Olympia

by Dennis Bock

  They told us their plans the same day we walked them down the path lined on both sides with chamomile and purple mint flowers and jara, the green sticky plant that grows everywhere in the Madrid sierra, and stood at the edge of El Atazar, a natural limestone and granite valley dammed up at the far end by an enormous cement retaining wall. It was burning hot that day. A rolling slow breeze came up from the south, damp and tired, and mottled the reflection of the sky on the glassy surface of the water. The old man I’d come to know since my first dive was down there, fishing off the junk raft Nuria and I sometimes borrowed and used as a diving platform. Two large pontoons, the old rotting planks lashed together with wire and twine and strips of clear and blue polyurethane plastic. I passed Nuria the bottle of water I’d brought from the car.

  Overlooking the reservoir, we explained the history of the Madrid waterworks to my parents. Nuria told them about the oldest dam in the province, an earth fill irrigation dam on the Aulencia river called La Granjilla, built in 1560. Some you could hardly pick out of the landscape, they were so old and grown over, she said; and they were still building them. There were already more than a thousand dams in all of Spain, flooding over 2,800 square kilometres. Hundreds were built under Franco alone. After the war there was a deadly shortage of power and water, and the sites best suited for the construction of the reservoirs were the deep gorges and limestone valleys like the one we were standing before. But there were social as well as environmental problems that came with the building boom. People got in the way. When there was a village at the bottom of one of those valleys, its inhabitants were forced to leave. There was no alternative. They were paid for their property and given six months to clear out their belongings. Usually a new town was built nearby and given the same name as the one they’d had to abandon. What they left behind is what brought us here. That was why we dived.

  “This is where Nuria taught me,” I said. She passed the bottle to my father. She’d shown me how to clear my mask of water in an emergency and how to buddy up on a single tank of oxygen. She taught me how to breathe compressed air. The water levels were higher then, maybe twenty metres to the deepest point in the middle of the valley. I told them about the trout I’d seen swimming through the streets of the town down there, some as big as four or five kilos, startled by the arcs of our flashlight beams slicing through the dark. Public bathing of any sort was not allowed here, but among the small cabal of divers and souvenir hunters who left Madrid on weekends in search of water, it was a preferred site. The area was never policed. Nuria and I never removed the trinkets we found, something most divers did, smuggling them out in the trunk of a car after a dive like grave robbers carrying off relics of the dead.

  “Where, exactly?” my mother asked. I pointed across the water to the deepest part of the lake, somewhere to the left of the old fisherman. “But didn’t people protest? You can’t flood a town just like that,” she said, unfolding her arms and snapping her fingers.

  “A dictator can do what he likes,” Nuria said.

  My father handed Nuria the bottle. Then he leaned into my mother’s ear and whispered something.

  “No secrets now,” I said. He pulled away and smiled. Back in the direction we’d come, the steeple of the church of San Judas Tadeo pricked the sky over Cervera de Buitrago, the village up the hill that had been built to receive the inhabitants of the abandoned town. Nuria passed me the last of the water. My parents were both staring out to the middle of the lake, at the old man fishing from his raft, I thought. I knew from experience he’d have a tough time of it today; that even stocked trout didn’t bite in weather as hot as this.

  In the province of Madrid that summer the reservoirs were down to twenty per cent capacity, the lowest level in ten years. There was a ban on watering gardens and lawns. They were running ads on TV and radio urging people to conserve. Don’t use your toilet as a garbage can, they said. Watch for dripping taps. There’d been no significant rainfall since the previous spring. Driving along the M-131 on the way to El Atazar the day before, we passed two other reservoirs, El Vellon and, later, El Embalse de Santillana, both of which I’d fished since I came to Madrid after leaving Canada. The fishing was simple here because the reservoirs were stocked and the trout usually hit anything you offered. The locals used corn niblets. Once three boys watched me fish the Manzanares with a dry fly and pull out four decent rainbows in less than five minutes. They’d never seen anyone fish with a fly before. They asked me where I came from and I gave them each a trout and they thanked me and scurried up the embankment and disappeared over the hill. But now as we passed the two reservoirs, my parents watching the hard dry landscape from the back seat, we saw only mudflats caked white in the sun and a thin vein of water running through the middle.

  “I fished there last summer if you can believe it,” I said to my father, applying the brakes. We’d always bait-fished together; while he was here I wanted to show him how to fish with a fly. I told him he’d get the hang of it in a few days.

  Nuria wasn’t much interested in the fishing, though. When it came to water, she preferred to dive. She’d written her doctoral thesis on the drowned villages of Spain. That’s how we met. We were both interested in drought. That and our Olympic past. But where I studied the clouds, Nuria looked to people. These days she was compiling a history of Spanish rain-making folklore and water-management tribunals in Valencia. She told me how people from the villages used to shoot firecrackers into the low-lying cirrus in order to force a cloudburst. More so after the war, when the drought worsened all over Spain, and when there was still an excess of dynamite to fire into the sky. For her first book she dived all the towns she wrote about at least once, twenty-eight in total. Completed the year of the Munich Olympics, El Atazar was our favourite dive because the town below her waters was so well preserved; the blue-and-white street signs fastened to the sides of the sandstone buildings still clearly marking the way as we swam, Calle Mayor, then right on Divino Pastor, the dead-end street where children that last summer might have played soccer and shouted up to the sky, oblivious to what was planned for their town. We’d already been out three times this summer. We’d found some old bent cutlery, a broach, three clay plates, and a pair of dentures, but we always left things as we found them.

  Over lunch that day Nuria told my parents about her family. We were at Casa Pepe, our favourite restaurant in town. There was a hotel upstairs where we often stayed when we came to dive. After we ordered lamb with baked garlic potatoes and a pitcher of beer, I leaned back in my chair and saw a donkey through the doorway that led out to the back patio, roped to an anchor, chomping on a pile of weed clippings. The entrance was strung with beads, which moved slightly and clattered when the wind blew the scent of the donkey in from the yard. Far below the patio I caught a glimpse of water.

  There were two old men at the next table. They’d smiled at us and waved when we walked in. I recognized them. Nuria knew them by name. She took the single stem of rosemary that my mother had picked for her on our way back up the path out of her hair and placed it in a glass of water in the middle of the table. The beer came and I poured out the glasses.

  My mom and dad still didn’t really know anything about Nuria. We’d gotten married quickly, a civil ceremony at city hall in Madrid. We’d been living together for almost a year when the doctors diagnosed her with lymphoma. After six weeks of tests and staying up all night, talking about what was on the other side, the specialist called us into his office and apologized for the mistake and tried to explain how they’d misread the symptoms. She was fine. We didn’t have time to invite my parents. The moment was ours, the wedding a kind of celebration of being alive. My parents had already heard it from me in the letter I’d written them after the wedding. But they listened silently, shaking their heads in disbelief, remembering our own terrifying experience with doctors. I watched a single tear struggling to surface in the corner of my mother’s right eye as Nuria s
poke.

  “Tell them about the Olympics,” I said. I wanted to turn the conversation around. My father brightened. The food came and I started dishing out the lamb. “Tell them how your grandparents met.”

  “My grandfather was a sailor, too. He was on the German team for a while,” Nuria said. “Not long, a couple of months. But he wasn’t allowed to compete in Berlin because of Hitler. That’s why he came to Spain.” She stopped and made an eager gesture with her eyes when I reached across the table and dropped some lamb on her plate. “He heard about the anti-fascist protest Olympics organized in Barcelona for the same summer. Against Hitler, you probably know about it. A lot of Jews from Germany came. But they were cancelled when the war started here. That’s how he met my grandmother. She was an archer on the Spanish team. He joined a republican militia. A lot of the athletes did. They got caught up in the street fighting in Barcelona at the very beginning and got swept up by the cause. Most of them were already Socialists and Communists anyway. My grandmother got pregnant right after they got married. She had the baby here. But when my grandfather was killed she took my mother to France with all the other refugees near the end the war.”

  “Maybe my father knew him,” my father said. “I mean in Germany, before he came here.” He took up his glass and stared into it thoughtfully. He put it down without drinking. “Sure they must have known each other. On the same team. Maybe even the same crew. I might even have a picture of them together.”

  I started scraping up the last of the potatoes. “You could look when you get back.”

  “Do you know what class he sailed?” asked my father. “Eight-metre maybe? Dragon?”

  She shook her head.

  “Sorry, just that he was on the German team for a while before he came here.”

  “Josef. This is a good time,” my mother said. “With all this talk of family and boats.” She pushed her plate aside and held up her glass. A smile spread over her face. “Your father and I have been thinking.” There was a glow in her eyes I recognized. Right away I tensed up. There was something in her voice. I had no idea that my parents had been thinking about anything other than what they’d already spoken of in the letters they’d sent and phone calls they’d made before they came. I’d expected the obvious. Day trips and walking tours of Madrid and driving around the countryside, gradually making our way to Barcelona for the Games. Talking about Oakville, where they’d resettled since their break-up after the big storm. I’d hear about the tomato plants and sunflowers my mother planted that spring, the peas and corn and the cedar hedge that ringed the yard where Ruby and I had played as kids. I imagined my mother standing beside Nuria in the Crystal Palace in the Retiro Park, talking about the glass walls of marriage and asking if we were happy together. She’d offer any advice she could and tell her that you could never understand married life until you were near the end of it and that it was a beautiful and frustrating endeavour that was worth all the time and worry we all spent thinking about it. And while they walked and talked, my father and I would visit the Oceanic Institute or the observatory or my office at the university where I’d show him my work on the drought patterns of the Iberian peninsula beginning with the end of the civil war.

  “We’re getting married again,” my father said. “It’s our thirty-second anniversary this year.” My mother reached across the table and took hold of my father’s hand.

  I put down my glass. This need to move back in time, I thought. Where did it come from? I looked through the green-and-white beads to the donkey out in the garden, the water in the distance. I turned back to the table. My dad smiled and nodded.

  “You’re serious?” I said. He said he was.

  “Mom?”

  Now as I thought about it, it seemed they’d been acting strange since they arrived. In the airport parking lot that first day, while my father and I stacked the luggage in the trunk of the car, he leaned into my ear and asked me how to say “I love you” in Spanish. There’d been lots of handholding and small, quick kisses. Nuria knew they’d had their fair share of trouble. She knew that my mother had moved out a year after my sister died. But now they were together again and I was glad that she could see them as I liked to remember them. They looked like schoolkids sneaking a kiss between class as we walked down the Gran Via in Madrid or through the Prado or the narrow winding streets around the Plaza Mayor. At the time I wondered if it had something to do with Barcelona, if this trip to the Olympic city was bringing out the best in them, or if this new ease had come only because they were alone now with no children to worry about and only their most selfish and intimate selves to look after.

  “We saw the water,” my father said. “It’s perfect. The raft will do fine.”

  At the mention of the reservoir I slid back in memory and saw the iron-rich water turning his large cupped hands a deathly yellow the day his mother drowned, his head sliding into darkness. I remembered my grandfather sitting off to the side of the houseboat, surrounded by a pile of cast-off suit jackets and shoes while he waited for his wife to come back up to the surface.

  I leaned back on my chair. “What do you mean, ‘raft’?”

  “We’re going to get married on that raft we saw out there today.”

  “We want to be newlyweds for the Barcelona Games,” my mother said. I looked across the table to Nuria for help. I wanted her to say something about the impossibility of all this; to say we were just strangers here and something like that wouldn’t go over well in a town as small and suspicious as this. Instead, she raised her glass in the air and my parents lifted their little beer glasses and held them there, waiting. They’d do it, I knew, with or without me. I couldn’t stop them. The beads over the open doorway clattered. A whiff of donkey carried through the air. Maybe they’d seen something down there earlier that day that I hadn’t. I raised my beer and our four glasses clinked in the centre of the table.

  “To love’s mysterious ways,” I said.

  “Amen,” they said. “Amen.”

  The pontoon boat would need reinforcing, but the old fisherman said he could do it with little problem. I figured he’d agree, but I didn’t think there was any chance that the town priest would agree to marry two Lutherans he’d never met before aboard a rickety old boat. I thought their plans would end there and we’d be able to get back in our car and head for Barcelona. But Father Duque agreed, smiling and nodding his head, as if he saw nothing strange in this request. Nuria had spent a lot of time here researching her thesis. She’d interviewed him many times about the spiritual and social impact of the flooding. She was dedicated to telling their story. Maybe he felt he owed her a favour. My parents insisted that they wanted to keep this simple; but I knew this was anything but simple, in body and in spirit.

  The next day I taught my father how to fly-fish. I thought this might give him the opportunity to talk about their plans some more. Just the two of us. But I didn’t press him. We left Nuria and my mother sleeping back in our rooms and walked down the main street of the town, silent and dark in the predawn. It was under a five-minute walk to the water. Once on the path, we brushed against the tilting mint and rosemary flowers, their stalks bent heavy with dew, releasing the smell of breakfast tea into the air.

  I left my shoes and socks on the shore and waded into the water up to my knees. There was a thin silver mist hanging over the surface, barely an inch thick. I showed him some casts, first telling him how you used the rod and line in a way that was different from the fishing he was used to because the fly had no weight and the heavy line was what carried the fly to the fish. I showed him a forward cast, then a side-arm cast, explaining over my shoulder that the perfect cast dropped the fly onto the surface of the water before the line so as not to spook the fish before he had a chance to take the fly. Then my father took his shoes and socks off and placed them beside mine and came into the water with me. He stood to my left, watching me work the fly
over the water, pulling in the thick yellow line and lassoing it in my left hand, working the rod in a V over my right shoulder. The line looped and straightened, then followed the tip of the rod back behind our heads. It traced long arcs through the air. The dim morning sun edged over the limestone hills and slid its cool light down over the water.

  I handed the rod to my father and stood behind him and placed my knees gently in the small crooks at the back of his legs. Looking over his left shoulder, I helped him find his proper grip, arm and rod-butt positions. We practised the overhead cast first until he knew where his mistakes were. The line snapped behind our heads. It looped absurdly and touched the gravel shore where we’d left our things. He almost caught the sock out of his shoe. He brought the line in with the reel and I showed him the knots that had formed in the long thin leader that joined the fly to the heavy line, which indicated that he was returning the tip of the rod back over his head too quickly. I tried to explain the V he wanted to draw in the air above his right shoulder, the pause needed behind the head to ensure the line had sufficient time to unroll of its own will and momentum, only to be brought back with the forward motion of the rod once it was fully extended and could do nothing but come back over the shoulder with even the slightest forward tilt of the rod. It was something that came with practice, I said. You’ve got to find and understand the rod’s energy and live that energy through the tip of the rod and your wrist and arm and shoulder. My father returned the rod to me and I cast again twice out over the water. The yellow line unrolled over the surface like a lizard’s tongue, throwing down the yellow image of its inverted self onto the black water, and gently dropped a number 16 bloodworm midge pupa thirty feet out. Before the fly had a chance to sink a small trout rose and I passed the rod to my father once the trout was secure on the hook and he brought him in easily, keeping the line taut and the tip of the rod between himself and the fish at a forty-five-degree angle to the water. I stood back and watched, patient now as he had been when he first introduced me to his strange world of wind and storm. I was his teacher now. My father looked over to me smiling and then back out over the water where the fish was fighting, down there somewhere where we couldn’t see him. He brought him up then and put the rod under his right arm and wet his hand in the water in the way I’d shown him so as not to damage the trout’s thin film of mucus in the handling, gently took the hook from his mouth and let him swim back down into the shadows to think about what had just happened.