GRAN CANARIA. LIKE A HALF-CLOSED FIST, TEJEDA IS WHERE IT breathes, Agaete, Arucas, Teror and Firgas are where it drinks, and it bathes in Las Canteras, on the Playa del Inglés and at Maspalomas. Las Canteras is a glorious beach, a perfect band of yellow sand that lies in a semicircle in front of Las Palmas itself. The poet of the city, Manuel Padorno, who lived right here, in this corner of the sea, in a white house with blue doors just above the rocks, next to the sand where he came to bathe his feet every morning, wrote as follows: ‘Beach ahead of me, the great open abyss. | I breathe the sun. I am diluted, | start to dissolve, slowly, at each step | in an endless draught, which flips me round, | which disassembles me, which fans me out | in all directions, turning round and round.’
An endless beach, an adventure. If I were asked to choose a landscape, or seven landscapes from the seven islands, then this would be one of them; I could live here forever, just looking out. The Las Canteras beach. Behind it is the city, the Port of Light, with its hubbub, with its wild and outlandish nightlife, its perpetual carnival, but here is the beach, which is the horizon for Las Palmas, the point where the city breathes, the city with sand in its lungs.
It is among the most beautiful of all the landscapes of all the islands, the most open, the exact symbol of the Islands’ vocation, the search for an eternal horizon; the beach at Las Canteras is like a point of entry for the islander’s gaze, onwards into the open sea and back into the city which was made to look at the sea and to live from it … Here we can spend all our time, from morning until night, and nothing will ever be the same for a moment, not the horizon or the sand or the sky or the sea which beats with a violence that is calmed by an artificial sandbank built in order to retain in this point the effective, unfathomable harmony of a truly happy beach.
Manuel Padorno speaks again, the man who lived his nights of alcohol and poetry next to this beach at dusk: ‘Spreading me out without mercy, leaving me | along the whole stretch of Las Canteras.’ The beach is like a totem, and emblem, like a dream where one can live.
LAS PALMAS, THE CAPITAL OF THE ISLAND, IS A COMBINATION OF ADVENTURE, history and silence; Vegueta is the island’s Spanish history, and from this point it might also have gathered its history of silence; this part of town is preserved as though a miraculous hand had stopped all the speculators of the past and the present in their insatiable predatory lust. Here, in Vegueta, and in the streets and houses of La Isleta, which is on the other side of Las Palmas, the night never ends, as though there were a ceaseless energy in the island; I believe it comes from the contagious, eternally living landscape of the Las Canteras beach.
The island is silence in Ariñez, by San Mateo and Santa Brígida; it is the agricultural murmur of Sur, it is Maspalomas, that still wild beach, where the dunes carry out their ancient mission to turn all of nature into a living painting, always the same, always changing. The apex of the island is Roque Nublo, in Tejeda. This monolith is the geographical and sentimental symbol of Gran Canaria. It is surrounded by other rocks, by Fraile and Bentryga; the first looks like a seated friar, hence the name, fraile meaning friar, and the second was a sacred spot for the first people of the Islands, who left their archaeological relics here, which attain their character as that of history assimilated by the men of today in the legendary Painted Cave at Gáldar, as though this were the one spot where there communication could be established between the mysterious past of the island and the people dedicated to unveiling its mystery. In Cruz de Tejeda the traveller may rest: there is the Tejeda hotel, whose surroundings were called a petrified storm by Miguel de Unamuno.
I sit down to look here, and looking at this landscape causes me nostalgia and melancholy. I am looking at the cliffs of Tejeda, and seeing memories.
MY FIRST MEMORY OF GRAN CANARIA COMES FROM MY YOUTH, AND THE island is still in my mind as an island made of air. This was because I came by boat, at night, enjoying the wind on the deck for the whole length of the journey from Tenerife, and when I arrived into the damp morning of Puerto de La Luz, which was a hodgepodge at that time, filled with dangerous people and sailors passing through, I was set down in a village which ever since then I have associated with the air. It was Tafira: I have come through it once again now on this trip.
There are lots of places in the Canary Islands where the air appears to be the essence of the space, the material out of which they are made: the air, the breeze, the wind, the distinct grades of the air; not the land, not the cliffs, not even the sea which, along with the wind, is what feeds my memory of the Islands because I have lived in the wind for more than twenty years now, in El Médano. But Tafira, on the road to Las Palmas and Santa Brígida and San Mateo, was the place where I first understood the metaphorical nature of the air, as though it were a fresh and dry gust of air that helped one sleep, helped one breathe, helped one love and also remain on the Islands. It is an air which, on the calm nights or melancholy mornings of the Islands, gives one the sense of eternity which is contained in all happy moments on similar lands.
Then I left Tafira, I returned to Tenerife; since then I have been back many times to Gran Canaria, and there has always been a hand in my memory, dragging me back to this blessed place which helped me to love the airs of the island more and to know, for the first time, what is most essential about it, the air of the island, the air of the north, the air that carries you over the peaks, from San Mateo to Tejeda. Tejeda may be the most beautiful village on this island of villages.
To get to Tafira I went through Bandama this time, by the capital, the place where I am now writing this passage; and here I am, standing in front of the beautiful beach of Las Canteras, an urban beach which is still the one that inspires poets and other artists, which is still the same as it was back when it was surrounded by huts and shacks; now Las Canteras, down there, the roar of its waves softened by a natural stone barrier, is surrounded by large buildings, all of them much taller than the beach deserves. But there is no way back from this now. When you say that you are in Las Canteras, on the beach, people usually say that it is a broken place, aesthetically wrecked by the excessive construction which has destroyed the Spanish coastline, and the coastline of the Islands above all. But here I have grown used to looking at the sea, the sand of the sea, this beach that is more than two miles long, its sand made damp by the waves but also by this climate with its low blood pressure which brings the low-hanging clouds that the locals call ‘donkey belly’.
The donkey belly is, although it might not seem so, a blessing; here, under these clouds that from Tejeda seem like a grey blanket, the climate is benign, is sweetened by the clouds, is a caress of calm air, sometimes a little unruly, but always much more habitable than the high temperatures which one can suffer in Maspalomas, where the sun is hardly ever dampened. Here the sun is made slightly wet, and we, who walk along this beach surrounded on all sides apart from the sandy one by tall buildings, enjoy the weather, as though the air of Tafira made it all the way down here.
Las Canteras is a spectacular beach; I was told that one of the psychiatrists of the island, Rafael O’Shanahan, makes his more disturbed patients come here to calm their nervous fears, and he prescribes them three hours sitting in front of the sea, or three hours per day walking on the yellow, damp and yielding sand. Other people have done the same, people who were not mad. They were poets, yes, like Manuel Padorno, who was born on Tenerife, lived in Barcelona and Madrid, and came back here at the beginning of the 1980s in order to regain the vision of the beach on which he had been happy in his childhood and his youth, and where he was once again happy as an adult, windswept and far from the capital. On this beach, on its sand, among its rocks, looking out at its sea, Padorno wrote the most beautiful lines that have been written to the Atlantic since the time of Tomás Morales, the great singer of this ocean which is made majestic in Gran Canaria, like an embrace of salt and water which never releases the island and which can be seen from all points, for the island is a round rock.
THE ISLAND IS A ROCK, A HUGE ROCK WHICH HAS, IN LAS CANTERAS AND the southern beaches, from San Agustín to Maspalomas, the sea that bathes it, the calm Atlantic. The sculptor Martín Chirino—who is now eighty-five years old but who grew up here, on Las Canteras itself, in Portugal Street, very close to the house where Padorno last lived—drew a rock made of spirals (his metaphor for the island is composed of spirals) and gave it the title ‘My Fatherland is a Rock’, summoning up some verses of the poet Nicolás Estébanez, a citizen of Tenerife from the middle of the nineteenth century who fought in the war of Cuban independence. The metaphor, this rock, is not a lyric accident, or a transposition of the definition which Estébanez was trying to set down; it is simply a description. If you stand at the top of Tejeda, with the two symbols of Gran Canaria, Roque Nublo and Roque Bentayga, surrounding you, themselves surrounded by intricate cliffs of immense natural power, then you will understand perfectly the fascination which Chirino finds in the word ‘rock’ as applied to the reality of our fatherland. As though the island were, in dreams but also in the reality as drawn by Chirino, a series of concentric circles, a spectacle which is perfectly summed up in Chirino’s drawing. A rock.
Gran Canaria is a rock, there is no doubt about it. The composer Néstor Álamo, who wrote some of the greatest folksongs of the Islands in the twentieth century, songs which have been performed by an outstanding folk group, Los Sabandeños, dedicated a song to Roque Nublo, the chief point in the island’s symbolism, which situates it once and for all where it will always be. Roque Nublo, Roque Nublo, lyrical lunar rock. It is a stone, a rock balanced in the air of these hastily-sketched mountains drawn as perfect peaks which show as a series of little points from which, here and there, larger sharp points stick up, the prolongations of this upright peak, this rock which stands in miraculous balance.
When we were there the last time, it was raining in Tejeda and on Roque Nublo, and it is not very common to see the fog dissolving and pouring down in this landscape. It is the village of the island where it rains the least, my friend Ángel Marrero told me, who has lived here always, because he says that one sleeps better here than in any other place on the whole island. It rains more in Maspalomas, which is the landscape where all the sun and the sand is concentrated, and it rains much more in Las Palmas, the capital of the island, than it does in Tejeda; when the island is in shade, something which happens a lot in Las Canteras, Tejeda will still be bright and illuminated, Ángel says. It must be the truth. But up there, that day, it was raining, and the wind was blowing, and at one point, looking out at the extraordinary landscape round Roque Nublo, towards the cliffs of which Néstor Álamo sang, I felt the tremendous impression that this rock, this majestic cliff, was going to fall with all its weight into this volcanic cone, equally deep and equally majestic, from which we were observing this damp nature.
Up there I felt a sensation, and I was looking at the landscape through the windows of Fina’s house, a young historian who has converted a nineteenth-century house into the Casa de la Tea, where she hosts foreign visitors (from Holland, from England and from Germany; she prefers the Dutch, because the Germans complain a lot; the English, she says, keep themselves to themselves) who are now trying in vain to protect their pale faces from the sun which is promised, sometimes falsely, by the tourist brochures. But they are intellectuals, or at least they look like intellectuals, and soon they hide themselves away from the wind and the rain and sit down to read large books. I was looking out through Fina’s windows, as I said, to see if the Roque Nublo of the songs and of reality, the rock of the island’s dreams and of the reality of the stones, this huge monolith that seems so weightless, would fall down on us, in the volcanic cone. Just as the Finger of God fell down in the middle of a storm onto Agaete: it was a rock called El Dedo de Dios, the Finger of God, and it looked very like a huge finger, warning men of the wickedness of the earth. The storm finished off the Finger of God, and now all that remains of this miraculous rock, which a divine thunderbolt split and broke, is nothing, air, the pure air of the island.
I was talking about the air, and my memory of the air as the clearest sign of the memory of rock which makes up the island of Gran Canaria. Now I want to recover my air: I have left the capital behind me, its main symbols being this fantastic beach, welcoming and fascinating, the place where the sea comes to rest, where poets and other men come as well, and the Vegueta district of the city, where the city was founded before other similar cities were founded in Columbus’s New World. I would live in Vegueta, but in the street, under its old streetlamps, walking from the Columbus Museum (history states that Columbus lived here) to the CAAM, the Modern Art Museum, entering as I did so into silent taverns, visiting the noisy market where I sometimes came in the mornings to bring milk from Aríñez, a village next to San Mateo, set amidst the reedbeds and banana plantations and eucalyptus trees and pines and old houses and the smell of the morning air … You can see, from the roads which used to be simple earthen paths, the most exuberant gardens of the whole island, as though they were the fortifications of old secret houses, beautiful remnants which one walks through as though one were always in a garden. This garden is what the air of Tafira preserves, the air I have come looking for, and which I have found once again in Gran Canaria.
BUT I STILL HAVE NOT RETURNED TO TAFIRA, I HAVE TAKEN LOTS OF detours; Tafira is a word which defines the whole island, Gran Canaria is a rock called Tafira or Tejeda, a rock made out of the air which I remember being used to construct these places. And Bandama is made of this air as well. Bandama is a natural wonder, they have told me; sometimes, when people tell you things like this, you later fall all the way down the slide to disappointment, and it was with this feeling, of being ready to be disappointed, that I climbed up to Bandama, on the way to Tafira, the spot I was looking for on Gran Canaria to help recover my lost time, as though air were my madeleine.
I made it to Bandama. This rock, Gran Canaria, is in some geological respects similar to La Gomera, or La Palma. Distances are short, curves are eternal; on La Gomera and La Palma they have cut out a lot of tunnels, but Gran Canaria does not have so many of them; and so, in order to get to Bandama, and to carry on to Tejeda, passing through all the villages on the mountainside, you have to follow the twisting fingers of the island, and so once you reach Ayacata, the village where the composer Juan Hidalgo—another of the artists formed by Las Canteras—put his purple house, you are already feeling a little dizzy, first of all at the naked beauty of the landscape and secondly because of all the twisting and turning you have been forced to carry out. In Bandama, there is a kind of balance which also causes vertigo from time to time. The volcanic crater is like the result of a bomb going off, opening a two-hundred-metre deep hole at the bottom of which you see a house where someone has dared to decide to set up home, far from the world, enjoying this, a paradise inside a pit, a strangely naked pit, without any trees or any other protection than that offered by the air.
I carried on from Bandama, surrounded by the air of Tafira, until I reached Tafira; I had been there several times before, years after my adolescent experience with the air of the place, to visit the poet Pedro Lezcano, who breathed in this air and put it in his poems. He travelled along this road and restored his tired eyes, and even shed a tear, because one of his daughters had died up here, and he spoke of this with a pain which is not calmed by any landscape, or any kind of air: ‘I should have gone first.’ Sometimes one goes out looking for landscapes or air, and finds memories; suddenly, as I reached Tafira, this memory upset my soul, the memory of seeing this man crying, in the midst of all the branches that crisscrossed the courtyard of his house, in front of some stranger who had come to listen to him. Pedro Lezcano crying … The Islands are not simply the journey from one emotion to another over dried-out landscapes, or wet landscapes, or sun-kissed landscapes: they are the experience which you have had faced by other people.
And so, to a certain extent, I walk with Pedro over these landscapes, although he has already taken the path into the shadows, following his daughter. In Tejeda, which was my destiny as I walked over Chirino’s spiralled rock, I met Ángel, who took me to his farm from Fina’s rebuilt house. There it was that I recovered my desire for landscapes, because he told me a very simple story: his farm is called Mister John. It owes its name to an old farmer who when he was sixteen decided to leave Gran Canaria and go and live in the United States; when he was fifty-two Mister John came back a multimillionaire and bought a farm among the cliffs; the people thought, most likely with some reason, that he had gone mad. But he overcame his supposed madness with inviolable decisiveness, and made this place into a little miracle of the agriculture and livestock business. He died at the age of ninety-four, rich and having made this corner of Tejeda richer.
Destiny has decreed that Ángel should now be the owner of Mister John’s farm. He showed me the rooms that the old farmer had built in order to receive people: before such a thing as a fitted wardrobe had made it to the island, the farmer had one imported here, and he imported fridges, and new ways of dealing with his employees. He was a revolutionary in Tejeda; listening to its history, seeing the chopped flesh of those cows whose melancholic tiredness lights up the rocky landscape, and he entered once again into the world, and breathed the air of the rock, among these fabulous cliffs which Néstor sometimes hymned in the voice of Alfredo Kraus. Cliffs like the ones at Tejeda, as the song goes.
LET’S GO BACK TO THE BEACH AND LEAVE THE CLIFFS BEHIND US, LET’S GO back to the sea in the midst of the fog. The poet Manuel Padorno made Las Canteras into the symbol of the whole island: ‘I wanted to find myself here; to find where I am; | a place without form or any figure, | no appearances, no customs: nothing at all of this. | Living here makes me doubt myself.’ It was in this doubtful happiness that Padorno lived by the sea until his tired heart gave way in May 2002. He sang the island, just as Tomás Morales did, just as so many others did. And he was our contemporary. It is very often that my memories of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria are touched with my memories of him. He represented the calm days and wild nights which started at midnight, drinking in places which no longer exist: Utopia, Gas, bars which were an extension of the bars I knew in the outskirts of Ripoche and of the Parque de Santa Catalina on the first times I visited Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the island seemed to be a place where all the lights of the night, all the forbidden lights of the night, were concentrated.
And so I took away from the city the impression that it was an endless place, open at all hours, its dives and discos and cabarets always ready for continual festivities. A city by the sea whose old town, Vegueta, was the perfect place to relax after so much excitement. And as I experienced it like this, this is how it lives in my own mythology, my dreams of the spots I have revisited on this journey.
THIS TIME, WHEN I ARRIVED I IMMEDIATELY WENT TO PUERTO DE LA LUZ in the evening; they took me over to the Russian boats that had been there ever since Russia stopped being communist; the crews did not go back to their country, the boats were not reclaimed by their owners; a friend of mine, the director Carlota Nelson, discovered them and filmed a documentary about them in which the poignancy of nightmares is balanced with the lucidity of those who do not want to take back things which they do not know are theirs. And the crew were living their lives as clochards in these boats which are no-man’s-land and which decay hopelessly inside the huge bowl of Puerto de La Luz. Carlota told me what she had seen when she first encountered these men in their crazy boats. ‘Everything moves. The constant crunching noise sounds like a dog barking to warn you of danger. After a few minutes your hands lock from the effort of holding onto rusty cables. The visitor to the boat must learn to relax. Seven metres down there is a bath of tar, seawater and gasoline if you allow yourself to let go. One more jump and you are on the aft deck. You are now on the Geminis. This is another world, remote but incredibly close to our own. The day was covered in dull cloud.’ The story seems almost unreal, Carlota says, ‘but even though it is hidden, it is an integral part of Puerto de La Luz’. This is the modern landscape, the concentration of a century’s emotions which were released in this way, people on the margins after living their whole lives in the communist empire, as mysterious and authoritarian as it was transparent and disorganised.
The pier that I now saw here also seemed to me to be a symbol of Puerto de La Luz, this spot that is so cosmopolitan and so open to individual strange histories. I was in these boats, and saw their savage detritus, scrutinised the gazes of their peaceful inhabitants, as though they were the denizens of a phantasmagorical city; people who had been abandoned by the ignoble twenty-first century, which had left people homeless, like beggars, simply because of their inability to tack to the winds of their current century. What better place than Puerto de La Luz to serve as a symbol of the diaspora, not just the Soviet diaspora, caused when the Russian Revolution finally burnt itself out?
And now, Ignacio Aldecoa comes back into the equation. This was another time, the Puerta is now like some kind of futurist composition, a mishmash, which contains the noise of the past within it as well, these ‘dogs barking to warn you of danger’. The Basque sailor Aldecoa saw something else: ‘Puerto de La Luz is like a breast, Usebio has written. The large ships come in here and are suckled from the petrol line. Boats from all over the world. Petrol tankers and cargo ships and transatlantic liners. One boat is painted a delicate violet all the way down to the Plimsoll line, the same violet that nineteenth-century women would use for the ribbons round their necks. A blue-grey petrol tanker bids farewell with a long blast on its siren. In Puerto de La Luz the colours of the boats have a special kind of force and power. The large orange letters on a Dutch boat gladden the eye of anyone who sees them. An English boat, under the Plimsoll line, shows four foot of emerald green paint. But the most common dress code is for the boats to be black down to the Plimsoll line, and then red down to the keel. The boats are always dressed in sports clothes.’
This is how Aldecoa saw it, like a painting, but reality imposed itself on the scene and now this diverse and enormous port, filled with Koreans and Senegalese and Russians and Japanese and Islanders, is another matter entirely; it looks much more like what Carlota Nelson described than what the Basque writer saw, back when the pier was a place to go for a stroll and look for points to note down just as I am searching for them now.
THIS TIME, AS ALMOST ALWAYS HAPPENS, I STAY CLOSE TO THIS SPOT, CLOSE to the landscape which is so deeply tied up with the island, the landscape of El Puerto. I stay in a hotel from which one can see the whole of the Las Canteras beach, from the house where the tenor Suso Mariátegui used to live, to the restaurant where we would eat parrotfish and drink white Lanzarote wine, to the house of the poet Padorno, close to the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium, named after the finest interpreter of the Tejida cliffs, the subject of Néstor Álamo’s song ‘Roque Nublo’.
In the morning my friend Diego Talavera comes to find me. He is a journalist. He wants to take me to see something he has always recommended to me: an area of his home town, Telde, which he wants to use to connect this place with the diverse history of the Islands that stand like statues in the ocean and which nonetheless have been penetrated by so many influences and affected by so many emigrations.
He takes me to San Juan y San Francisco de Telde. He tells me that Telde is the first of the districts of El Sur, and forms a part of the quartet of the great cities of the Islands, along with La Laguna, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. One has to be very careful about these questions on the Islands, because ever since the days of antiquity the larger islands, Tenerife and Gran Canaria, have fought among themselves to establish primacy, and so it is better to use alphabetical order when talking about such things. Let us say then that Telde is the third city … even in alphabetical order, with the first two by that criterion being Las Palmas and Santa Cruz.
The conversion of Telde, Diego says, started a century before the conquest. It was on the coast near here that a group of Mallorcan friars landed with the aim of creating a bishopric on the Fortunate Isles, the first city and the first bishopric on the Islands. After the Conquest of Gran Canaria, Juan Rejón sent a troop of soldiers out to build a fortress in Telde, one of the towers of which was used as the belltower for the basilica of San Juan Bautista, which was built at the end of the fifteenth century. It was the initial foundation of what is the current church, where the Christ of Telde stands, made by the Tarasco Indians of Michoacán in Mexico, using millet paste as their building material, so that the statue is very light despite its size: it weighs fifteen pounds and is about six feet tall. The figure has been in Telde since before 1550. The populace believe that the colour of the image changes, as indeed it does, but there is no miracle involved in this: it is because there are variations in the material used to make the statue.
Next to the San Juan district, Diego shows me San Francisco, another part of the town which one reaches by following the course of a rudimentary aqueduct. This whole part of town is filled with little earthen houses, whitewashed, like the houses in Lanzarote; the little streets are paved with cobblestones; all you ever hear here are footsteps; the whole district is silent, like a church or like eternity. The streets are pedestrianised. This district came into being because the Mallorcan friars discovered a spring of water here and set up a convent, which they called the convent of Santa María de la Cabeza. What is left of this is the church of San Francisco. They taught philosophy and logic classes in the convent, and there was also a class on offer on the restoration of bibles and other holy books. So this was the first place in the whole of the Islands where they taught classes in higher education.
In 1836, when the so-called Confiscations of Mendizábal took place in Spain, as a result of which the church lost a good deal of its property and privileges, the Franciscans were expelled, although the area was kept almost exactly as they had left it. The name of the district is a reminder of their presence.
Before leaving this place, which seems like a brief history lesson on the influences that have gone into making the Islands, Diego points into the distance, to the Telde districts of Cendro, Tara and Caserones. He says that in the pre-Hispanic period about ten thousand people lived there.
And from here we went to Bandama. Is it good to start a journey through the Islands with this area of pure air and cosmopolitan history, the journey to the centre of the island, to Tejeda, the kingdom of fog, and we passed through a village called Las Brumas, or Fog, a fact which I have noted down here. At the end of the nineteenth century the Englishmen who had come to the island set up the first golf club in the whole of Spain here; back then, when trade with Africa was just beginning, the citizens of Gran Canaria became so anglophile that they even instituted the custom of afternoon tea, just like the subjects of Her Majesty. The Englishmen had, just as in Puerto de la Cruz on Tenerife, an Anglican church, and here, like a relic of that anglophile period in the life of Gran Canaria, one can still see the elegant golf club which we looked down on from the Pico de Bandama, 1,900 feet above sea level, next to the Bandama Caldera, thirty-three hundred feet across and six hundred and fifty feet deep. We saw more from this vantage point: across a landscape which contained plains and valleys and cultivated land we saw the Isleta, Puerto de La Luz, as well as the inclement donkey belly of cloud softening the climate with its foggy weight, making the island liveable. We were turning up the road to Bandama and along with us, taking photos and turning as we turned, came many Russians, much more domesticated than the ones whom Carlota recorded in their messy floating refuges.
We have passed through Jinámar, where in the Spanish Civil War the people who were disaffected with the Franco regime were discharged; I saw a building designed by the regionalist architect Miguel Martían Fernández de la Torre, an old abandoned house that still had his style and his imprint on it, and a few of the English chalets which fill the landscape with the frank innocence which these lands had until the hyperconstruction that now threatens to fill all the Islands with cement got under way.
The road we were following combines palm trees with land sown with prickly pear; sometimes there are eucalyptus trees, as there are on the Vega de San Mateo, and sometimes there are curves, and nothing else, which surround a field whose mingled scent reaches all the way to us. At the peak, which is where we are now standing, the trees are hit by the musical wind; and further up, standing up straight, showing its beauty in all its aspects, is the object of our voyage, the handsome Roque Nublo, standing next to the rock which they call El Fraile; the Dedo de Dios is no longer there, it was struck down in a storm. They are figures in brown stone, tall and final, which are the greatest symbol of the mountainous landscape of Gran Canaria, always the same and yet always changing, protected by their cloudy or clear fogs; a symphony of mountains round a village, Ayacata, where Juan Hidalgo composes his avant-garde music in his violet house. When we walked past, the house was covered in a huge black cloth; it is a sign that it is not there, that here is not a trace of the unusual colour of the house filled with nooks and crannies. They say: ‘It is not violet; it is lilac. The house is painted lilac.’ It must be, I suppose. Memory always changes the colours of things.
Down below us is Artenara, the stone fortress which so enthused Unamuno, after seeing the rock of Bentayga; we are, as the Basque philosopher who discovered Fuerteventura both for its pleasures and for his poems, facing a petrified storm; it is not strange to be here and think that the ancients adored stone. The stone that you find in Gran Canaria is solemn, and definitive; there is no sense of weight about it, it is simply there; there is no sense of lightness either, so firmly is it planted on the ground. Like the island, perhaps: Gran Canaria is heavy and stands in the very middle of the sea, defying the sea. Jules Verne, who mentioned the island in one of his books, said that ‘Gran Canaria is a summary of other islands. If it does not possess a peak as imposing as that of Tenerife, it does at least hold a good position relative to all the rest. It is the island with the most inaccessible coasts, the best protected valleys, the deepest ravines and the most curious natural peculiarities.’
A summary of other islands, perhaps, but Tejeda is without a doubt the stone capital of the archipelago, the place where this febrile manufacturing island can pause for breath, always occupied in looking for its own stones. Tejeda is in front of us, under the Roque Nublo. Fina, the woman who rules over this restored nineteenth-century house where Ángel and Diego are taking us now, says that Oliver Stone has just come through, passing through the Roque in order to look for rest. Fina says that we are in a privileged spot, ‘because no one has ever wanted to buy this landscape’, and so it has always remained how it was, ‘ever since the island had a history’. You can breathe here and feel yourself the owner of the air, she says, and she recommends that I come back, ‘because it is a good place for asthmatics like you to visit, for anyone who suffers from lung problems. What the hell, it’s good for everyone,’ she concludes.
It’s raining, I say, pointing out the obvious. ‘And a good thing too, or else we wouldn’t have such good papas as the ones they grow in Tejeda.’ Later, Ángel takes us to see the papas he has harvested in the middle of Mister John’s farm; he shows us the animals he raises, he shows us the cheeses he makes, and he makes us stroke the potatoes. Here, every year, he organises World Potato Day. As it is raining, we get the impression that Tejeda is a land of water; however it is rather a land of sun and papas, in the shadow of Roque Nublo. Ángel says: ‘The more years that go by, the more I fit in with this landscape.’
He says this as we sit in front of two dishes which we have been served in the restaurant where he has taken us, a humble little place where everyone knows him by name. On the table, ropa vieja, which is a stew made from the meat left after stewing pulses, served with chickpeas and strips of steak. The wine is called Peña Rajada. As it is raining, the meal seems to be giving us a refuge; if the sun were shining then the meal would interrupt our day. Food that you eat where it is wet has a certain air of welcome, of comfort, of a meeting with friends where everyone in the area participates in a ceremony which the rain makes even more solemn.
I HEAD BACK TO LAS CANTERAS, THROUGH THE REEDBEDS AND THE bougainvillea; unlike up in Tejeda, the sun is shining here, the donkey’s belly has gone. The sun is a spectacle when the sands begin on this wonderful beach. ‘In just one part of the beach | the sun is special: not a lot of people know that. | It is a very precise spot. Bear it in mind,’ the poet Padorno says. ‘Look for it with care. Your body will turn golden, | shining and of a very high quality; your skin will turn very soft, | the colour of sunflowers, | giving an immense seductive capacity | to even the bluer parts of your body.’ ‘This is the part that will bewitch you,’ is how the poet finishes his poem ‘On the Secret Part of the Beach’. And that is where I am headed. To the landscape which he nourished by day to dream of at night.
It was milky in the morning, but the landscape which the poet described is now, this afternoon, startled. A man has drowned, they have surrounded the place of the accident with a coloured rope, and policemen are moving around the area, chattering, along with bystanders and medics. The curiosity we feel in the face of death. The next morning, when I have woken up in front of this piece of land, there is no rope anymore and no bystanders; there is nothing; death has left a dull noise in the sea, a piece of forgetfulness; now the sea is white and majestic, its noise is the only thing that sounds anything like itself; the sand is browner because of the water thrown onto it during the night. Sunday laziness fills the beach’s loneliness and at that instant, for a second, it has become the memory of the deaf torment of that death.
At this precise moment, when day is breaking, the seagulls are screaming like madmen, they are like ‘the constant crunching noise […] like a dog barking to warn you of danger’ in the Russian boats that Carlota Nelson visited. In front of this landscape large boats are passing, and little boats, and pleasure boats; Las Palmas is a city made out of the sea; the sea defines it and holds it tight, it spends its life looking at the sea. This morning they took us back to Telde, but today we are going in search of a sandwich, one that sounds good, a ham sandwich in a place called Jasmina, but Jasmina is closed today; we will never experience the legend ourselves; they say that everyone eats here, from truck drivers to the President. We did not get to eat it, but as we were travelling with Elsa Guerra and Joaquín Casariego, both architects, we went to another centre of the island’s energy, Vecindario, where the best wind on the island blows, or at least where you can best appreciate it; here the city blends in with the wind farms. We go to Agüimes, travelling through the village of Los Corchillos (palm trees, white houses) and we see above us, majestic, presiding over the island like another totem, the fortress of Ansdite, from which the first settlers were hurled after being taken captive by the conquistadors.
There is a party in Agüimes today, and people are out in the streets. The seventeenth-century houses are all spruced up and they are serving a good local wine in the bars, with very dry, very cured cheese. It is dry, and hard, and sharp, and yesterday this cheese won one of the island’s regional prizes. There is sacking hanging from the balconies, and onions and garlic and pineapples … This is the way in which the land makes itself appear present on the occasions when these villages, these introspective island villages, want to show off their beauty, to show that they live off the land. I ask the locals what the best thing about Agüimes is, and they reply in the same way as any Canary Islander or Cuban replies to such vague questions: ‘A little bit of everything.’ They have oil, but not olives, ‘well, some years yes and some years no’. An old man comes in, like in the Wild West; he says nothing, but the barman pours him a rum. He drinks it in silence, then he touches the empty glass with a finger and gets served another shot. He says nothing. I look at the houses: they have lizards drawn on them, like some kind of decoration. It is a fetish. And then the people go to Mass: it is Sunday, the village is en fête. The architects tell me that their church is one that dates back to the eighteenth century, the church of San Sebastián, an example of Canary Islands neoclassicism; there is a square filled with tall trees, like the square in San Sebastián de La Gomera, and from the direction opposite to the one in which we are travelling there approaches a white cow, enormous; it weighs a ton, the driver says.
We have gone through Arinaga and we are going to the deep south of Gran Canaria: this is San Bartolomé de Tirajana, which is the village that comes after Arguineguín. The landscape is brown and dry. Tourists have softened it somehow, finding their solitude and sun and apartments here ever since the 1960s. The construction started in San Agustín, which is where we now are, drinking coffee in a place called Bahía Feliz; you can smell the building developments all around you; the beaches are all happy places, just like the bar where we are sitting; the road carries on as though we were in a never-ending development, until Maspalomas leaps out at us round a curve. Maspalomas is a stretch of sand which is still fairly overwhelming, in spite of the hotels that have been built here, in spite of the roads and freeways. There was nothing here in the 1970s, it was a seascape of interminable dunes, from San Agustín all the way to the lighthouse of Maspalomas. But now cement has become an important part of the landscape, although I think of it as an inviolable landscape, the landscape of Maspalomas. It has to cohabit, of course, with the blight that is shopping centres, with the establishments that drag tourists to wherever they think they should go, but the landscape is wise, and the beach has known how to hold its ground, it knows how to be open and secret at the same time, an interminable dune which is the aim of this journey. Elsa and Joaquín show me the building which was the start of the touristic development of Maspalomas, discovered as an essential part of the island in 1959 as the expansion to the south began, when the International Maspalomas Canary Islands Coast Competition was announced. The competition was won by some French architects; the first building they built was called La Rotonda, right next to the sea; the next building was Oasis, a hotel built by the Spanish architects Vázquez and Molezún. Now the Oasis honours its name; here it is, noble and all the more noble if one looks around it, with its palm trees and its gardens, decorated with a mural painted by Maolo Millares, the painter from Las Palmas who was, in the second half of the twentieth century, an emblem of Spanish avant-garde art.
I ask Elsa, when we are parked and looking at Maspalomas, what is the best thing about the landscape of Gran Canaria which we have seen, from the mountains down to the sea. ‘The sea,’ she says, ‘the sea in Gran Canaria is astounding. In Tenerife the things that are astounding are Anaga, Almáciga, Antequera, all that mountain range. But here it is the sea.’
When faced with Maspalomas, I surrender.
Faced by this luminous sea, with the night falling, in Gran Canaria, the island of Agfaete and Arucas, the island of unsociable or astonishing shadows of history; faced by the mysterious sonority of Roque Nublo, I surrender, this is my landscape, the sea, this insatiable and continually transforming landscape which combines and separates the Islands. I surrender to Maspalomas, to the sea at Lanzarote, to the mountain range of Anaga, to the organs of La Gomera, to Famara on the way into the port of La Estaca, to El Hierro, to the seas at Gran Tarajal, to Puerto de la Cruz, to all these seas; I have come in search of the centre of the earth, to recover the smells, the tastes, the landscapes of my childhood, of my infancy, the areas of the world where I lived and dreamed, and I find myself in front of the sea, and I know, as any islander truly knows, that this is the one landscape which summarises all the rest.
Igancio Aldecoa has the right words with which to finish a journey: ‘An island may perhaps be a parenthesis in the monotony of the sea, like a lake is a parenthesis in the monotony of the land.’
THE LONELINESS OF AN ISLAND, THE POWER OF THE SEA AS IT TRIES TO beat it down, the air, the wind, the land which is either fertile or sterile, the men and women who are both humble and proud. A sentimental journey surrounded by the sea, by the sun, by rain, by leaves which in the summer rot down into an ochre and sleeping land. The Canary Islands. A fragmented history in the Atlantic, which the doves that come and go from its ruined or pure shores see growing, all the way from the top of Mount Teide down to the shore where children learn to say ‘sea’ or ‘beach’ or ‘mother’.
At the end of a journey I feel as though I had disembarked from a ship, at dawn on some island.
An island is a parenthesis. But it is also a rock, and I cling to it like a child.
WHEN I STARTED WRITING THIS BOOK I REMEMBERED A PHRASE THAT THE Catalan writer Josep Pla put at the beginning of his beautiful book about Cadaqués, his beloved homeland. The old master said that there would certainly be a more beautiful book out there, ‘a more eminent one’, than one he was about to start, but that this was his book. This is what I wanted to do with this complicated journey around and to the depths of my own land. When I was finishing it I came across a couple of lines from a poem by the German poet and editor Michael Krüger, a friend of Peter Mayer, the editor who commissioned this book on the Islands from me. The lines run as follows, and I have put them as the epigraph to this volume: ‘Sometimes my childhood sends me | a postcard: Do you remember?’ Well, this is what the book is about, this book which I now bring to a close: the postcards sent to me by my childhood, and by life itself.
El Médano, Tenerife, 11 November 2011