The day a dead whale appeared in Artà

All lives have, in childhood or early youth, founding episodes that are not erased no matter how long ago they occurred. They are impactful and formative episodes that forge a personality because they help you define a conception of life and a vision of the world, to discover good and evil (to define the meaning of what is just and what is unjust), and also to become familiar with a perplexity pierced by anxieties and wonders that no longer exists. The Mallorcan poet and translator Miquel Àngel Llauger (Palma, 1963) has taken two of these episodes and transformed them into literature in his new book, Whale diptych.

The two episodes Llauger recovers and reconstructs have a prodigious central element—in one case, an earthquake, and in the other, a dead whale on a beach—and the two resulting stories neither deny nor diminish this prodigious nature, which, in fact, escapes—for better or worse—the ordinary. However, Llauger recounts them with a realistic approach, having researched and offering proven information, while also imbuing them with a domestic warmth and grounding them in the most intimate and recognizable realm of everyday life. Whale diptych It is literature of the self and of memory, and all the devices and tricks the author uses – intertextuality, self-awareness, plurality of voices and perspectives, explicit passages of fiction – aim to underline this condition, not to deactivate or disguise it.

The first story of the diptych, Operation Managua, revolves around the terrifying earthquake that shook the capital of Nicaragua in December 1972, causing more than ten thousand deaths. To help alleviate the effects of the catastrophe, Palma City Council decided to organize a sort of charity vacation for children from Managua, who would be hosted for a few months by Mallorcan families. The boy Llauger's family was supposed to be one of those families, but in the end, nothing went as planned. Instead of arriving full of needy children, the charitable expedition brought to Mallorca around one hundred children from families addicted to the dictatorial Somoza regime. Ligero tells the story in a curious and delightful tale that combines childhood fears and hopes, pillage and dictatorial barbarism, various forms of charity, and the eternal question (with an impossible answer) of why God allows such misfortunes to happen to the world.

The whale of the colony is the title of the second story and recalls the fantastic commotion caused by the appearance, in January 1976, of an enormous dead cetacean on the beach of Colonia de Sant Pere, in the municipality of Artà. Although it also aims to literarily establish a "founding" episode in the author's biography, it is less journalistic and more narratively sophisticated than the first. With grace and astuteness, Llauger arranges for the text to be written by four different Llaugers: the child who was struck by the sight of the whale; the teenager who couldn't get it out of his head and wanted to write stories in the style of Gabriel García Márquez; and the fifty-year-old poet who wrote a poem alongside an entertaining and moving story.