Light is Like Water

From Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992).

Podcast performed by Jeremy Dean, Patrick O'Hare, Brooke Becker, Ta'Ron Middleton, and Gray Randolph. (Click post title or subscribe to our podcast to listen!)

At Christmas, the boys once again asked for a rowing boat.

'All right,' said their father, 'we'll buy it when we get back to Cartagena.'

Toto, who was nine years old, and Joel, who was seven, were more determined than their parents thought.

'No,' they said in chorus. 'We need it here and now.'

'But,' said their mother, 'the only navigable water here is what comes out of the shower.'

She and her husband were right. Their house in Cartagena de Indias had a terrace with a dock on the bay, and a shed that could hold two large yachts. Here in Madrid, on the other hand, they were crowded into a fifth-floor apartment at 47 Paseo de la Castellana. But in the end neither of them could refuse, because they had promised the children a boat, complete with sextant and compass, if they won the third-year prize in primary school, and they had. So their father bought everything and said nothing to his wife, who was more reluctant to pay gambling debts than he was. It was a beautiful aluminium boat with a gold stripe at the waterline...

...The next Wednesday, while the parents were watching The Battle of Algiers, people walking along the Paseo de la Castellana saw a cascade of light falling from an old building hidden among the trees. It spilled over the balconies, poured in torrents down the facade, and rushed along the great avenue in a golden flood that lit the city all the way to the Guadarrama.

Called to deal with the emergency, firemen forced open the door on the fifth floor and found the apartment brimming with light all the way to the ceiling. The sofa and armchairs covered in leopard-skin were floating at different levels in the living-room, among the bottles from the bar and the grand piano with its Manila shawl fluttering half submerged like a golden manta ray. Household objects, in the fullness of their poetry, were flying through the kitchen sky on their own wings. Brass instruments, which the children used when they were dancing, were drifting among the brightly coloured fish freed from their mother's aquarium, the only creatures lively and happy in the vast illuminated marsh. All the toothbrushes were floating in the bathroom, along with Papa's condoms and Mama's jars of cream and spare dentures, and the television set from the master bedroom was afloat on its side, still tuned to the final part of the midnight movie for adults.

At the end of the corridor, Toto was sitting in the stern of the boat, all at sea, clutching the oars tightly with his mask on and only just enough air to reach the lighthouse he was searching for, while Joel was bobbing in the prow, still charting the north star with his sextant; and floating throughout the house were their thirty-seven classmates, eternalised in the moment of peeing into a pot of geraniums, or singing the school song with the words changed to make fun of the headmaster, or sneaking a glass of brandy from Papa's bottle. For they had turned on so many lights at the same time that the apartment had flooded, and the whole fourth-year class at the elementary school of Saint Julian the Hospitaler had drowned on the fifth floor of 47 Paseo de la Castellana. In Madrid, Spain, a remote city of burning summers and icy winds, with no ocean or river, whose landbound population had never mastered the science of navigating on light.

Soundtrack:

Galaxy 500, "Tugboat"

Karen O and the Kids, "Sailing Home"

Phosphorescent, "Hej, Me I'm Light"

Iron & Wine, "Someday the Waves"

The Pixies, "Where is My Mind?"

Nick Cave, "The Boat Song"