Enrique Urquijo's hydrophobia

Ignacio Urquieta’s fear of water is both a disabling phobia and a defense against a childhood truth he has spent decades unable to face: the drowning of his schoolmate Chemari Goñi. The fear makes Ignacio appear, to himself and others, like a healthy man temporarily overcome by panic; its sudden disappearance in a swimming pool reveals instead how thoroughly his body has carried a memory his conscious mind rejected.

Childhood and the Buried Drowning

When Ignacio was five, he was known as Iñaqui. After an incident connected with Chemari, he ran home crying and told his mother that he had fallen into the water near the port. He described slipping on a mossy platform beside children who were fishing. The account is presented as a lie, but the surviving recollection does not supply a complete, independently verified reconstruction of what happened. Its importance lies in what Ignacio later comes to remember and believe: he identifies Chemari as the schoolmate involved and becomes certain that he himself caused the boy’s death.

The next day, Iñaqui walked to school to avoid meeting Chemari on the tram. It was a precaution with no immediate explanation for him: Chemari did not attend school either. The school then closed for the Christmas holidays, and when Iñaqui returned, he learned that Chemari Goñi had drowned. Employees had found the boy’s body at the bottom of the Club Loreto pool while preparing to empty it. Chemari was still wearing his roller skates.

Iñaqui was horrified by the news but, because he did not like Chemari, did not feel much grief. A terrible doubt briefly occurred to him; he pushed it away and settled on a less disturbing possibility, that Chemari had gone back to the club to skate during the days he missed school. The account makes this rejected doubt an early sign of the split at the center of Ignacio’s later condition: he could register the possibility of responsibility, yet could not sustain it as conscious knowledge.

The Phobia in Adult Life

The boy who had been called Iñaqui grew into Ignacio Urquieta, but the childhood event did not return to ordinary memory for thirty years. By then he was a patient at Nuestra Señora de la Fuentecilla Psychiatric Hospital. Water could overwhelm him with terror: other patients had seen him roll on the floor when it affected him, and rain could leave the self-possessed Ignacio hiding under the sheets, shaking with fear. The contrast between his public bearing and these episodes fed the impression that he regarded himself as sound while refusing to acknowledge that he, too, was ill.

That contrast shaped his place in the hospital community. Ignacio treated doctors and other staff as his equals, spoke with senior figures, and associated with people regarded as prominent among the patients. Many residents disliked his apparent arrogance and took satisfaction in the thought that rain would expose his vulnerability. His phobia was therefore not merely a private symptom: it made visible, against his self-presentation, a dependence and terror shared in different forms by the people around him.

The medical distinction later made by Dolores Bernardos clarifies the status of the condition. Ignacio’s diagnosis was an anxiety neurosis, specifically a phobic neurosis. César Arellano’s prognosis was that he would recover if he learned the cause of the phobia. In this account, diagnosis names the disabling fear, while prognosis points beyond the fear toward the memory it has been shielding.

The Pool and the Return of Memory

The decisive confrontation came when six patients seized Ignacio near Alice Gould and carried him toward the pool, intending to throw him into the water. Alice shouted to two staff members for help and ran after them. Ignacio shut his eyes and struggled in their arms, but could do little to stop them. Alice arrived in time to see him thrown into the pool. His cry and the frantic movements of his body appeared to confirm the familiar terror; two nurses took off their shoes and coats and prepared to rescue him, and Alice was about to follow them.

Then the response changed. Ignacio removed his shoes, which sank to the bottom, and began to swim slowly and rhythmically. He reached the opposite edge, pushed off with his feet, and swam the length of the pool three times with the style of a champion. He climbed the ladder looking dazed. The scene reverses the image the hospital has come to expect: the water that had reduced him to panic becomes, in a moment, something his body can meet and cross. His swimming precedes any full explanation of why the fear has disappeared.

Ignacio later described the moment as a sudden flash of recognition. Being thrown into the water while dressed produced a sensation identical to one he had experienced as a child. For an instant, the present became the past: the hospital pool became the Club Loreto pool in Bilbao, he was five rather than thirty-six, and the figure he had associated with the push was no longer Carolo Bocanegra but his schoolmate Chemari. The bodily resemblance between the two experiences opens the path to a memory that had not been available to him as a coherent account.

Recognition, Confession, and Significance

A few days later, Ignacio told Alice Gould what he had already told the doctors. The account places them together over lunch at Pepe el Tuerto’s tavern, with a large jug of water between them. Both had received declarations of health that day, and they had chosen to celebrate together. The water, formerly the visible focus of Ignacio’s terror, stands present as a witness to his changed relation to it.

His recollection turns on the image of a drowned boy weighted by large skates. That detail brings Chemari’s death into focus for Ignacio: he is sure the dead schoolmate was Chemari Goñi, and he is sure that he was the one who killed him. The narrative establishes the force of this conviction as part of Ignacio’s recovered memory; it does not provide a separate reconstruction that settles every circumstance of the childhood death. His confession is therefore a recognition of responsibility as he understands it, not an externally corroborated account of the precise mechanics of the drowning.

Ignacio explains the phobia as a substitute for the anguish he could not bear. As a child, he had tried not to think about having killed a schoolmate, while something in him continued to press the hidden knowledge toward awareness. When he came close to discovering the truth around the age of thirty, he believes, fear of water arose as a defense: one anguish displaced another. Consciousness had learned not to know, and the phobia helped preserve that avoidance. Once he knew what it had been protecting him from, he felt, the fear had become unnecessary.

The sequence gives the phobia a double narrative function. It conceals the childhood trauma from Ignacio while continually returning him to its central element: water. Its end is not achieved through gradual exposure or an abstract act of will, but through an involuntary repetition of the scene, when the sensations of the adult pool unlock the memory associated with Chemari. The body first reenacts terror, then swims; only afterward can Ignacio give the change a story. Dolores’s account of the diagnosis and prognosis makes that recovery legible as the outcome Arellano anticipated: the phobic symptom recedes when its cause becomes known.