Los peces en el río
Los pacientes del doctor García“Los peces en el río” is the Christmas carol that threads Adrián Gallardo Ortega’s memories of home into a scene of isolation at the palace of Pokrovskaya. Its refrain, remembered as neighbors singing that the fish drink in the river, makes the village’s winter celebration feel both enduring and painfully out of reach.
The Carol in the Village
The song belongs to a shared Christmas ritual in La Puebla de Arganzón. Adrián imagines neighbors gathered in the square, singing as they do year after year that the fish drink from the river, swallowing endlessly the water that can never quench their thirst. The carol’s familiar repetition gives the celebration a continuity that stretches across successive Christmases; its impossible image of unrelieved thirst also echoes, without resolving, the deprivation of Adrián’s own present.
Memory and Distance
The memory opens from a stark contrast. Adrián is alone, half-naked and shivering in the Russian palace, while his family would be gathered at home: his mother busy in the kitchen, his sisters around her, and his father selecting wine in the cellar. He imagines the scent of mint in the broth and a lamb roasting in the oven. Outside, neighbors sing in the cold, perhaps as snow falls. The scene is imagined rather than witnessed, but its concrete domestic details make the carol a passage back to a world of family and seasonal belonging.
A Refrain Against Exile
For Adrián, the village’s snow had once been a gentle companion: it decorated trees and rooftops, promised a prosperous year, closed the school, and drew children into play before they returned to the warmth of a fire. The snow beyond the palace windows is different—ice on fogged glass, surrounding him in a foreign landscape. Against that cold, the song recalls the Christmas he cannot share and the mother who would be missing him most. The remembered refrain therefore holds both communal familiarity and personal absence: the village continues to sing, while Adrián remains far away from the home that gives the song its meaning.
