Formentera is not a bad place to live the end of the world. I already experienced it once during the pandemic, when I went to make a report and I walked in plan I am a legend On the confined island, as if it were the last human being of the planet, shaking with my naked foot the virgin sand of the empty beaches. For a chance of destiny I was there again last Monday, when the blackout occurred, that apocalypse. Balearic Islands looked out, but it was amazing to see how communication with the rest of Spain was lost and it seemed that everyone out there – including my cat Charlythat this time he stayed at home – disappeared in the manner of a great and silent extinction.
Spending a few spring days in Formentera, when it is not yet high season, it turns out, a taste, you see local friends who are very relaxed, you find out about the island’s novelties on-site And you are preparing the landing of the summer holidays. At this time there are still few people, they treat you with consideration in the beach bars and restaurants, it is not hot and you can travel the island by bicycle (normal pedaling, although the electricity already proliferates). The negative counterpart is that it costs to get into the water, even very cold, and it is a shame not to be able to swim for a long time and dive into that blue sea lounge, so tempting, in which you spend hours later during the summer.
With all its wonders (the outbreak of flowers, the light, the amazing sky, the diaphanous air aromatized with thyme and the smell of curry From the evergreen), Formentera presented some disturbing notes, as if an omen floats in the air. A slightly surreal atmosphere, with a story of JG Ballard, the writer of the catastrophes, the apocalypse and the sick and dystopian landscapes, of which, curiously since the island is the closest thing to paradise, I have always perceived here an echo, increased by the fact that the house on Madrid has just dedicated, with great opportunity, with great opportunity, with great chance, with great opportunity, with great opportunity, with great opportunity, with great opportunity, with great chance to analyze its impact on the present. It is true that it has always been said that if you are not well inside, head or feelings, you better not go to Formentera, a place that returns you, magnified, what you carry there. As Ballard pointed out, the inner landscape configures the exterior, and becomes reality.
The fact is that the first day from the unnarks Start the silver sheet of the waves. The cormorants: so enigmatic with their questions in the form of a question and their custom of placing itself in front of the sun with open wings as if they prayed. Then I found one dead on the beach of Tenant, lonely except for a huge gray horse that appeared out of nowhere, was hound next to my widespread towel and almost demolished his rider. The bird was buried in the sand and stood out just a black pen. When stretching it, the entire rotating wing emerged and then the rest of the bird that had an oily and battered appearance. I reminded me of that Ballard story, Storm bird, storm dreamer “From the book.” Catastrophe area—in which a biological accident caused by a product to accelerate the growth of crops has caused birds to be made of huge size and attack people driven by hunger. The protagonist, the vigilante Captain Crispin, one of the hallucinated Ballardian characters facing the mysterious decomposition of the world, is dedicated to shooting on the beach from an artillery ship against the immense birds that demolishes and that hang on the water as clouds or fallen angels.
I also monitored my little desert of Llent, uploaded to the high white tower of the rescue and relief service of the beach, observing the limpid gaviotas of Audouin that they walked through the sand or crossed the luminous skies of the dream. Up there was the neil of Fugged to paradisepending the albatros of the island of Saint-Esprit, or the Jim de The Empire of the Sun, pulling the Mustangs P-51, “Cadillac del Cielo!” We had eaten in the Manolito kiosk, between empty tables, and contributed to the feeling of unreality of the account. And it is that in Formentera prices do not go down even if there is no one. Ballard would not have stopped writing down that crazy escalation that many predict as it will lead to disaster.
The novel I took for the days on the island was not a writer of Crashbut the bulky thriller Douglas Preston scientist Tyrannosaurus. It seemed a more harmless reading, but it turned out to be a story of Ballardian trims about the search for an exceptional fossil of the terrible T. Rex that contains a secret that can carry, precisely, at the end of humanity and life on earth. The adventure takes place for the most part in the Agostated Canyons of New Mexico, where the characters (including a dinosaurs search engine, a hired assassin and a former CIA agent converted into monk) suffer between hazards and penalties without a story without a deep physical and existential transformation.
Very Ballardians also looked like the members of the Pelayo family -fredy, Jonathan, Sablon, Aaron, Carlos, John, Dani, Jesus-, in her bathroom Eden next to the brilliant sea of Migjorn, these days completely free of algae. Against any forecast and despite having finished the contract, they continue at the moment with the restaurant, which they have become one of the most precious identity of the island, their vermilion sands, waiting to see what fate holds for them (it seems that they will take the gaucho and the pachanka of Es Pujols). A feeling of melancholy and provisionality, as finally all our lives, weighed on the roofs covered with palm leaves. Jesus, that natural philosopher, synthesized him while serving some herbs and spoke for his walkie-talkie Imaginary: “What has to be will be.”
In San Francesc, struggled at a table on the terrace of the center bar, I was surprised by a funeral in the church that presides over the Plaza de la Constitució. The emergence of death, with the funeral car, the coffin, the floral crowns in that bright and usually festive space, was another Ballardian aldabonazo.
In Ses Illetes, next to the Molí de Sal, instead of the fuselage of a plane sunk with the ravines, typical of Ballard’s imaginary, there was a great embarrassing sailboat, the Helisarathat once belonged to Von Karajan and that, stranded during the storm last summer, has not yet been removed and deteriorates and oxidized between the rocks, with the bow of the bow, the foque, torn and rocking to the wind like a broken wing. The long neighboring beach in front of the Illa dels Conills was plagued with small luminescent jellyfish (Pelagia noctiluca) that motized the turquoise sea with their violet-heater jelly bodies and its tentacles. There were so many that you could not even put your foot in the water and a multitude of them dead accumulated. In the Briss chiringuito, east of Es Pujols beach, there was another disturbing jellyfish: the one that had been tattooed in the leg one of the waitresses and that was not one of the urticating animals but the mythological being. I pointed to the girl that her tattoo looked like the marine jellyfish of the British museum, but she told me that she had made her tribute to the Cattana Raple and it was actually a copy of a drawing of the illustrator and graffiti artist Don Iwana who saw in a book, the poems The Mohs scaleof the singer and dead poet.
He stared at the horizon, beyond the sea, trying to discern signs of cataclysm
When the catastrophe occurred, I found out very slowly. The reality was disconnected at small doses such as the circuits of the Hal computer in 2001: an odyssey of space. He received calls from people who said that everything was falling and then disappeared giving way to an ominous silence. “Are you well there?” They used to be his last words. From Formentera, where life remained the same, as if we enjoyed an inexplicable extension, I stared at the horizon, beyond the sea, trying to discern signs of cataclysm, the high wave of the tsunami of darkness that was swallowing everything. It was again as Jim, glimpseing from the Nantao stadium the distant glow of the bomb over Nagasaki. A chill ran through the island bathed in the sun. When we finally took the Ferri for Ibiza -the same Monday afternoon we had the plane to Barcelona -we sailed silently with the feeling of going to the debacle riding in the waves. At the airport the screen already showed a canceled flight and delays in others. We embarked at last and fly self -absorbed, knowing that we headed towards the vortex of that apocalypse that we always carry inside.