THE SUNKEN SCHOOL

 

Every Sunday we were going to my grandmother’s house and we stayed there for many hours.

The living room was furnished with green velvet sofas and the small round table in the center of the living room had a texture where I could see faces that sometimes were scary. Everything was on a green carpet that had beige lines close to the edges shaping two squares one inside the other. The lines were thick enough to be used as little highways when I was playing with toy cars with my brother. The sitting adults surrounding us while we were playing didn’t pay so much attention to the little race that was happening in front of their feet despite the engine sounds that we used to make as the cars were speeding up.

We knew that our departure time was about to come at dinner time.

After being sitting silently on the couch resting her face on her hand and looking at the center of the living room with a calmed expression, my grandma used to walk to the kitchen to prepare the chicken soup. Every Sunday we had that meal. I knew that she was cooking that simple chicken soup on Sundays because, as a baby, it was my favorite meal. The leg was always kept for me.

Before dinner time, I used to go to my uncle’s room to watch TV with him, my brother and my other uncle. The television was a very small one and it was placed on the bookshelf, in a space where it perfectly fit. I like going there because in the living room, everybody was watching a varieties show of singers that I really disliked. My uncle used to watch “The Twilight Zone” and “Unsolved Mysteries”, even if sometimes these shows were way too scary for me, watching them was a better choice than seeing that horrendous TV show in the living room.

Sometimes, on the way back home, when it was raining hard and the roads were flooded, my father had to improvise routes in order to get

back home. One of those routes was the one uphill which passed by a school that had been abandoned. A dark place completely covered by water, where chairs and tables floated between the buildings, and aquatic plants grew all over. I used to lay on the back seat, looking at the moving shadows projected in the car by lights from the outside. When I knew we were passing in front of the school, no matter how afraid I was, I couldn't resist moving close to the window to see through the glass full of shiny water drops slowly dripping down as the car was moving.

There is a dead tree in the entrance. A large log without bark, with big branches, completely gray, almost white, and a big crack all along the side of it. Behind the fence, I can see clearly a couple of one-story buildings. From the car, the buildings seem to have an endless vanishing point that merges with other ones blurred in the background. The space between them is probably the playground. Everything is covered by a layer of aquatic plants, in some places they are islands, clusters of seaweed, like huge lumps of grass with reeds that grow from the bottom of the swamp reaching one or two meters over the water level. There are floating things: chairs, desks, pieces of broken furniture. The building on the right side has a gabled roof but the one on the left is different, it has a flat roof with lots of stuff on top of it – amorphous junk, piles of boxes. Their windows are so big, endless picture windows. They are divided into small squared sections and colored by several tonalities, some of them are broken, some of them are totally dark, and others are greenish because of the moss attached to them.

For many years the school was part of the environment. It was just another place in the block, another moment on the road where people used to swim and catch tadpoles, frogs and small fish.

In 2014 I started to think constantly about that memory. How a school might have ended up like that?
How such a place could be part of the environment? Who studied there?

I was thinking about it with the same curiosity and fascination like the one in my childhood, when I used to imagine the family that lived before in the house that was not built by my grandparents. What furniture did the old owners have? Who had walked through those rooms? How did they look like?

Later that year, the idea of the sunken school was so insistently haunting my thoughts that I started to research about it, I went to ask the neighbours, I went to the surroundings, I even went to the city hall.

–It sunk because the soil was too soft.
–The lake that was there in the past returned and took back its territory.
–The government used cheap materials to build it.

The school vanished, and no one owned the one true testimony about it. There were only memories, different versions; visions of a place that once existed.

In one of the conversations I was told that the school was rebuilt somewhere else twice. The kids couldn’t be without a place to study and the community got a piece of land a few meters away from the old one that was still under water. For a few months the classes took place in classrooms made of wood and other improvised materials until the whole place was set on fire. People said that the students did it intentionally because they didn’t like the place or because they wanted to destroy the report cards and other documents. Anyhow the school and its stories were destroyed again while the original one was getting more water from the small swamps around it.

They built the school again, this time it was done on the nearby hill. The teachers, the parents and the students took the furniture, the windows and other useful items to the new school. Apparently, it was like an uphill pilgrimage from the dead school to the new born one. I got that testimony from an old man who was in the new school because of the Xmas celebration.

He told me, that’s all I remember but the former director must have more information that might be of your interest.

I indeed asked him for her address or her phone number but he responded that he didn’t have any of them. He knew by hearth how to find her place though, and surprisingly he offered to take me there the morning after. His name was Sócrates and was the sports teacher of the sunken school.

Susana was the director at the time the school got flooded. She was very happy to see her old colleague before we had our only conversation about her youth and the school: how it was built, the teachers and the students, the voices in the corridors, the national anthem in the mornings, the revolution. All those dreams about a better future and society that were buried underwater by the rain that didn't stop.

The school was built on the slopes of a hill, on a territory which long time ago was a lake. During the late seventies, people from all around the country came to work in the city but could not afford the rents. As a consequence, they started occupying empty lands in the outskirts. The soil was still soft when the new houses were built. The owners were aware of the problem and built higher the foundations of every new house. Some of the remaining ponds of the old lake were still sharing the landscape with the new buildings. The heavy rains made them larger, flooding, with water, plants, and animals, the constructions around them.

The former director showed me what was left of her personal archive: just a few pictures of the time before the flooding, and plenty drawings that displayed how the furniture was spread around the buildings. In the floor plan, she showed me the distribution of the chairs that were numbered accordingly to the student assigned to them. Every classroom was rendered as an individual structure as if it was a new complex completely different to the buildings I saw. She also had some pages of a yearbook with little pieces of colored paper attached to them to mark which students were still attending the classes when everything happened, and a few small chairs probably from a dollhouse.

“In 1981 I noticed that the school's ground was sinking”; she said.

“When I arrived at the school, one stair step was below its regular level. I don't remember it so well. Then I realized that the whole school was sinking and that the playground, where the students played football and basketball, was completely covered with water. I notified the Education Department that the school ground was flooded at the back, that the whole grass field was flooded and that we could only walk into the lobby and by the sidewalks between the classrooms. We couldn't walk either to the field or to the playground. The water was coming from uphill; although at the beginning it was not so much. The first time it happened was in 1981”.

“In 1982, everything had been so beautiful in the run–up to celebrating the end of the school year. Oh, what a surprise! It was raining the day before, it rained strongly, very strongly and the water was coming from up the hill, the stones were falling from the hill, from the road, water came from the sewers, from the gutter. It was a real chaos. We could get into the school by making paths with little bricks, using little rocks along the left side of the classrooms”.

“We managed to do it, the parents, the children, the students, all of us went to the auditorium because we used to do the ceremonies there. Everything was flooded outside. Despite the fact that it was flooded the ceremony happened. We went on holiday. The water didn't get absorbed into the ground. It remained stagnant”.

“After a few months, I had to get into the water because I realized that my whole archive was in the drawers inside the shelves.”

“I took everything to the tables in the library and we placed school desks on top of them. In case the water level would rise by another meter we placed the drawers on the school desks. They were on top of the library tables so that the archive would be safe. Everything was piled up but we moved the most important documents to the laboratory, I don't know why but I preferred to move everything there”.

“The students carried the school desks, the ones who wanted to do it because at that time I didn't want to invite more people to come in. What I wanted to do, and honestly I am not a bad person, was to see them feeling that pain, the pain of seeing their school in that condition”.

“Later on, I asked a neighbor for permission to keep our things in his storage room because one day right after we left, we were walking to the avenue, I mean to the main street when some guys in swimwear broke in and used the school desks as boats to steal our stuff ”.

“I'm sure they thought that we had left because they were very cheeky. My students were so nice and they did what they found right, they even cursed them and chased them. It was a mess, they couldn't catch them and I never expected my students to be so foul–mouthed”.

“When I left the school, I felt like I was leaving something that I had made in my life, which had made me feel important. I felt that my imagination had taken the school as far as I wanted it to go. I always thought about the underwater school, its lost furniture floating slowly from one place to another, the blackboards still keeping notes of forgotten lessons, the quiet water waves hitting softly the glasses of the classrooms and the fig and olive trees that remained there the last time I saw the school from the car”.

After a long silent moment, she continued telling me other stories, always mixing what happened to the school with other events of her life.

I realized, and I'm sure she did too, that the sunken school wasn’t exactly the big place where students could learn and improve their future, as she thought it was. Probably something changed in the perception of his memories or I was projecting my thoughts on hers when the image that I used to see through the window of the car and the images of children fishing and swimming through the classrooms was confronted with just a regular school with an unfortunate ending. We both created the school from our own memories and desires, visions of unreachable events built by childhood fantasies and education and social utopias. The dried ground, after the rain, swallowed the school and with it, our beliefs.

The school remains somewhere, not precisely underground the sports field that was built years later by new people promising a better future and a better society.

What happened in the sunken school is still safe and intact, spread in the memories of who could experience it, hopefully coming back in regular conversations.

Iván Martínez, 2022