High Tide in Tucson (11 page)

The Canary Islands weren't named for birds, but dogs. Pliny the Elder wrote of “Canaria, so called from the multitude of dogs [canis] of great size.” In Pliny's day this archipelago, flung west from the coast of Morocco, was the most westerly place imaginable. All maps started here. For fourteen centuries Arabs, Portuguese, and eventually the Spanish came this far, and no farther; it remained Meridian Zero. When Columbus gathered the force to head west and enlarge the map, it was from La Gomera, in the Canaries, that he sailed.

I went to the Canaries for nearly a year, to find new stories to tell, and to grow comfortable thinking in Spanish. Or so I said; the truth is closer to the bone. It was 1991, and in the U.S. a clamor of war worship had sprung like a vitriolic genie from the riveted bottles we launched on Baghdad. Yellow ribbons swelled
from suburban front doors, so puffy and ubiquitous as to seem folkloric. But this folklore, a prayer of godspeed to the killers, allowed no possibility that the vanquished might also be human. I grew hopeless, then voiceless. What words could I offer a place like this? Five hundred years after colonialism arrived in the New World, I booked a return passage.

Subtropical Europe seemed an idyllic combination of wild and tame: socialized health care and well-fed children, set in a peaceful tangle of banana trees and wild poinsettias. We settled in Tenerife's capital city, Santa Cruz, in a walk-up apartment that was tiny by U.S. standards, average by European, and anyhow what we could afford. I soon got used to living in a small space. The walls vibrated pleasantly with my upstairs neighbor's piano sonatas. I planted tomatoes and basil in pots on the balcony. My daughter became bilingual without realizing it, continuing to chatter in Spanish as I walked her home from kindergarten. In the afternoons she and I made forays to the bright, rowdy markets, to the beach, to wherever the green city buses would take us. We sat in sidewalk cafés on the harbor, watching cars go by. Behind the cars, enormous ships passed by on a lane of water not visible from our vantage point, so it looked as if ocean liners were sliding majestically up and down the Avenida de Anaga. In the park we collected round wooden jacaranda pods with toothy openings like small dragon mouths. We grew accustomed to the remarkable habit of walking there, perfectly safe, after dark. We did not miss the New World.

I set my writing desk against the apartment's front window, from which I could look down into the tops of the great fig trees that lined the street below—a broad boulevard named for General Franco, the distinguished despot and friend to Hitler. (My friends who sent me letters there will vouch for this, my
astonishing fascist address.) So much for the innocence of this place, whose Spanish charm—like the whole world, apparently—is built on the bones of the vanquished. What new stories were here to tell? Instead of writing, I took to staring at the apartment across the street, also three floors up, where at night a fellow insomniac haunted his spartan balcony. I considered blinking my lights at him. I began to imagine a whole secret world of signals: A woman who sits on her balcony each morning drinking coffee, while the stranger across the street does the same. One day she buys a fern for her balcony, and the following day so does he. Then she buys a geranium, so does he. She fills her balcony, crowds it with flowers, so that he will too. Why? To watch him prove his devotion? Because she feels sorry for him, and wants him to drink his coffee in the lively embrace of a garden? Or simply because she has power over him? If that is the case, then she will take the plants away again, one by one, leaving him with nothing in the end. In my despondent state I could think of no happier ending. Power, like space, it seemed to me, would always get used. People expand and bloat to fill it.

My mind staggered and found nothing of use to tell. A small, squat spider patrolled the window casing above my writing desk. Its two white forelegs moved continually in a single repeated gesture: a scooping motion toward its mouth, like a mute beggar asking for bread. The spider became the muse of my empty page, asking, asking, asking to be filled.

In September Camille made plans to spend a weekend with a school friend. Given the chance to get away, briefly, I found I needed to go. I didn't know why, but I knew where. La Gomera.

 

Six of the seven Canary Islands have airports, the better to accommodate hasty visits from European sun worshipers. But any traveler who wants to approach the seventh, most secretive Canary—La Gomera—must take the sea road as Columbus did. I found myself that kind of traveler, in no particular hurry on a bright Saturday. I'd been told dolphins liked to gambol in the waves in this channel, and that sighting them brings good luck. I was ready for some luck. The sun on the pointed waves was hard as chipped flint, but I stared anyway, awaiting revelation.

The ferry from Tenerife to La Gomera churned away from a southern resort town with a bleached, unimaginative skyline of tourist hotels. For reasons difficult to fathom or appreciate, the brown hills dropping away behind the port displayed giant white letters spelling out
HOLLYWOOD
. An hour and a half ahead of us lay tiny La Gomera, where the hills don't yet speak English or anything else.

Among urban Canarians, La Gomera has a reputation for backwardness, and the Gomerans themselves are sometimes likened to Guanches—the tall, blue-eyed, goat-herding aboriginals whom the Spaniards found here and promptly extinguished in the fifteenth century. No one knows where they came from, though it's a good guess that they were related to the tall, blue-eyed Berbers who still roam the western Sahara. Throughout the Canaries, the Guanches herded goats, made simple red-clay pottery, and followed the lifestyle known as Neolithic, living out their days without the benefit of metal. They were farmers, not fishers; anthropologists insist these island people had no boats. On La Gomera they used a type of language unique in the world, which was not spoken but
whistled
. This exotic means of communication, called
silbo
, could traverse the great distances that routinely separate neighbors on an island cut through and through
with steep, uncrossable gorges. (Whistling carries its subtleties over distance in a way that shouting can't.) I'd been told by many Canarians that the silbo has died out completely. But others claimed it still persists in some corners, along with pottery making and farming with the muscle of human and ox. I made a pact for the crossing: if I see dolphins in the channel, I'll believe the rest of the story.

The blue cliffsides of La Gomera seemed close enough to Tenerife to reach by means of a strong backstroke. It's hard to imagine living on islands this small, in plain view of other land, and never being stirred to build a boat. In fact, I know of an anthropologist who studied the archaeological record of the Guanches, but could not convince her colleagues that their culture shunned the sea. People with such mysterious motives seem more legendary than real. That's the great problem, I suppose, with becoming extinguished.

Just beyond the rushing ferry's shroud of spray, the dolphins appeared to me, slick and dark, rolling like finned inner tubes in the Atlantic.

 

San Sebastian de La Gomera is the port from which Columbus set sail for the New World. Elsewhere on earth, the approaching quincentennial anniversary of that voyage had been raising a lot of fuss, but here at the point of origin all was quiet. Fishing boats sat like sleeping gulls in the harbor, rolling in the ferry's wake. A store in the port sold T-shirts with the ambiguous message “Aquí partió Colón”—Columbus departed from here. So did everyone else, apparently. San Sebastian's narrow streets were empty save for long shadows of fig trees and a handful of
noontime shoppers. I claimed my bantam-weight rental car and drove up a steep, cobbled hill to the
parador
overlooking the harbor.

The hotel, Parador Condé de La Gomera, is an old, elegant replica of an estate that stood here in Columbus's time. The massive front door leads to a cool interior of cut-stone archways and dark carved woodwork. Passages open to bright courtyards, where potted ferns grow head high and higher, brushing the door frames. The hallways turn out everywhere onto hidden sitting areas dappled with light, each one arranged like a perfect photograph. Easy enough a life, to stay forever in the paradise of San Sebastian. Columbus came close to doing it. Gomerans love to tell the story of how he delayed his first historic voyage for many months—nearly cashed it in altogether—having settled down here comfortably with the widow of the first Count of La Gomera, Beatriz de Bobadilla.

The balcony of my room overlooked the tops of palms and tamarinds leaning perilously over the edge of the cliff, and far below, the harbor. From a rocking chair on the balcony I watched the ferry that had brought me here, now chugging back toward the land of white high-rises. I tried to read a botanical account of La Gomera, but in the midst of a day so bright white and blue, some crucial, scientific part of my mind seemed not to have made the crossing with me. A steady rattle of wind in the palms hypnotized me into the unthinkable thing for a chronic insomniac: an afternoon nap.

In my sleep I heard a conversation of birds. I woke up and heard it still: birds in the garden, asking each other questions. I shook my cottony head and leaned over the banister, looking down through the trees. From my hidden place I could see only a gardener with bristling white hair. As I spied on him, I saw him
thrust a finger into his mouth and make a warbling, musical whistle. In a minute, an answer came back.

I threw on my shoes and hurried downstairs to the garden. It was as deep and edible as Eden: guavas, figs, avocados, a banana tree bent with its burden of fruit. Another tree bore what looked like a watermelon-sized avocado. I located the man I'd seen from up above, but I felt unaccountably shy. I asked him about the tree with outsize avocados, not so much for information as to nurture my fantasy that he would stick his fingers in his mouth and warble the answer. He explained (in Spanish, disappointingly) that the tree comes from Cuba, where they use the fruit as a musical instrument. I asked him to tell me its name in
silbo
. His mouth turned down in a strange pinch and he stood still a long time. Dragonflies clicked in the palms overhead. Finally he said, “She doesn't have a name in
silbo
. She's not from here.” And walked off toward the guava trees. A parrot in a wrought-iron cage behind me muttered barely audible Spanish words in monotone; I whistled at him, but he too held me in his beady glare and clammed up.

 

Breakfast was a sideboard loaded with fresh bread and jars of a sweet something called
miel de palma
, palm honey. I hated to get a house reputation for being nosy, but I was suspicious. It takes both bees and flowers to make honey, and a palm has nothing you'd recognize as a flower. (A botanist with a good eye would, but not a honeybee.) I mentioned this to the cook, who conceded that it's actually not honey but syrup, boiled down from the sap of palms in just the same way New Englanders make syrup from maple sap. I was still suspicious: palm trees, ancient
relatives of the grasses, have no xylem and phloem, the little pipes in a tree trunk that move the sap up and down through the tree. To tap a palm, you'd have to whack the head off a mature tree and let it bleed to death.

The cook was congenial about getting a science quiz at this early hour. He told me that what I'd guessed was partly true—in the old days
miel de palma
was a delicacy fatal to the trees, and therefore quite expensive. But in this century, North Africans had developed a gentler palm-tapping technique and introduced it to La Gomera. He said I should go see the palm groves.

I went. I drove up into the highlands of whitewashed villages, vineyards, and deep-cut valleys that rang with the music of wild canaries (ancestral species of their yellower domestic cousins). The island of Gomera is a deeply eroded volcano, twelve miles across and flat-topped, with six mammoth gorges radiating from the center like spokes of a wheel. Farms and villages lie within the gorges, and the road does not go anywhere as the crow flies. Often I rounded a corner to face a stunning view of cliffs and sea and, in the background, the neighboring island of Tenerife. From this distance, Tenerife showed off the pointed silhouette of its own grand volcano, Mount Teide, snowclad from autumn to spring, the highest mountain on any soil claimed by Spain.

La Gomera's farmland brought to mind my grandfather's tales of farming the hills of Kentucky: planting potatoes on ground so steep, he liked to say, you could lop off the ends of the rows and let the potatoes roll into a basket. But here the farmers mostly grow grapevines, on narrow, stone-banked terraces that rise one after another in steep green stairways from coastline to clouds. Hawks wheeled in the air currents rising from the gorges.

I stopped for coffee in a country restaurant that by chance was hosting a family reunion. Unwilling to leave me out, the
waiter brought me watercress soup and the country staple known as “wrinkled potatoes.” The spicy cilantro sauce had personality. So did the waiter. I told him I'd heard rumors of a village where they make pottery the way the Guanches did. (I was making this up, wholesale.) “Go to Chipude,” he said, startling me. “That's not where they make it. The town where they make it doesn't have a name, but you can see it from Chipude.”

I followed his advice—how could I not?—and at Chipude they waved me down the road to a place unmarked on my map, but whose residents insist it
does
have a name: Cercado (meaning, approximately, “Hidden inside its walls”). I spotted a group of white-aproned women sitting in an open doorway, surrounded by red clay vessels. One woman wore a beaten straw hat and held a sphere of clay against herself, carving it with a knife. She was not making coils or, technically speaking, building the pot; she was sculpting it, exactly as the Guanches are said to have done. When she tilted up her straw hat, her gold earring glinted and I saw that her eyes were Guanche blue. I asked her where the clay comes from. She pointed with her knife: “That
barranco
,” the gorge at the end of the village. Another woman was painting a dried pot with reddish clay slip: mud from that other
barranco
, she pointed. After a pot dries, they explained, and is painted with slip and dries again, its surface is rubbed smooth with a beach rock. Finally, the finished pot is polished to the deep, shiny luster of cherry wood. This last was the task of an old woman with the demeanor of a very old tree, who sat in the corner. She showed me her polishing stick: the worn-down plastic handle of a toothbrush. “What did the Guanches use?” I asked, and she gave me a smile as silent as the gardener's and the parrots.