Olympia (16 page)

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.

“You can kiss the bride,” he said in a proud conspicuous English. I turned again, hoping that the church had disappeared, hoping that what I'd seen had been nothing more than a rare angle of light performing some illusion on the surface of the water. But it was there again, bigger now and higher in the water. The belfry silent and empty. I put my hands on Nuria's shoulders and slowly turned her in the direction of the spire. The red clay shingles of the lower roof were exposed now, the building growing like a leviathan, rolling water off its back. Bricks large and glistening and slick with algae and weed as a dragon's scales. The raft tilted slightly. Everyone stopped kissing and talking and shaking hands and turned at once when Nuria jumped with surprise. The priest crossed himself. We were near the bottom of a hollow valley now, the vermilion sky narrowing above our heads. The top half of the church continued to rise until San Judas Tadeo appeared, the Patron Saint of the Impossible, the evening sun catching him on the right temple.

The rest of Cervera de Buitrago declared itself within half an hour, like a slow striptease. It was close to dark when Nuria and I left our shoes on the raft and felt for the bottom. When I touched something hard and flat I knew I'd found cobblestone. I slid off the raft and helped Nuria down. She rolled her dress up her thighs and held it against her hips as we waded. My parents took off their shoes and socks too and dipped their toes into the water. Father Duque and the fisherman stood at the stern. “
Un Milagro
,” the Father kept saying. “
Esto es un milagro
.” It seemed he thought this wedding must be blessed. And maybe he was right, I thought, wading through the town. Maybe something like this was due a family as exceptional as ours. I felt fish tails brush against my legs. The smell of a newly excavated town mixed with the mint and rosemary that rolled down from the hills, humid in the setting sun. I wondered if I'd see the big trout, splashing like a trapped bird in the darkening shallows.

There was a celebration in the town that night, for the rebirth of the sunken village as much as for the miraculous wedding. After Father Duque phoned someone at the
obispado
in Madrid, he regained himself and agreed with everyone that this was nothing but a coincidence. There were no holy rollers among us that night at Casa Pepe where we celebrated the reception. But everyone agreed that we should be made honorary citizens of the town of Cervera, and that we would be esteemed guests whenever we wanted to return. The mayor, with a result better than he could have hoped for (and it did occur to me later that he might have had something to do with lowering the water levels ahead of schedule), hurried out of the bar and returned a few minutes later with a large wooden key to the city, which he presented between sips of wine to my father and mother, his cigarette dangling from his lips, the beautiful girl whose costume my mother had admired at his side.

I got drunk that night. I did
coscorrones
up at the bar with José. He filled a small glass with tequila and soda water, then showed me how to slam it down against the bar with my hand covering the top so the mixture fizzed and popped in my mouth and my throat as I swallowed. Some of us danced a
Sevillana
;
then my father went upstairs to his room and came back down with his accordion and played some of his old favourite songs. Later he danced the
Schuhplattler
,
the traditional dance of Bavaria, my mother's province, slapping his hands and palms against his thighs and rump and the sides and soles of his shoes. He could still do it, though it was a young man's dance.

The tequila hit me suddenly. I walked out to the plaza and closed my eyes. A ringed moon cast a half-light over the town. I felt it through my eyelids. I leaned against a pillar and waited for the world to stop spinning. I thought I'd only need a few minutes to recover. I listened to the sounds echoing off the four walls of the empty plaza. But when I finally felt better I didn't go back. Instead I walked along the main street to the edge of town and found the gravel trail that led down to the hollow valley. In the half-light I strayed off the path twice, but I found it again and continued down until I came to the edge of the old shoreline and stopped and looked at the church spire shining in the moonlight at the bottom of the empty bowl before me. I caught my breath and started again, half-walking, half-sliding on my haunches down the incline of dolomite and rock clay and feldspar where the day before I would have swum until the bottom levelled out. I passed the stranded raft and entered the waters of the town, cool now in the night, and made for the church.

In the relief carved above the entrance Saint Judas returned life to a dying shepherd with a touch of his hand. The scene was framed with angels. The doors below him had been removed, like many things of the town that were worth anything and could be carried away, before the original flooding. I walked through the doorway and stood a moment in the dark, water up to my thighs, the only sound now a faint irregular dripping from the rafters somewhere above. There was no statuary, no pews. Even the stained-glass windows had been taken down. I remembered my first dive here, the texture of the water that our flashlight beams sliced around us, picking a large and alien fish out of the darkness, startled by our intrusions. There had been something of adventure in those dives here, always the sense that we would discover some clue to this lost place. But now I only felt cold. The same feeling that had come over me the day before as I walked back to town along the darkening trail.