High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [45]
I went to the Canaries for nearly a year, to find new stories to tell, and to grow comfortable thinking in Spanish. Or so I said; the truth is closer to the bone. It was 1991, and in the U.S. a clamor of war worship had sprung like a vitriolic genie from the riveted bottles we launched on Baghdad. Yellow ribbons swelled from suburban front doors, so puffy and ubiquitous as to seem folkloric. But this folklore, a prayer of godspeed to the killers, allowed no possibility that the vanquished might also be human. I grew hopeless, then voiceless. What words could I offer a place like this? Five hundred years after colonialism arrived in the New World, I booked a return passage.
Subtropical Europe seemed an idyllic combination of wild and tame: socialized health care and well-fed children, set in a peaceful tangle of banana trees and wild poinsettias. We settled in Tenerife’s capital city, Santa Cruz, in a walk-up apartment that was tiny by U.S. standards, average by European, and anyhow what we could afford. I soon got used to living in a small space. The walls vibrated pleasantly with my upstairs neighbor’s piano sonatas. I planted tomatoes and basil in pots on the balcony. My daughter became bilingual without realizing it, continuing to chatter in Spanish as I walked her home from kindergarten. In the afternoons she and I made forays to the bright, rowdy markets, to the beach, to wherever the green city buses would take us. We sat in sidewalk cafés on the harbor, watching cars go by. Behind the cars, enormous ships passed by on a lane of water not visible from our vantage point, so it looked as if ocean liners were sliding majestically up and down the Avenida de Anaga. In the park we collected round wooden jacaranda pods with toothy openings like small dragon mouths. We grew accustomed to the remarkable habit of walking there, perfectly safe, after dark. We did not miss the New World.
I set my writing desk against the apartment’s front window, from which I could look down into the tops of the great fig trees that lined the street below—a broad boulevard named for General Franco, the distinguished despot and friend to Hitler. (My friends who sent me letters there will vouch for this, my astonishing fascist address.) So much for the innocence of this place, whose Spanish charm—like the whole world, apparently—is built on the bones of the vanquished. What new stories were here to tell? Instead of writing, I took to staring at the apartment across the street, also three floors up, where at night a fellow insomniac haunted his spartan balcony. I considered blinking my lights at him. I began to imagine a whole secret world of signals: A woman who sits on her balcony each morning drinking coffee, while the stranger across the street does the same. One day she buys a fern for her balcony, and the following day so does he. Then she buys a geranium, so does he. She fills her balcony, crowds it with flowers, so that he will too. Why? To watch him prove his devotion? Because she feels sorry for him, and wants him to drink his coffee in the lively embrace of a garden? Or simply because she has power over him? If that is the case, then she will take the plants away again, one by one, leaving him with nothing in the end. In my despondent state I could think of no happier ending. Power, like space, it seemed to me, would always get used. People expand and bloat to fill it.
My mind staggered and found nothing of use to tell. A small, squat spider patrolled the window casing above my writing desk. Its two white forelegs moved continually in a single repeated gesture: a scooping motion toward its mouth, like a mute beggar asking for bread. The spider became the muse of my empty page, asking, asking, asking to be filled.
In September Camille made plans to spend a weekend with a school friend. Given the chance to get away, briefly, I found I needed to go. I didn’t know why, but I knew where. La Gomera.
Six of the seven Canary Islands have airports, the better to accommodate hasty visits from