I WENT TOO SOON FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER, AS IF THE ISLANDS were all connected by a great motorway across the sea. As though you could travel from Garajonay to Betancura on the back of a high-speed mule, as though you travelled from La Gomera to La Graciosa, or Lanzarote, throwing stones that stayed in the air alongside you as you travelled at the speed of a flying stone.
In fact, while I saw all these primeval spaces of my Canary Island memory I was travelling from La Gomera, present for one last time at the almost religious expressiveness of its mountains, which in the distance seem to be temples or figures brought over from legends; ahead of me is Tenerife once again, omnipresent as a memory. As I went through Vegaipala on La Gomera, I felt a strange symphony of cliffs, valleys, crags and palm trees, and silence, and in my imagination I recalled a similar feeling in the mountains of Tejeda, on Gran Canaria, or else in Vilaflor on Tenerife, or Betancuria on that yellow and desolate land that is Fuerteventura, a high plain, an island which is like a donkey or a camel put face to face with a desert, indecisive and lost, listening to the noise of a wind that is like the wind I heard on the south coast of Tenerife, in El Médano.
The wind is an odd topic, diluted, something which adds a melancholic gust to the music of the southern islands, in Gran Canaria, in Fuerteventura, in El Hierro with its juniper trees, in the desert El Médano of Tenerife …
Here, higher up, in Antoncojo and Lo del Gato, further on in my voyage through La Gomera, the symphony can be heard which is sometimes the sound of the wind and sometimes the sound of the earth, here is also the almost eternal dun colour which transforms La Gomera into a large and humble dog, stretched out under a persistent and lazy sun; Fuerteventura is a donkey, or a camel nonplussed by the earth; and La Gomera is a dog, howling in rage or from melancholy, lost among the cliffs. A large dog looking at a lizard: because La Gomera is an unquiet dog, and the land that it faces is the southern range of Tenerife, which is like the spine of a sleeping lizard; this is what can be seen at a distance, at the foot of Mount Teide, a mountain range which looks like the risky and angry tail of a giant lizard.
I don’t know why I always associate the appearance of my homeland with the subtle elegance of a saurian, creatures of the mountains or the deserts, odd animals which hide from the shadows and which only appear when they can be certain of finding the sun.
I RETURN TO LA GOMERA, I LEAVE LA GOMERA, I AM ALWAYS COMING and going, and La Gomera is like the island-magnet which Lezema saw in Cuba, the island which repels and which attracts, the sweet Gomera of the forests and the terrible Gomera of the cliffs, yin and yang of a perfect island which stretches its limbs under a sun made of fog. I travel by boat, and the ocean is the hand that waves goodbye.
There is an intense sun beating down on my head, I am leaving the island this time, to my right is the ceremonial urn from 1968, empty and dry and forgotten, and a little further on is the Square of the Great Trees where I drank a coffee at midday, my ears assaulted by the almost nautical sounds of the creaking, uneasy trees. People here walk slowly, as if they had made all possible journeys already: to arrive at an island is to see it in motion, to leave one is to see it at peace, as if behind you there stood only individual figures—men, women, children, dogs, lizards—all of them sunk into a lethargy in which you will find them once again when you return. The August sun adds to this sensation that one only gets from the smaller islands, the idea that life is not so urgent, that it is only a passing event which one can get through much better if one allows oneself to be guided by patience.
In the light of a summer afternoon, from the deck of the boat, the island’s mountains seem to become softer, and the cultivated (or dried-out) land which runs down to the sea starts to look at this time of day like a series of Mayan temples, magical places which are made perhaps even more mysterious by the loneliness which distance grants them.
The evening light also bids farewell to the sensation that one is beginning a new voyage, a journey towards another kind of melancholia.
Suddenly, after the announcements in English and in Spanish to the passengers, the same warning is repeated as a whistle. It is almost a song, I hear it as a song. For centuries, this was not any kind of music, but rather a real need, which now has developed into a symbol of the solitude for which La Gomera was always destined. I hear the whistling and remember, immediately, one evening in the Valle Gran Rey, seeing a line of perfect palm trees and then a single palm, an open window and the sun that poured through it, as if this memory were suddenly a postcard, a metaphor for the light and trees of this island, which I recommend you come to observe as I would recommend you to feel the touch of paradise …
THE BOAT WHERE I FEEL THIS VISION OF THE ISLAND AS A METAPHOR IS taking me back to the island where I was born, Tenerife; I have reached the south, Los Cristianos, the beach of extremely fine sand where I lived through the years where one discovers love via discovering caresses, one’s own caresses and those of others, and this sand, the sea stroked by the noble cliffs that are still there, even though surmounted with new buildings that make the place unrecognisable, was the scene of all my discoveries. And here is where I come from La Gomera, which was the first point I visited in this reconstruction of my memory of the Islands, but I don’t want to start this return journey here, I don’t want to begin this return to my native land after so many years on this beach at Arona, so far to the south, and previously even further to the south, when Tenerife did not have the motorway with which it now is provided.
I want to start where Alexander Humboldt started, an excellent guide, perhaps the man who has best described what it is that the stones of the island tell us.
The first thing that Humboldt saw, without a doubt, was the enormous headland of the Anaga range, right to the east of Tenerife; on this new journey in which we reconstruct Humboldt’s vision, the headland is pointed out by the biologist Wolfredo Wildpret, an inhabitant of Tenerife but of Swiss origin, to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who travels over the island as though he were the reincarnation of Humboldt, getting excited about everything and asking all manner of questions. Back in Germany, Enzensberger is the editor of the complete works of Humboldt in twenty volumes, including the famous (or at least, famous for us) Journey to the Canary Islands, which for several years has been one of my key books, the explanation in book form of the genius of the botanist in seeing what it was the landscape was telling him. So here we are, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the point where Humboldt landed. Over on this side, Wildpret says to Enzensberger, is the Anaga park, a huge nature reserve; and on this side is the container park. Yes, here they are, the island has evolved and now bears that contemporary ecological burden which so obsessed the Lanzarote naturalist César Manrique, who guessed that one day there would be more containers and cars than trees on the island. This is not yet the case, Wildpret said to his companion, but we are on our way … Under the huge Anaga headland are Las Teresitas and San Andrés, the beach and the village, a fishing village with its ruined castle and narrow little streets that remind one of a souk, and its little restaurants (try El Túnel, it’s wonderful) where fish is still the clear sign of popular food. And the beach made out of new sand imported from other beaches, strewn there as though it had been there all its life. Behind these are other halts: Benijos, Taganana … I did not travel with them, because Wildpret and Enzensberger had another route in mind, but when I was there in the past, among these spaces, I rediscovered the Tenerife that had been hidden behind the mountain ranges, a natural island emerging from its surrealist dreams, open spaces, infinite seas on which the sun lays its enthusiastic hand, just as we do.
Wildpret explains some of Humboldt’s discoveries to Enzensberger. For example, Humboldt took note of 460 distinct botanic species on Santa Cruz; in Humboldt’s time the poor travelled by donkey and the rich went on horseback; the German naturalist enjoyed the vineyards in the country and appreciated the Mediterranean climate of Tacoronte, where citrus fruit grows so well; the surrealists André Breton and Óscar Domínguez came to the same places that Humboldt had visited many years later and discovered that ‘agriculture is a form of silversmithing’. Bréton wrote, when he was back in Paris, the following about his journey to the Islands: ‘When I reached Tenerife I washed my hands with common soap that was like lapis lazuli. I washed all Europe off my hands. And first of all, I washed away France, which was where I had come from.’ And on his journey, without having washed his hands of Europe, Humboldt discovered the Valley of La Orotava, back when it still contained ‘all the shades of green’. The title of one of John Ford’s films came to Wildpret’s mind: How Green Was My Valley. Because this valley, where some people say that Humboldt dropped to his knees (something that he never did), is now not even the shadow of the one that he saw back in the eighteenth century (‘I have never found such peace as I have in this valley’ is something he demonstrably did say): building works have proliferated, the banana plantations have been decimated by the incessant progress of housing, and not even the vantage point which was set up in Humboldt’s honour was in use when Wildpret and Enzensberger made their excursion back in the spring of 2010.
And how would Humboldt himself have spoken of this? In the edition which I have of his now famous book about his journey round the Islands (a journey which lasted only six days, six very productive days) he writes about the impression which he had of the capital of the island: Santa Cruz is ‘a great inn, on the road to America and the Indies’. It is place of such strategic importance that ‘practically all accounts of any trips taken across the ocean begin by talking about Madeira and Tenerife’; it was here that Humboldt made contact with enlightened Canary Islanders who led him across the island to Mount Teide and even to La Orotava, where, at the end of the eighteenth century, he found an agitated social environment. He wrote that in La Orotava he had met ‘people who have a taste for literature and music and who have brought into these distant climes the comforts of European society. In this sense, with the exception of Havana, the Canary Islands are very dissimilar from other Spanish colonies.’ And he adds, in another letter to the English nobleman, Baron De Forell: ‘What culture there is here, what elegance! One could imagine oneself transported to London, if the banana trees and coconut palms didn’t fix us here, in the Fortunate Isles.’ He was surprised by what Alonso de Nava y Grimón, the Marquis of Villanueva del Prado, had done over the course of the eighteenth century for La Orotava and, as the editor of the volume I am using, Manuel Hernández González, adds, ‘Humboldt was pleasantly struck by the hospitality, friendliness and interest in science shown by the people he met.’
But his enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of a naturalist, was taken to the next level when he saw Mount Teide, as a result of the thick fog which looms over the island; he must surely have seen it from the spot where Gabriel García Márquez’s character in One Hundred Years of Solitude sees it, or else from where Columbus saw it on his journey to America, but Humboldt found it hard to see the peak which gave him so much work in his dedicatedly scientific investigation. ‘On the 19th [19 June 1799], we saw the peak of Naga (Anaga or Nago), but the Peak of Tenerife remained invisible. The landscape was poorly defined; all of its aspects were covered in thick fog. As we approached along the road to Santa Cruz, we saw that the fog, pushed by the wind, was coming closer to us. The sea was highly unruly, as it always is in these areas.’ The boat dropped anchor in the middle of the fog, but ‘when the time came to start to leave, the fog dissipated completely’. And then ‘the peak of Mount Teide showed itself clearly above the clouds and the first rays of the sun, which we had not seen until that point, illuminated the top of the volcano’.
This marvel as described by Humboldt is the chief attraction of the island, and it is a majestic accident of nature which is the pride of all the inhabitants of Tenerife; all the islands can be seen from its peak, and it itself can be seen from many of them (in winter one gets a spectacular view from the top of the sacred mountain of Tindaya on Fuerteventura); snow-covered in winter, clear and dry in the summer, a dormant volcano which at its 12,198 feet above sea level is the highest point of all the Canary Islands as well as of the national park that bears its name and over which it rises with indisputable authority.
Humboldt knew that he was approaching a historic bay in the islands, because it was here, as he records in his detailed account, ‘two years before our arrival, in July 1797, a cannonball took off the arm of Admiral Nelson, during the attempted occupation of the islands’. The German scientist arrives at the island and sets himself up in the city like a journalist or a sociologist; he sits down, if you will allow me this anachronistic supposition, in the spot where much later they would build the Atlantic bar, where in 1970 the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda sat down to drink beers with his friends the Canary Island surrealists, with whom he had entered into correspondence before the Civil War. Neruda did not want to get off the boat that was taking him back to his homeland, to work with Salvador Allende in what would later be the triumph of the Unidad Popular; the poet said that he would never step onto land controlled by the dictator Franco, but some of us, the ones who went to see the boat, reminded him that he had already visited Barcelona, in order to stroll through the town with his friend Gabriel García Márquez; at this, the poet resigned himself to the inevitable, climbed down from the boat, and chatted and drank in that bar situated exactly where I want to imagine Humboldt as having spent his first hours in the city of Santa Cruz. It is a bar which contains a huge painting of Mount Teide by the twentieth-century Canary Island painter Martín González.
The German naturalist wrote as follows: ‘The position of this city is very similar to that of La Guayra, the most-frequented port in the province of Caracas. The heat is excessive in both places, and for the same reasons, but Santa Cruz appears sadder. There are houses, of a splendid white, built above a narrow sandy beach; they have flat roofs and no glass in their windows, and are backed up against a wall of sheer black rocks with no vegetation. An attractive pier built out of ashlar blocks and the public promenade planted with poplars are the only things that break the monotony of the landscape.’ As they do not face it, Humboldt continues, the inhabitants of Santa Cruz don’t even have Mount Teide, which can be seen much better from Puerto de la Cruz, or Puerto de La Orotava, as it was known back then.
Is the German exaggerating? Is Santa Cruz really so sad? It was, as it is now, a city of merchants, turned in on itself, but open to foreigners, who disembarked here and turned into islanders, like their hosts; Humboldt himself was received like this, as a most welcome guest whom the rigors of travelling had led to feel recalcitrant in the face of the quiet charms of the Tenerife capital. In the streets, the first thing that drew his attention ‘was a very thin woman, extremely attenuated and poorly dressed, who was known as La Capitana. She was followed by other women who were no better dressed than she; all of them begged to be allowed to go aboard the Pizarro: a request which, naturally, was refused.’ The German is in a bad mood and does not understand the level of permissiveness displayed here: ‘In this port, so frequented by Europeans, the disarray of general custom takes on the form of order. La Capitana is a chief chosen by her fellows, over whom she can exercise great authority. She does the best she can to prevent any behaviour that stops the ships from fulfilling their schedules: she makes the sailors get back on board their ships at the agreed time. The officers go to speak with her if they are worried that any members of their crew might be hiding in order to desert.’
And so the impressions which first met Humboldt as he set off on a journey that would be so important for him and for the image of the island itself could not have been worse. But the naturalist got used to the place: ‘Santa Cruz is a fairly attractive place.’ It is. And now, at the point where he saw La Capitana, there still stands ‘that famous monument in Carrera marble, thirty feet high, dedicated to Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, in memory of the miraculous apparition which she made in 1392 in Chimisay, near Güimar’, but it has been joined by a later architectural addition, both polemical and interesting, made by the architects Herzog and de Meuron, who have tried to draw attention away from the monument which the Francoist government set up in front of the Cabildo, the seat of local government, in honour of the fallen on the Nationalist side in the Civil War. Also, it is here that the commercial area of the city begins, then following on down the Calle de Castillo and making a halt in the impressive Plaza de Weyler, in front of what used for many years to be the General Staff Office of the Canary Islands, the seat of the region’s military government. Further up is one of the most beautiful promenades in the Islands, the Rambla de Santa Cruz, which used to be called the Rambla del 11 Febrero in the first Republic, and then was renamed Rambla de Franco before attaining its current title. On this street, in the 1960s, in the Parque García Sanabria, which was recently remodelled, there took place a unique exhibition of Sculpture in the Street, which brought together people of the calibre of Martín Chirino, Joan Miró, Óscar Domínguez and Henry Moore. And right here, where Humboldt sat down to contemplate what he called ‘the sad city’, there passed for years, right up to the present day, the carnival processions of the island, which defied, in the years of dictatorship, the strict moral code of Francoism.
So it might be fair to say that the German scientist jumped the gun a little, or perhaps should have been aware that it is risky to take notes on a topic when one is tired from travelling. In any case, we are left with his adjective, ‘an attractive city’ which is connected in its layout and its landscape to what Humboldt immediately, with his geographical and geological knowledge, identified to be the case: ‘This group of islands is a part of Africa, and, what is more, of the most arid part of that continent.’
But nature had its way of confusing him: when, the next day, he climbed up to La Laguna—the oldest city of the island and the first capital of the archipelago—he saw something that anyone can check for himself if he so desires: that this city, also known as La Laguna de los Adelantados, is the replica, the fundamental model, of the settlements built in Latin America; created with an almost mathematical precision, it houses the university (the only university on the Islands for a very long time) and the middle school; important churches; convents; the archbishop’s palace; naturally beautiful streets, such as the Camino Largo; inns; historic buildings in whose damp walls there resides an extraordinary past of men and of legends. A truly fantastic city, perhaps the city of the Canary Islands, or even of the entire world; most beloved by the author of this book, by the man who, so many years after Humboldt, is writing this impassioned journey around the Islands … The overheated scientist who complained about Santa Cruz found that ‘as we entered La Laguna we felt the atmospheric temperature gradually lowering. The sensation felt all the softer given that the air in Santa Cruz was truly suffocating.’ In order to understand the heat, Humboldt turned to geology: ‘The heat which so affects the traveller when he enters into Santa Cruz de Tenerife or La Guayra must be attributed to the reverberation of the rocks which surround these cities.’ But La Laguna … ah, La Laguna! ‘It is the perpetual freshness which fills La Laguna,’ Humboldt concedes, ‘that makes it perceived across all the Canary Islands as a delicious and luxurious place.’ Now it is something else, of course: La Laguna has grown beyond its perimeters, has spread up into the mountains into the areas known as La Esperanza and Las Mercedes, has covered areas that used to be farmed, has uprooted the forests of ‘laurels, myrtles and arbutus’ which had benefited from the frequent rain; it is no longer, as might be expected, the city which the contemporaries of Humboldt would have known; but it still, even in summer, has a singular beauty, a beauty appreciated both by its inhabitants and by tourists. Every year, several times each year, many people, myself included, travel to La Laguna almost as pilgrims, as though this urban space were to some extent the ideal city.
Perhaps it is the fact of seeing La Laguna which makes the hitherto-reticent German scientist exclaim at a certain point of his journey: ‘Tenerife, situated in a manner of speaking at the entrance to the tropics, although only a few days’ sailing from Spain, enjoys all the beauties which Nature has given to its equinoctial regions. And the vegetation grows here in some of its most impressive and beautiful forms, banana trees and palm trees.’ And then Humboldt, now fully surrendering, goes on to say: ‘Any man who is sensitive to the beauties of Nature will find on this island a delicious medicine for any melancholy he may be suffering. There are no other places which seem more likely to do so and also to return one’s agitated soul to a state of peace than Tenerife and Madeira.’
Humboldt also observes one item which back then was a recent innovation and clearly visible, and which now to us seems to hark back to a remote past: ‘This effect does not derive from the beauty of the island’s position or the purity of the air; they are above all due to the absence of slavery, which has such a shocking appearance in the Indias and anywhere else that European colonialists have taken what they call their enlightenment and industry.’
Humboldt’s journey has a particular attractiveness nowadays, because although the island has evolved a great deal ever since he looked at it with eyes that were at one and the same time irritated and admiring, its outlines and its landscapes still clearly reflect his successive discoveries. And it would be no bad thing for someone today to retrace his journey, which is, for the Canary Islanders who come from Tenerife, a sentimental one, a journey which is undertaken with a certain natural degree of patriotic pride.