In a beautiful, desolate place, the death of a grandfather brings together all the members of a family. Beside the reservoir that swamped their home almost fifty years before, and where Domingo's ashes will lie for eternity, each member of the family silently reflects on their relationship with him and the others, and on how exile marked all their lives. This novel is an ensemble narrative of lives in which the clock cannot be turned back, a kaleidoscopic, dramatic narrative in which the surface of the reservoir serves as a mirror. There is no single way of looking at water, but the sense of uprooting, of definitive exile, has, drop by drop, generation after generation, permeated this family. Perhaps because no place is more painful than the one you will never be able to return to except in memory or death. But what's important is to return, like Ulysses to Ithaca. It doesn't matter how or in what form.