Butterflies in November

SIXTY-FOUR

As we drive down the side road, I see the whale has been cut open and that her calf is lying there in the car park beside her, all in one piece, two metres long and black just like its mother.

Before setting off, I ask the kid at the petrol station to take a picture of us and, as he carefully hands the camera back to me, he says:

“Did you know that the heartbeat of a whale can be heard from a distance of five kilometres?”

I say I didn’t know that.

“Then you probably also didn’t know that a whale’s heartbeat can disrupt a submarine’s communications and prevent a war?”

The turn behind the blind hill comes as a surprise. I’m not driving very fast, but still almost swerve off the road. The car runs on loose gravel and the bay opens up ahead, a long stretch of black, sandy shoreline strewn with seals. The sand is covered with their warm, glistening bodies, flipper rubbing against flipper. They move sluggishly, dozens at a time, as if they had overgrown the straitjackets of their own skin. I pull the handbrake on the side of the road and we get out.

The boy wants to take his shoes off and find a wish stone, whereas I wouldn’t mind hugging one of those seals and stroking its earless head.

There is plenty to choose from on the beach, thousands of stones to test one’s wishes on, every one you touch, one after another. We sit down. I arrange my stones in a small circle; Tumi assembles his in a small, vertical mound, one on top of the other, making a cairn, erecting a monument.

I have almost completed my circle and dash over to the car one moment to grab my camera. When I come back I see that he has pulled everything off: his hoodie, trousers, leggings, T-shirt and underpants. Stark naked in his snow-white skin, he abandons his clothes in a small bundle in the middle of the sand and charges towards the seals on the black shoreline, heading straight for the surf and sea. He is so white that his torso is almost phosphorescent and fuses with the white of the ocean and the heavens above. His approach triggers a clumsy stampede of seals into the water. I run after him in my bare feet, feeling the sharp shells and cold seaweed under my soles, sludge squishing between my toes and salty water reaching my ankles. I catch up with him in a pool of floating algae, throw my sweater around him and lift his cold little body onto my shoulders. There is black sand between his toes. He strokes my earlobes. I glance swiftly at the ocean before running back again.

“Lots of sea,” says the boy in a clear voice.

14:14, says my watch.

West, says the compass in the car.

He is dressed again and sits silently in the back seat, his chin buried in his overalls and the tip of his balaclava barely reaching the window. I fasten his belt.

After slipping an Astor Piazzolla bandoneon disc into the player, I turn on the heater full blast. Then I hand Tumi a sandwich and chocolate milk over my shoulder and pierce the hole with a straw for him. In return he stretches out his clenched hand with a bleeding smile. I unclasp his small fingers, one by one, and finally see his little front milk tooth in the palm of his hand.