Soy un aballena...

I wrote this short story more than a year after 29 September 2009. Everything in it is probably true. I wish it weren't. I have not viewed the burnt DVD for a very long time. It hurts so much...

A little house at the bottom of the sea

A few years ago, my father came home one Friday evening with a video camera packed in a bag. I always called him Papá, as he came to Australia from Spain. He had borrowed the camera from work because he needed to practise; or so he said. The next day he filmed me and my twin brothers in the backyard. I saw the movie a few times after that day. It was fun and cool to see and hear myself and my brothers singing. Then he said he would burn a CD, but I didn't see the fire. He sent it overseas, to the place where he was born, for my Spanish relatives to see.

He does not want to see it too often these days; it makes him cry.

The movie is not too long, just about seven minutes. We run around the backyard while he‘s doing his best to focus and frame us. There is a moment I just lie on the dry browned summer grass and do something silly. “What on earth are you doing?”, he asks in Spanish. "Soy un aballena", I say. (Papá laughs at my mistake in Spanish.) “I‘m a little whale, I live in my little house at the bottom of the sea”, I chant in my shrill girl Spanish voice. “Get off the ground, you’re getting your clothes dirty”, he says in the stern voice he reserves for when he does mean something.

I did get up, eventually. I was only three years old.

****

We’re finally here after spending a couple of days in Apia. The sea dazzles; at noon the heat is quite intense yet bearable, there are a few clouds around but it does not look like it will rain. We flew across the ocean for about seven hours. I said to them: “We will arrive yesterday”. They looked puzzled, of course. They thought it was a joke. I guess the mix of tenses doesn’t go down well when you’ve just managed to learn to speak, and that the language mix at home may make things particularly complicated sometimes. Yet in a manner of speaking, it is true that we have travelled into the past: We left Australia on Friday afternoon and arrived in Apia on Thursday night.

Just five nights ago we were at home, practising the numbers in Samoan: tasi, lua, tolu, fa, lima… We think it’s worth showing you make the effort when you visit another country.

We’ll be staying here for a couple of nights. In one of these fales, metres away from the water. Behind the resort is the steep hill, dense with vegetation, mysterious yet inviting. The water is so clean. There is another smaller island about half a mile away, green, majestic. For thousands and thousands of miles around us, there is nothing else but water. On the horizon, the permanently white line of the reef. Hardly any waves make it to the shore. Perfect for children who are still learning to swim. They will gain in confidence.

After lunch we take a walk along the beach. Later we all put on our swimmers, make sandcastles and splash about. Everybody is having a great time, but she seems to be enjoying Samoa more than anyone else. She looks radiant, beautiful, so full of life. Her skin has quickly tanned under the Samoan sun. It’s taken just a couple of days for her to go very brown. She has my Spanish complexion.

****

My twin brothers woke up early – they still do. No rest for the wicked. Mummy said we wouldn’t get breakfast until nine, so she gave us fruit to eat. I ate my pear on the sand, looking at the beautiful blue water. I finished it and then Papá gave us some biscuits. He said they were from Chile, from across the water, and he pointed to the west. Then suddenly the ground started shaking. It was quite strange. The fales were rattling for almost a minute. Mum and Papá looked at each other and talked briefly. They looked at the other tourists. They looked at the local people, the ones who ran the resort.

We then went for a walk along the beach, like the day before. I saw the local kids on the road, wearing their school uniforms. I asked Mummy why they were going to school. She said they weren’t on holidays. We were on holidays. We had come from Australia for a holiday. On the beach I followed Papá, I was skipping on the sand, carefully putting my footprints on his. It was fun but difficult. He has such big feet I could not stretch myself long enough.

Suddenly Papá shouted: “Corred, corred”. He sounded very serious. We ran. We crossed the road. We were barefoot but kept on running. Papá was again yelling, but this time in English: “Run! Everybody run!” His voice sounded really scared. We just ran. We ran past a house. A woman was on the ground, crying. There were a few piglets, trotting around. They seemed scared, too. I turned around. I did not understand. Why was there no sky now? What was that water coming towards us? And that roar?

I was still holding Mummy’s hand. So was my brother Om. My other brother, Jay, he was with Papá. We turned and kept running for the hill. Then the water came. The water. So much water. It was so strong I immediately lost Mummy’s hand. The water dragged me up and down, it swirled me around. I hit a tree or something else. Lots of different things hit me: bits of coral, pieces of wood, rocks, tree branches… they hit my legs and my arms, they hit my back and my head. I could not come up for air.

I stayed at the bottom, like the little whale of my silly singsong a couple of years before. I think I became a whale-loving mermaid.

But Mummy and Papá cried a lot afterwards.

The Impossible

We have been receiving a few well-meaning warnings about the release of the movie The Impossible. In case you don’t know, it tells the story of a Spanish family who were holidaying in Thailand when the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami struck. They all survived, miraculously. The Spanish director, Bayona, enlisted two extremely famous actors to play the roles of the parents, María and Quique.

The other day I came across a lengthy newspaper article titled ‘Unidas por el tsunami’ (United by the tsunami), and signed by a Toni García. I was curious, so I read it. I can’t help but see it as part of the huge ongoing promotional campaign for the movie; I just cannot consider it any other way.

But for me, the only thing of value in the whole article is María’s words. She chose to sell her story, and that's fine. I suppose she did so because it's a story that ends ‘well’, so to speak. Had she lost any of her three children, I'm certain the movie would have never seen the light of day.

María says she now knows herself strong, “because I know I'm fragile”. I do know what she’s talking about.

She knows her/their survival was a miracle, but says that any religious connotations attached to the word need to be removed, dispelled. In other words, it was impossible for her/them to survive, but somehow, inexplicably, she/they did. I also know what she means, and I completely agree with her. I feel exactly the same way about what my two sons, my wife and myself went through on 29 September 2009.

She acknowledges that she did make an attempt to read a book about the survivors who lost loved ones that fateful day, but she was unable to. I read Pacific Tsunami: Galu Afi, but I doubt I'll ever read it again. María thinks that the proverb “Time heals everything” is just a big lie. And I agree with her. “Time does not heal anything, time is life […] . […] from afar everything becomes more bearable, everything has become more anaesthetised. The rest are clichés”, she tells the reporter.

The journalist, Toni García, writes the following: “[María] rescued one of her sons from the water, despite being badly injured.” Hey, welcome to the real world, Toni García! Any worthy parent, let me tell you, would try to save their child in such circumstances.

Asked whether it is good to talk [about the tsunami], María replied: “It depends on who you talk to. There are very few people who will sit with you and talk about the subject openly. Me, I ask a lot of questions, and if someone’s had an accident I will ask them, patiently. However, at least in my case, people think it is taboo to talk about it, about the wave, the tsunami. When I returned [to Spain], people would look at me with fear, as if saying, ‘Take it easy, I'm not going to ask you anything’.” I know all too well what María is talking about.

I read elsewhere a stupidly cruel review of The Impossible. It more or less said it was a very melodramatic film about a family of tourists who had lost their entire luggage in the Boxing Day tsunami. The point the reviewer wanted to make was that hundreds of thousands of people died, that so many thousands of families lost loved ones, children, siblings, parents, grandparents… so why make a movie about a Western family whose five members survived? Other reviewers have drawn attention to the fact that the movie basically ignores the Thai victims by focusing only on a Western family. I will offer no opinion on that, because I have not seen the movie.

But I have watched the trailer of The Impossible. Online. All I can say is, the tsunami scenes are incredibly realistic. It is very much like that. But I also want to emphasise the 'incredible' aspect of it. Don’t forget it's a movie. Reality is a f**king lot worse.

Luckily for the director, María had a lot of input in the script. I guess we should not be surprised if it were awarded an Oscar for the FX.

But what I really wanted to consider was this: I wonder what we would say to each other, if one day I met María. I have seen her photograph: I have noticed how her eyes look somehow lost, like they're glancing at something that is not there. That look is vaguely familiar.

She still has all her three children. I have only two left.

On the morning of Boxing Day 2004 we were on a beautiful beach in New South Wales, thousands of kilometres away from the death and destruction that was taking place in the Indian Ocean. Clea was almost two years old; she was running on the white sand, running away from the waves that came too close, and she was giggling, giggling, like she always used to do.

I will not watch the movie. But it's nothing to do with the tsunami images, it's nothing to do with fear. The truth is I don't need a movie to remind me.

I guess I just don’t enjoy happy endings that much these days.

The Force of Nature

This is one of the last photographs of Clea. Our own camera was of course lost in the 29 September 2009 tsunami; all the photographs we took while we were in Samoa – and there quite a few of them – were gone with the wall of water.

This photograph was taken at the top of the Telstra Tower in Black Mountain, on the 24^th of September 2009, less than a week before she died. Clea went on a school excursion that day; she was so excited! It was going to be her last day of school for the term – it ended up being her last day of school ever. The next day we drove to Sydney and boarded our flight to Apia.

On the plane, Clea was sitting next to me during landing. In those days, you had to cross the dateline to go to Samoa, so we arrived the day before at night time. The dim lights we were able to glimpse through the window were those of Apia: little shiny specks amid the immense blackness the ocean is at night. The plane appeared to be shaking a lot while we approached the runway, far more than I am used to, to be honest, so the landing felt kind of bumpy. Clea got a little scared until the plane touched down and ran the length of the tarmac.

For some reason, this image of Clea haunts my imagination in ways I cannot describe – nor would I like anyone to have to imagine. I see a vulnerable little girl, recoiling, holding on to her hat (which, actually, she lost that day!) and grimacing against the very strong, cold winds that swept Canberra that early spring day. I see the image of my daughter against the force of nature; I don’t think anyone could argue that, the impression you get on seeing the image is that she was not having fun as her teacher took the photograph – by the way, I have cropped it so that other students are not seen. Her jumper is zipped up tight; her hair is a real mess, hardly held in place by the pink hair band I now wear on my left wrist every day, wherever I go.

No, her facial expression definitely says that at this moment she was not enjoying being up there, at the top of the Telstra Tower.

For a few months after our return to Canberra, I had frequent nightmares, reliving the tsunami. Even now, nearly three years later, I occasionally may wake up with a start in the middle of the night, and it may take me a long time to settle again into a normal rhythm of sleep, if or when I do at all. Normally, I have no idea of what is it that woke me up. Yet something wakes me up. Believe me: it’s neither the carbon tax nor the prospect of another boatload of asylum seekers approaching the very remote islands to the north of the very remote northern coasts of Australia. Those are not things I would lose any sleep over.

It’s not as if I were consciously trying to keep memories of those horrifying moments. In fact, I wish I could forever forget the panic and the terror; if only I could erase those from my memory for good… But the truth is I cannot. Our imperfect brains: We forget what we want to remember, but what we would like to forget keeps coming back to haunt us.

This is not too dissimilar from the widespread notion that with time we, the grieving parents, have to somehow “get over” our child’s death. I’m sorry if I disappoint somebody: we just don’t. We never will. We just cannot “get over” it, because we will never be able to retrieve such a big chunk of our future. yes, it is their future that we have lost forever. How can one get over the fact that your child’s future (which is also yours) suddenly snaps and then is gone? Does anybody know?

I do know, however, that my daughter Clea died a terrible death. She perished under the unstoppable violence of nature, the victim of an incredibly powerful, relentless natural force. It is almost impossible to comprehend – and even for us, who were there and survived, it seems unreal now.

After the Japanese tsunami happened more than a year ago, for a while I kind of expected people would ask me about it. For the first time in human history, a tsunami was broadcast live on TV. It was possible for people to gain a better understanding of what it is like to be there, so vulnerable, so small under the colossal force of nature.