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.