Olympia (15 page)

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.

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 tilted 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.