But then he caught a glimpse of it. In my thoughts. So I helped him on his way. ‘I saw someone in there who I recognised from the hospital. A doctor. An oncologist.’
He looked like he had been punched. Winded. He switched the music off. We stayed parked even as cars circled us, looking for a spot.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean to pry.’
He bit his lip. Agitated. Distraught.
‘It’s just I supposedly have extra-sensory powers beyond anyone,’ I went on, ‘and yet I can’t access a single thing about you. You are a closed door. I can’t see anything. I can understand a lobster or a lizard or a horse more than I can understand you. Why don’t you let me inside? I want to help. If something is wrong with you, I want to be there. As a…as a…as a friend. And I know there is more danger. Others will need to be protected. So I am staying. But I won’t be able to help if I don’t know who to trust. And I need to trust you.’
He sat there for a moment. He seemed to be weighing something up. A car beeped at us. Alberto leaned out the window and swore at the driver.
‘Okay,’ he said, calming down. ‘Before we see Marta I need to tell you something. I know a little roadside café on the way. A quiet place…They serve the most beautiful orange juice. Freshly squeezed.’
Unsipped Juice
We sat inside a basic roadside café, next to a broken pinball machine.
The wall was lined with posters for old club nights from the last century, the text in a hybrid of Spanish and English.
Ku presents Fantasy. Domingo 17 de julio de 1980.
Flower Power at Pacha. Fiesta de cierre, 1988.
Moondance at Space. Every Wednesday/Todos los miércoles, 1992.
I thought of all the wild parties that had taken place while me and Karl had been raising Daniel, in our tight little enclosed family world. When you have a child, the world slips away for a while. You become your own satellite planet and forget that other things exist unless you make an effort to look. That other lives, as important as your own, are happening all over the place. Some of them happening glamorously in Ibizan nightclubs.
Alberto, too, was staring at the posters.
‘Good times,’ he said, as we waited for our orange juice. ‘There was Pacha, of course. Basically a disco in a farmhouse. To this day it is still essentially a casa payesa. That was the place the jet set went to right from the start, when it was no more than a finca with a disco in the seventies. Then there was Ku. Which was pure excess. You know, when Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballé filmed their video for the song “Barcelona”, they did it at Ku because Ku was on an operatic scale. Ku was the place to be. Polysexual, glamorous, eclectic. David Bowie, Grace Jones, Mick Jagger…you name them, they were there. It was a beacon for every wild soul, every creative crackpot out there. This giant avant-garde disco in the hills in the middle of the island. Did you know these places used to be open-air? Ku was a kind of outdoor Studio 54. Amnesia was a little wilder, a little…looser. Just dancing under the stars right through the night. Hippies, film stars, Indian gurus, artists, slackers, musicians, writers, elegant people, scruffy people, those first ravers, gay and straight and everything in between before it all became such an industry…We used to go and drink and smoke some pot and take the magic mushrooms and dance next to the palm trees…’
‘You may not know this about me,’ I told him, surprised by my own impatience, ‘and I don’t mean to offend you, but I am not particularly interested in the detailed history of Ibizan nightclubs.’
Our orange juices arrived.
I knew it would taste ecstatic, so I decided not to sip it until Alberto actually got to the reason we were here. Maybe that is what I had been doing for too long. Choosing not to enjoy, denying myself a pleasurable life.
‘What about whales?’ he asked.
I wondered if he was ever going to talk about the vision of him and the doctor I had seen at the airport. The one that had kept me here. ‘Sorry?’
‘Yes. You are not interested in wild parties. So what about whales? Are you interested in them?’
And then I asked the question everyone probably asked him at some point in a conversation. ‘What are you on about, Alberto?’
The 52-Hertz Whale
‘There is a whale in the ocean,’ he told me, after a gulp of his juice.
‘There are lots of whales in the ocean.’
He nodded. ‘This whale is different. This whale is a very lonely whale.’
‘Oh. Poor whale.’
‘Do you know why he is lonely?’
I shrugged. ‘He hasn’t got an internet connection?’
He smiled his wide and wonky smile. ‘Kind of. It’s the sound of its call. Whales are big communicators. They call all the time, but it has to be the right frequency. But this whale uses a very unusual high frequency to make his calls. Fifty-two hertz. It is the world’s loneliest whale because no other whale understands calls at that frequency. It is a blue whale, and blue whales are much lower. Blue whales are the Barry White of marine mammals. Deep, deep, deep. So the poor high-pitched creature has to swim through the ocean all alone, finding it impossible to make friends and with no one to hear his call.’
He was smiling, but his eyes were glazed with sadness. ‘I was that whale. I was writing about incredible things, and no one was on my wavelength. No one understood me. They thought I was a joke. Like a high-pitched whale. Even my daughter Marta didn’t understand me for a while. But I stayed doing what I believed in. And this was before I even came into contact with La Presencia. I just knew. I was open-minded…’
I shook my head. ‘So what happened?’
‘What?’
‘To close your mind?’
He was insulted by this. He shrank back on his chair. He muttered something rude in Catalan that he forgot I could understand. ‘My mind is open. I accept the existence of more species than—’
‘I am not talking about that. I am not talking about species. I am talking about thoughts. I am talking about the wall you have built around yourself. Why have you shut yourself away?’
He knew what I was talking about. He knew that all I got was that grey-green sadness and his wide smiles of denial.
I pointed to a young couple getting off a hired moped at the petrol station across the road, heading to the cash machine outside the neighbouring CaixaBank.
‘I can read their minds as easy as anything. They both spent the day on luxurious loungers on the pale sands of Es Cavallet beach and ate grilled calamari and salted sea bass at El Chiringuito restaurant, where they both surreptitiously held eye contact with attractive strangers. Their relationship will dissolve two weeks after they return to Berlin. And they are a good hundred metres away. Yet you. You are right in front of me, and I don’t know anything.’
