{"id":171546,"date":"2025-08-27T10:00:31","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T14:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171546"},"modified":"2025-08-27T04:54:35","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T08:54:35","slug":"salt-statues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/08\/27\/salt-statues\/","title":{"rendered":"Salt Statues"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Mariana Enriquez.<\/p><\/div>\n

Carhu\u00e9 Cemetery
\n<\/em>Buenos Aires Province, <\/em>Argentina, 2009<\/em><\/p>\n

The concrete Christ designed by Francisco Salamone, severe like all his works are, emerged some time ago from the ultrasalty waters of the flooded Epecu\u00e9n Lagoon. Now people leave offerings to it, partly in thanksgiving that the flood didn\u2019t reach the town of Carhu\u00e9, partly to pray that the town of Villa Epecu\u00e9n will once again become the successful tourist resort that it was for decades, before it turned into the ruin it is today, a town haunted by trees so dry and salt-coated they look like they\u2019re made of ash. White trees, ghost trees, triffid trees with their roots exposed, trees that look like spiders on an endless march.<\/p>\n

I remember photographs of that Christ on the cross. The water had risen to cover his feet, and all around him were dead, half-submerged trees. The trees are still there, but the crucifix was moved a few meters closer to the city; it\u2019s now on a wooden platform that you access by a ladder from the beach in front of the lake.<\/p>\n

The Christ was once in the cemetery, which has also reemerged from the floodwaters; I can see it in the distance. A cemetery that\u2019s low to the ground, pretty modest for Buenos Aires Province, where even the graveyards of remote towns have domed mausoleums that look like small cathedrals.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s cold. Our host and guide\u2014I\u2019m traveling with Paul, my husband\u2014is the son of the man who built that platform for Salamone\u2019s Christ.<\/p>\n

The town is modest, with a certain Patagonian ambience, the charm of the plains, but there is something in the air and the people here: it\u2019s the almost-palpable residue of collective trauma. What happened was more or less this: the towns of Carhu\u00e9 and Epecu\u00e9n, in the province of Buenos Aires, are on the coast of the Western Chain Lagoons, a closed hydrological system\u2014meaning one without drainage\u2014made up by the Alsina, Cochic\u00f3, del Monte, del Venado, and Epecu\u00e9n Lagoons. Several streams empty into this system, and, basically, the water didn\u2019t have anywhere to go, it had no way out. For a time\u2014paradoxically\u2014the lagoons started to dry up; then the streams were directed in a way that would maintain the water level. The anthropologist Alejandro Balazote, a specialist in the social impact of flooding in the region, explains in his 1997 paper \u201cAguas que no has de beber\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

The Florentino Ameghino collector channel was built in 1979, is 92 kilometers long, 30 meters wide and 2.5 meters deep. The project cost $30 million. The lack of complementary regulation work meant that in periods of high rainfall, such as those that occurred in the early 1980s, flooding began to occur, though the first floods had occurred in 1977. As a solution, a \u201cplug\u201d was built in the Ameghino channel at the Huascar stream, but the force of the currents that flowed through the channel repeatedly destroyed it. [\u2026] The system of chained lagoons is endorheic, since it lacks any natural or artificial outlet. Because of this, water removal only occurred (until the pumping system was set up) through evaporation or soil absorption. In just a few years, we went from a frightening lack of water to an excess, with tremendous social, environmental and economic consequences. But this was due not only to the change in rainfall patterns, but also to a lack of foresight on the part of the agencies responsible. From 1980 to 1985, no work was carried out to regulate the flow of the Ameghino channel.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 1985, when nearly five million hectares of Buenos Aires Province flooded, Epecu\u00e9n Lagoon overflowed, completely covering the tourist town that had existed since 1921. That town had been frequented by your run-of-the-mill sightseeing tourists, but it also attracted crowds because of the supposed healing properties of its water, which contained almost three hundred and fifty grams of salt per liter, an enormous amount that makes the lake one of the most saline in the world.<\/p>\n

Most of Epecu\u00e9n\u2019s inhabitants resettled in Carhu\u00e9, a town about twelve kilometers away. Villa Epecu\u00e9n has almost entirely reemerged from the water by now, and its remains are like twisted white stalks, the trees and buildings all corroded by that miraculous salt. More than a bombed-out city, which is the most common comparison for these ruins, Villa Epecu\u00e9n looks to me like a city devoured, a city chewed to its bones.<\/p>\n

Our guide takes us to the cemetery, and the route leads us across and down the beach. He tells us that when the water was still high, he used to kayak to the domes and crosses that rose above its surface.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was never scared,\u201d he says proudly.<\/p>\n

Those crosses and domes aren\u2019t there anymore. In a crazy, incomprehensible move, the Carhu\u00e9 authorities decided to destroy everything above the water\u2019s surface; they made the cemetery disappear. When someone looked at the lagoon, they would no longer see those macabre domes and crosses rising from the water. There were some who opposed the action, but they were in the minority. Our guide, for example, was against it. Plus, he thinks that it was done in secret (he talks about it as though it had been done secretively). However, other inhabitants assure us that the population agreed, and there is even mention of a referendum.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember how you could hear the pounding at night when they were knocking down the mausoleums and crosses,\u201d says our host.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey knocked them down at night?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, it was night, but you could hear everything. Out here, just imagine \u2026 I heard that noise with my dad while we were building the platform for the crucifix.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who knows what madness made those people decide that the monuments emerging from the water needed to be destroyed.<\/p>\n

The cemetery had been in existence since 1890, and back then it had large monuments, sumptuous mausoleums, the kind that were common among the rich families of the Pampas. The flooding began on November 10, 1985. On November 17, Villa Epecu\u00e9n was evacuated, and no one knew if the water would reach as far as the cemetery. It did.<\/p>\n

They started to evacuate the cemetery in December, but by then it was only accessible by water. People were asking anyone who would dare to get their dead family members out of the flooded city. Those \u201cextractors\u201d worked to get the coffins out, and then the coffins were taken to warehouses or stored in trucks or even in the garages of houses. It wasn\u2019t easy to find space for those bodies in the overcrowded neighboring cemeteries.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut why didn\u2019t they want the cemetery monuments to be visible?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n

Our guide shrugs. \u201cIt was a tough time. Coffins were floating up. Some people thought tourists would stop coming because \u2026 because, well, the water had lost a little of the salt concentration with the influx from the other lagoons, and, to top it off, if people thought the water had bodies floating in it \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The water receded between 2007 and 2008. Now, in 2009, the town can be accessed and cleanup can begin. New complaints have also surfaced. Questions about how this destruction was allowed to happen. How to preserve what remains.<\/p>\n

At the cemetery entrance, a municipal employee takes down the names of everyone who goes in. He doesn\u2019t say why, but he\u2019s keeping a record. He is very friendly and his demeanor is apologetic, but he insists, asking for first and last names and an ID number. We plan to take pictures but we don\u2019t mention that, and he doesn\u2019t explicitly forbid it.<\/p>\n

The cemetery is still surrounded by water, but we can tell that cleanup has begun. The paths are clear, and a few families have revived their graves with flowers and tributes (there will be many more in the months to come). Like the ruins of Epecu\u00e9n, like everything the corrosive water touches, the cemetery is bright white and barren.<\/p>\n

The mutilation of the niches and mausoleums is obvious. Whole levels are missing, knocked down with hammers (to talk about this, people use and repeat the verb bajar<\/em>, meaning “to lower” or “to take down”). Why did they think the place would never reemerge?<\/p>\n

Everything that was iron is now rust. The ashen trees don\u2019t look solid, and it seems strange that the wind hasn\u2019t blown them away. There\u2019s something that looks like cloth hanging from some of the crosses, and I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s an effect of the salt or petrified muck; it looks like they\u2019re wrapped in shrouds. All the shorter graves are intact, though moldy. Are they all empty? There\u2019s no way to know. Almost none of them have plaques or metal photos; maybe the salt has torn them off and swallowed them. All that remains is concrete and marble.<\/p>\n

Everywhere you look there are pieces of statues, and no one knows which tomb or mausoleum they belong to: headless virgins, wingless angels, handless Christs. The passages through niches with bricks exposed are full of debris, and you can\u2019t walk down them. This is the fallout of the nocturnal demolition that was carried out by boat. Some of the destroyed statues must have been atop mausoleums, around the domes. Now they\u2019re crushed amid the rubble. One little angel has its whole body but is missing its arms: twisted iron rods protrude from its shoulders.<\/p>\n

We move through the area quickly. We want to see the Salamone slaughterhouse, a building from the thirties that\u2019s near here. The problem is that everything is closed off because Roland Joff\u00e9, director of The Mission<\/em>, is filming scenes for his movie There Be Dragons<\/em>\u2014specifically, a sequence that takes place during the Spanish Civil War.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t get close.<\/p>\n

Our host, however, has a secret weapon: his maternal grandfather, Pablo Novak, the famous, last, and only resident of Villa Epecu\u00e9n. This man, who is over eighty years old, lives in the abandoned town in a well-equipped house with his dogs. His friends visit him there. He doesn\u2019t want to leave, and besides, he\u2019s famous now: at least twice a year he receives journalists and guides them through the ruins, which he knows by heart, remembering exactly what was in each place, where the pools were, where that hotel was, the restaurant, the bakery \u2026<\/p>\n

Don Pablo is royalty and he does what he wants, so he takes us to the movie set (the crew members already know and adore him), where we watch the arrival of catering, and then, with some apprehension, a few explosions: What if they damage Salamone\u2019s monument to the bovine pampa, with its huge capital letters that read MATADERO<\/small> (“slaughterhouse”) and its tower shaped like a knife handle? Does it really look like a building from the thirties? It reminds me more of a set piece from Flash Gordon.<\/em><\/p>\n

The slaughterhouse, of course, is spectacular. There, surrounded by stunted trees with visible roots that make them look like crawling bugs, the feeling is not so much that you\u2019re on another planet but that you\u2019re in a different time. Maybe a postnuclear future, a sort of ancient future.<\/p>\n

We go to drink some mat\u00e9 at Don Pablo\u2019s house. He tells us that when the cemetery flooded, coffins floated up to his house regularly. \u201cLike little boats,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou weren\u2019t scared by that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy would it scare me? It wasn\u2019t pleasant, I\u2019ll give you that. I just went and let people know that another dead person had come, that\u2019s all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat people?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe firefighters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course. One of Don Pablo\u2019s dogs, named Patac\u00f3n, wags his tail. Don Pablo doesn\u2019t want to relocate to Carhu\u00e9. He has lived and worked in Villa Epecu\u00e9n his whole life; his family, he says, helped build this town, and he wants to live out his old age four blocks away from the ruins. There\u2019s no convincing him otherwise, his grandson assures us. And why try? The man doesn\u2019t seem sad or melancholic. He keeps busy. He doesn\u2019t want his legs to stiffen, he says, and that\u2019s what will happen if he sits down with his daughters in Carhu\u00e9 to watch TV.<\/p>\n

People bring him croissants, invite him to lunch, and he rides around on his bike like a teenager. Smiling, his cap always on, Don Pablo is a guardian. He is the joyful spirit of lost summers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This essay is adapted from a chapter of<\/em> Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave<\/a> by Mariana Enriquez, to be published by Hogarth in September. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mariana Enriquez is the author of the novel<\/em> Our Share of Night\u00a0and three story collections<\/em>,\u00a0A Sunny Place for Shady People, Things We Lost in the Fire,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>The Dangers of Smoking in Bed,\u00a0which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Megan McDowell has translated many of the most important Latin American writers working today. Her translations have won numerous prizes, including the National Book Award, and have been nominated for the International Booker Prize four times.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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