You might be wondering why Hilcias whistles instead of talks.
People around him wonder why, too.
Listen.
He's a genius.
Few know this.
I do.
He sees the world with a heart full of curiosity.
That's how I first learned about him.
Because he was curious about whales.
"There's a boy who knows EVERYTHING about whales," came the word through the water.
He does.
"This boy can speak our language and understand our songs. We could UNDERSTAND each other."
We do.
He keeps a sketch book with him all the time.
In it, he sketched a picture of a bowhead whale and wrote beneath it, "A bowhead whale's blubber is over two feet thick so it can live in the Arctic cold. It can create it's own breathing hole by breaking through ice that's up to one foot thick."
He sketched a picture of a blue whale and wrote, "A blue whale's heart is as big as a Volkswagen Beetle, but it's ears are as small as the point of a pencil."
He sketched a picture of a sperm whale and wrote, "For many years, oil from a sperm whale's head was used to provide light for people. In fact, we measure the strength of light bulbs in lumens, which is the light of one spermaceti candle."
He is a whale genius.
But it's not his ingenuity that causes me wonder.
No, I don't wonder at what he can do.
I wonder at what he can't do.
He can't talk.
Or he won't talk.
No one knows which.
We only know that he's ten years old and has never spoken a word in his life.
When he was a baby, his mamí talked with him in the language of poetry as she walked with him tied to her back down the long rows of tomato plants and peach trees under the South Carolina summer sun.
She reached down to the ground and took a smooth tomato in her hand, or she reached up to the sky and took a fuzzy peach.
She rubbed them against his soft cheek.
She whispered
Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres
porque de las proderas planetarias
otra estrella no tengo. Tú repites
la multiplicación del universo.
I love the handful of earth you are,
because of it's meadows, vast as a planet.
I have no other star. You are my replica
of the multiplying universe.
She waited for him to talk back to her with toddling talk, to speak words like "mamí" and "amo" and "tú," but he didn't say a word.
He simply looked at her with with wide, unblinking eyes and whistled a soft, gentle song.
Now, people ask him, "What's your name?" or "How old are you?" or "How are you?" and he answers them with a whistle instead of with words.
People ask his abuelo, "What's wrong with him?" and he sighs the sigh of someone who carries heavy loads on his back and in his heart.
"Dios sabe," he answers.
"God knows."
I think I know, too.
So I want to tell you so you might know.
If I don't help you hear him, he might never be heard.
And that would be sad, because he is someone the world needs to know.
- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown eyed girl, 2020
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