I wrote this piece originally in English and then I translated it into Italian to have it published on Carmilla. It is a very short essay on one of my favorite stories of all times. I did make some personal hints on the author's psyche so before I ventured publishing it I got in touch with the author's son to ask if he was ok with that: he graciously granted me his go-ahead. "The swimmer" is available online here.
John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”: a man past the shadow line.
A wealthy and self assured man just past his midlife, still bearing “the especial slenderness of youth”. He’s at some friends’ house, by their pool, a midsummer day. All the guests are lazily enjoying the mature part of the day, busy with their respective headaches; they all had too much too drink the day before, no-one able to socialize more than this comment with their sleepy skins exposed. But Ned, he’s a man with an “inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools”, and he has a “vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure”. So he steps up from the pool curb with an idea: he shall swim all the way home. His house lies eight miles south. In the suburban area where he lives, he can be “taking a dogleg” and reach his home by water, swimming across all the pools he finds along his path: 15 private pools and a public one to create his “contribution to modern geography”. He knows each of them, recalls the owners’ names one by one like a mosaic, a “string of swimming pools”. He will “name the stream Lucinda after his wife” even though she is not reacting when he tells her he’s going to swim home.