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.

The mystery monument

At first it looked like a simple repair job by the town council. A couple of workmen had been assigned to relay some paving. We watched approvingly from a cafe table as they prised up the slabs - good idea! In this location especially we could do without raised edges, right at the crossing of pedestrian streets near San Sebastián’s main square.

By the following day, however, it was evident that this was more than routine maintenance. The two guys were digging a trench, surrounded protectively by the council’s smart plastic barriers. And a small pile of building blocks had been delivered.

This is one of the town’s prime sites, which used to be occupied by an ornate wooden kiosk selling newspapers and magazines, cigarettes, toys, sweets and rolls of film. The kiosk was a social centre for casual conversation, arguments about football and illicit reading of newspapers on their rack. Sadly, it suffered from woodworm, dry rot and old age and eventually had to be dismantled, its role being transferred to a proper shop on one of the pedestrian streets. A silent remnant lingers as faint, wiggly lines of brown sealant on the paving, outlining where the kiosk floor used to be.

But now the two workmen were apparently creating something new and significant. They laid a bundle of tubular plastic conduits in their trench, refilled it and built a low, square plinth on top. We watched as one of them cemented dark grey tiles around its periphery.

This was going to be some kind of monument, then. Plinth, monument. Obviously. Perhaps a statue or a sculpture. And four holes had been drilled in the paving around its periphery, suggesting concealed lighting - this new monument was important enough to be comprehensively illuminated.

We asked one of the workmen what it was going to be.

‘Colón,’ he responded succinctly. Ah, of course! We should have guessed. Cristóbal Colón, Christopher Columbus. The clue lay in the timing. We were now approaching the sixth of September which is Columbus Day on the island of La Gomera. In fact there’s a whole week of Columbus Days, the Jornadas Colombinas.

I’ve mentioned before the importance of Columbus in this island’s history (Columbus and the Countess, 13 September 2016) and the small bronze bust that sits proudly beside the house where he replenished his water barrels. The bust is politely described as modernista in style. It’s an interpretation rather than a portrait. Columbus is detectably human but with features distorted painfully sideways as though by a fierce hurricane or the irresistible flow of human history.

Would this new monument be something similar? Another gale-blown interpretation would be quite appropriate, it’s always windy on this particular corner. Or an abstract sculpture? Symbolising adventure, discovery, the urge to breach boundaries, sail new oceans, conquer new challenges!

The workmen said they hadn’t seen it, they’d just been told to build a plinth.

I missed the crucial next stage when they mounted the thing itself on its plinth but in any case it wouldn’t have helped because it remained closely wrapped in black plastic. The shape of this dark bundle, with a small, rounded top and a huge bulge at its midpoint, was strongly suggestive of a pregnant gorilla.

As launch day approached the pace of preparations heated up. There was a problem with one of the lights, the plinth needed grouting and the black plastic wrappings were trying to escape in the gusty winds.

On the day itself the winds continued to frolic as the monument’s creator (a young woman) and two council officials attempted to replace the black plastic wrappings by a much smarter cloak of red satin, without revealing what lay beneath. It ended up trussed by multiple cords within its gala day satin like a mad bishop constrained for transport.

A workman was still crouched in front of the plinth, fixing a commemorative plaque, as the shadows of the island’s president and the town’s mayor fell across him. He withdrew with seconds to spare before the speeches began.

The artist expressed her pleasure at being asked to participate in such an important event.

The mayor expressed his pleasure that attending the event were representatives from Huelva, the port in the south of Spain from which Columbus had departed for La Gomera.

The president expressed his pleasure that on the sixth of September in 1492 Cristóbal Colón had set off westwards across the Atlantic on his way to discover the New World, and the island from which he set sail was La Gomera. There is only one Isla Colombina, and this is it!

The artist, mayor and president then began tugging at the monument’s bindings to release it. The satin sheath came away without mishap and was handed to an assistant, where it fluttered like a flag as the audience broke into applause. Mainly from relief, I suspect, because the monument was instantly recognisable as a human being.

It’s rather a fine statue of Columbus, dignified but not boring, and it even includes a little symbolism to satisfy the intellectual. The admiral stands in front of a waist-high pedestal that supports a globe. His right hand rests on the globe as though taking possession of the world while his left hand holds a permit to do so from the Spanish Crown. I’m guessing about that, it’s just a scroll.

Most of all I like a little joke the artist has incorporated. Inspect the globe beneath the admiral’s hand more closely and you’ll see that the large continent on view is not Asia or Europe or Australia or even the most logical choice, the Americas. No, it’s an enhanced version of the island of La Gomera, and around it are the other six Canary Islands. A world occupied entirely by Canary Islands would be a big improvement in my opinion.

Notes for the serious student
Our new statue was sculpted by Cintia Machín, a young artist from Lanzarote. It looks like bronze with an attractive green patina, but is actually made of resin which is lighter to handle and presumably less costly. So far it has survived the many children who climb around the plinth and the many visitors who take selfies while embracing Christopher Columbus like a favourite uncle.

Given that his Spanish name is Colón I developed an instant theory that this is the root of the English word colony and its derivatives - colonise, colonial etc - which would make a very satisfying ending to this little account, but unfortunately it’s rubbish. It comes from the Latin colonus which means someone who farms the land, a settler.

Rumours of my death

The first indication of trouble was when I met Marta coming up the hill. She had to struggle for breath before she could get the words out, choked by… what was it? Excitement, fear, horror?

I was on my way down the hill, taking a bucket of cans and cartons to the recycling containers at the bottom of the hill. Marta was plodding upwards with a bucket of goat's milk.

'This thing about the foreigner!' she finally managed. 'Qué más triste, no? - isn't it terribly sad?'

'Which foreigner? What's sad?'

Marta frowned at such a silly question - how many foreigners are there in this village? 'Well, the other one of course, he who cycles like you.'

'Hans? What's sad about him?'

Astonished, Marta did a kind of whole-body gasp, making the milk dance in its bucket. 'You haven't heard? He's dead!'

Muerto. There's a dreadful resonance in that Spanish word. It takes longer to say than dead and conveys more roundly the finality, the despair and decay.

'Muerto? Hans?'

'Muerto!' He had been found, Marta told me, lying by the side of the road next to his bike. 'He does too much at his age! They took him to hospital in an ambulance but he died on the way.'

'Marta, this can't be…'

'He was there in the mortuary this morning. Ana told me. She saw the gates wide open and foreigners going in and out.' She shook her head dolefully. Another visitation by the Grim Reaper.

'He does too much,' she repeated. 'Did too much. Always in a hurry. At a certain age it's best to take things more easily.' She nodded sagely, looking me in the eye, weighing up my chances.

A moment later she stepped backwards to avoid a bike whooshing down the hill, its rider waving cheerily through the rush of air as he passed. Marta watched in silence as he weaved his way down the road and disappeared around the corner.

'Mi madre! - good heavens!' One hand covered her heart protectively as her eyebrows ascended to hide beneath her straw hat. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. Her expression was one of - well, I'm not going to say disappointment, that wouldn't be fair, but death is a story like no other and this one had just been squashed flat as a beetle. Marta needed a moment to come to terms with that before relief and a smile took over. 'Well, thank goodness! He's still alive!'

These stories get around, we agreed. You can never believe anything until you see it with your own eyes. Rumours! Never trust them. People tell you nonsense, idiocies, they'll tell you anything. Etc.

So that was that. However, this particular rumour possessed the quantum-world property of parallel realities. It existed in different versions. Later that day as I cycled past a pavement cafe, someone sitting at a table saw me, said something to his companion and pointed urgently towards me. I waved and cycled on.

In town, one of our village neighbours approaching on a pedestrian street glanced towards me and stopped suddenly motionless, as in that party game 'statues'. Then started forward again looking bewildered, grabbed my elbow and squeezed it. 'You're okay?'

'Hola, José. I'm fine. Perfecto.'

'Gracias a Dios! I'd heard - uff!' José exclaimed, wiping his forehead. 'So it wasn't you.' He patted my shoulder with evident relief, which was very touching but a little troubling. He told me the story I'd already heard from Marta: the foreigner, the bike, the ambulance.

I heard it several times more that day - local news flies faster than sparrows in a gale and death in particular is broadcast instantaneously. What's more I fitted the reported facts even better - male, foreign, bike rider and significantly older than Hans. At my age, I should take things more easily…

Over the next couple of weeks the rumour recast itself as a joke and I was regularly congratulated on still being alive. The sad foundation for the story was that a foreigner had indeed died, an elderly man who visited the island only occasionally, staying in his holiday home not far from our village. He had suffered a heart attack while cycling.

Finally the dust settled but it left me feeling a little strange, as though I'd narrowly survived a mortal challenge. As Mark Twain famously commented when something similar happened to him: 'The report of my death was an exaggeration'.

Notes for the serious student
While we're on this delicate topic: the ambulance service here is very efficient and anyone falling seriously off a bike is rapidly rescued. Visitors occasionally fall off footpaths too and if necessary are airlifted by helicopter, to be flown to the hospital in La Gomera or the big one in Tenerife.

The rumoured death of Mark Twain - whose real name was Samuel Clemens - came about because a cousin with the same surname fell gravely ill in London while the author was there on a speaking tour. News that an American called Clemens was on his deathbed in London reached a New York journal, which cabled for confirmation and thus provoked Mark Twain's immortal response. His cousin recovered and so did Mark Twain, but I'm sure it left him feeling a little strange.

The tragedy of the broken bowl

They were last seen a couple of years ago as refugees from a grim Lancashire winter, when their cruise ship called into San Sebastián. Now Doris and Bill are back in La Gomera, taking refuge from another grim Lancashire winter, and this time they have a full two weeks in which to warm up.

Today they've hired a car. The roads are very good and very safe but they take a long time to get anywhere because the island is shaped like a crumpled umbrella, all folds and creases. Its roads wind up, down and around the hills with happy disregard for the welfare of car gearboxes, which is great fun if, like Bill, you enjoy real driving.

'Let's stop here for a coffee and a cake,' suggests Doris, who hasn't so far managed to persuade her gleeful husband to pause at any of the miradores, viewpoints, on the way up. Successfully enticed, Bill pulls into the car park of a cafe-restaurant perched above a spectacular view.

They spend a few minutes taking photographs of the valley and the ridge beyond, a landscape like a craggy version of the Lake District except for the Canary palm trees scattered around in handfuls by some playful giant. Then our adventurers enter the cafe and order coffee along with two of the little ring-shaped cakes, rosquillas, that Bill spies on the counter. They seat themselves by a window overlooking the valley and Doris takes out her map. 'We're here,' she indicates. 'Degollada de Peraza.'

'Mmm,' agrees Bill. 'Saw the sign. These cakes are scrumptious.'

'Which means' - Doris continues, pausing to consult her pocket dictionary - 'good heavens!'

'What?'

'Degollar means to slit the throat. Behead.'

Bill swallows and licks his fingers. 'I'm going to have another one.'

'So Degollada de Peraza must be where Peraza got... Ooh!'

'His throat cut. Who's Peraza?'

Doris will find out, she enjoys finding out about things. It's a little confusing because the word degollada in this case just means a narrow pass where footpaths cross a mountain. Some hundred metres further along the road there's another spectacular view, this time on the other side of the road, with a path down to the village of La Laja deep in the valley and a series of reservoirs that supply farms and gardens with irrigation water.

However, the Peraza in question was indeed murdered here, or justly executed, depending on your point of view. He died because of a romantic encounter, and his death led to perhaps the most tragic event in Gomeran history.

The victim was a grandson of Hernán Peraza, a Castilian count whose troops invaded the island in the fifteenth century and attempted to subjugate the indigenous inhabitants, the guanches. Two of the island's four tribal regions stubbornly refused to surrender and finally Peraza gave up and agreed a peace pact with the tribal chieftains, sealed by drinking milk together from a clay bowl called a gánigo.

In this new spirit of cooperation, the Gomerans helped the Spaniards to build a defensive tower near the coast of San Sebastián. It was completed in 1450 and still stands today as the Torre del Conde, Tower of the Count, the oldest surviving monument in the Canary Islands.

Everything continued peacefully until 1488, by which time the old count had been succeeded as the island's governor by his grandson, Hernán Peraza the Younger. This one seems to have been a spoiled brat, a thoroughly unpleasant character who ruled as a feudal lord and tyrant, sowing huge resentment among the guanches.

Matters came to a head when the young Peraza launched a romantic affair with a guanche princess called Iballa who lived in a (surely very luxurious) cave near the cafe where Bill and Doris are now sitting.  The tribal elders pronounced this affair to be illegal by the terms of the original pact, which forbade any carnal relations between the Spaniards and the locals.

Ya se quebró el gánigo - the milk bowl was broken! The pact was over! They sent a warrior chief, Hautacuperche, to apprehend Peraza. Caught while visiting the princess in her cave, the young count tried to flee but Hautacuperche hurled his spear and killed him.

The count's newly widowed spouse, Beatríz de Bobadilla, ordered the local garrison to exact vengeance but the Gomerans not only repelled the attacks but proceeded to launch a big rebellion, which eventually saw Beatríz holed up in the Torre del Conde with her troops while Hautacuperche and his guanche warriors tried to flush them out. Unfortunately, the besieged Spaniards managed to kill Hautacuperche with a bolt from a crossbow, greatly demoralising the guanches, and on top of that Beatríz succeeded in sending word of her problem to the governor of Gran Canaria, who immediately despatched a two-hundred strong force to help.

The guanches were quickly overwhelmed and the Spaniards set about slaughtering as many men as they could lay hands on. Women and children were sold into slavery. This brutal suppression of the uprising saw the consolidation of Spanish rule in the island, and they've been here ever since.

Nobody seems to mind any more.

'Rebellion of 1488,' Doris later reads to Bill in their apartment, rummaging around the internet on her iPad. Bill watches her contentedly, glad she's happy, a glass of beer in his hand and a bag of rosquillas on the table by his side.

Notes for the serious student
Doris and Bill played a small role in a previous story, The clandestine emigrants (21 December 2016).

For the current story they involved me in some diligent research about Hernán Peraza the Younger and exactly what happened to him, but I'm still not sure. There are conflicting accounts. The juicier version says that the warrior chief Hautacuperche might have killed the young count out of self-interest because he had already picked the beautiful princess as a suitable spouse for himself. His mission had been not to execute Peraza but to haul him before the guanche council for them to pass judgement.

The other view is that by taking part in the milk-drinking ceremony with the guanches, the first count, Peraza the Elder, had effectively sealed a pact of brotherhood with the two tribal groups involved, so that he and his family became subject to the same cultural rules. One of these was a prohibition of sexual relations between members of the same tribe. This might have been a sensible way to avoid interbreeding but sounds a bit unlikely.

I think Peraza the Younger was killed simply because the guanches, a proud people, were not going to put up with being treated as serfs and slaves. Good for them, really, except that huge numbers of them died as a result.

Surprisingly, however, a study in 2011 found that the genome of present-day Gomerans still includes a large element of guanche, perhaps as much as 40% on average and up to 90% in some individuals. Today's exercise: spot the guanches!

But good luck with that because they are said to have been a handsome people, sometimes dark, sometimes blond and with splendid physiques, which of course perfectly describes most of our neighbours.

There is an impressive monument to Hautacuperche by one of the beaches in Valle Gran Rey, holding a broken bowl in his right hand.

Flat and wide or tall and thin

From the corridor we shuffled cautiously through a half-open door into a darkened room. Looked for somewhere to sit, aware of shadowy figures watching us from around the walls.

A young woman shifted sideways to leave two seats vacant.

'Gracias.'

'Nada.'

We sat down to wait along with our fellow patients. There was no noise except the occasional sound of footsteps approaching and retreating along the corridor, the click of a door, a distant loudspeaker summoning someone for examination.

We were there for J to have a routine eye check. Hospital waiting rooms are terrible places, forlorn, troubling, because everyone has something wrong with them and secretly fears for their future.

The anteroom for an ophthalmic consultation is especially terrible because everyone has had drops put into their eyes and is waiting in gloomy twilight for their pupils to expand, so the ophthalmologist can peer inside.

'Good hospital, this,' an elderly man remarked to his neighbour, breaking the silence. 'Now that it's finally open. Better than the old one.'

The great thing, sometimes, about the Spanish is that they never speak in hushed whispers. If you're going to say something, you say it as though you wish to be heard, not only by the person you're addressing but by anyone else who cares to take an interest. In cafes this open and sharing approach can raise the ambient noise to painful levels, but in our dark, silent chamber it was as though somebody had toggled a back-to-life switch to awaken a nest of dormant zombies. You could hear the creaking of chairs as people sat straighter, catch the glint of spectacles as they turned their heads.

'The old hospital was a disaster,' answered the second elderly man. 'Nowhere to sit, everyone crammed like sardines in the corridors. And you couldn't get through the entrance for people queuing at the reception desk.'

'That's right!' agreed the first. 'What kind of architect designs a building where you can't get through the main door?'

'Loco, crazy. This is different altogether. Big foyer. Glass doors that slide open for you. Modern.'

Murmurs of assent from around the room. 'Modern!'

'Mind you,' continued the second man, 'I don't understand why they built it flat.'

'Eh? Flat?'

'The whole building. Flat. Low and wide.' He demonstrated with a sweep of his hands, visible now that our eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. 'If they'd built it tall instead of flat it would have taken up less land.'

'It's got two floors.'

'Poof! That's what I mean. Flat. They could have gone up five, six, seven floors and taken up less good farmland.'

Somebody else chimed in: 'That's right, covered less land that could have been used for farming!'

'But it wasn't being used for farming, was it?' objected another patient. 'People used to dump old cars on this site. Supermarket trolleys, broken bikes, old floor tiles. The land hasn't been farmed for twenty years.'

'Apart from which,' offered somebody else, 'this hospital, being low and wide, fits in well with the terraces on the hills behind. You hardly notice it.'

'Who wants an invisible hospital? A tall, narrow one you'd be able to spot miles away, know where you're heading.'

The waiting room divided itself into those in favour of a wide, flat hospital and those who would have preferred a tall, thin one.

This is why no waiting room, cafe or public plaza on this island is ever silent for long. Canary islanders, like most of the Spanish population, will always find something to discuss. And they will always divide into two or more factions, because where can you go in a conversation if everyone agrees with everyone else? Unless, of course, the disagreement is with a common adversary such as the local council or the Spanish government, in which case the competition is to find innovative new infamies for everyone to agree about.

We have witnessed intense and heated discussions about - to take a few random examples - gas and electric water heaters, Movistar and Vodafone mobile phone networks, potatoes, yams and old coins. The old coins were the subject of an earlier post (Four bitches, 29 July 2016). The potato dispute we initiated by enquiring about the best variety for papas arrugadas (see Wrinkled potatoes, 25 May 2017).

Yams came up during a family feast when the argument was whether a lump of cooked yam, which looks like a section of freshly exhumed leg from a marshland burial, should be sliced lengthways or across. I can't remember which side won that argument.

Notes for the serious student

The new Hospital de La Gomera opened its doors in 2010 on the outskirts of the capital, San Sebastián. It's a very modern, high-tech building with clever external mesh screening that shades the sun and promotes natural ventilation, a flat roof with vegetation to provide natural climate control and skylights to funnel natural light into the interior. It's not particularly pretty but nobody expects a hospital to look pretty.

For many years after the new hospital opened, its predecessor, on a hill closer to the centre of town, remained empty while everyone searched for a way to reuse it. The problem was that its antiquated design was more suited to a Guantanamo-style penal centre than anything socially acceptable and finally it was demolished. Some day a senior citizen's residence and day centre will arise from the rubble.

A moment of madness

It's only April and already the excitement is growing in the air, the anticipation, like the scent of spring blossom that promises summer.

The ayuntamiento, the town council, has just announced with great ceremony the winning illustration for the poster. We'll have to wait until October for the event itself - a very special celebration that takes place only once in five years, an elaborate homage to the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of the island.

Seeing the poster design triggered memories of a strange - and at the time, very sad - story from this same event many years ago. The poster depicts the fleet of boats that will accompany the Virgin on her voyage around the coast, and it immediately made me think of Isabel and Isidro.

It was a few weeks after the celebration that Isidro sat himself at our café table: 'Con permiso?' May I?

'Of course! Que tal, how's things?'

'Mal,' he answered, briefly. Bad. He ordered a black coffee.

We had known Isidro and his wife Isabel for many years. They ran a small business (now long gone) where we began as customers and soon became friends. The last time we saw them they'd been seated with a friend of Isabel's at the front of a ferry, one of the scores of vessels large and small bobbing around the Virgin's boat on her big day. Isidro was strumming his guitar and the three of them were singing a stirring song in the patron saint's honour, swaying from side to side in happy unison.

Today he was looking much less happy. 'She's kicked me out,' he announced, flatly.

'Who's kicked you out?'

'Isabel. We've separated.'

I laughed, I'm afraid, and so did J. People joke about ditching their lifelong partner: 'Where's your wife?' 'I sold her last week.' It's the kind of silly tease you tell your grandchildren to make them giggle, or sometimes cry.

After a moment, seeing Isidro's expression, we both stopped laughing and J said, 'It's a joke?'

'No joke. I've moved out. Living apart.'

This was too ridiculous to believe. Minnie Mouse booting out Mickey? Popeye leaving Olive Oyl? Isidro and Isabel were inextricably part of each other.

It was the friend's fault, Isidro alleged. Verónica. She and Isabel had been close friends at school but as a young woman Verónica left the island in search of wider adventures. They kept in touch though and now Verónica was back, no longer young, and with nowhere to live. She moved in with Isabel and Isidro.

Her arrival was like dropping a firework cracker into an afternoon siesta. Verónica woke them up with a flash and a bang. Well, she woke her friend, anyway. The two women returned to girlhood, taking up where they'd left off several decades ago, launching themselves like parrakeets into a new spring. Isabel cast off her old, tired plumage and emerged in fresh and colourful display, her clothes of the latest season instead of whatever's in the wardrobe, her hair tinted and curled, her make-up bright with pink blushes and blue shadows. She became again a partygoer, late-night dancer, diner in restaurants with hilarious groups of friends.

Isidro wanted none of this and was quickly written off as a bore.

I don't know the painful details of the final weeks but the outcome was that Isidro moved out of the family home, leaving the two girls to enjoy their second youth alone. It turned out to be a fairly short one because Verónica had a heart attack, so for a while Isabel became a nursemaid. Eventually her friend recovered enough to take flight again, back to wherever she'd come from.

I would like to imagine the two of them, Isabel and Isidro, sitting quietly on a park bench in the shade of a palm tree, chewing over this episode: so what was that all about, then?

Fear of growing old, the feeling that life had crept slyly past while they were busy running the business, bring up the kids, doing the dusting, polishing the car? A cry for more, another chance, let's have a little more fun this time?

She and he would sit there in silence for a while, side by side, looking over the grass and the trees and the flowers, then one of them would take the other's hand and they would decide it had just been a moment of madness.

But no. They didn't get together again. After a few years of living alone Isidro found another partner and, a while later, so did Isabel. They continued attending the five-year October celebrations, of course, and I'm sure they'll be at this year's, although they're getting a bit old for the strumming and singing.

Notes for the serious student
Every year there is a celebration of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the Monday following the first Sunday in October. Once every five years the celebration expands into a huge series of events called the lustrales, a word that nowadays just means five-yearly celebrations. (Any more and we'll get drawn into discussing Latin and ancient Rome, which I'd be wiser to avoid.)

On Monday the eighth of October this year, the Virgin will be taken from her permanent home in a little chapel on the coast at Puntallana, loaded onto a gaily decorated fishing boat and carried southwards to San Sebastián, accompanied by a huge fleet of vessels from tiny dinghies and sailboats to luxury yachts, car ferries and naval patrol ships.

In the port of San Sebastián she will be transferred to the beach and into the town to be feted with singing, dancing and fireworks. This is called the Bajada, the landing, and most of the population of the island will be there to watch, along with many more from the other islands. It's a big do. There is even a dedicated website:

http://www.lustraleslagomera.es/

There is much more to be said about the Virgen de Guadalupe - for example, she's called affectionately La Morenita, the little dark-skinned lady. Why is she dark? But I think it had best wait for another time.

Screams in the night

The scene: a darkened bedroom with feeble moonlight filtering blue-grey through the closed shutters. In the double bed are two large, motionless lumps. The peacefully sleeping occupants of the house.

One of the lumps stirs uneasily then half raises its head, revealing tousled blonde hair. This is the wife. She appears to be listening to something. She elbows the lump next to her.

'Wha...?'

'I can hear something.'

'Wharra...?'

'I can hear something moving. Under the bed.'

Her husband sits up, frowning, and listens for a moment but hears nothing, unsurprisingly because he's unlikely to hear anything less than a foraging heffalump. One hand scrabbles on the bedside table to find the emergency mini-torch then he leans over to peer upside-down beneath the bed.

'Can't see anything.' He waves the torch around. 'Probably a lizard. Or a gecko. It'll go away.'

Detectably grumpy from being woken up for the sake of a lizard, husband heads for the bathroom. He has just closed the door when he hears a piercing scream from the bedroom, a prolonged shriek of pure terror. He rushes back, heart thumping, to find his wife clutching her hair.

'It was a mouse! It got tangled!' She's trawling desperately through the locks as though there might be other mice lurking.

'How do you know it was...'

'I saw it!' she cries. 'It ran across the bed and jumped off.'

Husband leaps backwards. He's in bare feet.

Ten minutes later he has found no trace of a mouse under the bed or anywhere else in the bedroom. It must have fled to some safe corner elsewhere. After a fright like that it will probably leave again the way it came in, whatever that was, he tells his wife reassuringly.

In the morning they find fresh mouse droppings on the kitchen worktop.

We recounted this incident to our neighbours Feli and Lali, who laughed uproariously. These are country folk for whom mice are part of life like flies, slugs and politicians. 'If it's still around tomorrow,' Feli said, 'I can lend you a ratonera, a mousetrap.'

The next day we found fresh droppings all around the house. No intention of leaving, then, and keen to get to know its new home. Feli produced his mousetrap, an evil steel device with jagged jaws that could disable a goat. 'Be a bit careful with this,' he warned. 'It's really for rats.'

That evening I placed a cube of cheese on the trigger spike and set the vicious trap very, very cautiously. In the small hours of the morning we were wakened buy a thunderous clunk! as the jaws sprung. I rushed upstairs to find the teeth clamped around nothing at all. Not even the cheese.

This trap was too big, we decided, so we purchased a couple of smaller ones, the classic Tom and Jerry design with a wooden base and a wire loop that snaps shut over the bait. I set both of them with little lumps of cheese and in the morning both had sprung, with the cheese gone but no mouse.

So, a clever little blighter, this one. Over morning coffee in Arturo's cafe we sought opinions about what to try next. Arturo had the answer at once. 'Yellow cheese is no good,' he explained patiently as though to rather slow children. 'No sirve, it won't work. It can just lift it off the spike.' We needed something stickier, like blue cheese, that the mouse would have to tug at.

'Gofio,' suggested his wife Marta from behind the counter. Maize flour. 'A little ball of gofio mixed with honey, that'll do it.' Gomerans have enormous faith in the magical powers of gofio.

One of our fellow customers joined in. 'Mice know all about mousetraps,' he told us. 'They've learned the tricks, you'll never catch it with a mousetrap. The only certain method is a card covered with glue. Put it on the floor with something tasty in the middle - cheese, a piece of apple, gofio with honey, doesn't matter. Mouse walks across the card to reach it, gets stuck fast. Ya está, you've got him.'

Okay, but then we've got a live mouse stuck to a card. What do we do with it?

'Hammer,' chuckled Arturo. 'Bam!'

'Bucket of water,' offered his customer.

'They're vegetarians,' Marta intervened, seeing our expressions. Ah, well, in that case... Heads shook.

'What you could do,' suggested Marta, 'is to put on rubber gloves and pick the mouse off the card with your fingers.'

'You'd leave its feet behind,' said Arturo.

By the time we left the cafe, the favoured solution was an empty paint can with its inner surface coated with oil or grease. Put some bait in the bottom. Mouse jumps in, can't get out again because it's too slippery.

I returned home giving myself a stern talking-to. Look, it's only a mouse. All this fuss, sticky cards, paint cans. Mousetraps must work, they've always worked.

That night I baited the trap with a little ball of honey-flavoured gofio, took a pair of pliers and adjusted the wire trigger to the most extreme sensitivity I dared. A mouse whisker would set it off.

It did. A clean kill.

At the inquest in the morning we viewed the corpse with growing dismay. Guilt. Such a little mouse. And rather sweet, and very pathetic with its legs splayed out and...

Well, enough of that. Feli and Lali consoled us with the observation that if we'd set it free a cat would soon have got it anyway.

Notes for the serious student
A mouse in the house is a rarity - in fact this was the only time, so far. There isn't much to be said about Gomeran mice, which are much like anyone else's, small and greyish or brownish. They can run fast but not always fast enough to escape the local cats, so are most often sighted as chewed remnants deposited outside someone's front door.

Lizards and geckoes are more frequent visitors. Gomeran lizards come in large and small models. The bigger one is the lagarto, about the size of a sausage when fully grown but a dark, murky grey in colour and frankly not very pretty. We've never had one in the house. The lagartija is smaller, attractively striped and thin enough to wriggle under doors. They are also a bit dim, tending to fall off walls and get trapped in post boxes and shower trays, where they will leave behind a thrashing tail when you try to rescue them.

Geckoes are even harder to catch because they have clever little suction-pad paws that can run up the side of a bucket. The Gomeran version - known locally as the pracan, pronounced placan by true Gomerans - is fairly small, quite cute and reassuringly content to pootle about on the ceiling most of the time. However, the babies are as clueless as the lizards and tend to get squashed in closing doorways and shutters, which is perhaps why there are not very many of them.

The barefoot immortals

As we settled ourselves outside a café, four of them were just getting up to leave, gathering together their rucksacks, carrier bags, guitars, two African drums, a sack of juggling clubs and a small rumpled dog on a rope.

The astonishing thing about hippies is that they are clearly immortal. They haven't aged in more than half a century, looking exactly the same now as they did in the 1960s except that the flowers in their hair have mostly withered and gone. Otherwise identical though - the same baggy pants, granny wrappings, long hair left to do its thing and, very often, bare feet.


Bare feet! These are a key component of the whole Back-to-Nature ethos. One of the leading proponents of barefootedness was the teenage singer Sandie Shaw (now a pensioner), whose little pink toes would pace the stage as she sang: 'I walk along the city streets you used to walk along with me...' In bare feet? No wonder he vanished. Who wants a girlfriend whose feet smell of old cigarette ends?

'Are you on your way to Valle Gran Rey?' we asked the departing hippies. Usually they're on their way to VGR because the myth persists that it's a hippie haven, which it really hasn't been for many decades, it's a working port and a tourist resort with smart hotels and apartments, sandy beaches and some excellent restaurants.

'We've just come from there,' one of the girls replied. She looked a bit glum.

'Didn't like it much this time,' added the other girl.

Oh, why?

It had changed, she complained, to nods of agreement from the others. 'Too many police around,' one of the guys contributed, perhaps unwisely, shaking his pony tail. We didn't ask why that might be a problem and anyway they were hurrying to catch the ferry to Tenerife, but one reason could be that they'd had difficulties in trying to set up camp.

There is emerging agreement among the island's town councils that something needs to be done about los hippies. Not that anyone is particularly against hippiedom in itself, Gomerans are tolerant of most kinds of normalities and eccentricities, but the problem is that today's hippies usually arrive with a limited budget that rules out staying in even a cheap pensión for any length of time, so they set up camp on a beach or in a field.

Not only is this illegal, it's also damaging to an island that prides itself on being unspoiled. People come here from all over the world to wander along paths and beaches where all they encounter is the natural environment, and an especially beautiful one at that. A fairy circle of hippies slapping drums, twanging guitars and chucking juggling sticks in the air is not what most visitors are seeking.

And being fair, probably the hippies themselves don't realise that the isolated beach or clearing where they're pitching their hoop tents and lighting camp fires is a designated Lugar de Interés Científico, a Site of Scientific Interest, to be cherished and protected. Much of the island is protected one way or another, not least the World Heritage laurel forest that covers 40 square kilometres.

In recent weeks the Guardia Civil, the national police who get tasked with this kind of thing, have evicted several groups of campers from around the island, in one case a colony of over a hundred individuals living on a remote beach. The Guardia do it gently - no charging with riot shields - they just warn the campers that what they're doing is not permitted and make sure they pack up and go.

It's a shame, but a small island has to choose what kind of haven it wants to be. Unfortunately for the world's everlasting hippies, this seems to be a Europe-wide trend. Being a hippie brings new challenges these days.

A local journalist recently offered a different angle on this phenomenon. The relationship between La Gomera and its hippies is a little deeper than it seems. Back in the sixties, the people who turned up to make a temporary home here (mostly young Germans and English) came with some kind of income, or at least prospects of earning one. They were simply looking for an unconventional lifestyle.

They were all labelled hippies when they arrived but some of them stayed, worked, set up home and renovated old houses. The most significant point, though, is that those early adventurers played a big role in putting La Gomera on the tourist map. In particular, the valley, port and beaches of Valle Gran Rey, which is now one of the island's principal tourist venues. There's a historical debt of gratitude, when viewed this way.

A personal one as well, in fact. It was a hippie who first told us about this island some thirty years ago, a girl on a coach in southern Spain. She spoke of ancient, abandoned cottages in the hills where it was possible to sleep for nothing. Maybe it was, in those distant days, if you could find space on the cottage floor between all the bare feet. Today, forget it, the abandoned cottages are either roofless, occupied by goats or exquisitely renovated as casas rurales, country cottages for visiting ramblers. Wearing boots.

Notes for the serious student
What is a hippie? Wikipedia tells me the word derives from hipster, which was an African American term for one of the in-crowd as we used to say then, people who were right up there with the latest trends. Cool. (That's another word that lives on from the 60s.) The root word, hip, is of uncertain origin.

Also uncertain is whether hippie should be spelt hippy, which fits better with standard English - one hippy, two hippies - but the snag is that hippy as an adjective means, well, lots of hip. Broad in the beam. One of the dafter songs of that era was 'Hippy hippy shake' which required dancers to shake their hips left and right. This was obviously addressed to people with hips and not hippies, who generally don't have hips because they eat only beans, carrots and green leafy vegetables. So I think that's pretty conclusive.

Gestures

I've referred several times in this blog to Spain's wonderful collection of hand and body signals. Everyone in the world uses gestures of some kind but the Spanish system almost merits World Heritage status.

Some of the signals are remarkably useful, some are entertaining, some are open to tragic misinterpretation. So in the interests of international peace and understanding, here are a few of the most important. Pictures would make everything easier but my sketching skills aren't up to it.

Waggling forefinger
Forefinger held vertically at head level, waggling from side to side. One of the most dangerous for risk of misunderstanding because it looks like an admonition: 'How dare you should say such a thing!' or even a warning: 'Any more of that and you'll be in deep trouble!' But it's neither of those, it's completely benign and used only to emphasise negation: 'There's no way I'm going to pay two euros for a tired cabbage!'

Waggling hand
Another one to learn as a priority. Hand extended palm-down, waving up and down like a traffic cop signalling you to stop or, if more urgent in appearance: 'Get down, there's an incoming missile!' But no, it means 'Come over here!'

Deep shrug
Both shoulders raised high as though trying to engulf the head. This is ubiquitous and, reinforced by the facial expression, is easy to interpret: 'Maybe, maybe not, who can tell?' Or more cynically, 'That's the way things are, sadly, but what can you do?'

Deep shrug with hands
An amplification of the deep shrug has both hands raised in front of the shrugging shoulders, palms outwards. The face will feign bewilderment with wide eyes, raised eyebrows and mouth downturned. Sometimes this truly indicates bewilderment, but more often it's deep scepticism: 'That's what they claim, and who am I to question it?'

Mouth zip
Lips closed, finger and thumb drawn from one side to the other as though closing a zip fastener: 'I'm saying nothing'. Typically employed to avoid a public scrap with your spouse who has just said something deliberately provocative.

Open arms
Like the Pope greeting the faithful - arms spread wide, hands held palm-upwards as though waiting to catch a very large balloon. This is a nice one, always friendly: 'Where have you been, cuanto tiempo, haven't seen you for ages.'

Slice of doom
Not a nice one at all. One hand is held at shoulder height, palm upwards and slicing from the wrist as though threatening a mortal blow with a sickle. This is most often seen in parents communicating with children: 'You stop that right now or I'll slaughter you.'

Horizontal hand waggle
Hand at waist height, palm down, fingers pointing forwards, thumb and forefinger slightly protruding and waggling like a small aircraft trying to land in a crosswind. This indicates maybe yes, maybe no: 'Is the sea still warm enough for swimming? Depends what you call warm...'

The benefit balance
Both hands extended in front of body, palm down, alternately rising and falling as though playing with old-fashioned weighing scales. Indicates a question of balance, weighing up costs and benefits – so, a rainy day is good for farmers but disastrous for visitors. If there's a winner there's a loser, the zero-sum choice.

Patting the poodles
Both hands moving up and down together as though slow-motion patting a pair of poodles. This is often exchanged by fellow sufferers queuing at the Post Office, an empathetic encouragement to keep calm, have patience, we're really in no hurry.

Five fingers down
Hand in front of chest, five fingers hanging downwards like weeping willow fronds while moving up and down: 'It's going to rain.'

Five fingers up
Hand in front of chest, five fingers pointing upwards while opening and closing: 'The place was packed, we were crammed in like sardines.'

Togetherness fingers
Hands held palm downwards with the forefingers extended in longitudinal contact. Signifies marriage, family connection, friendship or any other kind of relationship that might place people metaphorically side by side.

Ring finger interrogation
A friendly enquiry – forefinger pointing to a real or imaginary ring on the ring finger, accompanied by a questioning expression: 'Where's your husband / wife / partner?' This often reflects concern that the missing other half is ill at home or has ditched you for somebody richer.

Two-hand roll
Hands with forefinger extended, rolling over each other in front of the body. Normally a long-distance signal to or from a bartender: 'Same again.'

Clash of cymbals
Hands smacked together at a glancing angle like a showy cymbalist at the back of the orchestra. 'That's it, job done! Ya está!'

And, and, and...
There are many more gestures but most are self-explanatory. 'Give me a call,' for example, is a telephone handset comprising a thumb against the ear and forefinger pointing to the mouth. I once witnessed a wonderful variant of this, with a closed fist at the ear and the other hand briskly turning the handle of an Alexander Graham Bell wind-up telephone. Sadly I understood it at once, which places me squarely among the ancients.