‘You are a woman of mathematics. You want answers, don’t you?’
‘Yes. I want real answers.’
There were stones that bled easier than Alberto bled answers. But I sensed he was getting there. So I stayed with my back to him, staring at the sea and the bushes.
‘Christina disappeared in the ocean on a moonless night. Do you know who else did that? Francisco Palau…And there are three hundred pages full of his own handwriting in this church. And yes, I want to know about La Presencia. Of course I do. But researching La Presencia is the exact same thing as researching what happened to Christina. Now, please. If you can free lobsters, you can turn locks. Let’s get inside.’
The Belief in More
Inside, the air was cool. The floor was shining tiles. Squares tilted forty-five degrees into diamonds. Neat pews well-spaced apart along the nave with a wide middle aisle. There was a tranquillity that made me wish I’d been to church more in recent years.
I think I had been playing hard to get. With God, I mean. I wanted Him to come to me. To prove He was there. But now I realised it doesn’t work like that. We make our own faith just as we make our own stories. We believe in what we want to believe, but it takes effort.
‘I came here as a boy,’ said Alberto. ‘My mother was a very religious woman. I have sat through a service in every church on the island. But mainly we went to the church in Santa Agnès de Corona. Our village. We lived across the road from it. I used to have a pet toad. A speckled Balearic green toad. I called him El Capitán. I used to take him with me. In my pocket.’
‘Poor toad,’ I said.
‘Sí. Es verdad. I have spoken with toads since and they have little time for sermons. Or pockets.’
‘Are you religious?’ I asked him.
‘I think so. But I believe if there is a god you don’t get to them by a church. You get there by the ocean or the forest. I learned more from the toad.’
I tutted at him, on behalf of my Catholic upbringing. ‘I like churches,’ I said. ‘They are still and silent and serious. You could learn something from them.’
Aside from a large elaborate portrait of Christ above the altar, the church was simple, minimal, so it didn’t take us long to locate the manuscript. It was in a glass cabinet beside the font of holy water not far from the entrance. It was the only thing on display in the cabinet. Needless to say, it was locked, but as with the door I opened it with alarming ease. I felt the latch in my mind, and I only had to confidently imagine it moving for it to move. And then I opened the cabinet and held this yellowed manuscript, bound with ribbons pulled through needle holes along the sides of the pages. The manuscript that Francisco Palau had written, according to the date at the top of the first page, in October 1855.
‘Put your fingers on the words,’ Alberto said. ‘Read them but put your fingers on them too. That is how you do it…It is called psychometry. The ability to understand a mind of someone just by touching something they touched. It is a very deep and intense kind of mind-reading that can even cross the line between the living and the dead. You don’t just read the person’s mind – it involves many senses – you almost are them. At that place in time. It is time travel, effectively…’
‘Could you,’ I said, ‘just please be quiet?’
‘Stare at the words,’ Alberto whispered.
‘Shh.’
So anyway, I stared at the words. The old priest’s account, written in an old-fashioned Catalan, of his arrival in Ibiza from the mainland. His exile here.
His writing was elegant, the letters leaning slightly backwards, windswept, struggling with the speed of his pen. As if he knew he was on borrowed time.
‘No,’ said Alberto. ‘Not this part. Flick to the end. Flick to his final trip to Es Vedrà.’
I ran my finger over the words with my fingertips, waiting for the psychometry to begin, or – more scientifically – for my biophotonic-induced capabilities to be activated.
As I closed my eyes I could hear, faintly, the sound of the sea. It was hard to know if this was the actual sea, the one very close by, lapping onto the beach at the foot of the cliff. Or if it was the memory of the sea. The sea always sounds like the sea, after all.
‘Can you hear the sea?’ I asked Alberto.
‘No,’ he told me. ‘I can’t hear it at all. The actual sea is too quiet to hear. So you are hearing something else. You are hearing somewhere not here. I am right beside you, but you will leave me for a while. You will encounter another person in another time. Just for a little while. Buen viaje!’
His words faded into nothing.
The sea became rough. I could hear it crashing against rocks, and I realised I was letting go of the fixtures of time and identity, moving into the fluidity of pure and all-encompassing life. I had a moment of brief release, like taking off a tight helmet, and then I was somewhere and someone else entirely.
Mansions
So, Maurice, of all the things that happened to me up until this point, I believe this was the most peculiar. And because of that, I think it is also the hardest to convey to you. I suppose, like all the talents I had, it was an extreme exaggeration of something I had already experienced in my normal life. For instance, whenever I read an autobiography – Maya Angelou or Anne Frank or Richard Feynman or whomever – I feel a kind of empathy, where a tiny part of me becomes for a short while the person I am reading about.
I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion.
All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.
Now imagine a dial, like a volume dial, but an empathy one. And if the experience of reading a normal book turns that empathy dial up from a one to a two or a three, then the experience for me of looking at and touching Francisco Palau’s handwritten manuscript was the shifting of the dial to ten. It was a complete and utter immersion.
I wasn’t just experiencing the words written. I was experiencing the life around them. The words were just seeds that grew a sudden full-sensory experience. The church I was standing in disappeared completely. I was back – if back is really the word – in 1855. I felt the hot wind on my face. I heard the sea.
The Third Person
I was gone.
I was him.
I was he.
I was the third person.
The Falling Moon
I was Francisco Palau. Of course, I was technically still Grace Winters, and I was standing in a church, but in this psychometric trance I could feel everything he felt. I had no agency, I couldn’t change this past experience I was observing, but at the same time I felt like more than just a witness. I felt like I was fully inside his mind and time, sitting in a rowing boat between Cala d’Hort and Es Vedrà. But it was still easy to tell that this was not the Cala d’Hort of the twenty-first century. There were no buildings on the coastline. No huts along the beach. No restaurant. No other boats. No Atlantis Scuba. Just beach and rocks and nature.
