Whalesound
by Christian Lesmes ︎︎︎The sound came to me before your voice.
That night, I saw you escaping from the sound waves, riding a fireball under the moonlight. Everything appeared silver and purple as if the world was seen through a fish scale. The broken bricks resembled teeth more than bricks, devouring the night and echoing songs of grief.
A couple of months earlier, I was crossing the border with a professional tennis player. She was driving her scarlet truck and effortlessly bribing the cops as if paying a toll to overtake uniforms, cash, fault, love, deuce, a sense of déjà vu, as if something you believed would happen only once kept
repeating itself,
repeating itself,
‘This purse is more expensive than the cash inside it. It's a Chanel Classic, whale skin.’ Rebecca said as I looked at her and wondered how things holding other things often seem less valuable than what they contain.
Our destination was the coast. We planned to build a two-story house facing the Pacific Ocean, where she could spend the last years of her life and enjoy a sip of whiskey every night, eyes riding the roar of the surf that embraces the earth— a white villa with a steel facade that would rust completely when her dreams touched the salty wind for the final time, and the walls eroded, slowly burying them— a house designed to fall apart, a Temple of Autodestruct.
Two steep orange-green jelly mountains loomed ahead through the windshield, framing a straight asphalt road that led directly to the blue bay. The landscape was arid and moist, threatening to seize our lives with thirst only to revive us with a gentle breeze.
‘What else can you ask for? What else?’ Rebecca said. ‘The God Sun is with us!’ she added before sipping her cold beer. ‘And He does not care about us,’ she continued with a Wet-Moon smile.
During the first week of working on the house, I met Ekaterina. Since then, I have always wondered how Russians ended up in this town so far away, without a sewage system, where Chinese ships hunt shark fins, drill oil and fund energy projects— a city where the government left the coast open for narcos, competing violently for control of cocaine routes to Europe.
In front of the migration office, I saw her for the first time. She looked like a surfer with Sun-kissed orange skin. I was there to check my email and make copies of my passport as if building a temple of paperwork: one day, a passport; the next, an ID. Then a passport, then an ID, and so on. Sometimes, I’d check the news as an excuse to see her— a weekly intrigue on the first page, a "crime of passion"—a South American euphemism for feminicide, playing out to Baby Don't Hurt Me in the Internet Café.
‘Can I call you later today?’ I asked.
‘Sorry, I lost my phone. A Whale ate it; a white one,’ Ekaterina replied, chuckling slightly.
‘Oh, I hope you get it back.’
I left clumsily, but she called out for me to return. We exchanged numbers just in case the White Whale decided to call.
‘Please wait for the call and do not disturb the sea.’ She added, smiling.
In the following days, Ekaterina taught me how to say "cherepahka" and swim with dolphins as they glided between our legs, feeling the ocean's salt and the haunting call of whales like distant, echoed ringtones. She explained how angry the whales were at the fishermen killing their kin for fins and how the rumble of drilling hurt them deeply.
It was April 16, 2016, at 6:58 pm.
That night, just before I picked up the phone, I could hear rubble falling and my heart racing.
‘Hey, the Whale gave your phone back, huh?’ I asked
‘It’s Rebecca’, you said, almost shivering. ‘I didn't know whale sounds could do this,’ your voice almost breaking. ‘Everything smells like blood, and people are looting the ruins of the houses,’ your voice swelling in fear and bravery.
‘Please leave the city now; there’s a tsunami coming.’softly
‘I’ll be okay,’ you added softly—
softly
your voice was echoing inside the White Whale.