this day, Jim, I’m not entirely sure that it didn’t actually happen, and that the amas, in order to protect the world that is their birthright, chose to keep it hidden from me.