IT IS DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE SUCH FIRES IN THE MIDST OF SO MUCH FOG. Fog is a factor in the mountain, and I think that when historians talk about the character of the people of La Gomera (and that of many of the inhabitants of the Canary Islands as well) as being turned in on itself and melancholy, then they need to bear in mind the effect which this fog has on the soul of the island. The director of the Garajonay National Park has studied the phenomenon of the fog and summarises his conclusions as follows: ‘Throughout a large portion of the year, especially in spring and summer, the islands are affected by the trade winds which come from the Azores anticyclone: these are superficial northeasterly winds which are filled with moisture by their passage over the relatively cool waters surrounding the archipelago, and which bring freshness and good weather.’
Good weather and melancholy, the pleasure that each inhabitant of the Canary Islands has in imagining that his is the best climate in the world.
According to a chronology of Canary Island history which I have been using to tell myself the history of the Islands, the Islanders have always referred to the place where they live—even when there were no maps, even when it was believed that there were more islands than the ones people knew of, when people thought that there was an undiscovered island, San Borondón, an island which was never discovered because it does not exist—as the Fortunate Islands, because of their situation, because of their climate, just because. And the first time they were referred to as such was in the year 188 or 186 BC; Plautus referred to them in his work The Three Coins and then, with Christ already walking among us, the Greek geographer Strabo ‘refers [I’m quoting from the chronology here] to some islands in his Geography as the Fortunate Islands, and he is doubtless referring to the Canary Islands.’ And it was in the second century AD that Pliny the Elder ‘wrote the first more or less faithful description of the Canary Islands in Book VI of his Natural History’, which must have been written, according to the same chronology, round about thirty years after the death of Christ.
So, ever since then the Canary Islands have not been a matter of merely fiction or history, but they have been identified with this ‘fortunate climate’ which is the foundation and the surface of their value to tourists.
If their climate is so fortunate, if they are themselves the Fortunate Islands, then where does the melancholy come from?
The truth is that the melancholy which is attributed to La Gomera as one of the key elements in the islanders’ character is distributed throughout the Islands, and has taken root in almost all of them, like grief, like hopelessness. This was something which Alexander von Humboldt noted in 1799 when he reached Santa Cruz and then looked for the topographical essence of so much beauty in the valley of La Orotava; it was noted with a deal more humour by the Canary Islander Viera y Clavijo (1731-1813), when he recounted the self-obsessed and confused story of how the Guanches were shaken out of their ingenious laziness by well-equipped conquistadors, and it was also noted by Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), the philosopher and poet, when Primo de Rivera, the dictator who first showed Franco the way, chose Fuerteventura as the site of Unamuno’s exile for his disobedient behaviour.
What Unamuno saw in Fuerteventura was an extension of the African desert, an Unfortunate Isle, an island without any fortune whatsoever, assaulted by the sun and the wind, on which a decimated population looked to the sea as though it could provide them with a miracle. In the poems which Unamuno wrote about his experience in this prison without any walls, an experience which he transformed into a seminar on poetry and philosophy, the great Basque writer went deep into the soul of Fuerteventura, the soul of the majoreros (Fuerteventura used to be called Maxorata, and its inhabitants are called majoreros), and discovered within it the identity of the island: ‘this mountain a ruined volcano | corroded by thirst and so naked | that desolation itself looks out in silence | from this suffering and hermit island.’
One need do no more than step onto the island and walk across its barren plains without even a single shrub rising from them, in order to imagine this desolation as always having existed, right up until the present day; and when desolation itself did not look out to sea, Fuerteventura appeared to be the dry abyss of a ravine. People say that to a degree Unamuno was the first person to discover the happiness of the sun and the extraordinary possibilities of the sea in Fuerteventura. But this is, of course, a legend based on a number of anecdotes.
They say that Unamuno, that sullen Christian philosopher, who was to some extent as gaunt and desolate as the spirit of the island itself, was the inventor of public nudism, both in Fuerteventura and in the whole of Spain, back in the 1920s when Spain had not yet decided to be modern; at midday he would leave his friends in the intellectual discussion group which he had put together in Fuerteventura, and go up to the terraced roof of the apartment block where he lived in order to enjoy the sun naked as God intended. Without any scandal attached to his actions or any attempt at provocation, as though it were nothing more than a poetic gesture and to that extent necessarily healthy, the author of Through the Lands of Portugal And Spain defied gossip and also the perception that the sun was the single element of the curse that separated the island from the possibility of any dampness, of any life, and instead claimed it as a force of life itself. The sun as an emblem of the future, a sign of the health of the island; the sun became, with the passage of years, perceived as the guarantor of the island’s survival; if not for the sun, what would have happened to the beaches of Fuerteventura?
Unamuno was also the discoverer of one of the best and most sought-after kinds of seafood, gooseneck barnacles, which on the island are large and tasty, and as difficult to gather as the gooseneck barnacles from the Atlantic coast of the north of Spain. Unamuno, as a Basque from Bilbao, knew well that the taste of the sea, its smell, is concentrated in these molluscs which look as though they are made of moss, and that are the size of a non-tumescent penis (that is the technical term, at least in Galician, the language spoken in the northwest of Spain: do carallo de home), and Unamuno found out that here, on the Fuerteventura coast, just as on the Basque Atlantic coast, these delicacies could be found in abundance. And he convinced the local fishermen not to ignore these barnacles, called by the unflattering nickname (until Unamuno gave them another name) of ‘goatsfeet’: the Fuerteventura fishermen used to throw them back into the sea, they felt disgusted or superstitiously fearful about them, they thought that they were rubbish which the sea tossed out to them along with the other trash it occasionally sent back.
I ate some of these ‘goatsfeet’ in Gran Tarajal, one of the black sand beaches of Fuerteventura, sitting and facing the ocean which here, in Gran Tarajal, comes in high and almost frowning, perhaps annoyed at having had to travel such a great distance, dark as the memory of stones. They were larger than Basque or Galician goosenecks, and our hosts said that this was because they came from Africa; a few years later I ate them again, in Madrid and elsewhere, ones that really came from Africa this time (they all come from Africa, perhaps, and this is no contradiction to what I am saying, because we are talking about Africa when we talk about Fuerteventura).
And so, in discovering the sun and gooseneck barnacles, Unamuno discovered the soul of Fuerteventura for his poetry, the soul of this island right at the other end of the archipelago from La Gomera, in the part of the Islands closest to Africa, both of them distant from everything (from Europe, from America, from the world, if I am to speak with the sense of drama which we islanders regularly deploy when we talk about our isolation), and both of them sharing this kind of melancholy which comes on the one hand from the fog, and on the other hand from its absence; it is here, in this desert which the sun has made just about habitable, that one sees the other side of the Islands: La Gomera is where the greenery is to be found, and here is where drought dwells, the yin and yang of a fragmented territory, an archipelago with its light and its shade, and the light is not fully light and the shade is not fully dark.
In this poem, the sixteenth of his collection From Fuerteventura to Paris, Miguel de Unamuno describes the island as ‘suffering and hermit’: ‘The merciful sea bathes with its foam | its feet, and its sharp-edged | camel chews on the rough gorse, | spreading out four colossal legs to scratch. | Balls of gofio, the skeleton of bread | form these men—the rest is conduto— | and on this slag-heap ground, simple | and rooted into the stones, grey and scrawny, | the grandson walks by like the grandfather | without any leaves, giving only fruit and flower.’
This essential landscape described by Unamuno (who was Basque, and Castilian to an extent, a scrawny fellow himself) is almost the landscape of himself, because he was like this, a pure skeleton, as though he were the very definition of a struggling man, a man agonising, as he liked to call himself when discussing his life, using this word, originally Greek, agony, a word from one of the languages that animates his culture. In the notes that accompany the edition I have of these poems, all of them beautiful and hard as a ball of gofio, there are a few explanations which make the description given above not simply a journey through the landscape of Fuerteventura, so far away from La Gomera, but so close to its soul.
The note that explains this song to Fuerteventura, poem number XVI, reads as follows: ‘The Fuerteventura peasants principally live off gofio, wheat or maize flour—or a mixture of the two—which is first of all toasted and then milled in a windmill. They call conduto—in Castilian it used to be conducho—everything that accompanies this fundamental basis to the dish: dried fish, dried figs, cheese, etcetera. Conduto, from the same root as conduct: that which makes something pass. Gorse is practically a skeleton of a plant, the camel is almost a skeleton, and Fuerteventura is practically a skeleton of an island.’
The description given in the poem and the note corresponds to the past, but the precision with which Unamuno develops his own desolate impression scratches into the soul what still today is the essence of the island, its deep melancholic root, growing from its own history, a physical history, scorched by the sun even on the summits.
I have been up on these peaks, and from above the sun casts the shadows of the cliffs as though it were opening them up for the first time, breaking them gently to allow the sea to observe them.
AND MEANWHILE, WHILE THE SUN AND THE SEA ARE YET TO BE SEEN, when it is night and all that can be heard on the peaks is the desolate clonk of goat bells, Fuerteventura seems like a camel lost in total solitude, without any light to show it the way in the desert.
I want to lose myself mounted on this camel, following the path of Ignacio Aldecoa, who in the 1950s, as I have already told you, travelled all over the Islands looking for refuge; Aldecoa found his harbour in La Graciosa, a unique island, a beautiful little island isolated from the world by a powerful and boisterous arm of the sea. On his journey Aldecoa wrote as follows about Fuerteventura: ‘Over gorges and gullies, over the beds of pools which once were and which are now nothing but crystallizations, like snowflakes, the seagulls sail and hunt. Sometimes there is an oasis, a green point. The violent red of the earth fires the green up to the sky.’
And Aldecoa continues on the journey which it is my aim to imitate: ‘In Puerto del Rosario—called until just the day before yesterday Puerto Cabras—wind and red dust. An ancestral landscape. Ancestral Castile, where Miguel de Unamuno spent his exile, rediscovering his Castilian love, his love for the land of the plains of the peninsula in the barren and thirsty lands of Fuerteventura.’
I walked through these godforsaken places, searching for the monument that commemorates the exile of the Castilian philosopher. His statue has now turned the colour of Mount Quemada where they set it up years ago, his image back then a pure white. You reach Mount Quemada, at whose feet the agonising poet now rests, by crossing over the twisting folds of this sensual island, perhaps the most sensual of all the Islands; it is the island of loneliness and echoes; above, in the village of Betancuria, set among terrible statues of unlikely Guanches, huge, powerful as mythology demands, one hears the insistent bleat of grazing goats, feeding indifferently on the dry grass in front of an abandoned sixteenth-century church on whose portico one can still read ‘Diego García Herrera (Conquistador), 1485’. It is a church that is now useless, Spartan, in an architectural landscape which evokes that of Castile, just as Aldecoa said: that is to say, that it is an empty church, filled on the off-chance with a humble light which fades as the day fades, the light of the sun, which to a certain extent is the light of the wind: I have seen film footage of this church: there was something a little like terror in that light, distance and fear, the accumulation of the sentiments formed in Betancuria, hanging from the light of the world.
On the journey that takes me to see Miguel de Unamuno, or at least his statue, there are trees that have been knocked down by the wind, fig trees that give this desert space the appearance of an ancient Greek city, tormented and white; inside the empty church I have seen a mysterious alcove which seems, from its colour and from the sense of mutilated space which it gives to the religious image it shelters, to be a painting by Antonio López, the Castilian artist; as if the church had suddenly become a museum. I can see here evocations cast up by chance and nature that make the walls appear fragments of a work by Fontana or Brancusi; here everything looks half-made, and ruination has done its job, as it looks as though time has passed here, a great deal of time.
A green tree suddenly shows that there is life in this spot, and not just buried history. I cling to the tree: it is the shade within which I want to walk.
Aldecoa says, as does Unamuno, that ‘Fuerteventura, the fortunate island, is unfortunate. A good land, but no water.’ Thirst and hunger. I feel it, I feel hunger and thirst, and so I eat a sandwich made of good bread, the good bread of the island, with cheese in it, somewhere between soft and hard, somewhere between salt and dry: this island, owner of one of the best cheeses in Spain. I eat it in front of a windmill, near the Betancuria palm trees, before I carry on walking. The road that gave Aldecoa hope leads me in front of the so-called Tefía Mill; I knock on the door as I pass, but the mill’s sleeping sails make no response and no one comes to the door; of course no one comes to the door: I knock as though I were calling the past, and the past no longer exists, makes no echo, mills no grain. The mill is a symbol and I sit down next to it as though I were visiting an ancestor. The past, that past of hunger and farming which first Unamuno and then Aldecoa saw, is a sealed past, the past of those desert stretches at the back of which one always hears a cock crowing, at any hour of the day, or else a humble cricket, fighting to escape from the shadow of a pebble.
The sun is like the stones, rugged, obstinate, and while I write in this humble and ancient air, importunate flies remind me that this is not simply the idyll of the earth and the sky, but also the place where the earth stores its detritus. But the noise of the volcanic sand crunching under my feet finally scares the flies away, and there is a moment at midday when this truly seems like a desert, when the palm trees are like hands blocking the sun which comes from heaven and hell at the same time.
The walls of the Tefía Mill seem covered with the earth of centuries: here it is, overlaid on the primitive white skin with which it was first built to fulfil the role it no longer carries out. It is not strange for me to feel here that I truly travelled back into a past which also belongs to these flies that now come back as there is no more noise; I have stopped walking, and the volcanic zahorra sand does not crunch under my feet any longer, and I am sitting down once again, leaning against the past of Fuerteventura.
It is odd, on this trip that takes me across this land which both Unamuno and Aldecoa saw as a land with no hope, no fortune, that I should now think of Mexico, the country from which I have just travelled. Just as there, among those burning Mexican deserts, I sense here the same climate of death and indifference which one feels in the country of the Aztecs, and I sense that perhaps Aldecoa saw here, just as Juan Rulfo saw in the tundra of his own land, the same shadow which pursues people who identify land with nightmare. But it was here that Aldecoa unleashed his loneliness. I am taking his place for an instant. I remember his words about the same crags: ‘A good land, but with no water. La Oliva, with its hayricks and its large house—Quinta Roja—is one of the villages of the island that suffers the most from this lack of water. La Oliva is a village from a Gothic landscape. Desperation and misery. Misery which, like the Fuerteventura vulture, threatens us from the stone crenels or the surrounding lava.’
Time has gone by, of course: now it is no longer hunger or misery which are immediate descriptors of this landscape, and water is no longer so dramatically scarce. But there persists a part of both poetic viewpoints (that of Aldecoa; that of Unamuno) the anxiety with which the two Basque writers—one from Bilbao, the other from Vitoria, two Basques accustomed to seeing greenery—looked at the stony ground.
Unamuno was furious, and there is fury here, in this interior and intimate landscape, and Aldecoa wrote in a series of blows and attacks, as though he were swiping with a brush at the grinding stones of a mill; Unamuno was a follower of Kierkegaard, if one can put it that way: he was possessed of a Nordic melancholy, and Aldecoa came from Hemingway, or Camus, and wrote as though he wanted to tear off people’s skin, to blind them with the pitiless light of his words. I come from Unamuno and I am headed towards Aldecoa, for Fuerteventura is like that, carrying you from one symbol to another, it moves you around just as the wind of Morro Jable moves you, or as the wind moves the dark sails of windmills that I see on my journey.
‘Further south, the desert,’ Aldecoa writes. ‘From Puerto del Rosario to La Oliva, through La Oliva to the right. You can’t miss it.’ It is Corralejo. This is what that Basque traveller was looking for, what I am now looking for, by the sea, among the dunes, the lively sea beating against the docile rocks of the shore.
AND NOW I AM NOTING DOWN, AS UNAMUNO DID, PROPER NAMES, places with their unforgettable euphony: Ampuyenta, Almácigo, Tuineje, Tiscamanita, Antigua … And I reach Los Palmerales de Gran Tarajal, which appears to be a place of rest from this loneliness. I am in the Tiscamanita desert, in Los Arrablaes. Here are the windmills, dancing among the bright colours of the volcanic sand. A single palm tree gives some kind of meaning to the landscape, which here is nothing more than a metaphor, in its vast loneliness, for the earthy intensity of Fuerteventura.
The landscape which I see in this desert is impressive. In La Gomera one feels this degree of immensity in green, and here the colours are different: sand, zahorra, rocks and loneliness. Here, in the face of this immensity, what one feels is that the trace of mankind, although probably visible further on, in Tiscamanita, is nothing more than a scratch on the world, nothing, the trace of a car that passed by decades ago, the buzz of a fly that will die a little further on, of the heat, or else of thirst, or boredom. The flies in Fuerteventura must be astonishingly bored.
What this rocky landscape of Los Arrabales does have is the soul that Unamuno wrote about: volcanic, nothingness, but not a wretched kind of nothingness: this nothingness where the wind has built its metaphors is the air that the Basque poet and thinker identified with the difficult happiness, the search for any kind of fortune, inherent in this island. To be here is to accept that man can fly, or that his ashes can. Or that the island itself can fly, as though this proud and lonely island were never calm.
I AM SURROUNDED BY MOUNTAINS, AS THOUGH I WERE AT THE BOTTOM of a large and tormented crater, surrounded by natural monoliths; but this physical geography is only the visible part of Fuerteventura. In reality, we are sitting on a skeleton that the wind makes dance.
When I descend from the promontory from which I have looked out at the desert which so moved Unamuno and Aldecoa at their different points in the twentieth century, I ask myself which music from that time, or from a time closer to ours, would best fit the memory which they took with them and which I am now taking with me. And I come to the conclusion that The Doors, or Pink Floyd, played at full volume, would sound good, and I walk off humming to myself, after first writing down in my notebook:
‘It’s the end of the world. Which is to say, the beginning.’
And after writing this, I sat down once again among the crags and wrote the following, as though I were writing down a dream of the air and of the music at the same time:
‘Here any noise, even background noise, seems composed, seems to be the result of the natural demands of harmony. Here the wind that takes us seems like a caress, an embrace which makes us small again, just as the birds are made smaller in the air …’
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SLOPE, NEAR TISCAMANITA, BEHIND THE LONELY palm tree, there is a mountain which looks like some kind of maternal hollow, an open hand, and also a face, like a mouth calling for help. The light turns this one vision into multiple successive visions. Nature can speak; I have no doubt of this. And I think that this is the voice of the Canary Islands, nature speaking here in this lonely vastness that the wind bequeaths to the land.
And further behind my back is a black mountain, scratched and scraped by man, straight and upright: in its belly it contains the traces of avarice, because someone thought that there were treasures in the mountains, and cut deep into their hearts: there are lots of these excavated mountains in the Islands; I lived in front of one of them for many years: it was the calm mountain of my childhood, until they gutted it and built a hotel on the top, a hotel which the volcanic sand tumbled down on more than one occasion, until they laid down concrete foundations which established this impressive building as the substitute for the landscape with which I grew up.
BUT I AM IN FUERTEVENTURA, LOOKING AT THIS BLACK AND WIDE MOUNTAIN: it is another metaphor for the land. For the presence of man in the land, and not just the shadow of the wind which falls on the earth. The wind is kinder; it allows the earth to continue to exist, it sweeps across it but it respects it. Man digs into the earth in order to wound it.
But man cannot destroy it.
The Canary Islands are a fine example of ancestral survival, struggling against volcanoes, remade by volcanoes.
And Fuerteventura is the embodiment of this experience.
Here I am on these stones which are like clumps of ice on some fantastic iceberg, which impress themselves on the memory of your gaze like a gift from the earth. I sit down here, in Los Arrabales, and I am happy in the face of this vertigo; it is as though here, in the midst of all this violent lava, I had discovered the soul of the land where I was born: it doesn’t matter if it is in the shade or in the sun, but this is the soul of the Canary Islands, I have felt it; what would happen to mankind if the land did not give him so much?
And the sun.
The sun is mythical, like an animal agonising before its death, throwing out fire as one of its miracles; here and now it is a setting sun, and the shadows of the mountains are sinuous black suggestions of the night.
In the face of such a landscape one can only feel vertigo, as if the air here were the antechamber that led to nothingness, to fear.
Silence.
Fuerteventura. Fuerte ventura. Strong fortune. The wind’s fortune.
I made it here. I want to shout this out and let the night make the sun its final refuge. I touch the rocks which are still warm; it is possible that they have been here since the beginning of the island’s history, and I imagine that eternity must also be a kind of stone. Like time, like love, perhaps.
I have come from Mexico, as I said; when I was there the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo said to me that everything would disappear immediately; I said that it might take decades, and he replied:
‘No, everything will vanish right now.’
In the tremendous space that lies in front of me, and in the loneliness which is itself a rock, I venture to suggest that places like this will perhaps survive after whatever Fernando Vallejo fears has come to pass: stones that man cannot dominate and which will never be dominated by the wind.
I carry on walking; I feel that I am on an unformed island, Fuerteventura. In the distance I see Lanzarote, which I will visit later. In my memory it is the complete opposite, a fully-formed island; Fuerteventura is like a young and tired donkey, a donkey that has been rubbed down in the evening. Fuerteventura, an island that remains just as it was when it was first made, incomplete, silent, upright yet fearful.
I travel to Lobos from here, the little island that could be San Borondón if it were not for the fact that it actually exists; the water rises and falls, the beaches appear and disappear; you are bathing in the sea and suddenly there is no sea in the pools. But I am still on Fuerteventura; I will get to Lobos later.
Upon reaching Lobos (the ‘wild island’, as he called it), Aldecoa wrote: ‘You reach the island of Lobos in forty minutes by ferry from Corralejo beach in Fuerteventura. Lobos is a wild island in the strait of Bocayna. This is the strait which separates Lanzarote from Fuerteventura, the gap between two headlands: Punta Gorda on Fuerteventura, and Punta del Papagayo on Lanzarote.’ It is nearby, just a stone’s throw away: the sea is a tiny channel but filled with dangers, and although the distance is not that far one has the impression that between the coast of Fuerteventura and the coast of Lobos there is a whole world and a number of mysteries. The ferry is now made of rubber and travels much faster: it only takes a few minutes to make the journey, to risk the sea, to risk above all the Calafate, a rock that rises and falls from under the sea and is a danger to any unwary traveller. One might almost say that it is like the mysterious island of San Borondón, which does not exist but which in legends appears and disappears in the midst of the fog.
This was the discovery of Fuerteventura, its deserts, the soul which Unamuno saw and the land which Aldecoa discovered. It is odd that such a deserted island should have blended with my experience of La Gomera, the most fertile of all the islands, as though my opinions travelled faster than my body. The yin and yang of the Islands: La Gomera, Fuerteventura.
But my memory is still travelling, and now it reaches Lobos. The lazy seagulls are accustomed to the solitude of the island; there is no one here; half a dozen or a dozen houses built up into the rock, blending with the rock; summer visitors; fishermen who are tired of fishing; a minuscule harbour which welcomes our boat as though it were allowing us to check whether or not the island exists; there used to be a lighthouse—there it is—upright and closed, on the top of the tallest of the island’s tiny mountains; we arrived thirsty, and the only restaurant on the island—serving paella and salad—sells us an enormous cold beverage that opens our appetite for walking along the island’s paths. This is life stripped of everything, there is nothing here, it is life and nothing more, and this is what Ignacio Aldecoa was looking for; when he set out to search for paradise he began a flight which gave him not only his book about the way in which a godo sees the Islands, but also another book, a very special, very strange one, Part of A Story, the tale of a shipwreck on an island (La Graciosa) where everything is still to be discovered.
BUT LET US RETURN TO ALDECOA’S DISCOVERY OF LOBOS, WHICH WOULD be a very similar discovery today. I have visited Las Lagunitas and have observed, as though they themselves were immobile, the undaunted seagulls that would move only if there were to be an earthquake; the launch, which moves exactly as the island itself would move if there were an earthquake, has taken us to Las Roques, rocks covered with red crabs and with an eagles’ nest somewhere, blending with the darkness of the stone. It is an eagles’ nest, but it houses only a solitary eagle; we wait for it, hoping for its arrival as though we were looking for the green ray at sunset, but the eagle and the green ray both disappoint us.
But we can read here what Aldecoa put in his book: ‘The island of Lobos has monk seals, known as sea wolves, and it has a lighthouse, as well as dangerous sharp reefs and Technicolor coves and a rock that rises and falls from the sea, known as the Calafate. At the tiny landing point where the whole population of Lobos lives—only over the winter—it is difficult to land a boat if there is a high tide. If there is a high tide, then access to the sea is difficult. And the high tide becomes a lottery, according to the fishermen, and reaching Papagayo or returning to Punta Gorda is no longer difficult but a one-in-a-million chance, with you more likely to drown or faint from fear. Shipwrecks in the Bocayna are less showy than those in other straits, in other latitudes. There is an intense blue sky, and it is as though the appearance of the islands were covering up another sky behind them. You can’t trust anything.’
You can’t trust anything. I too was scared, sitting right in the bottom of the motorboat, splashed by the lively waters of the Atlantic, following the trail of the sea and seeing the reefs which Aldecoa spoke of showing their teeth like sharks. I saw the Calafate, a threat to all unwary or inexperienced sailors; and yes, I was so scared during the journey that it was as though the fear were a warning, a perception that things were going to go badly for me. And they did. But not yet, I shouldn’t tell you that part of the story yet. I was pleased to find out that Aldecoa, who was so intrepid, suffered in the same was as I did. He was scared, and then he described the fear in tranquillity, described the black shadow of Lobos, a forewarning of the island: ‘From Playa Blanca, as though shrouded or with an undercurrent, Lobos is no more than a black shadow, a thundercloud in a clear afternoon. The sun shines over the slopes of the ocean, between Punta Pechiguera and Punta Tostón. Over the deserted slopes of the ocean. Calm is born.’
Calm was born for me once I set foot on dry land again, when we bipeds were once again back in the environment for which we were conceived. The sea belongs to the fish, and here, between Fuerteventura and Lobos, the sea is a danger. You can’t trust anything; I saw how close the Islands were, but I also saw the nature of our fear of the real and hazardous treachery of the sea. In front of me ‘Lobos is no more than a black shadow, a thundercloud in a clear afternoon’, but it is also bluntly distant from me, a large black stone which I want to reach simply to be able to hold onto something solid, a long way away from this sea which seems like a caress from a distance and which when you are riding on its back is actually a treacherous and wild stallion.
And so it was a relief for me finally to set foot on Lobos, looking back at Fuerteventura. Then, when I returned to Fuerteventura, I knew that there is danger also on dry land. It was on dry land that this traveller had his belongings stolen, and the computer on which he was writing and all his notes about his trip to the Islands. The sea scared me, but the land took away a part of my memory, and it was not just anywhere that my belongings were stolen, but from the left luggage office at the hotel where I had left these papers and all my materials, which are now nothing more than a part of the trash of the world … But at least I was back on Fuerteventura by then, which is luck enough in itself.
THE ISLAND, FUERTEVENTURA, SEEMED IN THE DISTANCE TO BE A SERIES of mountains overlaid one on another, shaded by a sun that at that point was at its zenith, right at midday. Lobos is an animal extension of the land we abandoned. And the trail behind the boat as it crossed the sea was like a handkerchief waved across a void.
Lobos is a series of forking paths; at some point the anatomy of the island turns into a marine biology laboratory, the white sand beaches seem a replica of the beaches to the south of Fuerteventura; but they exist and do not exist at the same time, depending on the frequency of the tides; and so you can swim out of your depth in the sea and then, a few minutes later, a very few minutes, you are not in the sea but on pure white sand, prehistoric sand like that which I saw one day in the Cíes Islands off Galicia, sand that is so white it hurts your eyes, or makes you dream of other visions, things that only appear after nightmares …
LA GRACIOSA, WHERE I GO FROM LANZAROTE, IS TERRA MUCH MORE firma than Lobos, as though Lobos were an island still engaged in its apprenticeship and La Graciosa had already graduated: it has a bakery, a post office, a school. Lobos has nothing. La Graciosa is already heavily populated; it is no longer the desert place where Aldecoa went looking for peace and solitude and nourishment for his melancholy. While we were travelling—not in a small boat as Aldecoa did halfway through the twentieth century, but aboard a much more powerful vessel—I went back over what he wrote about the place. His vision, before he actually travelled there, was an idyllic one: it is as though he were travelling to some place which he imagined as a metaphor of all islands. ‘La Graciosa is on the other side of the River. The River is the strait which separates Lanzarote from the first of the three northern islands. Lanzarote has a point which sticks out into the sea and wounds it like a knife, a point called Fariones. The beaches of La Graciosa curve sweetly in front of the keel of Fariones.’
He arrived there in a ferry. When we boarded, in the summer of 2010, sixty years had gone by since Aldecoa’s discovery of the island, and the following poster was displayed in the village of Órzola: ‘We want to be able to bathe where our grandparents and parents did.’ This is because La Graciosa, like Lanzarote, has grown up, has become more popular, and the beaches are being overwhelmed by building works, and people want the appearance of their dwelling places to go back to how it was in the time of their grandparents and parents. The journey there, of course, can be imagined as though it were the journey made by Aldecoa and so many others both before and after him … The cliffs are still there, albeit drowned by the white buildings which mark the tip of the island of Lanzarote on the way to La Graciosa. The sea is clear, a little dulled by the dawn clouds. And it is cold on deck, where a drunk enlivens the dawn just as he would have done on one of Aldecoa’s boats. The sea is peaceful, or nearly: at least it is nothing like what Aldecoa called ‘the disturbed River’. ‘Sometimes,’ he added, ‘there is no way for anyone to cross the River.’
From the sea, as we leave Los Fariones behind us, in the middle of the River, facing towards the beach of Famara on Lanzarote, the island of La Graciosa seems to be an extension, an extra limb added to the island that César Manrique dreamt of in order to recreate it, the island of Lanzarote. But as the boat draws closer, La Graciosa takes on its true dimensions. To my left Lanzarote is a wall, and ahead of me La Graciosa is a single figure, perhaps a woman, lying down. And here we are: when I put my foot on dry land I feel that I am stepping onto an island for the first time, as if I were arriving somewhere whose mysteries always made space for adventures. The sound is different: the music of places is always different when you reach them by boat; it is as though you were treading on dry land for the first time, even though you only stepped onto the boat twenty minutes ago, back in Órzola where the dawn was breaking. People are still queuing here to buy bread, and we get down off the boat just as Paul Bowles and his companions would get off their old vessels when they reached Tangiers, back when everyone dreamed that true adventure was to be found in travelling.
BUT BEFORE I CONTINUE, BEFORE I TURN MY EYES TO THE LAND, LET ME pause for a few minutes on a species of no-man’s-land, which would certainly have been the landscape of Bowles if he had come through here: the salt flats, which are a special terrain in Lanzarote. There are at least twenty salt plants on the Canary Islands: some of them abandoned; some of them still in use, and the saltworks of Janubio on Lanzarote are the most beautiful and interesting of the whole Islands. Cipriano Martín and Alberto Luengo, who have seen these saltworks in the light of both architecture and science, write as follows in their book The Salt Garden: ‘its values both as a landscape and as an ecosystem, added to the original and complex architectural and hydraulic organisation of the whole, allow us to claim, with no room for doubt, that it is one of the most important saltworks in the world. The drying pans and the work sites, the ramps and the windbreaks, are all gathered to form a landscape of extraordinary architectural beauty.’
The preparation of salt requires the four fundamental elements of ancient alchemy: water from the sea to fill the salt beds, the mud needed to keep the water-sheets impermeable, the fire of the sun that crystallises the salt, and the soft warm winds that help the evaporation. ‘For Aristotle, this was “burnt earth”: a gathering of the four elements: fire, air, earth and water.’
The work involved in the manufacture of salt is closely related to the rhythms of the agricultural world, because ‘in all the salt beds on the Canary Islands, the harvest time runs from March to October, and the low season is used for maintenance and expansion.’
The saltworks are a work of art. I can still see in my mind’s eye the Janubio works, near Yaiza, looking as though they were a painting by Turner, or Rothko, or Cy Twombly, or else a Brancusi sculpture. Ghostly, spectral, the breath of a cloud laid down on the earth. My friend Eduardo Manrique, the sculptor, the nephew of César Manrique, made a sculpture for his uncle, a door, and this work of art is where my image of this natural marvel now resides, a marvel which is not on any map and which is one of the most beautiful symbols of my land …
In the first half of the twentieth century there were thirty saltworks in the Islands (above all in Lanzarote and Gran Canaria). At the end of the 1970s, when tourism started to turn itself into our daily bread, these saltworks started to fade away, and their remains are now a decadent and beautiful symbol of the terrain which the salt of the sea has won back from the land. César Manrique, the man who reinvented Lanzarote, explains his fascination with this in the prologue to Martín and Luengo’s book The Salt Garden. ‘I have always been impressed by the sight of a saltworks. The ones in Lanzarote have always struck me with their rectilinear beauty and their blinding whiteness.’ The survival of the saltworks is a blessing that the Islands owe to the blind chance with which beauty works. Lanzarote has other tangible attractions, other miracles which César emphasised with the energy that he used to reinvent the island, changing it from the lava field of previous perception. But among the marvels that I can still see in my mind’s eye, when I talk about Lanzarote when I am far away, the saltworks are the spectacle that seems to me to be the most perfect, the most powerful pictorial representation of this island, black and white gifts of the sea.
I HAVE LEFT BEHIND THE HEADLANDS THAT POINT OUT INTO THE SEA, AND here, in these bars which give La Graciosa the air of a Mediterranean village, perhaps on one of the Greek islands, I think that it would not be entirely terrible to spend days and days waiting here for something, anything, to happen. Like Aldecoa, like these fishermen.
But this is no longer a fishing village, which is what its discoverers sought in an earlier time; this is now a tourist village filled with jeeps that carry sleepy travellers along roads that were once dusty paths on which it would be possible to imagine the plots of mystery novels, stories of love or broken hearts, as in Part of A Story, Aldecoa’s novel. The salt is still there, the seashore, perhaps the memory of the mystery, but it is now becoming just another island. It has lost for good the physiognomy which Aldecoa sketched out. Now La Graciosa is an extension of the coast opposite, a mirror of Lanzarote, with its houses gathered together, showing off that kind of collective air which all contemporary villages have, forcing their inhabitants to breathe at the same time and keep the same hours.
All right, the smell of the pier is the smell of the piers in the smaller islands, its noises are those of solitary islands waiting for adventurers, good entrance points for archipelagos, anthologies of the whole territory.
What can be heard is, if I may put it this way, the noise of the first villages, and when we step onto the island, when we tread on its sand, then everything, or almost everything, is a part of the village, the sand remains in its narrow streets, the hippies are setting up their stalls, the queues in front of the bakery are still there and an old woman gives us the dried fish that she herself was eating in the shade of her house. I took the fish with my own hands and looked at it: in some way it was the embodiment of the mystery of the island, a mystery that she had inherited by cooking, and I felt obliged, in spite of the fact that the morning is the wrong time to eat salty food, to eat it slowly, just as she did, showing my enthusiasm for eating the fish her sons had caught.
Seagulls are privileged inhabitants of La Graciosa; their unpleasant call, like that of a stray, cruel pigeon, must have been the first thing Aldecoa heard as he set foot on the island. Around me, in the café, some keen cyclists from Catalonia are talking, and also a group of teachers from Pamplona, who have just arrived, like me, at the isolation of La Graciosa. There is a school named after Ignacio Aldecoa, and there is a parish church which was consecrated in 1945, and the sun comes out, which is good news because the island has the ‘donkey’s belly’ hanging over it, that accumulation of low clouds which regularly attacks the Canary Islands and which threatens their inhabitants with spending the whole day feeling oppressed by the weather, which can drive you mad, or give you a migraine. When the donkey’s belly moves away, the sky is clear, virginal, and makes you want to touch the sea, which has now taken on the same perfect colour as the sky. When we leave the pier and the bars and the bakery and the cyclists having their party, the island sinks into an almost miraculous silence that accompanies me to the cemetery.
There are more tombs here; life turns into more life and more death, and the two graves which Aldecoa described in his book are now dozens. Cemeteries are a visual chronicle of life: the more life there is, the more death there is too; statistics don’t lie; La Graciosa grew bigger, so the number of its dead also increased. Aldecoa saw it like this too, back when it was still difficult to die on La Graciosa: ‘La Graciosa has a cemetery with only two graves, because the deaths coincided with the high winds and the fishermen could not take the bodies back to bury them in Haría on Lanzarote. This seaside cemetery, this hallowed ground with only two inhabitants, must be almost a holiday resort for the afterlife. The beach at La Graciosa is a great place to await the resurrection of the body, with the sea up against the walls and the noise of the sea in the shells that surrealist nature has scattered all over the sand, with the boats in the port and the wind in the sails, the vast angelical sails which the fishermen’s wives make.’
THAT’S HOW IT WAS, THE IDYLLIC VISION ALDECOA HAD IN HIS MIND’S eye, and the one which he gave in his book. The island is not now like this: there are now very many people here even among the dead; but the sand on the beach still has the revivifying and idyllic power which Aldecoa saw and which can also be seen on the other great beaches of the Islands, such as Las Canteras on Gran Canaria, or Famara on Lanzarote, or El Médano on Tenerife, or La Barca on Fuerteventura.
Here I am, stranded on this island, sitting next to a dusty jeep which has driven from the most isolated and softest beach. The driver talks to me:
‘They can’t build anything anymore here. No one will give permission. It’s over.’
And he was quiet for a moment, then spoke again.
‘The fishing is done for, of course.’
Then I said:
‘If the fishing is done for then La Graciosa will be done for too.’
He replied:
‘La Graciosa will live forever. It’s a magnet.’
Aldecoa’s magnet.
The man who spoke with me was called Orlando: he had been a merchant mariner, and is still young. He was the one who took me to the cemetery. And I wrote in my notebook: ‘In the sailors’ cemetery. Like that strange cemetery that I saw in the sand at Cofete, Fuerteventura. Ghostly, the colour of the earth, the stones already illegible, like the empty lives to which they lent their names. But in this cemetery, unlike that other cemetery of sand and forgetfulness, life has not stopped; the dead are still coming, marking the natural cycle of La Graciosa, where there are now very many more people living, and more people dying too.’
Orlando points at his jeep, and speaks with nostalgia and arrogance: ‘This is my boat now.’ He drives me to a little mountain: ‘Las Agujas, 876 feet above sea level. It’s our Mount Teide,’ he says proudly. And then adds: ‘It’s one of the few national parks of Spain that doesn’t have any asphalt in it at all.’ From the beach where he takes us (‘travelling along the La Graciosa M-30,’ he explains, talking about the road we are travelling on, which on this island has the air of a broad highway: he is joking as he refers to it, making a reference to the ring road which goes round Madrid) we can see the little further islands: Alegranza, which is very like a whale, Montaña Clara, Roque del Este; here is one of the most diverse marine reserves in Europe. It is there, in front of us, protected by the clear waters of the Atlantic, which here looks like a backwater. It is a perfect beach; I walk in bare feet across its sands, and it is as though I am travelling on a shifting boat which rolls and seduces me with its movement; I have the same impression here as I did in Famara when I visited it for the first time: a beach which makes you young again, which makes you excited, although I have another sensation as I walk on La Graciosa, as though the beach were also the end of the world, a beach which is the prophet of another universe or another age, the perfect place for a mysterious shipwreck. This is the mysterious place where Aldecoa set his novel Part of A Story, in which the shipwreck has such an important role to play.