Back of Beyond (15 page)

One of the larger boys came over and shook my hand. And he wouldn’t let go. He tugged and pointed to the steps.

“Mi casa—my house. You come.”

It was an invitation and I accepted.

We all climbed together. The smaller children straggled in a line behind me; I felt like the pied piper, and even my wheezing at the end of the 130-step climb had a pipe-ish sound to it.

I’ve never seen a place quite like El Roque before or since. The lime-white cottages clustered tight in medieval fashion on either side of a six-foot-wide stone path that twisted and roller-coasted up and down, following the idiosyncracies of the promontory’s rocky top. I passed a couple of shops the size of broom closets that doubled as rum bars for the men. Crusty bronzed faces peered out curiously from shadowy doorways. Old women, shrouded in black, scurried by. One very ancient woman, her face a mass of deeply etched folds, cackled wildly as we passed, exposing an enormous toothless mouth. The older boy smiled at me and did a loopy sign at the side of his head to indicate she was a little mad. The young boys touched her upraised hand gently with a sign of respect—or fear?

About halfway down the wriggling street we paused outside one of the larger houses and faced a ten-foot-high carved wood door decorated with etched brass medallions. The older boy, obviously one of the leaders of my pack of frisky followers, pushed at the door and a panel squeaked open. The rest of the door remained solidly in place.

We entered a dark lobby with bare blue walls and a richly tiled floor. I could hardly see in front of me and bumped into a low iron table. The boy took my hand and gestured to his followers to stay back at the main door. We moved deeper into the house where it was even darker. Then he opened a smaller door and the sunshine rushed in, blinding me.

We were in the living room, simply decorated with small tapestries and a broad oak table on bulbous legs topped with two fat brass candlesticks encased in wax drippings. Eight dining chairs were placed around the table; their backs and sides carved in high Baroque style with vine leaves and grape bunches. Straight ahead were three large windows looking out over a bay of black sand edged by banana plantations and, high beyond that, the great cone of Valcequello. The room was filled with light. The windows were open and I could hear birds, canaries I think, by their flighty chattering, and mourning doves, issuing soft cooing sounds.

The boy’s name was Julio. He called out and I could hear someone coming, the swish of sandals on tiles. I was still mesmerized by the view until a figure stepped in front of me and gave a slight curtsy. At first the face was in silhouette against the light. Then it turned to smile at Julio, and my heart (I know this sounds corny but it really does happen) skipped at least two beats. She was utterly beautiful. Devastating.

“My sister,” said Julio in slow English. “She is named Maria.”

“Maria, this is Senor David.” Now my wife, Anne, tells me I have a “soft spot” for the beauty of youth, particularly female beauty, and although I think she exaggerates, I can occasionally be touched by open-eyed innocence and the unlined face. Nothing insidious you understand, just fascination of things unspoiled. But this amazing creature…

I couldn’t speak. Literally. My mouth sagged and stayed sagged. My smile must have seemed a terrible grimace. A gurgly sound was meant to be “Buenos dias” but was just that, a gurgle. Julio pulled my hand.

“Please sit. Sit here,” he gestured to an elephantine armchair by the window, and I made a lot of motion getting in, trying to regain composure.

“Maria. Cognac, por favor.”

He was the young master of the house even though much younger than his sister.

She smiled, proud of her brother’s performance. Then she smiled at me and was gone.

“This is a beautiful house—your casa.” I tried a bit of light conversation to see if my tongue was working.

“Oh yes,” said Julio, sitting in another equally enormous chair beside me.

“Yes—beautiful.” Well I got those words out. I was recovering fast.

“And my sister?” He looked very directly at me. (So he had noticed my reaction. A perceptive boy.)

“Your sister?”

“She is beautiful?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. Beautiful also.”

“Yes. All people says so.” Well I was relieved to hear that. At least I was among like-minded company. Maybe she had this effect on everyone. Quite the princess no doubt. Smiling and blinking those long black eyelashes at anyone who comes around. Spoiled too, I suppose. Maybe devious—innocence is rarely as innocent as it seems. A real little Lolita. Oh yes. I’ve seen it before. People all googly-eyed over a pretty girl. And they look so stupid, gibbering inanities and falling head over heels in instant infatuation. Well I’m wise to all that, Julio m’boy. Just let her come with the brandy and I’ll show you how to handle that kind of nonsense.

“Please, Mr. David.”

She was back, offering me a glass of brandy on a small silver tray and, damn it, I was doing it again. One look at that utterly perfect porcelain face framed in long black hair and those big black eyes and that aquiline nose and I was lockjawed again, trying desperately to shape a sensible smile that said “thank you for your courtesy” and nothing more….

The door opened and the room suddenly became much smaller. A great bear of a man entered, hands as big as frying pans and fingers like thick bananas. A bushy moustache covered most of his mouth and curved down, walruslike, at either side. His hair was as black and bushy as his moustache. A long scar, reaching from forehead to jawbone, gave him a dangerous look, but his eyes were the gentlest blue, shining, exuding welcome without words. Julio stood up, rake straight, Maria gave one of her curtsies and vanished again, and I rose to meet the man.

“Papa, this is Senor David.”

Somewhere under the moustache a grin grew. A gold tooth flashed in the sunlight, and one of his enormous hands engulfed mine completely. He stood for a long time boring into me with those eyes, then he released me and gestured me to sit. He lifted one of those gigantic carved chairs at the table with two fingers, twisted it around, and sat down facing us both with his arms folded.

Tomas Feraldes could speak no English (his words rumbled from deep in his chest, like boulders tumbling down a ridge) but during the next half hour or so I enjoyed one of the richest conversations I have ever had with a stranger. His son acted as interpreter, and we talked in baby language of everything—the village, the banana plantation upon which all the villagers depended for their livelihood, the ocean, the wonderful variety of fish you could catch by a simple hook from the promontory cliffs, the history of Gran Canaria, and the great pride of the islanders in their little green paradise. I remember one of Julio’s translations: “We are of Spain but we are not of Spain. We are Canary people. This is our land. This is our country.”

The brandy flowed. Little dishes came—calamari in lemon and garlic, big fat fava beans that we squeezed to pop out of the soft flesh, spicy mixes of tomatoes and garlic with chunks of lime-marinated fish, sardines, island cheese, and more brandy.

Then Tomas motioned to Julio and spoke softly and firmly. Julio looked very intense and then smiled. He turned to me.

“My father says you will stay here if you wish.”

“Here? Where? In this house?”

“No—in another place. My brother’s home. He is away in Madrid.”

“Where is this house?”

“It is very close.”

Tomas spoke softly to Julio again.

“My father says you will come to see your house now. If you wish.”

“My house!?”

“Yes. Come now. I will take you. You will stay, I think.”

I now knew I had no control over anything. I’d followed my inner voice and let things happen and they were happening so fast and so perfectly I had no wish to impede the flow.

We were outside again in the narrow street. The children were still there, waiting patiently as if they knew what would happen long before I did. And off we all went, pied-piper fashion again, wriggling between the houses, right to the end of the promontory, where we all stood on the edge of the cliffs watching huge waves explode fifty feet in the air and feeling the vibrations through the rock.

Julio nudged me.

“This is your house.”

I turned. He was pointing to a small square building, the last house on the rock, white and blue, with a staircase leading up to a red door. On the flat roof I could see plants waving. There were windows everywhere overlooking the beach, the volcano, the broad Atlantic.

Grinning like an idiot again, I followed him up the stairs. He unlocked the door with a key big enough for a castle dungeon, and we walked into one of the most beautiful rooms I have ever seen. Light filled every niche. On the left was a small propane stove, a sink, a big working table, and four chairs, Van Gogh chairs with straw seats and big unpolished wood uprights.

The living area was simply furnished—a few scattered rugs, armchairs, low table, lamps, empty shelves hungry for books (my books!). I could see the bathroom, tiled in blue Spanish tiles, and then another staircase leading up and out onto the roof, with views over everything—the whole village, ocean, mountains, bays….

It was a dream.

“You like your home?” Julio was watching my face.

“Julio, this is the best house I have ever seen.” I meant it too. “Yes,” he said simply, “I know. My brother was happy here, but he is away now for a long time.”

“Your brother has a lovely home.”

“My brother’s house—now your home.”

I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt like giggling, weeping, even praying a prayer of thanks (something I do far too infrequently). I shook Julio’s hand and then I hugged him. At first he pulled back, and then he was hugging me as hard as I hugged him.

Moving in was splendid chaos. Every child in the village came to help me carry my belongings from the camper (she looked so tiny from the top of those 130 steps) to the house at the end of the village—clothes, sleeping bag, books (far too many books), cameras, food (far too many useless cans), fishing rod, cushions, towels—and my guitar. When the children saw that they went wild. Compared to the island
timpales
, this was a brute of an instrument, a battered Gibson with a deep tone. They were all shouting something at me. Indispensable Julio stepped in again.

“They say play, Senor David. Please.”

But what? Which of my English and American folk songs could make any sense—Baez, Dylan, Guthrie, Paxton, Hank Williams, Pete Seeger, Donovan? Pete Seeger! Good old Pete always had a knack with kids. He could get them to sing in the middle of a tornado. I’d never sung much with kids before, but what the heck, everything on this island was new to me anyway and all I had to do was flow with the flow….

“Skip, skip, skip to m’Lou…” I’d used the same song before on one of my journeys, and it had worked wonders. The chorus is simple, the melody obvious, and even if you couldn’t get the words straight you could hum and la-la all the way through it. Which is precisely what they did.

Twenty-three little voices “Skip to m’Lou-ing” it up at the bottom of El Roque’s steps, bouncing around in the hot afternoon sun, making the dust rise in golden haloes, singing faster and faster, “Skip, skip, skip to m’Lou.” High above, a crowd of villagers gathered by the wall at the top of the rock, began clapping, and then the kids started clapping—“skip, skip”—and the whole bay rang to the sound of this crazy ditty that was utterly meaningless to them and perfect for this impromptu getting-to-know-you celebration on this, my first day in El Roque.

I thought—maybe a week or two here and then off to new places. But it didn’t happen that way. It was four months before I left that island. I even managed to tempt Anne to put aside her work for a while and join me in my island home. The villagers were delighted. Once they realized I was married, all attempts had been abandoned to match me up with one of the many eligible females in El Roque. (No, Julio’s sister, Maria, was already spoken for.) And on the day Anne arrived I invited the whole village to the house for a celebration. I had no idea what a Pandora’s box I’d opened with this innocent little gesture.

Very casually I’d asked everyone to come over in the evening after their long workday in the banana plantation. Come anytime after six, I said. Anne and I had prepared some platters of bread and cheese and opened bottles of island wine and rum. Then at 6:30
P.M.
precisely, there was a knock on the door. It was Julio (he’d long since appointed himself as my social secretary and general factotum).

“Please. Come. We are all welcoming your Mrs. David.”

Anne and I walked out on the platform at the top of our steps and looked down. Faces! Scores of laughing, smiling Canary faces staring up at us, clapping, singing. And everyone was carrying something—we could see cakes, pans of broiled fish, a bucket of live crabs, banana branches, straw baskets of tomatoes, bottles of wine, more cakes…

“Everyone who comes to the house must bring present,” Julio told us. “It is our custom.” I have no idea how we got the whole village of El Roque into our tiny house, but we did. The kitchen, the living room, even the roof was jammed with villagers—many of them we’d never met. Anne and I were buoyed like froth ahead of the surge onto the roof, and we never made it back to the kitchen to serve the simple dishes we’d prepared. At one point Julio went to check for us.

“They’ve gone. They’ve eaten them. I’ve told them to bring the cakes for you to cut.”

One by one, six brightly iced cakes made the journey over the heads of guests from kitchen to rooftop where we ceremoniously sliced them and sent them back downstairs for instant consumption. Then someone carried up the timpales and the guitar and off we went into a spree of folk songs that set the whole house bouncing long into the night….

What had been intended as a one-time “Welcome to Anne” occasion became a regular weekly event for the rest of our stay. Every Thursday evening there’d be a “folk-fest” gathering at the house, which would leave our voices hoarse and our kitchen table bowed with food. The problem was actually getting rid of all the fish, sausages, tomatoes, bananas, cakes, and wine before the next session on the following Thursday. The most difficult items were the bananas. They’d bring whole branches with as many as 150 firm green bananas hanging from them. We tried every way we could think of to use them—banana bread, banana cake, banana crêpes, banana omelet, banana purée, banana souffle, fried bananas, banana with garlic (interesting experiment there), and even fish with baked whole bananas. And we still ended up with huge surpluses, which we invariably had to heave over the roof wall into the surfing Atlantic, one hundred sheer feet below.