This was true. This was all true. But for some reason it was never part of the memory.
‘You had a whole life ahead of you. It was a waste. I think of you every single day, Daniel.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like this. You have nothing to feel guilty about. No more than anyone else.’
‘I miss you so much.’
He scrunched up his nose. ‘You miss me but don’t see me. You just see your own guilt. You just see versions of me as a grown-up that would probably never have existed.’
I had nothing to say to that, because it was true. Of course it was. There was only truth here.
‘You’re needed, Mum. You can be happy again. You don’t have to let things turn to sand. You were so happy, once upon a time. You can be that way again.’
Once upon a time.
‘It is deep inside me. The guilt. I was your mother. I should have protected you.’
‘I don’t want to be your guilt. I want to be your son. Please…it’s time…’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It really is.’
And then the blood started to disappear.
His large eyes and smiling face, the one that was always ready to change at any mood alteration, the one that crumpled like a spoon-smashed egg every time he cried. He looked as happy and healthy as he had done in the last school photograph.
‘You will remember me like this now. Not as a moment, but a person. You will know it wasn’t your fault. Now, please, go. You are pure now. You can be the signal that you heard about. You can save yourself and you can save others. They need you.’
And then he ran away, into the trees, and I stood there a second longer, as a solitary bluebird flew and danced in the air.
The Signal Can Happen Now
I opened my eyes. The tide was lapping at my hair.
I saw Sofía standing in Art’s way. She was talking to him.
Art looked distressed. Yes, that is the word. Distressed. Not angry, not cold, not villainous.
‘I’m…’
He never finished that sentence. The unsaid word an eternal mystery. But there was no time to ponder as he switched and stared with burrowing eyes at Sofía. He was about to do her harm. He knew that without her interference I would be dead by now.
She spoke with confidence. ‘This was all a mistake. I made a mistake. This island doesn’t want you.’ I saw her as a child helping her arthritic grandfather get out of a chair.
Art was about to hurt her. I couldn’t let it happen.
Alberto was beside me. ‘Grace, you are stronger now. It came to you. While you lay there. The signal can happen now. You can send it. You just have to realise how connected you are to all of it. To everything. You can do it, Grace.’
I remembered the paragraph he had written in La vida imposible.
This fisherman was called Joan Bonanova…He recounted to a journalist how he felt connected to every animal on Ibiza and managed to send them a signal. And others corroborated this report, saying they had seen animals act in a strange manner that night. How creatures of all species had acted as one…
‘Look, Grace…Look at the sea…It healed you.’
So I looked at the sea. In fact, everyone was now looking at the sea. Because once you saw it, it was impossible not to look at it.
It was glowing that impossible blue. Brighter and broader than ever. Pretty much all the way from the beach to Es Vedrà. And as with the first time I saw La Presencia’s glow, it was like staring at a feeling. But this time that feeling was stronger than ever. It was a hope so strong it became certainty.
‘I’ve seen this before,’ said Art, aghast. He was remembering the day La Presencia saved him and carried him back to this very beach. For a moment, he felt like he was eleven again.
I got to my feet, and I realised everything was different. I thought of Joan Bonanova himself. The fisherman saved by La Presencia. The one who wasn’t just in Alberto’s book but also Christina’s message. The one she had described as having had ‘such a pure soul, free from guilt and sin’. The one who sent a signal to every animal on the island to fight the fascist soldiers.
Without guilt and grief and pain to imprison me, I realised I was everywhere. I was we. I was the sum of infinities. I was in every mind. I was in every grain of sand. I was in every drop of water. The isolated fortress of me no longer existed. I was still me, but also I was everyone else. The way a one is still an entity to itself yet there in every other number. I was wide, wide open. There were no lines between myself and others, or between humans and animals, or animals and plants. Everything was just a connecting thread in life’s tapestry. I had an infinite power in that moment. A power granted to me by the ocean, by La Presencia. I wasn’t there to save the planet. I was the planet. Just as we are all the planet. The difference was that I was allowed right there to really feel it. It was like I had a telephone line to every creature on Earth.
And I was calling for help. I was indeed sending a signal.
‘What the fuck?’ Art wondered aloud.
And now of course he wasn’t talking about La Presencia’s light. He was talking about something that looked sublime and ridiculous all at once, the way miracles are inclined to do. He was talking about the sky full of birds.
I didn’t have to follow his stare, like everyone else did. I knew about the cormorants flying towards him, responding to my silent hope, their shining black wings beating with urgency, their long necks all forward at the same angle.
‘Cormorants,’ gasped Art, remembering his conversation with Sofía about how they nested on Es Vedrà.
But it wasn’t just them in the sky.
There were gulls too. A couple of kestrels, a lone falcon, and now – remarkably – a flamboyance of pink flamingos, who had only just recently migrated to the salt lakes in nearby Ses Salines for the summer. Their wings were even bigger than the cormorants’, beating hard in the sky, angled back like arrowheads.
I remembered the taxi driver telling me about them on my first day on the island. You must see them.
