When the past reappears in summer: Isaac Rosa on the reservoir of his youth

We are a land of dams, a people plagued by drought and floods from ancient times, a nation that for a century and a half has bent on taming its rivers and flooding its valleys, flooding entire regions so that thousands of people had to evacuate their place of residence. Spain, a map covered in blue scratches, with more river kilometers than coastline and more than three hundred reservoirs.

For us children of the arid regions, growing up far from the coast inland, in working-class families who could at most afford short summer vacations by the sea, the reservoirs became our beach, cheap holidays. Our childhood baths in it were as exciting as they were unsettling, adventure and nightmare at the same time, the water still and dark, so different from the crystal clear water in the river. As we jumped in, we were accompanied by an eternal tale of fascination and horror, passed from mouth to mouth and magnified by mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, neighbors, friends: Just be careful by the lake! Don’t go in too deep! The currents are unpredictable, the gentle water treacherous, it grabs you and pulls you to the bottom. Watch out for the holes in the ground that lurk invisibly under your feet, if you sink in there you’ll never get out! Don’t do head dives, there are sharp rocks hidden in the water, you could crack your skull there! Sudden whirlpools, unfathomable depths, temperature swings that paralyze the swimmer, giant fish that could swallow a dog.

You went into the water, took only two steps from the murky shore and already lost sight of your feet, sunk in the mud and erased by the dark water. It was like moving forward blindly, at the mercy of snapping teeth, a pool of water, a whirlpool that would pull you down without anyone being able to count on help, because besides, the drowned always died in pairs: the daring, the warning into the wind and tried to swim across a narrow arm of the reservoir and started screaming and flailing his arms halfway; and the imprudent one who tried to help him swam hurrying to save him and inevitably went down with him.

And that, too, was a childish fear of our summers: that of the drowned, who seldom surfaced again. The police cruised the reservoir in boats, poking at the bottom with long poles, looking for drowned people and anyone missing in the surrounding villages, a missing child, a runaway teenager, a woman whose husband shed crocodile tears, to hide his guilt. Where should they have gone if not at the bottom of the reservoir? The divers swam blindly down, feeling the terrible bottom where they hoped to make out a leg among the rocks and branches, a hand, an open mouth into which fingers would unexpectedly slip. And so we added to the bottomless holes, whirlpools, currents and fishes the fear of meeting a corpse, churning up the muddy bottom with our feet and encountering a bloated belly. Or worse, the corpse could find us, a hand could grab us by the ankle and pull us under before we had a chance to scream that from the shore we’d be seen flailing our arms like another drowning man, and then disappear.