Vacaciones de Navidad

Vacaciones de Navidad marks the interval between a childhood encounter that unsettles Ignacio Urquieta and the discovery that Chemari Goñi has drowned. The break interrupts the ordinary school calendar, but it also leaves Ignacio with a suspicion he dismisses—one that will remain unexamined for thirty years.

Position in the Narrative

The holiday period follows an episode in which Ignacio, then a schoolboy, returns home crying after Chemari has left without saying goodbye. Ignacio tells his mother that he fell into the water near the harbor, giving her an account involving children fishing and a mossy platform. The next day, wary of meeting Chemari on the tram, he walks to school instead. The precaution proves unnecessary: Chemari does not come to class.

The Break and Chemari’s Death

Chemari is also absent on the day the first-term grades are issued, when the Christmas holidays begin. After the break, Ignacio returns to school and learns that Chemari Goñi has died by drowning. Employees discover his body at the bottom of the Club Loreto pool as they are preparing to empty it; he is still wearing his roller skates.

Ignacio is horrified by the news but feels little grief, since he did not love Chemari. A terrible doubt briefly occurs to him, then he rejects it. He settles on the likelihood that Chemari had returned to the club to skate during the days he missed school before the holidays. The account preserves both the suspicion and the quick explanation with which Ignacio contains it.

Delayed Significance

The holiday break separates the last school days Ignacio shares with Chemari from the discovery of his death, leaving the boy to reconstruct what may have happened in the intervening days. Ignacio does not think about the matter again until thirty years later, when several patients at Nuestra Señora de la Fuentecilla Psychiatric Hospital form a paradoxical conspiracy against him. In retrospect, the break is not merely a pause in the school year: it is the gap in which Chemari disappears and an unresolved doubt takes shape.