The other side of the world

The first time I went to the beach I was eleven years old. Technically, I had gone before when I was three: there are photos of me me running away from the waves because -and this is the only thing I remember about that time- I was sure a shark was coming in each one of them.

I learned everything I needed to survive in that beach full of families in La Paloma, Uruguay: “If anything happens and you get lost, you come to this yellow house and I’ll be waiting for you” said my mother pointing at, obviously, a yellow house. I had seen some pictures of the beach before but I could never imagined it would be so huge. Everywhere I looked there was more beach, endless amounts of sand and thousands of water. It was a strange place.

On the third day the beach was old news, I liked it but somehow I was getting bored, so I started asking questions about everything: “What’s the sea?”, “How did all this sand get here?”, “What’s on the other side of the water?”. My father told me, with his deep and loud and confident voice “Across the sea is Africa”. I told him “Perfect, I’ll get there someday”. He laughed: “You’ll have to swim a lot”.

I persuaded my parents to let me have a daily walk by myself. I felt excited, it was like growing up from one day to another, I walked around the beach and looked everyone like “I made it, you know, I’m an adult, just like you”.

One day I reached an empty beach. In the distance I saw a group of people. They were watching something. I walked towards them. I made one step and looked back and then front and then another step and looked back and so on. It was a very smelly pile covered with a green fabric. A very fat man told me “You shouldn’t be here alone, where are your parents?”. He repeated that several times: I wasn’t looking at him, I wasn’t even listening to him. I couldn’t get my eyes out of the pile. The smell was so awful that I could even feel it in my mouth. I walked around it, among the people, and then I saw it: a flipper escaping from below the fabric. I felt my heart exploding. And then, before I could even say a word, a kid said “It’s a whale. And it’s dead”. I was freeze: I’d never seen something so big and dead at the same time.

I came back to my parents. They were worried. I was pale as a zombie and they asked what had happened. I just said: “An african whale. It came swimming and died upon arriving. I’ll have to train harder if I want to get to Africa and not die trying”. They just laughed. I wasn’t joking.