Doña Lucinda's fingernails

Crossing the church square she caught the eye like a tropical bird wafted in by the wind. We intercepted her and, giggling with girlish excitement, she told us she was getting ready to go on a trip!

Already well into her eighties, I would guess, Doña Lucinda was my all-time model for the art of growing old gracefully. Her face had never seen a pot of anti-wrinkle cream in its life and her entire history was written there, engraved in cracks and canyons by some heavy-handed gnome. But she was beautiful. Deepest of all were the smile lines. She would break into a sunshine smile at the least provocation, in fact she rarely stopped.

We first got to know her on occasional evenings in one of San Sebastián's oldest restaurants, where she would sit at the bar sipping delicately from a wine glass while deciding what to order for supper. It was she, I'm sure (although this was many years ago) who opened the conversation, wanting to know who we were, where we were from, why we were here, what we did for a living. She was interested in everybody and everything.

In contrast to our casual clothing (what do you mean, scruffy?!) she was always dressed impeccably. Weirdly, but impeccably. With artistic vision, bohemian perhaps - not the granny rags of the hippies who sometimes pass this way but more an adventurous dignity. A colourful, swirling dress, cascading necklaces, jangly bracelets and dangly earrings that danced when she laughed. She shone rainbows into the shadows.

During our first conversation with her, perched as bright as a cockatoo on a bar stool with her silver hair gathered into a cheeky topknot, she explained that she was lodging here in San Sebastián on doctor's orders, in a small hotel.

Her home town was Hermigua, further to the north, where she lived alone (but with an interesting history, I suspect) in an old farmhouse down among the banana trees in the valley. Although splendidly cool in summer, her house tended to dampness in the winter and as the days grew shorter Doña Lucinda would grow wheezier.

'So my doctor sends me away to San Sebastián!' she chuckled, as though she'd been banished for chronic naughtiness. 'It's drier here, and warmer.' Just as in earlier days, wealthy TB sufferers in Europe would be despatched to the crisper airs of Switzerland.

The restaurant's owner was also from Hermigua and Lucinda saw the place as a refugee's home from home. The young barman and waiter, Jaime, had no links with Hermigua but quickly succumbed to the old lady's irresistible cuteness and treated her with enormous kindness. 'Just a little plate of potaje de berros, watercress soup,' she would instruct him. 'And some bread, not much, I'm not very hungry.' He would guide her to a table in the corner and deliver a plate of soup not too hot and not too cold, together with a ready-sliced bread roll.

So, we were already old friends with Doña Lucinda by the time we met her that morning in the church square. 'I've signed up for the trip to Mallorca!' she told us. 'With the group. I've never been to Mallorca before. I'm so looking forward to it. Look, I've already had my uñitas done, my fingernails!' She showed us her fingers tipped with vivid crimson, expertly applied in a local salon. Fingernails are uñas but, as always in Spanish, the -itas adds warmth - these little fingernails were something special, these were holiday fingernails!

The holiday was a free two-week excursion to Mallorca provided by the island council for Gomera's senior citizens. These were people, reasoned the councillors, who had worked all their lives, often in great hardship, and now deserved an occasional treat. (The council still organises annual holidays for pensioners but, times being as they are, at subsidised cost rather than free.)

We admired Lucinda's sparkling uñitas, wished her a wonderful holiday and kissed her goodbye.

A few weeks later we found her seated at the restaurant bar once again, sipping white wine while deliberating on her supper. How had the holiday gone?

'I had a wonderful time!' she laughed. 'They cared for me very well, really very well indeed.'

'Cared for you?

'In the hotel. I got a terrible gripe, 'flu, on the second day and spent the rest of the time in bed.'

'Oh, no. That's not fair.' This is the kind of ridiculous injustice that so often hits those who least deserve it. I mean, why don't things like that happen to...

But no, enough. Doña Lucinda herself was far above such whimpering. She waved a hand as though wafting away a fly. 'It's not fair but it's life,' she said. 'Anyway I had a trip in an aeroplane, and I had a ride around town in a horse-drawn carriage the first day, before I got ill. That was fun! I had a lot of fun.' She giggled her infectious giggle. 'You should go to Mallorca one day,' she advised. 'They're lovely people, the mallorquines.'

 I'm quite sure they are, but then everyone's lovely when you're Doña Lucinda.


Notes for the serious student
Why was this delightful old lady known universally by the honorific doña? Most people of her age are addressed simply by their first name or, if you wish to show respect, as señora. There are various ways she could have earned her upgrading to doña (see The three dons, 24 May 2016) but in Lucinda's case, none of them really fitted. Simply, there was no question of her being anything else but doña. She was far too charming and full of character, full of life, to join the humdrum masses of señoras.

The Three Dons

Don Carlos, Don Fernando and Don Salvador. They often played dominoes together, seated around a table in the shade of a palm tree. Or chatted over a glass of wine in a bar, snacking on jamón serrano, the famous Spanish cured ham which comes in expensive and distressingly thin slices.

Don and doña are terms of respect in Spanish, courtesy titles, much superior to the plain old señor and señora which simply mean Mr and Mrs. You can ascend to the title don or doña in various ways. The simplest is to open an account with an electricity company, because their monthly bills will address you thus. But this is just commercial toadying and not to be taken seriously.

More convincing is another common method, which is to become very old - or even more reliably, to die, when the obituaries in the local newspaper will award you the title posthumously.

Far more appealing as an approach, although much less easy to achieve, is to have lots of money. Our Three Dons all had lots of money.

We got to know Don Carlos on the beach. While we swam he walked briskly up and down the tideline in the sunshine, a dignified figure in bathing shorts and a big, prosperous belly. From initially nodding cheerfully to each other we progressed to pausing for a word or two, and gradually we learned a little more about him. Born on the island, he still owned property here but had married into business interests and a different way of life on the Península, the Spanish mainland. 'I come back here to relax,' he told us. 'Un pequeño paraíso.' A little Paradise. No argument there.

Don Carlos had a heart problem and had been told to take gentle exercise. The problem was something to do with swollen blood vessels - let's not be too gory - and although it was operable, the cardiologist had warned him there was a one-in-three chance of failure. 'One in three chances that they'll kill me!' he roared, outraged. Two in three that they wouldn't, then, but Don Carlos was clearly not a gambler and had decided just to cross his fingers and keep walking.

Maybe his friend Don Salvador played some role in this decision. He was a pharmacist, addressed as don perhaps from respect for his expertise, or his age, or more probably because like Don Carlos he had inherited property. By the time we met him he had retired, but he still lent a hand now and again in the pharmacy.

I went there one day with a sore back to ask if he knew anyone who could massage it better. 'There's a curandero,' replied Don Salvador, shrugging eloquently. A curandero is someone who claims to heal without being conventionally qualified.

Don Salvador could have tried to sell me pain-relief pills, but it turned out he also suffered from back pain and as a fellow sufferer, he showed me his cost-free solution. 'Look,' he said, coming around to the front of the counter. 'The best way to treat a sore back is this.'

Bending his legs, he leaned backwards against the edge of the counter, positioning it between two of the knobbles of his spine. Then he leaned back a little further and wriggled, like a brown bear rubbing its back on a pine trunk. 'Like this, you see?' Rising a little to position the counter edge between the next two knobbles, he wriggled again. Whether it was doing any good I've no idea but he was clearly enjoying it.

A while ago the town council installed some bright yellow exercise machines near the beach, one of which has a big rubber roller that achieves much the same effect. Any brown bear would love it.






And then there was Don Fernando. Who had a secret.

We got to know him a little better than the others through chatting in the bar of the Club Náutico, the Nautical Club, a pleasant venue half buried in a cave and not as grand as it sounds. 'We call you people the golondrinas,' he told us. The swallows, who arrive in winter and depart in spring, until some of us forget to fly off again.

A man of wit and wisdom, and also of great patience, Don Fernando listened to our baby Spanish with elegant politeness rather than hysterical laughter and occasionally helped us climb over a pronunciation hurdle. I can still hear and see him demonstrating Archipiélago Canario, the Canarian Archipelago, leaning forward for emphasis: 'Arr-chee-pee-AY-lago!'

Like his two friends, Don Fernando owned land and property, including a large farm in one of the island's many valleys where he, or rather his handful of loyal workers, grew bananas on a commercial scale. And avocados, oranges, grapes, apricots... anything will grow in this rich, volcanic soil, you just have to throw down a pip, spray a little water and stand back.

He invited us to call into the farm one day, which of course we did. 'Have a banana!' A banana picked yellow from the growing bunch is a revelation, rare and wonderful. For export the bunches are cut down while still green, because if you try to transport bananas already yellow they arrive looking like discarded work gloves from an oil rig.

At this stage Don Fernando didn't know us well enough to confess his secret. That came later, over a glass of wine or two in a restaurant. Eccentricity being not only permitted but expected of a don, he drank his wine from an ordinary glass tumbler as used for water: 'Much better than any wine glass, look at all that air above it for the bouquet!'

As our conversation progressed from the humdrum to deeper probings and the broader-sweep stuff about work, life and the Universe, he suddenly became pensive. 'Luck plays a big part in life.'

'Well yes, but you have to…'

'Do you know,' continued Don Fernando, lowering his voice, 'how I came to own my farm, all that land?' We had assumed it was inherited, but he shook his head. 'I have my wife to thank for that.'

'Ah, so the land was hers and…'

'No. I won the lottery. A big prize, mucho, muchísimo.' He mimed a huge bag of money, golden doubloons. 'I'd have spent the lot, wasted it,' he admitted with endearing honesty. 'Fortunately my wife had more sense and insisted I buy land. I couldn't see the point, but she was right. Look at it now.'

He topped up our glasses from the bottle. 'Sensible woman. Here's to my wife.' We clinked glasses.

'And also to health - salud! And happiness - felicidad!' And while we're at it, let's add luck as well - suerte! When you think about it, all you really need is luck.


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A postscript for the pernickety
In English we capitalise the titles Don and Doña, whereas in Spanish they do not. Nor do they capitalise our Sir and Dame, which looks a bit odd, as in 'sir Francis Drake' or 'dame Maggie Smith'.