Lamalera Blog

17th August

It is the middle of the night and I am wandering alone on the beach.

I’m more exhausted than I have ever been but I just can’t sleep. I had to come down here to check it all really happened. To follow the lines that tether the five dead whales in the surf so I can touch their rubbery bodies, just once, to check they are actually real.

Bits of today keep replaying in my mind. Stefanus stood quivering with the harpoon on his shoulder right before the strike, the frantic thumping noise as the men hammered their spearheads into the bamboo shafts, the boat that was pulled under, the people sat on its hull, tables turned by the animal they had sought to kill. The whale. The panic. The blood.

The first time the whale breached it resembled a stop-motion monster from the Sinbad films I had watched obsessively as a child of the 80s. It didn’t look like it was part of this world. My hands started to shake uncontrollably, so I filmed them, unsure if they really were mine.

At one point I was caught between two running ropes. Suddenly this was all very real indeed. They squeezed my waist as the lines screamed out in hot pursuit of the whale. I made it to the back of the boat okay, but nowhere was really safe. Seconds later the Nantucket ‘Hand of God’ hovered in the air above the boat, the whale’s tail momentarily poised to obliterate us all. I have no idea how long it took to die but it felt like forever.

Aloo had warned me it was “life and death out there”, but until you have sat in that boat you can’t really appreciate the gravitas of those words.

The lower jaws of the whales snap shut with every pounding wave. Before their demise the only scars on their grey bodies were from battles with giant squid and each other, now their eye sockets pick up livid white wounds as their massive heads collide with the rocks in the surf.

Marcellinus from our crew is drunk and wailing at the moon. His Father was killed by a whale a few days before he was born and his friends say he empties his grief onto the sand when he’s had a drink. The waves, they say, are the souls of the Lamaleran dead visiting the village, so this is the only chance he gets.

I’m turning back to Stefanus’ house now. I don’t want to see any more.