Living water

Spray from the beach showers painted dancing rainbows around us. I pointed out to a fellow swimmer, Iván, the recent scars on my leg. ‘Oof! Mal,’ bad, he commented sympathetically. ‘They hurt.’

They do indeed, they hurt like little red-hot needles when it first happens. They’re almost worth suffering, though, for the satisfying gasps of horror when you show them to people. My exhibit consisted of two finger-length rows of bright red spots and another cluster of them covering an area the size of a hen’s egg, like the aftermath of a picnic by a herd of fleas.

‘I got stung as well,’ Iván commented, and showed me the scars on his left arm. The worst thing about having any kind of wound is that someone’s always got a better one. The rows of spots on Iván’s arm were bigger, brighter, more numerous and a sinister shade of purple.

We’d both been stung a couple of days before, when the wind changed from the benign alisios which blow from the north to the more treacherous southerlies, which can bring all kinds of trouble such as rain in winter or mists of African dust in summer and, on the beaches, heavier swells and bigger waves that roll in from the south.

And with those waves come, just occasionally, jellyfish. This is a very rare event - in many years we get none at all - but when they do float in it’s wise to climb out of the water, dry off and stay away until they’ve gone.

I didn’t spot the one that got me until too late. It happened just after I’d walked waist-deep into the sea and launched into my warm-up overarm stroke, when I felt something wrap itself around my leg. This could mean an encounter with a plastic bag which is disconcerting, but plastic bags don’t sting.

James Bond would have calmly diagnosed the problem, thrown a mini-grenade and swum away powerfully, leaving behind him a muffled whoomp! and a fountain of jelly and tentacles. I didn’t do that. I panicked, yelled, beat the water with both hands, struggled to my feet again and lurched backwards towards the beach.

As I retreated I glimpsed my attacker just beneath the surface - a translucent blob about the size of a ring doughnut, dull yellow-brown in colour with darker spots somewhere inside. It was pulsating gently like a ballet-dancing parachute.

This was an aguaviva, literally ‘living water’. A delightful name for a thoroughly nasty animal. It trails thin tendrils as it glides through the water, each tendril covered in little stingers. The shock of being stung is worse than the pain itself, which is not much greater than the burn you get from brushing against a nettle and it doesn’t last for long.

Other types of jellyfish can do more damage. When I announced proudly in Arturo’s café that I’d been stung by an aguaviva someone capped my story by saying two Portuguese men o’ war had been seen floating around in the marina. They’d heard this from a friend who had heard it from a yacht owner. La fragata portuguesa! Two of them! If you get stung by a portuguesa, well now, that’s really something you’d know all about… Yeah, yeah, okay. I’d only been stung by an aguaviva. Must try harder next time.

Too late now though, the southerly winds had died down to be replaced by the northerly alisios and all the jellyfish had drifted away, leaving the water as calm and clear as usual. For a day or two I swam in short bursts, raising my head regularly like a performing seal looking for buns, but now we’re all back to normal. Still got the scars, though, they linger for a long time. I took a photograph of them at their vivid best but nobody’s very interested.

NOTES

for the serious student

In case you’re worried, jellyfish are not a big problem in La Gomera. In thirty years of swimming off the beach in San Sebastián this was my first personal encounter.

However, they’re out there in the broad ocean, as they are worldwide. The aguaviva is one of the most common types in these waters. Its English name is the mauve stinger, which is less poetic but perhaps more helpful, and they come in a choice of colours from mauve through pink to a muddy brown like the one that stung me.

The other two common varieties float on the surface of the water rather than hiding sneakily below. One is called the velella, which derives from vela, sail, because it has a little triangular sail like an offcut from a sheet of celluloid. In English it’s a by-the-wind-sailor, a beautiful name for a blob of jelly.

Then there’s the fragata portuguesa, the Portuguese man o’ war, a suitably bellicose name for a creature with a nastier sting. It has a taller, inflated sail which looks vaguely obscene, like something invented for a sci-fi film about invading aliens. Beneath this is a complex body the size of a dinner plate, broadly purple in its overall colour scheme, and supporting a trail of tentacles that can stretch ten metres or more. They’re not really proper jellyfish at all if we’re being pedantic, they’re a clever assembly of several different organisms that cooperate for mutual benefit. Theirs, not ours.

The banana inspector

The Club Náutico, Nautical Club, one Saturday lunchtime. A youngish couple are perched on high wooden stools at the bar. They have discovered that this is a good time and place to get into conversation with locals of all varieties (the bar and restaurant are open to everyone) and they are keen to improve their Spanish.

An older man wanders in and heads towards the bar. He is dressed casually but smartly with neatly-pressed trousers and an open-necked shirt. The young man on the stool turns towards the newcomer and smiles with recognition: ‘Good morning! We met last year. You’re the Inspector de Plátanos, the Inspector of Bananas!’

The newcomer nods affably, shakes hands with the young couple and signals the barman to bring him a glass of red wine. Then he turns back to them looking a little puzzled. ‘I’m not an inspector of bananas,’ he tells them. ‘I’m a plumber.’

He’s a plumber. Un fontanero. The young foreigner attempts to explain in his Stage One Spanish that the previous year he and his wife had conversed in this very place, at this very bar, with a man of remarkably similar appearance who came over from Tenerife regularly to inspect shipments of Gomeran bananas. In an official capacity. He was an Inspector of Bananas! Whose job was to…

…inspect bananas. Etcetera.

While this awkward scene is resolving itself, let’s turn away for a moment to fill in the background. At that time, many years ago, bananas were the island’s most important export crop. On the quayside in San Sebastián stood a long, open-sided shelter beneath which cardboard boxes full of bananas would be stacked to await collection by the banana boat.

There is a touch of magic here. There were two banana boats, both of which were painted a bright
banana yellow. I don’t know whose idea that was but what a wonderful, unnecessary piece of commercial artistry! From the cliffs above the town you could watch one of these banana-coloured boats sliding into the harbour, confident in its identity and its role, confident in its importance for the island.

The ships were nicknamed los delfines amarillos, the yellow dolphins, because they were called the Delfín del Atlántico and the Delfín del Mediterráneo. On each trip they would sail around the Canary Islands picking up bananas then carry them northwards past Morocco, through the Straits of Gibraltar and along the Mediterranean coast of Spain to unload at Alicante, Valencia and Barcelona.

As well as the Inspector of Bananas (I’ll get back to him in a moment) we also got to know Manuel who had spent two decades as a chef on one of the banana boats. ‘Brilliant,’ he told us. ‘I saved all my wages because at sea there’s nothing to spend your money on.’ He took a very early retirement and invested his savings in an apartment block which has given him a comfortable income ever since, without having to work at all. However, if you ever want some novel ideas for cooking with bananas, just ask Manuel.

But to return to the Club Náutico: it was me of course, the embarrassed young man, and I never again accused anyone of being an inspector of bananas, but the friendly plumber turned out to be surprisingly knowledgeable about bananas. In fact all Gomerans know about bananas. They all eat them and they all have someone in the family who grows them.

Bananas are still one of the island’s major exports, some from small family farms but mostly from large plantations in the valleys. The bunches are cut while green and wrapped in blankets like big babies to be taken to a central warehouse in La Gomera. From there they are loaded into refrigerated containers, hauled by lorry to the port in San Sebastián and onto a ferry for transport to Tenerife and then onwards to mainland Spain and the rest of Europe in anonymous container ships. It’s a less charming system than the old one but perhaps more efficient.

The plumber - let’s call him José - was unusually knowledgeable about plumbing as well as bananas. He was one of a very small number who were fully qualified to do just about anything involving pipes, even gas pipes, and a year or two later he supervised the installation of our bottled-gas water heater and cooker.

A few days after completing the work he returned with an Inspector of Gas Installations, who came over regularly from Tenerife like the Inspector of Bananas. We watched as José performed the required pressure and leakage tests under the stern gaze of the Inspector. All went well and the Inspector issued a permit for us to buy our bottled gas, then went on to his other appointments around the island, chauffeured by José who would also do all the testing.

It’s a rule of life on this little island that everyone you meet can surprise you in one way or another. Perhaps it’s a rule of life everywhere, but here there’s more time to explore it.

NOTES

for the serious student

Bananas themselves are surprising. Did you know, for example, that those huge trees live for just a single season? They grow from a tiny green shoot to a three-metre tree in a year or so, produce a big bunch of bananas then die. All over. Banana production is handed over to the next generation, which is already beginning to sprout from around the base of the old tree. As with mushrooms, there’s more going on under the soil than appears at the surface, a big root system capable of sustaining a long series of generations.

And banana trees are not even trees really, they’re herbaceous plants. The trunk is just a tightly wrapped roll of leaves, like a cigar. At the top of this pseudo-trunk the leaves break free to spread themselves luxuriously under the blue sky while from their centre sprouts a flexible stalk which will bear the fruit. It starts with a very large and strangely sinister purple flower dangling at the tip. This the male. Higher up the same stalk female flowers then sprout in huge numbers, arranging themselves in a series of rings, and beneath each flower a banana gradually forms.

The end result is a big bunch of anything up to three or four hundred tightly-nested bananas weighing something like 50 kilos, which is more than most men would want to try and lift unaided. The Canary Island variety are a little kinder to their handlers, generally being smaller and lighter than their more showy West Indian cousins. Smaller and sweeter too, which is one reason they’re so popular.

Apparently you can also eat the big purple flowers as a delicacy. You deal with them in much the same way as artichokes, peeling off the tough outer petals to reveal the tender green petals beneath and the soft heart at the centre. Eat them raw in salads, stir-fried or boiled in a stew. I haven’t tried them and I’ve never yet seen a restaurant in La Gomera offering them on the menu. A big opportunity for one of our more adventurous chefs.

The piglet game

‘Falta! Falta!’

The guy next to me was yelling excitedly towards the arena, waving his fist. Falta means ‘foul’ as when a footballer kicks another’s ankle, or ‘fault’ as when a tennis player hits the ball after it’s bounced twice (they rarely kick each other’s ankles).

In this case the falta was because one competitor had pushed another out of the way while both were trying to grab a piglet.

I’m not sure that I should write about this, for fear of upsetting delicate sensibilities, or of misrepresenting this kindly island, but the fact is it used to be an annual event. Our village fiesta in the summer was an all-weekend affair in those days, with Saturday devoted mainly to feasting, music and all-night dancing while Sunday was for family fun. The kids bounced in bouncy castles and splashed in bouncy play pools while the adults stood around sipping beer. There were adult games too, such as the wheelbarrow race in which young men wheeled young women around the sports ground pursued by others trying to empty buckets of water over them.

The highlight of all this jollity came in the early afternoon, with la suelta del lechón. The release of the piglet, a game that attracted crowds of spectators from the town and the other villages around. The arena was a section of the riverbed (always dry in summer) smoothed out and spread with sand. A largish piglet, about the size of a spaniel, would be released into the arena and allowed to run free while two or three competitors tried to catch it.

The piglet was provided with shelters made from wooden pallets to hide behind, and its legs were thoroughly greased so that grabbing just one leg was unlikely to be enough. The winner was anyone who managed to lift it bodily from the ground and carry it around the arena. Winners of the various bouts would then compete in a final play-off. And this was a game worth playing, because the winner kept the piglet, donated by a local farmer.

This was country life, where animals were for people to use. Most families kept a pig. Every now and again a lorry would tour around the villages selling live piglets to be fattened up, much as other vendors came round selling fresh fish. (They still do.) Most families also kept chickens and often a couple of goats.

I have a vivid memory of a neighbour allowing two recently-born kids to scamper around the street, springing joyfully into the air like little toys on wind-up legs. ‘They’re happy to be alive,’ he commented, chuckling. He too was happy they were alive, because they’d fetch a good price a few weeks later from a local restaurant where fresh cabrito - young goat - was a prized delicacy. (It still is.)

One of the village’s pigs lived in a small enclosure we regularly cycled past, and it would always pop its head up, front trotters on the wall, to watch us with bright eyes and its ears pricked up expectantly. We greeted it with a friendly comment about the weather or the coming elections. Pigs are intelligent animals and worthy of respect.

We were, of course, deeply uncomfortable about watching la suelta del lechón, and we were not alone. Even in those days, when the onlookers ringed the arena three-deep and noisily cheered or reprimanded, it was obvious that many of them didn’t really like the spectacle. ‘Not a lot of fun for the piglet,’ a shopkeeper from the town commented, turning to lead his two youngsters back to the car. You could sense that this event would soon be history.

The last suelta took place quite a few years ago, with only a straggle of spectators and a handful of competitors. Many families still keep animals and chickens but they don’t play games with them. I’m not at all sorry that the piglet game has gone, but nobody quite knows what to put in its place. Like bullfighting, it is what it is, and there is no real substitute.

Bullfighting, by the way, has been banned throughout the Canary Islands since 1991, and I’m not sorry about that either.

How not to be a thief

Two lads were sort-of playing football. In a lazy, sporadic, hot-afternoon kind of way. They were on the village sports field, which is concrete but flat as a billiard table, smartly painted dark green and with white and yellow lines in all the right places.

One of the two players remained sitting on the ground with his back to a wall while the other stood a couple of metres away, kicking the ball gently towards his friend who then threw it back to him. The more energetic of the two was the lad sitting down, who would sometimes throw a bouncer, making the ball leap into the air just in front of his opponent’s foot.

The most interesting aspect of this uninspiring performance was that the ball they were using was a baby aguacate, an avocado.

Did you know that immature, freshly fallen avocados will bounce? I didn’t. It’s not something you’d want to test in normal circumstances. They do though, they bounce very well, almost as well as those brightly coloured little bouncy balls dispensed by machines in bars and cafes.

The avocado footballers were attending, like us, a village fiesta in honour of one of our saints (there are two). The religious celebration had taken place on the previous evening - a short mass in the chapel followed by a procession around the village - so today’s event was pure pleasure, with music from two of the island’s many traditional folk groups supported by a kiosk selling beer, wine and soft drinks and the prospect of a communal paella later in the afternoon.

However, this was the month of July and the sun was strong. The town council had provided a marquee with folding chairs for those who wished to listen to the music, but it was amplified as always to jumbo-jet volume so many of us simply cowered around the periphery in whatever shade we could find. Our two footballers continued playing but taking things nice and slowly.

Watching them, it occurred to me (not for the first time, not for the first time at all) how extraordinarily unbalanced is this world we live in. I’d recently read that New Zealanders had developed a huge appetite for avocados which local farmers were scarcely able to satisfy, leading to the entirely new crime of avocado theft. Organised gangs were creeping among the avocado trees at night to denude them of their fruit. Farmers faced seasonal ruin.

Here in La Gomera avocados grow so prolifically, on trees that grow so tall and broad, that the fruits can quite literally fall on your head. Many get squashed by passing vehicles.

So too do the oranges and the mangos in their seasons. But please be aware, reader, that a fallen fruit still belongs to somebody, no matter what the law may say about it. I know of a foreigner, a permanent resident on the island, who took to picking up fallen avocados and carrying them home in a plastic bag. He was seen the first time he did this, of course - there is always someone who will see anything you do - and he was at once labelled as a thief. In a society where honesty and trust are taken for granted and very rarely abused, such a label is with you for life. Anything you do thereafter, no matter how innocent, will be viewed with suspicion - what’s he up to?

You can pick up a fallen avocado if invited by the owner, naturally. And if you meet a neighbour walking back from their farm with a bucketful of avocados, oranges or mangos, you will be given an armful of them with no option for refusal.

You could also, I guess, play football with a fallen avocado without penalty, because football is second only to religion as a respected activity. Be careful, however, not to do what young Rubén did at our fiesta. When the two footballers lost control of their baby avocado, Rubén intercepted it, attempted a nifty return but trod on it instead. He walked away looking a bit crestfallen and trying to shake guacamole from his foot.

Notes for the serious student
Know your avocados! They are on sale all year round in the local shops and markets, but several varieties grow on the island itself and they appear at different times. First up are the ubiquitous pear-shaped kind with a slightly rough green skin, the sort you expect to get in your avocado-with-prawns starter anywhere in England.

They’re fine, but better still are the rounder kind that ripen later, with knobbly skin ranging in colour from dark green to black. The skin is tough and thick but the flesh is full of flavour. They’re my favourites.

Finally come the smooth-skinned variety, much like an overgrown pear in shape and colouring, and they can be huge. They’re perfectly edible but bland and watery.

Mangos too come in various guises. The first to ripen, typically around June or July, are the size of a plum, yellow in colour and with a darkish yellow flesh. They are delicious but extremely fibrous and will have you picking your teeth for hours. I suspect these are the closest to the wild fruit.

The later ones are called mangas rather than mangos in the Canary Islands, but they’re just various cultivars of mango. Ranging in size from hen’s egg to ostrich’s and in colour from green to red or purple, they are milder in flavour than the fibrous mangos but equally delicious if you catch them at the right moment.

A practical tip for dealing with mangos: to get at the flesh, take a sharp knife and slice the mango on either side of its flattish central stone, which you can find by looking for a slight hump in the roundness of the fruit. Then scoop the flesh from your slices with a teaspoon. You’ll get covered in mango whatever you do, but this is the least messy method.

The little dark one

A big day for the village. On one of her very rare trips around the island, she would pass through here as she returned to San Sebastián, and would pause to receive a civic reception by the villagers.

The reception was to be held in a car park beside the main road, extensively beautified with bamboo fencing, palm fronds and swathes of flowers. We arrived shortly before the appointed time but, as is habitual with the famous, she was a little late in arriving. The sun had already given up and was sinking behind the hills, turning the sky into a glorious son et lumière show. The soundtrack for the show came from a group of folk singers, strumming guitars and singing appropriately demure traditional songs.

Passing by the front-row seats we greeted our many neighbours who had probably been waiting there patiently for an hour or more - Gomerans are good at waiting patiently - and found a spot to lean against a wall.

Crowds had gathered not just from our village but from other villages around, and even from the town. This was an Event! A large police presence - well, two of them, Felipe and Fernando, but notably animated - attempted to keep the wandering villagers away from the main road, without much success.

The problem was that the car park itself was now fully occupied by a small stage garlanded with flowers, rows of seats for the elderly, the strumming folk group and a bar counter with beer fountain, leaving little room for the stream of cars still arriving, which therefore had to park along both sides of the main road.

Finally the two harrassed policemen introduced an impromptu one-way flow system which they controlled at each end with arm gestures and whistles. No-one in the meandering crowds got killed and although the line of vehicles queuing to get by on the main road grew steadily longer, many of them tooted their horns in cheerful support when they eventually passed through. Nobody would complain about a visit by La Morenita.

A sudden surge in mobile phone activity signalled that at last her cavalcade was approaching. She drew up in a kind of self-assembly Popemobile, a huge glass cabinet carried on the platform of a sparklingly clean pickup truck. Designated assistants from the village helped to extract La Morenita, perched on a golden plinth draped with red velvet and fresh flowers. They carried her with exquisite care to her place on the stage, where she was formally greeted with speeches from the attendant priest and a representative of the organising committee. A guitar duet played a classical piece for her, and some of the local children sang a song of praise, a verse each. They’ll remember this day, with pleasure I hope.

La Morenita, ‘the little dark one’, is an affectionate family name for the Virgen de Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the island’s patron saint. She normally resides safely at home in a little chapel by the sea, but today she is nearing the end of a journey that began nearly two months ago, when she was taken from her chapel, placed in a fishing boat and carried around the coast amid a large flotilla to land on the beach in San Sebastián. It happens only once every five years, the years of Las Lustrales, which is a fancy way of saying five years.

La Morenita is the guardian and protector of every town and every village on the island. She is hugely popular and revered. Hand-painted signs around our car park and on the main road shouted Gracias, Madre! Thank you, Mother! in huge letters.

Watching all this adoration, it was clear that there was something more than mere religion involved here. The Catholic religion is no longer the powerful force that it used to be in Spain, when attendance at Mass and events such as this was obligatory.

No, La Morenita represents something more. She represents the island, the people, the way of life. She is a rock-solid core to the island’s culture and a social glue that binds everyone together. I’m a little bit envious. Try as we might, we can never experience the sense of belonging that La Morenita provides to those who were born here.

Ah, well… We can still join in with the celebrations and enjoy the free paella and wine. After an excitement like this visit you need to calm down again slowly over some celebratory refreshments. Gomerans are good at celebratory refreshments.

Notes for the serious student
I touched on the subject of this five-year celebration in a previous story (A moment of madness, 18 April 2018) but left open the question of who exactly she is, this Virgen de Guadalupe.

Physically La Morenita is a very small statue. Really remarkably small, about the height of a wine bottle, but given stature by a tall crown and a splendidly elaborate plinth to stand on. Her holiness is emphasised by an aureole, a large gold circle like a ring of light behind her.

The Virgen de Guadalupe is venerated in many Catholic communities worldwide including Mexico, where she is also the patron saint. Her dark skin is undoubtedly due to her South American origins.

She seems to have arrived in La Gomera fairly early in the Spanish occupation, the imagen or statue having been carved in wood by an unknown sculptor sometime in the 16th century. She was awarded her own chapel on the coast in Puntallana, where it remains today, but she became the island’s patron only in the early nineteenth century when she took over from the Virgen del Buen Paso.

But then, does any of this really matter? In La Gomera, La Morenita is who she is, she’s always there, and once every five years we celebrate such certainty in a world of constant change.

The capture of Doris and Bill

Panting, Bill counts the last few steps out loud for dramatic effect: ‘Three hundred and sixty-three… three hundred and sixty-four… three hundred and sixty-five. Oof!’

He pauses to gather breath in the sunshine, mopping his forehead with an already damp shirtsleeve. Bill and Doris have just climbed the same number of steps as days in the year, which is a pleasing coincidence but perhaps unwise for an overweight pensioner. And perhaps only approximate, because the number depends on what you view as a step - there are stretches of roadway as well - but Bill started counting when they set off, behind the big church in San Sebastián, and now they’re at the top of the last flight of steps, standing on the road that continues uphill towards the Parador hotel.

‘I could do with a beer, Doris,’ says Bill, looking around hopefully. Got to be a bar somewhere near here, he’s thinking. There’s always a bar somewhere near, in Spain.

‘Let’s wait till we get to the Parador,’ his wife urges. The Parador hotel is why they’ve climbed the hill. Doris wants to have a look around and maybe have lunch there. They’ve been told it’s a splendid old building - well, a replica of a splendid old building - on a clifftop site with beautiful gardens overlooking the town, the harbour and dramatic Teide volcano across the water in Tenerife.

Doris and Bill are a success story for the island’s tourism development strategy, which includes enticing cruise ships to call here. Although the cruisers moor up only for a day, sometimes less, their passengers spend serious money (reputedly around 50 euros each) and often award La Gomera their highest satisfaction ratings. These two liked it so much on their previous brief visit (The clandestine emigrants, 21 December 2016) that they’ve come back for a fourteen-day holiday.

At the moment, however, Bill is still grumbling about being thirsty as they set off up the hill towards what may or may not be the Parador in the distance. They pass a house with a huge open garage occupying most of its frontage, from which float happy sounds of conversation, laughter and clattering cutlery. Intrigued, Doris pauses to peek inside.

‘Doris…’

‘It’s a party,’ she tells her husband. Bill retraces his steps to pull her away, but it’s already too late, they’ve been spotted. Doris is shyly waving her hand to someone inside, returning a greeting. ‘I think they’re inviting us in, Bill.’ The hand signal for come here is confusingly different from the British version, a palm-downwards flapping like a traffic cop pulling you in.

After a brief show of reluctance, they step into the cool interior of the garage, where a cheerful young man points to a beer bottle on the table and says in a fair attempt at English: ‘Beer? You want beer?’

‘Ooh, well…!’ says Bill. The young man retreats into the gloom at the back of the garage where a large white fridge is lurking in one corner. He returns with two opened beer bottles and glass tumblers. The tumblers are cold, the beer is colder, and Bill pours his and takes a swig without pausing. The young man politely pours some for Doris. ‘Today it’s hot!’ he observes accurately, smiling at Bill who is still mopping his forehead.

Meanwhile, a woman with a young child dangling from one hip is waving them towards two empty chairs beside a trestle table. The table runs the entire length of the garage from front to back, covered with a white paper tablecloth and dotted with plates and dishes full of black olives, green olives, chunks of white cheese, slices of ham, slices of chicken, baby squid bathed in tomato sauce, baby fish fried in batter and more, more, along with baskets of bread carved into hearty pieces from a barra, the Spanish version of a baguette.

Plates are placed in front of Doris and Bill, cutlery passed along the table and hands indicate that they are to help themselves from the feast on display. ‘Ooh, well…!’ says Bill again. He hasn’t yet learned to say ‘sí’ or ‘gracias’ or ‘How kind of you, I’d be delighted to take a little of the cheese’ but it doesn’t matter, all they both need to do is relax, smile and hold up their beer glasses as though offering a toast. ‘Salud!’, good health, agree the others around the table, raising their wine, beer or Coca Cola.

The young man who successfully captured them and is clearly proud of his achievement points to a lady seated at the far end of the table. ‘Eight,’ he tells them, holding up seven fingers then eight after doing a recount, and launches into a song that sounds exactly like Happy birthday to you except that the words are Spanish. ‘She’s eighty today,’ Doris interprets cleverly for Bill. The balloons bobbing in brightly-coloured bunches around the walls are a helpful clue.

‘Yes, yes, etty,’ shouts the young man, delighted. ‘And two,’ holding up two fingers. Everyone cheers and the birthday lady chuckles and nods. She’s obviously had her hair done specially for the occasion, carefully trimmed and curled and tinted to a warm, youthful chestnut, and she looks in fine form for eighty-two, apart from a couple of missing teeth when she smiles.

An hour later Bill and Doris are still in the garage, sipping red wine now and finishing platefuls of bacalao a la viscaína, salt cod in a spicy tomato sauce. At some point after that - who’s watching the clock? - they’re up on their feet and dancing, with each other, the birthday lady and practically everyone else, to an irresistible salsa rhythm from a large loudspeaker hitched to a laptop computer.

‘We haven’t been round the Parador, Bill,’ Doris reminds him severely during a brief pause for coffee and almond biscuits.

‘Tomorrow,’ promises Bill. ‘And we’ll come up by taxi.’

Notes for the serious student
Garages are tremendously important. In most families or extended families there's at least one member with a garage, ideally large enough for at least two cars. On a site of limited area the house itself may be perched on top of a garage occupying the entire ground floor.

The garage doesn’t have to be pretty or even finished, it just has to be big enough to accommodate a family party. Often a house will remain for many years hoisted on concrete columns, the ground floor garage to be finished when finances permit.

Garages that are further advanced may include a cooker and sink at the back and even a toilet, as well as the trestle tables and plastic chairs piled up neatly until the next party. In the final stages of evolution the walls are plastered and painted, the floor laid with big shiny tiles and the toilet cubicle expanded to include a shower. By now the car is usually left outside, which doesn’t matter much in this climate.

And sometimes, in the case of a really big garage, granny will get permanently installed there along with her furniture - an impromptu apartment for independence but with easy access to help from son or daughter. This is almost certainly an illicit use of a garage but nobody’s going to make a fuss about it.

A song of light and love

Nieves was even more restless than usual, moving from table to table, chair to chair. A familiar figure in the town’s cafe landscape, Nieves tends to disappear for long, unexplained intervals then reappears like a rose emerging to a new spring. But she is always restless.

‘What’s the problem, Nieves?’

‘Can’t find the right spot. I need a little sun but not too much.’

She came over to explain. ‘Six months ago,’ she told us with a finger dramatically raised, ‘I was bitten by a spider! Just here,’ she added, indicating a point halfway up one thigh. ‘A spider!’ she emphasised, and it sounds even more threatening in Spanish, araña, arr-AN-ya!

‘Poison. I was poisoned!’ She had nearly died from the spider bite, she claimed. No more than a centimetre from death. Her thumb and forefinger indicated a gap remorselessly closing: poof! - out like the flame of a candle.

Ever since then she had been cold from the inside. ‘From the inside! Frozen!’ This is a terrible thing to feel, we agreed, in perfect honesty. It’s one thing to feel a chill, the need for an extra woolly or jacket, and quite another to feel a deep-body cold that warns of something wrong.

Nieves clamped a hand around J’s wrist, and then mine. ‘You see?’ It was cold, no doubt about that. ‘So I need the sun to warm me up,’ she explained, ‘but not too much because it burns. Sol y sombra,’ sun and shade.

‘A little of Lorenzo but not too much!’ she amplified, chuckling.

Eh? Lorenzo?

Nieves looked surprised at our puzzlement. ‘Lorenzo! The sun! You don’t know?’

We didn’t know. The sun is called Lorenzo. ‘And the moon is Catalina,’ she added, nodding as though this were obvious. Clearly this needed further investigation, but Nieves was by then heading for a table that had just been vacated, with shade from a sun umbrella but warmth on her back.

Soon afterwards one of our most reliable sources of information passed by with a cheery wave on his way to the office. We lassoed him: ‘Enrique! A little question.’ He paused obediently because he quite enjoys our little questions which rarely rise above the level of Spanish for Dummies. The sun, he confirmed, is called Lorenzo. But no, he didn’t know why, it just is. You might say, for example ‘Como pega Lorenzo hoy!’ which means ‘How Lorenzo beats down today, how strong the sun is!’

And the moon, he added smiling, ‘is called Catalina! As every schoolkid knows.’ Then he broke into song, quite prettily, which translated goes:

The sun is called Lorenzo and the moon is Catalina
Catalina comes by night and Lorenzo comes by day
Lorenzo fell in love with the fair Catalina
And one morning asked if she would marry him…

And so on - it’s not a very exciting story. However, I have since read that the legend behind the song, which seems to have come originally from Asturias in the north of Spain, offers a little more. The problem these two lovers had was that their paths never crossed. Lorenzo, young and strong, worked by day to ensure that people had light to find their way around, while Catalina was a ballerina who danced daintily by night among the stars. When would they ever meet? How could they marry?

Ah, but then they realised - there’s one occasion when their paths cross. Sometimes they are able to snuggle together in the sky, Catalina hiding Lorenzo, and the world discreetly darkens while they share a brief kiss. The solar eclipse.

And so they married, and how lovely Catalina looked in her bride’s veil of twinkling stars!

A nice story and so far it seems to have been a good marriage, they still follow each other around and meet occasionally. The song is looking a bit suspect these days though - why isn’t Lorenzo the ballet dancer and Catalina doing a useful job of work instead of just looking pretty? But please don’t ban it, anyone - children need a little magic in the world, and so do I.

Notes for the serious student
First, the spider. I don’t know of anyone else who’s suffered seriously from a spider bite in La Gomera, there is nothing you’d call venomous, but perhaps Nieves has a particular allergy. Or it just makes a good story.

As for the song - charming as it is, it doesn’t explain why the sun is called Lorenzo. This is probably not worth a lifetime’s research but I did a little digital digging, and one explanation is that San Lorenzo, the Catholic saint, has his special day on the 10th of August, which is often on or near the hottest day of the year in Spain. (It’s true, I checked the tables).

Another explanation is that San Lorenzo was put to death brutally by being roasted on a grill, and it does seem that his name is used to describe a sun that hurts: ‘Como pega / pica / quema / torra!’ – ‘How it beats / stings / burns / roasts!’ Perhaps there’s room for both explanations, as they both fit quite well.

But what about Catalina as the moon? Trickier, but I found one suggestion. In Asturias where the song came from, specifically in the coastal town of Gijón, there is a hill (cerro) called Santa Catalina which overlooks a beach called Playa de San Lorenzo. There you are, job done!

Unless you prefer a more Catholic and painful interpretation. The legend of Santa Catalina says she was a young noblewoman in Alexandria who converted to Christianity and set about trying to convert everyone else, with an unwise degree of success. The emperor Maximinus failed to stop her and eventually condemned her to execution on a big wheel (you don’t want to know how that works). However, instead of killing her the wheel broke into little pieces - each one an arc, the shape of a crescent moon. This stretches things a bit far for me, but who knows?

Catalina is, by the way, the patron saint of young women, especially students. Who may perhaps study alone by night, with a bright moon shining through the window to keep them company…

Okay, I’ll stop.