Below is the passage which we are basing our performance off of. When initially reading the work, I was taking it at face value. I assumed what was happening was all in the imagination of the children and aside from the death it was a rather harmless tale. I later looked into 1970 light bulbs, which, through my research seemed to contain dangerous gasses. Gasses such as Argon and other inert gasses were used in lightbulbs at the time and these gasses are known to create hallucinations and cause dizziness and death. This then can be seen to explain the imaginary world which the boys see and it also explains why the “light” isn’t in the room when the parents come home. This later also explains why the fire department is present as the gas leak is a fire hazard. Towards the end of the story the two boys are the only two alive in the house full of their friends and gas. This would potentially be due to the scuba gear. The boys are wearing masks and have scuba tanks with oxygen, allowing them to breath while the others inhale the gas and die. This is quite a dark interpretation of the story but it’s what I took away from it when I first read it.
Light is Like Water
For Christmas the children once again asked for a rowboat.
“Sure,” said the dad. “We’ll buy it when we get back to Cartagena.”
Totó, nine years old, and Joel, seven, were more determined than their parents thought.
“No,” they said in unison. “We need it right here right now.”
“First of all,” said the mother, “the only water you could sail in here is what comes out of
the shower.”
She and her husband were right. At their house in Cartagena de Indias there was a patio
with a pier that reached over the bay and enough space for two big yachts. On the other hand,
here in Madrid they lived squeezed into the fifth floor of number 47 Castellana Ave. But in the
end, neither he nor she could refuse their pleas, because they had promised the children a
rowboat with a sextant and compass if they won the third grade laurel award in school, and they
had. And so the dad bought it all without saying anything to his wife, who was more reluctant to
pay the debts of gambles. It was a beautiful aluminum boat with a golden border at the
waterline.
“The boat is in the garage,” the dad divulged at lunch. “The problem is that there’s no
way to bring it up through the elevator, nor the stairs, and there’s no more open space in the
garage.”
Nonetheless, the following Saturday afternoon the children invited their classmates to
bring the boat up through the stairs, and they managed to get it to the bathroom.
“Congratulations,” the father said. “Now what?”
“Now nothing,” said the children. “All we wanted was to have the boat in the room, and
now it’s there.”
Wednesday night, like all other Wednesdays, the parents went to the movie theatre. The
children, now the men and owners of the house, closed the doors and windows and broke the
shining light bulb from the lamp in the room. A stream of golden, fresh light, like water, began
to flow from the broken light bulb. They let it run until it was four palms high. Then they cut
the current, pushed off in the boat, and sailed between the islands of the house as they pleased.
This fantastic adventure was the result of my thoughtlessness during a seminar about the
poetry of household objects. Totó asked me how it was that with the simple push of a button,
lights turned on. I did not think twice about it.
“Light is like water,” I answered him. “You turn the knob and it comes out.”
So they continued to sail on Wednesday nights, learning how to use the sextant and
compass, until their parents came back from the theatre and found them sleeping like angels.
Months later, eager to go further, they asked for scuba diving equipment. All of it: masks,
flippers, tanks, and air-powered spear guns.
“It’s bad enough that you have a useless rowboat in your bathroom,” said the father. “But
it’s worse that you want scuba equipment as well.”
“And if we win the gold gardenia award first semester?” said Joel.
“No,” said the mother, worried. “Now nothing more.”
The father criticized her stubbornness.
“It’s just that these kids don’t deserve as much as a penny for doing their duties,” she
said. “But on a whim they are able to win even the teacher’s chair.”
In the end the parents did not say yes or no. But Totó and Joel, who had been at the
bottom of their classes the two previous years, won the two gold gardenia awards and public
recognition from the principal in July. That same afternoon, without having asked again, they
found two sets of scuba equipment in their original packages in their room. So the following
Wednesday, while their parents watched The Last Tango of Paris, they filled the apartment up to
their shoulders and they dove like domesticated sharks under the furniture and beds. From the
bottom of the light they rescued things that, over the years, had gotten lost in the darkness.
In the final award ceremony the brothers were praised as an example for the school, and
they received excellence awards. This time they did not have to ask for anything. Their parents
asked them what they wanted. The children were very reasonable; they only wanted a party in
their house to celebrate with their classmates.
The father, alone with his wife, was glowing.
“It’s a testament to their maturity,” he said.
“God willing,” said the mother.
The following Wednesday, while the parents saw The Battle of Algiers, the people who
passed by Castellana Ave saw a cascade of light falling from an old building hidden between the
trees. It flooded from the balconies and spilled in torrents from the front, channeled by the large
avenue into a golden flood that illuminated the city up to Guadarrama.
Called to the scene, firefighters broke down the door of the fifth floor and found the
home brimming with light up to the ceiling. The leopard skin sofas and armchairs floated in the
room at different levels, between the bottles from the bar, the grand piano, and a shawl that
fluttered mid-water like a gold manta ray. Household objects, at the peak of their poetry, flew
with their own wings past the kitchen ceiling. The marching band instruments, that the kids
played to dance to, floated every which way between the colorful fish liberated from the mom’s
fish tank. They were the only ones that floated lively and happily in the vast illuminated swamp.
In the bathroom the toothbrushes, dad’s condoms, the small containers of creams, and mom’s
false teeth were floating. The master bedroom’s television floated sideways, still playing the last
installment of the midnight movie forbidden for children.
At the end of the corridor floating suspended below the surface, Totó was sitting at the
stern of the boat clinging to the oars with his scuba mask on, looking for the lighthouse, when his
tank ran out of air. Joel floated at the bow still searching for the height of the North Star with the
sextant. Their thirty-seven classmates floated through the whole house, eternalized in the
rebellious moment of peeing in the geranium flowerpot, of singing the school anthem with
different lyrics as a joke on the principal, of secretly drinking a glass of dad’s brandy. They had
opened so many lights at the same time that the house had overflowed. The entire fourth year at
the San Julián el Hospitalario school had drowned in the fifth floor of number 47 Castellana Ave
in Madrid, Spain, a city far from stifling summers and icy winds, without sea nor river, whose
indigenous of terra firma were never masters of the science of light sailing.
1978