Chemari Goñi's Roller Skates

Chemari Goñi's Roller Skates are the recurring object through which the novel connects Chemari's death in childhood with Ignacio Urquieta's recovered memory three decades later. Found still on Chemari's feet when his body is discovered in the Club Loreto pool, the skates first appear as a detail of the death; in Ignacio's adult recollection, they become the striking clue that makes him question what happened and his own part in it.

The Skates at Club Loreto

As a child, Ignacio is pushed into water by a schoolmate and goes home shaken, wearing only his socks as he runs through the street. He gives his mother a false account: he says he slipped from a mossy platform by the harbor while watching children fish. The next day he walks to school to avoid meeting Chemari on the tram, but Chemari is absent too. Neither boy returns before the Christmas holidays begin.

When Ignacio comes back to school after the break, he learns that Chemari has drowned. Employees preparing to empty the Club Loreto pool discover the body at its bottom, with the roller skates still on. The skates identify Chemari through the object associated with his skating, but they also make the death difficult to dismiss as an ordinary disappearance: they are a concrete, memorable detail attached to the body. Ignacio is horrified, though he admits that he does not feel much grief because he did not like Chemari. A terrible doubt briefly comes to him, then he rejects it, deciding that Chemari probably returned to the club to skate during the days he had missed school.

A Detail Recalled in the Pool

Ignacio does not consciously revisit the episode for thirty years. It returns during a later crisis at the asylum pool, where Carolo Bocanegra has pushed him into the water. As Ignacio begins to swim, he imagines catching the mute patient and giving him a dunk, reasoning that this would be easy because the man is wearing skates. The thought turns against itself: Ignacio corrects the image, realizing that the skates belonged to the schoolboy who pushed him, not to the person he is imagining in the present.

The correction brings back more than a misplaced object. Ignacio recognizes that his urge for revenge feels like the one he experienced as a child. He imagines the mute patient drowned at the bottom of the pool, weighed down by large skates, and links that image to Chemari's death. Even as the memory gathers force, uncertainty remains: Ignacio wonders whether someone told him that Chemari had been found wearing the skates and whether he refused to take it in. The object is thus both a remembered fact and a test of memory, connecting what Ignacio once knew with what he may have suppressed.

Evidence and Uncertainty

Ignacio ultimately identifies the boy as Chemari Goñi and becomes convinced that he himself killed him. The novel presents this as Ignacio's conclusion, reached through the returning pool memory and the detail of the skates; the recollection does not independently establish every circumstance of the childhood death. That distinction matters. The skates make Ignacio's past feel newly legible, but his certainty emerges from a memory he is only now recovering, after years in which he had replaced doubt with the explanation that Chemari must have gone back to skate.

The roller skates also link two pools and two moments of attempted revenge. In the childhood memory, they belong to the boy found drowned; in Ignacio's adult imagination, they first attach themselves to another person's body before he recognizes their true place in his past. Their reappearance converts an impulse in the present into recognition of an earlier one. Later, among a list of remembered figures, Chemari is recalled as the child who knows how to skate, preserving the ordinary association of the boy with the activity even after the skates have become inseparable from Ignacio's account of loss and guilt.

Narrative Significance

The skates serve as a small, physical hinge between a concealed childhood episode and Ignacio's adult crisis. Their persistence on Chemari's body makes them available to memory, while their mistaken transfer to the mute patient shows how the past initially returns in displaced form. Ignacio does not begin with a clear confession: he first relives the bodily situation, imagines retaliation, and only then recognizes the old schoolmate and the object that belonged to him.

The object therefore carries both the force and the limits of recollection. It gives Ignacio a specific connection between his childhood push, his unacknowledged doubt, and Chemari's drowning, while leaving the reader with the distinction between an event and the adult patient's conviction about it. A pair of skates, once merely part of a child's identity, becomes the detail by which a long-buried memory breaks through.