The third chair

Two middle-aged women stood uncertainly in the outdoor terraza of the restaurant, each pointing to different tables. They finally selected one in the corner next to us but then changed their minds, something wrong with it, headed towards another, changed their minds again and returned to the corner table but called a waiter to turn it diagonally and add a third chair. I've no idea why but they were right, it looked better.

When they'd settled, I commented lightly 'Ahora todo perfecto!', everything's perfect now, which established that we were Spanish-speaking foreigners and probably to be avoided. The two women smiled politely and nodded as they picked up their menu cards.

I was wondering about that third chair. If it were meant for another female companion, this could be a girlie night out and likely to become raucous, although at least they wouldn't be shouting about football. The waiter brought them both an elegant glass of beer.

A minute or two later the missing third element arrived in the form of a husband. He approved the ladies' choice of table, nodded affably towards us, sat down then leaned over towards me and said 'Usted uno, yo dos!', you one, me two, smiling broadly and pointing at the women.

I should, of course, have made some cutting remark along the lines of 'Goodness gracious, you expect me to laugh at a grotesquely macho comment such as that, which has absolutely no place in modern society and least of all in Spain where women are treated with the greatest respect and… etc etc,' but I didn't, I pulled a stricken face and said 'Oh, that's not fair at all, I'm off right now to find another.' No point in spoiling someone else's evening. The women probably exchanged eye-rolls but I didn't notice because the new arrival was already engaging us in conversation, clearly out to enjoy himself, and he needed an audience.

He asked where we were from. England originally but now La Gomera, we told him, at which his wife clapped her hands delightedly. She was also from Gomera! We spent a minute or two discussing this happy coincidence in more detail until hubby interrupted to say he wasn't from Gomera, he was from La Palma. I assured him that being from La Palma was almost as good as being from Gomera.

But in fact, he continued, he had spent most of his life in Venezuela. Oh, right. It's difficult to enthuse about Venezuela these days. He didn't try to defend it, running a finger across his throat to illustrate the quality of life there, and we all agreed that it was much better here in the Canaries, whichever island you choose.

He felt this needed a toast and raised a glass of what I suspect was a very expensive red wine that the waitress had just poured for him. 'Le invito!' he offered, have one on me, but unfortunately I already had a full glass of the house red. We all clinked glasses anyway: 'Salud!'

This little incident took place on a brief visit to Santa Cruz in Tenerife, but it illustrates three important features of Canarian life. One, eating out is much more common among ordinary folk here than in Britain, partly because it's cheaper but also because, like all the Spanish, Canary Islanders are brought up to view communal eating as normal and everyday, whether it's breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Feature number two, there are Gomerans everywhere if you look for them. Number three, there are Venezuelans everywhere as well.

Numbers two and three are directly attributable to a mass exodus of restless young Canarians during the mid-1900s, seeking a better way of life than subsistence agriculture. The Canary Islands were largely neglected by Spanish governments on the mainland, especially during the 36 years of General Franco's dictatorship from 1939 to 1975. Many Gomerans tried their luck in the much larger island of Tenerife, while many others headed across the Atlantic to Venezuela.

There is still a steady drift of young people across the 30 kilometre channel that separates Gomera from Tenerife, simply because there are more job opportunities there. We've found Gomerans working as taxi drivers, waiters, shop assistants and hotel receptionists, while others we know have left for posts in the social services, civil administration, finance and all the other things people do.

I don't know of any who have emigrated to Venezuela lately, however. The flow is now in the opposite direction. Several of our more elderly neighbours had brothers or sisters in Venezuela who decided years ago to cut their losses and come back home. There are also Venezuelan immigrants here from the indigenous population. Many already had family links with the Canaries and in any case they speak Spanish. There is a particularly strong feeling of kinship with Venezuela but we also know Gomeran residents from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and, especially, from Cuba. There are lots of those, even more than Venezuelans. Cuba lies over 6,000 kilometres across the Atlantic but there are still many close family ties.

There is even - I happen to know - a Canary Islands association in Havana, the Asociación Canaria de Cuba. We were told about it during a visit to Cuba a few years ago and called in, of course, to say hello one afternoon. It has its own clubhouse complete with cafe and bar, in which we found a good sprinkling of members sitting around chatting or playing dominoes. We were greeted by a small, plump, bald and utterly delightful president who served us beer then spent the next half hour chatting. Canary Islanders are reliably sociable wherever you come across them.

-------------- NOTES --------------

I touched on the topic of emigration from the Canaries in a story a few years ago, The clandestine emigrants, December 2016.

The current population of Gomera is predominantly the result of a violent immigration, the Spanish conquest of around 1450, when many of the original guanche natives died. The numbers of inhabitants slowly increased after that, with a census in 1787 recording nearly 7,000 while a century later there were just over 15,000. During the 30 years from 1900 to 1930 the population climbed steeply to 26,000 and reached a peak of 30,747 in 1960, supported largely by fruit exports to the other islands and mainland Spain.

From that high point, emigration to Tenerife and South America (especially Venezuela) brought a decline and by 1990 there were scarcely 15,000 inhabitants. When we two arrived not long after that you could sense the decline by the large numbers of abandoned houses both in the towns and in the countryside.

However, since then agricultural exports have picked up again, tourism has taken off, emigration has slowed to nothing more than a normal healthy trickle and young couples continue producing babies, although typically just one or two rather than the 10 or more of their grandparents. The island's population is now around 21,500 of which some 9,000 live in San Sebastián. In England that would count as more of a village than a town, but here it's our island capital and holds its head high.

For the figures quoted here I'm indebted to an article by Pablo Jerez Sabater in the online magazine Canarias Ahora dated 7 January 2015.

The clandestine emigrants

On Friday 25 November 2016 one of the world's best-known heroes or villains, depending on your standpoint, finally succumbed to the enemy that nobody ever defeats. Fidel Castro was cremated the following day and the island of Cuba entered a nine-day period of mourning. Followed by, we can be sure, a much more prolonged feeling of strangeness, a sensation that the world has changed.

So what has this got to do with La Gomera?

Let's address that question with irritating obliqueness by following Doris and Bill as they make their way down the gangway from their cruise ship, one sunny morning in the port of San Sebastián. They are refugees from a grim Lancashire winter, taking a week's sunshine cruise around the Canary Islands, and this is their day in La Gomera.

Ripe for adventure, or at least for something vaguely interesting, Bill and Doris stroll hand in hand past the neat rows of yachts in the marina. As they approach the town they pass a flower bed where a small metal sculpture lurks apologetically beneath a giant cactus.

Doris pauses to look at it. 'It's a yacht,' Bill tells her and tries to walk on but Doris, who was once a teacher and likes to know about things, has caught a whiff of history. 'It's bigger than a yacht, Bill. It's an old sailing ship.'

Bill grunts and bends down to look at the bronze plaque beneath the ship. 'Telly-macko,' he reads. Shrugging, he takes Doris's hand again and pulls her onwards.

Well, they did better than most - at least they noticed it. But they've just dismissed an extraordinary and highly emblematic event in Gomeran history. This humble sculpture commemorates the sailing of the Telémaco (Tell-AY-mako) in August 1950, the last sailing ship to depart from La Gomera carrying clandestine emigrants across the Atlantic to South America.

Why clandestine? Because in 1950 General Franco, the Generalissimo, was still very much in control of everything that happened in Spain and strongly discouraged emigration, even from islands such as the Canaries which he had allowed to descend into deep poverty and hardship.

The Telémaco passengers had a terrible time on their voyage, but some of them eventually managed to settle in Venezuela. Many other such fly-by-night escapees from the Canary Islands fetched up on the island of Cuba, and many of them stayed there. So there's our first clue to the Castro conundrum.

Meanwhile, Doris and Bill have just happened upon another highly significant monument as they stroll along the seafront. This time it's a large lump of rusted metal perched precariously on a marble-clad plinth. Bill is a little more intrigued here, walks around the monument, peers through the central hole as though it were a telescope or Henry Moore sculpture.

He stands back to squint at it for a moment then announces: 'Propeller!' Correct, got it in one. 'It's the shaft of a ship's propeller. Must've been quite a big boat.'

There is a bronze plaque on the plinth but the embossed text is difficult to read and anyway it's in Spanish, so most visitors never find out what this thing is. Sadly, it's all that is left of the proud Cantabria, a transatlantic steamship whose captain took the bold decision, on the fifth of March 1862, to beach his ship in the harbour of San Sebastián after it suffered mechanical problems and a dangerous leak.

The Cantabria was bound for Cuba with a battalion of Spanish troops. At that time Cuba was still a Spanish colony but showing increasing signs of not wanting not to be, and Spain was reacting with a brutal campaign of suppression.

In short - what these two humble monuments illustrate is the closely interwoven histories of the Americas and the Canary Islands. There are large numbers of Latin Americans today with Canary Island blood in their veins, and in recent years many have returned to the Canaries, ironically, in search of work and a better way of life. It's by no means a flood, nothing to merit a Donald Trump We're gonna build a wall! - but here in La Gomera I know of families from Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Cuba.

Especially Cubans. There are quite a few of those. They fit here perfectly, their culture is much the same, hardworking but friendly and cheerful. I asked a few of them in San Sebastián how they felt about the demise of Fidel Castro, their revolutionary Comandante and head of state for the last half century and more.

Most were neutral - 'He was an old man, death comes to all of us, it won't change anything very much' - but Yani, a waitress in one of our favourite cafés, confessed to feeling triste, sad. Maybe she was sad about Fidel, or maybe the news of his passing reminded her of family, friends and her earlier life in Cuba.

Yani is settled here now, with her own family, but like all our Cubans she goes home now and again for a holiday. Mostly they come back complaining about the heat. There's really nowhere better to live than La Gomera, even if you're Cuban.

Notes for the serious student
The Telémaco was heading for Venezuela, a voyage of nearly 6,000 kilometres. A small cargo schooner, it set sail on the ninth of August 1950 with 170 men and one woman crammed like sardines on the deck and below. They left at night, without permits, without papers, and with nothing but hope to greet them when they arrived. Skippered by a local fisherman who had never before ventured out of sight of land, because the professional pilot who was booked to do the job took one look at the ship and fled.

Not long into the voyage they suffered two great storms, followed by continuing heavy seas that washed overboard most of their provisions, including the water barrels. They were saved from almost certain death from starvation and dehydration by a Spanish oil tanker whose captain gave them water and rice. Four terrible weeks after setting off, they arrived at the island of Martinique where the inhabitants took them in for a few days, revived them with food and kindness and gave them provisions for the rest of their journey.

Six days' more sailing took them to the port of La Guaira in Venezuela, where the authorities immediately sifted out the fourteen voyagers they considered responsible for this adventure, imprisoned them in Caracas for 45 days then sent them back to Tenerife.

Some of the other would-be emigrants chanced their luck by slipping away illegally into the hinterland, where they generally had a hard time, while the rest were eventually given immigration papers and found work of one kind or another in Venezuela.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this story is that ten days into their voyage, while they were fighting the waves, Franco lifted his ban on emigration. If they'd waited a couple more weeks they could have done it all so much more easily.