There are sounds that disappear the moment they cease, and others that find somewhere to remain for years, waiting for a moment when your guard is down to return with the same intensity as the first time. I remember almost none of the words from that afternoon’s phone call. When I try to reconstruct the conversation, the sentences come back incomplete and out of order, unable to explain what was happening. The only thing that never lost its clarity was the sound of the water.
At first, I thought there was a problem with the connection. The telephone carried a confused murmur of voices, hurried footsteps and doors opening and closing, until gradually I began to distinguish something else: a deep, constant sound that eventually seemed to cover everything. It took only a few seconds to understand that what I was hearing was not interference, but water.
A lot of water.
Only then did someone manage to make themselves heard.
“Alfredo… the hotel is flooding.”
I do not remember answering immediately. The first thing I did was look out of the window, a gesture as absurd as it was inevitable. On the other side of the glass, the day was unfolding with bewildering calm. People walked along the pavement, a few cars waited for the traffic light to change, and there was nothing in the sky to suggest that, more than two thousand kilometres away, the building I had walked through every day for so many years was facing one of the most critical situations in its history.
My mind did what the mind of almost any manager accustomed to solving problems would probably have done: it began looking for an explanation before looking for a solution. I thought of a burst pipe, then a leak in the heating system and, as I continued asking questions, I walked through the hotel from memory as though I could still move along its corridors. I entered through the lobby, crossed the front desk, climbed the stairs and made my way along the second-floor corridor, trying to discover, room by room, the exact place where everything had begun. I was convinced that if I could understand what had broken, I would also find a way to stop it.
On the other end of the telephone, no one could answer me. Each question hung there between new voices, slamming doors and that sound that seemed to occupy every space left in the conversation. For several minutes, I continued to believe that the problem lay somewhere above the ceiling, without realising that what truly mattered was no longer happening there. It was happening several metres below, among people I still could not see and decisions that were already being made without waiting for me to intervene.
Those first few minutes were strange because questions stopped being useful. Every time I tried to put what was happening into some kind of order, reality seemed to move faster than any answer. No one could stop to describe the scene to me; they had enough to do simply getting through it. For years, I remembered that call as a chaotic succession of voices and sounds, although now I think it could hardly have been otherwise when part of a building was beginning to come apart in front of the people trying to hold it together.
I never managed to reconstruct the entire scene. Everything I know about those minutes came later, through fragmented conversations in which each person carried away a different image. Someone remembered water falling from a light fitting as though the ceiling had begun to rain indoors. Someone else spoke of a family coming out into the corridor with the children still wrapped in blankets. Others said that, for a while, the noise was so intense that it was difficult to hear one another even from only a few metres away. No single account could contain everything that had happened, but together they allowed me to imagine it.
Water had begun falling from different points on the second floor almost simultaneously. At first, someone thought it was an isolated leak, but it took only a moment to realise that this was neither a drip nor a minor leak. The ceilings began releasing water as though the roof had suddenly decided to empty itself over the rooms. The carpets stopped absorbing it almost immediately, and the water began running along the corridors, following the slope of the floor, entering open rooms and slipping beneath closed doors. Within minutes, sixteen rooms had been affected.
At moments like these, hotels are rather like ships. While everything remains calm, each department seems to operate separately and it is easy to forget that they are all part of the same structure. When water appears, those divisions cease to matter and the entire building seems to become a single body trying to stay afloat.
Guests came out into the corridor without fully understanding what was happening. Some watched water falling onto the beds; others tried to move their luggage or gather up the clothes they had laid out for the following day. Amid the confusion, the receptionists left the front desk and began moving them to the first floor. One accompanied an older couple down the stairs while another searched the screen for rooms that could still be used. Keys changed hands as spaces became available, and explanations were given while everyone kept moving.
No one could remember afterwards who had been the first to leave their usual task to help somewhere else. At some point, almost without anyone noticing, it stopped mattering which department anyone belonged to. A waiter crossed the corridor with a mattress resting on his shoulders. A cook came down the stairs holding a television against his chest. Open suitcases, pillows, clothes still hanging from their hangers and anything else that could be removed before the water reached it came out of the rooms. While some housekeepers prepared the available rooms on the first floor, others spread linen over furniture and carpets to contain what was still falling.
The accounts never matched completely. Some remembered instructions being shouted, while others insisted there had been almost no need to speak. Perhaps both were true. What no one could say was who had organised all that movement or at what point each person understood where another pair of hands was needed. The emergency had found the hotel with no time for meetings, explanations or detailed instructions, and yet people kept stepping into the places that needed filling as the situation unfolded.
I was still holding the telephone two thousand kilometres away. On the other end, I could hear doors opening, requests for towels, footsteps moving back and forth along the corridors and voices barely managing to rise above the constant sound of the water. I was trying to understand which part of the building had been affected, how many guests needed to be moved and what could be done to stop it, although every new question seemed to arrive too late. While I was looking for a cause, people at the hotel were already moving guests and removing furniture and luggage from the rooms.
Every so often, I asked the same question again.
“Do you know where it’s coming from yet?”
Not yet.
The explanation came after the water had stopped falling and the hotel was slowly beginning to recover its rhythm. All afternoon, we had imagined burst pipes, leaks in the heating system and every kind of possible fault. The cause turned out to be far stranger than any of our theories. An exceptional combination of snow and wind had forced snowflakes into the roof ventilation ducts, where they accumulated until the warmth of the building began to melt them. The water then found the only path available and eventually poured onto the ceilings of the second floor.
Later, we modified the design of those vents and the problem never occurred again. For several days, carpets were dried, installations checked, materials replaced and work carried out so that the rooms could be occupied again. Little by little, the hotel began to look as it had before. The guests continued their journeys, doors closed again and the corridors recovered the familiar sounds of suitcases and housekeeping trolleys.
For a long time, I thought the explanation for that flood was the most important part of the story. But the years did their work. I stopped remembering the direction of the wind, the path the water had taken inside the ceiling and even the moment when the rooms were occupied again. The other images, however, never disappeared. I did not see them that afternoon; I pieced them together from the memories of those who were there, and yet they remain in my mind more clearly than the explanation of what happened itself.
Whenever someone asks me about that flood, the first thing that returns is a telephone ringing more than two thousand kilometres away and the certainty, formed much later, that while I was still trying to understand what was happening, everyone at the hotel was already taking care of what was in front of them.