AND SO, HERE WE ARE: THIS IS OUR SPACE. A SPACE OCCUPIED BY Romans, by Africans, by Spaniards, by Genovese, by the French … Even so, are we a special people, a race apart?
I said above that in the Franco period it was frowned on for the Canary Islanders to say that they came from Africa, at least insofar as their geography was concerned. Out of a still-existing imperialist atavism, the Islands, even the easternmost ones, the ones closest to the neighbouring continent, have looked in the other direction, most likely for economic reasons, but also, at least in the most immediate past, for cultural and political ones as well. Africa has not provided a solution in the past, but now people believe that its market will increase in size and that what was once treated with disdain and ignored will have to be seen at some point as the necessary future.
The Canary Islands have been (to use an expression very much along the lines of those current in the Franco era) a ‘Spanish beachhead in Latin America’, a site which travels in the Atlantic like that stone raft thought up by the Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, a man who lived in Lanzarote for the last twenty years of his life, and who had many visitors—among them Susan Sontag, Günter Grass, Álvaro Siza, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes—who came to see why he had chosen this site to carry on writing his oeuvre after he had been expelled by his country’s politicians and also by its public opinion, having had the gall to write, to the shock of many of his backward-thinking compatriots, a Gospel According to Jesus Christ. To a degree, Saramago was a part of this beachhead that the Canary Islands is on the way to America, himself embodying this crossing of paths and visions.
But this idea of the Islands was one which first came into existence in 1492. Right here, where I stand at this very moment, and where Juana stands, and the French tourists stand, putting their boots and anoraks on in order to face up to the persistent rain which offers so great a contrast to the torrid sun of San Sebastián. And it was in San Sebastián, in this peaceful stop on the way, under the shade of the peak which is so like Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain, on a beach with grey sand and prehistoric pebbles, that Columbus dropped anchor when he set off with his sailors and other scoundrels and delinquents whom his voyage was eventually to redeem on the way to the Indies dreamt of by the Catholic Kings of Spain, in their desire to become even richer and more powerful.
COLUMBUS CAME TO SAN SEBASTIÁN DE LA GOMERA, TO THIS CALM AND self-contained port which is close to where I am writing at this very moment, and to which tourists come from all over the world, especially Germans—like Madame Merkel—and other Islanders—mostly from Tenerife, an island which is an economic and sentimental extension of La Gomera. Here people see the same plants Columbus saw, and for years they were able to walk the same packed-earth roads (I walked them myself); here is to be found the same small castle where the few relics of that past time are still kept, and the sea is the same, of course, a sea which wrinkles with waves as soon as you are past the harbour but which here is a smooth harbour where boats from all over the world jostle for position. One of these, the Never Ready, holds in its ironic name a concise definition of the character of the Islanders: we are industrious, yes, but always only nearly about to fulfil our aims, never entirely ready …
The port of San Sebastián de La Gomera is a quiet one, gathered into a bay which, like many of the natural harbours on the Islands, is protected by a large rocky outcrop, which, like that of Rio de Janeiro, is surmounted by an image of Jesus Christ.
Columbus came here, as did the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of the island, with his group of adventurers, and it was here that he met Beatriz de Bobadilla, the wife of Hernán Peraza El Joven, the lord of the island; she, and the water and other provisions which La Gomera was able to provide, were the reasons why he would continue to return to La Gomera on his future journeys. On one of these journeys, Gran Canaria was also a stopping point for the great navigator. The Islands all quarrel among one another, and this perceived division in Columbus’s affections between La Gomera and Gran Canaria has been a source of discussion for centuries, although over recent years the increasing consensus among historians and the lack of any new polemical materials has led to the debate moving on to other topics which are equally tiring but perhaps more succulent in political or journalistic terms; it is odd that the Islands have spent so much time disputing this strange version of primacy when it would have been good for both of them, for all the Islands, to have acknowledged Columbus’s presence and transformed themselves into privileged protagonists of the most famous expedition in history. But that is how things are between us, or at least how they have been: it has always been seen as better to take away rather than add together, and perhaps this has made the Islands smaller than they are, sunk into their own pettiness and diminishing their actual glories.
But Columbus was here. One afternoon I followed the Columbus path from Beatriz de Bobadilla’s house (now known as Columbus House) to the Torre del Conde, which was where Beatriz was imprisoned once her infidelities and other unpleasant aspects of her character (at least, those considered unpleasant by other people) were discovered.
I did not find, in any of these sites connected with Columbus, any particular enthusiasm to make the record of the navigator anything more than the kind of memory found in tourist guides: at the Torre del Conde there were on display some inadequate maps of La Gomera at different periods, from antiquity to the present day, and the so-called Columbus House was exhibiting a few pre-Columbian relics and some abstract art.
Even so, the island does seem to have been deliberately made, with its peaks and exuberant greenery, its extraordinary, beatific Mount Garajonay, the Islands’ version of the Iguazú Falls, as a doorway to the exuberant America which Columbus discovered, given strength by the waters of La Gomera and the caresses of Beatriz, the woman who bade him farewell as he set off for adventure. It is as if a kind of Macondo avant la lettre were created here, a forest surrounded by incomparable sheer cliffs, as if the damp and shady solitude of America were being thought up already here; La Gomera established itself, still establishes itself, as a kind of reverse beachhead. It is as though destiny had been plucked from this spot, from this South American island, both tropical and peaceful, instead of from the south of Spain (Huelva, Palos de la Frontera, the Andalucian Atlantic coast) which was Columbus’s true origin on his quest to stir up the waters of geography and history. The island is like a single point in space, a point in the middle of the sea, a suggestive and powerful rock surrounded with greenery, spread out like a hand into cliffs like fingers, a place as immensely rocky as the depths of the sea. An island which is like the bottom of the sea; there is a clump of rocks on one side of it, vast and shaped like an organ, and if you pass round the island at midday, looking at how the shadows outline the organ pipes, then you will most likely see at one and the same time the island and her dreams.
SITTING IN FRONT OF THE SEA AT HERMIGUA, WHICH COLUMBUS PROBABLY never saw as it is to the north of the island, covered by the fog drifting down from Garajonay, I wrote down some of these reflections on Columbus and his journey and what he might have found (or missed) if he had not come on his journey to the slow, almost domestic port, where the waters come quietly as though the sea had lost its vivacity and gained nothing but melancholy. As if the sea were the very essence of the folía, rising and falling as the feelings rise and fall with arrivals and departures … Columbus never came to Hermigua: he couldn’t have. Hermigua, with this high and wrinkled sea, would have been a place to stop, not to pass through. He would have halted here, his ships would not have been able to fight against the buffetings of the sea, I imagine, looking at how the tide rises and falls with untamed intensity.
If Columbus had come through Hermigua … First of all, he would not have come, because he came in particular to see Beatriz de Bobadilla, and this was a powerful reason for him to travel by the course he did (although, Tejera Gaspar informs me, Beatriz was not on the island when he arrived. Legends are like that). Secondly, he could not have dropped anchor without putting his three ships in serious danger.
The sea is still today as it was back then: of course, the sea is eternal just as the landscape is eternal, and if mankind does not disfigure it, then it should remain the same for many centuries to come. We come down to Hermigua from Garajonay because the landscape compels us. When you are up on top, high on this magnificent mountain that seems to be a metaphor for a mountain, after having crossed the paths cut by water and the woods and the laurisilva (a word that comes from Latin, laurus + silva, ‘laurel forest’, and which is used to mean a kind of subtropical forest which is found in warm, damp areas), and when your gaze is sated with the recurrent vision of the huge trunks of prehistoric trees and fog, then the road offers you two options. If you turn back, then you will make the same journey through the scrubland, down into a dry south which it appears impossible could ever have come from such a vast, exquisite, unusual forest; or else you will travel into a soft north, filled with banana plantations and old houses done up by the Germans or the Islanders themselves, the path moving sheer down to the sea, as if a green hand were stretched out to inform you what La Gomera lived through for so many years: to tell you what it was going to become, to tell you about the nearby Cedro, the mountain down whose sides run streams of clean water which irrigated the fields and made these gardens a mystery of tree-filled silence. And, from time to time, you will see a palm tree, arrogant as a mountain peak.
And we decided to travel to the north, towards green Hermigua, presided over by a silence which is given life by the sheer cliffs which lead to the peak from which there emanates an unending air of mystery. From above, Hermigua is nothing more than this singular, absolute, almost vertiginous green, and then the sea. The sea is the counterpoint; one senses its waves—the strength of its waves—and how they come in like nothing but the sea, majestic but inaudible until you reach the edge of the cultivated lands and the planted terraces, the fertile banana plantations, the tomato fields, the vineyards which are not simply fertile but which used to be the main element of the commercial life of the town. Wine always rising up like a light from the ground; the humble vineyards alongside the roads of the Islands.
IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT, AS HAPPENS SO OFTEN IN THIS LAND, AND in so many other lands as well, Hermigua is, with respect to San Sebastián, the yin (or the yang, if San Sebastián is the yin), and this is so not simply for logical reasons of local rivalry, but also because here, between the southern capital and the northern territory, we see the divisions within the Islands themselves, an archipelago which has its north and its south almost as though it had two souls, two sets of customs, two ways of being. The splendid north, filled with the colourful farms, the bright paths and damp lanes, and the dour south, where the touch of the sea gives scarcely any water and the interior is a parched land where, on the larger islands, avarice has built apartment blocks, hotels, chalets and motorways in order to transform what was once a kind of desert into a continuous and largely disorganised urbanisation. Here, where I am now, under the Garajonay fog, in Hermigua, a stimulating equilibrium has been preserved: the sea and the cultivated land, and the old houses, and the silence where even the softest voice sounds like an attack on the crickets and the chickens.
And the soul of Hermigua is in the sea; that sea which Columbus could never cross, because it would have stopped his journey; the sea is much stronger than Columbus.
IT IS THE SEA WHICH TRANSFORMS THIS TINY PARADISE—A SIGN ON THE way into the town says ‘Hermigua: the best climate in the world’—into a natural halt in the world; you look towards the sea, and it is there, unsettling and majestic, epic; the sea raises itself up against the tallest rocks—and it may be that the rocks at Hermigua are the tallest in the whole archipelago—and then it falls as wild foam, the foam of a giant or a prehistoric animal, and this process transforms into a kind of lyric spectacle, vast and overwhelming.
This is an island, like others in the archipelago, like La Palma, like Gran Canaria, like Tenerife, built up out of deep ravines, of cliffs falling into the sea, but it is here, in La Gomera, where the ravines are deepest, where the division between the north and the south, the yin and yang of the Islands, is most profound. The hellish topology which the aboriginal inhabitants of the Islands dealt with as best they could and the descendants of the Islands’ conquerors dealt with in Christian humility. At least, this was the case until mechanical shovels and great digging machines gave the Islands more control over their north, or their south: the island of great drops and sheer ravines has been diminished somehow.
IT WAS THIS TOPOLOGY THAT FORCED THE INHABITANTS OF LA GOMERA to learn to communicate by whistling, a strange custom which still survives despite telephone lines and mobile phones, despite greater mobility and better means of transport. The whistling language of La Gomera, which was declared part of humankind’s cultural heritage by UNESCO and which is now taught in schools so as not to be lost for ever, is an ancient tradition that dates back to the African ancestors of the Islands, but it is also a necessity; rather than being a fascinating gizmo or contraption of little use, it was a natural invention of the inhabitants of La Gomera in order to overcome the distances which the make-up of the Islands imposed on them, and it has survived not simply because of local stubbornness, but because it was, until the arrival of mobile phones and other portable means of communication, the only way for individuals to be in touch regarding questions of livestock and other elements of daily life. In these wildernesses crisscrossed with ravines of all sizes, to hear the whistling language is not simply an alert, but also makes one shudder with recognition: it is a signal of life which comes from the depths of earth’s history. Women and men, fingers in their mouths, producing a sound from prehistory, the voice of essential help and assistance—a way of communicating from out of time that has come to us right up to the present day.
I have said that the boundaries between the north and the south are being eroded: water, highways, bridges have all turned the landscape into a continuum. But the evidence that things were not always this way, that the north and the south were geographically irreconcilable both here and in many other islands, finds in Hermigua and its surrounding villages its clearest metaphor. One had to approach this area from San Sebastian and the other islands by crossing this boisterous sea which sounds as though it is snoring on the August afternoon where I write, just having come from eating in the friendly surroundings of Doña Juana’s refuge. Ferries carried travellers from one side of the island to the other, from San Sebastián to Hermigua, over rough and calm seas: a form of transportation which to us might now seem primitive, but which was all there was right up until the day before yesterday, if I can put it that way.
In order to be able to establish connections with Hermigua, people built a spit, a kind of artificial port, stealing space from the sea and her rages, building around a natural pool among the crags. Another time, when I was watching the angry salt water, the sky above me was, as it often is in this melancholic and cloudy north, a firmament of brick and mud over our heads, and the clouds helped give the scene the air of an illusion; we were the subjects of the sea and the fog, and we were being overwhelmed by a perpetual invasion of sounds both indifferent and powerful: the all-encompassing, pitiless sound of the sea.
As if the northern sea wanted to make its victory even more visible, the waves beat against and climbed over what remained of the spit, a few powerful but ancient columns from which sprouted the pointless iron bars that had been used to make them. A boy pointed out to me the point the waves could reach when the sea was really wild, and I felt even more fearful, because on the rocky outcrop where we sat we were more than six metres above the endless waves. And down below us, the boy said, people still go swimming, in spite of the immense violence of the waves, in spite of the pitiless, predatory willpower of the sea which Columbus would not have dared to brave, at least not here.
OLD HOUSES, SILENCE, BANANA TREES, THE SPIT REACHING INTO THE SEA. Hermigua is a series of symbols, both of La Gomera and of the islands in general, perhaps because, who knows, La Gomera is a metaphor for all the islands. It is said—and I imagine that this is said of every island in the world; it is definitely said of the British Isles, for example—that the Canary Islands are like continents in miniature; and if the Canary Islands is a continent in miniature, then La Gomera is a continent in itself: it may be miniature in terms of its size (142.76 square miles), but it has to be a continent because of its ravines, its eternal ravines, which have never been broken by the bridges cast by the hand of man. A self-sufficient, self-sustaining island, just as back then, in the post-war period, was the yard of the house where I was born. Poor but self-sufficient, standing firm against hunger, protected by the forest of beauty.
So, here is Hermigua, the central metaphorical element of the physical presence of the soul of the north of the Islands. Nervous when faced by the island gorges, I made a note in my book: ‘the milky water violently caressing perfect rocks, almost prehistoric’. Rocks like the stones which García Márquez examined next to the ice factory in Aracataca. But then my eyes grew accustomed to the situation and I saw the uniform terraces, designed by the imperious randomness of perfection, like the ones that you see to the south in the Gran Rey Valley, or like the ones that Humboldt saw when he climbed into the La Orotava Valley on Tenerife, a much more friendly landscape, one that almost caresses the eye itself, or like the ones on Gran Canaria, near Bandama or Tejeda … Mankind, ever since he started to cultivate the Islands, has made common cause with nature as though he were blending into nature itself, or as though he were its accomplice, its way of clawing at hunger, the violent wound of misery.
But man has not been able to tame the sea, not at all, and here you can see (as my notebook says), ‘black rocks and the white dew covering the violent sea all the way into infinity’. When I left I went back to see the spit, which nowadays is like a sculpture by Eduardo Chillida or Tony Gallardo, or Martín Chirino or José Abad (the last three of these artists are themselves from the Islands): a violent sculpture, or one which has had violence done to it; four enormous columns resisting an assault which still, even in my memory, is overwhelming. And I saw, perched on one of these pillars of Hercules, a single seagull, picking its way through the wild remnants of the spit, like a dove on the shoulder of a demigod.
Ignacio Aldecoa was unable to go to La Gomera: the seas were too high for his baot, and he writes in his incomparable A Tourist’s Notebook that ‘La Gomera is a strange fantasy of valleys for this tourist who wanted to see them and could not, because of problems with the motor of the ferry that was to carry him. He saw it at a distance and heard tell of its magnificent valleys.’ The word he uses for ‘tourist’ is a specific one: godo. A godo is a Spaniard from the mainland who is not yet used to the customs of the Islands, who is not yet an adapted citizen. It’s a slightly derogatory term. When they say ‘mainlander’ they are not trying to be derogatory; they only hope that the visitor knows whose land he’s walking on: Aldecoa called himself a godo, and that is the vantage point from which he looks at the Islands. But he cannot enter La Gomera; the sea won’t let him: it is treating him as though he were still a godo. The Basque writer also says the following about his observation of the island at a distance: ‘The traveller had to return to Guía de Isora-Alcalá, where the old men of the sea were waiting for him, the seven old men from the Tenerife legend who fish for tuna alone. They row out to the horizon and beyond, into the open sea. They seek the huge tuna which swim in the sea round La Gomera. They navigate by Mount Teide, the silver head of the mountain which starts to shine in the early sun. The old men set out to sea at the mountain’s first light and come home with its last. The old men belong to the sea; they might die with their oars in their hands, their tackle pulled down into the deeps by some great fish, their prows spun round like a candlewick by some sharp gust of wind; but the seven of them are there now, to the south of Tenerife, facing La Gomera, ready to be counted.’
The sea welcomes them; the sea throws them out. And to think that I came from this land, and here everything is sea, an intrusive sea which travels like a seagull towards the America sought by Columbus.
ABOVE ME WAS THE LAND, WITH ALL ITS FAIRY-TALE MYSTERY, STRANGE nooks where men and birds made the nests they dreamt of, nature calm and under control, shaded from the rain in summer; down here at this singular sea, infinite, it is as though the noise the trees make is torn from its depths.
I haven’t been able to forget Hermigua, although I do not know if I can explain why.
AND NOW THAT HERMIGUA IS NO MORE THAN A DAMP MEMORY, THE evidence of its high tides, the green paths through its cultivated terrain feeling almost like courtyards or gardens, I have travelled over the southwest of the island, I have climbed down the great cliffs that separate San Sebastián de La Gomera from the next valley, just one of many, but perhaps the most exotic of them all, the valley which shelters Santiago beach at the end of a steep path lined with palm trees and thistles, where every now and then one hears the lonely bleating of a goat separated from its flock. And after this bleating, as though all it were waiting for were someone to throw a rock at it to wake it up, there is a calm ocean which dozes and makes a noise as though of underwater trees or crickets who dare not make too much noise.
It is a desert, but its dunes are infinite and tall and made of stone as though carved by the hand of a mighty sculptor trying to divide the island into pieces, as though he had broken it up in fury simply in order to create articles of beauty out of the wreckage. These huge stones, rocks which are sometimes in the shape of houses, or lions, or arms, give the spectator the idea that he is in an empty forest, inhabited only by ghosts which will then visit him in dreams or nightmares. People who suffer from vertigo should think twice before entering into this indescribable phenomenon of curves and surprises. Palm trees, or pines, or the cacti that line the winding path are only halts on a path that at times appears to be an allegory of thirst.
THIS IS A LAND DESIGNED FOR LONELINESS, A DESERT INHABITED BY THE sound of the lonely, by whistling and by melancholia. I haven’t heard the whistling over the last few days, but it is there, like an ancestral language invented by man in order to eliminate all kinds of distance, to allow him to be understood both by other men and by animals. The whistling has not been heard, or I have not heard it, but the cliffs which made it necessary are still there. They have made tunnels through them, but it has been impossible to deal with these crags upon crags upon crags. I hope they never do, because they are where the changing appearance lies of an island which, simply because it had and has these ravines and cliffs, is still a miracle which can be pointed out to show men how the intact physiognomy of the planet once was.
BUT MAN HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO REFRAIN FROM ACTING; HE HAS HAD TO take from this island even the symbols preserved in the desert of enormous and incessant rocks, and has done so to such an extent that the sea has been substituted for the air: he has built an airport. Was it necessary?
In the area that was perhaps the least sheer of this island of huge precipices, man decided, then, to lay down a runway and establish an airport which looks more like a refuge in the midst of the most gentle calamities of the desert. The cliffs might have protested, but the steamrollers eventually found a way.
But this is no refuge; it is an airport like many others, open from dawn until mid-afternoon for inter-island flights; people come to see it as though it were a symbol of the future, but they also see it, as do I, as a relic of the past, the final attempt, the most modern and riskiest attempt, to make La Gomera bring into itself, from its ancestral silence, all the noises of the modern world, including the sound of aeroplanes.
The airport, built eleven years ago, was installed in order to break the large distance that separates this island from the other islands; since 1974 this is a distance which has been made shorter by ever more frequent and faster boats: today one can travel from Los Cristianos in Tenerife to San Sebastián de La Gomera in half an hour; in the past, the boats used to go to the spit at Hermigua, that relic whose remains—now guarded by seagulls—symbolised the absolute, almost stellar, distance between La Gomera and the other islands; more recently, boats have connected Tenerife and San Sebastián de Le Gomera from Santa Cruz, the capital of Tenerife. Travellers would journey in repurposed post-boats, and the journey would take the whole night: they would sleep surrounded by the food and utensils which were being delivered to what was then the most distant of the islands, in spite of its role as the compass needle or key to Columbus’s American journey.
I travelled in one of these post-boats, first of all in 1968, when the Olympic torch came through La Gomera on its way to Mexico, pausing first of all at the Olympic Games and then heading to Tlatelolco, where the Mexican government ordered troops to fire on students who were protesting in the run up to the Olympics: 1968, a year when the foundations of the world trembled, from Paris to Peking as well as in Tlatelolco …
But the Olympics and Tlatelolco hadn’t happened yet. The torch was brought in the Juan Sebastián Elcano, a Spanish teaching boat commanded by a descendant of Christopher Columbus, himself called Christopher Columbus, and the vessel stopped in San Sebastián de La Gomera as a memory of the vital journey of the admiral who discovered America.
We saw them carry the burning torch out of the boat, and we saw some local athletes climb up to the ceremonial urn which had been built on one of the lower rises of the La Cueva beach, where the Nautical Club of San Sebastián de La Gomera is now situated. The local authorities, all of them back then appointed by Franco, came to welcome us, and the island was decorated for what was the most important event since the earlier Christopher Columbus has passed through on a mission which at one level appeared similar: to discover the world, to cross the sea to bring a new light—a light that was no better or worse than others, merely distinct. The torch seemed to be a metaphor of that past.
They lit the torch and put La Gomera on the map, once again, and then they played floral games, read poems in homage to the New World, and the Juan Sebastián Elcano (a ship of the Spanish navy) sailed on, leaving the ceremonial urn still warm from the flames of the torch, and leaving behind also the square with its large trees, the main square of La Gomera, where people still live their life in common, where people gather to give each other the news and gossip, and where the artisans and farmers of the island, many of them married to foreigners, until recently sold their products or merely gathered to talk.
I have gone to see the urn now, I have seen it there, standing upright, its iron cold now: the American flame still burns in the soul of La Gomera (how could it not?), but the fire is no longer visible, or rather I have not seen it, the torch is not lit and people don’t remember the last time they saw the flame.
And so La Gomera, which was the most important staging post of modern exploration, sanctioned by Columbus as the point from which one had to set off (like the torch) in order to head into the unknown, was even in times of absolute violent contemporaneity, until the twentieth century, entirely inaccessible by air, and even today the connection is uncertain, because it is not clear that it is either affordable or desirable for such a precipitous land, so many islands within a single island, to have a landing strip for transitory visitors.
BACK THEN, WHEN WE TRAVELLED IN POST-BOATS, LANDING WAS AN EVENT in itself; the inhabitants of the Islands, people of all ages, gathered on the old pier (later to be rejuvenated), and the island, which seemed almost like a film set, was set in motion; this liveliness which entered into the island when the boats arrived is in some ways similar to that which takes place in the Colombian city of Cartagena de Indias—which also looks like a film set—when the aeroplanes arrive: in both cases, people seem to burst into life before shortly sinking back into lethargy until a new boat arrives, and the cycle repeats itself. It is not like Cartagena, but sometimes it appears to be like Macondo, with the old people waiting for time to pass, looking at the calm sea, greeting and bidding farewell to the boats that come with passengers and goods.
THERE WAS ONE OLD MAN IN THE SQUARE WITH THE BIG TREES, THE ONE known as the Square of the Discoverers, who sat there and told old stories about the old islanders, and also recited proverbs and told jokes, and was like one of those old men who name things in A Hundred Years of Solitude, whose author, Gabriel García Márquez, was born in Aracataca, a tiny village in the north of Colombia which reminded me, with its sweat and wind and inclement yet fruitful climate, of some of the hidden areas of this island—another mythological place.
Back then, the people who came to San Sebastián and listened to this man giving names to things were not tourists; they were travellers, and they came bringing things that the island needed; they would stay for a few days; they were civil servants or messengers; they were known to the islanders; they were not godos, as Aldecoa said he was; they did not come to sunbathe on the isolated or beautiful beaches, or to smoke cannabis, or to grow cannabis, or to meet in hotels or tour groups. They were travellers, but they were a part of the island. La Gomera produces a complicated and delectable variety of food; its fruits (mangoes and bananas in particular) are always sought-after; its livestock is rough but fertile; its cheeses are good (Columbus mentions this: ‘We took on board water and firewood and other provisions, cheese in particular, of which there are many and all of good quality’); you could sever all connections between La Gomera and the rest of the world and the island would carry on working, up to a point, because the inhabitants of La Gomera had learnt, within the islands that make up the island, on this wrinkled sheet of cliffs which divides the island into many islands, to survive without any external assistance. And this had been the case for centuries.
But here is the airport; people who live in this part of the island (for example, the people who work at or who visit the Tecina hotel, the most important element of the La Gomera hospitality industry) now save themselves the trouble of travelling round the cliffs from San Sebastián; however, the other inhabitants of the island prefer to rely on the boats, a tradition which is also a sign of identity for La Gomera, and an extremely resilient one.
As well as all this, the economic contributions it brings, the ease it brings to travel, the airport appears to me now that I see it for a second time an island palace, a symbol which accentuates the image of this tiny island which embodies so much history and—perhaps because of this—so much melancholy.
The airport underlines the distance inherent in the island, a distance which is already under the skins and in the souls of the people who live on La Gomera, a distance that can be touched, that can be felt in the air.
La Gomera is distance. This much is emphasised by its cliffs and by the line of palm trees which seem to mark the beginning or the end of a desert.
AS I WAS WALKING DOWN THESE SLOPES WHICH THE SUN TRANSFORMS into the physical manifestation of thirst, I was looking at the ground and the rocky distances; and there in the distance, under Mount Teide—the volcano which, at 12,198 feet above sea level, is the tallest mountain in the archipelago, and which can be seen from this point better than from anywhere else in the Canary Islands—the range of Tenerife seemed like a natural extension of La Gomera, as if the two islands were connected and formed a single continent without an obstinate sea between them.
But the sea was there, down by our feet, like a dull witness to so much melancholy.
MELANCHOLY IS BORN UP THERE, UP IN GARAJONAY, AND IT TRICKLES down. Geologists say that the volcano that is the island is dormant, that the immense burst of greenery on the top of the mountain hides underneath itself a fire which went out three million years ago, but only provisionally, and which could in theory spark up again at any moment. It is difficult to imagine a rude awakening in the middle of these beds of water and moss, and it is difficult in general to imagine fire among the fog, even though these mountains have shamefully been the scene of terrifying fires, mostly caused by the negligence of people who set a fire without wanting or needing to, and then terrible things happen, like the fire that thirty years ago devastated a huge tract of Garajonay and led to the deaths of twenty people, among them the civil governor of Tenerife, Paco Afonso, a friend of mine from childhood.