The Dam at St. Francis
by Grete Dalum.
The Dam at St. Francis,
... the night it broke. A wall of water. A wake of materials. Pushing through the valley through the night, to the sea.
... I lie awake at night listening to the sound of the sprinklers, hissing their pace, from one side to the other, hitting a tree, hitting a wall. Rhythmically, in patterns, repeated from night to night. I listen to the blood rushing through my veins.
He tried to collect the water. Bringing it in through pipes and canals. The engineer, the founder, the organizer of the citys and the gardens of the south west. What a waste if it runs straight to the sea. I must collect it, I might need it, next year, or the year after, when the drought returns.
... as I walk down the road I begin to recognize the houses, the old station, the farmhouse they rented for a while. I enter a house, I am at my cousin's party, but I have no idea about what I am doing there, while making love, wandering, miles and years later. My aunts friend calls me a bitch, for interfering with my parent's lives. I want them to behave as grownups and be responsible. I get very drunk at the party and very restless. I take an extra sweater from the rack and re-enter the night, walk through the fields, the October breeze pushing over the hill from the sea. My dress against my legs. I walk on the beach thinking about getting away. Far away.
I walk up the side of the canyon, my legs heavy, moving through water. I feel it pulling. I feel the liquid body, that displaced the air for a while between the narrow sides of the canyon. The reservoir, the dam that burst, he tried to economize. He tried to keep in control. But he did not read the warning, the thick brown water tickling out through the dam. Dead bodies, bridges and soil. A hundred feet avalanche, through sleeping villages.
... the grandmother lives behind the kitchen, and spends her time collecting water from the tap, in pots, pouring it from pot to pot and heating it. I don't understand a word of what she's saying, and reach the conclusion that she is probably senile. The farmwomans brother lives on the couch, drinking glasses of clear liquid, at first I take it to be water. He lost his teeth in a fight in the city, and has come to rest at the farm. I watch television with him, carefully seating myself in a chair. Conversation fades quickly, he tells me the same things about the house and the local spectacles, as the farmer told me the first night, when I came from the bus. The grandmother finishes her business for the day, and disappears into her tiny domicile. The brother moves on to the floor, next to my chair and confesses "now, finally we're alone", "so what?" "so you can kiss me". I explain to him that this was not exactly the moment I was waiting for.
There's a kid who listens to Nirvana and works on the farm for the summer, he asks me if I want to smoke a cigarette with him in his room, he's got three CD's. There's sheep around the house all night, in the kitchen the woman is feeding the newborn lambs. The nights are light and before I fall asleep I lean my camera tripod against the door. It doesn't lock.
Wanting a shower seems to embarrass the whole family. The guest bathroom has no hot water. After talking back and forth for a while, they invite me to use their private bathroom. I clean the bathtub before I dive in.
The village is under a waterfall, I can't spend time in the house. The brother is sleeping and farting on the couch and the grandmother is pouring water. It's drizzling and I walk up through a low cloud, behind the waterfall. There is a small still watered lake, the mist frosts the colors, and the sound travels like in a room, but it travels far.
... "your pocket is at just the right height for me to piss in", he said, with one hand in my back pocket and the other on his zipper. I was too surprised to speak, and the crowd too tight for me to move away, so by some hidden impulse my hand flew through the air, hit his chin, he hit me back, but it felt good, and I drifted away through the crowd.
... after reading all afternoon, I walk into the disco, buy a rum & coke, and I don't really know what to do with myself, so I end up talking to a guy; he is a lot older than me, maybe nineteen and he has taken the trip before. He takes me up on the deck and we watch the lights on the oil rigs, kiss and his hands moves up my legs, around the corner of my back, under my arm, from the back to the front. We're sitting on a bench. He is searching. I am curiously attending the progress of the situation. When his hands reach under my pants, I tell him to stop, and I want him to, but instead he tells me that we are at international sea, and that there, there are no limits.
When he cant enter my body in his cabin, he complains about the price of the condom. Wasted.
He doesn't say hello in the duty free shop the next morning, I go and sit on the deck, look at the sea without watching and finish reading Gone With the Wind.
... after the party we jump the fence to the swimming pool. I went with a friend, but once we were there, she chickened out, but I was not going to be there and not swim, so I ended up being the only girl in the pool, with some of the party boys from the school. I never liked him; blond, blue eyes, mustache, always looking at me in a way that made me want to spit in his face. While swimming he grabbed me from behind with out notice and tried to squeeze his dick up my ass. I don't think anybody even noticed. We were all too drunk. I fought him off, and left it at that.
Later I didn't even hate him, I ignored him, and started wearing a swimsuit whenever I swim.
... I am back in the hated city of the ocher Castillian high desert, with its mix of medieval and fascist architecture. Looking for the cafˇ where we stored our luggage, I had a cup of coffee, and he a glass of water. I find the cafˇ and realize by what a complicated route he took me to the train station. My backpack is gone, and so is he, he already picked it up, tells the bartender. I knew that he wanted me to leave the bag with my camera too much, he had no money, and he took mine, and he took my backpack, and he took my body, as we spend the night together, kissing, moving into the country. I felt more and more lonely, approaching, and when he pulled down my pants and fucked me, on the train, my thoughts became quiet. They lost their voices, they lost their effect, the link between the will and the tongue, disconnected. Moving back to the city, hated.
I planned to go somewhere else, but spend the whole day on the train station. Relieved I entered the morning after the long ride, followed the river, and went down to the sea. Later when I was looking for breakfast, I found nothing open. There had been killings. The streets filled with tear gas and rubber bullets. People screaming and armed police. I went back to the train station, it seemed to be a place to go, I never thought of taking a hotel room. It was too late in the year to get really hot, so I sat in the train station reading a classical novel. I talked to a guy for a while, he suggested that I get on the same train as him, just to get out of there. But I was planning to follow the coast in the other direction. -
A guy keeps bumming cigarettes, we look, he gives me a little tin heart ring, we have no common language, so we start kissing after a while. It is almost evening, and my train is coming in, he has a plan for me, and I follow it, and stay, I don't know where I want to go anyway.The reason for traveling along the coast is because it is where my ex-boyfriend went over the summer, and I miss him. So I kiss the thief and we get back on the train, back to where I had come from, that same morning. That hated city, without language. I arrive at the coast in the morning, and I look at the sea. My mind is clear and I look at the horizon, without thinking about anything in particular. I rest for a while, the waves beat the rocks at a steady pace, before I enter the resort city looking for food and something to drink.
He built the dam, he said 'I envy the dead', he said. 'Waste', he said, about the water running into the sea, the spring flood, the summer flow, and the lazy hot drops of the late autumn.
By the time it reached St. Paula it consisted of half water, a quarter mud and a quarter other materials. A funeral wall carrying bodies, houses. Bodies classified as 'other materials'. Bridges, concrete, soil. He built the dam, I envy the dead, it ran full and burst, in a late night in March, travelling through the night to the coast. The dam was strong, and the cliff was soft, later in court it dissolved in a glass of water. It leaked brown thick mud, the warning wasn't read. The farms, the orchards, the families living under the dam disappeared. Got caught in the wake, and went to sleep in the ocean. The water finally reached the sea in the early hours of morning.
Copyright 1994, CA. Grete Dalum.
Artnode texts