Hilcias walked beside his abuelo down rows and rows of tomato plants and peach trees, shielded from the sun by his trusty cap with a whale stitched on the front of it.
“A blue whale’s heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.”
“A beluga whale is called the canary of the sea because it sings so much.”
“A fin whale can make a sound one side of the ocean and be heard by another fin whale on the other side of the ocean 2,000 miles away,” he whistled.
“Boy,” his abuelo smiled, “You sure know a lot about whales. You’re a whale genius.
Now, as he sat beside the water at Playa La Carbonera, something astonishing happened.
A gigantic tooth washed up with the waves onto the shore.
The tooth was a sperm whale's tooth, of this he was certain.
The sperm whale his favorite whale.
The first picture he’d ever drawn of a whale, before he visited the public library and checked out every book he could find about whales, was a picture of a sperm whale.
This was before he learned that the brightness of a light bulb is measured by a lumen, which is simply the light one cup of spermaceti oil from a sperm whale’s head gives off.
This was before he memorized every fact about sperm whales in his field guide to cetaceans of the world.
He picked up the tooth with both of his hands.
It was a foot long.
It was shaped like a cone.
It was ivory.
"This came from the lower jaw of a sperm whale," he thought, "because they don't have teeth in their upper jaws, only slots that the teeth from the lower jaws fit into.
If I sliced the tooth in half, it would show the age of the whale like the rings of a trunk show the age of the tree.”
He gently laid the tooth beside him on the sand.
Then a conch shell washed up onto the shore with the waves, too.
"What an amazing shell,” he thought.
“Look at it’s shape and color.”
The shape was a common shape in nature, formed by graphing the numbers 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on, the Fibonacci numbers, a special shape that appears many times in geometry, architecture, art, literature and music.
“Some people call the shape ‘God’s blueprint,’” he thought, “Because it seems to be the plan from which God created the whole, wide world.”
It's color was a common color in nature.
There were three shades of yellow.
It's spine was the brilliant yellow of the sun that rose that very morning.
It's siphonal canal was the quiet yellow of the corn he and his abuelo shucked in early August.
It's aperture was the deep yellow of sunflowers in a field.
He picked up the shell with both of his hands.
He raised it to his tiny ear.
Someone once told him that if you hold a conch shell to your ear, you can hear the ocean inside of it.
"I wonder if it's true," he thought.
"If it is, I can take it home to our bus and bring the ocean and the great whales with me.”
He expected to hear only the ocean.
Boy, was he surprised.
The sound he heard inside the shell wasn’t only of breaking waves and rolling tides.
There was also a song.
It was the most beautiful song he’d ever heard in his life.
He closed his eyes and saw the notes dancing before him.
“I...understand.
I understand!”
A whale sang to him in his own language, with his own clicks and whistles!
They were the notes that made up his life, the notes he clicked and whistled to the world but that the world couldn’t (or wouldn’t) understand.
A tear rolled down his cheek and dropped onto the sand.
He wept and all the tears inside him poured into the surf and washed away into the vast reaches of the deep sea.
“I hear you!
I understand you!” he whistled into the shell.
“I hear you!” he heard to his great surprise.
I understand you, too!
There’s a story we hear along our migratory routes,” sang the sperm whale, “About a boy on land, a boy who can sing our language, a boy who can understand our songs.”
You, Hilcias, are that boy.
You are that boy.”
