I AM ON EL HIERRO, THE ISLAND WHICH IS STILL INTACT, THE ISLAND OF the sleeping lizards, an abandoned animal, as dark as the desires of the sea, a deep and arrogant island, a small island which is like an unforgettable blow to the face of the fog.
You can think whatever you want about it before you arrive, but as soon as you set foot on the island the very air seems to you to be a metaphor for patience. Everything is possible on the island, but everything takes its time. I saw it from the air, surrounded by the majestic sea, a little stirred up by the wind which drove adventurers like Christopher Columbus and the Islanders who emigrated to America, and it looked to me like the last bastion where a fist had sought refuge, a deformed fist but a fist nonetheless, a fist that fights against the mists and punches through them, turning them into drizzle over the island’s capital, Valverde.
People might believe that land is the essence of the Islands: they are made of land surrounded by the sea. But no. The essence of the Islands is the sea, and it is the sea surrounding El Hierro that has made the island what it is, has turned it into this deformed and isolated fist whose own light is blocked out while the sonorous light of the sea still shines on. This is a high sea, invasive, impenitent and impertinent. I have always kept the sea in my mind as the most important constitutive element of El Hierro, perhaps because I first came here by sea many years ago, when the island had barely any electricity and you had to wash your hands one by one in the hotels: first one hand, pressing the tap down with the other, then the other. And when I arrived that time, the boat had to carry out a very difficult manoeuvre (a manoeuvre which it always in the end managed to carry out) in order to enter Puerto de la Estaca, as if the sea did not want to render up new inhabitants to the island. It was a manoeuvre which seemed to last a lifetime, with the captain up on the prow following instructions which seemed to be coming from the first navigator in history, trying to verify the first principles of navigation by sea.
STEEP AND STRIPPED-DOWN, MADE OF LAVA AND OF LIGHT, THE ISLAND greets you like this, by rejecting you, because its true nature is to be unpopulated, intact. It was much sought-after by Spanish and French explorers, and fell into the hands of the French adventurer Jean de Bethéncourt in the fifteenth century, who treated the inhabitants under his yoke abominably; now it is much sought after by people who are looking for an island that is still intact.
It has been saved by patience, by the patience of those who live on it, by that of those who came to enjoy its long silence. Before landing in the little airport which was my point of entry this time into El Hierro, I looked down on the cobalt-blue ocean which makes the island grow or shrink. In other places the sea is a place of transit, a room without any doors, but here the sea is the journey in itself, and transforms the island, at every point, into a kind of little boat which is at its mercy; the day on which I arrived there, 9 August 2009, the weather report says nothing, but you can see the kindness with which we are being welcomed if you just look out of the window: the sea is wrinkled, but there are only a few white crests to the waves, which look like birds that are also flying to El Hierro, prettifying a surface which seems at times smooth and at times violent. From the air the island looks majestic, but monotonous; from below, when I came by sea, the surface of the sea, the same surface, was powerful and authoritative, like the vast hand of some sea monster that the island pushed away with its imperious cliffs.
Back then I was unable to appreciate it, because I felt the fear of having travelled by sea, but the black cliffs, their reddish colour on sunny mornings, the blunt darkness of the soil, immediately reminded me of Lanzarote, even by night. Lanzarote, César Manrique’s island, the island of the artist who reinvented it so that it could stay the same, is a plain; El Hierro is built vertically, it lives by breathing in the air from the clouds, which in Valverde solidify and turn into damp and drizzle all at once; but the soil of both islands is the same, as is the feeling that they have just gone through a savage yet silent fire which has left its trace in a tongue of lava, the light following a disaster.
As soon as you set foot on it, El Hierro overwhelms you; it is the sense of fear one has before feeling truly afraid, as though you were about to feel an emotion different from those on all the other islands: in this mysterious emotion, El Hierro is also like Lanzarote. As though behind this heavy silence, with its echoes of other silences, there were an even greater mystery, a sleeping monster holding in its jaws the unruly cry of time, that great destroyer. The monster of time is asleep here, I thought. And if time itself has hungry jaws, then they are bound shut here on El Hierro, the island which patiently counts life minute by minute.
I arrived by sea and I could enter. Twenty years before, round about 1950, Ignacio Aldecoa could not do the same. In his book he writes of how he was thrown off the island right at the mouth of the harbour: ‘El Hierro, according to many, is the island known as La Pluitina, where there is no other water save that which a particular species of tree distils from the fog with which it is covered every day in the mornings: a wonderful prodigy of nature. El Hierro is dark, flat, sour with lava. El Hierro was rounded but not reached. They say—it is a story they tell—that on El Hierro they still maintain the custom of zorrocloco, whereby the man stays in bed while the woman prepares to give birth. They told this godo things about El Hierro, not always good things. And the sea in front of El Hierro was rough and we went back through its waters like an old sloop, as scared of El Hierro as we were scared of the water and the sharks.’
He could not reach the island. The fascinating entry-point to El Hierro welcomed us the very first time, and now below me I see the vastness of the sea and its pitiless waves. But this time I skipped the adventure.
AS I SAID, THIS TIME I ARRIVED BY AIR, AND I WENT TO HAVE LUNCH IN El Tamaduste, where the air of the island takes a rest and the water too, in the natural pools created to add to El Hierro’s air of patience. El Tamaduste is protected from the most stormy seas, which allows the fisherman to have the patience to capture succulent fish, which are later turned into fish soup. With rice, if possible. But there is no fish soup today, and no rice; a lot of people came through before us and the waiter has had to say ‘no’ to all the hungry mouths who have come here looking forward to the fish soup that is mentioned whenever one mentions the name of El Hierro. With rice, always. We’ll have to wait until we reach La Restinga, where the fish is even more abundant. But here, in this bar which is like an alley, I want to stop for a moment to talk about the patience that greets you when you come to the island.
It is here, in these small places within small places, that the legend of Canary Island slowness takes shape. In a time when people praise slowness as a last resort against the hustle and bustle of contemporary life, the pressure which causes illnesses and other forms of hysteria, the slowness of the Canary Islands should be a medicine or an antidote, or at the very least an example. But people who say that they suffer from excessive lethargy use the word aplatanado, which derives from the word plátano, or banana, the cultivation and export of which has been the mainstay of the Canary Island economy for centuries. The fact remains that if slowness exists and if it is a remedy, then we Canary Islanders have taken it in more than sufficient doses. But the capital of slowness is to be found in El Hierro. Even the air seems lazy here, like the countryside, held fast for centuries in a complicated landscape which has remained almost completely intact, at least until the insolent drill-bit opened up tunnels through the mountains, tunnels which now seem to be miraculous shortcuts preventing the mountains from standing in the way of the inexorable march of a kind of progress which cuts and breaks in order to free the way for other hindrances.
I once spent seven minutes waiting to avoid death by one of these tunnels, the one that leads up to the main El Hierro hotel: there was a sign which said that this was the amount of time one should wait to ensure that cars coming from the other direction had been able to pass through the tunnel. ‘WAIT. BETTER TO WAIT A FEW MINUTES THAN LOSE YOUR LIFE.’ This blunt statement is perhaps the most direct thing that one can read or hear on this island of slowness and patience. Wait rather than lose your life. El Hierro might even adopt this as a symbol of the apparent attitude of its inhabitants, the attitude of the island itself.
Slowness has its own vocabulary. Slow Canary Islanders are said to be like Galicians, and it was the Galicians, in the guise of the Portuguese, who were among the first Europeans to inhabit these islands, and above all the island of El Hierro. No one ever really knows what people who live here know or do not know; they tend to hide it until they know what you yourself know. And there are memorable phrases connected with this, milestones in the history of the language of the Canary Islands: ‘If I told you I’d be telling a lie’; ‘I’m not going to say yes and I’m not going to say no.’ Worthy elements of discretion, the Canary Islands’ way of keeping quiet even while speaking.
It happened in the restaurant, El Tamaduste. We were standing up, the waiter was walking past, sweaty and in silence, carrying food, plates of chickpeas, cuttlefish, fried squid, as though he were providing us with a gastronomic trailer of the delights to come; a little boy was jumping around, young people were laughing as they drank their Coca-Cola, and a man was taking swigs from a vast glass of beer; we looked around, but the waiter did not look at us: one of the great virtues of the patience of the Islands is that of not looking, so as not to be seen. One might say that it is one of the fundamental conditions of slowness: not to let other people’s haste disturb your patience. Finally one of us spoke.
‘Don’t you see us standing here?’
The man looked me up and down.
‘I think I noticed something.’
And there we were, standing at the end of the steep cliff which protects El Tamaduste from the wind; the man had noticed us, but he was doing his job, his time was important and our time could wait. We asked for stew and a local cheese, and for some reason, one that can only derive from the Canary Island spirit of the perverse (the idea being to do something unexpected in an entirely natural fashion), the man also brought a jar of honey.
As these things sometimes happen, as they sometimes put something on your table just so you know that they actually have the local products they pride themselves in so much, I asked the waiter if this was honey from El Hierro.
He looked at me and said something almost sublime, which summarises in a phrase a whole way of being, of existing.
‘I imagine it might not be.’
THE CANARY ISLANDS IS A PLACE WHERE CULTURES MEET, AND ALTHOUGH El Hierro is the most isolated island, the furthest west, the most separated, the one which seems the most abandoned of these world’s ends on the way to America, it was always the crossing point, a sea lane and a lighthouse. It is not that it says goodbye to the world (the Romans believed that this largish islet was the end of the world, the end of the known world), but that it is the place Columbus thought (people say this and Columbus himself said it) he should use to work out which path to take into the unknown. Perhaps because of this the Romans wanted to take control of it, and the French, and the Portuguese. The fact of being at a crossing point has influenced the character of the Islanders, and this phrase, ‘I imagine it might not be’, is an expression of a whole way of being, of existing; one both is and is not present; El Hierro is the closest thing, hidden in the fog, to what we dreamed of when we thought of the mysterious island of San Borondón. One day, in 1990, I was walking through a village in Cuba, Las Villas, and I asked a passer-by which way I should go to get to where I was going, and the man replied:
‘If I told you, I’d be telling you wrong.’
‘I imagine it might not be’ and ‘If I told you, I’d be telling you wrong’ are different ways of saying the same thing, which is ‘I’m not going to commit myself, even though I might know the answer’. The Cuban had surely inherited the phrase from the Canary Islanders who travelled in the nineteenth century to look for treasure in Cuba, and this man from El Hierro who was waiting tables with such a lack of urgency was one of those Islanders who prefers the Galician-Portuguese method of engaging in conversation, and prefers silence to any kind of definite statement.
He knew that the honey was not from El Hierro, and it was easy to prove it: in large letters, under a picture of a bee, it said ‘Made in France’, but I had asked the gentleman the question merely to make him speak, and making someone speak is a task which sometimes is difficult on the Islands. The Islands as a whole, and especially those which we call the minor islands, have always been turned in on themselves, as if they were still scared of an invasion, or a storm that will take from them this almost paradisiacal peace in which they live, scanning the horizon and navel-gazing at the same time
The waiter did not explode or snap at me, but brought, with a humility which he transformed into silence and efficiency, the local cheese, one of the finest delicacies of El Hierro: the thin, sun-beaten sheep have to fight for every mouthful of the grass that the sun allows them, and this leads them to produce pure milk and a cheese which, once it has been cured, has to be eaten with wine, if possible with a wine called Tanajara. It is one of the very best wines that they make in the Islands, and in Spain as a whole. When I finished my trip to El Hierro I bought two bottles of Tanajara Baboso and a whole cured cheese; they let you carry the cheese on board the aeroplane, but the wine has to go in the hold. The result is a wonderful combination which it is worth seeking out because it gives to one’s palate the hidden tastes of this flat and bitter land of lava, as the great Ignacio Aldecoa once called it.
AND THE WAITER AT EL TAMADUSTE GAVE US FRESH BREAD, A STEW OF meat with vegetables and some excellent fried papas: the fried potatoes are not always like they were here; they can be failures, poorly-made, carelessly prepared. He also gave us some chickpeas, the larger variety of the Islands, a product which needs to be named among the marvels which my mother made when there was nothing to eat in the house. The large chickpea, the garbanza as opposed to the garbanzo, has always been an icon of Canary Island cuisine: the person who knows how to cook them well—with meat, with fish, with vegetables, boiled or stewed, all by themselves with oil and vinegar or mojo, in a salad or even fried—has known glory, and I must say that this man at El Tamaduste, who brought us the chickpeas with meat, managed to create an extremely tasty dish which made us forget completely the exaggerated slowness with which he worked, his pride in being from the Canary Islands, from El Hierro, from El Tamaduste.
A woman who saw me talking to him, trying to make him speak, trying to make him bring me some food, trying to make him react to my stimuli, said as she left the table next to ours:
‘We are not ready for tourists in El Tamaduste.’
But we ate very well, I said to her, and I said the same thing to the waiter, when I was heading out to the dark shadows of the roads that twist and turn as though they wanted to hide the next scene in the landscape.
Behind us lay one of those inns which combines slowness with calm; these two things together define midday in El Hierro, that kind of summer siesta where people live as though their watches have stopped.
WHILE I FOLLOWED THE SILENT ROADS OF EL HIERRO, DRIVING THROUGH cliffs, next to a wild blackish sea, twisting round blunt rocky outcrops beaten by the sea, I remembered something of what I felt in Lanzarote, whose dry, black earth reminds one so much of various corners and landscapes of this western island. I felt that although we were silent there was some kind of music flying above us, as though there were a kind of local musical legend nearby, lost in the air, falling onto the Islands and having its own identity, a kind of soundtrack to the Islands.
I thought that the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd was the sound of Lanzarote. Strident, intrusive and happy, a colourful music, like the extension of some infinite dream. And what about the music of El Hierro? El Hierro is mysterious; it is made of mystery, as though it were protecting a set of feelings that it was never going to reveal, the mystery of a secret kept by every single one of its inhabitants; a music of silence, and how musical, how beautiful is the music contained in the silence of El Hierro. A music which sounds most clearly on the road between Sabinosa and El Pozo de la Salud down to the black sands that seem to push through the sky like a twisting, lost highway until they reach, after a series of dangerous curves that are almost like nightmares, the viewpoint at Bascos, from which the island bids the rest of the world farewell with a majestic insolence. The viewpoint at Bascos is a discovery; if the road is indeed dangerous because it loses itself as though it were ascending into the sky, and gives the impression that there is no one and nothing on either side of it, and that the road stops in mid-air, then the landscape which marks the end of this risky journey is incredibly beautiful, unforgettable.
BUT A LONG TIME BEFORE REACHING THE VIEWPOINT AT BASCOS, I WAS thinking about the music of El Hierro as I walked down to Puerto de la Estaca after leaving El Tamaduste. There is a feeling, like a jolt of strength and vitality, when one sees old landscapes in which one has felt almost simultaneously the sensations of fear, nightmare and delight, and this was what I felt as I went into Puerto de la Estaca, which I had first visited at the end of the 1960s. Back then El Hierro was a more ramshackle island, much smaller—if I can put it like that—and more virginal, and to touch down, to drop anchor here was a much more dizzying journey than it is now. The music that accompanied me at that time was Albinoni’s then omnipresent Adagio, and here, in the year 2009, I was listening to silence, by itself, the silence that one looks for after having been overwhelmed by so many of the sounds of the world.
Forty years ago, there were great old ships that came to the island, limping, defying the inclement waves that lifted their keels so high it was as though they were flying; we went there, scared of sinking, scared of not making it, scared of having to reverse our steps on this laborious journey which we had undergone ever since our departure from the western capital of the Islands, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Ten years before Aldecoa had not been able to land here; on my first journey to El Hierro we were about to turn back as well, about to go back to where we had come from. The boats were old, and everything smelt of salt; the journey took more than a day, you had to sleep in the boat, you came up on deck in the morning, still sleepy, and found ahead of you a huge peak of reddish rock, which is what the modern-day traveller sees as well. Although today, in the twenty-first century, you reach the island in boats that are much faster and less unwieldy, and the anchoring manoeuvre, which once forced sailors to engage in extremely dangerous hijinks, is now much easier, unless the waves decide to make the boats fly in the face of the reddish and inexpressive peak which looks at you as though you were being observed by prehistory itself. El Hierro resists, just like the waiter, and holds its silence like a black stone. It is solemn when it greets you, as though it were subjecting you to an interrogation. It is a mystery island, a question island, it welcomes you but does not give itself up to you immediately; you have to stroke it, as Tony Gallardo did, the artist from Gran Canaria: stroking the stones to fit them to his hand. Tony showed you the stones as though they had grown from his hand, happily, he was like a big child saving the most overwhelming gifts of the ocean from the water.
AND SO AHEAD OF ME IS THE PUERTO DE LA ESTACA OF MY CHILDHOOD, looking back at me, now that I am sixty years old and heading back to a landscape that used to scare me, and I am filled with a new unease. Now I ask myself if coming back, coming back by boat, would cause me the same fear, or whether time calms all fears. Here I am, facing the old port which is now a port just like any other, filled with pleasure boats; a sailboat cuts through the sea in the distance, like a dove: the loneliness which hit us forty years ago is now a question of nothing more than memory. Time passes and El Hierro remains silent, and the music is a music of the sea, which rings out as though in stereo.
Today the port of El Hierro is like a party where friends are waiting for Gatsby to show up: there are yachts, pleasure boats, a few fishing tenders waiting for fair weather, and the old boats no longer exist, those ramshackle and rusty vessels are present only in the memory of those of us who can feel nostalgia, or melancholy, even for the things which scared us in our childhood as we headed for an island that seemed to be some kind of ultimate secret, in the middle of an unencumbered sea, a sea which I remember as high, set on a slope, looking out into the infinite as though it too wanted to head off, as though the sea itself wanted to run away, the dark blue sea licking at the black rocks, jet black, like the black rocks on the beach of my home town, Puerto de la Cruz in Tenerife.
I described these rocks as though I were describing my childhood, and I walked on the scarce black sand around La Estaca as though I were treading on my past, the past of El Hierro and my own past, the past in which the first people came, those who believed that the sea was the house where the Islands lived.
WHEN I CAME HERE FORTY YEARS AGO IT WAS AN ISLAND FILLED WITH borders: these have now all, or nearly all, been knocked down. There are three or four tunnels where there used to be impenetrable mountains, and one of these tunnels, dug into a rock whose emptiness now seems to be a symbol at the end of which one sees the enlightenment which the Islands were looking for, is that which allows access to the main El Hierro hotel, where I stayed. On my first visit I stayed in the Valverde inn, a cheap hotel which had a sink in the corridor; among all the cold air and fog of Valverde, the hotel was the most civilised inheritance of a world of poverty which had once tithed the island to unusual extremes. The island, a little over a hundred square miles in area, the smallest of the Canary Islands and the youngest in geological terms, was the final point of the known world for Europeans; from it you went to the New World, and thousands of inhabitants of the island went to Cuba, and Argentina, and Venezuela … Between the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century, the island had slightly more than three thousand inhabitants; it was old people and children who stayed put; the adults left in order to find a means of sustenance which was always more difficult on El Hierro. Survival was a miracle and their journey was an obligation imposed on them if they wanted to stay alive. If it had not been so painful for them, their hunger would have seemed like something out of a fairy tale.
Dearth was still visible when I arrived on the island in 1969, in the farmyards and the villages. At a house in Salmor, where the enormous lizards live who make the island into a scientific curiosity, I once saw a sign which I cannot find now, many years later: it read ‘Thank you, Venezuela’. One of the emigrants who had gone to Venezuela trying to find a different life from the miserable one which he suffered in the beautiful and defenceless villages of the Islands was the only night taxi driver in El Hierro, Antonio, who told me some things about how those times had been. There was nothing in his home in 1956, and his parents asked the police to witness a document allowing them to send their son, still a minor of sixteen, to Venezuela. He got aboard one of the boats that travelled from Tenerife to Caracas, arriving at midday in the Venezuelan capital. Two hours later he was working in a market, ‘counting oranges by the hundred’.
Lots of people also left my village, a great number. In my immediate family it was only my father who did not emigrate, perhaps because he was the most adventurous of his brothers, but wanted to live the many adventures he dreamed of back on his native land. What is certain is that back then, round about 1956, when the largest emigration took place, I was a boy who had learned to read and write, and the wives of the emigrants came to me to get love letters (or break-up letters) written to the people who had left, abandoning their wives either provisionally or for ever, without either party knowing if the abandonment was temporary or forever. It was as though the men were reborn on their journey and as though the women died a little because of their partners’ voyage. They told me what they wanted me to write, and I took notes as in that Brazilian movie, Central Station; I was the amanuensis to the tragedies and hopes that the queue of women brought to me, filing past the little table where my papers and their stories accumulated …
The stories were moving, stories of loneliness and abandon; sometimes I felt that I was the repository of a series of heartfelt confessions which made me feel ashamed or compassionate, and never indifference; the women would lean down and whisper into my ear, and would speak to me as though I were a father confessor and not a child, not an adolescent who would be hurt or confused by all the events which took place right next to my home without my hearing any part of this dull murmur of loneliness and tragedy, misery and hope.
Just like the protagonist of that Brazilian movie, I sat there at my desk holding a biro, sitting in front of a page of airmail paper, ready to be put into one of those prepaid red and blue envelopes shaped like an arrow, listening to the most diverse confessions. All of the letters written by the wives or mothers or sisters began in the same way, at their dictation: ‘Dear son [or husband, or brother], I hope that when you receive this letter you are well. We are well, thanks to the Lord.’ After this hortatory introduction, the invocation of the Lord, who appeared in every single letter I wrote, the women would start to dictate to me their family dramas, illnesses, deaths and other suffering; then they would ask me to read them back the letters I had written for them, from the date at the top all the way to the signature at the bottom, and then they themselves would put the letter in the airmail envelope, lick it shut and carry it to the post office as though they were carrying a will, or else the memory of an embrace. My mother wrote letters as well, in her large and capricious handwriting, to her brothers and sisters, her nieces and nephews.
She told them of her own miseries, and her hopes as well, but she did not need to resort to me; she had her own handwriting, her own form of thankfulness. Those years were so poor that I can remember precisely the afternoon when poverty in its strictest sense left our house. It was when an uncle of mine, who drove a truck for a dairy company in Maracaibo, Venezuela—Leche Carabobo—came home for a visit, bringing a certain amount of silver he had earned (‘silver’ was what the emigrants who travelled backwards and forwards between the Islands and Venezuela called their money), and decided to buy my mother a gas cooker.
And so the petrol cooker vanished for good, that old cooker which filled the house with black smoke and harmful smells, especially harmful for me, the asthmatic son; some men came and put in the new cooker, and the next day at around four o’clock in the afternoon, that hour which still seems to be a time of absolute silence in my house, my uncle appeared: he looked in from the courtyard, checked that the white new cooker was there, and said nothing. And my mother said nothing either, but that was how people expressed their gratitude back in those days. With silence.
BUT THAT IS A PERSONAL STORY. WE WERE IN EL HIERRO LOOKING through the symbols which connect the island with the essential history of the emigration to America of so many Canary Islanders, a history which is not a fairytale or the plot of a movie, but which is rather a story of risk and poverty. Round about 1970 a little boat, El Fausto, left El Hierro and was lost on the journey; the story, which it was up to me as a junior reporter back then to tell, runs that the boat was lost in the fog which always accompanied every dramatic incident on the Islands, headed for somewhere which is still a mystery; some people say that the boat was headed for Gran Canaria, just a stone’s throw away, still in the archipelago itself, but others say that the Islanders in the boat went off course or were driven off course by the wind, and carried on towards Venezuela; they say that if you throw a bottle into El Golfo, on El Hierro, then sooner or later it will end up at the port of La Guaira in Venezuela, which is where Antonio ended up; Antonio, the only night-taxi driver on the island. But the passengers and crew of the Fausto never arrived, neither at Gran Canaria nor at Venezuela; they live on in the drama of myth, they live in the memory when they are deliberately evoked, as they are here.
The Fausto is a metaphor of something that has happened so often: urged on by poverty and hunger, islanders from the whole archipelago have taken on, in equally miserable circumstances, the risk of a journey that may have no end.
HOWEVER, THE EMIGRANTS WHOSE WIVES CAME TO MY HOUSE SO THAT I could write letters for them did make it across the ocean; they were the people whose earnings propped up poor and even not quite so poor families; some of them came back rich, and built houses which were like the ones they had seen in Caracas or in other parts of Venezuela (Maracaibo, Valencia, Puerto La Cruz …), and the ones who did not come back rich tried not to come back at all. The emigration was a lottery, but it was also a race: if you didn’t finish it then you would be considered a failure in life. Sometimes a man came round to our house who had made his fortune, and he came by showing off his ‘silver’ to my father, so that he would know what he had made by his adventures in Venezuela. I still have in my mind a clear image of this man, who came round to the house at dawn to pick up his false departure papers, the ones that would allow him to board the boat, make the journey, and settle into Caracas life without any bureaucratic problems from that country which was so used to receiving Canary Islanders. The money people earned was useful for the Canary Islands, and emigration was helpful for affluent Venezuela, which needed labourers at all levels of the workforce. The first gas cooker to be installed in our house, this gift from my uncle who drove lorries for Leche Carabobo, was more a miracle than a gift, and when cheques came from Caracas, the whole neighbourhood felt as people from poorer districts now do when they win the lottery.
El Hierro made a great deal from this miracle, the miracle of Venezuela. A singular figure, the journalist José Padrón Machín, who wrote almost simultaneously, under a number of pseudonyms, in all the papers of Spain and the Canary Islands, and who showed me El Hierro for the first time in 1969, called it the Seventh Island, because it is the seventh one if you count from Fuerteventura, although it is the first if you are counting from the west … The nickname stuck, the Seventh Island, and this is the name given to it in the papers, and even the Islanders themselves refer to their home by this name. But Venezuela was called the Eighth Island. Caracas is one of the places in the world with the largest population of Canary Islanders: three hundred thousand Islanders live there (Las Palmas, the city in the archipelago with the largest population, has four hundred thousand inhabitants); their number is diminishing, because the poverty which beat us down back then now beats down, in some kind of infernal cycle, on the Venezuelans and the Canary Islanders who stayed there, or who were born in Venezuela. Whether emigrants or born there, we are all a part of the same community: to talk about Venezuela in the Canary Islands is to talk about an extension of the Islands, and the same thing has happened and still happens when the reverse takes place. José Martí, the liberator of Cuba, spoke to the Canary Islanders as a part of the population of Cuba; Bolívar did the same in Venezuela; they were not seen as being Spanish, but rather as Canary Islanders (Bolívar would give speeches in which he spoke of ‘Spaniards and Canary Islanders’), and in Latin America, above all in Cuba and in Venezuela, it is still a valid distinction. ‘Islanders’, they call us, even in Cuba, and Islanders is what we are; what distinguishes us is the fact of being from an island, and I don’t know a better metaphor for the idea of an island than that huge rock which rises up from Puerto de la Estaca and which is called El Hierro.
IN ANY CASE, LEAVING NATURE AND ORIGIN TO ONE SIDE, LEAVING ASIDE unlucky and fortunate emigrations, in this journey which is taking me through the Islands, which sometimes takes me in one direction and which sometimes leads me in another, sometimes directly and sometimes by indirection, because for me the Islands are a kind of memory and memory mixes everything together, on this journey I was travelling towards the main hotel on El Hierro, travelling from El Tamaduste, and I was waiting at a traffic light that was taking an age to change, in front of a sign that told people to be patient and wait for the light to change. Don’t be in a hurry to die: that seems to be the motto of the island. Patience keeps you alive: look at the sea; it never gets old. The sea’s patience is infinite. And infinite is the time that you spend waiting for the stoplights on El Hierro to change. The time can be spent, if one is patient and sets oneself to the task, in thinking about the capacity which mankind has to pierce the earth until he changes the thick rock into a hollow at whose end one can see the light, destroying distances which would otherwise make travelling so smoothly impossible on an island with El Hierro’s particular nature.
This tunnel, which is a mirror of the patience of the Islands, is 3,100 feet long, and the stoplight keeps us waiting for seven minutes. The landscape around us is dry, with a few yellowing cork trees, a landscape as dun-coloured as Platero, the donkey in the Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón Jiménez’s novel Platero y yo. This landscape, with the donkey included, appears in many of the areas of the island, where the green foliage, the upright and infinite palm trees, even the juniper trees which are usually a separate item among the island’s vegetation, give a kind of olive-coloured counterpoint to the landscape, in which there are always flowers, and the impatient passion of water to transform places into little gardens: an island of lava and greenery, a fist that is dour and soft at the same time. El Hierro is an abrupt poem which suddenly transforms into a winding path along which one might lose oneself forever, oneself also transformed into silence.
There, at the end of the passage which releases the island from the burden of one of its most unbearable journeys, the passage which leads travellers to the Parador, the island’s main hotel, one can see the ghostly figure of the future, a light which grows larger and clearer, until you come out and face the enormous reddish cliffs which the sun wraps in all manner of different light; one looks on the sea from the Islands as the thing which changes, a surface that is constantly portraying itself, and finding superlative tones as it does so, as in a bolero, but the thing which truly changes is the landscape itself … The island is, and then it suddenly is not, or is something else. The myth of San Borondón, the island which only exists in dreams, may perhaps have been born from this fact of nature: that the Islands keep on changing as the hours go by, as the clouds go by, and there is an instant when it appears that they have disappeared. It is an illusion out of which emerge mythologies like that of the island nobody has seen, but which truly exists …
Speaking of Fuerteventura, at the other end of the archipelago, where the islands are truly a part of Africa, a Catalan academic who studied the urbanisation of Barcelona in the nineteenth century told me, as he ate some fresh fish in a restaurant right at the south of the island, that what was fascinating for him about this place which moved Miguel de Unamuno so much was the fact that the landscape was the land and that was it. Everything else is added by the hand of man, and sometimes man does not add anything.
WE WILL TALK ABOUT FUERTEVENTURA AGAIN, AND ABOUT THAT FEELING of standing on untouched land, but it is certainly the case that what this Catalan intellectual said is more generally applicable to all the islands, and especially of those Canary Island territories which do not appear to have been too greatly touched by the hand of man. El Hierro is absolute: if man were to disappear, then the landscape would still have its own personality; there are islands which are designed for solitude, and islands which are solitude themselves, islands which are entirely solitary; the landscape of El Hierro is the landscape of loneliness itself. The archipelago has a lot of areas like this: parts of La Gomera, parts of La Palma, the lonelier parts of Fuerteventura, Lobos island, almost the whole of Lanzarote … In all these spots the landscape has its own particular aspect, its own depth: the land at Gran Canaria is yellow as dates; on Tenerife the landscape alternates drought with the colour of pine needles and the reddish or green rocks of Las Cañadas del Teide; La Palma is green; La Gomera is an island of water to one side and austere drought to the other; Lanzarote is black, pure black; Fuerteventura is land and shadow, a land that seeks its shadow.
And then there’s El Hierro.
El Hierro is a landscape in itself, each square foot of the island is already a landscape which has everything: shadow, land, relaxation, the abyss, an island and its own ghosts.
AN ISLAND IS A GHOST WHICH HAS ALREADY LIVED THERE. I HAD THIS feeling when I was on El Hierro and it was so strong that I still feel it now as though it were the light that I saw at the end of the tunnel that took me to the Parador. Later, after checking in, I looked out of a window and saw a red cliff: then I thought that the rock, insolent and solemn, was looking at me, and I adapted myself to its height as though it were an accusatory finger, or a shadow, falling over me and over my memories of the island, forcing me to look with different eyes at the island where I had just arrived, perhaps for the fourth or fifth time. The memory which the island imposes on you is so powerful that you can remember the exact number of times that you have arrived there, as if your memory were associated with its own smells and tastes, with the vision which the island leaves in the memory of your eyes.
The first time I was there something very similar happened, after being impressed by our landing at Puerto de la Estaca: for the very first time a sea rock caught my gaze, this time at dawn. The boat drew out of the harbour with the grace of an elephant, or a dinosaur; those of us already on solid ground went to Valverde, which was a display of fog with the light of a bar at one end of it, a bar called Los Reyes, which owes its name, as do many things on El Hierro, to the Virgen de los Reyes, the holy patron saint of the island, the virgin before whom even atheists break down in tears. In the Los Reyes bar I saw a man drinking a small glass of cognac and slowly smoking a cigarette, while the owner of the bar cleaned, with the inherent patience of the inhabitants of El Hierro, the zinc counter on which he topped up the little glasses of wine. I kept in my mind the image of this man, tall, thin, perhaps a little too tired for such an early hour of the morning, and knew that he was a doctor. A while later I went back and there was a space at the bar, the doctor wasn’t there, he’d left: I asked the journalist Padrón Michín, the man who knows everything, about him. The man, the doctor, had gone on the run because he had killed a policeman in a knife fight that was like something out of the Wild West, which is an attitude and a geography that is often repeated in the Islands, especially in the south, as something inherent to farmers, or else something that seems to be born from the cliffs and fix itself in the timeless gaze of the silent peasants.
What had happened to the doctor? Padrón Machín, who was an encyclopaedic and absolute chronicler of the Islands, who wrote of the moods of El Hierro as though the island had a soul of its own, never wrote this story down, but that day when I asked him he told me, and a long time later he told me again, right there in front of the Los Reyes bar, in fact: the bar was closed, or being sold, but the mystery of the murder was still there, going round in my head like someone else’s bad memory. This policeman, the guardia civil in his tricorne hat who both protected the citizenry and threatened them, but who in the Franco period did a lot more threatening than protecting, was an arrogant man who made fun of the citizenry, and he laughed at the doctor, using sarcastic and chauvinist language which eventually annoyed the medic. Until one day, in the middle of his insults, the doctor decided that he had had enough, and took out a pistol and shot the policeman; the policeman fell down dead in the middle of a crowd of people who all, in relief, took the doctor into hiding. The murderer left the island, helped by the complicity aroused by a mutual distrust of the police and general disdain for this particular policeman.
Who was the murderer? Nobody said anything at all, and justice on the island was so slow that the doctor’s act of revenge remained unpunished. When I reread what Ignacio Aldecoa had to say about El Hierro (‘They told me things about El Hierro, not always good ones’), I remembered this incident, the violence enclosed in it, and the patience with which the hatred carried on building up, until finally, in a spot as calm as a bar on El Hierro, a kind of anger was unleashed that one would normally only imagine existed in bars in the Wild West. But no, this really happened, on El Hierro, in the same place where, two generations later, a young man told me the story as though it were one of the legends of the island.
The anecdote is filled with all the symbols of the time, the excesses committed by authority, the dictatorship’s abandonment of responsibility, and what island solidarity is capable of when it shares in the rage of an individual. Padrón Machín was protected by his fellow islanders after the Civil War; he had been a court employee during the Republic, and a triumphant Francoism looked for him everywhere, but, as happened here and in many parts of Spain, the citizenry was brave enough to hide a number of the fugitives. Machín, the chronicler of the Islands, learnt from these experiences how to hide himself, and in the 1960s, when we went to look for him so that he could show us the island, he would appear from the strangest nooks and crannies, as though he were still living clandestinely: he would come out from under his bed, or else from behind a kind of screen that he had used to make himself a secret study where he could use his typewriter lying down.
But we were in the hotel, and I got carried away by the story of a murder, instead of telling you about the impressions I had after leaving the ochre lights of the headland behind me and discovering a line of trees, at the back of the sky, which were a contrast with the sad old vegetation of this part of the island, the southeast of El Hierro, an area bathed by an insistent and orderly sea which ends up on the only sandy beach on the whole island. They call the spot Las Playas, which means The Beaches, and it is well-named, but it could have been named in the singular, The Beach; it is a modest beach, black as jet, seemingly abandoned in front of a sea which is always bidding it farewell, a strong and querulous sea where I saw stones that were like the stones of my childhood in Martiánez, in Puerto de la Cruz.
They are round stones, like little mountains, very unlike one another, always rough to the touch, but seeming very smooth at a distance, like the sculptures of Henry Moore which always come to mind as I walk these desolate, black shores. Sitting in front of them, in front of these stones, I was reading an old book by the old historian of El Hierro, Dacio Victoriano Darias y Padrón, a man whose name is very typical of the Islands, and in particular of El Hierro. Reading this book I refreshed my memory of some of the references spoken of so often among us, the Islanders, which are now a part of the legend that surrounds us. For example, Dacio recalls in his book that Pliny the Elder wrote as early as the first century AD of the origin of the name of the islands: there were so many dogs on them that they became known as the Canary Islands. Multitudine canum ingentis magnitudines. But earlier in that same century came Strabo, and he called them Fortunate, Fortunatae insulae. Perhaps the name came up, Dacio says, ‘because the Islands were close to the place where myth and poetic legend situated the Elysian Fields, although other people say that the name derives from the gentleness of the Islands’ climate.’
WE ISLANDERS HAVE SOMETIMES FELT HAPPY AND SOMETIMES EMBARRASSED by what Strabo said, his good will having inspired him to say something which we now see as flattery.
Fortunate? For centuries we have lived through times of great misfortune which the undeniable beauty of the Islands has done little to improve; it is a fact that the pleasant nature of our climate has helped our development and attracted tourism, which for a long time has been and still is the major source of wealth in our fragmented territory.
But really, fortunate? Perhaps it is better to say that we are situated in a favourable position on the way to America, close to Africa, but a long way from the hardships of Africa, safe from wars but also a point of strategic importance for the powers that fight: consider the Second World War, for example, when Nazi Germany wanted to transform the Islands (in particular El Hierro and Fuerteventura) into observation points in case the theatre of war should move in that direction.
Fortunate to be protected by the climate, but really, truly fortunate? The post-war period, in which all of Spain suffered, was here extremely harsh, not just for political reasons, but because of the hunger which the Islands suffered, and which perhaps sank the character of the Canary Islanders even further into that sleepy memory which we find it so hard to escape.
My teacher Domingo Pérez Minik, who is the author of an important account of the time André Breton and his surrealists spent on Tenerife, gives us in his published speech, The Human Condition of the Island Dweller, a few indications of how it is to be a Canary Islander, influenced by history to the extent that at times one feels extremely lucky and at times one feels sunk into miserable confusion.
Pérez Minik says, in a passage beginning with Miguel de Unamuno’s feelings when he lived on the wasteland of Fuerteventura: ‘And when Miguel de Unamuno lived on Fuerteventura as an exile, the things that he thought, the anguished poems that he wrote, the interpretations that he made of the character of the islanders, none of this has anything at all to do with the Canary Islander himself, this non-transcendental realist, always possessed of a sense of humour about the circumstances he lives in, suspicious and bittersweet, a simple sailor without any of the airs of the coloniser, who in his struggle for life has no other aim than to escape from his isolation, to demythologise his sea and detach himself from his own intimacies. Man is existence and being, without a doubt. But for the Canary Islander to stay standing, he has to engage in permanent conflict.’
His nature, the nature of the Canary Islander, is at once melancholy and struggle, and his existence derives from the struggle with his environment, which is pleasant to look at and to stroll through, but at the same time very hard to dominate. Steep and solitary lands, land that you can work but which is also rebellious, land from which the Islanders have managed to raise a harvest, but at the cost of great suffering … This speech of Pérez Minik’s is extremely important because it is not always the case that we Islanders have considered the isolated character of the Islands with such non-jingoistic lucidity, with such a degree of passion to find out who we truly are, without thinking about the flatteries of others, men and women who have written about our lands without thinking that isolation doesn’t always turn these lands into a kind of paradise. Far from it, in fact. Pérez Minik was a socialist and a republican, who was locked up at the beginning of the Civil War. He gave this speech when he was older, when Franco was still in charge in Spain and when it was not particularly common for people to think of the Islands as anything other than fortunate, back in the time when they were normally only mentioned in order to praise their beauty. ‘We know,’ Pérez Minik says, ‘some contradictory properties of the character of the Islander, which flourish like a living green-black water, bright and dangerous, and which have granted to him an intimate perception of his freedom: his way of being both tolerant and dour, polite and suspicious, focussed and expansive, narcissistic and parochial, always with an aggressive sense of humour at his fingertips, but one which contains within it a very touching melancholy; but with all of these elements, we still don’t know the invisible axle of freedom around which he turns.’
‘I will say it again,’ Pérez Minik continues, ‘that living in the Islands is both a punishment and a pleasure, both purgatory and paradise. Between these two biblical states, the Canary Islander travels both eagerly and painfully. […] Isolation is favourable for development, in animals and in trees, in larks and laburnums, and in the human soul. It is favourable in many ways, but harmful in others. There is a deep and wide trench between the world of biology and that of human history which we cannot simply jump over. An island is always trying to deal with two irreconcilable forces […] It is very common to see on all islands, from Japan to Crete to the Canaries to the Antilles, common elements which give them a surprising character: the lack of any uniform kind of space, the sense of enclosure caused by the sea, and the feeling that one is living in a place where time has stopped. These elements make it possible for one to create a paradisiacal environment, but at the same time make it difficult for the development of higher culture, which requires an environment full of stimuli, of movements and responses, of fundamental changes to the body and the spirit.’
This is how things are: a truly paradisiacal land could be ours, where time stops in order for men to enjoy themselves, in order for men to enjoy the gifts that nature has apparently set aside just for us. It could be like this. In the world of insular jingoism, which has a long history and which survives right up to the present day, it is usual for someone to observe that we Islanders consider ourselves to be responsible, more than for nature, for the advantages which nature has given us; so we are responsible for the fact that Mount Teide exists, we built the dunes at Maspalomas with our bare hands, we cause the waves of the sea to beat against our shores angrily or calmly, and we can be proud of the shores themselves. We have lived, and we still live, in possession of this character, turned in on itself, vain, a natural tendency of us island dwellers, an Adamic tendency to believe that nature and mankind are designed to be together, as if nature were not something that existed before mankind ever did, and man did not have the tendency to despoil the land which is given to him for free. Although it is true that it is because of their nature that the islands are called Fortunate …
But are the Islanders themselves fortunate? Quite the contrary, we are the slaves of an ‘oceanic oppressor’, and free at the same time, as Pérez Minik says. He puts it as follows: everyone who travels to the Islands and writes about them ‘forgets that the Islanders, we ourselves, faced by the dangers of our earthly paradise and the drama of our purgatory which is both concrete and decisive, have had to transform everything, to solve our urgent problems, to live in constant danger of change in order to survive, if we don’t want to turn once again into our Guanche ancestors, Neolithic shepherds, Arcadians, separated radically from the constant transmutations of history.’
We were no longer Guanches, we were no longer the descendants of tribes from the north of Africa sent into exile by cruel Romans, dispossessed of our lands and even our language; we were the descendants of the Spanish conquistadores and other voyagers who have transformed the Islands into a mixture of populations which came and settled and took on the human condition that Pérez Minik talks about; we were a consequence of the ‘constant transmutations of history’, and all that remained to us of fortune was the legend hurled into our faces by Strabo in the early years of the Christian era.
IT WAS A FORTUNATE LAND, THERE IS NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT; WE STILL live in this climate, there is no doubt about that either, the climate has made us fortunate, truly, and the climate conditions the landscape, which makes us, let’s make no bones about it, fortunate; our fortune is right in front of our eyes, it is the landscape … Halts on the journey and strolls down the paths give some idea of the pleasure that many people have felt here, at different times and in different places: Breton, Humboldt, Bertrand Russell, Agatha Christie, Oscar Wilde’s father, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Miguel de Unamuno … And this pleasure is physical, you can sense it at the top of El Time on La Palma, in Garajonay on La Gomera, on the sandy plains of Fuerteventura; you can walk on it in Las Cañadas del Teide, in the waves beating against La Punta del Viento of Puerto de la Cruz; you can feel it while eating fish in San Andrés, next to the Las Teresitas beach, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in the marvellous tranquillity of Bajamar, past the mountains of Anaga, in Tenerife, on the Las Canteras beach, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria …
As I write this, as I go over this geography of fortunate pleasure, now no longer on El Hierro but instead in a house in the north of Tenerife, hearing the noises of the birds and the wind in the nearby palms, under the northern sun, watery and milky as the clouds which dominate us and cover it, I feel the climate which my forefathers spoke of; it never gets higher than thirty degrees, and if it does then the winds will come from the sea, the trade winds, to soften the weather and turn it into true springtime, the eternal spring that they always write about in the tourist brochures. And they are telling the truth: sometimes tourism has something to do with reality; it even turns it into a manifesto. The tourists, of whom there are both good and bad, noisy and ill-mannered and silent wanderers along our paths, discoverers and despoilers, teach us how to see the Islands, to discover their secrets …