How not to be a thief

Two lads were sort-of playing football. In a lazy, sporadic, hot-afternoon kind of way. They were on the village sports field, which is concrete but flat as a billiard table, smartly painted dark green and with white and yellow lines in all the right places.

One of the two players remained sitting on the ground with his back to a wall while the other stood a couple of metres away, kicking the ball gently towards his friend who then threw it back to him. The more energetic of the two was the lad sitting down, who would sometimes throw a bouncer, making the ball leap into the air just in front of his opponent’s foot.

The most interesting aspect of this uninspiring performance was that the ball they were using was a baby aguacate, an avocado.

Did you know that immature, freshly fallen avocados will bounce? I didn’t. It’s not something you’d want to test in normal circumstances. They do though, they bounce very well, almost as well as those brightly coloured little bouncy balls dispensed by machines in bars and cafes.

The avocado footballers were attending, like us, a village fiesta in honour of one of our saints (there are two). The religious celebration had taken place on the previous evening - a short mass in the chapel followed by a procession around the village - so today’s event was pure pleasure, with music from two of the island’s many traditional folk groups supported by a kiosk selling beer, wine and soft drinks and the prospect of a communal paella later in the afternoon.

However, this was the month of July and the sun was strong. The town council had provided a marquee with folding chairs for those who wished to listen to the music, but it was amplified as always to jumbo-jet volume so many of us simply cowered around the periphery in whatever shade we could find. Our two footballers continued playing but taking things nice and slowly.

Watching them, it occurred to me (not for the first time, not for the first time at all) how extraordinarily unbalanced is this world we live in. I’d recently read that New Zealanders had developed a huge appetite for avocados which local farmers were scarcely able to satisfy, leading to the entirely new crime of avocado theft. Organised gangs were creeping among the avocado trees at night to denude them of their fruit. Farmers faced seasonal ruin.

Here in La Gomera avocados grow so prolifically, on trees that grow so tall and broad, that the fruits can quite literally fall on your head. Many get squashed by passing vehicles.

So too do the oranges and the mangos in their seasons. But please be aware, reader, that a fallen fruit still belongs to somebody, no matter what the law may say about it. I know of a foreigner, a permanent resident on the island, who took to picking up fallen avocados and carrying them home in a plastic bag. He was seen the first time he did this, of course - there is always someone who will see anything you do - and he was at once labelled as a thief. In a society where honesty and trust are taken for granted and very rarely abused, such a label is with you for life. Anything you do thereafter, no matter how innocent, will be viewed with suspicion - what’s he up to?

You can pick up a fallen avocado if invited by the owner, naturally. And if you meet a neighbour walking back from their farm with a bucketful of avocados, oranges or mangos, you will be given an armful of them with no option for refusal.

You could also, I guess, play football with a fallen avocado without penalty, because football is second only to religion as a respected activity. Be careful, however, not to do what young Rubén did at our fiesta. When the two footballers lost control of their baby avocado, Rubén intercepted it, attempted a nifty return but trod on it instead. He walked away looking a bit crestfallen and trying to shake guacamole from his foot.

Notes for the serious student
Know your avocados! They are on sale all year round in the local shops and markets, but several varieties grow on the island itself and they appear at different times. First up are the ubiquitous pear-shaped kind with a slightly rough green skin, the sort you expect to get in your avocado-with-prawns starter anywhere in England.

They’re fine, but better still are the rounder kind that ripen later, with knobbly skin ranging in colour from dark green to black. The skin is tough and thick but the flesh is full of flavour. They’re my favourites.

Finally come the smooth-skinned variety, much like an overgrown pear in shape and colouring, and they can be huge. They’re perfectly edible but bland and watery.

Mangos too come in various guises. The first to ripen, typically around June or July, are the size of a plum, yellow in colour and with a darkish yellow flesh. They are delicious but extremely fibrous and will have you picking your teeth for hours. I suspect these are the closest to the wild fruit.

The later ones are called mangas rather than mangos in the Canary Islands, but they’re just various cultivars of mango. Ranging in size from hen’s egg to ostrich’s and in colour from green to red or purple, they are milder in flavour than the fibrous mangos but equally delicious if you catch them at the right moment.

A practical tip for dealing with mangos: to get at the flesh, take a sharp knife and slice the mango on either side of its flattish central stone, which you can find by looking for a slight hump in the roundness of the fruit. Then scoop the flesh from your slices with a teaspoon. You’ll get covered in mango whatever you do, but this is the least messy method.

The little dark one

A big day for the village. On one of her very rare trips around the island, she would pass through here as she returned to San Sebastián, and would pause to receive a civic reception by the villagers.

The reception was to be held in a car park beside the main road, extensively beautified with bamboo fencing, palm fronds and swathes of flowers. We arrived shortly before the appointed time but, as is habitual with the famous, she was a little late in arriving. The sun had already given up and was sinking behind the hills, turning the sky into a glorious son et lumière show. The soundtrack for the show came from a group of folk singers, strumming guitars and singing appropriately demure traditional songs.

Passing by the front-row seats we greeted our many neighbours who had probably been waiting there patiently for an hour or more - Gomerans are good at waiting patiently - and found a spot to lean against a wall.

Crowds had gathered not just from our village but from other villages around, and even from the town. This was an Event! A large police presence - well, two of them, Felipe and Fernando, but notably animated - attempted to keep the wandering villagers away from the main road, without much success.

The problem was that the car park itself was now fully occupied by a small stage garlanded with flowers, rows of seats for the elderly, the strumming folk group and a bar counter with beer fountain, leaving little room for the stream of cars still arriving, which therefore had to park along both sides of the main road.

Finally the two harrassed policemen introduced an impromptu one-way flow system which they controlled at each end with arm gestures and whistles. No-one in the meandering crowds got killed and although the line of vehicles queuing to get by on the main road grew steadily longer, many of them tooted their horns in cheerful support when they eventually passed through. Nobody would complain about a visit by La Morenita.

A sudden surge in mobile phone activity signalled that at last her cavalcade was approaching. She drew up in a kind of self-assembly Popemobile, a huge glass cabinet carried on the platform of a sparklingly clean pickup truck. Designated assistants from the village helped to extract La Morenita, perched on a golden plinth draped with red velvet and fresh flowers. They carried her with exquisite care to her place on the stage, where she was formally greeted with speeches from the attendant priest and a representative of the organising committee. A guitar duet played a classical piece for her, and some of the local children sang a song of praise, a verse each. They’ll remember this day, with pleasure I hope.

La Morenita, ‘the little dark one’, is an affectionate family name for the Virgen de Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the island’s patron saint. She normally resides safely at home in a little chapel by the sea, but today she is nearing the end of a journey that began nearly two months ago, when she was taken from her chapel, placed in a fishing boat and carried around the coast amid a large flotilla to land on the beach in San Sebastián. It happens only once every five years, the years of Las Lustrales, which is a fancy way of saying five years.

La Morenita is the guardian and protector of every town and every village on the island. She is hugely popular and revered. Hand-painted signs around our car park and on the main road shouted Gracias, Madre! Thank you, Mother! in huge letters.

Watching all this adoration, it was clear that there was something more than mere religion involved here. The Catholic religion is no longer the powerful force that it used to be in Spain, when attendance at Mass and events such as this was obligatory.

No, La Morenita represents something more. She represents the island, the people, the way of life. She is a rock-solid core to the island’s culture and a social glue that binds everyone together. I’m a little bit envious. Try as we might, we can never experience the sense of belonging that La Morenita provides to those who were born here.

Ah, well… We can still join in with the celebrations and enjoy the free paella and wine. After an excitement like this visit you need to calm down again slowly over some celebratory refreshments. Gomerans are good at celebratory refreshments.

Notes for the serious student
I touched on the subject of this five-year celebration in a previous story (A moment of madness, 18 April 2018) but left open the question of who exactly she is, this Virgen de Guadalupe.

Physically La Morenita is a very small statue. Really remarkably small, about the height of a wine bottle, but given stature by a tall crown and a splendidly elaborate plinth to stand on. Her holiness is emphasised by an aureole, a large gold circle like a ring of light behind her.

The Virgen de Guadalupe is venerated in many Catholic communities worldwide including Mexico, where she is also the patron saint. Her dark skin is undoubtedly due to her South American origins.

She seems to have arrived in La Gomera fairly early in the Spanish occupation, the imagen or statue having been carved in wood by an unknown sculptor sometime in the 16th century. She was awarded her own chapel on the coast in Puntallana, where it remains today, but she became the island’s patron only in the early nineteenth century when she took over from the Virgen del Buen Paso.

But then, does any of this really matter? In La Gomera, La Morenita is who she is, she’s always there, and once every five years we celebrate such certainty in a world of constant change.

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.