NOW, AS I AM GOING TO WRITE ABOUT TENERIFE, WHERE I WAS BORN, there comes to my mind like an unpublished image, insistent and marvellous, something never before photographed, and never before seen. It was late afternoon in August 2009, and I was returning to the island from Madrid via the northern airport, Los Rodeos. You couldn’t see the island; you could only see the clouds: they were red, still, immense, infinite, mysterious; I saw them from the aeroplane as though it were for the first time in my life, or at least the first time I had wanted to see them. Like many people, I am scared of flying, and I have always tried to avoid sitting in a window seat as I fly. On the window side of the aeroplane your proximity to the abyss can make you behave rashly, and I had grown accustomed to taking a central or aisle seat, but I was less crowded in my part of the aeroplane this day and I plucked up the courage to take a look out into the abyss, and I saw Tenerife … Drowned, submerged, an island beneath the clouds.
It was a fascinating vision.
It was a summer evening, around nine o’clock, twenty-one minutes before the plane was to land in the middle of a particularly clouded, perhaps the most clouded, part of the island, near La Laguna, the first university city of the island, the place where I had studied, next to the Monte de las Mercedes, near Mount Esperanza, on the foothills of Mount Teide, without any doubt at all the highest mountain on the whole archipelago. A guardian of the Islands, a dormant volcano which one ascends in an almost ritual fashion, in order to confirm that the mountain is strong, powerful and tall, filled with veins and colours, beaten by a wind that is at times frigid and at times hot but which never manages to dominate the mountain.
BUT NONE OF THIS WAS THERE TO BE SEEN. ALL YOU COULD SEE WAS THE red cloud, the sea of clouds which completely covered this part of the island. Little by little, as though a figure of authority were forcing its way through a crowd, Mount Teide emerged from the red and white landscape, monotonous but fascinating, and now what could be seen of the island was this black and red peak, a kind of fist held up to the sky, as André Breton called it when he came here to see it in 1935.
It was, I will admit, an extraordinary moment, a rediscovery. I was alone in the aeroplane, was reading something, any old thing, a newspaper; I had books lying by me, poems, and I was well provided for by my own memory; I was remembering, as happens when one lands in a plane, other landscapes of the island, the things I was going to see, a good meal, the laughter of my friends, the familiar sensations evoked by a return to the place where one was born, but this way of returning to the island was for me entirely new. Everything conspired together to make it exceptional, first of all the weather: it had been hot the last few days, and the island was burning in the sun, perhaps because the whole world, or at least Madrid, which was where I was travelling from, was burning too, as we were right in the middle of summer; but this particular part of Tenerife had clouds squatting over it, and the sun, which had heated the earth throughout the day, seemed to have departed, leaving behind a spark of fire to which the clouds were testimony, refreshing the space into which the aeroplane was going to fire itself like a shell.
What happened were several minutes of ecstatic contemplation, and the evocation of this and of other landscapes: then I wondered if I would ever be able to see the island again from this perspective, with these red clouds; a lot of coincidences would need to fit together, among others the idea that I would return from a journey at this hour of night and that I would look once again through the window next to me, and that my eyes would be able to capture in all its variety the spectacle that I have just tried to note down for you here on paper.
This will never happen again, because no island is the same as any other, and because the island (not this island, and not any island) is never the same as itself, just as man is never identical to himself, man being an island in and of himself, and never the same as he was the instant previously; a dune is always a different dune, constantly different; the sea is always changing, every second; the mountains hold one colour and then another; and it is clear that people change from one moment to the next, and I am not the same man who saw the red clouds hanging over my island.
This joy in change is one of the most notable expressions of the nature of the landscape; greenery is not a landscape, as Francesc said, that Catalan student of urban development, the man who was eating fish soup in Puertito de la Cruz; landscape is tectonics. This is what César believed and what Unamuno believed too, and I would be willing to bet that Aldecoa believed the same. Landscape is hidden inside clouds, inside what changes, what makes imperceptible changes: landscape is not greenery. I am writing this now in El Médano, in the south of Tenerife, and the wind is blowing, and all around me there is sea and sand, and this spectacular confluence of ungraspable elements is what makes up the landscape.
Landscape is not greenery.
Well. That is why I spent so long looking down from above, as though I were going to stay hanging there in space forever, seeing how the island is while it is not there. Lewis Carroll has a magnificent phrase: ‘She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out.’ That day I had the chance, along with all the passengers who were looking out of their windows on the same plane, to check what the truth of this phrase is, using Tenerife as its protagonist: what the island is like when it is not there, or when it is buried by the strange magnificence of clouds.
Is the island there, are the clouds there? The land is very often the same thing as the clouds, something cloudy which hides behind the cotton-like mystery of the sky; one describes what one remembers of the land and very often this includes the clouds; I feel, talking about this and about other islands, as though I were myself hanging among clouds, describing a reality that at times is tangible but which many times is also simply a sentimental reality, within which one has never stopped living, even though one might have left the island a thousand times and come back a thousand times, even though one might have landed in the middle of this dreamlike landscape only once, this landscape which can be remembered only in fragments of memory, which is never described, only remembered. Samuel Beckett, talking of his homeland of Ireland from abroad, said: ‘I thought I had left the island; poor fellow; the island can never be left, it always travels with you.’
And so the most tangible thing I found among the clouds was perhaps this, that the island travels with me, like the island that always accompanied the author of Waiting for Godot.
IT IS ODD THAT SAMUEL BECKETT SHOULD HAVE COME UP WITH THIS quote on the memory of the island; many years ago, on one of my annual ascents of Mount Teide, lying in my bed in its calm, handsome, fortunate hotel, I read a book by this sceptical, angry Irish writer, and I came across this phrase which every islander, myself of course, could apply to his own relationship with the isolated terrain on which he was born. And then I sat up in bed and looked out of the window, as though reading Beckett had been some kind of spring that impelled me to confirm my physical relationship with the landscape, with the physical island itself, not just with the mental island that us islanders have forever embedded in our mind and in our souls. I looked out of the window at the rocks, the lava, the stolid Teide, a mountain that is young but still ancient, majestic, looking down arrogantly from its peak that has been scarred by the ancient eruptions that took place in its now silent crater.
I looked out over the cavernous rock formations, down to the geological constructions that tourists have, with good reason, photographed a million times or more, and I focussed my imagination and my eyes on Llano de Ucanca, where all the shades of all the colours alternate, where Raquel Welch filmed the movie One Million Years BC, where UFO hunters and other oddballs claim that aliens and flying saucers come down to land, or at the very least spirits which come down to the earth via the Teide valley. I looked out there as though I could touch the place, as though I were touching an essence, the essence of the island.
THE TRUTH IS THAT UP HERE, MORE THAN NINE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE sea level, the silence is overwhelming; just as the stars are overwhelming at night, just as the sun is overwhelming when on hot days it lays itself over your head like a mantle of hot lava. Albert Camus spoke about the exceptional silence of the beach where L’Étranger took place. Up there, where I had just read this phrase of Beckett’s, the island is an exceptional silence, like the earth, a reflexive silence, where the earth is still and it is your footsteps which break the extraordinary harmony which surrounds you; here you can abandon yourself, think that the world has decided to make a pause in its journey and has left you to the mercies of whatever the landscape wishes to do to you. You can see here the poetic peculiarity of Mount Teide: there are millions of mountains in the world, and there must be many that are more beautiful; there may be many that are better preserved because back in the 1970s this mountain had a wound inflicted on it which has never yet healed: a cable car that takes people all the way up to the base of the crater … There is the cable car, like a small embarrassment to which the mountain has become accustomed; I went up in it once. What is clear is that speed diminishes the mountain, takes its solemnity away, puts it on the same vulgar level of the men who go up and down and say that the mountain’s not up to much, that anyone can climb it. No, not anyone can climb it, because this is a mountain that has to be climbed on foot: that is the tradition, and that is also what this incredible landscape requires of you, to dominate it on foot, as you would have done in the past …
There are more beautiful mountains and better conserved ones, but this is our mountain. My mother never climbed Mount Teide. She looked up at it from the La Orotava valley, that spot where, as legend has it, Alexander von Humboldt fell down in submission; but she looked at the mountain with the eyes of the island’s first inhabitants, like a mythical mountain which passed on secret signals to the inhabitants: for her the snow, which always stood on it during the winter, signified love and Christian behaviour, but its mere presence meant protection and respect. For the first inhabitants of the Islands the volcano also meant refuge, and fear: fear of the eruptions, of the fire, but the fire was also what was attractive about the mountain; it was like mother earth, and now it is the mother mountain. I do not know if it is true that Humboldt fell to the ground when he saw the valley and wept at the virginal beauty of the sight; I do know, because he wrote it down, just as he did not write down that he fell to his knees on seeing the valley, that Mount Teide made a huge impression on him, that he deliberately disembarked from the boat that was taking him to America in order to evaluate the qualities and characteristics of the volcano. But in any case, whether Humboldt bowed his head or not in the face of such majesty, Mount Teide marks the authority of the island, is its fundamental symbol, its light and its darkness, and so it is not at all strange that the ghostly vision which I had as I returned to the island by plane should have contained within it this generous but abrupt element, the peak of the mountain, in the concrete vision which I had of Tenerife. And it is not strange either that it should have been on Mount Teide that I read Beckett’s definition of the island as an eternal fellow traveller, which always, right up to the hour of our death, stops us seeing clearly the inner landscape from which our souls and minds and even bodies derive.
AND SO WE HAVE NOW LANDED, ALTHOUGH WE MANAGED TO SET FOOT on Mount Teide from the air. I was born in the north, in Puerto de la Cruz, the city which Oscar Wilde’s father found charming, which was approved of by Agatha Christie, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill and André Breton, amongst others, but now I live semi-permanently in the south, which until the 1970s was like an inhabited desert, a place segregated from the rest of the island by abrupt hills which could only be crossed by sinuous roads which helped maintain the mystery of the place but which increased all distances. A freeway—the Southern Freeway, like the title of Julio Cortázar’s famous story—broke this curse, if one can call it that, and joined the cloudy north of the island with the dry south, on a route that goes from Santa Cruz, the capital of the island, to Guía de Isora, in the deepest south; the southern beaches—in particular, El Médano in Grenadilla de Abono, and Las Américas, in Arona and Adeje—had attracted local holidaymakers for decades; the freeway and the subsequent hotel development revealed these southern beaches to foreigners as well, and suddenly, in little more than thirty years, the northern primacy was broken and the south started to consolidate itself, economically, as the most powerful part of the island. If one climbed up to a high vantage point, the top of Mount Teide, for example, and were able to see the whole island, the north and the south, and were able to draw a line which divided the landscape in two, then we would have a perfect indication of what it is that divides the north from the south here and in the world in general; the north is leafy, fertile (plants grow here, flowers and banana trees and tomatoes and all kinds of fruit), while the south is a wasteland which can still give the more difficult kind of crop, palm trees and tomatoes, but which is largely a dry area, the place where sun and sand go to hide …
Tenerife is a space that is cut in two, and it was even more divided years ago, before the freeway which both divides it and brings it together. To one side it is green, to the other side it is dry. I have already said what I thought of that urban landscape where I ate soup; and I think that here my feelings are similar: the south is a landscape and the north is a landscape, in one of them the only important thing is the tectonics, and in the north the geology is covered with greenery … The green north, the dry south. Tradition meant that things were the same for centuries and centuries: wealth on one side and drought-derived poverty on the other, almost a biblical curse on the south of the island.
Now that the curse is broken, if we can put it like that, the unequal division between the trees and the desert has been broken. The south is still the south, with all its characteristics, all its shrubland beaten down by the sun and the wind, as in El Médano, where I am writing this passage, and the north is still the green expanse it was when Humboldt expressed his ecstasy in the face of the botanical beauties of the valley, which was the nucleus of his experience of the island. But the south has taken its revenge, and that part which once seemed lost, a desert facing an ocean, is now cultivated land, cultivated largely by tourism; there were always banana trees and other plants which were sown in defiance of the climate and its consequences, but the true wealth of the south has come from its arid landscape which, while arid, is still calm and sunny; tourists in search of sun have made this part of the world a refuge, a place for the sea and for silence; the north was, and still is, a landscape which Mount Teide beautified from above, and which the greenery beautified with a particularly concrete kind of softness, the softness which Humboldt saw, but the north is no longer the only destination for tourists, who have found in the abrupt crenellations of the desert a special kind of attraction, one to which I myself succumbed as well when I first discovered El Médano, about forty years ago, when I was still a young man and came to this fishing town with my parents, this town which has become a symbol of what the south gives its visitors: the beach, sand and practically nothing else apart from air, a dry wind which at night turns into a violent cold caress.
BUT LET US START IN THE NORTH, WHICH IS OBLIGATORY; IT IS WHERE I come from, it is for me, perhaps, the island, or the part of the island that Samuel Beckett spoke of: the part that you never escape from. I want to speak about the soul of this place before travelling through, as best I can, the memory of this island which I saw from above as a sea of red clouds.
The north, which for centuries was a reference point for travellers, is green and silent and naval and exuberant; it has lived for a long time calmly confined underneath a sea of clouds which filter the Atlantic sun until it blinds you with the quality of its light. The place where I saw the island for the first time, in my childhood, was an uneven symphony of banana trees and cheap houses, round a cliff where children and adolescents would go to look for scrap metal. The adults, men and women, got up early in the morning to water their plants, water their bananas or tomatoes, and many of them worked all day to pack their fruit into enormous warehouses where their produce would arrive entirely au natural, without having been cleaned at all; there, in the warehouses, it was all prepared. This work was a kind of prelude to the only source of income that there was in the Islands, which were divided between the poverty of the many and the wealth of the few, the caciques who had always been rich, and the nobles who had only recently become so. Tourism did away with a great deal of the poverty, and the wealthy were now not only those who owned the arable land, but also those who owned the plots by the beaches, first of all in the north and later in the south.
My family lived right in the heart of what Humboldt had seen; back then, from above, from what would later become Humboldt’s viewpoint, in the shade of the La Orotava mountains, all that could be seen was green, the green of the banana trees, and some paths; at the end of the 1940s, when I was born, the land still looked like the steep and exotic greenscape which the German scientist had studied. But then the foreigners started to come. At the beginning of the twentieth century there was one hotel that people could go to in the north, the Hotel Taoro in Puerto de la Cruz, which was in the middle of the national park which bore its name, the Taoro Park. Here there also started to appear private houses which reflected the economic situation of their owners, who were the masters of lands and plantations. This was how tourism entered into Tenerife, and one can perhaps say that this was the entry point for tourism into the whole of this Atlantic archipelago.
Even today the Taoro park maintains the stately decorum of previous years. The existence in its heart of an Anglican church, which was also there back in the days when Spain was much more cohesively Catholic, back in the Francoist dictatorship, gives some idea of how tourism influenced the development of the island and how it became ingrained in the customs of the Islands. This air of polite cohabitation which the church shows, this metaphor, is complemented by the stately air of the buildings, which is connected in La Orotava and in certain streets of Puerto de la Cruz, and in other places such as Tacoronte, Garachico or Icod de los Vinos, with the signs of a period of great wealth that occurred because of successful agricultural trade.
Taoro Park has always seemed to me, out of all these buildings and all these places, the one that best embodies the idea of perfect peace. Still today there is a hotel there, the hotel Taigaga, which keeps to some degree the distinction of older hotels in the Islands and in the world as a whole; regular clients are received as though they were a part of the history of the establishment itself. The Taigaga was founded by a German family, the Taigs; it has just celebrated its fiftieth birthday. When I started writing the book I was sitting out on the hotel terrace, looking out at the invariable beauty of Mount Teide. I suppose that over the past fifty years thousands and thousands of travellers have felt this same excitement, under the sun or under the clouds, under the stars or under the moon, which I felt that morning, looking at the way in which my land exerts the same fascination as always, even though men have put concrete in the exact place where Humboldt only saw greenery.
BUT IT IS NOT JUST THIS PLACE THAT IS THE NORTH OF MY CHILDHOOD. It was the north of the lizards, of the uncultivated lands, of the mountains that had been eviscerated in order to dig for zahorra or sand for building works, it was the north of trees and birds’ nests, of goats and cows, of the silence that went alongside you as you walked to the little school lost among the banana trees.
It was the north of gofio and cheese, of salt fish; it was the north of the sea beating incessantly against the rocks on the Martiánez beach, one of the most beautiful and sudden beaches of all the islands, where the speed of the sea and the narrowness of the stretch of sand turns a simple bathe into a struggle against the violence of the waves, against the speed of its flowing and its riptides; bathing here meant being bathed by a powerful hand, in the south it was the hand of the wind, and in the north it was the hand of the sea.
Now that I have gone back to live there, up in the cliffs above a beach which looks like this one from my childhood, El Socorro beach in Los Realejos, I have heard the sound of this sea, insistent and powerful; for years, so that people would feel safer, they hung a rope out into the sea so that the bathers had something to hold on to, and this part of the beach at Martiánez was known as the Charco de la Soga, the Rope Pool. The requirements of safety, and probably a desire to make more money from this abrupt and beautiful beach, steep and difficult, surrounded by caves that evoke the caves of the ancient Guanches, led the authorities to ask César Manrique to design a plan to make the space less dangerous, and Manrique built them a new coast. Lots of what Manrique did was good, and his enthusiasm to make sure that the Islands would be happier and more prosperous is something that his admirers, among whom I count myself, praise at the tops of our voices, but not a few of us would have preferred the beach at Puerto de la Cruz to have been left forever as a little range of miniature archipelagos, black and savage rocks, with the sea beating against them, the same sea which I can now hear, free, beating against the foundations of my house, just next to La Romántica, near the Rambla de Castro, one of the most beautiful parts of the touristic north, to which I have returned as though I wanted to recover the ancient aromas of what is now nearly nothing more than melancholy inhabiting the landscape in which I grew up.
And I have recovered them, I have recovered these aromas. I have been in the Plaza del Charco, in Puerto de la Cruz. Surrounded by the ancient taro plants, as green as the greenest thing you could possibly imagine, the Dinámico bar is still there, as are the swings which were the gift in the 1950s of an eccentric Catalan called Tomás; tourists and locals still walk by just as in the old times, enjoying the climate which gained this place a reputation for being the land of eternal spring. And I was at the stream where the old fishmongers used to wash the mackerel which I bought early in the morning to take home to my mother. And opposite this stream, in the centre of this little pier from which the fishermen leave, I have seen the splendid house of the Yeowards, British merchants who set themselves up here so as to be at both ends of the trade route in their exportation of bananas. Now the Yeoward house is the site of a permanent exhibition of surrealist and abstract art collected by Eduardo Westerdahl, a critic and painter of Swedish extraction, who was the man who brought André Breton here from Paris in 1935, in order to mount the first international surrealist exhibition; here it was that Breton said that Tenerife was a surrealist island. He would later say the same thing about Mexico, and other places; the discovery that his praise was nothing more than a cliché turned Breton, for me, into a charlatan of landscape. But yes, it is a surrealist island, how could it not be, this crag which it is better, as Aldecoa said, to describe with silence rather than with words.
AND SO I HAVE COME BACK INTO THE ATMOSPHERE WHERE I USED TO LIVE, and I have taken once again the path down to Martiánez, through these streets that were once walked by Bertrand Russell, or Agatha Christie. And I have smelt the sea as I walked, smelt it as one can smell it in no other place in the world, from La Punta del Viento, that point where the air turns round and which has already been mentioned in these pages for its powerful smell of salt and seaweed. Here, in La Punta del Viento, beyond El Penitente, I used to stop for many years to smell the salt and the seaweed, and now, as I smell this odour once again, it is as though I had grown fifty years younger at least. Below me, beating against the large and the small rocks, are the San Telmo pools, near the old natural swimming pools which Manrique incorporated into his project of remodelling the coast. Above us all, looking down on this spectacle which it now has to reconstruct from memory, is the old hermitage of San Telmo, which is a part of what remains of these memories that accompany me as I walk through what life here used to be like.
I have asked people where I should go to eat some good fish, from Puerto de la Cruz. And everyone says that if I want it to be fresh and recently caught, like the fish that we used to wash in the little stream down by the docks, then I should go to a place about twelve miles away, in El Guincho, on the way to Garachico, a suburb of Garachico, in fact. It is an old house with lots of nooks and corners, like the old houses of the north; they show you the fish in zinc buckets, without any salt, natural, just as it was taken out of the sea. As I drove along the freeway I saw in passing lots of old houses which have been recovered and which are now houses where people live, set among banana trees which survive as a source of income, competing with the true source of income which is tourism. I have travelled through tunnels which have been drilled in order to bring villages closer together, and as I have driven I have seen alongside the banana trees bright terraces which no one now plants, all of them dry and filled with yellow bushes, the sign of the end of an era, or the end of a dream, or simply the end.
And now here, in El Guincho, I wait as the food is slowly prepared; it is as though the Islanders have decided to pay homage to people’s perceptions of them and have decided to honour me once again with a display of their patience, as happened in the restaurant in El Tamaduste, by the sea in El Hierro; they prepare parrotfish, and groupers, and zebra seabream; they put green pepper on them, stew papas; in order to make the wait bearable they bring cheese with gofio, which is a combination that sprang up in other times of need, back when there was nothing in people’s houses apart from cheese and gofio; but necessity always creates the most flavourful combinations. And so I wait out my meal with this cheese, but they also bring an octopus which still smells of the sea, as if it had been cooked, and it surely was, in sea water.
Everything here tastes of sea and of the countryside at the same time, as though the two kinds of flavour were being put together, and the robust and resigned north were seizing hold of the two styles of life on the island: the land which protects and the sea which caresses. There is silence all around me as though the diners were fulfilling a religious ritual, and the fish were blessed by the same silence which now falls like a hand on all of us in the room, drinking our robust wine that to me tastes like the first wine I ever drank, which must have been in a place like this, with the fish in their zinc buckets.
The people here eat with their heads hanging down; in the room, which is covered with old photographs of the island, photographs of bright goats and old women wearing black hats, there is an atmosphere which is one of celebration and mourning at the same time, an atmosphere which reminds me a great deal of the celebrations of my youth, when I always had the sensation that we were mourning as we celebrated. I don’t know if I have brought the old spirit of the Canary Islands to the table with me, or if it is the wine which has put me in this mood, but here I am, in the midst of the history made between us: made, above all, of daily life.
FROM HERE I GO TO A CITY WHICH I LIKE A GREAT DEAL, ICOD DE LOS Vinos, which for many years was the involuntary port of the south of the island, or at any rate the spot through which one had to pass in order to keep on travelling to the unexplored and still savage side of the island.
The other alternatives were crossing the peak, by La Esperanza, in La Laguna, or else using Las Cañadas from La Orotava, or else the paths that led to the south from Candelaria and Güímar, which were, until they built the freeway down to the south in 1972, abrupt and winding roads which took you slowly through every one of the villages and hamlets on the way, a long way from the sea, through what were ever drier mountains on the way down south; now we are travelling in the other direction, to the deep north, Icod de los Vinos, which is now next to Garachico.
Icod is distinguished by El Drago, a tree which we have always said is more than a thousand years old. Humboldt was confused by the presence of this tree, which grows so well in this part of the island, from the valley of La Orotava all the way up to here, up to Icod. And lots of travellers have come to see El Drago, and now very many tourists come as well. We say it is a thousand years old, and for some time we were happy to say that it was far more than that. Nowadays even the people trying to drum up the tourist trade say that it is ‘probably’ a thousand years old: it could be a thousand years old, it could well be, but it is not likely that it’s much older; specialists have concluded that it might even be a bit younger than that. And even Pérez Minik was suggesting things along those lines, that it might not be quite as ancient as we claimed, but when he wrote his book, in the middle of the 1960s, it was very difficult to say anything on the Islands other than that which was canonically accepted by the bigots who governed us.
Whether it is a thousand years old or not, El Drago is a marvel of nature; also, one does not ask trees their age. There are two squares practically joined onto one another by El Drago, or if not joined onto one another then probably parallel, which increase the calm of the place and prepare us for the abrupt access of emotion which the sight of this ancient, or in any case very old, arboreal remnant will inspire in us. I have seen it many times; it used to be possible to see it from the road, you could stop for a moment and touch it, if you were feeling particularly daring, then you could take a strip of its fascinatingly twisted bark away with you. But the bark started to be taken away in ever-greater amounts, to the great detriment of its vegetal health, and scientists decided that they needed to carry out some radical surgery: first of all, they isolated it from all kinds of traffic and limited access to its trunk, and then they inserted cement into the tree to hold it up. And so this tree, which, like Mount Teide, has become a powerful symbol of the island, and has inspired surrealists like Óscar Domínguez, and which inspired the creative soul of André Breton when he first came to the island, or that of Rafael Alberti, who dedicated a poem to the tree—this tree now looks like an old man whose health depends entirely on the aid of his servants.
But it is a spectacle, a true spectacle. If I had never seen it, or if I had never seen it in those circumstances, open to the public, right next to the road, majestic but nevertheless exposed like any common tree, then I would not have recognised it now. El Drago was a symbol of health, a kind of blow struck on behalf of the earth, a tectonic affirmation of everything vegetal, a capricious offshoot of nature, put there by the will of some ancient god who might even have been a metaphor, a point of reference, a mythological plant, right here in this spot on the island, as though set in place to prove that a legend was true. This is how the poets saw it, and how it was easy to see it, because its nature did not only blend with the surroundings, but also with the threats posed by progress. They thought it was indestructible, but it was gradually destroying itself.
And so they isolated it; they put it, as my mother said, in a flask, a kind of glass bell, and surrounded it with rocks; they poured cement into its soul, so that now you see it as though it were in a crypt, in a kind of narrow circle; you are no longer able to touch it; it is sick but it is beautiful, you can see that, it is not necessary to touch it to see that its different illnesses haven’t destroyed any of its prestige. I was taking photographs of its belly from a distance; the belly of a colossus, in spite of its weaknesses, is still in its own right colossal. One side is healthier than the other, and that might perhaps be the side which is less impressive. From a distance, the tree’s trunk seems to be young.
It is green; ever since the days of antiquity it has kept that colour by which nature identifies its healthy trees. I noted that it seemed to be a young woman, shaded by a palm tree with a great deal of leaves which grows alongside it like a shield, or like its own improbable shadow, ‘odd shadow’, as I wrote in my notebook.
They have, in order to preserve El Drago, built up around it a park in which they have planted some of the indigenous vegetable species of the Islands as a whole, and so I was able to walk through the past and the present of our trees as though this walk were to calm me of all the violence I should feel at seeing the beauties of this great bleeding tree. I was surprised to see here, mixed in with all these plants, a butterfly house, for I did not remember that here in this part of the island, around El Drago, there had ever been a flourishing of butterflies, such as there are, for example, in One Hundred Years of Solitude. But the butterflies are here, perhaps looking for a combination of the kind the surrealists liked when they made El Drago, and its blood, a symbol to feed their metaphors.
I LEFT THE PLACE OVERWHELMED BY MY CONTEMPLATION OF THAT SICK yet still powerful tree. I was walking between the two squares in Icod, and I was entertaining myself by looking at the balconies around the squares, houses that once were the expression of the neoclassical style which came to the island via this town (the house of Lorenzo Cáceres is here, the general in the engineers who introduced this style into the islands in the nineteenth century), and, above all, I was looking at a palm tree which seemed to me to be extremely out of the ordinary: a palm tree shaped like a menorah, with its seven arms skeletal yet powerful, showing the same blend of exuberance and strangeness that in other parts of the island had made the most famous naturalist ever to visit Tenerife, the German scientist Alexander Humboldt, cry out with emotion.
Icod is a place where the darkness of the earth leads all the way down to the sea, down to the beach at San Marcos, where the sand is like all the sand of the beaches along this coast: Bollullos, Martiánez, El Soccorro, La Fajana, San Marcos … Black sand, high waves, a lively sea, a succulent smell of seaweed, the loneliness of the sea marking with its sound the lonely northern nights.
I carried on down the road to Garachico. I had been told of so many places there that I needed to see that I decided only to go and look at the sea. I could have gone to the hermitages, the strange houses, the banana plantations which evoke a wealth that is now no more than a legend, the convents, the well-preserved streets (as there are also in La Orotava, Puerto de la Cruz and Icod), the old cobbles … But I wanted to see the sea, which had come all the way up into the town until the violent Garachico explosion at the beginning of the eighteenth century cut off the promising future of what had been the wealthiest town on the island. And so I set off to look at the ocean, as if an old friend was calling to me. There is an old davit there, rusted, which now looks more like a sculpture; it is next to a packaging plant for bananas and other fruit. Garachico is festooned with hills of the produce of its extremely fertile land, the banana plantations are still, obviously, an external sign of wealth, and so here, in this davit, I find a symptom of what was once a rich port and which now is assaulted by the violence of the sea. They are building another harbour in another part of the town, but it was here until the volcanic eruption put it out of use.
Aldecoa, in his Tourist’s Notebook, explains his impression, which was impressed upon him when he visited this formerly depressed village in the north: ‘Garachico, on the edge of the sea, was buried by the lava of an eruption. A rock surged up in the bay, a hump which now houses strange plants, lizards with two tails and black birds known as ospreys. The sea here is deep, and sometimes the sharks climb onto the troubled land. The slope at Garachico is the precise opposite of that at La Orotava. What is green there is here ash, and black rock from the heart of a volcano. A skeleton with no earth to clothe its bones, a petrified storm under a deep blue sky.’
The poet felt like this, but I think he must have been inventing the sharks; I never knew that there had been sharks in Garachico, rather than those black birds; this winged rock lifting itself up into the blue sky of this town battered by the volcanic lava in the past …
WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT GARACHICO YOU KNOW THAT YOU ARE COMING to a special place: you know this by the smell of the sea, by the rock (the Roque de Garachico) which is like a dry fist surging out of the sea; you will already have seen the omnipresent banana plantations; to those of us who know that, just as sugar cane and piglets went elsewhere, the cultivation and export of bananas is not a major part of the island’s future, this persistence of the bananas seems to return us to a memory of a landscape, the landscape of our childhood, when banana monoculture was practically the only way Canary Island families had to survive, both for the rich people who employed the poor and for the poor who were employed by the rich.
And so, when you look at this landscape, which has remained unchanged for more than a century, you see that it represents what the island is, and you do not know for how much longer. This ancient landscape still can surprise the visitor, but it also now surprises the emigrant who returns, when the green of the banana trees approaches and almost touches the blue of the sea. And you can still smell the sea with the same intensity that is proper to the seas of the north, constantly beating the shore, filled with seaweed.
They have built natural swimming pools across the whole of the north of the island, from Punta del Hidalgo and Bajamar in La Laguna, all the way to Garachico, Los Silos and Buenavista, where we will travel later, but the sea keeps on breaking over the artificial barriers put in its way, and keeps encroaching with its scent and its waves, with its irrepressible violence, all the way into the avenues and squares of the town.
And it came all this way as well, all the way to where I am, in Puerta de Tierra. This was the spot where merchandise came into and departed from Garachico; this was the customs post, where the papers were deposited which bore witness to an exchange which was a cosmopolitan activity, coming from Europe, from America, from Africa. This port, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was a reflection of the naval splendour of the bay, the principal port of Tenerife. Agricultural produce came and left, as did wine, sugar, cured skins, pitch, cloth … English cloth came in, French cloth came in, Dutch art … The Italian geographer Torriani described the port in the sixteenth century as a vital element of commerce in the Canary Islands, as the axis on which the existence of the island turned. This was the case until the volcanic eruption of 1706 caused what is known on the island as ‘the catastrophe’. The legend says that the wealth of the town was such that all the streets were paved in marble; now they are no more than cobbles: most of them are paved in shining cobbles which give the town a medieval air, the same as certain Castilian towns possess. But the streets are not paved in marble, and never were. In Puerta del Tierra—where there is still a bust of Rafael Alberti, who came here too after his vegetal ecstasy at the sight of El Drago—one can feel when standing in the Plaza de la Pila or the Plaza de Abajo that the symbols of the town’s ancient splendour are still there to a degree. But it is in the convent of the Franciscans that the devastation wrought by the volcano can be observed in terms of dates and consequences.
Humboldt, in his description of his time on Tenerife, says that it is ‘slightly sad to see a crater in the very centre of a land that is otherwise fertile and well cultivated’. And the German naturalist continues, in a sudden access of pessimism: ‘The history of the Globe tells us that volcanoes destroy what they have created over a long stretch of centuries. Islands which the action of undersea volcanoes has pushed above the waves are little by little covered by a rich and cheerful canopy of greenery, but often these new lands are destroyed by the very same forces that have lifted them from the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps there are islands which are now no more than mountains of trash and volcanic ash that used to be as fertile as the hills of Tacoronte and El Sauzal on Tenerife.’ And Humboldt, in a heated and somewhat scared peroration, concludes as follows: ‘Lucky the lands where man does not have to fear the land upon which he lives!’
HERE, IN GARACHICO, ONE STILL FEELS THE GLOW OF THAT VOLCANIC ERUPTION, which ruined the future of the whole place. Here, in this convent, one of the four or five remaining monuments which the town retains as a part of its worship of the past and of silence, the whole volcanic biography of Tenerife can be seen. Here are the maps, like palimpsests of fear: Chinyero, the last eruption in 1909; Garachico in 1706; Boca Cangrejo in 1492, the year in which Christopher Columbus discovered America, and Fasnia, which began a year before the disaster that fell upon Garachico. This started on 5 May 1706 and continued until 13 May: this was the first phase of the eruption; after a pause it gathered its strength and continued to erupt until 13 June.
The eruption of Garachico destroyed the port, but there were no victims. The population of the town were surprised, but they managed to hide. And Garachico could no longer be the same; the town was ‘dominated by seven arms of fire which filled the deepest and most protected part of the port’. Viera y Clavijo, the historian who was born in Los Realiejos and who did so much to bring the encyclopédiste spirit to the Islands, wrote as follows: ‘One arm broke the port, pushing the sea away and leaving only a small cove which was difficult for even small boats to access. […] The vineyards disappeared, as did the water, the birds, the port, all commerce and the entire neighbourhood.’
Devastation. The more recent volcanic eruptions, of San Juan and Teneguía on La Palma in 1949 and 1971 respectively, caused far less damage. I was a witness to the eruption of Teneguía, as a journalist: it was an enormous crater of fire, black and red, which breathed out terrible explosions that people watched as though they were watching the end of the world. But people did not seem to be scared. The exhibition I saw in Garachico included a report filmed at the time by a colleague of mine, Cristina García Ramos. She spoke to some inhabitants who were looking at the effects of the fire in the distance and listening to the terrible explosions, and one of them said, ‘No, I wasn’t scared; it’s a beautiful sight.’ I wasn’t scared; it’s a beautiful sight. When the tragedy has gone by what remains is a landscape; tectonics, something that will eventually be buried in greenery, something which will at some point in the future once again be soil, a green spot even though now empty, a wasteland. No, I wasn’t scared; it’s a beautiful sight. Canary Island language in its purest form.
THEY MUST HAVE READ WHAT I FOUND ON ONE OF THE PANELS IN THE exhibition which spoke of these eruptions: ‘The Canary Islands have appeared as the result of different underwater eruptions over the last twenty million years. Volcanic islands are still being formed under the water, which will appear in a not very distant future. The history of the Canary Islands is the history of the cohabitation between man and volcano, a coexistence that at times has been very difficult, but which has been in general more beneficial than harmful for the inhabitants of the islands.’
Now that I look at these images, these landscapes which have been devastated or expanded by the fire of the volcanoes, I think about a particular image: the figure of a man who saw Teneguía vomiting fire; he had very little hair, and that hair he did have was white; his name was Telesforo Bravo, and he is one of the great Spanish geologists of the twentieth century; he studied Mount Teide, the volcanoes of the islands; he travelled round the world and went to savage islands, he looked for water in Persia, and here, in this image, he looks like someone who is drinking in an action carried out by the land he knows so well. Now I have read Humboldt once again, I imagine Bravo speaking with the German naturalist about his fears. (‘Lucky the lands where man does not have to fear the land upon which he lives!’) He would surely have tried to calm Humboldt down, or at least one sees him here, watching as the soil of La Palma burns and smoking his pipe, smiling with the calm expression of a wise man.
Nature is doing its job, and although it may cause devastation, it knows all too well what it is doing.
I left the place and walked through what is now Garachico; I stood in front of a convent where there are still cloistered nuns, and there must be very few of them; it is a single block with white walls, large windows through which passers-by are unable to look. A friend sent me a message to make sure that I didn’t miss a thing. ‘You can walk through the centre of the town. As far as sites of architectural interest are concerned, there is the convent of San Francisco, the convent of Santo Domingo, the convent of the cloistered Franciscan nuns, the church of Santa Ana, the Casa de los Condes de La Gomera, the Quinta Roja Hotel, the Puerta de Tierra in the Plaza de Abajo, the Camino Real between the crosses …’ And he listed other places as well which were equally important to understand the patience with which Garachico has protected the past. But more than anything else, I stopped for a while in front of this monument to silence, and imagined the nuns sewing and darning, keeping their silence like an offering or a sacrifice, and I went to listen to the sea, which was a relief after the powerful silence of Garachico.
Above me the climate of the northern half of the island, the haze, the opaque sky; I drank a coffee in one of the hotels which my friend had recommended to me, and any sound, even the sound of the teaspoons, seemed some kind of interruption or an alarm. There, under the white and insistent clouds, I thought about this climate which leads people so much into introspection and melancholy, as though the absence of sun were a door that opened into dreams and delirium, into a lack of physical activity and a need for mental activity, for dreaming, nightmares or poetry. And I made a note: ‘A climate that makes it easy to be introspective or delirious; the cloud thrown over the island so fully that it even covers the line of the horizon and gives the sea an almost violent somnolence such as there is in many of J.M.W. Turner’s later paintings.’
THE CLIMATE IS A RETURN, TO CHILDHOOD, OR IN ANY EVENT TO ONE’S origins, and here, in the midst of this haze whose calmness is broken by the smell of the sea and the sound of the sea against the rock and against the salty coast of Garachico, I was taken back to the years when I began to discover the island, to live it. By association of ideas, there came back to my memory a scene from Camus’s novel L’Étranger, when Mersault commits his murder and attributes his stupor to the effective and powerful blanket of warm cloud, to the sweltering heat that lies over his forehead and his soul. And he kills, he has no other way to act than to kill, to shoot several times; I can still hear in my adolescent ears the expression used to describe the impression which the murderer has upon completing his horrid task: ‘I understood then that I had broken the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach on which I was happy.’ I did not commit a murder on this beach, and nothing took place to disturb the harmony of the day, but I feel a similar heat hanging over my head, it is the climate which is sending me back to my childhood, to my adolescence, to my reading of that book and to the climate of that time.
I went to a restaurant to eat fish (and ended up eating meat): Casa Gaspar, a restaurant in front of the rusted davit; as had happened to me before in El Tamaduste on El Hierro, waiting for a plate of chickpeas, and in El Guincho on Tenerife, waiting for a plate of cod, the man whose job it was to bring my meal thought that two hours was a decent time for him to bring my order. Our friend Humboldt complained in his book about his journey to Tenerife of the time it took the islanders who were accompanying him up Mount Teide to fulfil their particular tasks: ‘Our Islander guides were desperately slow; they had tried to persuade us the evening before to travel no further than Las Rocas on the next day; they sat down to rest for ten minutes or so every ten minutes; they stealthily threw away the samples of obsidian and pumice stone which we had carefully gathered, and we discovered that none of them had yet been to the summit of the volcano in their whole lives.’
Of course, what happens in restaurants is nowhere near as serious as what happened to Humboldt, but it does make one feel a little desperate. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that what seemed to me to be a natural part of El Tamaduste or the moral haze of El Hierro was only a part of the idiosyncrasy of those particular islands, because it is not an attitude, but rather something more, as though it were a part of the climate: the sensation of loneliness, of exhaustion, the fear that walking too fast will lead us straight into the abyss.
Anyway …
BEFORE LEAVING GARACHICO I WENT INTO A CHURCH; IT WAS LONELY, there were about four people there, all of them praying while moving their lips; the atmosphere was one of absolute seclusion, like that which one finds in the churches in certain villages in the south of Italy; an ashen light came in through the open doors, and the candles that were lit here and there made the church appear ghostly, a place where one might go for a secret meeting or to lie in wait for someone. When I left Garachico, thinking about my childhood, I was tempted to carry out an odd journey, an excursion in search of my father, something that would be logical in a psychodrama but not in this particular exercise, whose aim was to discover, or rediscover, the landscapes which form my life. But my father was a man who created landscapes. He was a driver, an adventurer, he worked as a builder and, in the final phase of his life, he built paths and roads, and as a result of that he also destroyed paths and roads and houses. Once, without him wanting to do so, a truck of his demolished an old house, and then a highway was put through the space, and one could always see the void that he had created. It was on the road from Puerto de la Cruz to La Orotava, via Las Arenas, the place I always go through when I go back to the home where I was born, under the hollowed mountain where they built, with suicidal perseverance, an unnecessary hotel.
BUT ON THIS OCCASION I WANTED TO GO TO LA GUANCHA, NEAR Garachico, on one of the roads near which my father had once left an immense stone which nobody could remove. He insisted that it was a meteorite, a stone that had accompanied an extraordinary phenomenon which had occurred without any warning, and he wanted people to know that it had happened. When I managed to arrange for someone, my friend Salvador García Llanos, to write a report on him and the phenomenon, my father gave a sigh of relief, as he had managed to make someone take notice of what he had discovered as he was digging up the ground. He died a while later, and I always thought that he, insistent and obstinate as he was, a man of absolute convictions, would not have died before the interview had been carried out and the report had been published in the newspaper.
Because of this, because of the memory which he left stuck onto the surface of the island, I spent a whole afternoon looking for the stone, whose whereabouts had become somewhat blurry in my memory. Then, after a great deal of poking around, I found it. There it was; a young man who lived in the area said that it was a ‘volcano bomb’. When they were making the highway, the kid told me, ‘they found this shape, perfect, round, powerful’, and tried to break it into pieces. The rock broke two jackhammers and also couldn’t be lifted by a crane. And so the man who was in charge of the development, the kid said to me, just left it here, just left it some space.’
The boy didn’t know who the man had been. I spoke to him standing in the middle of a farm which he had inherited, among chickens which never stopped cackling and laying eggs, a farm where my father would surely have been happy, and I felt like the sentimental heir of a stone which is now surrounded by palm trees, like a tumulus dedicated to a unique man who thought that he touched the sky whenever he touched the ground, and who was happy whenever he saw the ground, as if the earth were speaking to him, as if the stones were talking to him.
The boy told me that when they found the stone, drivers at night thought that there were pieces of mica embedded in its surface, ‘and that there were, and now there aren’t anymore’. They were there: I imagine my father convincing everyone that the stone reflected what people wanted to see in it, a solid testament from some kind of extraterrestrial. The boy told me he was called Gustavo and that he was twenty-three years old; as I left I told him that the man who found the stone was my father. And then I left as though I were also a part of the landscape.
TRAVELLING DOWN THROUGH THIS LANDSCAPE WHICH I AM FOLLOWING one reaches the south, which is where I am now writing, sitting facing the beaches of El Médano, where I have lived for almost twenty years now, driven here by my desire for health, for sand, for wind, for joy. To get here from the north, I have travelled via the same bus stop that I used to use when my father took me to building sites where he was working in isolated spots in the south which I will reach in a while, from Buenavista.
There were women in mourning clothes who travelled with me in these dusty buses, and workers, and peasants and a great many chickens; I don’t know why there were so many chickens in my memories of these journeys, but it certainly is the case that back then a good layer was a form of economic security. The eggs could be sold, could help make a little money, and they were also, of course, useful as food; my mother raised chickens and cows and pigs, but it was only the chickens that got to travel by bus.
Now, however, in this twenty-first century journey (twentieth-century journeys on the Islands were made using nineteenth-century means) I travel in a car which is much more modern than that limping beast in which my father used to drive me back from the building sites where he was working. He took me to Tijoco, near Guía de Isora; he built houses for the agricultural landowners there, along with his team of builders; the lizards scampered over the roof of the shed where he slept like all the other workers, and I saw them; at the bottom of the dry plains, dry as some landscape out of a novel by Juan Rulfo, you would sometimes hear a Mexican corrido, which back then was the kind of music they listened to in the countryside, the combination of violence and melancholy that was the sound of the tiny villages out there. Many years later, Jesús Polanco, president of the El País newspaper, a noble man who fell in love with the Islands, and especially with the view from the south of Tenerife towards La Gomera, took me out to the abandoned farmland where he would build a hotel, the Abama Hotel; the houses that my father had built were just opposite. It is difficult to say what your memory is trying to tell you when such coincidences take place on the tiny space that is an island and in the vastness or minuteness of a life …
And so, in this modern car, I am travelling once again, many years later, to a place which brings a great number of memories to mind, the Tierra del Trigo, high up in Buenavista. A sensual and silent place where I was once decades ago; I remember being there, alone, one absolutely normal evening, shouting out a single word in the midst of all that fog, and I remember the echo bringing it back to me. I don’t remember the word; it might very well have been ‘silence’.
Now as I pass through the Tierra del Trigo I realise that the reason it has remained so evocative is perhaps something to do with the discovery which I made back then of the echo in the solitude of the landscape. From down here I can see the mountains and observe how the banana plantations head all the way down to the sea, from here to Punta de Teno, on one of the most spectacular freeways on the island. As I travel down this road I have stopped by some geological protuberance which looks like the now vanished Dedo de Dios, the Finger of God, which was so called because it did indeed look like a finger made out of stone; it was knocked over by a storm on Gran Canaria. Here near Punta de Teno there is another Dedo de Dios which has no name and which points up lonely into the sky like a lighthouse or a milepost, facing a clean sea that beats against it with extraordinary violence.
Here is where the island breaks in two. The pure north comes to an end and we enter, buffeted by a wind which emphasises the sense of solitude, into the northeast, or the southeast. This is Macizo de Teno, before which every traveller needs to feel a sense of respect which he should later keep in his memory. We have passed through a wonderful place to eat, El Palmar, where they roast the best chickens on the island, and which is a sensible place for a traveller to pause, if he later wishes to plough through these roads which the people here call highways—technically they are correct, because the roads are paved, but they still give you the sense of fear that driving on an unpaved road over the abyss might provide—with something pleasant in his stomach.
I have never been here before, or at least I don’t remember it if I have. From a certain height, once I have recovered from my fear and from the wind that was blowing next to the Tenerife version of the Dedo de Dios, these imposing rocks seem to have been deliberately shaped by the hand of man, and they give a sense of emptiness and danger at the same time, or else they arouse both sensations simply because it is a clear day and it is as though every object you see from so high up, whether it be a house or a goat or a tree, is in fact a miniature figure in some diabolical or benevolent world.
It is the end of the north, the beginning of the south; anyone who has been to La Gomera and knows the abruptness of its cliffs will find an even more majestic symphony here, and will want to listen to a calmer music in order to help their spirit become accustomed to these gorges, to these nooks where there seems to dwell a wind that will fly with you among all the crags.
YOU TRAVEL ALONE HERE; SOMETIMES A FEW CARS COME IN THE OTHER direction, and then you need to move to one side, climbing onto the narrow pavements, but you have the reward of imagining that you are travelling across a secret island on which you have the feeling, at any given moment, that you are alone, that it is only you who are crossing the island, that you are hanging from the heights, and not hanging from a stone, but hanging from an emotion or a mystery. Will you arrive? It doesn’t matter. And moreover, where? It doesn’t matter either. Suddenly Tenerife seems like the essence of an island, a geological event which the hand of man has worked on in order to make sure that the earth is not alone. An island is a rocky surface, is pure rock; men come to do it violence, its destiny is loneliness and we walk over it in silence, as though we were praying to it.
Ay, the paths we have to take.
AND WE ARRIVE AT THE SUMMIT, WITH MASCA BELOW US. I CAME ALONG these paths two or three years ago, through a forest trail that allowed us to escape from the fire. It had burnt the Buenavista forests that lead to Masca; I saw, below in this little village, groups of men crying because they had lost everything, their houses, their belongings, their wooden chairs, their clothes: they didn’t have anything, and they were crying. As I left the spot I saw a piece of wood still burning, a little tree perhaps, and thought that this little piece of fire represented the fire itself, was its testimony. Now I have returned and can see them rebuilding the house. And the burnt mountains are regaining their pine trees, although the parts that were burnt by the fire still have black bald peaks. I can see certain similarities with La Gomera in this landscape which takes me to Masca, in particular with the landscapes that you can see, majestic and aerial, as you go down from Playa de Santiago to the Gran Rey valley: huge palm trees which resist the heat and the wind, and here they are, offering leafy paths into which the traveller leans as though facing an oasis after such a curving road.
But then you have to go up again; unlike the mountains of Fuerteventura, which are extraordinarily sensuous, modelled out of an infinite number of silken curves, these mountains are cliffs, like pillars or knives, and as you climb them you can feel them taking their revenge. You get to the top out of breath, and you have your reward there before you have to turn round and head down again. To either side of you, you see the two opposed universes, the north and the south, the left and the right of the cosmos: the north is abrupt and intricate, and the south is vague and flat. The vagueness begins below, in Santiago del Teide, the village from which hangs the immense geological construction which is the cliff of Los Gigantes, which reminds one once again of the natural constructions the sea makes in La Gomera and in certain areas of Anaga in Tenerife.
This path leads me to Guía de Isora; here you can see the dusty villages through which my father drove me as we went to the building sites. One day, more than forty years ago, he left me in his shack and while I dozed and listened to the distant Mexican songs, I became aware of a moving point on the roof of this modest shelter.
It was a gecko, a large and potbellied lizard which seemed to be showing me the essence of the south, the kinds of loneliness which the heat generated. I was in the south and the lizard was its symbol; it was walking its own way and I came out of the shack in a fright, looking for my father’s protection against this pest.
I will not see lizards on this trip, but they are there, they are the testament of the sun, and it is a stern sun which falls on me as I walk between the sea and the banana plantations, from the Los Gigantes cliff to Adeje, which is a soft village, something like the capital of the south, up in the hills, looking down what in my childhood were nothing more than tracts of land and which now are groups of houses that look down on the sea, all the way down to the Las Américas beach, the greatest tourist emporium of the island, one of the largest in Spain, where the climate attracted the first colony of expatriates, the Swedish, many years ago.
They were Swedes who were disabled or in pain, people to whom their doctors had recommended a dry climate such as this one, and here the Swedes built a clinic which was also a convalescent home, Vintersol, which means ‘winter sun’. When I was a boy and the summer came round, I would see the Swedes trying to recover from terrible illnesses; we lived between Arona and Adeje, in Los Cristianos, at the start of the Las Américas beach, in a village which was like the entrance to the sea. Back then, halfway through the 1960s, there were no iceboxes in people’s homes, and you had to bring in ice on your shoulders, carry it in to keep the food fresh, and the streets were made of sand or earth, and there was no light in the houses at night, and no light in the streets, so the adults and the children entertained themselves by looking up at the sky, at the moon and the stars, whose movements we all knew by heart.
Now everything has changed too much. There are still dusty banana plantations on the south of Tenerife, and there are still beaches like there used to be, but this part of the island, which once was the mirror of a desert of sand, is the most cosmopolitan, most inhabited part of the island now; the village on whose beach I live, San Isidro, has one of the highest levels of commerce in Spain, is one of the places with most notaries; the southern airport is nearby, built to give some kind of outlet for the economic and touristic strength of Tenerife, and to compensate for the ancient primacy of the Los Rodeos airport, which brought in life and wealth to the north for decades.
The south now has its revenge.
I live in El Médano, which is a place that I was first taken to in the 1980s by Doctor José Toledo, who was born here, studied in the United States and in England, was one of the great surgeons of Europe, and died when he thought he was going to be able to enjoy this, the landscape of his childhood, for many more years to come. He stood in front of the Montaña Roja as though he were worshipping it, and this vision was enough to make him sure that he was living a happy life. He was a poet, but he did not need to write down his works: he was a poet in his looking at things, and this landscape filled his heart with poetry.
Allow me to speak a little about this village before I head back to the north, this time travelling from the south.
Perhaps it is a symbol of the south in its purest form, this distance which marks the difference from the north, from the green and tectonic parts of the island; here we have nothing more than the purely tectonic, and the man who touches this soil touches a fundamental, dried-out solitude. Back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, houses were rare here, and squat; they had an interior patio into which every room led, so that they could all be protected from the wind which, along with the dunes whose shape imitated that of the hills behind the village, was the morphological metaphor for this place.
The great beach, which now is called Leonardo Machado beach, was the main attraction for those holidaymakers who chose El Médano as a place where they could rest, or simply disappear.
Back in those decades, when tourism was starting to unroll industrially in the Canary Islands, people travelled here as though they were travelling to a foreign country. Things have changed since then, as the southern highway has been built, and the southern airport has started to run flights. Now this little village of local holidaymakers and fishermen is a motley formation which combines package holidays with the tourists who come from the Islands or from Spain and the foreigners who come more sensitively. Foreigners have always given this place a surprisingly cosmopolitan air; lots of Italians have decided to make their homes here, lots of Chinese and Latin Americans, and all of them have set up businesses which make this ancient sandy and half-deserted place into a typical example of the flood which the southern coasts have suffered, both here and in most of the rest of the Islands as well.
This is, let us say, the history of El Médano, which I recommend strongly that you visit because it represents the combination of the sea, mountain and wind which has always characterised it. It is impossible for anyone to see now what El Médano used to be, and to take refuge in that little village which exists only in the memory of the oldest inhabitants of the island is useless. There are other places, like Porís de Abona, a few miles away from El Médano—where the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog decided to build himself a house, an act which caused a new wave of interest in this landscape—which still have the same qualities as they did back in the past, but there are very few places to compare with the beaches near the place where I live. The wind, and the lively sea, which breaks smoothly and decisively on the dark and light sand, has made the place an international centre for windsurfers, who dominate the shore with their passionate struggle to beat the wind and bend it to their will.
Sometimes I stand in front of my window and look at the windsurfers, and the sinuous movement of the kites, and I have the impression that I am on a different beach from the one where I actually live; it is different from the place where my ancestors lived, who would look at the sea as it is now (lively, white, broken, violently stroked by the wind) and see it as a surface that was useless for fishermen. It was a closed sea: the sea was here and the land was there. Now the windsurfers defy this border and fit into the waves as though slipping into a glove.
The great metaphor of El Médano, its emblem, is the Montaña Roja, nearly six hundred feet tall, made of reddish stone, a kind of guardian of the sea. On one side it looks back at the steep cliffs at the end of the beach, and on the other side, like some poorly-trained animal, it faces what is the apparently quieter shore of a surprising and isolated beach, La Tejita, where the sea is high and treacherous, and the currents are peaceful but implacable: a beach for people who are experts in beaches, one of those beaches that needs to be treated with the same delicacy with which one might treat a beautiful crocodile, some soft and sinuous, but equally implacable creature.
Montaña Roja is surrounded by the low hill, dark and green and sometimes hidden by the sandstorms, of its oasis; its height and standing remind one of other sacred mountains, such as the one that the sculptor Eduardo Chillida wanted to hollow out. One can imagine the Montaña Roja, back in the times when El Médano was a practically undefined space, without any tall buildings and with hardly any houses, sending out the message of loneliness that it still transmits today. I like to look at it; I like to think that when I look at it I am using the eyes of my soul just as people like Doctor Toledo did, all those people who admired and who still admire its serene existence, tormented by millions of years of the sun beating down on it, and the wind and the cold, protecting the coastline like an enormous magic dog.
This is my place, I cohabit with this place, I am writing here today, listening to the insolent knocking of the wind against the window, the wind which at the present moment is enlivening the atmosphere of El Médano, next to Cabezo beach; a windsurfer ties his foot to the board on which he wants to reach Montaña Pelada, another beach, a nudist beach at the other end of La Tejita. I have been there several times, it is very sheltered; La Tejita is open to the ocean, but Pelada has a rock which protects it. These are the two vectors of the village; in between them is a population which has a special energy to it, a tiny part of which I have been borrowing for years now.
I CAME HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME WHEN I WAS AN ADOLESCENT; THE EXCESSIVE heat made me faint and I was revived with cold water and a little plate of Russian salad; later on, round about 1970, I came here with a group of friends to get over an annoying love affair and to get drunk on the empty beach, where I woke up in the middle of an expanse of wild sand, windy at the dawn, facing a clean horizon, the same one I look at today, although from a much more populated coast than that desert which in those days scarcely appeared an any maps. And, twenty years ago, thanks to a playing card which I found in a building site, and which I thought would bring me luck, I bought this house where I have written most of my books and most of this book about the sentimental memories which I retain of my homeland, the Canary Islands.
El Médano, as distinct from that little village of fishermen who lived on earthen roads with their doors open to the street, into whose houses the sand came like just another guest, is now a multinational place where, thanks to the windsurfers who come from all over the world, but especially from the cold north of Europe, breathes regularly an air (a wind, perhaps) that is absolutely cosmopolitan.
Now El Médano, which is part of the Granadilla de Abono district, a place through which one has to travel in order to reach Teide via Vilaflor, is also next to the airport which, along with the southern highway, guaranteed a tourist boom for this part of the island, a boom which has changed the face of this entire area and also the psychology of its inhabitants, among whom there are practically no fishermen anymore.