San Juan and a revelation

Feli and Lali were perched on the wall side by side like twin Humpty Dumpties, watching the sea and an oddly murky moon climbing into the twilight. I touched them both on the shoulder. 'A bit dangerous, sitting here!' Their legs were dangling above a sheer drop of several metres to the beach. But Gomerans are good at heights, they've lived with precipitous drops all their lives. Our neighbours shuffled along the wall to make room for us: 'Sit down, sit down,' but we declined. Too high, too much smoke. 'We'll see you later.' They smiled and nodded tolerantly, accustomed to foreign eccentricity.

The smoke that stung the eyes and yellowed the moon came from the beach below, where party revellers were camped around half a dozen crackling bonfires. They were here in honour of San Juan and later there would be dancing, but as always we'd arrived far too early. It's difficult not to arrive early for Spanish festivities because they always start terribly late. Rule of thumb is to add an hour to the published start time before you even think of turning up, and you'll still be early. But Gomerans are good at waiting too, they are patient people, and an hour to wait is an hour to chat and joke and celebrate being Gomeran.

We retreated further from the beach to escape the worst of the smoke. Mixed with the fragrant and carcinogenic aroma of burning timber was the acrid stench of scorched meat from handheld barbecue forks. I'm not a big fan of bonfires but don't ever say that on San Juan's day.

Also down there on the beach was Leandro the loudspeaker man, plugging cables into black boxes and aiming vast black boomboxes menacingly around him, clearly determined to leave no refuge. Of the musicians there was no sign, no doubt because they were sensibly gathered in a distant bar to ease themselves into the mood.

The festival of San Juan Bautista, John the Baptist, is one of the many Catholic festivals that have appropriated a pagan equivalent. The bonfires were originally intended to inspire the sun at the midsummer solstice, its finest moment, to blaze on in glory rather than sinking towards winter. The strategy has never worked all that well but people live in hope, and the bonfires of San Juan still hold mysterious powers. If you jump over one it cleanses you of evil spirits, or something of the sort, and this forms an important part of the San Juan festivities in some towns. Like bull-running, its main function is for young men to demonstrate their fearlessness to other young men and the more naïve of young women. (Brighter ones say no way, José, no father of my children is going to leap over bonfires.) I have no idea how John the Baptist came to be involved with this, and I doubt if the Pope does either. Stop asking questions, just enjoy.

Around ten o'clock I tired of trying to get a good shot of the peek-a-boo moon and began to worry that the smoke might have ruined my camera. (It didn't.) Put away camera. We wandered up and down the track behind the beach wall, greeting people here and there. Most of those now arriving were hauling insulated food boxes the size of treasure chests, their kids following behind with six-packs of beer and cola. Down on the beach a few near-naked youths were still mucking about in the waves then scootling back to their bonfires to warm up. By now I was also worrying that the fog of smoke swirling around us would leave an indelible scent of burnt resin on my fleece jacket. (It did.)

Leandro the loudspeaker man had turned his attention to the microphones, darting around on the podium under a red spotlight like a performance art event. Adjusting the volumes. Hola? Hola, hola! Tap tap tap. Sí! No! Uno dos tres. No sign of any musicians yet.

Heart slowly sinking while the moon escaped into the clearer air above, I realised that not only had we arrived too early, we had arrived far, far too early. The dance was not going to happen until well after midnight. It would continue until six or seven in the morning, when everyone would wobble off to buy hot chocolate and churros.

This is entirely typical, not only in La Gomera but in the whole of Spain. Which leads me to a theory I've just developed. A revelation I attribute to the festivities of San Juan. How is it, do you suppose, that the Spanish in the fifteenth century managed to overrun such vast swathes of territory, including most of southern and central America, in the face of fierce opposition from so many millions of native warriors?

I think I know. Imagine the two opposing bands - invading Conquistadors and defending Indians - camped for the night on opposite sides of the valley. Oil lamps flickering, meat roasting, wine splashing into mugs. As the stars take hold, supper over, the natives settle down under their goatskins for a good night's sleep before tomorrow's bloodshed.

Just nodding off nicely when, over there on the other side, one of the foreign invaders starts twanging some strange white-devil instrument, the others join in singing and before long there's uproar, you can't hear the wind in the palms or the babble of the stream for the stamping and shouting and strumming carried pitilessly on the cool night air. They're still at it as the sun peeps over the hill, finding the Spaniards fired up and ready for anything, the natives bleary-eyed and knackered from sleep deprivation.

This, I now believe, is the secret of Spain's extraordinary success as a colonial adventurer. Its people do not need sleep. They can party all night while others fall senseless around them. San Juan, this year as other years, was honoured and serenaded without our help. Soon after eleven, with the bonfires burning merrily but still no musicians, we gave up and went home, vanquished like the Indians.

What's your favourite?

She approached us with a wide Canary Islands smile, a slim, attractive lady in a summer-bright dress. Much more ominous was the cloud of nine-year-olds swirling around her, each clutching a little piece of paper.

Friday evening. We're seated outside a café on the pedestrian main street, chilled rosado wine catching the last of the sunlight to paint glowing blobs on the table. Couples stroll, toddlers tumble, old folk sit on benches complaining about politicians, Real Madrid and their arthritis. Newly-arrived tourists trundle their suitcases far too fast, still anxious from the journey, they'll take a day or two to relax... We're just sitting here watching it all, nothing really, people doing what people do.

'Excuse me, are you English?' The youthful cloud has arrived, wafted towards us by their smiling leader. She speaks excellent English with only the mildest of accents. She's a teacher. We fear the worst.

We are, we admit, English. 'Ah, I thought so!' The children swirl closer, gathering around our table like pigeons spying peanuts. 'These children want to practise their English. Do you mind if they ask you a few little questions?'

'Err...'

'It won't take long. They're very easy questions!' She's got a lovely smile, and the kids are standing there meekly with their little pieces of paper... Oh okay, fire away then.

'Thank you very much!' She points to the first girl in line, over on our left - 'Yolanda!' The back of Yolanda's paper is decorated with mysterious squiggles in coloured crayon. The front of it holds her list of questions, which she's going to ask in what she believes to be English. We wait for her to select one.

Yolanda plunges in confidently: 'Do you like La Gomera?'

Got it! 'We love La Gomera!' J responds, and everyone smiles. Going well so far.

'What's your favourite colour?'

Tricky. J's favourite colour is not one of the rainbow seven. 'My favourite colour's blue,' I offer boringly, giving time for J to plump for the honest response: 'My favourite colour's turquoise.'

Teacher helps: 'Ah yes, that's turquesa.' See, not difficult. Yolanda nods and consults her paper, getting into her stride, but it's time to move on to Ricardo fidgeting beside her. Ricardo wears scruffy jeans and will undoubtedly want to get his eyebrows pierced someday soon. He wishes to know what we like for breakfast. Prompted by a wink from teacher we give him the works, full English, fried eggs and bacon, sausage, tomatoes and the rest... lots of good vocabulary in there, not that Spanish kids really need to learn 'baked beans'.

Ricardo scribbles something on his paper then goes for the big one. 'Do you like football?'

This is aimed directly at me. I haven't the remotest interest in football. And look, I'm not going to lie about it to these kids, they need to know the sad realities of life. 'Umm, not very much.'

Teacher chuckles nervously but it's okay, Ricardo interprets my response as too ridiculous to take seriously. He carefully articulates his follow-up: 'What's your favourite football team?

I grab a name from the fog: Arsenal. Ricardo looks bemused. Try again: Manchester United. That's more like it! He nods and writes it down. Every boy across the entire planet has heard of Manchester United.

There are about ten of these cheerful little interrogators and soon they know everything there is to know about us - favourite colours, favourite island, which fruit we like best, which pudding. It all reminds me of the long-gone days when, briefly, I taught children of this age in a primary school. Get them involved and they'll plunge into anything up to their armpits, they're very rewarding.

My vino rosado is getting warm and teacher wisely hurries things along so as not to drain our goodwill. After Sandra has rounded things off with only the tiniest hiccup - 'Do you like best... Do you like cats or dogs best?' - we're invited to visit them at school whenever we want. We exchange names, all of us. Not going to remember any of theirs for long but maybe they'll remember ours, greet us in the street one day soon, hello Janine, hello Peter, what's your favourite sandwich?

Arturo, the café proprietor, has been watching from the doorway. He grins as the teacher wafts her students away, waving. 'They gave you a hard time!' No they didn't, we rather enjoyed it. How often do you get the chance to spend ten minutes talking exclusively about yourself, with an attentive audience noting your every word? Short of being Prime Minister, this is as good as it gets.

The whistle

Raising her hands to her face, she stuck both forefingers into her mouth like Dracula fangs. Breathed in, blew out and emitted a shriek that could shatter a kidney stone.

'That's the whistle,' our host Eusebio explained superfluously. 'That's how you make the noise. First you learn how to do that, then you learn how to say things.'

He was talking about the famous whistling language, of course, the silbo gomero, that used to ring across the deep, wrinkled valleys of La Gomera. No wonder the Spanish conquistadors had such a bad time trying to crush these people, the whistle alone would be enough to send any sane soldier scuttling back to his troopship, chainmail ringing.

We were gathered in our neighbour's house in the village to celebrate the arrival of the new year, many years ago, when conversation turned to the silbo. It took a few glasses of wine to get Luzma loosened up enough to perform, being a little shy in front of these two foreigners, although she knew us well enough by then.

'Say something, Luzma,' Eusebio commanded. Luzma was okay now, the first whistle had relaxed her like a steam engine shedding pressure. She poked her fingers into her mouth again. This time her whistling was modulated, a tuneful warble like a blackbird singing into a Rolling Stones amplifier. When it finished our host Eusebio got to his feet, took the wine bottle from the table and topped up her glass. She warbled again, briefly.

'She was asking you to...'

'Refill her glass. Then she said, thank you Eusebio.'

Luzma was whistling again with an oddly mischievous expression. Eusebio listened, said 'Uff!' then sat down, shaking his head and pretending to be shocked. His wife Carmela explained, chuckling: 'She told him to drop his trousers to see what's inside.' Luzma cracked up with laughter. Country humour soon turns earthy.

Many of the earlier-generation Gomerans such as Luzma can still do the silbo and most can understand it. Sadly, you rarely hear it in the streets these days, although sometimes a guy will hail a friend across the town square: 'Juanito! Come and have a beer.'

As a tourist you're most likely to hear the whistle as a demonstration in a restaurant. That's fine, it's genuine enough, no play-acting or deceit, but there's an obvious risk that the silbo could turn into a cabaret act. It could forget its roots and become as false as the Disneyland flamenco dancing you can suffer in any Spanish tourist hotel.

I suppose even that would be better than the alternative, that it should fade and die, supplanted by the mobile phone. But the good news, the really good news, is that the Gomerans and the world in general realised in the nick of time what they'd got here and set about saving it. Schoolchildren now learn the silbo as part of their weekly curriculum. Even better, it has gained global recognition as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which will ensure funding and support although it sounds a bit posh for what Luzma does.

Now and again the council runs a competition for young whistlers from the local schools and colleges. And they are very, very impressive. If you don't believe the silbo is really a language, watching one of these competitions will convince you. The participants compete as teams of two, a whistler and a listener. The whistler is handed a slip of paper with a message typed on it. The messages are pulled at random from a box and the competitors have no idea what they are until they're handed the paper slip. And the messages are not about galleons on the horizon or goats falling into crevices, they're things like:

Romina, we're going to the beach this afternoon, come with us and bring your radio.
Rafael, tell Rubén I met his brother and he wants to borrow his bicycle tomorrow.

The listener can request – by whistling, of course – a repeat of anything they haven't understood, then they have to say aloud what the message was. Mostly they get it right, either completely or nearly. It's astonishing.

How does it work? There are learned books and research papers about this, but basically the silbo is a phonetic representation of the Spanish language. You can hear that in the sound of it, a warble that mimics the words and intonation of the spoken language. A skilled silbador, a whistler, can represent at least four of the spoken vowels individually and perhaps all five. The consonants are mostly doubled up, one sound for two or more consonants, but that's good enough to be perfectly intelligible.

And no, I can't do it. I would love to be able to whistle across the square 'Hey, Antonio, fancy a beer?' but so far I haven't even managed the carrier signal, the raw noise. A local expert who knows everything about Gomeran culture showed me how to whistle by mouth alone, no fingers: 'Roll your tongue into a tube – like this – then put it behind your teeth and...' There it was, the piercing blast.

If you really want an ear-splitter though, to reach across a ravine, you poke one knuckle into your mouth while the other hand cups around it to focus the sound. I've tried everything, one knuckle, two fingers, tongue rolled like a cigar, but all I produce is a damp hiss or a bat squeak. Maybe Gomerans are born with some special gadget behind their teeth.