The water man

Writing about the deluge (9 December 2015) reminded me of a strange incident from a few years ago.

Late one afternoon someone hammered on our back door, a flat-palmed thudding like a four-in-the-morning drugs raid. This is normal - nobody tippety-taps in the Canaries, if you knock on a door it's because you wish to be heard.

I opened to find a plump, pink-cheeked individual encased in a slightly rumpled grey suit and with a black leather portfolio under his arm. He didn't look like an evangelist, not polished or smiley enough, and anyway they come in pairs. He looked like the Man from the Council.

'I'm here about the water, el agua,' he tells me. 'You know about the problems with the water?'

'What problems?'

'The quality! You haven't noticed? With the drought, you know, no rain, the water quality's very poor. Can I talk to you about it?'

I invite him in, a little concerned and rather more puzzled. It's true the rain is a little late this year but the island practically floats on fresh spring water, it's never a problem. However, here's this official telling me something's amiss so of course we need to know more.

I show him into the kitchen, which is where we keep the kind of water you might worry about. 'We haven't noticed anything wrong,' I tell him, turning on the cold tap. Water runs smoothly, normal colour, no bobbly bits, doesn't smell funny...

J has arrived to see what's going on. 'He says there's a problem with the water.'

'What problem?'

The Council man has deposited his black leather portfolio on the kitchen table. 'I'll show you, if you can spare five minutes?'

He requests a glass tumbler, which he fills with water from the tap. Then he pulls from a bulging pocket of his jacket a little black box. It has four metal prongs on one side and an electrical cable sprouting from the end, terminating in a plug. The plug is chipped and the cable insulation has been repaired with insulating tape. You'd think the Council would equip its water engineers rather better. Doubts are forming.

He places his little box on top of the glass tumbler with two prongs dangling in the water, then plugs the cable into a mains socket. Within a few seconds little streams of bubbles being rising to the surface from each prong. 'You see?' he says, indicating the bubbles.

Well yes, you'd expect bubbles. 'That's normal,' I tell him. 'Electrolysis.' Basic science – electrocute water and its molecules ping apart into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen. Which are gases, so they bubble.

I attempt to explain this in Spanish to our demonstrator, who agrees smoothly but cuts me short, holding up a hand: 'Wait a few moments!'

A green scum begins to spread across the surface of the water. He turns towards me, smiling grimly. 'Now. You see?'

After a moment's thought I suggest politely that the green scum is probably copper oxide from one of the electrodes. But he's now on the alert for this kind of nonsense and holds up his hand again. 'Give me some bottled water and I'll show you the difference!'

I'd love to do that, I tell him, but we have no bottled water. 'You drink only tap water?' he cries incredulously.

Of course we do. It's fine, the tap water is excellent, sourced from the island's springs, properly treated and monitored - why buy bottles?

The man who, I am quite sure by now, is not from the Council shakes his head. 'I wouldn't drink that stuff, myself. Not from the tap.' He dries his little box on a paper handkerchief, wraps the cable around it and slips it back into his pocket.

'So now what?' I invite him cordially. By now I'm really curious to know.

'Ahora qué?' he repeats, smiling. 'That's very Spanish.'

'Thank you.'

He sits himself confidently at the kitchen table, as a man who has the answers. From his portfolio he extracts a two-page leaflet about his company's domestic water purifier.

It's quite small, he assures us, would easily fit under our sink. Takes just a couple of hours to install then no more problems with dodgy water and murky scum! He produces an application form for us to fill in.

I break it to him not very gently that we don't want a water purifier. There is no way I'm going to spend a thousand euros or whatever it is on a complicated piece of plumbing we don't need. He gives up without a struggle, puts away his leaflet and application form and leaves, looking miffed or perhaps just tired.

After he's gone I ponder a little more about his gadget. Four prongs, electrodes. You only need two for electrolysis. Three were bright and shiny, I remember, while the fourth was dull and greenish, probably copper or a copper alloy.

Here's how it runs. You use the copper prong for your demonstration with tap water because it produces a nasty-looking scum. Then if the householder is a normal member of the modern world and can supply you with bottled water, you use the other pair of prongs, neither of which contains copper, so they produce only nice clean bubbles.

Your victim is thus convinced that tap water is poisonous while bottled water is good – but even better would be the superlative water from one of these magic purifiers, which will save you having to buy bottles!

The more I thought about this, the more appalled I was. This wasn't just salesmanship, it was evil. And if I was mistaken, how else would you explain those four electrodes?

As far as I'm aware nobody in this village bought a water purifier, they're all sensible folk who recognise knavery when they see it. And I'm sure he didn't come from this island, he'd been sent here on a test mission, a sacrificial goat to see how the locals reacted.

A few more calls like the one to our house and he probably crept home to weep for a while then look for a job delivering beer.


Health warning: please don't try 'electrocuting' water!
It's extremely dangerous without the right equipment.

After the deluge

As we arrived at the beach Blasina was rising from the waves like Botticelli's Venus, although decently clad in a big black bathing suit.

She looked unhappy. Walking towards us across the sand she waved grumpily towards the water. 'Look at it!'

A founder member of the Floating Heads discussion group (story dated 8 September 2015), Blasina likes her ocean to be as it should be, and today it just wasn't.

So what was the problem? Well, to explain that we need to go back a couple of days. To an evening when, sitting quietly reading at home, J suddenly looked towards the window. 'Hear that?'

I'm not good at faint noises these days, but yes, with a little imagination...

We flung open a window. Rain! And not just a fairy sprinkling, this was the real thing. Within a few minutes it had turned into the kind of downpour that fills the air like a demented fog, plummeting and pummelling, rattling on the rooftops and bouncing from the streets.

Other windows were lit in other houses, glimpsed through the waterfall, each with a shadowy figure peering out into the night.

Why anybody would want to stand at the window and watch rain falling may be hard to understand if you live in Birmingham, Düsseldorf or Omsk. Here on this island, however, rain is rare, and there have been occasional years with none at all, which is disastrous.

But now we were having our first downpour, reassuringly early in the winter. And after the initial frantic demonstration of intent it settled into a steady thrumming on our flat roof like a crowd of baby gnomes trying to stamp on each others' toes. They continued for most of the night but by daylight they had grown tired and trickled off home to bed, leaving only an expectant silence suffusing the air.

The big question now was whether... opening the doors to our terrace... yes, there it was! In the distance, the unmistakeable clatter of stones upon stones. This was significant.

We ventured out into the street and down the hill. So did everyone else. Down to the dry riverbed, which was now gloriously alive with hurtling water and tumbling rocks.

Kids dared each other to put a foot into the raging torrent and were summoned back under threat of being thrown in. Somebody with a new 4x4 whooshed through at speed, sending spectacular wings of water flying sideways and demonstrating the wisdom of his 30,000 euros investment.

Watching this rare novelty of running water, our neighbour Lali wore the ecstatic I-can-hardly-believe-it expression of someone who's just won a year's supply of groceries. 'Estamos muy contentos, muy contentos!' she laughed, 'We're really happy...'

The gift of rain on this island, if you wish to be poetic, brings life to the land and food to the children. It greens the hills and sprinkles bright colours across the springtime meadows.

More prosaically, rain means the difference between irrigating your potatoes for free or having to pay for water from the tap. If the reservoirs are full, anyone with a farm or smallholding, a finca, can use the water to irrigate their crops.

There used to be a clever system of little canals snaking along the hillsides, distributing water from the inland lakes throughout the countryside. To irrigate your banana plantation you would simply remove the stone that blocked a gap in the canal wall, allowing the water to cascade through into your field. Then, using a spade, you would guide the water along channels in the soil to reach the far corners.

It's mostly done by pipes and valves nowadays, which is a lot less fun.

But to get back to the story - a night of rain like this can go a long way towards filling the reservoirs, but as Lali and many others cautioned, 'We still need more...!' What we needed now was a few days or preferably nights of gentle drizzle in order to replenish the aquifers - the vast stores of water that underlie the island and keep its wells topped up and fresh. La Gomera is rich in water, unusually for the Canaries, and for that we have to thank the winter rain that soaks deep into its foundations. Much of it is captured in the island's central forest, the Parque de Garajonay.

In San Sebastián that morning the streets were shining wet in the early sunlight. A few shops had suffered minor flooding, but nobody minded too much and there was a party atmosphere of celebration. There's a well-recognised signal for 'rain' - you position your hand with all five digits pointing downwards and shake it up and down while shouting mucha agua! - lots of water! - followed by a broad smile to show you're not complaining.

Tourists were wandering around with that happily dazed after-the-storm look of the holidaymaker rescued from calamity. In short, all was contentment and good cheer, except down at the beach where Blasina was still grousing as she rinsed off under the shower. 'Filthy,' she snorted. She was talking about the sea. 'Thick as rancho canario.'

Mmm, sort of. Rancho canario belongs to that class of soups known as 'hearty' that you can throw anything into. You wouldn't want to eat what was churning around in the sea this morning, though. All that water surging along the dry riverbed had dislodged a year's worth of dust, dead foliage, bamboo canes, plastic bottles, aluminium cans and supermarket bags, transporting them all to the sea where they swirled around the bay for a while before being dumped on the beach. The sparkling water had turned pink and the normally pristine sands looked like the set of a post-apocalypse movie.

That's life for you, there's a black cloud beneath every silver lining. This one was soon dispersed, though. The town council sent in a couple of beach clean-up teams with rakes, while the sea performed its own twice-daily cleansing with fresh water from the Atlantic. Within a few days everything was again as bright as a baby's bathtub, and Blasina was her usual sunny self.

We could still do with a drop more rain, though.

What's that on your nose?

Part 1: The bubble

Arturo was the first.

Seating ourselves at a shaded table outside his café-bar, we waited quietly, knowing what would come next.

Arturo came out to take our order. 'The usual?' He paused, staring at my nose with the hesitant half-smile of a man torn between politeness, curiosity and suspicion that he's about to get his leg pulled. 'What's that?' Pointing at my nose.

'It's a spot,' I told Arturo. Beyond that I could tell him nothing.

It had begun as such a tiny thing, appearing out of nowhere, out of nothing, like the cosmic Big Bang. A tiny pimple on the upper bridge of my nose, placed with geometric exactitude midway between the eyes. Nothing much happened for a week or two while the newborn pimple sat there deciding what to do, then one day it began to expand enthusiastically.

In the story of the Big Bang this phase is known as 'inflation', a fudge that nobody understands but purports to explain why we now have a Universe to live in. After the inflation of my pimple what I had was a pink circle spreading across my nose and beginning to swell like one of those slow, malevolent bubbles in a volcanic mud pool.

Arturo peered more closely at my bubble. 'There's a kind of scab on top.' Yes.

'And it looks like there's blood inside.' Yes indeed.

He retreated, trying not to look repulsed. 'You ought to see a doctor with that.'

I had already made an appointment for the next morning. Meanwhile I covered the bubble with a sticking plaster which reduced the repulsion but not the comments, since it clearly hid something big and nasty.

My doctor at the local health centre, well practised in avoiding alarm for his patients, flinched only briefly when I showed him the excrescence but sent me straight to the dermatologist at the local hospital with a big label Urgent around my neck and instructions to beat down the door if nobody answered. (I'm exaggerating a little.)


Part 2: The treatment


There are some doctors who inspire instant relief - at last I'm in good hands! - and others who inspire dread that they're hiding something from you. My dermatologist belongs to the first group, an extremely competent lady in whom I have the utmost faith. She examined the growth on my nose with her high-tech illuminated magnifying glass, through which it must have looked magnificently horrid.

She straightened up and nodded. 'It's not malignant.'

'It's not malignant?'

'It's not malignant.' She must be well accustomed to having to say that twice. 'But it does need dealing with.'

Yes, good, great. An ointment, a pill, an antibiotic? 'We'll do it now,' she decides. 'Agreed?' Right, fine.

The best thing to do, she explains, is to burn it out.

Burn it out? I picture a little blowlamp hovering between my eyes. But I have complete faith in this lady. If she wants to burn it out, let her burn.

'Over to the couch there, and lie down.'

'Right.' Complete confidence. J is watching from the guest chair and looking as perplexed and nervous as I'm trying not to look.

'You don't have a pacemaker, do you?' asks the dermatologist. Why would that matter? But I don't. Could probably do with one just at this moment. She switches on one of those mysterious electronic machines they have in hospitals then administers a quick jab of anaesthetic at the top of my nose.

A minute or two later she's waving in front of me a little rod trailing a curly cable back to the machine. The rod turns out to be an electronic red-hot poker. She taps the bridge of my nose with it, tentatively at first, perhaps to see how I react, then with more determination. Tap, hold, withdraw... tap again, hold...

This doesn't hurt, it really doesn't, but the billowing smoke and barbecue smell are alarming. And the cotton swabs, handed to her in quantities by her assistant to mop up whatever’s flowing from my nose bubble. How deep does this thing go?


Part 3: The aftermath


It's best to leave the cauterized wound open to the air, it seems, to heal more quickly. Within moments this revamped adornment to my nose catches the eye of Bernardo, a fellow villager. He is seated in the waiting area, accompanying his mum (nobody ever visits a doctor alone). 'Hey, that was a good shot! Right between the eyes. You must have really annoyed her.'

Such remarks will be repeated throughout the next week. Shop assistants, bartenders, friends, taxi drivers (especially taxi drivers). My barbecued nose spot has become a blood-black hollow, perfectly circular, clearly the entry wound of a high-velocity bullet. I've seldom produced such hilarity with so little effort.


Part 4: Epilogue


Eventually the black scab fell off and now there's just a little scar. But the question remains - what provoked this evil eruption?

Well, it was certainly the sun, and it's suspicious that the spot nestled precisely below the bridge of my old plastic sunglasses. Could the curved lower surface of the bridge have acted as a concave mirror, treacherously focusing the ultraviolet into a hotspot?

Who knows. I'm not going to experiment. Maybe it was just the usual cause of most such problems these days, la edad, age. And the remaining scar, a little white patch, could come in useful one day, as Arturo pointed out. 'When it's time to put you down they'll have something to aim at.'

But meanwhile: 'Another little glass of wine?' Oh okay, Arturo, go on then.

Gofio

One morning many years ago, on our way out of the village, we paused beside a cloud of blue smoke billowing from the patch of land on the street corner. At the centre of the cloud was Dolores, perched on a rusty kitchen stool before an upturned dustbin lid. The lid was balanced on two brick columns and beneath it was an unruly fire of logs, twigs and leaves.

Peering through the smoke, all I could see in the dustbin lid was what looked like dark sand from a Gomeran beach. Now, why would anyone...?

From the stone shed behind Dolores a cockerel greeted our arrival with a subdued cock-a-gloogle-gloo while its harem of hens clucked excitedly around it. A clutch of turkeys gobble-gobbled next door and at the far end, two goats looked on from their tin outhouse in goatly disdain, chewing. A compact little tribe of fellow travellers on a leisurely passage to the dinner table.

We bid Dolores good morning and asked politely why she was heating sand in a dustbin lid. She beckoned us into the enclosure to look more closely. Ahah! Right. Mixed in with the sand were grains of maize, also known as corn. The sand was there to surround the maize with an even heat so it didn't scorch. Clever!

'You're roasting the maize,' I ventured, 'to make gofio?'

Dolores nodded - got it on one. Not too difficult because if you live in La Gomera you know about gofio. Gofio is what for centuries has enabled little Gomerans to grow big and strong, Gomeran women to bear fifteen children without blinking and Gomeran goatherds to leap across hillsides using long poles. Gofio thickens your breakfast milk and your lunchtime soup, gofio dumplings sustain you in the fields, honey-sweetened gofio balls are a treat for the kids and toothless grandpa.

Once the maize grains were well roasted, Dolores would sift them from the hot sand and take them up the hill to the gofio mill, where for a small fee they would be finely ground into flour. Very finely ground. On my first introduction to gofio I made the near-fatal mistake of sniffing it. I've since wondered if a lungful of gofio could spontaneously explode, as powder aerosols sometimes do, but the effect is in any case similar. Don't ever sniff gofio.

At a New Year's day family gathering to which we'd been invited, a particularly enthusiastic advocate demonstrated how to make gofio dumplings in the authentic manner. The first requirement is a rabbit. There are many rabbits in the Gomeran hills and Luis had obtained one, or rather its skin which is the key component for this purpose.

You sew the skin up again (nicely cleaned of course) to make a long bag, open at one end. If you ignore the dangly legs it now looks fairly innocuously like a Scottish sporran.

Into this bag you pour your gofio, being careful not to sniff, along with water or perhaps goat's milk for a richer dumpling. Close the end of the bag and tie it tightly with string then - here's the skilful bit - start rolling it like a big heavy sausage across your knees, backwards and forwards, applying pressure with the palms of your hands as in deep massage. You will be subjected to rude jokes while you're doing this, as Luis was, but ignore them and keep massaging.

After the proper length of treatment you can untie the rabbit bag and peel it away from what is now a large roll of slightly squidgy gofio dumpling. Slice it into bite-sized discs as required.

Nobody does this in real life any more, of course. They just mash up the mixture with a wooden spoon or, more probably, bung it into an electric dough mixer, but the end result is much the same and just as healthy.

Gofio forms part of a beautifully integrated system of self-sufficiency. You grow the maize on your family finca or smallholding. Being tall, the maize plants shelter other crops such as beans and potatoes from the strong winds which are a known feature of Gomeran weather.

Having consumed the maize cobs, either sliced up in soup or turned into gofio, you donate the rest of the plant to the goats or the pig. In return the goats give you milk and, in due course, meat, and the pig gives you ham, bacon and blood sausages as well as a friendly honk every morning when you go to feed it, except for the last time.

The goat milk - a litre or more every day - you can drink fresh from the udder or turn into cheese, to eat with your slices of gofio dumpling. Gomeran goat cheese is wonderful, tasty but mild, not at all goaty like the French stuff.

Meanwhile, back at the smallholding, your potatoes are coming along nicely in fertile volcanic soil enriched by nitrogen from the beans growing between them and by manure from your goats and pig. The beans will later form the basis of a nourishing soup called rancho canario into which you sprinkle your gofio...

It's not as satisfyingly circular as that nowadays with our frozen foods, takeaway pizzas and spit-roasted chicken, and there are fewer goats and pigs around than before, but you will be hard pressed to find a family without its own finca and somebody still making good use of it.

Dolores doesn't grow maize herself now because her joints have let her down, but her sons do. And gofio, although now produced mainly by companies rather than individuals, you will find on the shelves of every supermarket. Buy it, eat it and grow strong!

Paco and the magic bracelet

For such a simple device, this thing is miraculous. We had to queue to get it fitted. Well, queue in the loose sense of milling around with everyone else. Queuing is mainly a British phenomenon and elsewhere it's done differently, sometimes by the simple use of elbows. Not in Spain, though. The Spanish queue is an invisible thread that winds itself through the throng and is generally respected. Each participant knows who arrived before and after them.

So we all waited patiently to check in and, once verified as worthy, to have our magic bracelet fitted. Paco, who has Down's syndrome and is everybody's favourite, gave a little shiver of excitement as the fitter wrapped the bracelet around his wrist. Made of bright green plastic with rows of holes, it took only a moment to clip it fast and trim off the excess with a pair of scissors.

You can put it to work immediately. Head for the bar, demand a restorative glass of beer and kaboom! - there it is on the counter. Take it away and nobody will charge you anything, now or later. Paco marched off with a glass of fizzy orange and a look of wonder in his eyes - you don't have to pay for it? This is not life as we know it!

We were on a weekend indulgence with our village association, staying in a smart hotel in Tenerife on an all-included deal, the todo incluido. You pay in advance and once the pain of that has faded, all is magic. In the restaurant that evening the waiter, mesmerised by our bright green bracelets, plonked a bottle of red wine on the table then awarded us the freedom of the self-service counters.

Most people start by overdoing the magic then feeling ill the next day, which slows them down and is what the hoteliers depend on to avoid ruination. Our neighbour Eusebio started by overdoing it then continued to overdo it for the next two days.

He and his wife Carmela were sitting at a table next to ours, his plate cleverly piled in multi-coloured layers assembled from everything on the buffet counter. I raised my wine glass: 'Salud!' He grinned and returned the salutation.

As a second bottle of wine arrived on his table, shortly afterwards, we raised our glasses again. 'You know,' Eusebio said, perhaps a little defensively, 'we need this kind of break now and again. Carmela and I work hard all day, every day. What's the point if you don't ever have any enjoyment? Eh? What's the point? Tell me!'

This drew prolonged applause from a nearby table, where two young women were tucking into plates similar to Eusebio's. We all drank a toast to enjoyment. Later the two friends told us they worked on a banana farm in the north of the island and this was a little holiday, an escape from work, an escapadita.

People do work hard in these islands. Eusebio, for example, has a full-time job with the local council but he and Carmela also maintain a little farm, a finca, where they raise goats and grow much of their own food. They're not alone in this, the family finca has formed the heart of Canary Islands life for centuries. More about that in another story, perhaps.

But to get back to the magic bracelet - like all sorcery it has its darker side. When you venture into the town during the day your cheerful, brightly coloured little bracelet marks you like the electronic tag of a paroled prisoner. Seated at a café table with your coffee or beer in hand, you are instantly recognisable as a todo-incluido.

So you have to decide. If it bothers you, hide it beneath a rolled-down shirtsleeve. I decided that it didn't bother me at all, I was happy to roll up my sleeves and wear my magic bracelet with pride. It's a badge of those who have worked hard and believe they've earned a little enjoyment. (Pause for applause.)

It also goes down well with the proprietors of bars and cafés for whom the todo incluido concept threatens disaster. Anyone who ventures outside the hotel to eat, drink or otherwise spend money is to be cherished.

Returning to the hotel for an enchanted pre-dinner aperitif by the pool, we found that Paco had been appointed Wizard of the Drinks and was running a shuttle service over the bridge across the bathing pool, carrying wine, beer, orange juice or vodka-limón. 'Only one at a time,' his brother cautioned him. 'And if you spill any of it you're a dead man.' Paco is well used to being teased, loves it and is a dab hand at the withering retort.

So we drank and we ate and we chuckled, then like tired but happy children we piled into the magic bus to take us home. Two days is enough but it's a fun way to do nothing together.

Here's to good health and enjoyment without guilt. Salud!

Get rolling!

Many years ago, during my first faltering attempts at Hispanic communication, I asked a young waiter in a café-bar for two glasses of rosé wine, which in Spanish is vino rosado. Two glasses, dos copas, so there you go: Dos copas de vino rosado. Easy, see?

The waiter, who was probably called Juan, frowned and leaned closer. I had already learned to dread this Spanish frown. It is not one of annoyance, it simply means I'm concentrating really, really hard to try and catch some faint inkling of what you're on about.

Try again: vino rosado? with hopeful doggy expression. No joy. Juan smiles apologetically and tries a wild guess: 'You want two beers?'

I was rescued by Victoria, the landlady of the apartment where we were staying at that time, who fortuitously passed by at the height of the impasse. She said exactly what I'd said but this time Juan nodded gratefully and toddled off to get the wine.

A bit miffed, I demanded to know in what particular respect my pronunciation had been deficient. Well, difficult to know where to start with that one, but it seemed the crucial failure was the 'r' of rosado.

I hadn't yet learned to trill. In Spanish, when an 'r' comes at the beginning of a word it requires work. You must start it up, roll it along on your tongue then release it like a motorised butterfly: rrrrrosado!

Likewise, a double 'rr' in the middle of a word: Un tarrrrro de mermelada! will get you a jar of marmalade. Maybe.

Learning Spanish is no more difficult than learning any other language. It's just that the sounds you're supposed to make demand courage and, especially, a tongue that's unafraid of adventure. It has to be prepared for new and strange experiences.

Our landlady Victoria was very good at nurturing tongue-tied foreigners. With great patience and tact she taught our two tongues the basic tricks. That word rosado for example: it wasn't just the 'r' I was getting wrong. 'You're saying the 'd' so it sounds like 't' to me,' Victoria explained. Really? But surely a 'd' is just a 'd', whether Spanish or English...?

No it isn't. Victoria had uncovered for us a crucially important, breakthrough piece of information. 'You must put your tongue,' she explained, 'behind your teeth like this.' Tip of tongue against back of upper incisors. Your 'd' then comes out like 'th' in bother. Thus, the capital city of Spain is not what you thought at all, it's Mathrith.

The dictionaries make light of this. Some even claim that 'd' at the beginning of a word is the same as in English, which is outrageously false. Just listen to a Spaniard!

Even better, watch their mouth closely as they speak. I offer here the simplest and most useful piece of pronunciation advice you may ever read: When speaking Spanish, the tip of your tongue should play a dominant role, clearly visible from the outside, waggling around like a trapped ferret.

Victoria, bless her little waggling tongue, also gave us this useful rhyme for practising the motorised 'r' (erre, pronounced ay-ray, means the letter 'r'):

Erre con erre cigarro

Erre con erre barril

Rápido corren los carros

Los carros del ferrocarril

It's almost meaningless but not quite: R with R cigar / R with R barrel / Rapidly run the cars / the cars of the railway.

Intriguingly, the fourth line is sometimes written as Cargados de azúcar al ferrocarril - 'loaded with sugar on the railway' - which conjures a wonderful image of steam trains puffing through waving fields of sugar cane under a blazing sun, long ago in Cuba. Or Mexico, perhaps, or ...?

I'm sure this little poem has an interesting history.

Salsa and the widows

Eusebio elbowed me in the ribs. 'Those women need help.'

'What?'

'Those women. They need help. Look at them.'

I looked at them. He was right, they needed help. 'You do it,' I suggested, but Eusebio pleaded exhaustion. Too much wine, too much food. Yeah, me too. But still. Chivalry and all that.

It was party day in the village. A day to eat, drink and enjoy being a little cluster of people living in close proximity who are mostly happy with that. The summer sun was friendly but fierce and our sports ground was clothed with canvas gazebos sheltering tables, food, drink and most of the villagers.

Over in one corner young Crístofer, who knows about these things, had set up a laptop computer feeding chirpy salsa music into two black loudspeakers perched like vultures on tall poles. He was still sulking over being made to keep the volume below denture-rattling level - 'Hey, chico, some of us want to talk, turn the effing thing down!' - but was otherwise doing a good job of keeping things lively.

There is no moment, at these events, when we all sit down at the tables to start eating, nor any identifiable end - the meal starts when anything edible arrives, and people sit and eat or stand and talk as they wish. A relaxed and fluid feast that lasts all day.

Crístofer's salsa music pervaded the air like an aerosol drug that went straight to the feet, causing involuntary tapping and twitching. Men headed for the beer cooler wiggle-walking in time with the music. People abandoned their plates of chick pea stew or barbecued pork in order to dance, impelled by their hyperactive feet.

Rubén, a twenty-something guy who has hyperactive everything, danced wildly with the kids, some of whom would get sick before much longer.

So we were all having a great time, everything was hunkydory and ticketyboo, until - inevitably - around mid-afternoon someone produced a football. Someone always does. It was probably Rubén but I can't swear to that. And football, as everyone knows, is the world's worst bully, it will claim any amount of space for itself and ruthlessly exclude all non-players.

The lads all joined the game and, even more distressingly, so did some of the lasses. And that was the end of the dancing. Crístofer left his disco station to take up position as centre-half for the Red team.

Thus it was for a few minutes. The football took over. But – here was his big mistake - Crístofer had left the music playing. Under the shade of the gazebos, at the tables, fingers still drummed along with the beat, feet still tapped and twitched. And on the margins of the football game five widows lingered wistfully, swaying their hips. Five women who had lost their husbands some years ago but had not retreated permanently into black mourning, had decided that life was still to be lived. They wanted to keep on dancing.

Eusebio, a man who also believes that life is for the living, recognised that things had slipped out of kilter. 'Go on,' he urged me. 'I'll go if you do,' I offered. Okay. We approached the five widows together, offered ourselves as partners and led them gallantly onto the football field.

Five ladies and two blokes dancing salsa on a football field can mess up the game pretty thoroughly. Nobody minded. They must have known in their hearts that we were right and they were wrong.

The goalie at our end started dancing. The Blue team’s star striker caught the ball in his hands and shoved it beneath his tee shirt, shimmying. The ref retrieved the ball, whistled and sent him off. He didn’t go.

Committed footballers tried to continue the game but they were lost. Down at the far end, the defenders turned their goalmouth sideways, probably the best defence anyone has ever invented.

Meanwhile Bernarda, one of our salsa widows, grabbed a plastic bottle full of fizzy orange and sashayed across the field with it balanced on her head. The game dissolved into chaos and anarchy. This was my kind of football.