UNAMUNO SAID, JOSÉ LUIS REMINDS US, THAT BETANCURIA WAS LIKE A whitewashed tomb. In the silence which reigns over it one can hear the strange sound of quiet places. The people who think that Betancuria is a paradise would miss there being a sound that connected it to the world. Some people believe that this would have been the work of César Manrique, the artist who saved Lanzarote.
But time caught up with César Manrique, a contemporary myth, in September of 1992, when a car took his life just as he was driving round a curve in his own car, next to the space where he collected all his invention and all his art, in Tahiche, Lanzarote.
And here we leave Betancuria, alone, in the majesty of its silence. A village that is an island hanging from the roof of the world, in a time that is defiant and placid as the donkeys who live there, as calm as the palm trees and the goats.
Let us leave Betancuria and think about César, a spectacular man, an artist who took an island and remodelled it until it was no longer an island but also the image of its recreator. César was an island.
Allow me to introduce him.
He was a visionary. Imagine him at dawn one day: almost seventy years old, in 1992, living in a landscape which he seemed to have invented. At this uncertain hour of the day, when the cool of the night has not yet passed to the warm air of salt and lava of Lanzarote, this man, with his clenched mouth and large eyes, the most active animal on the island, was already stretching on the cool stones in front of his house. This house, the one where he is at the moment, is his house in Haría, in the cloudy north of the island; he has gone there, after searching over the whole island, because this house gives him the melancholy and the loneliness which he now cannot find in Tahiche, where he built his first melancholy house among the volcanoes, the one that appears in every catalogue drawn up of wild and strange dwelling-places. Tahiche was a village, and still is; he discovered the open mouths of an extinct volcano, and thought that this was his territory, a space that had been invented for him. Under the earth, in the suffocating heat of a ground that was fire itself. And here he built his house, the joy of generations of artists whom he invited to come to visit him, as though he had managed to enclose the dream of an island underground. One day, when he was almost seventy, he abandoned this luminous and buried house and went to live in a larger place, much darker, where he could hunt for the comfort of his last years; this retirement from the world reminds me of Picasso’s in his old age. There was something about this journey to the north, towards Haría, which was like César’s farewell. But he did not close Tahiche, of course not, this volcanic site was like the root of his life.
And there, in Tahiche, his foundation has been set up; we can say that he is not truly dead; we can follow his itinerary and say that this is his foundation, and that he comes here every day, early, as though the sun rose with him.
IT IS EARLY, THEN, WHEN CÉSAR GETS UP AND WANDERS THE ISLAND, AS though he himself were waking it up. He wants to establish, at this time when the light is still uncertain, a relationship of gratitude between the earth and the day; it is his way of praying: getting up early. And his relationship with life is one of gratitude. Everything is ordered in his house, and he leaves the house as though he had fulfilled a pact that he had agreed with sleep: to sleep in order to live. He would prefer to be always awake, his huge eye fixed on life as night fell, and he prepared to hang himself from sleep just as birds hang themselves from threads of light. To play a little, he opens the lid of the piano and sounds out a few arpeggios; to play a little, because the piano is not for him, a friend has come, or will come, who needs the piano to express himself or to brighten up the slow afternoons in Haría; but César just likes putting his hands on the piano, making music, picking out a few notes so that Corcho, his dog, a beautiful Labrador, thinks that his master is talking to ghosts.
And so César gets out of bed and leaves the house’s large bedrooms, says a joyous hello to Corcho, his friendly and well-mannered dog, who sees him at a distance with the grandiose indifference which is the property of all melancholic dogs, and Corcho gets up slowly to come and meet his master, walking over the gravel that separates the house from his kennel. César gives him a kiss and laughs, that’s my dog, that’s my Corcho, and Corcho is grateful for the hug with which César celebrates all the life that surrounds him; the dog licks his cheeks, runs around him, returns the caresses that his master gives; in the midst of this recent dawn silence, the man and the dog look as though they are trying out dance steps, happy but also lazy … César is a happy man who does his morning exercises.
He has found nopales, cacti, in the luminous kitchen, as well as milk and cold water; he peeled the nopales the evening before; they are always there, like a greeting that he himself has prepared for himself, a breakfast with life to it; he is vitality and lightness itself, he is ready for the joys that the day will bring, and he eats and drinks as though this were the first time in his life he had eaten or drunk, because life begins anew every day, he says, and one needs to celebrate the fact that everything is always starting again. And so he starts his life, then returns to the piano—if only I knew how to play, he says—then touches the book he is reading, as though objects had a life of their own that they will live while he’s out of the house, when he’s in Tahiche, the house which is like a root to him. I found this book there, a book of poems, after César’s death; the book was open at a particular page, I picked it up and then put it back down again, as though César were going to come back to touch the silent keys of that piano.
BUT LET US GO BACK TO THAT DAY, WHEN THE ARTIST IS GETTING READY to live through all the hopes and dreams of this particular day in September, a day, as his Peruvian namesake César Vallejo said, that one remembers before it starts … The car is outside, he looks out at the spectacular hillsides of Haría and listens to the cocks crowing, but above all, from the hollow where his house is set, he appreciates the persistent breeze which makes the few remaining hairs on his shiny head wave a little; his head is a noble sphere which he strokes as though he wanted to stroke his entire personality as well, the site of his thoughts and dreams, the violent conjunction of harmony and revolution which gives life to his solitude and his nights, his parties and his melancholia. His heart is everywhere, and at the moment he feels his heart in his head.
When he starts the car and feels the strength of the engine under his feet, the Jaguar in which he is about to cross the island as he does every day, the image of the Universal Expo in Seville comes suddenly into his mind, a spot where they have an exhibition of his work—we are now in 1992—but why should he travel to see it, I imagine him thinking, for the first time affected by the melancholy that accompanies travelling or any kind of effort: why travel so much, why do so much, why not stay here, in this little spot filled with silence and calm, why not just be Corcho for a while, or even for ever; the dog looks at him. He has made his Haría house for this purpose, so that the warrior of the island can rest, like Picasso looking for an escape from his melancholy in Vauvenargues.
There are other images that pass through his mind, among them one in particular, the image of his house in Tahiche, where he started to calm the volatility of his genius, where he became a real artist. Tahiche, thousands of square metres laid out under the lava, a fig tree in the middle of it all, reds and blacks, a swimming pool among all the lava, a skylight to make the light that picks out the bedrooms more natural, his huge dark bedroom, black sheets, the pleasure of touching life itself; he needed the darkness of love, a degree of melancholy, bodies walking naked through the white rooms, figs in the kitchen, a hint of music coming from the dark rooms. But one has to carry on, and one has to travel between Haría and Tahiche, to look through papers to find old memories which give some sort of meaning to what he is planning …
He cannot go and leave this island without his voice speaking up against those who would destroy the work which he has spent so much time patiently building up, to turn the whole island of Lanzarote into a marvel of red, white and black; he has to stay here; he is a witness and his words are whips that warn people about what could happen to this landscape if it were left alone, if there were no one to defend it. He is the shield of the island. He invented it, if one can put it like that; he invented Lanzarote, because it used to be nothing more than a piece of land and now it is the right eye of the archipelago, a place which attracts speculators from all over the world, people who come to speculate with this beauty that is rigorous, and clear and extraordinary, in which the air twists and turns, perhaps ecstatic at its own eternal perfection. He looks up at the sky, it is always cooler in Haría, and there are clouds now, the clouds of autumn, dawn has broken already …
Every time he recalls the previous poverty of the island, poor at a time when everyone was poor and all the islands were humble, César imagines himself sitting down with Pepín Ramírez who at that time, back in the 1970s, was the President of the Lanzarote local government, both of them sitting on the edge of a cave which back then was nothing, a hole in the ground, just another hole in the volcanic soil of Lanzarote, a passageway left there by the fire. César was a young abstract artist who had just come back from his adventures in New York, and also from a personal tragedy, because his wife had just died. Pepín and César were friends and each of them listened to the fantasies of the other, and César had just come back from a long journey and must have had at least something to say.
César was having one of his most exuberant days that day, for him the world seemed to be filled with marvels, and Lanzarote was one of them. What, this poor island? This poor island is one of the wonders of the world, César said. Now as he starts up his heavy car in order to drive through the Cactus Garden, a kind of living symbol of the dryness of the island, César remembers the foundational moment for what one might call César’s Lanzarote.
He was not an architect; he wasn’t even a landscape artist; he was an artist plain and simple, a vitalist who had experienced in New York the vision which sometimes dominates the dreams of every immigrant: to return to his native land in order to make it into a work of art, in order to turn it into the greatest place in the world. And this was what César said to Pepín.
‘Pepín, we’re not going to be wretched our whole lives.’
‘…’
‘We are going to start making Lanzarote the most beautiful island in the world. Will you help me?’
PEPÍN WOULD DO WHATEVER CÉSAR SAID HE SHOULD DO, AND WHAT César offered him was a fantasia on the Lanzarote which he could now see from the car which drove him slowly, heavily, down the road; the car in which he travelled with a certain degree of internal joy, as though he were travelling across a work of art which had no frame and which was not a sculpture, and didn’t even fit in the memory of any single man: the island of Lanzarote. The mountain over there is luminous; Lanzarote is always like that, like a shadow that had been born from the earth in order to head up to the sun or to the infinite, although the old clouds of night grow complex over the shadows of the palm trees in the headstrong presence of the glowing embers of the salt water. The artist who made the island looks down at all the efforts the local inhabitants made in order to help him to create the genial harmony which is what now makes this island, this island which used to be, when he and Pepín agreed to refound it, nothing more than a wasteland which evoked the word ‘misery’ as though it were a wretched glove laid over the real island.
First of all came this cave, the Jameos del Agua, and then the Cueva de los Verdes, a kind of spectacular natural prospecting of the lava underneath the earth, and then came the mysterious, overwhelming path of Timanfaya, the black and red park caused by the eruptions in the middle of the island, which created a new landscape, a future which seemed like the future of poverty and which is now a landscape of an almost airy, musical beauty. And then there come back to the memory of the artist as he retraces the origins of his version of the island other facts which turned Lanzarote into his pride and his greatest memory, and just at the moment when his tired eyes look at the island’s nascent sea, his memory returns to the Mirador del Río, across the strait from the island of La Graciosa, where he imagined the Basque writer Ignacio Aldecoa in his fight for life, the life of this novelist who reinvented the lonely island, a kind of fist made of sand in which César also saw a reproduction of the perfect islands, and in the Mirador del Río César offered an explanation of the reasons why he carried on covering the island with new attractions; we need people to come to visit, because the Islands are not trying to become virgin territory, but we don’t want there to be too many people coming; this is a delicate island, it can’t get filled with cars, with people and hamburger joints; what we have to do is create the need here for people to come and travel through the landscape.
But now, as he travels through the landscape, it is 1992, and the island is overflowing, with cars, with people, with smoke, with freeways. This makes him feel both angry and exhausted; he wants to fight against it, and so he has created the Fundación César Manrique, which is where he is headed today, where he goes every day, even though today is Friday and why not stay at home in Haría painting in this house which he has set up for his last years. But he has never been able to stay still, never, not since he was a child, when his parents took him to the vast and stimulating beach at Famara, facing La Graciosa, underneath the Mirador del Río. This was his sea, these were his rocks, a beach filled with wind and with salt, there, in the restaurant which looks out onto a boat that sank so many years ago that it now resembles a sculpture made by time and rust … this was the beach were César ran ‘like a mad goat’: he was Lanzarote, but Lanzarote, more than anything, was this young beach where he had run as a child.
And this is the Fundación César Manrique, in Tahiche; this is his day-house, if one can put it like that; it was here that the light was born which César wanted to gift to himself; like Chillida before Chillida invented the mountain of light, César made the light of Lanzarote out of lava, out of the heart of lava. This is the result of his quest, his pride: his former house, the house of a madman who felt the enlightenment of colours, the summary of his work of love and friendship; Lanzarote is his space, and the house was his refuge, and now he seeks refuge in Haría, with Corcho and the piano, and the fig trees. Here in Tahiche are his paintings, his projects which he has created in almost all the islands, the collections of other people’s work which he has put together and which are now the kernel of an extraordinary collection of abstract art, made at the movement’s moment of greatest euphoria in the 1960s and 1970s.
Here it is, and here he comes, to see what it contains, to walk from one side of the old house to the other, the old house which is no longer his house but rather his memory; he travels its labyrinths again, he looks at the poem which his old friend Rafael Alberti dedicated to him, and he sits in the shadow of the fig tree which was the symbol of this house and the symbol of the whole of Lanzarote itself. The ancient sound of the lava is over his head, and in this solitude, so far from the noise that one would tend to associate with such an active man, the soul of his best memories and his chief melancholy flies overhead: his melancholy is that life should not be eternal, that he is not able to be alive forever, to gift life forever. This morning he designs new places—in Puerto de la Cruz, in Tenerife, in El Hierro, in La Gomera; in El Puerto he has successfully created a new coast, as though he were capable of defying the sea, which beats on the coast here like the hand of God—he receives commissions to transform them into more beautiful corners of the world, just as he transformed Lanzarote. But it is late now; by the end of the morning of 25 September 1992 he had given everything he could give that day, and it was time for him to return home, to the piano and Corcho’s willing and puzzled back. Before he goes, he speaks to Pepe Juan’s son, his godson, the grandson of Pepín:
‘I’ll bring you the picture of the camel this afternoon.’
And so here is César, this vital man, filled with enthusiasm, stepping once again into his car, where music and solitude are like an air of the earth, pressing the ignition button, driving to the no-man’s-land where the freeways end and which he knows well as though he had seen them in a nightmare, but he cannot see, he cannot see as well as he used to, and his tired eyes don’t warn him about the world coming to throw itself upon him, this end that is approaching, and when he is finally finished, finished forever, then a blanket of grief and confusion falls over the island, César is dead, the accident was terrible, no one can believe it, there, just next to the Fundación, where he always told people to drive carefully, another car killed him, he didn’t realise it was coming, his eyes, his eyes aren’t as good as they once were … He died on that day, on 25 September 1992, a day I always remember …
In Lanzarote, César, the visionary, was everything. Just now, while I was in Fuerteventura, a rapid memory of salt and earth brought that day in September 1992 back to my mind, as though it were only yesterday. He was everything for Lanzarote. César was everything, a lighthouse, a beacon for the Islands.
LANZAROTE IS A PERFECT METAPHOR FOR A STRANDED ISLAND, SURROUNDED by the cleanest of possible atmospheres, looked at by a calm sky like blue lead. It holds in its bosom a perfect combination of every single natural element, which sometimes coexist in a single space, just like the water which the lava ploughs through in Los Jameos, or the power of the earth, harmonious and surprising, in the Montaña del Fuego, or Timanfaya. I remember one day there, with Günter Grass, the German Nobel Prizewinner: in the face of these sand-built rocks, the writer (and painter) asked us to stop the bus, got out, took out his pencils and started to draw the plastic result of the lava’s actions like someone doing a court-side sketch of the beginning of the world. And here his friend, José Saramago, would walk as if flying, and the air was sketched out by the ancestral whistling of mysterious birds; the air is like the most transparent place on earth, and here it is in all its fullness. Here is the air that Saramago thought they would never be able to take away from him, not even after his death. And this is the air they have in Femés, a village up in the mountains, where the writer Rafael Arozarena found the materials he needed for the earthly inspiration of his poetic novel Mararía, which was born from a dream, perhaps from the survival instinct of Lanzarote itself. Carlos Fuentes came here to see if it was true, what Breton said of Tenerife: Lanzarote is also a surrealist island. And when Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover was published in Spanish, she came to see Saramago so that he could show her the mysterious sound of the Timanfaya volcano.
Lanzarote is the remains of a volcano. Between 1730 and 1736 it underwent the largest eruption in its history; the lava flowed down and buried several villages in what is now the Timanfaya National Park. Thirty-five craters exploded and their rain of fire and lava buried a third of the island’s surface: the most fertile third. In one of the holes which had sunk into the lava, César Manrique would one day build his house. And here, in the middle of this wasteland which the lava had left behind, I have seen Susan Sontag fascinated because the heat of the earth is enough for one to fry an egg in a hole dug in the volcanic sand; a huge cauldron of boiling water was later to frighten her, as the author of The Volcano Lover saw the spectacles which the passage of this devastating sheet of fire that helped create the island again left behind it. Aldecoa left a description of it in writing: ‘Tao, dragon, Timanfaya, fire mountain. Tinecheyde, hell mountain. The massive mythology of volcanoes is something that spills over into the place names of the island. The tremble that might signify awakening sometimes runs over the island, the shiver of morning fright at the idea of the first day, the signs that the earth is about to wake up. Huge cracks open in the ground and the fire is born from them. You only need to dig down about a foot to find that the earth is burning. Pits of water boil and bubble: Satan, who has been put in charge of finding proofs for the ignorant and the faithless, keeps a close and malicious eye on them.’ The presence of the volcanoes lighting up the peaceful earth while a song, perhaps something by The Doors, plays in the background, is a majestic presence to the contemporary mind. In contrast, Aldecoa’s mind received the following message: ‘Fire mountain is beaten by the winds. Neither the winds nor the years have managed to cool the mountain down. When it rains, the mountain is veiled in water vapour.’ It is a question of temperament, Aldecoa says. The mountain’s temperament, the temperament of Timanfaya, the temperament of Lanzarote itself.
Lanzarote is an island that walks by itself; it is as though it is laughing at time itself. Conquered land, there is a monument in Teguise like a colonial Castilian castle right next to the continent of Africa. The Janubio saltworks is a ghostly site, like the remains of some sea lying on the ground, a surrealist sight which fascinated one of the greatest Canary Island writers of the twentieth century, Agustín Espinosa, the author of Lancelot. And, in the mythology of the Lanzarote landscape one also comes across La Geria, a large county completely covered in volcanic ash, planted largely with vines and figs and other fruit trees. As a place for growing food, La Geria is an outlier. As a space, as a monument or a place with a focus, it is something special. It was an archbishop’s fault: after the eruption of Timanfaya, which buried a great deal of the arable land of Lanzarote, he ordered that holes be made in the ash and lava in order to recover or uncover the land and get back to planting in it. As they did this, the farmers discovered that the volcanic rock retained the morning dew and this allowed them to develop an entirely original method of cultivating their land: which consists in carrying the quarried rock (or rofe, as they call it on Lanzarote, just as they call it zahorra on Tenerife) to the areas that have not been covered by lava, and laying it down there before planting. Semicircular structures of rock, which also protect the vines and fig trees from the wind, give a great deal of beauty to this landscape. This is where the malmsey is made which Nelson tried after his Tenerife defeat, and which Falstaff drank in Shakespeare’s play: the cosmopolitan connections of an extraordinary island.
I WAS TRAVELLING FROM BETANCURIA TO CORRALEJO, TO ILLUMINATE myself with the blinding light of the beaches that look out to Lobos, the loneliest island, and Lanzarote. From here one can see two islands successively, one is a lizard that looks a little like a smaller version of Fuerteventura, and the other one holds itself upright, black and majestic, like a sleeping volcano. I am on the beach; this is where the dunes have made themselves urban, but they still maintain their own light. When you climb up them and see the sea close up, it’s as though you have made a journey towards a pure beauty, the pure beauty of Fuerteventura’s metaphors.
As I left, on a plane once again, to travel to Tenerife, I made some notes. Fuerteventura is the image of vastness, of the sky, of the earth, of the sea. Of the air.
And this is a sensation which you perceive everywhere, especially from the Cofete viewpoint, which is where the air turns round.
Fuerteventura. Let us turn back for a moment. There are sensations in the air which I do not want to lose. A desert like the desert at the end of the world, the sensation that you are living in a novel by Unamuno or Cormac McCarthy … The index finger of the archipelago, pointing towards Africa and moving away from Gran Canaria in order to come closer to Lanzarote and the wind. Beaten by the air which seems to be made out of sand, and which is sometimes violent, like an eternal whirlpool, it is a clean island, as though a hand were stripping it clean every night in order to make it even more deserted, more uninhabited. Forced into the interior by its history, it is in
Betancuria where the island’s silence lives, and its greenery is preserved in La Oliva. Professor Brian Morris from the University of California, who studied the surrealist movement in the Islands, told me that when he reached Betancuria he felt as though he were at that moment the only inhabitant of the island; that his voice was the only echo up there. In La Oliva he felt, as I felt too, that he had reached an oasis, but that the desert was its destiny. On the coast, from Gran Tarajal to Jandía, the beaches are the permanent quintessence of this island which bids you farewell and then returns, and is never the same because the wind continually moves it.
It is as flat as Lanzarote, and its undulating movements seem to be bodies sculpted by Henry Moore. Although its agriculture has been elusive, beaten down by the sandy wind, the Islanders have sharpened their imagination and found ways to survive off their livestock and its products: cheese, meat; they also eat the fish of the sea. The cheese of Fuerteventura, just like that of La Palma, or El Hierro, or the Flor de Guía cheese from Gran Canaria … One cannot leave the Islands without a piece of this cheese and a glass of wine.
And here, I have said already, Miguel de Unamuno lived out his exile; it was from here that he set off for Paris, from the dryness of the island to the damp of the Encyclopédie; to Paris from Puerto Cabras, which was what they called Puerto del Rosario until 1957. A land of contrasts, Fuerteventura holds its whole way of looking at the world in Puerto de Rosario: here is its beaten topology, dampened by the vibrant sea, young and almost insolent. The island itself is an index finger held up to the wind.