He had also managed to ask me to check in on Marta, if I was staying in Ibiza. I told him I would.
‘Vive por mí,’ he told his daughter. He then looked at me and said it again. That was his last wish to us. Live for me.
Marta cried. Her partner, Lina, was back in Ibiza now, and they hugged for minutes as Marta sobbed into her shoulder. And then I was beckoned into the hug too, and so I joined them, and I felt Marta’s pain so sharp and real as her body convulsed. She felt it all. She didn’t flinch from the pain. She howled like a wolf under the moon in that sterile hospital, strangely echoing her father’s howl the first time I met him. Tender animals. And I silently underlined the promise I had just made to Alberto. I will be here for you, Marta. I will do everything I can. And we stayed there and just let her cry. Which is sometimes all you have to do.
Ashes
We scattered his ashes at sea, after dark. The water glowed a little. A soft throb of light coming from the seabed. I allowed myself an indulgent thought, that maybe La Presencia was taking him to Salacia anyway. Whether he liked it or not. Reconfiguring his atoms and sending him through the wormhole. Or maybe it was just saying goodbye, like we were.
We stayed in the boat a while. Marta had brought a little stereo and had made a playlist of songs that meant a lot to him. There was Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’, an absolutely gorgeous old Catalan song called ‘Per Una Cançó’ by Maria del Mar Bonet, ‘It’s My Life’ by Talk Talk, The Cure’s ‘The Last Day of Summer’, Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Landslide’, José Padilla’s ‘Adios Ayer’, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Beast Of Burden’ and a dance song called ‘Promised Land’, which Marta and Lina bopped to on the boat.
They both pulled me up onto my feet.
‘Come on, Grace,’ said Marta, her mind a whole universe of emotion. ‘Let’s dance.’
And we danced. The water was calm enough for me to keep my balance. And after the song ended, she turned to me and said: ‘I don’t want to forget him.’
‘You won’t,’ I told her. ‘I miss my son and my husband every day, but I see them clearer than ever. I remember the good times and I am grateful to have lived them.’
‘I love you, Grace. Thank you.’
And we hugged, and I felt a childhood memory of her father sailing her and her mother to Formentera, singing to her.
‘You should go,’ she said, knowing what my mind was seeing. ‘To Formentera. You would love it.’
I Happen
Marta and I have agreed to take it in turns to feed Nostradamus. Every other morning I get in the Fiat Panda and go and pour a load of oats into his bowl and he is as grateful as a goat can be. Which isn’t much, but it is something.
On my way there one morning I noticed something as I stepped out of the door. Not only that the plant – the Nolletia chrysocomoides – had grown and was in full bloom with the most exquisite yellow, heart-shaped flowers. But that there was another one further away, on the patio, which had grown through cracks in the tiles. And one a short way from that. And another, and another. Nine in total.
It had been a Tuesday.
Every Tuesday, by the way, I get the boat from Ibiza Town to Formentera and spend the day there, just as Marta recommended. Just to get away. The journey is less than half an hour so I have plenty of time even after feeding a goat. And nothing happens on Formentera. That is the whole point of it. Well, I mean, nothing too annoying happens. Of course, really, it is as happening as everywhere else. Air happens. Solitary cafés happen. Juniper bushes happen. Wheatfields happen. Sand dunes happen. Salt pans happen. Sheep happen. Lagoons happen. I happen.
Alberto wanted us all to live. And I am pleased to report, for good and bad, I feel alive. Here, a lucky guest on this fascinating and varied small island. It’s bittersweet, to be so present when so many people I care about are absent, including Alberto (even the scent of Hawaiian Tropic makes me think of him). But that is how we beat death. We beat death by living while we are here. Death may be infinite, but, as we know, infinity is a relative concept. We can create a bigger infinity out of life. By feeling. And every day I feel. I feel deeply and intensely and what I feel is gratitude. To Ibiza, to Spain, to the world, to people, to nature, to life, to the hidden forces of the universe, and it makes me want to carry on helping to protect and cherish every natural thing.
Bluebird
You said in your email that you were in the dark and you need light. Well, don’t rush it. It will come. Sometimes the light is there and we don’t realise it. People sail over La Presencia and its photonic forces every single day and never know. What feels impossible now won’t always be. But don’t think of the bad times as unrelated to the good. The dark is how we see the light. We need the contrast. We don’t see all the stars in the day, do we?
Speaking of stars, I had an interesting conversation with Marta yesterday.
She came round to help me with the garden. There is only a small patch of earth, but it is starting to look lovely. The once-extinct flowers were just the starting point. Marta wanted to help me. She said there was nothing more healing than gardening, and I think she is right. There is something about putting hands in the earth and trying to cultivate life that makes you feel elementally connected to everything. Marta had brought with her a few plants. A small hibiscus bush full of pink-red flowers she had bought from the garden centre, along with some lavender and potted herbs – parsley, mint, basil, rosemary. All are doing wonderfully with a little help from some agua de La Presencia from the olive jar.
They smell divine.
Anyway, we were talking about mathematics. We’d started off talking about the Fibonacci sequence and how its spirals are visible in the leaves and petals of plants and flowers. She said that, like me, she has always found comfort in mathematics – one of the things that led her to a career in astrophysics – but it was only recently that she understood why the subject was such therapy for her. It is because, in mathematics, you realise that balance and symmetry is actually in everything, even when it feels like chaos or pain.
‘The ancient Greeks worshipped mathematics because they saw it as representing ideals,’ she said, in roughly those words. ‘And that it was always tied to religion because it was seen as something purer than normal life. That is why Pythagoras was a kind of spiritual leader. But I think La Presencia has given us the understanding that mathematical purity is everywhere. We are inside it. Nothing is random. Not life, not death. Not even randomness. Not even us two here making this dirt into a garden. All of it connects. Everything is part of this whole. This beautiful fabric. Heaven isn’t somewhere else. Nor is everyone we have lost. We are tied to them. The strings are in us. Am I making sense?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You are making total sense.’ And I meant it, because I had to say what I meant in front of her, because she could read my mind just as I could read hers.
Anyway, even after she left, I looked at this modest but lovely garden and I felt – more than any of the weird things that had happened – that this was the true change that had happened. I was gardening again.
But it wasn’t just the garden. It was the inside too. I fixed up the house. I went back to the hippy market at Las Dalias and bought the painting of Es Vedrà from Sabine. I also acquired a picture of fruit. I now have a giant orange hanging in the bedroom. I bought some other bits and bobs too – some brighter clothes – with winnings I gained from a second little trip to the casino.
I didn’t want to entirely rid the place of Christina’s memory, though, so I thought I would cherish it instead.
I went to the dry cleaner’s in Ibiza Town and had Christina’s bohemian throw and rug given a makeover. They emerged bright and pretty, and I dusted the large fan in the living room and mopped the floor tiles. The old piano near the window still filled half the room, but I didn’t want to get rid of it, so I did something else. I started to play it.
Yes, I can play the piano now. It comes easy to me. And the thing I like playing most is ‘Blackbird’. I still can’t sing, though. La Presencia is powerful, but not that powerful.
One other thing to tell you. I once found tattoos distasteful. But I have changed my mind. I recently went to the tattoo parlour in Playa d’en Bossa. I took with me Daniel’s picture of the bluebird he’d given me for Mother’s Day and asked for a version of it on my wrist. So now, whenever I see a red bicycle, I just look down at my wrist and remember the good.
It’s really quite lovely. It flies with me everywhere.
Blaze
It rained yesterday.
I was in Santa Gertrudis. I’d just been food shopping. I stepped outside and it was raining. It fell hard and it comforted me. My car was parked a little way along the road, so I walked along, beneath the fading poster for Lieke at Amnesia, and a moment later I passed a villa with overflowing pink and magenta bougainvillea flowers and a swimming pool visible through a gate. I stopped and watched the drops bounce and dance in the water. A kind of percussive music. I was mesmerised for a moment. I looked up to the sky and opened my mouth a little and enjoyed the rain’s mineral taste. I am trying to do this now. Let moments get the best of me, however mad it looks to passers-by.
You see, shortly before he died I had sat on the beach with Alberto. We ate watermelon together. He was looking older and weaker and was in some pain. But he also looked quite calm and wise and handsome in the dying light, more philosopher than pirate, as we sat and watched the most glorious and complex sunset.
I told him I felt a responsibility. That I should go to the Amazon rainforest or to the Antarctic or equatorial Africa or somewhere else where I could use the talents I’d been given, but that I knew my talents would be stronger here, near La Presencia.
‘It wants you to be here,’ he said.
