Sunday, October 22, 2017

Tomás

Listen.

He’s a genius, but no one knows this about him except me. He looks at the world with a heart and mind full of curiosity. That is how I first learned about him - because of his curiosity about whales. 

"There's a boy who knows a lot about whales," came the word over the water. And he did. 

He drew a beautiful, detailed picture of a bowhead whale and wrote beneath it - "A bowhead whale's blubber is over two feet thick so it can withstand the Arctic cold. The bowhead can create it's own breathing hole by breaking through ice up to one foot thick." 

He drew a blue whale and wrote - A blue whale's heart is as big as a Volkswagon Beetle, but it's ears are the size of the point of a pencil." 

And he drew a sperm whale with these words - "For many years, oil from a sperm whale's head was used to provide light for people. In fact, people measure the strength of light in lumens, which is the light of one pure white spermaceti candle." 

He’s a whale genius.

It’s not his ingenuity that causes me to love him, though. No, I don't love him for what he can do. I love him for what he can't do. He’s ten years old and he can’t speak. He hasn't spoken a single word in his whole life.

When he was two, his mamí talked with him in the language of poetry as she walked with him tied to her back down the long rows of peaches under the South Carolina sun. His mamí reached up to the trees, took the peaches in her hands, and rubbed the fuzzy skin against his soft cheek and whispered,

Amo el trozo de tierra que tú eres
porque de las praderas 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 in toddling language, to say words like mamí and amo and tú, but he didn't say them. He didn't say anything at all. He only looked at her with his wide, unblinking, brown eyes, eyes the color of the deep parts of the earth, and jutted out his little, bottom lip as if to say, "There’s much I want to say, but I can't. I just can't find the words."

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. They ask his abuelo and mamí, "What's wrong with him?" and they simply sigh the sighs of people who have carried heavy loads on their backs and in their hearts and answer, "Dios sabe, God knows." 

I know, too. 

I want to tell you so you will know. 


That's the purpose of life, right? To know and to be known. If I don't tell you his story, if I don't help you hear him, then he might never be known. And that would be sad, because he is someone the world needs to know.

No comments:

Post a Comment