Here's an example. We're sitting in a local restaurant, watching the chef sending discs of dough spinning into the air with the showmanship of a conjurer producing white rabbits. At the moment he's producing our frutos del mar (sea food) pizza and half the fun is seeing him do it.Seated at a nearby table is a wizened figure wearing a dilapidated blue blazer and an equally sad blue beret. The pizza already cooling in front of him looks dauntingly big but he is helping it down with an equally daunting glass of red wine. He is probably German, judging from his accent as he placed his order, although it's hard to be sure because he did so in an ancient, quavery whisper.
The young waiter, who is called Oscar and is the shape and size of a wine vat, delivers our pizza and we raise our glasses to greet its arrival. By chance the old man is raising his at the same time and, catching his eye, we toast each other's health: 'Salud!' As he replaces his glass it hits the edge of his plate and tips over, gushing a lake of wine across the table.
There can be nothing worse than this when you're eating alone. With a companion you can have a row about it - clumsy oaf! - to relieve the embarrassment, or join forces to mop it up with paper serviettes, or snap your fingers to summon assistance, thus turning disaster into a demonstration of your coolness and command. But alone you are a little island in a sea of unknown faces, all of them wondering how you'll cope.
The old man leans back in his seat, dismayed, watching the red lake spread across the tablecloth towards his lap. We both half-rise to see what we can do but are outpaced by young Oscar, who has a nifty turn of speed for a wine vat and arrives within seconds to murmur reassuring words to his distressed customer as he clears the table, gathers up the soggy tablecloth and whisks it away to the kitchen. Moments later he returns with a dry tablecloth, restores the old man's pizza and cutlery, pours a replacement glass of wine then smoothly retires as though nothing has happened.
A splendid demonstration of waiterly expertise. If you're going to get exasperated when one of your customers spills wine, forget it, become a bricklayer.
Here's another one. Sipping a morning coffee outside one of the town's many cafés we watch a young mother trying to get her baby back into its pushchair. The infant does not want to go, he's enjoying himself out there surrounded by admirers and is going to give his mum hell if she tries to remove him. By now he has passed the stage of whimpering protest and is heading towards screaming indignation.
Laura the waitress materialises from nowhere like a fairy godmother to seize the bawling baby from his mother's arms. She begins talking to him, not soothingly as I might have tried, not pleadingly or angrily like his flustered mother, but in quick-fire Spanish that leaves him open-mouthed with astonishment as she whisks him around to show him an ice-cream placard, a pop concert poster, a newspaper, a potted plant, a pigeon, a dog and a beer mat, the last of which she gives him to try biting as she plonks him firmly into his pushchair and straps him in. 'Bueno,' good, she tells his mother, 'he's fine now, you can take him home,' and waves cheerily at the stunned baby as he gets wheeled away.
You have to love children to be a camarero or camarera, waiter or waitress, in La Gomera, it's an obligatory qualification. Residents and visitors alike should be prepared for waiters of any gender to grab their offspring and carry them off to show their companions. Babies are delightedly tickled as they get passed around, toddlers are encouraged to explore behind the counter and will be lifted into the air to thump the cash till. When they are delivered safely back to you a few minutes later they will be happily clutching a packet of crisps or a lollipop on the house.
Then there are the skills that come only with training, experience and innate talent. How many ordinary folk could commit to memory an order from a table of six people for wines, beers, coffees, cokes and sandwiches, without falling to pieces as half of them change their minds? While simultaneously being polite to two nearby tables waving their arms to demand the bill, a third requiring more mayonnaise for their hamburgers and a fourth whose tiny treasure has just swiped all the glasses to the ground.
Laura could do that. She has now retired from waitressing after getting married and producing exquisitely well-behaved babies of her own. Oscar is still vat-shaped but has gone independent, running all-night kiosks at dances, which demands the additional quality of being able to stay on his feet from midnight to six in the morning. Both of them a tragic loss to the everyday world of bars and cafés, but fortunately there seems to be a healthy supply of similarly talented newcomers coming along.
Notes for the serious studentThere is a local training college, an instituto de formación, where you can learn all you need to know about catering whether your goal is to be a cook, a waiter or a high-flying manager. But many of the skills these excellent people display are acquired simply by living in a café culture, where eating and drinking outside the home are a normal part of everyday life.
There is also the essential point that being a camarero/a is not just something students do to pay for the gigs and pills, it's a respected profession. Some do it for a while then move on to a better paid industry such as fashion or construction, but others stay in the job for life. It's not at all unusual to be served by an elderly waiter or waitress in Spain, as in many other countries, and they do their work with pride and astonishing dexterity. Try weaving your way between closely-packed tables while balancing a tray full of drinks high in the air on the outspread fingers of one hand. Try carrying three loaded plates on each arm and depositing each carefully on the table without tipping octopus salad into someone's lap. These are rare and valuable skills, as Angela Merkel found out in 2012 when a nervous waiter placed in front of her a glass of cold beer while pouring the other five down her back.
