ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT HAS LED ME TO THINK OF OTHER TRAVELLERS, those who have seen us while we were making our own discoveries, while the centuries went by and the adventures we had became the background to our lives.
Agatha Christie used us as strategic background for some of her mysteries, as did Jules Verne, seeing this fragmented territory as a broken continent; André Breton transformed us into a surreal landscape; Miguel de Unamuno thought that he could see certain traces of his own Basque homeland here; Daniel Defoe gave up on his idea of coming to the Islands because he could feel the shadow of pirates hanging over the traces of Robinson Crusoe.
The literature, both fiction and non-fiction, in which the Canary Islands appears, above all the two largest islands, Gran Canaria and Tenerife, is large. It is a strategic site: the Islands normally form a stopping-off point in a journey, and such a voyage has usually been a difficult one, threatened by the underhand behaviour of international actors, or sometimes encouraged by colonialist greed.
Shakespeare had heard of our wine; García Márquez knew of our birds, and in the works of both writers, one in the sixteenth century and the other in the twentieth, both birds and wine have been used as the basis for their metaphors. We have seen this, the interest which the Islands inspire in outsiders, as a stimulating factor, because the Islands like to see themselves reflected in all kinds of mirror, just like Narcissus …
And I want to compile here a set of fragments of the large variety of mirrors which enfold and embrace us, before continuing along the path set out by Humboldt, down into my own valley, the place where I was born, the Valley of La Orotava.
We have looked into the books in which our islands appear as though we were searching for our own essence, as seen by the eyes of others, as if identity were something that was spilled into texts by people who just happened to be passing through, found that this was an extraordinary environment and told us as much. Some of the books I read surprised me, and others seemed to me, with the benefit of hindsight, to have been written by people who loved the Islands a great deal and who left traces of their exaggerated affection here. Other people didn’t love them at all, as certain of the accounts show.
First of all, the birds. There is a pleasant passage in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel by Gabriel García Márquez which is at one and the same time so Atlantic and so personal to us, in which the Aracataca-born novelist describes the birds that are to repopulate Macondo, his mythical terrain. ‘The cage of canaries showed that these were not improvised suggestions. Remembering that his mother had described to him in a letter how the birds had been exterminated, he had delayed his return by several months until he had found a boat that had would call at the Fortunate Isles, and there he bought twenty-five pairs of the finest canaries to repopulate the sky over Macondo. This was the most lamentable of all his frustrated initiatives. As the birds began to reproduce, Amaranta Úrsula started to set them free in pairs, and they took longer to feel themselves at freedom than to leave the village. In vain did he try to make them live in the dovecote that Úrsula had put up in the first restoration of the village. In vain did he make them false nests of straw in the almond trees, and spread canary seed on the roofs and stirred up the remaining prisoners in order that their singing might dissuade their fellows from leaving, but the deserters flew up into the sky at the first opportunity and turned round in the skies just long enough for them to fix on a route and head back to the Fortunate Isles.’
The birds return; the islanders return. They can’t deal with captivity; it is their vocation to be free. We Canary Islanders have always connected our name with that of these birds, their light and liberated presence; even though others say that the etymology derives from dogs, canes in Latin. García Márquez gives us this honour, and has his birds come from the Islands, but the birds return; they cannot accept any form of captivity … a beautiful symbol of our presence on the earth.
Birds and their nests: these childhood obsessions, wherever the birds live, these flocks which Amaranta Úrsula could in no way control. The Islands have always been a peaceful place, with tall trees, and our childhood took place at a time when children still looked after birds in their own nests. Perhaps this is a custom which still exists, but childhood is a period which vanishes forever; I think that the time of nesting is one that passes too.
Birds and Mount Teide. The poet Francisco Brines wrote—as did Rafael Alberti and Vicente Aleixandre, all three of them Spanish poets—about the bird of Mount Teide, a myth which has entered in its strangeness into both poetry and legend, because it is a creature which it is impossible to find. Perhaps because the freest bird is the one which does not exist. To a certain extent, Mount Teide itself, the volcano which presides over the topography of the Islands, as well as their mythology, is a simple bird, an odd bird, a volcano which no longer threatens the Islands and which has drawn in its fiery wings … There is a text by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, author of The Enlightenment, which describes the mythical character of Mount Teide and the effect it has on his imagination and on ours. It is in his book The Road to Santiago: ‘That morning, the shadow of Mount Teide had painted itself against the sky like a vast mountain of blue cloud. The bearded man, travelling as a Christian, giving himself airs as though he were a Burgundian who had travelled to the Indies on licence from the King (he has promised to show this on his arrival), knows that his journey will soon come to an end. As Gran Canaria trades with people from England and Flanders, and more than one Calvinist or Lutheran captain offloads his cargo here, without being asked if he believes in predestination, fasts during Lent or wants to buy Papal bulls on the cheap, it will be easy for him to get lost in the city, and then think how to get off the island and make his way to France. He casts a knowing look at Juan, so as not to talk about what they both are thinking. For the time being, he is happy to have rediscovered, in lentils and salpicón, in cheese and in brine, flavours which he had missed a great deal, over there in the stockade where, more in spite than in real grief, Doña Yolofa and Doña Mandinga sit and cry, who used to set themselves up as fine Spanish ladies in front of the other black women, given that they were the concubines of the son of a Squire, whatever that was, it must be something important.’
Mount Teide, the lighthouse that attracts the stranger. Daniel Defoe wanted to come, and in Robinson Crusoe he describes what happened: ‘I fell into terrible misfortunes. The first was this: our ship making her course towards the Canary Islands, or rather between those islands and the African shore, was surprised in the grey of the morning by a Turkish rover of Sallee, who gave chase to us with all the sail she could make. We crowded also as much canvas as our yards would spread, or our masts carry, to get clear; but finding the pirate gained upon us, and would certainly come up with us in a few hours, we prepared to fight; our ship having twelve guns, and the rogue eighteen.’
A failed attempt, but an attractive and beautiful vision of the mountain which Carpentier saw in his fiction, and about which Defoe says the following: ‘Once or twice in the daytime I thought I saw the Pico of Teneriffe, being the high top of the Mountain Teneriffe in the Canaries, and had a great mind to venture out, in hopes of reaching thither; but having tried twice, I was forced in again by contrary winds, the sea also going too high for my little vessel; so, I resolved to pursue my first design, and keep along the shore.’
Paul Bowles did make it to the Islands, as did Lawrence Durrell. Durrell dedicated a poem to Tenerife, an island which he sees as a woman.
Bowles discovered this atmosphere as well and describes it in his story, ‘The Fourth Day Out From Santa Cruz’; it is his vision of a landscape which one only travels through, in the middle of the twentieth century, in a city which is both African-American and unclear: ‘It is pleasant to walk by night along the pier of an unknown port, with the autumn breeze pushing you softly from behind. Ramón was in no hurry; he stopped in front of a café to hear the guitars and the shouting, without allowing himself in exchange to be importuned by the by the women who called to him from the darker doorways.’
AMONG THE MANY SPANISH VISITORS TO THE ISLANDS, I BELIEVE THAT Miguel de Unamuno is the one who manages to enter the soul of the Islands in the most passionate way. His vision of Tenerife coincides to a degree with the first impression which Humboldt had when he arrived there, when he discovered the unbearable slowness of the Islands. The Basque poet and philosopher writes as follows, adapting to his own purposes a few famous lines of Nicolás Estévanez, the soldier and poet of the Canary Islands who fought, amongst other conflicts, in the War of Cuban Independence: ‘There is nothing for me to say to you about Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Except that once I arrived there I started to become impatient with the slowness of the inhabitants of this land. And I started to feel the effects of the somnolence of the Islands, the sweet drowsiness that comes from isolation … I hurried up to La Laguna de los Adelantados. On the way I was shown the house of Nicolás Estévanez, and next to it an almond tree which Nicolás had made famous. His lines run as follows: my fatherland is not the world; my fatherland is not Europe; my fatherland is not Spain: my fatherland is a shack, the shadow of an almond tree … etcetera. Poor man, having no other fatherland than the shadow of an almond tree! He ended up hanging himself from it.’
In La Laguna, Unamuno says, ‘there is a silence and a solitude that affects me to the very marrow of my soul. In the sky there is fog, a fog of dreams, a fog of absolute somnolence. Long streets, long as dreams; at the end of them a shattered dark tower. Here and there houses with jutting wooden balconies, and latticework, normally painted green; very typical balconies, behind whose latticework one imagines the lady sitting and waiting, waiting for centuries now, the same lady from back in the days of the conquistadores. Some houses are topped with a verede, a little plant like a small palm tree. […] They say that La Laguna is like a Castilian city, and there is something in that: there is also something of Castile, of the mountains of Castile, in the landscape that surrounds it. But there is also a special tone to the place that is not really like that of the old Castilian cities. These wide and straight streets, this clarity, this air that is half romantic quadrille and half ceremony, everything that shows it to be an aristocratic creation of the seventeenth century, all this marks a difference between La Laguna and the rough Castilian streets with unbreakable Roman towers standing over them, where there may be some fragment of a Roman wall, or some air of the Reconquista, something that speaks of a naïve faith brandishing its sword and ready to fight. La Laguna instead wears a dress coat; or a monk’s habit, if you will.’
From La Laguna the poet went to Gran Canaria, and searched for the heart of the island. ‘The interesting thing here, about this island that is Gran Canaria,’ he wrote, ‘is to be found in its interior, in the two great bowls of these enormous volcanoes that have been silent for centuries. I climbed up as far as Teror, a village of an almost preternatural calm, which reminded me of the villages of the Miño area in Portugal. If it were not for the palms, that liturgical tree which is like a great green altar candle, if it were not for the bananas, if it were not for the other tropical plants, then this area of the world would remind me a great deal of Galicia. But here, in Teror, almost 2000 feet above sea level, the landscape changes. The extremely leafy chestnut groves in Osorio reminded me of a corner of my native Basque country. And there, in the chestnut groves, I waited for the afternoon to pass until I saw the hills sink into the calm of the night. It is something that is always new, something that seems to lead us to the source of life itself, something that invites us gently to mingle with mother earth.’
And then Unamuno went to Tejeda, in Gran Canaria, a miraculous site where he found the peace in the stones of the island at the same time as other, more Dantesque discoveries: ‘And so we started off on horseback to visit the valley or cliff of Tejeda, one of the two great volcanic cauldrons on the island. The path leads between cliffs, where the humble laburnum covers the ground and where the chestnut tree and the walnut lift their fuzzy heads from hollows in the ground, and here and there, from the scorched cliff sides or among the volcanic there sprouts the occasional miserable euphorbia. We made a pause in Valleseco, a tiny village that sits in the lap of the mountain and where the streets were decorated for a party. Continuing along paths that were occasionally cut by sheer and abrupt rock falls, we caught our first view of the Valley of Tejeda. The sight is impressive. All the black walls of the great volcanic cauldron, with their crests that seem to be fortified, with their upright rocks, give an effect that is almost Dantesque.’
Jorge Luis Borges came through Las Palmas in a boat, on his way back to America. And on this voyage he wrote this poem dedicated to the city:
At the noisy point of twenty days’ voyage
the night knew, with surprising skill,
how to soothe the seas’ relief, that placid reproach
to the upright waves and the harsh storms.
Afterwards there remained engraved in my consciousness
among the sharp jostlings of the covered wagon,
the market and the tower, a calm clasp
linking quiet streets and blue skies.
Some little houses daubed in ochre,
a few little squares, smug as altars,
the palm tree whose top was covered with the soft night,
hills which lift up the mediocre populace …
In this spot the soul, broken up by the seas,
received once again the familiar caress of the earth.
Jules Verne saw it in the same way, and in the prose of his novel The Thompson Agency and Co. describes the same city which Borges had given us in poetry: ‘Built at the end of the Guiniguada cliff, on a series of extremely uneven patches of land, the city has an entirely oriental aspect. […] Las Palmas is a constructed city, with dark narrow streets, but one where the nature of the landscape converts every stroll into a perpetual ascent, followed by a perpetual descent. Apart from the cathedral in its Spanish Renaissance style, it has few interesting monuments. As for the Moorish aspect of the city: when seen from the sea, it provokes unreasonable expectations which disappear as soon as one looks closely. There is nothing less Moorish than these streets, these houses, their inhabitants, who offer up to public admirations exclusively European, almost French, refinements.’
And then there is Shakespeare. He did not travel to the Islands, but he heard the legends attached to malmsey wine. In Henry IV Part II, act II, scene IV, Mistress Quickly speaks as follows:
‘I’ faith, sweetheart, methinks now you are in an excellent good temperality: your pulsidge beats as extraordinarily as heart would desire; and your colour, I warrant you, is as red as any rose, in good truth, la! But, i’ faith, you have drunk too much canaries; and that’s a marvellous searching wine, and it perfumes the blood ere one can say “What’s this?” How do you now?’
And Prince Henry says, in Henry IV Part I, act II, scene I:
‘O villain, thou stolest a cup of sack eighteen years ago, and wert taken with the manner, and ever since thou hast blushed extempore. Thou hadst fire and sword on thy side, and yet thou rannest away: what instinct hadst thou for it?’
Falstaff, in the same scene of the same play, calls out, possessed by the spirit of dry Canary wine (he calls it ‘sack’ in the original, referring to malmsey):
‘A plague of all cowards, I say, and a vengeance too! marry, and amen! Give me a cup of sack, boy. Ere I lead this life long, I’ll sew nether stocks and mend them and foot them too. A plague of all cowards! Give me a cup of sack, rogue. Is there no virtue extant?’
And then, in the stage directions, ‘he drinks’. Let us drink, then, let us stop for a moment in the same spot where we left Humboldt, let us look for his tracks, which are not the tracks of his tears but perhaps the tracks of malmsey wine.