‘How was it different?’
‘Well, for a start it was in daylight. The only time La Presencia has been made visible in broad daylight. And it wasn’t an adult. It was a boy. An English boy. He was on holiday here. He nearly drowned. He swam too far out from the beach, and no one could get to him. His father saw him but too late. He went under. He was under for seven minutes. He was dead, effectively…’
I thought of Daniel. I thought of him lying still on the tarmac. I thought of the red of the bike and the blood.
‘So what happened?’
‘Light,’ Alberto answered. ‘That’s what the witnesses saw. Including the boy’s father. They saw a glowing circle of blue light below the water. And then after the seven minutes the boy came to the surface. He was alive.’
‘And what happened to the boy?’
Alberto shrugged. ‘He went back to England. And whatever talents it had given him, he kept them quiet…But that was a totally different situation. You were chosen, Grace. You weren’t in danger.’
I sighed. ‘I don’t understand why we need to go to church.’
‘There is a manuscript in the church. A very important manuscript. Francisco Palau’s. A very important man. He was a priest and a…’ He mimed holding a hood, as he said the word. ‘…monk…who came to the island, and he often spent time in a cave in Es Vedrà….’
As the path became rockier, I slowed down. The tyres growled over the red dirt and stones. I remembered Rosella from the grocery store telling me about the religious hermit. Years and years ago there was a hermit who lived there. In a cave. A religious man. A priest. He wrote about lights he saw in the water. Lights that lit up the whole sea.
Alberto smiled. He knew I’d made the connection. The gap in his teeth like the entrance to a mysterious cave. And then we slowed to a halt and he pointed up ahead to a gorgeous white cubic church. ‘Mira, Grace. We are here. Isn’t it beautiful?’
Church
It was true.
The church in Es Cubells was a thing of clean geometric beauty. With neat lateral buttresses on either side of its cubic body, it was whitewashed to the point it dazzled. Utterly simple in its design, perched above the sea, it was transcendentally calming and I could have stared at it for hours in the afternoon sun.
As I got out of the car, Alberto was heading to a bush. ‘I really need to, how do you say in English…drain the anaconda.’
I turned away from him. ‘No one says that. Literally no one.’
‘Water my weasel, you know?’ he continued, unabashed.
He was as close to a beast as I have ever seen a man. Once he finished urinating he came to join me on the dusty path.
Before we reached the church door, I noticed a lizard by my feet. It was totally still, the way only lizards can be, and I sensed its paradoxical state of mind. Just as some languages have words others don’t have, some species have emotions humans have never known. A lizard, for instance, always seems to be in a simultaneous state of constant alertness and deep relaxation, totally in tune with its surroundings, both terrified of it all and in quiet love with it all.
You are approaching, it told me, mysteriously. You are nearly there.
‘See?’ said Alberto. ‘You now understand the thoughts of animals. That’s a gift, yes?’
‘And yet, Mr Ribas, I still don’t know your thoughts. Isn’t that interesting? Do you have more to hide than a reptile?’
‘Man, you say that like it is an insult to be compared to a reptile. Reptiles are the truest, most noble and purest of all creatures. They are full of ancient wisdom. They understand how to be. When they tell you something they are telling you many, many, many things. Their thoughts are more precise than a haiku. They…’
He stood there a considerable while, there on the hot dusty ground, in that baking shadeless heat, giving me a lecture on lizards, his accent veering from Spanish to American to a kind of English to something uniquely Alberto. And no amount of extra-sensory perception could keep me focused on what he was saying. So I stared into the distance. Beyond the cliff, beyond the juniper bushes, to the sea and its mysteries. Eventually the words stopped and he started walking again.
I knew the door was locked even before I touched it. So I told him. ‘It’s locked.’ He probably had known it too. He frowned at the door. In fact, it was more a glower. I realised, to much amusement, that he was trying – really, really trying – to open the door with his mind.
‘Listen,’ he bumbled, ‘I used to be able to do locks quite easily. But recently, my talent’s faded.’ He looked sheepish about this. As if there was something he wanted to tell me. ‘It makes us more powerful until it doesn’t. It doesn’t make us immortal.’ The tiniest crack in his defences. I could almost get inside his psyche but not quite. He sighed. Snapped out of it. ‘But trust me, this is the most important bit of research there is to do, and you are the only person who can do it, so we need to open the door…’
‘So I am here to do your research?’
‘Yes,’ he said. Then rethought. He frowned. Cross with himself. He scrunched up his face from more than the sun. ‘No. The research is important, of course. Because La Presencia is important. But there is no point me telling you what I know because I don’t even know what I know.’
‘But you told me I would know by now. I would know everything about what happened to Christina. That was the whole reason I met you on the beach at midnight.’
He stuck out his bottom lip. ‘Oh. Really? I thought it was my magnetic charm.’
‘Funnily enough: no.’
‘Oh.’ He looked so crestfallen I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
‘I went diving because I wanted answers. You promised answers. And all I have is “she disappeared at sea”…’
‘I thought it was going to tell you,’ he said. ‘La Presencia.’
He looked at his watch. ‘We need to be quick. We need to be out of there before they open the church.’ He batted away a single-minded mosquito. ‘Listen, yes, I am using you, Grace. I am using you. I admit this. You have an immense talent, and you can help. Christina wasn’t able to access the mind of the dead, of Francisco Palau, but you might…’
‘Is that why she died? She wasn’t of use to you any more? She couldn’t help you with your research?’
He looked infuriated. He had the scowl our old Pomeranian, Bernard, used to give every time we clipped him back on the lead.
‘You are a very stupid person,’ he grumbled.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am well aware of that. I am the stupidest woman in the world. If I wasn’t, I would never have gone to you for answers.’
I was in such a huff I was walking off. Have you ever done that? Been so angry you have to start walking? And then once you start you have to carry on like you mean it, even though you really just wish you had stayed still and taken a deep breath instead? Because there was nowhere to go except the edge of a cliff or a baking hot car you were pleased to be out of?
