Salt Statues

Photograph by Mariana Enriquez.

Carhué Cemetery
Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, 2009

The concrete Christ designed by Francisco Salamone, severe like all his works are, emerged some time ago from the ultrasalty waters of the flooded Epecuén Lagoon. Now people leave offerings to it, partly in thanksgiving that the flood didn’t reach the town of Carhué, partly to pray that the town of Villa Epecuén will once again become the successful tourist resort that it was for decades, before it turned into the ruin it is today, a town haunted by trees so dry and salt-coated they look like they’re made of ash. White trees, ghost trees, triffid trees with their roots exposed, trees that look like spiders on an endless march.

I remember photographs of that Christ on the cross. The water had risen to cover his feet, and all around him were dead, half-submerged trees. The trees are still there, but the crucifix was moved a few meters closer to the city; it’s now on a wooden platform that you access by a ladder from the beach in front of the lake.

The Christ was once in the cemetery, which has also reemerged from the floodwaters; I can see it in the distance. A cemetery that’s low to the ground, pretty modest for Buenos Aires Province, where even the graveyards of remote towns have domed mausoleums that look like small cathedrals.

It’s cold. Our host and guide—I’m traveling with Paul, my husband—is the son of the man who built that platform for Salamone’s Christ.

The town is modest, with a certain Patagonian ambience, the charm of the plains, but there is something in the air and the people here: it’s the almost-palpable residue of collective trauma. What happened was more or less this: the towns of Carhué and Epecuén, in the province of Buenos Aires, are on the coast of the Western Chain Lagoons, a closed hydrological system—meaning one without drainage—made up by the Alsina, Cochicó, del Monte, del Venado, and Epecuén Lagoons. Several streams empty into this system, and, basically, the water didn’t have anywhere to go, it had no way out. For a time—paradoxically—the lagoons started to dry up; then the streams were directed in a way that would maintain the water level. The anthropologist Alejandro Balazote, a specialist in the social impact of flooding in the region, explains in his 1997 paper “Aguas que no has de beber”:

The Florentino Ameghino collector channel was built in 1979, is 92 kilometers long, 30 meters wide and 2.5 meters deep. The project cost $30 million. The lack of complementary regulation work meant that in periods of high rainfall, such as those that occurred in the early 1980s, flooding began to occur, though the first floods had occurred in 1977. As a solution, a “plug” was built in the Ameghino channel at the Huascar stream, but the force of the currents that flowed through the channel repeatedly destroyed it. […] The system of chained lagoons is endorheic, since it lacks any natural or artificial outlet. Because of this, water removal only occurred (until the pumping system was set up) through evaporation or soil absorption. In just a few years, we went from a frightening lack of water to an excess, with tremendous social, environmental and economic consequences. But this was due not only to the change in rainfall patterns, but also to a lack of foresight on the part of the agencies responsible. From 1980 to 1985, no work was carried out to regulate the flow of the Ameghino channel.

In 1985, when nearly five million hectares of Buenos Aires Province flooded, Epecuén Lagoon overflowed, completely covering the tourist town that had existed since 1921. That town had been frequented by your run-of-the-mill sightseeing tourists, but it also attracted crowds because of the supposed healing properties of its water, which contained almost three hundred and fifty grams of salt per liter, an enormous amount that makes the lake one of the most saline in the world.

Most of Epecuén’s inhabitants resettled in Carhué, a town about twelve kilometers away. Villa Epecuén has almost entirely reemerged from the water by now, and its remains are like twisted white stalks, the trees and buildings all corroded by that miraculous salt. More than a bombed-out city, which is the most common comparison for these ruins, Villa Epecuén looks to me like a city devoured, a city chewed to its bones.

Our guide takes us to the cemetery, and the route leads us across and down the beach. He tells us that when the water was still high, he used to kayak to the domes and crosses that rose above its surface.

“I was never scared,” he says proudly.

Those crosses and domes aren’t there anymore. In a crazy, incomprehensible move, the Carhué authorities decided to destroy everything above the water’s surface; they made the cemetery disappear. When someone looked at the lagoon, they would no longer see those macabre domes and crosses rising from the water. There were some who opposed the action, but they were in the minority. Our guide, for example, was against it. Plus, he thinks that it was done in secret (he talks about it as though it had been done secretively). However, other inhabitants assure us that the population agreed, and there is even mention of a referendum.

“I remember how you could hear the pounding at night when they were knocking down the mausoleums and crosses,” says our host.

“They knocked them down at night?”

“Yes, it was night, but you could hear everything. Out here, just imagine … I heard that noise with my dad while we were building the platform for the crucifix.”

Who knows what madness made those people decide that the monuments emerging from the water needed to be destroyed.

The cemetery had been in existence since 1890, and back then it had large monuments, sumptuous mausoleums, the kind that were common among the rich families of the Pampas. The flooding began on November 10, 1985. On November 17, Villa Epecuén was evacuated, and no one knew if the water would reach as far as the cemetery. It did.

They started to evacuate the cemetery in December, but by then it was only accessible by water. People were asking anyone who would dare to get their dead family members out of the flooded city. Those “extractors” worked to get the coffins out, and then the coffins were taken to warehouses or stored in trucks or even in the garages of houses. It wasn’t easy to find space for those bodies in the overcrowded neighboring cemeteries.

“But why didn’t they want the cemetery monuments to be visible?” I ask.

Our guide shrugs. “It was a tough time. Coffins were floating up. Some people thought tourists would stop coming because … because, well, the water had lost a little of the salt concentration with the influx from the other lagoons, and, to top it off, if people thought the water had bodies floating in it …”

The water receded between 2007 and 2008. Now, in 2009, the town can be accessed and cleanup can begin. New complaints have also surfaced. Questions about how this destruction was allowed to happen. How to preserve what remains.

At the cemetery entrance, a municipal employee takes down the names of everyone who goes in. He doesn’t say why, but he’s keeping a record. He is very friendly and his demeanor is apologetic, but he insists, asking for first and last names and an ID number. We plan to take pictures but we don’t mention that, and he doesn’t explicitly forbid it.

The cemetery is still surrounded by water, but we can tell that cleanup has begun. The paths are clear, and a few families have revived their graves with flowers and tributes (there will be many more in the months to come). Like the ruins of Epecuén, like everything the corrosive water touches, the cemetery is bright white and barren.

The mutilation of the niches and mausoleums is obvious. Whole levels are missing, knocked down with hammers (to talk about this, people use and repeat the verb bajar, meaning “to lower” or “to take down”). Why did they think the place would never reemerge?

Everything that was iron is now rust. The ashen trees don’t look solid, and it seems strange that the wind hasn’t blown them away. There’s something that looks like cloth hanging from some of the crosses, and I don’t know if it’s an effect of the salt or petrified muck; it looks like they’re wrapped in shrouds. All the shorter graves are intact, though moldy. Are they all empty? There’s no way to know. Almost none of them have plaques or metal photos; maybe the salt has torn them off and swallowed them. All that remains is concrete and marble.

Everywhere you look there are pieces of statues, and no one knows which tomb or mausoleum they belong to: headless virgins, wingless angels, handless Christs. The passages through niches with bricks exposed are full of debris, and you can’t walk down them. This is the fallout of the nocturnal demolition that was carried out by boat. Some of the destroyed statues must have been atop mausoleums, around the domes. Now they’re crushed amid the rubble. One little angel has its whole body but is missing its arms: twisted iron rods protrude from its shoulders.

We move through the area quickly. We want to see the Salamone slaughterhouse, a building from the thirties that’s near here. The problem is that everything is closed off because Roland Joffé, director of The Mission, is filming scenes for his movie There Be Dragons—specifically, a sequence that takes place during the Spanish Civil War.

We can’t get close.

Our host, however, has a secret weapon: his maternal grandfather, Pablo Novak, the famous, last, and only resident of Villa Epecuén. This man, who is over eighty years old, lives in the abandoned town in a well-equipped house with his dogs. His friends visit him there. He doesn’t want to leave, and besides, he’s famous now: at least twice a year he receives journalists and guides them through the ruins, which he knows by heart, remembering exactly what was in each place, where the pools were, where that hotel was, the restaurant, the bakery …

Don Pablo is royalty and he does what he wants, so he takes us to the movie set (the crew members already know and adore him), where we watch the arrival of catering, and then, with some apprehension, a few explosions: What if they damage Salamone’s monument to the bovine pampa, with its huge capital letters that read MATADERO (“slaughterhouse”) and its tower shaped like a knife handle? Does it really look like a building from the thirties? It reminds me more of a set piece from Flash Gordon.

The slaughterhouse, of course, is spectacular. There, surrounded by stunted trees with visible roots that make them look like crawling bugs, the feeling is not so much that you’re on another planet but that you’re in a different time. Maybe a postnuclear future, a sort of ancient future.

We go to drink some maté at Don Pablo’s house. He tells us that when the cemetery flooded, coffins floated up to his house regularly. “Like little boats,” he says.

“You weren’t scared by that?”

“Why would it scare me? It wasn’t pleasant, I’ll give you that. I just went and let people know that another dead person had come, that’s all.”

“What people?”

“The firefighters.”

Of course. One of Don Pablo’s dogs, named Patacón, wags his tail. Don Pablo doesn’t want to relocate to Carhué. He has lived and worked in Villa Epecuén his whole life; his family, he says, helped build this town, and he wants to live out his old age four blocks away from the ruins. There’s no convincing him otherwise, his grandson assures us. And why try? The man doesn’t seem sad or melancholic. He keeps busy. He doesn’t want his legs to stiffen, he says, and that’s what will happen if he sits down with his daughters in Carhué to watch TV.

People bring him croissants, invite him to lunch, and he rides around on his bike like a teenager. Smiling, his cap always on, Don Pablo is a guardian. He is the joyful spirit of lost summers.

 

This essay is adapted from a chapter of Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez, to be published by Hogarth in September. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.

Mariana Enriquez is the author of the novel Our Share of Night and three story collections, A Sunny Place for Shady People, Things We Lost in the Fire, and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize.

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today. Her translations have won numerous prizes, including the National Book Award, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times.