Marta Bausells Holidays in Saturn

Marta Bausells

Holidays in Saturn

One night in July, my mother was looking at a star that has existed for at least 20,000 years. Her job is to study how stars die – how they expand, then implode. For a week, my phone buzzed nonstop as she flooded the family chat with pictures of the enormous Chilean telescope where she was working. I had to put her on mute. We all look at the past every day, of course. It takes sunrays eight minutes and 20 seconds to make the journey to our skin. The moon we see every night is that of 1.28 seconds ago. Some stars in the sky are long dead; by the time their light reaches our pupils, having travelled distances our minds can’t even grasp, what we see no longer is. Because I grew up with two physicists for parents, these notions were somewhat familiar to me as a child. On the walls of our Barcelona apartment were framed posters of the Andromeda galaxy; on the shelves sat books with titles like Black Holes and Time Warps or Gravitation. At school, I didn’t know how to explain what my parents did – I barely understood myself; Mamà an astrophysicist, Papà a microelectronics specialist, each dealing with phenomena bigger or smaller than the eye can see. Any romanticism or mysticism about space was out of the question. My parents lacked what I considered to be the minimum level of coolness one required to exist in the world. I was into daydreaming that I’d won Oscars or Grammys, or that I lived a life of hedonism with my idols, or that I dated the hot Power Ranger. I never wanted to look at life with a mathematical eye. I wanted humour and lightness, even if that meant being oblivious and not always literal or all knowing. They, meanwhile, applied science and logic to the most mundane situations,

like the time they cut the last olive in quarters because there were four of us. And yet, somehow, I began an unlikely love affair with planets in my teenage years. I watched Powers of Ten, a film by Charles and Ray Eames. In it, they zoom out beyond our galaxy, moving 10 times farther away every 10 seconds, and then quickly zoom back into Earth, to a couple having a picnic, and then into his arm, hand, skin, atoms. It gave me a mix of existential fear and solace; the infinite universe was too much to digest. But the solar system itself seemed to me like a bunch of friendly, protective neighbours – especially Saturn.

The first time I saw it, from an observatory on the hills of Barcelona, it made me conscious that I was looking at an inconceivably massive object in the actual universe. It was like what I imagine seeing Leonardo DiCaprio in person might be; something you’ve always seen in two dimensions suddenly presents itself in three. I later took to learning about Saturn’s weather and environs, almost as if I were planning a holiday. The planet’s climate is cold as frozen hell, at an average of minus 288 degrees Fahrenheit; it’s surrounded by a mysterious system of 53 moons; and if you get up close, you can see its epic storms, which are roughly as large as the Earth and whose clouds look like drops of milk first touching tea. Sometimes my friends would think that my mother worked in astrology, to her absolute horror. But over time, I secretly began to learn some astrology myself. Saturn is considered the master of the universe, signifying responsibility and rites of passage between the big phases of life. The period called Saturn Return – defined by when Saturn is in the same position as the time we were born – happens around the ages of 29, 59 and 88, natural times to reckon with who we are and where we want to go, of endings and possible beginnings. I don’t actually believe that the planets’ positions have any interventionist link with our lives, but I’ve found the act of putting cynicism aside to be therapeutic. The best quality of Saturn is, of course, its unmistakable rings of ice and rock, which are cartoonishly iconic, irresistibly proportional to

the human eye. Sure, there is the mighty Jupiter, with its spectacular patterns and gravitas. But where Jupiter is all fire and brimstone, Saturn is composure and balance. Saturn’s existence has always given me a real sense of possibility: Those rings don’t only exist in tedious school diagrams – they’re there, for you alone to see, on the other end of the telescope. Glancing at them has the effect of making you feel simultaneously insignificant and momentous, which is a pretty sobering, and useful, emotion, usually telling you: ‘Let’s get to work.’ Later that summer, I travelled home for my mother’s 60th birthday party. It consisted of a workshop in her honour in a small Catalan coastal town, with current and former colleagues of hers. I spent the day alone, swimming in the sea while they presented papers to one another, and joined them for meals. All I had to do was sit, chat and quietly observe details, for example, the fact that an alohashirt-clad Arizonan astrophysicist had the wonderfully apt name of Starrfield. As I floated in the Mediterranean, soaking up sunrays from eight minutes ago, I thought about the dedication of this group of people: the kinds of men and women who would travel to a scenic location to celebrate a birthday, then wind up sitting indoors all day to discuss star implosions. I might not appreciate the sky for the same exact reasons as they do, but they are definitely my kind of people.