The ferryman that he was facing was a tough-faced, alcohol-scented, godless man called Miquel. He had refused to row so late in the day, but Francisco had offered him three reales to make it worthwhile.
‘I am not like you, Father,’ Miquel told the priest, in Catalan. ‘I am a sinner. God doesn’t offer me the same protection. I could not stay there on that rock one single night and see morning.’
‘What is your meaning?’
‘There are things around Ibiza and Es Vedrà that are not in nature. Outside of God.’
‘There is nothing outside of God.’
‘Well, if these things are inside God, then God is to be feared.’
‘Feared, yes. But fear is just another route to Him. Another route to His love. It is there in the Book of Matthew. “So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known…And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” ’
Miquel absorbed this, deeply, as he dipped the oars back in the dark and softly swelling water. ‘Now I have another fear on top of the first one, Father.’
And Francisco had laughed, tightly, and said nothing more. Miquel was right. He wasn’t like him. He was lost, thought the priest, like so many were. A slave to fears, and all other impulses, an unholy jumble of varying superstitions still infecting them from the days of the Phoenicians, coupled with folkish credulities.
He contemplated that, of all the superstitious people on the island, the boatmen were the most resolute. Maybe it was that strangely concocted herb liqueur they all drank, a cask of which Miquel had at his feet. Maybe that fusion of alcohol and fennel and juniper and whatever else they put in it loaned them hallucinatory visions and feverish imaginings.
It seemed that the people of the Balearic Islands (he had been to Mallorca too, to work with the monks there) inhabited a reverse world, where the more fantastical a story, the more likely it was to be believed. But the native Ibicencos were particularly prone to such deliriums, and even had many festivals where various superstitions were fervently celebrated and honoured and featured a type of dancing around wells where men in red berets leaped into the air around bejewelled women to a cacophony of drums, flutes and castanets. He had a deep distaste of such ungodly things, which he tried his best to hide when in front of the locals.
But then: something.
The ferryman saw something in the water. Then Francisco saw it too. A glowing light. Some kind of reflection.
‘I thought there was no moon tonight,’ the priest said, sounding a little nervous.
He looked up and saw it in the sky. Some light object heading towards them. At first it was just a line of light, but then as it came closer to Earth it broadened into a bright sphere.
‘I think it is falling from the sky,’ said Miquel, dumbstruck. ‘The moon. I think the moon is falling from the sky.’
‘That is not the moon. It is too blue for a moon. That is something else. Its shape is changing.’
The light grew closer and closer. A glowing blueish white, a sphere narrowing into a thin, impossibly long rod of light that hit the water with barely an impact. And then suddenly it was gone. Into the water. But a moment later there was light again, deep underwater. A cloud of light, becoming a sphere, becoming a cloud again.
Miquel drank from his cask and then offered the drink to the priest, who gulped it back without hesitation.
1855
‘I felt you feel it.’ This was Alberto’s voice, shaking me out of the trance.
I was suddenly back in the church.
‘That was it arriving,’ he blurted, way louder than you are meant to speak in a church. ‘That was La Presencia reaching here. He saw it. He saw it in the sky. He didn’t write that he saw it arrive…He just wrote about lights in the water…Not them arriving.’ He was incredibly excited. ‘But he was there when it landed. He was there. It arrived here in 1855. This is incredible detail. This is a real breakthrough. I thought it might have arrived before then. I thought it might have been here since the time of the Phoenicians. But no. 1855. Eighteen. Fifty. Five…Do you know what that means?’
‘It means that I am your frustrated research assistant?’
‘No. No. No. It means it came for a reason. Like we thought. It came here just as our planet was going fucking loco, man. Wars, empires, railways, and the real start of this, you know, destruction for the environment.’ When he got animated his Spanish accent and grammar became more apparent. It was almost charming. ‘The 1850s was when the number of extinct species went…’ His hand became a rocket. He made the sound. ‘Four times as many species went extinct as the decade previous. It was the beginning of the end. The air was full of smoke in cities. Everyone coughing. You know. Human beings in this crisis. So you get all the great writers writing their great stuff because everything is turning to shit. Dickens and Flaubert and soon after our very own Mr Galdós. It was the start of the conservation movement. And then La Presencia arrives. A healing force…Why then? Is it not possible that it came to help us? That it came from Salacia – was sent by the Salacians – because they saw life in danger and wanted to preserve life? Go on…on…get to his other trips to Es Vedrà…’
And so I placed my fingers back on the text and I slipped once more into the past. Francisco Palau was visiting Es Vedrà again, climbing up towards his cave as the day began to die.
Salvation
Francisco must have been climbing on this steep path for well over an hour now, but he knew he wasn’t far from the cave. So he stopped there for a little while and absorbed the view and took his flask and sipped some water.
The sky was awash with colour.
Pink, purple, orange and gold decorating thin parallel streaks of cloud, like the ridges and furrows of some heavenly field. He clutched the beads of his rosary and silently offered a prayer of gratitude. He had been all over Spain, far beyond his native Catalonia. He had moved from place to place, due to war or hunger or persecution. He had known a lot of sky in his life, and many of his prayers were sent towards it. But nothing compared to this.
As a child on the farm, years before he was banished from the mainland, he would stare in wonder at the sun setting beside the small square church at Aitona, feeling a proximity to the One and Only Father Himself. Yet here the sky was something else. The beauty was overwhelming. The closeness to God had an intimacy that he could feel inside his chest. No cathedral had ever offered him such a feeling. It helped him breathe and gave him strength and made this journey possible. It would help sustain him through three days of meditation and observation and writing in the cave. It was almost enough to make him forget all the terror he had witnessed.
Looking out across the water, beyond the lower rock of Es Vedranell towards the cove he’d just travelled from, he caught sight of a low-flying cormorant. He loved cormorants and wished he had a better view. A striking, majestic, shining black wonder of a bird. He could just about see in the near-faded light the brown speck of the ferryman’s rowing boat too, safely moored on the sand beside the rocks at Cala d’Hort.
It was now that the priest noticed something moving by his feet.
A lizard.
Nothing unusual about that. It was the common black-and-green speckled kind he had often seen in Ibiza. The lizard paused for a moment, before scuttling away towards one of the rare hardy shrubs that clung to the rock.
But then there was another. Precisely the same. And another, and another. He tried to count them but lost track at eight. They were all heading in the same direction. Down. Away from where the priest was heading.
The last time he had been here he had spotted two goats. Maybe they had startled them. But he couldn’t see the goats now.
For a moment he felt an irrational twinge of fear.
It was doubly irrational, as one of the blessings of Ibiza, and presumably this adjacent islet too, was that there were no fearsome or deadly animals. No poisonous plants. No native snakes. God had made it a sanctuary of peace. A protected place.
The priest inwardly shook away his concern, let his flask hang by his side once more, and continued his journey towards the cave. He kept on looking for more signs of lizards, but they were nowhere to be seen. He did, however, see a falcon flying in circles overhead in the dying light.
