From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Saltando
This work features Leif and Katita. It is collected in Pastoral Scanlines.
"Saltando" is a prose work by C. W. Smith, collected in Pastoral Scanlines.
The work features Leif and Katita as principal characters. Leif walks a beach barefoot and recognizes Katita—a woman he had encountered at a street fair where he played piano. Katita invites him to the baths. At a boulder, Leif falls. Katita descends underwater to embrace him: "her body a mass of bubbles." The moment accumulates toward intimacy through accident and rescue. "Katita, she introduced herself after."
"Saltando" is one of several instances in which Leif and Katita appear in Smith's wider oeuvre, functioning as what the author terms "instruments of return." The baths setting recurs in Smith's work, including in Antinomicity and Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters, where water functions as a threshold of transformation and encounter. While distinct from the fragmented narrative of the embedded Beach Surgery outline, "Saltando" engages the same character-presences and uses similar motifs—immersion, recognition, the meeting of two bodies in a singular moment—to map the pair's character-world as one of tenderness and physical presence.
The work is typically read in relation to Summer Endzone, Leaving/Leading, and A Billiard Table with Five Balls and Twelve Cues—companion pieces in Pastoral Scanlines—as part of Smith's sustained meditation on Leif and Katita as a transmigrating pair across his oeuvre.