William Charles Anthony Frerichs, Ice Skating (1869), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
In Stockholm it didn’t snow on Christmas or New Year’s Eve or at the beginning of January. The days were gray and, in the afternoon, just before it got completely dark, there was often a dank glow that turned the sky brown.
That December, we bought some cheap skates and went one night—in midwinter it’s most accurate to use the term one night even when describing something done during the day—to skate in Vasaparken, where they flood the grass pitches with water, turning them into a huge floodlit rink that never closes. I’d skated only a couple of times in my life and so many years ago that I’d lost any muscle memory my body might have had.
It was my first winter in Sweden. Before leaving the house, I watched some YouTube videos that explained the theory of ice skating. I enjoy tutorial videos. They’re a genre in their own right, the perfect fusion of two words with the same root: genre and generosity. People from all over the world teaching you how to change blinds, recover objects lost in washing machines, make a hem, or repair scratches on the kitchen counter. In spite of the evident goodwill of the people uploading the videos, it’s obvious that some tutorials are more useful than others. No one there can teach you how to skate.
I also watched a video showing how to ride a bicycle, which might sound utterly useless but was very moving: they filmed an adult woman who’d never learned to ride a bicycle and who, by the end of the video, was able to go a few feet on her own without any help. The happiness on her face as she rolled along reminded me of a moment in Michitaro Tada’s Karada, where the author recalls his baby standing up on her own for the first time. Tada writes that he never again saw an expression of such complete happiness as that of his daughter at that moment. Standing and walking on your own! Two of the most difficult things we ever have to do in our lives. We learn the trickiest, most embarrassing tasks in our early years, which is probably why we don’t remember doing so.
When I first stood on the ice in my skates, I had no stability. Your deepest urge is to keep both feet in contact with the surface, but to move forward on skates you have to do precisely the opposite. Vasaparken doesn’t have any walls or railings to cling on to. As soon as I was out on the ice, I was alone, stranded in a void. I hadn’t felt physical fear like that in a long time, the fear of doing something that my body didn’t know how to react to. But scared as I was, I can’t say that it was an unpleasant experience.
People skated past me quickly, enjoying the sensation of gliding along. One guy had a speaker in his backpack and was skating to reggaeton and vals. I thought that seeing all these people so obviously more skilled than me would make me feel bad, but to my surprise, I had the opposite reaction: as I saw them glide over the ice in long thrusts, I had the pleasant sensation that we were members of the same species. Anything they could do, I could do too. Of course, they’d been doing it for years. It was the same with language: if I’d been born in Sweden, I would be able to speak Swedish perfectly. What had happened to my infant body, which had come equipped for any potential human scenario?
I circled the rink a few times, and felt an entirely new sensation. As I clumsily made my way along, I suddenly felt roasting hot, while my heavy winter clothing felt as though it had been soaked in ice-cold water. This must be what cold sweat means, I thought.
***
Later, in January, it snowed and snowed and I was able to distinguish between three different kinds of snow, although I had no idea whether they had different names or were simply the same phenomenon happening at different intensities.
The seagulls and crows that flew over the city in the summer and autumn had disappeared. The only birds you see in winter are magpies; I saw two from the window, flying over the same roof. It’s commonly held that they steal shiny objects to take to their nests and although this has never been proved, I did once see a magpie with a pull tab in its beak.
They’re pretty, each with a streak of blue feathers on its back, and when they fly high they close their wings for a few seconds and look like twigs flying through the sky.
***
Three weeks after my first attempt at Vasaparken, we went to skate on a frozen lake for the first time, Rönningesjön, in the northwest of the city. We took the 11:06 A.M. train from Östra Station, right by the entrance to the university campus.
From the railway you can see fields, trees, and dry plains covered in frost, and every now and again a huddle of small houses made of red and yellow wood with white roofs whose gardens are as bare as the branches of the birch trees. Who could imagine that these are the same fields that explode with life in summer? Winter gives us a lesson in humility. It forces us to believe in the existence of things we can’t see.
A friend had bought some wooden stakes tied to a string with a plastic whistle that you wear around your neck. If you fall into the water, you stick the stakes into the ice to pull yourself out before blowing on the whistle to call for help. I heard that if you fall in the water and get disoriented under the ice, you shouldn’t swim toward the light but where you see a dark dot. That dot is the hole. The mere idea brought back the cold sweats.
The surface of the lake was smooth and completely firm, which made me feel safer. Underneath the thick layer of ice, everything was black: the water. For the first hour, I skated very slowly, sweating profusely. I fell three times and once, smacked my hand and the small of my back. I’d taken the precaution of keeping my backpack on to protect my head if I fell backward. The problem was learning to get back up.
A couple of hours later our Russian friends arrived. To my eyes, they looked like Olympic champions. They could even skate backward. Her skates were black and sculpted like ballerina shoes, not like mine, which were clunky and had plastic strips. As she skated next to me, however, I felt something change. We chatted as we went along, admiring the landscape and sunlight. It was two in the afternoon. A fine, cotton candy–like mist began to fall over everything, but the skies remained clear, blue turning to orange. We were immersed in the silence of the forest. It was all deeply beautiful.
I started to push harder and go faster, and little by little I began to lift my feet. The conversation distracted me from my body and, it seemed, my fear. I had assumed that I’d skate better alone, free of the gazes of others, but that wasn’t true: I got better when I was with other people, when I stopped paying attention to my legs and just chatted, letting my body do its thing.
***
It is February and the light is changing. In truth, it’s been changing for months, it’s always in flux, but recently it’s become more perceptible, to me at least. Last week I said that spring was around the corner and Fede laughed. It’s still just as cold, the temperatures are between -13 and -5 degrees Celsius and it has snowed almost every day in February. But the light is different and that’s enough for you to start thinking about the end of winter.
When it gets very cold, the snow glows at night. The flakes look like crystal and continue to sparkle even when you scoop them up in your glove. It’s a magical effect I’d never seen before and I suspect that it only occurs when the temperature is a long way below zero. Gabriel, our Mexican friend, calls it la nieve del pinche frio (the snow you get when it’s cold as a motherfucker).
We went to skate again on another frozen lake, this time in Hellasgården, to the south of the city. Along the path from the bus stop to the shore, patches of the lake were visible, surrounded by a forest of white birches. In winter, everything becomes achromatic.
As I got closer to the ice and the dock swimmers jump off in summer, which now served as a bench for people to strap on their skates, I felt my heart begin to beat harder and my abdomen and torso were soon drenched. I went out onto the lake hesitantly, but I didn’t fall. The first steps—or, rather, slides—are always clumsy, it’s not easy to get used to that strange friction under your feet. But after a few minutes on the ice, my feet were no longer so reluctant to lift from the floor. Fede was standing a few feet ahead with his arms open the way parents do when their children are learning to walk. I slid over to him and hugged him. It’s a wonderful sensation to feel that one has learned a new physical skill thirty years on from the last. Skating! Something I never thought I’d know how to do or enjoy. Next to us was a father teaching his four- or five-year-old son to skate. The man was about forty-five, the attractive Scandinavian type with grey hair—like the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård, whom Swedish writers hate. The boy was in one of those padded one-piece snowsuits that make children look like tiny factory workers. He was wearing new skates and kept falling down even though his father had him by the hand. The father moved on a few feet, showing him how to do it, with his hands behind his back and legs bent. The boy was still on the ice. He made progress slowly and with difficulty, but it was obvious that after a couple of sessions he would be moving along much more gracefully than me. I passed by in my slightly clumsy way and the boy stared at me. I was an oddity, an adult who didn’t know how to do what his parents did.
Of all the colors a winter sky can turn, the most beautiful is blue and the most awful is yellow.
Another attempt: this time on a lake in Farsta, to the south. The circumference of the lake made for a long circuit, more than twelve miles, and because everyone else skated faster and better than me I was often left behind, making my way as best I could against a tricky headwind that day. At one point, I stopped for a few seconds to admire the beauty of the landscape around me. I was filled with gratitude at the opportunity to see the forests and frozen lakes. My face stung from the cold and amid my aesthetic rapture, I lost my balance and fell to my knees on the ice. In that moment, I understood that humility and humiliation have their physical place in the metaphorical workings of the body, and that place is the knees. The knees, which bear the weight of the rest of the body when one falls to their defeat.
I was left so far behind and got so tired that I had to take off my skates and put on the boots I had in my backpack to walk back along the path to the side of the lake, stepping carefully where snow had gathered.
***
The light is really beginning to change now, it’s much more obvious in March than February. The days must be as long as they are in November, but the sensation is different, because we’re coming out of darkness. It’s a matter of intensity, like music. There’s still daylight at three in the afternoon and that seems incredible. The worst part is when the snow melts. In subzero temperatures dirty snow is very similar to wet sand; it has the same consistency and color. Now, the temperature has risen by a few degrees and all the streets are wet. One’s shoes get covered in mud and the grit they spread on the sidewalks so people won’t slip. In Sweden almost everyone has dirty shoes. Even if you live in the center, at some point you have to cross a park, patch of mud, or snowdrift. Swedes used to clean their shoes at the door with birch branches. Now everyone takes their shoes off before going into a house. And people prefer sneakers or boots with thick soles even when they’re dressed up or headed out to work. An Italian woman I met once said, “Swedes dress very well but they’re let down by their shoes.” Swedish women prioritize comfort. You see lots of well-dressed women in the city wearing elegant clothing combined with comfortable sneakers or tennis shoes. Once, in a restaurant, I saw a woman arrive in clunky boots covered in snow and replace them with a pair of doll’s shoes she had in her handbag. The skating rinks start to close at the end of winter—another reason why March can be a melancholy month. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to practice my new motor skills again until next year. I wondered whether my body would remember any of it the next time I strapped on my skates, whether my feet would know how to move. Or whether the cold sweats would return, and it would be like the seasonal skills I tried to learn when I was a girl, playing cards in summer, knitting in winter. They were rival crafts that fought for the same space in my brain: when one took precedence, I forgot the other.
I think that the peaks of winter and summer—although they seem convincingly endless in their splendor and apparent solidity—keep the sadness of the ephemeral in their hearts. Their solidity is just an illusion. Right now, I’m not longing for summer but the real winter, which is coming to an end.
The sound of running water is everywhere: all the snow and ice is running down the drains and gutters into the sewers. Everything drips. The spell is broken. For the first time in a long time, I hear the sound of rain.
Translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude.
