Club Loreto

Club Loreto, a club in Bilbao whose swimming pool becomes central to Ignacio Urquieta’s buried childhood memory, is both the setting of Chemari Goñi’s death and the place that returns to Ignacio through a bodily flashback decades later. Its significance lies in that double association: a real pool and a remembered one, joined by water, a shove, and the belated recognition of what happened to a schoolmate.

Setting and the Childhood Death

The evidence identifies Club Loreto through its pool and its location in Bilbao. After the Christmas holidays, Ignacio learned that Chemari Goñi had drowned there. Employees discovered Chemari’s body at the bottom of the pool as they were preparing to empty it; he still had his roller skates on. The discovery gave the club pool a fatal association in Ignacio’s memory, although at the time he was frightened by the news more than grieved, since he did not care for Chemari.

The Pool Recalled

Thirty years later, after Ignacio was thrown fully clothed into the asylum pool, the sensation of falling through the air recalled an earlier experience with striking force. For a brief time, he experienced the present as the past: the asylum pool became Club Loreto’s, the person who had pushed him seemed to be Chemari rather than Bocanegra, and his adult age gave way to the age of five. The remembered scene first arrived as bodily recognition, before he could settle what it meant.

As Ignacio began swimming, he also recognized the impulse to retaliate as one he had felt in the earlier scene. The thought of the mute patient drowning with heavy skates on drew his mind to Chemari’s body and to the detail that the dead boy had been found wearing skates. Ignacio wondered whether he had not been told that detail, or whether he had refused to take it in. He ultimately became convinced that he himself had caused Chemari’s death, a certainty he later described to the doctors and to Alice Gould.

Narrative Significance

Club Loreto’s pool links an old death to Ignacio’s later recovery from his fear of water. What had remained unthought for three decades re-emerges when the present repeats the physical pattern of the childhood incident: a shove, immersion, and the possibility of revenge. The club is therefore not merely the location where Chemari’s body was found; it anchors the memory through which Ignacio confronts his suspected responsibility for his classmate’s death.