SIXTY YEARS AGO, THE BASQUE WRITER IGNACIO ALDECOA TRAVELLED to the Canary Islands in search of what he had been told was paradise. He wrote a book, A Tourist’s Notebook, which the publishing house Arión published in its series ‘A Pilgrim in His Own Land’. I first came across this book many years later, in a second-hand bookshop in Madrid. I bought several copies, as many as I could find; I also tried to get some publishers interested in reprinting it, and I even got together a group of young filmmakers, led by Miguel García Morales, to film a documentary based on Aldecoa’s sentimental journey to the place he did indeed end up believing was paradise.
Meanwhile, Peter Mayer, an editor whom I had met when he worked for Penguin, spoke to me once in Madrid about making a similar trip. He did not know Aldecoa’s book, and on that occasion I didn’t mention it to him, didn’t mention this text that I had read with both gratitude and excitement some time before Mayer made his suggestion. One thing was definitely the case, that ever since Mayer spoke to me I had a clear idea in my head: to follow Aldecoa on his journey; to revisit the places he had been to; to rediscover, insofar as it was possible, the terrain he had covered, keen to lose himself in the landscape of the Islands.
The notes of the conversation I had with Peter Mayer about what he wanted from my journey got lost in a taxi somewhere, but could not be wiped from my mind. He said that he didn’t want a general history, or a geography textbook, or a tourist guide: what he was keen on was a book of my memory of the Islands, the knowledge I kept in my mind’s eye of their landscape, and that which I kept in my heart about the people there, my forefathers and my contemporaries. He didn’t want a scholarly book either. He wanted a sentimental portrait of the Canary Islands. A sentimental journey, as I understood it.
These jottings were in a notebook I had taken out to record my conversation with Peter. The task was exciting and confusing all at once; it is very difficult to compress into a single journey, a single point of view, the whole extent of such a fragmented land. The Canary Islands are a group of seven large islands (plus two smaller ones and two islets) situated in a strategically significant part of the Atlantic, next to Africa, fragments sheared off that continent by geological processes; they are on the way to America, or to Europe, depending on the direction you’re coming from, and they have a lot in common with all of these places: Africa, America, Europe. They have belonged to the Spanish Crown since the fifteenth century, and are a part of Spain, of the history, culture and language of Spain. Their relation with America (South America above all) has been essential for their development and for that of their language, their culture, their attitudes and their thought. And of course their relation with Europe, via tourism and other forms of human contact, has supported their development.
The whole region of the Canary Islands, which used to be divided into two provinces and which now is a part of the autonomous framework of democratic Spain, has been visited by writers, scientists, politicians, all kinds of people: the writers, over the course of their visits, have seen surreal spaces, extraordinary displays of the power of the earth, metaphors for both the sea and the land; artists have been struck by the variety of the landscape. And they have written, or painted, or sculpted—either while on the Islands themselves or basing their work on their experiences there—the impressions which have remained in their mind’s eye or in their heart of these crags bathed by the Atlantic.
But there are not many people who have done as Aldecoa did, not even among the travellers from the Islands themselves; very few, at least very few that I know of, have travelled the full circle, have voyaged into the interior of the Islands and seen them from the outside as well, have learnt enough to be able to describe the Islands as a whole. Aldecoa’s book, only fifty pages long in its first edition, is in this sense exceptional, and is a true guide for anyone who might want to make the incredible journey over the whole of the archipelago: high and low, far and wide.
If it had not been for Mayer’s suggestion (visit all the islands, describe them all, with modern eyes but without discounting the views of the past), then I would never have undertaken this journey. Years ago, when Julio Cortázar published The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, a book describing the sentimental journey he and his wife, Carol Dunlop, took along the highway from Paris to Marseilles, I decided to imitate the great author of Hopscotch and go on a circular trip over and around Tenerife, the largest island of the archipelago, where I was born. On the first day, along with my wife, Pilar Garcia Padilla, I came to a pretty spot in the northeast of the island, the hamlet of Masca, a beautiful place that I have since revisited in order to describe it to you in the book you now have in your hands. But the first time I was there, a group of thieves, who were staking out that part of the island with the aim of taking advantage of unwary tourists, stole everything that we had in the car, and so we called a halt to our adventure. The journey which I have now finally undertaken, travelling not just across Tenerife but through the whole region, had as its aim the same goals: to see, close-up, in as much detail as possible, the physical myth of the archipelago; to get as deep as possible into the land in order to be able to describe, or try to describe, its soul; to travel from the green forests to the geological rifts; to speak with the stones and the sea and the mountains; to see things in order to talk of them.
It was a very complex journey: it was not simply a question of looking at maps or searching for written and oral sources to guide me; Mayer’s suggestion, which I took up, was that I should give a personal account, an extremely personal one, of what it was I found.
And what did I find? That time has passed since Aldecoa jotted down the results of his poetic investigation of the archipelago. Back in his day there were islands that it was impossible to visit, where storms blew in and boats did not dare drop anchor. Back in those days, the middle of the last century, not every island had its own airport, and the Atlantic is both fierce and treacherous. It was extremely difficult for Aldecoa to dock at El Hierro, and La Gomera resisted him as well. Nowadays, all the islands are far easier to reach, although the Atlantic remains fierce; the boats have been improved and are now much faster and safer, and every island has its own working airport. The region which the Basque author visited was one that was semi-feudal, where survival almost everywhere was dependent on agriculture; tourism had not yet started its exponential growth, and the customs which he noted are very different from those which can be seen nowadays on these islands where nearly two million people live, far more than the population of the archipelago when he travelled there.
So, to some degree, Aldecoa travelled to one set of islands and I visited another. Are they really so different, changed by the passing of time and the new impressions and sensations which it has laid down? I don’t think so. The fundamental sentiment of the island dwellers (isolated as they are; landscape has a significant role to play in this) is still their melancholy (their magua, as it is called there) which Aldecoa so clearly identified, and which was visible in my parents, and in my older brothers and sisters, and in the countrymen and the fishermen whom you run into in the villages and who are still the archetypal representatives of the native islanders.
This is a sentimental journey: I began it (or began it again, as it is a journey which contains within it all the other journeys I have made to the Islands over the course of my life) in La Gomera, and have finished it in Gran Canaria: two islands which look similarly blunt, both striking like fists from the sea. But this is not a journey from island to island; that was not my aim. Just as memories do, the islands sometimes become confused with one another: they have a great deal in common. And so from time to time something that I see in one island will remind me of other physical aspects or feelings that are to be found in other parts of the archipelago.
The painter Pedro González said something to me when I told him that I was dedicating a great deal of space to the sea in this book: a phrase that I wanted to include here because to some degree it is the framework or leitmotif of my journey. ‘The sea is the horizon for the Canary Islanders,’ the great artist said, and then clarified his statement as we drank red wine in La Carrera, the main street in La Laguna on Tenerife, his home town. Like the sea, the horizon constantly changes for Canary Islanders: it can be in-your-face or oblique; it can embrace you or push you away; it breaks your heart or it consoles you. The sea is our common point; it encloses us and defines us; it frightens us and warns us. It makes us the people we are.
This journey has made me love my islands more because it has explained them to me; I am a little closer to their horizons because the islands themselves have shown their horizons to me.
While I wrote this book I needed a crutch to continue walking: an emotional crutch, words that would inspire me to carry on travelling down paths which one can only travel using the words that other wise men have previously uttered. And so, as well as Ignacio Aldecoa’s book, I made a great deal of use of two other unique texts. One was Journey to the Canary Islands by the German naturalist Alexander Humboldt, who spent time in the Islands (Tenerife above all; he saw some of the other islands in passing) at the end of the eighteenth century, as he travelled towards America. It is an extraordinary book, in which the scientific traveller does not simply observe the geology of Mount Teide, the vast volcanic mountain of the Islands, which is his passion and the object of his investigation, but also deals in great detail with the character of the islanders who put him up or whom he meets in the streets. The other book is by one of my teachers, Domingo Pérez Minik (1903-1989), a self-taught and extremely articulate man who lived through the Spanish Civil War on the losing side and was one of the members of the committee that welcomed the pope of surrealism, André Breton, to Tenerife. Minik offered a vibrant discourse on the human condition of the island, a few fragments of which I share with the readers of this book, as they seem to show in great detail what it is to be an inhabitant of these Atlantic islands.
At the end of the book, my sensation as I finished was that I had embraced, or tried to embrace, the essence of an archipelago which offers as many surprises to the visitor as the people of the islands have impressions of the sea. Before leaving you with what I saw in La Gomera and on the rest of the islands, travelling back and forth over a period of time, halting when I needed to in my sentimental memories and in those of others, I would like to thank Peter Mayer for his commission, the sentimental importance of which I don’t need to explain here, and also my dear companion, Pilar Garcia Padilla, through whose eyes I saw my own emotions anew as I travelled once again through these landscapes in which Aldecoa sought paradise and I found my horizons once again. Pilar also corrected what I wrote, gave coherence to the expression of a great number of my feelings and instilled logic in what were initially only side-tracks and suggestions. She was, if Peter will permit me to use the expression, the first editor of this book, which is dedicated to Oliver, my grandson, who, at the time of writing in January 2011, was as yet unborn, hanging safely in the belly of our daughter Eva. To some extent, this book is a form of letter to Oliver and to Eva, a letter which many people helped me to write: Yolanda Delgado, with her intelligent corrections, Ulises Ramos, Marian Montesdeoca, Carmelo Rivero and Leoncio González, who provided me with fertile literary materials to help me understand how foreigners approach and think about these islands.
IN CLOSING THIS INTRODUCTION I RECALL THE NAME OF THE COLLECTION in which Ignacio Aldecoa published A Tourist’s Notebook: ‘A Pilgrim in His Own Land’. And I realise that this is what I have been all this time as I travelled through the Islands, a pilgrim in my own land, in search of an ever-changing horizon which appears and disappears like the non-existent and mysterious island of San Borondón.