by Dennis Bock
We practised for another hour until my father had the hang of the overhead cast. The mist over the water dispersed and the sun was up in the sky, fully over the hills that cut the reservoir off from the rest of the world, the sky now blue and the rocks and thin spiky grass and scrub bathed in the purple light that came when you stared too long into water. We put our shoes and socks back on and walked back up the path, through the pockets of mint and rosemary, and back to the village where we found my mother and Nuria on the terrace of the bar around the side of the hotel, drinking coffee and eating custard apples. The donkey was there, still roped to the anchor, his chomping now clear in the morning quiet.
“My favourite men,” my mother said. I leaned the rod against the wall. When my father sat down beside my mother, she passed him a spoonful of chirimoya. “Try this,” she said. “I’ve never eaten this before.” He put it in his mouth and held the spoon comically in his fist like a Henry VIII caricature as he worked the flesh off the stones, his cheeks and jaw moving.
“Sehr gut,” he said. We ordered coffee and muffins from José, the owner, who also worked the bar, and when he went away through the curtain of green-and-white beads we told Nuria and my mother about our morning at the reservoir and the fish that had required the both of us to land.
Before lunch we took care of some more wedding preparations. By the end of the day the whole town knew what we had planned. When we walked down the street, people called out “Vivan los novios” through cupped hands. Some mistook Nuria and me for the happy couple and I told them that it was my mother and father who were getting married, not Nuria and I, but it was an easy mistake to make. By the end of the night everyone seemed to have the story straight and offered handshakes and wine wherever we went and slaps on the back for my father and me. A lot had to do with Nuria, whom most people already knew from her interviews here. Even the mayor, a small man with a red face and nicotine stains on his fingers, stopped us on the street and reintroduced himself to Nuria. He said he would be pleased to help in any way he could. Our good news was welcomed everywhere, it seemed, even though it belonged to strangers.
The next morning I tried to catch up on what was happening in Barcelona. We had a TV in our room. Some events had already advanced to the medal rounds, though the Games had only been going for three days. The sailing, diving and gymnastics were yet to come. We had tickets. We’d be leaving for Barcelona in two days, the morning after the wedding, three days later than originally planned. After some boxing, a news spot came on about Bosnia. The old Olympic capital had been surrounded now for more than one hundred days, the announcer said. I turned down the sound. I was thinking about all this wedding business. I wanted us to be on our way, to get back in the car and drive. I looked back at the screen and saw a line of refugees streaming northward into the hills.
The following day, news of our first setback came. There was a knock at our door. The mayor stood at the threshold. I was in front of the TV, my shaving brush in my hand, face half-covered in lather. I’d been watching women’s equestrian. He told us that engineers from the Canal de Isabel II had found structural damage in the retaining wall of Puentes Viejas, the dam in the middle of the system we were on, about ten kilometres north of here. It required immediate repairs. If it should give before repairs could be completed, it would flood both the dams beneath it and drown dozens of villages along the way. There would be a chain reaction. First El Villar, then El Atazar, where we were. We were at twenty per cent that summer. But the three reservoirs together meant more than twenty-three square hectares of water. They were opening the two lower dams as a precaution. He said they were going to drain off all the water beginning tomorrow at midnight. He’d just got off the phone with the people at the Canal de Isabel II in Madrid. There was nothing he could do about it. It was a necessary safety precaution.
When I told him we could move up the wedding, he nodded, brightening. I left Nuria and the mayor talking in our room, already making new plans, and walked across the hall and told my parents that the Madrid Waterworks was rescheduling the show. My father was standing in the bathroom door in his underwear, my mother sitting in the chair at the window, her knitting in her lap, now looking at me over her glasses. We had to find Father Duque to see if he could reschedule the service. Then the old fisherman we’d planned to rent the raft from. He was making repairs, and could they be finished for tomorrow? The whole village knew about the water level crisis. Walking through town later that afternoon, people looked at us with sad eyes and offered their condolences as if this were suddenly turning into a funeral.
That evening before supper, while my parents attended the rushed wedding rehearsal on the patio of Casa Pepe (Nuria was there as their interpreter; the donkey, chomping at its pile of grass, the only idle witness), I walked down to the water with my fly rod and tried my luck for the last time before the reservoir was drained. It would eventually be filled again, when the rains finally came in December. But the trout would be transported to another body of water, Navacerrada or Navalmedio, I guessed, released to swim among the ruins of a different sunken village. The Atazar had never been drained before. I would see what I could take from her before her waters began to rush through the sloughs at the south end of the reservoir and the rooftops of her underwater town felt time restart and the breath of air move through her streets for the first time since she was flooded twenty-two years before.
I fished the number 16 bloodworm again between ten and twelve feet down, casting in an arc from a point of land that stuck out of the shore into the reservoir like an accusing finger. I knew from diving here that sunlight penetrated only that far, even on the sunniest days, and that’s where I’d find trout, just above the weed cover. I tried an olive-coloured dragonfly nymph, then an olive damselfly. Nothing was hitting. The sun was starting to go behind me. I was casting out fifty, maybe sixty feet and retrieving the line between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, pulling it in slowly with a gentle rolling motion to simulate the foraging of the mayflies and scuds I was imitating. Then suddenly my rod bent double in my hands and I lifted the tip into the air and a trout came out of the water and tail-walked big and shining over the surface and went down again, moving quickly to deep water. I watched my reel give out, screeching. I pressed with my left hand to slow the drag. When I was down to about five yards I seized up the reel and the fish came up out of the water for a second time, almost in the centre of the lake it seemed, and hung in the air, glistening red and silver, sparkling as brilliant and bright as a rainbow. He was free before he hit the water. My rod fell straight. I sat down heavily on the shore, shaking and looking at my hands and up again to where the trout had disappeared. I sat like that until the night started in from the east across the dry plain beyond the valley. I stood up and watched it move over the land. It was like a giant man bringing his thundering shadow across the earth. I turned and walked hurriedly along the path to town and found everyone waiting for me at Casa Pepe, where we’d agreed to invite Father Duque for the supper after the rehearsal.
Father Duque was teaching my parents some Spanish when I came in and joined them. They were already into a second bottle of wine. At first it seemed nobody understood anything anyone was saying. My dad was speaking a mix of German and English and Latin. Nuria was leaning into the three of them, translating and writing down words on a napkin. There was a plate of pigs’ ears and a Spanish omelette and a wooden tabla of cheese sitting between them. José came with another bottle. I knew Nuria was excited about the chance she’d get the day after tomorrow to look at the town, at least part of it, when the water level was dropped. She’d slip into professional mode after the wedding, take some photos, kick around the muck looking for anything she might have missed during one of her many dives here. This was an unexpected opportunity to breathe natural air while she nosed around the village, instead of sucking compressed oxygen from a tank and moling half-blind with a flashlight. But when I sat down she til
ted her head and turned serious, as if to ask me what was wrong. She didn’t ask me outright, and I didn’t tell her that I’d felt something strange on my way back up the trail from the water. But she knew something had happened, although I didn’t know exactly what myself. She poured me a glass of wine and deflected the conversation away from me for a time so I could come back into myself.
When we got down to the water the next evening, half the town was gathered on the shore waiting for us. A few of the women were wearing chulapas, the traditional tight-fitting polka-dot dress and handkerchief head wrap typical of Madrid, a red carnation placed at the top of the head. We walked down the hill on the path I’d retreated over the night before. My mother’s face flushed. She’d never seen these fabrics before. I knew she’d want to slow this down a little and talk to these women about the dresses they were wearing. Small girls came with flowers and glasses of wine and sweet biscuits and morcillas on silver platters. I looked to the shore ahead of us where the boat was waiting with the old fisherman there like he said he would be, the captain who would take us to sea.
We shook hands with the mayor. He looked bloated and nervous in his old suit. The dark tie around his neck seemed to have held the same knot since the first day he tied it. I could already see him planning bus tours from all over Spain and the rest of Europe. These hills and this water would be billed as the elixir of love that would lead to a second honeymoon, and a second chance for this town. We shook hands all around and a small girl in a red-and-blue dress with an embroidered apron around her waist stepped forward and offered my mother and father shortbread on a silver tray. I saw my mother studying the dress. She touched the sleeve and bent her head to admire the weave, to see how things were done here. Then they each took a piece of shortbread and said thank you in Spanish and the girl smiled and curtsied and retreated back into the crowd.
Nuria unclasped the Star of David necklace she’d worn at our own wedding and fastened it around my mother’s neck. She told her that her grandmother had worn this the day she married her grandfather back in 1936. Then she kissed her on both cheeks. My mother carefully placed it under her dress against her skin, then lifted Nuria’s right hand in hers and held it for a moment against her heart.
A wineskin was passed forward and I took it and raised it up and felt the wine splatter against the back of my throat. Nuria had a drink and wiped her mouth with a handkerchief she took from her dress pocket. The wine was warm already in the hot air. But it felt good on my throat and helped me breathe easier.
After half an hour of more handshakes and wine we climbed onto the small raft that the old fisherman had reinforced since yesterday with extra inner tubes and boards. Now it was as big as a small barge. It didn’t seem to sink deeper into the water when we stepped on board but held its own against our weight until the six of us were ready and the old fisherman untied her and pushed us off and began working the tiller at the stern, moving the barge heavily out to open water.
There was a small altar at the bow fashioned from a thick tree branch about waist high with a square flat board nailed at the top on which rested a leather-bound Bible. My father stood beside the altar, looking down into the water. We moved over the glassy surface in small jerking movements. I wondered now if he was having second thoughts. I wondered if the joke was over for him and he was thinking about his mother. I half expected him to ask the old fisherman to turn this pile of junk around and get him back to the shore right away where he would return to his normal self. But he just kept looking down into the water, then out to the middle where we were heading, one hand in his pocket, his suit jacket thrown over his right shoulder. He was smaller than he used to be. He was shrinking. Old now, I thought. Like my mother. An old couple play-acting on this rickety stage. This shrunken man, this withered bride.
The hills all around us rose higher into the sky the longer the old fisherman rowed. We’d already been out forty-five minutes and were still going. The light-headedness I’d felt from the wine I’d drunk on shore was gone now. They wanted to be in the middle of the lake, they said. They wanted to be married again out there on deep water. The old fisherman’s navigation of his newly altered raft was poor. He cut a zigzag over the water, looking back and cursing at the irregular wake, stopping mid-sentence to ask forgiveness from Father Duque who stood next to him, then crossing himself from beret to belt buckle, then across his chest. As he pulled against the tiller the sky grew smaller, the hills reached higher over our heads. I thought it was an optical illusion. I thought the magic of this place was taking over and the recollection of the big rainbow that had taken my fly the evening before was making me see this differently, grander than I’d ever known any of this to be. The people who remained on shore were specks now. But I could see that some were still waving their arms in the air.
My father came back out of his reveries and turned and motioned to the old fisherman that here was fine. He stopped and wiped his face with a red-and-white handkerchief, then removed his beret and held it with both hands over his lap. My mother and father collected themselves at the bow and Father Duque stood before them, rocking slightly with the motion of the slowing raft. I took my place at my father’s side. Nuria, my mother’s maid of honour, stood to her right, a bouquet of roses pressed against her chest. I straightened my tie, my father’s ring in my casting hand. I passed it to my left and rolled it against the hard surface of my own ring. I looked back to the shoreline where we’d started. That’s when I saw we were already in trouble, when I saw the thick dark strip of wet rock running along the perimeter of the reservoir, already five or ten feet deep. The shoreline was rising against the surface. The water level was lowering. That’s why the hills had seemed to be growing, the sky diminishing. I looked at Nuria. She still hadn’t noticed. I wondered who’d gotten their scheduling wrong, the mayor or the Canal de Isabel II people. Off by six hours. My parents off by thirty-two years.
Father Duque was speaking. Under his voice, Nuria translated. “With a wise and mature love,” she said, “you have elected to marry again, before your son and daughter-in-law and before God.”
Before God and my wife and parents I watched the shoreline rise, the dark band of wet rock thickening against the hills. A few hundred metres to the south at the opposite end of the reservoir, water would be rushing down the uncontrolled floodgates at 410 cubic metres a second, throwing up sparrows in fright from their nests within the great concrete and iron works of the dam, rabbits and lizards from the dry spillway behind the enormous arch-cupola of the retaining wall. That was a lot of water, I knew. I was familiar with the Inventario de presas españolas 1986, the publication that listed details of all the dams in the country. Because we were only at twenty per cent to begin with, an escape rate as fast as that would drain the Atazar in about four hours.
Then it occurred to me that this wasn’t a miscommunication. Maybe the timetable had been changed suddenly because Puentes Viejas was deteriorating faster than had been expected. I knew it was an old dam, one of Franco’s first, built in 1940, right after the war when cement was still scarce and of poor quality. Maybe ten kilometres upstream the dam had given way and twenty-some square hectares of water were pounding down through the valley, wiping out everything in its path. I tried to shut out the words of the priest. I listened for a deep rumbling. I felt the air for vibration. There was nothing but the scent of mint carried on a light breeze and the faint taste of wine in my mouth. My hands were clammy now. I fidgeted and watched the shoreline rising above the water. I looked at Nuria, deep in the ceremony, my father’s ring slick in my palm.
I loosened my tie and turned and looked behind me, behind the old fisherman standing respectfully at attention, unconsciously fiddling with the beret in his hands. I turned for no reason I knew, maybe it was only nervousness, but just in time to see the slender steeple of the first church of San Judas Tadeo stick its point out of the water like a periscope raised up into the light and air to
investigate a world it hasn’t seen in twenty-two years. It was right there, ten feet off the stern. I turned just as it appeared. The slate shingles of the belfry shone silver-white in the afternoon sun. Squinting, I forced a smile for the old fisherman, then looked back to Father Duque. His eyes moved between my parents and his Bible, then up to me. He paused. I thought he’d seen it too. I wondered if he’d call off the ceremony. But he just waited, looking at me, waiting for something. My father gave me a nudge with his elbow. “The ring,” he said under his breath. I felt them all looking at my shaking hand as I wiped it on my sleeve and passed it to him. My father turned to my mother and slowly wiggled the band up her finger, twisting and turning the bright gold. Father Duque smiled when he finally got it over the knuckle.
