WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT FUERTEVENTURA, JUST AS WHEN YOU ARRIVE at every island, you should look out of the window of the aeroplane, if you are not coming by boat; in the case of Fuerteventura, this is obligatory in order to see if Miguel de Unamuno was right when, living here in exile in the 1920s, he said that you have to approach this beautiful desert with a clean soul. Unamuno said as much in a famous sonnet from his sequence From Fuerteventura to Paris where he wrote that that Fuerteventura is a skeleton of an island. And that is how you see it from above: a skeleton which grows larger and smaller, like a size-shifting lizard that somehow manages to stay alive and vigilant no matter its size; wounded or whatever else, the lizard keeps on breathing whatever its dimensions.
And that was how I saw it from the air; Fuerteventura is the air itself, like the air of the earth; it is an island in search of shade, and it is a skeleton. Unamuno compared it with gofio as well, the major source of food for the primitive inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and of all of us who have continued to think of this food as the symbol of all our meals; if you say ‘bread’, then you are talking about the basis of your diet, and if you say ‘papas’, then you are talking about what the Canary Islanders and the Southern Americans eat, and if you say ‘gofio’, then you are referring to the Canary Islands, or to Fuerteventura in particular. The same Fuerteventura that Miguel de Unamuno saw.
So, when I read Unamuno and saw him identify the island with gofio, I felt that he was my poet, that he knew where the Islands’ childhood came from, how we were able to survive when there were only papas, fish, gofio and cheese, the basic elements in the diet of generations of Canary Islanders. And Fuerteventura, which is an island that has been extremely isolated by its poverty, felt more than any other island, at least as much as El Hierro or the south of Tenerife, the humble solidarity of gofio with one’s stomach.
But we had reached Fuerteventura, and some verses of Unamuno took me back to everybody’s childhood. Now a great deal of time has gone by, and childhood no longer exists save as the memory of a memory, or the distant gleam of an event in the past, and Fuerteventura is a different island from the one which welcomed Miguel de Unamuno (which embraced him, literally, preventing his exile from turning into an imprisonment). Back then Unamuno—who was the rector of Salamanca University in 1936 when Franco started the Civil War, but who in the 1920s was a thunderous professor, a republican member of parliament, and opposed to the soft dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera, who had him sent into exile—scandalised the whole of the conservative society of the capital of Fuerteventura, Puerto Cabras, now known as Puerto del Rosario. He led his discussion groups here; his was a peripatetic discussion group, as he had been forbidden from speaking to many people: he walked through the streets, stopping here and there, in bars and at the windows of people’s houses, and added voices to his poetic, political and philosophical chorus. His ideas derived from a militant Catholicism, but also from a struggle to identify the true identity of God, which was his great battle, his great agony, a word which is fundamental for his philosophy and its evocation of the struggle—the literal meaning of the word ‘agony’ in Greek—which he forced himself to control.
AND SO, FROM ABOVE, FROM THE WINDOW OF THE AEROPLANE, FUERTEVENTURA looks like a series of large dun-coloured lizards, a kind of ghostly island which opens up in the middle of an eternal or probable sandstorm, and which looks—how could it not?—like a skeleton made of gofio.
The sensation of sandiness which one feels upon looking at Fuerteventura is not surprising; Fuerteventura is sand, is only sand, succulent desert sand, scattered with occasional humble trees which give an ever-greater sensation of loneliness; a sandy fortress stained with the sand of the sea. In the atmosphere there is sand; there is sand on the roads, and they used to be covered by even more sand; in Corralejo, near the capital, Puerto del Rosario, Puerto Cabras as it was in Unamuno’s time, the dunes rolled onto the highways and the roads; now the dunes are smaller and they don’t cover the highway except in particular parts of one’s journey.
Everything is the colour of sand. In some places, such as Corralejo, the sand is whiter; and in the very south, in Cofete, the sand has the colour of millet gofio, or else wheat: a light brown shading into dark brown. In Corralejo, which is where I went the first time I visited Fuerteventura, forty years ago, the sand is like an addition to the sun: a clear, sparking sun; crystal-clear, pure waters, and as a result of this combination one feels a sense, physical, pleasurable, of joyous delight, almost like the sense one feels at Famara on Lanzarote, the beach where the artist César Manrique grew up, the best, most mysterious beach of all the Islands. But we will get there later.
NOW WE ARE IN FUERTEVENTURA, AND TRAVELLING SOUTH, ALTHOUGH not to the very south, not to Cofete. We are arriving at the Costa Calma, which is given that name for obvious reasons, and to a particular spot where I want us to travel together, my readers and I. I came here because the poet Pedro Lezcano recommended that I do so, years ago. He went here every summer; until he was more than eighty years old he did scuba-diving and underwater fishing here, and this is a wonderful spot for looking at the bottom of the sea, not simply at the sea itself. Lezcano stayed in a hotel, the Hotel Los Gorriones, which was like an old car with soft leather seats; there was a bar which was like the old bars of the Islands, with a slight English air to it, like the bar in the Hotel Mencey in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which is also a hotel of leather and wood, a kind of dovecote where it looks as though the clients will spend their entire lives sitting with a whisky in hand, just as in those dangerous parties that Gatsby used to give … Perhaps I am idealising things here, but in my memory the bar at the Hotel Los Gorriones is like that, just as I remember, and just as the poet spoke of it to me: a comfortable bar, darkened in the afternoons so as to be able better to see the sunset, which shaded with melancholy the farewell the sea was bidding to the sand …
It is likely that this memory, which is perhaps a false one, has been made larger by the actual evidence available to me, because the bar has now disappeared and in its place is a chill-out lounge which I doubt would have been useful or pleasurable for my friend, the poet Pedro Lezcano. But here we are, and we are not walking towards the hotel anymore, but instead strolling along the beach. Fuerteventura from the air is a lizard, but at ground level it is a beach, many beaches, beaches of all kinds: large, long, wide, white, black; this one in particular, the beach where we are, Playa Barca, the Beach of the Rowing Boats, as it is called for obvious reasons, looks like a real beach: narrow at the ends and wider in the middle, and you walk along it as though you were dancing in the middle of an agreeable desert. Like every beach on the island, it is entirely clean, and this is another symbol: it is not that the sea has taken away the rubbish, but that people have not left any. It is the responsibility of the Pájara local government, the largest local authority in the whole of Spain, but it is also the consequence of a tradition in Fuerteventura, which is that the beaches should always look as though they have been recently swept. The wind contributes to this miracle, without any doubt.
In any case, the Beach of the Rowing Boats is lots of things: a distance (four miles), an aesthetic, a pleasure … It is a good representation of the metaphor of the beach, the metaphor of Fuerteventura itself; your gaze loses itself in the distance, because the beach is distance itself, and your footprints follow you and are immediately blown away, because the wind shifts the fine sand with great skill, and the marks you leave in the sand are filled as though no one had ever walked there. It is a beach from which to go diving, a beach where you can swim, a beach to observe. It is a metaphor of the island itself. If you take photographs of Caribbean beaches down to the Playa Barca and compare them carefully, then you will see that there is a lot of overlap between the photographs and the beach in front of you. This is not a coincidence; it is a copy: many of the beaches in the Caribbean sell themselves, in Spain at least, by using photos of the Playa Barca; it’s easier to use these photographs than to go to the Caribbean and take proper ones yourself.
Although it is a major part of the life of the island, not everything is to do with the beach. No sooner had we left the Playa Barca, heading down towards the very south of the islands, my friend Andrés Duncanson, a journalist and fisherman, spoke to me of a tradition connected with another product of the island: its wool-bearing livestock, its sheep and its goats. He pointed towards the dull and dry hills and told me about the great livestock drives for sheep and goats which took place in these dry areas, all the way as far as Cofete, every year. The goats graze at their leisure and are gathered every year in order to be slaughtered. They belong to their owners; everyone knows who these free-ranging goats belong to; they graze by themselves at their liberty and eat what they want, nature gives them what little it has; wherever there is a shadow, behind every tiny rock, among the cliffs, there is some little piece of greenery, and this patch of green is where you will find the goats. The goats and the sheep do what they want, but their ears are marked, and the mark shows who they belong to. The livestock drives are necessary to check that everything is well with the animals, and to divide them among their owners; the money made from the sale of their meat will be divided between the owners of the various earmarks.
We are in the Jandía National Park, and this is where the goats graze peacefully; all of their customs are peaceful and familial: the kids, the baifas, only suckle from their mothers, and follow them with the devotion of the needy; the owners of the sheep pay most attention to the wethers; Andrés tells me that theirs is the most succulent meat, and the most succulent part of their succulent meat is their forelegs, which is where the animal makes least effort when walking. These are country tales, from the shepherding tradition of Fuerteventura, which has not been eliminated, although it might seem so, by the tourist influx, especially by Germans, which has turned this island into one of the most desirable sites in the world if what you want is beaches and places where you can take the sun, go swimming or windsurf.
Andrés tells me that there used to be two available distractions in Fuerteventura: looking at the goats walking around, and looking at the dunes moving onto the roads. The dunes are now calmer because the roads are better and more controlled, but they used to create their own landscape, which was never the same from one day to the next; the dunes at Cofete, which is where we headed, were universes with their own dynamic, the poetic and secret dynamic of the dunes, guided towards the smooth and sinuous mountains by the same wind which has made these southern coasts the best place in the world to practise competitive windsurfing.
Goats, dunes, sand, beaches, donkeys (there are many donkeys, and all of them sad, as all donkeys are, on Fuerteventura) and suddenly, of course, advertisements for McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. Tourism is now another aspect of the landscape. We travel past the Jandía salt marshes, the Jandía spurge bushes, we see the Jandía lighthouse, elements of the landscape that has always been here, but there is another landscape here which looks like all other landscapes everywhere, the landscape of tourism, all the same at least until we make it past Morro Jable, the most densely-populated nucleus of the Jandía peninsula. And after Morro Jable there is a track of stone and earth, which is occasionally enlivened by the goats and the donkeys and the beaches, and which takes you to coves which have their own history. In particular, this track leads you to the La Señora beach, which owes its name to a lady who was a lover of King Alfonso XII; she was exiled to Fuerteventura in order not to upset the peace of the king’s family, and this was where she is supposed to have gone to swim. The beach now has another meaning connected to it, because it is the first place where the bodies of African immigrants wash up from their dinghies that they have used to escape the misery of their homelands in search of what they believe to be a better life in the Canary Islands or in Spain.
The shadow of the dinghy deaths marked the inhabitants of the coast of this island for decades, until better vigilance, or the final understanding that this better life was also a Utopian dream which cost people’s lives, convinced the people who were tempted to emigrate not to do so in such a risky fashion, crossing the ocean from the coast of Africa.
Andrés, the fisherman, tells me that these beaches have good fishing; as though he were making a synthesis of the sea and the land, he fishes for parrotfish, the subtlest and tastiest of all the rockfish of the Islands, using the tip of a goat’s horn as a float. ‘It’s an orgasm, the feeling when a good fisherman gets a bite, the feeling as the line goes tense, the weight on the rod that shows you’ve caught something leaves your legs trembling.’ Different strokes for different folks … When we sat down to eat by the Jandía lighthouse, Andrés took some rods out of his bag, ready to accompany the guitars that rang out at the other end of the bar; a second later and there was party in full flow; behind us now was the anxiety we had felt earlier: Andrés believes that nature can be overcome, and took us to a beautiful cove which one has to enter by defying the theory (and practice) of gravity. We flew through the air and landed on the wonderful sand of the secret beach, the welcoming sand. The leap was a sudden one, dangerous; luckily enough, there were no rocks below, but only the miraculous sand that has been there since the prehistory of Fuerteventura. We came out alive, but we needed to eat and drink in order to overcome our fright.
This spot, Puertito de la Cruz, is a kind of lawless Wild West town, where there are caravans that look as if they have been there ever since the hippies decided to live in a commune: but here they have food that can help you recover from any kind of fright. In particular, they sell a kind of soup made with fish, onion and saffron, and on the side gofio with salt and raw onion. And a good ice-cold local beer (I recommend Dorada, it’s my brand) encourages you to forget about what happened on the secret beach, encourages you to join in the party that’s kicking off at the other end of the bar, and encourages you to live, to imagine the clean water, crystal-clear, the metaphor for all the waters of the sea that was waiting there after the risky flight that left us on the welcoming and now unforgettable sand. And while we ate the delicate fish, the women at the counter sang; I feel as though I am in a place where the world says goodbye to everything among the sand and the crystal-clear water, as if after tonight there would be no more ports, no better state of health, no easier or more beautiful happiness.
What happens on these islands is that every time you touch the sky you end up touching the ground. And you think about metaphors, but you end up accepting them wholeheartedly: this fish soup, made of wreckfish—a salty fish that can also be very dry, but which here is as soft as the soup itself, which you eat with escaldón, that is, gofio mixed with water and stock, and raw onion—becomes a metaphor for the patience of eating, for the baroque way in which we Canary Islanders treat our food.
My mother used to mix everything together, she put all the food on the table, and thought that you could eat the solid parts of the meal and the liquid ones at the same time, as well as the sweet bits and the savoury bits: she invented fusion cuisine ahead of her time. This is something she has done and that millions of other Canary Islanders have done over the course of time, usually compelled by necessity, when there was only saltfish and gofio and a bone in the house with which to make a soup. And it is from this need that our humble cuisine developed, passing these satisfactions into culinary history. Here I am seated in front of this vast soup tureen, made of hot zinc: inside it is the fusion, the fish, the papas, the sweet potato, other vegetables.
Andrés says that it is not so simple, as he sees me stirring the pot: you don’t just stick everything in and later take the fish soup out; it’s not so simple. You have to watch the time; time is patience, and cooking is patience as well, and that is why they have taken so long to bring us the food; they have put our patience to the test. You might come from cities where there are noises and traffic lights, and find yourself face to face with roads on which you can travel for whole afternoons at a time, while you adjust your gaze to the sight of immense safe beaches, where there are no mosquitoes or anything else that is not nice to look at.
And this slowness is like a lullaby which is later turned into the form of food, food which comes when it is ready, and when, if I can put it like this, one’s patience is at an end, only because it is now no longer necessary. Andrés even says that they have brought it a little bit too soon, that the fish is not quite how it should be. But one never knows, and I eat it with the delectation it deserves. Out there, on the dirt, the children are playing in among the dusty caravans; there are dozens of them, quiet and dirty; there is a warehouse selling a whole load of junk just in front of us, like a set from Easy Rider. So far away from everything, Puertito de la Cruz. And there, opposite us, looking out into the particularly blue sea, is the lighthouse, just one more lighthouse; the Canary Islands delimit their world using lighthouses.
The women are still singing; they are singing Maná’s version of the song Probablemente, a song from Mexico, which fills me with nostalgia and a kind of unsteady happiness while I eat a fish soup which is like something my mother would have made. ‘In the same place as always, the same city and the same people,’ as the song goes. They are singing, the women are singing. Andrés raises his fishing rod to them, like the fine musician he is, and accompanies them, and while the melancholic music plays I feel in my depths the noise of fishing rod knocking against fishing rod, enlivening the party as if it were going to last all evening and for the rest of all our lives, like the fish, like the stewed papas, like the greenery which gives a bit of life to the food, like the Dorada beer that has just fallen like a cold lifeline into my throat.
There are other things that people call happiness, but this small pleasure is happiness itself, here and with these people. We serve ourselves green mojo and mojo picón; these sauces, the mojos, are a part of the humble (or grandiose) theory of cuisine; they are both a luxury and a necessity, there is no flavour in the food of the Islands which does not allow one to add a mojo, mojo with everything, mojo with gofio, mojo with papas, mojo with meat, mojo with fish.
‘The tasty sauce of the Islands is called mojo picón,’ as Caco Senante, a star of the 1980s, once sang: he is also the originator of a kind of sarcastic slogan used to apply to people who leave the islands and go to live in Madrid: ‘What are you doing here, a seagull in Madrid?’… Well, here we are, in Puertito de la Cruz, this Wild West village where the remains of what used to be the hippy world live alongside the nostalgia of the farmers sitting dreaming at the bar as though they were lost stills from the films Baghdad or Paris, Texas.
They are used as though they were a form of condiment, the different types of mojo, and cover up all other flavours. The Catalan academic who studied urban development in Barcelona so far away from where we are now dipped his bread in mojo, we pour mojo on the gofio with which we accompany our soup; all around us the Germans and English order their food, dip it in mojo and for the first time try this sauce, which is like a sign of identity in some ways.
Mojos, mojos, the Canary Islands are summed up by their mojos. Mojo verde is the smoothest, made with cilantro, or else parsley; mojo picón, sharp mojo, is made with red pepper, and is sharp, as the name suggests, it’s used to make the taste of whatever you are eating even stronger; if you use too much mojo then your food stops having any flavour at all, mojo picón can take on all-comers; the green variety is much more simple, a friendly kind of mojo which enhances flavours without overwhelming them. For a long time I used to eat both kinds, but now I prefer to eat my papas with oil and vinegar, which is also, for me, the best way of dressing a salad. They didn’t give us a salad at Puertito de la Cruz, and now I imagine the flavour of the salads they normally serve in the Canary Islands: with millet, palm hearts, avocado, guayonge onions (which are bluish, tasty, grown in the area from which they derive their name, in Guayonge, a part of Tacoronte on Tenerife) … But there was none of that here; here there was only onion, and it was not blue, and it was what we used to eat the gofio, as though it were a spoon. Salads are a ritual that comes directly from the fields; if you want to believe that the Canary Islands are there, right there on the table where you’re eating, then apart from the mojos and the stews you need to order salads, and you have to insist that they contain onion. And if it is blue, that strange blue onion which they grow up on the cliffs, then so much the better.
As we finished eating, the women were singing El rey, by the Mexican José Alfredo Jiménez. Pero sigo siendo el rey. But I am still the king. This is the kind of place where the music takes you away to anywhere at all, and we were simultaneously in the Canary Islands and in Mexico, in the Wild West, and in a paradise where the wind moves the sands in order to put them in their proper place. The Catalan academic, the expert in nineteenth-century urban planning in Barcelona, ate a huge fish, fiery and red, and made a few notes. I spoke to him directly. His name is Francesc, and he is on the island ‘to disconnect for a bit and to study a little’.
Can you do the two things at the same time, disconnect and study? Yes, he says, you can.
I like to speak to the foreigners who visit the Islands; they all see things which we never see; I have always spent my time watching them and trying to talk to them; one of my first jobs was looking after the children of some foreigners, and as a child I used to run after them and beg for pennies, and speak to them; the first words I ever saw written down were foreign words (‘Trulsa ös mormor’); in a general store which had some goods imported from England, I saw the phrase ‘Good because Danish’, and I noted down the following Portuguese phrase from a jar of Nescafé: ‘Mantenha a lata bem fechada’ (Keep tightly closed). The Canary Islands have always been, and still are, the site of an immense and constant traffic of foreigners who have transformed our language, connecting our vague borders with the border of the world. It is impossible to live enclosed within the Islands: the Islands are a window which has been open ever since I was a child.
And so I spoke to Francesc as though this Catalan academic were a foreigner and asked him if you could combine study and disconnection. And looking down into the bottom of his plate, covered now in mojo, bread and the remains of the fish he had eaten, that parrotfish which he dissected as though he were studying it, he confided in me a discovery which I now copy from him: ‘I like the fact that it is not greenery which defines the landscape here, but rather tectonics.’
It is not greenery which defines the landscape here, but rather tectonics. He said this in Fuerteventura, of course, where the greenery is either artificial or distant, set back from the parts that the sea and the sand can reach; in Puertito de la Cruz and in all the surrounding countryside you see wretched little goats, but never any grass; perhaps there is grass or some kind of plant hidden away in the stones themselves, where the animals all gather like thirsty men meeting at an oasis.
There is no greenery here, there is only tectonics. He said this as though he were laying a hand on the earth. It is true. There is little greenery; there are a few little trees which stand by the side of the road, clinging to the ground like limpets, which I have on occasion stopped to photograph, bending down to the ground until my chin is almost touching it; but this is greenery which gives no shade. Andrés has pointed out to me a tiny plant which hides crouching next to an equally small rock. But there is no greenery here; in the distance, sometimes, you see in the deep south occasional strips of palm trees or hedges which give you the impression of facing an oasis, but Jandía was not made for greenery, and so what Francesc said was just what everyone feels, that it is tectonics, the structure of the landscape itself, which is the most important aspect of Fuerteventura, even the air is made of sand, it is as though it will soon solidify. We live in the midst of a sandstorm that sometimes unleashes itself absolutely, but which otherwise hangs in the air like a threat.
BUT THE MAN WHO HAS NOT VISITED COFETE AND WHO HAS NOT CLIMBED up to the viewpoint, a rustic type of construction, deforested by the wind, has not truly seen the extent of the loneliness which transforms this island, as Miguel de Unamuno said, into the skeleton of an island. We are in the Jandía massif, we have left behind us the house which they say that a German engineer, Doctor Winter, used during the Second World War to provide fuel to the German submarines that passed by the Islands; we have seen and thought about this mystery which is one of the legends of the Islands; we have marvelled at the fish soup; we have been about to die leaping into the sand of a secret beach: but even so, none of us is prepared for the impression which strikes us as we round this curve in Cofete, harried by an endless wind. What you see is a virgin extent of nine miles of beach up against a massif which looks like God’s own open hand throwing its shadow down on the earth, aided by some greyish clouds which make the ground on which we tread seem even more ghostly and hallucinatory.
At the end of this smooth greyness are enormous lonely beaches, and a ghostly cemetery, like the memory of a mysterious cemetery where the dead are eternally doing penance for the sin of having been buried where there is nobody, not even God.
COFETE STOPPED BEING A TOWN IN 1960 AND THE LAST BURIAL IN THE cemetery was in 1953. It is strange to see here, amid all these succulent beaches, which call out to people to indulge in the pleasure of bathing or losing themselves, the presence of a truly marine cemetery; it is a construction which is now truly a part of the sand, which gives it a particularly symbolic appearance, as though the sand were going to cover it fully one day, and indeed is now covering it fully, in the face of the air’s indifference: the air here is like time and patience itself, a constant steady breeze which seems, like the lost souls buried here, to be a part of eternity.
Time is the inheritor of this cemetery, and the air here is the earth which hides the cemetery as it marks time. Here I felt once again the sensation of being inside a film, hearing once again the music of Paris, Texas. I saw abandoned palm trees, sometimes standing in little clumps, completely dry; I have seen volcanic landscapes intermingled with fields of palm trees elsewhere on this island, which on clean sunny days give the impression that we are between the desert and paradise. And if this is paradise, then paradise must be a lonely place.
THEN WE RETRACED OUR FOOTSTEPS; IN TEFIA WE SAW THE MONUMENT to Miguel de Unamuno. Upright, alone, the philosopher who stood up to Franco, to Millán Astray and to the fascist battle-cry of ‘Viva la muerte!’ during the first years of the Civil War, was here, resistant as a palm tree. Unamuno has transformed himself into a kind of lay patron saint of Fuerteventura; his verses are recited as though they had been written by a native of the island, a majorero, and we ate gooseneck barnacles here, the food which he helped to discover as though he were its creator, inventing food in order to make people’s life on the coast happier, at least on the coast of Gran Tarajal, which was where I ate them for the first time in my life, almost half a century ago.
The other symbol of the island is more purely of the island: it is a mountain, Mount Tindaya. I went to see it once again; years before I had been to it to describe it for a newspaper article; now I approach it as though I were carrying out some kind of religious pilgrimage, in order to see what I can hear, if I can hear something at the foot of the mountain.
Tindaya is a perfect relic, a construct which nature has transformed into a kind of caress of the land, undulating, a wave of land balanced above the wasteland. The primitive inhabitants of the Islands transformed it into an object of veneration, and although people later made use of its stones (trachyte, valuable as a building material) and damaged it, the people who lived there realised just how valuable the mountain was only when a Basque artist, Eduardo Chillida, wanted to transform it into a temple of light, the house of the sun.
It is strange to think of it now, that three Basques should be so connected to the mythology of the Islands: Chillida, the sculptor; Unamuno, the philosopher; Aldecoa, the writer. One of them from San Sebastián, one from Bilbao, and the last from Vitoria. The Islands are a magnet, but the magnet only works when there is a poetic gift that can recognise its qualities.
Well, there is that.
As the result of a coincidence which I have mentioned elsewhere, I had something to do with the dream of this Basque sculptor.
Chillida, who died in 2000, after suffering from depression and Alzheimer’s disease, said in around 1990 that he had a dream, and spoke about it to the press. In his dream he had found a mountain that he could hollow out, in order to make it into a receptacle of light, the light of the sun, the light of the moon, a receptacle for light in general; in his dream the mountain turned into a kind of temple in which the light of two particular heavenly moments would be gathered: the light of the full moon and the light of the sun at its peak. An architect from Gran Canaria, José Miguel Fernández-Aceytuno, and his partner, the writer Yovanka Vaccari, knew that I was in semi-regular contact with Chillida, for professional reasons, and asked me to share with him an idea which they thought fitted perfectly with his dream: to consider the mountain at Tindaya. They had made a sketch of their dream and its consequences, the top of the mountain transformed into a site such as Chillida had spoken of, and they handed it to me on a vast roll of paper. They had made their drawing following a commission from the government of the Canary Islands, which wanted to protect the mythical mountain. ‘Culture and art against mining’, was what Yovanka said to me. The dream was passed into the hands of Chillida, who wanted to hollow out a mountain.
CHILLIDA WAS A SCULPTOR AND A POET. HE HAD PLAYED SOCCER, BEEN A goalkeeper, and that, he said, gave him an exact idea of spaces: the ball fits into your hand, and the space that one’s open fingers can contain is the perfect space. He told me this as we strolled on the beautiful paths near La Concha, below his studio in San Sebastián, surrounded by playing children, perhaps just as he had done at the same age, leaping around among the adults on this peaceful path. Some of Chillida’s best drawings are studies of hands, open hands, fists, closed hands, expectant hands, hands asking for help, hands offering it, hands held up to prevent another’s approach, hands which fly, empty hands.
Chillida was a dreamer and an ingenuous man, and strong until Alzheimer’s took hold of him. But back then he was in great shape, and received the stimulus of Tindaya with great excitement. Yes, the mountain on Fuerteventura, which was both a closed hand and a myth, a kind of recreation of the dark myth of the cave, was the perfect spot; this was where he should hollow the world out to make his secular temple to light.
And here my work as a messenger ended: I left the plans for the Tindaya mountain with him and went away, my mission accomplished. Then the technicians were called in; Chillida worked with an engineer, whom he called the ‘engineer of shadows’, José Antonio Fernández Ordóñez, who worked out the ways in which the mountain could be hollowed out without affecting its shape, the ways in which Chillida’s dream could be carried out without breaking the mountain.
But the ecologists of the island did not think the same way, and little by little, between their opposition and the slow political management of Chillida’s idea, the project started to fade away in a haze of ecological accusations and indications of political scheming to get hold of the valuable trachyte in the mountain. Chillida was obsessed with light: it was not at all odd that he should have found a mountain like this, on an island where the highest value is placed on light. It was a symbol of all he aimed for as an artist: capturing light.
When I took him Aceytuno and Vaccari’s proposal, it was round about 1995; I heard Chillida talking to Fernández Ordóñez, the engineer, about his obsession, his obsession with light. The engineer reminded the sculptor how he always managed to interpolate lightness into weight; the Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, whose poetry added so much to Chillida’s concepts of space and light, said that lightness is what weighs the most. And then both of them, the engineer and the sculptor, started to talk about concrete as though it were a material from a dream. And Chillida put his hands together as though he were crumbling concrete into crumbs. Or as if he were turning it into an accordion which he used to accompany the powerful silence of his hands …
This was the same way he put his hands together when he found out that Tindaya existed and that it was on offer for him to fulfil his dream. In this session with the engineer, he said: ‘We see nothing without the light. I am working on the Tindaya mountain in order to be closer to the light.’ Light is what it is, Chillida said: ‘It is everywhere; in alabaster, in marble. It is here, in this paper.’ He went to the mountain. He visited it to see what it was like. He returned absolutely fascinated with the island and the mountain. He worked obsessively on the project; it was his last great work; for him it was alive in the moment. But Chillida died a few years later; when his project started to be picked apart he began to feel a huge sense of melancholy, as though the light had been covered, as though his dream had been killed. He wanted Tindaya to be a part of the mythology of the future, and also to respect the mythology of the past, without harming the legend of the mountain, and preserve it forever by stopping people from speculating with the value of the material which made up the mountain; he wanted to create a space ‘in a mountain set aside for people of all races and colours, a great sculpture for tolerance’.
TINDAYA IS THERE NOW, I SEE IT THIS AFTERNOON IN THE MIDST OF A grey cloud; it is dull brown, like the skin of a donkey, and its base seems lightly chewed. Nearby there are adverts for petanque competitions and rock concerts; there is an old, silent house, an adobe and stone construction next to this silent mountain which Chillida wanted to turn into the house of the light, and I look at it all, trying to remember the expression on the sculptor’s face when he got this strange commission to fulfil his dream.
I carried on walking, surrounded by these bare mountains, by cultivated terraces, by lonely palm trees which live by spreading their shade over time itself, and I felt that Fuerteventura was some kind of musical rhythm, was architectonic, that there was an odd harmony to the island. On that occasion when I heard Chillida speaking with Fernández Ordóñez about air and light, he said the following: ‘When I walked into the cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria, I felt I was walking into the lungs of Johann Sebastian Bach.’ Well, when you arrive on Fuerteventura, whether by air or by sea, it is as though you are entering a score written by Albinoni or Vivaldi, with all the force of their melancholy, or even a work by Vangelis or Theodorakis, and here is the proof that all forms of art and music can coexist. And you always feel as though you are hearing the chords on the soundtrack of Paris, Texas, the melancholy of the desert following the route of an island that seems to have sunk into sand.
But if you walk through the mountains, at some point, inevitably, you will see a sign advertising a McDonald’s.
There are places where meeting these perverse signs of the future (trash food, trash traffic, trash tourism) is impossible: I recommend travelling by a route that avoids them. If you go from Morro Jable, which is where all the ‘Mc’s have their headquarters, across to Puerto del Rosario, or Corralejo, or Pájara, then take the road that is marked ‘To La Pared’, because it will take you to a little village called La Pared. Lanzarote stands out from the other islands by having whitewashed its villages—an initiative of the incomparable César Manrique—and a number of the villages on Fuerteventura have followed its lead, and here is where you will see a number of them, La Pared among them. But the important thing here is to look at the perfect symphony of mountains succeeding one another, brown and red, always smooth, sometimes appearing to have almost human, feminine shapes; in order to see them properly, you need to link two of your senses, touch and sight, and the combination of the two is the true pleasure to be found in looking at Fuerteventura.
FUERTEVENTURA IS NOT A FLAT ISLAND, ALTHOUGH IT HAS A GREAT DEAL of flatness to it, and a single man up in its mountains can dream, both accompanied and awed by the calm there, a calm that carries you to Betancuria, which is like Tindaya but with its own history.
Before reaching Betancuria I climbed up to a spectacular viewpoint that allows the visitor to look out onto a boundless loneliness, a solitude that is complete, generous or pitiless depending on your state of mind. The palm trees that I saw from there reminded me of palm tree in the Gran Rey valley on La Gomera, which filled me with a kind of melancholy, because landscapes covered with palm trees have the air of being unattainable and tiring and always fill you with other memories of other places.
There are thistles here, tomatoes, cactus pears; a cross made from thistles remembers someone who died in a car accident … It is common in these areas, especially in the rural parts of the world, for families to make these memorial crosses out of the widest variety of materials, and this gives the sides of the road a ghostly atmosphere of memory and sadness. And the Islands in themselves are melancholy; the series of crosses turns them into a physical geography in which the sorrow of bereavement becomes a persistent shadow, impossible to forget.
This is how the landscape is, halfway between deserted and subtle, until you reach Vega de Rio Palmas, where the vegetation has all gathered as though expecting a visit.
And here is Betancuria, with its history and air and mountains, and the sound of a goat bleating that is just the same as the sound I once heard on La Gomera.
BETANCURIA WAS THE ADMINISTRATIVE AND RELIGIOUS CENTRE OF Fuerteventura until the seventeenth century. But now it is nothing more than the shadow of its former glory. Its population hovers around five hundred people, and it depends entirely on tourism, on people who come through looking for a souvenir of the island’s past. It is the only tourist site on the Canary Islands which has saved itself from the cement that has buried the sea-views all along the coast on almost all the islands.
Betancuria is the majesty of silence. This is silence that has been present for centuries, and which still falls over Betancuria with the moral force of a mystery. But today we are greeted by a flock of crows who are waiting tirelessly for the baby goats to die, those little animals who are grazing here with the playful passion which distinguishes these sun-loving animals. A man told us that Betancuria is like ‘a village that has been beneath the sea. But without drowning.’ And the same man also told me about how time passes here: ‘It is as though time had stopped and we were clinging on to the hands of the clock.’ Betancuria is a stopped clock.
It is in the very centre of the island, hanging up there, looking down; it was the religious and administrative capital of the island. In the fifteenth century it fell into the hands of the French coloniser Jean de Béthencourt, which is why it is called as it is; successive dominations have not managed to delete this first impression, of which all that remains is the skeleton of a convent.
But now Betancuria is no more than the shadow of its former self, of which it retains this convent and some other ecclesiastical relics, and the silence which will surely never leave it. The population, as we have said, is around five hundred people, and the silent, dry streets are filled with absences, except when tourists to Fuerteventura come in search of a souvenir of the earliest history of the island. And there are not so many souvenirs to take away.
From above, this closed valley is clearly visible as the strategic site which Béthencourt chose to protect his conquest, and you walk across the plain as though treading on history. You hear your footsteps on the stones, and you feel, when someone asks you a question, that the intimate, almost wild, sometimes savagely timid, character of the Canary Islanders turns these questions into what amounts to an examination of intimacy, a knife into the silence. It is better not to ask questions, to walk by without asking questions, not to scratch the silence with our impertinence, to walk by without anyone seeing you.
Canary Islanders don’t like people asking them questions; the Canary Islander is definitely someone who wants to be intimate, but whose shyness is the defence of a form of separation, the Islander feels better alone, in his corner, looking at the floor, speaking with an inner mirror that will never let him down or abandon him; the Canary Islander is like one of Juan Rulfo’s Mexican characters, like Juan Rulfo himself, in silence, hidden under the shade of his hat. This is something I saw in Betancuria above all.
Pérez Minik says, in his speech on the human condition of the Islanders, something sensible about our willingness to speak to foreigners and strangers and also about our willingness to remain in obstinate silence, the consequence of our refusal to make a free gift of our intimacy. He says, as he writes a kind of history of the (difficult) construction of our national character: ‘The geographical conditions of our Islands made this kind of stagnation possible, made our calm possible, made the Garden of the Hesperides possible, the inheritance of our idyllic Guanche ancestors. If the Spanish had not arrived, then this state of affairs could have been prolonged infinitely and placidly.’ This could not have been the case (luckily, I add now), because ‘in order to protect themselves from these immense dangers to their physical and mental health, the Islanders had no other option than to exile themselves deliberately from their homeland and then return with the treasures they had gathered from their long journeys all over the world, or else to stay permanently in their paradise, calling upon the foreigner to come to visit them, and the more foreign the visitor the better, either to live together in friendship or else to keep a fertile debate in play, formed of hints and suspicions.’
Pérez Minik was a cosmopolitan, and the inheritor of a cosmopolitan tradition; his spiritual nourishment, in these islands sunk in their post-war isolation, was foreign radio (from Paris and London), foreign newspapers (Le Monde, above all), and his daily walks, which he made until he was an old man, out onto the pier at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, whose large and small boats he knew by heart. From his attitude there arose his belief that the Islander, in general, relies on the arrival and departure of foreigners to the Islands, and from this fact arises his conviction, his cosmopolitan affirmation which fits alongside the spirit of the Canary Islanders, especially the inhabitants of the larger islands, the ones where the large capital cities are to be found, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
But the Islands are now calm; they are not sought after; as Pérez Minik says, the descendants of the former pirates now come here only as tourists. ‘We must state,’ Pérez Minik says, and I cannot be sure that he speaks without nostalgia, ‘that in these days it is now difficult for other populations to come to the islands with a view to conquest, given the current economic climate, and we have no other recourse than to wait for the arrival of foreigners.’
The foreigners for whom we are waiting represent ‘for our time, to the child of the archipelago who is trapped here definitively, the same as the Chinese did in later Japanese civilisation, or the Saxons in the development of Great Britain, or the Spanish in the conversion of the Islands themselves.’
BETANCURIA REPRESENTS DISTANCE ITSELF, A POINT THAT ONE REACHES only in order to travel through it; its situation as a space lusted after by the greed of the conquistadors is long behind it. Foreigners come and go, but they never stay; there is a provisional degree of noise and hubbub stirred up by them, just as there is for example in Taganana on Tenerife, but then silence once again fills the air …
The town of Betancuria, where we pause to eat a bit of cheese and drink something, lives off the visits of tourists; this, along with a little livestock farming, with whatever agriculture remains, is what provides the locals with any hope of survival. The survival of Betancuria depends on whether or not the tourists come to walk its streets, to see its monuments, to try to find among its stones something that even they cannot identify. But if the tourists don’t come, then nothing at all will happen: there is no custom of asking for help on the Islands. If there’s cheese, and gofio, and papas, which taste so good here, then we can all struggle on, as the old men said to me as they waited at the house where the post was delivered: a few letters that are then shared out among the houses …
A GIRL, VANESA, TOLD ME THAT BETANCURIA WOULD ONE DAY BECOME a ghost town. ‘Because not even old people will be here.’ I’d heard this before. I heard it as soon as I arrived, when I came into Betancuria accompanied by the chattering of birds. It was a young man who works as a lifeguard in Pájara who said as much, José Hernández, the son of the local magistrate: ‘And what if I get married, what then? I don’t know, but it would be difficult to live in Betancuria.’
It would be difficult, but for the time being it is a pleasure. The houses are as old as the world, and one day they will collapse and there will be not a single trace that remains of Betancuria. A young student said so, pointing to one house in particular: ‘Now it’s nothing, but it will be a ruin soon as well.’ There is something akin to an air of collapse in the midst of a music which the palm trees turn into the healthy monotony of a village asleep in their murmur.
At the top of Betancuria, where the crows were, the local magistrate José was coming to look at his flock. He said, with a laugh, that ‘animals are better than people’; some you care for, some you judge. He has five hundred goats and their kids, and a few sad donkeys, grey and melancholy, as well as a camel which twists around nervously or flirtatiously, and it was as if we were in the midst of a fog that separated Betancuria from the rest of the world. Across from where we were looking at his collection of fauna, José pointed out the clarity of the air: ‘there’s not a single cloud in the sky,’ he said, and it was true, and this clarity made the presence of the waiting birds even more ominous.
The magistrate’s farm smells of cheese; we came into his yard and the noise of our feet on the gravel was for a time the only sound that had been heard in Betancuria for centuries. The donkeys looked at us with their inexpressive yet mysterious eyes, and we stroked the head of a kid as though we were greeting the whole of the traditional livestock of the Islands.
THE CAMELS—THOSE MYSTERIOUS ANIMALS WHICH AT SOME POINT WERE the standard means of transport for the whole of Fuerteventura—walk in a way that makes one unsure whether they are uncomfortable or flirtatious; one thing that is for sure is that they do not look out at us with the same nobility as the donkeys do, or even the horses, and I walk alongside them as though in their troubled gaze there were some kind of threat that is intensified by their large yellow teeth, the cruel zip of their mouth. José showed me a machine which allows goats to be milked automatically, while they listen to music; they relax and their milk is better, and there is more of it. So music can calm goats as well.
There was a sensation which I felt in Betancuria that one can feel in a number of villages that are high up in the hills, next to the clouds or next to silence: it is as though time has stopped; it is a feeling I have experienced in Arona on Tenerife; I have felt it in Teguise on Lanzarote, in Arucas on Gran Canaria; I have felt it in Valverde on El Hierro, and more than anything else I have felt it on La Gomera, in places like Chipude or Agulo, and one feels it strongly here as well, in Betancuria, as though Béthencourt the French adventurer were a contemporary of Franco. A young student of history told me that here this sense seems to be concentrated on the past, as though the goons and chieftains of the Franco period were still in charge, and that this is probably an illusion (or delusion), but the truth is that sometimes in Betancuria one has the impression that time has stopped and that you are travelling backwards, to meet with a universe that no longer exists in any other place, or even in reality. But the historian, who is from here, loves to return: it is, he says ‘my place, my life, a paradise’.
José Luis took me to look at the monuments that were still around, the relics of this history which we still appeared to be living through. Some of the houses were ruined, some of them were closed and ransacked. But they still have—according to Doña Milagros, who has always lived here—the devil’s tail! She says that according to the legend the hermitage at San Diego was built with stones carried by the devil as a penance, and when the task was done, he left behind the rope which they used to tie him up and his tail as well.
There is a sensation in Betancuria that time has stopped still. And there, lying on the white sofa at the entrance to his house, is one of Vicentito’s crutches; Vicentito, whom everyone refers to as the ancient eyes of the village. He is more than eighty years old, friendly and uninhibited in his speech; one of his nephews, Paco, tells us that we’re going to need several of the notebooks we have with us to record everything he’s going to say. Vicentito is out at the moment, making his regular round of the neighbouring villages with the postman, whose name is Bernardo; when they get back they sit down to have breakfast together like comrades who share confidences at the same time as food. Their meeting has something about it of the atmosphere which Gabriel García Márquez found in the smaller villages of Colombia, and above all it contains elements of the attitude towards his correspondence of the colonel that nobody writes to. ‘And what are we going to eat tomorrow?’ ‘Tomorrow, we eat shit.’ The postman tells us that every day he delivers about one hundred and ninety letters, adverts, bank statements … There are only five or six families that still exchange letters, with Cuba, with Venezuela … The world does move, but it is as though it moved backwards in Betancuria.
VICENTE, WHICH IS A NAME IT FEELS ODD TO USE, RATHER THAN WHAT everyone else in the village calls him, Vicentito, says with a laugh that he is the head of the village. To him Betancuria has always looked as it does now, and he imagines it will carry on looking the same for ever. There is an air here, an air of resignation and of the past, as though time might crack if you tried to force it in either direction. Talking to the postman, Vicentito says that one of the signs that the village has not changed is that you still do not need to lock your door when you leave the house. This happens in some villages, but does not happen everywhere, and given that they lack other sources of pride, this is one of the sources of pride for the inhabitants of Betancuria. ‘There will only be old people here one day,’ Vicentito says with a laugh, ‘and why would you want to rob old people? Old people don’t have anything.’ The young people left, and he left too, to go to the war with Franco’s army; here he is, in a photograph: there they are, with the mayoress, who was his wife, standing next to the Generalissimo. He was a builder, but the best building here is the village itself, he says. ‘People think that Betancuria has always been here, that it’s old, the oldest village on Fuerteventura, but I remember the days back before there was electric light.’
Marta, a Colombian, walks over the stone pavements of Betancuria; she passes this way every day to get to the restaurant where she works, walking past the impressive church, the cathedral which looms over the village with a majesty that contains within it centuries of silence. Betancuria reminds her of the villages near Tolima in Colombia: the sense of peace, the little houses …
And it is as though we had moved into another world. ‘It is as if time had stopped,’ José Luis says, and as though we were hanging onto the hands of the clock. Something traps you and you want to come back. Here everything is different: time, personal relations, life. This is what I have to explain to my brother when he comes to visit. He comes from New York, from the world of new technologies, and probably doesn’t really remember how things are here. It’s as though we were a village at the bottom of the sea, but without drowning. It’s the opposite of Tibet, which is so high up and where it’s impossible to come down … We’re at the bottom, and how do we go up?
A stationary paradise.