GARAFIA, ISLE OF LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS / 2016
One afternoon, Kata, Antje's red cat comes calling.
We play—I tug his stuffed, pink dinosaur and he bats and fight; legs wrapped around the faded, plush body. Eventually, he curls up next to me and falls asleep on the striped patio bed.
Before I can blink, it is four o’clock and I am due at Antje’s shop. We are going to the nearby town of Puntagorda to see the local mercado (market) and attend an African culture festival. Hurriedly, I lock the door to my little cabin and bound down the trail to the town square. When I arrive, there are a surprising number of people in the plaza. Usually, it feels forgotten by time—just a few old men drinking wine at a plastic table in the corner.
Inside Antje’s shop, I see a German couple that I passed on the Camino Real de la Costa earlier that day. We exchange niceties and as they leave, Antje introduces me to another man. She nods at him and asks, “Can we take this one to Puntagorda, also?”
He is tall and wiry with brown, curly hair, a scruffy beard, hands stuffed in his pockets. A shoulder bag is slung across his chest and he wears faded, brown cords, and sandals; his black cap is tilted slightly. Che Guevara, I think.
“Sure,” I say.
Before we can leave for Puntagorda, we must wait for Antje to close her shop. Che turns to me. “May I invite you for a drink?” He asks.
Before I can accept, Antje shoos us out of the store. So we walk next door to the local watering hole.
“You would like coffee? Or wine, perhaps?” He holds the door for me as we enter.
“Coffee, por favor,” I reply.
He says his name is Manolo and asks mine. I tell him. The bartender, Petra deftly whips up a caffe sola and I carry it to the table. Monolo also has a coffee but tries to talk me into a shot of Jägermeister.
I make a face. “En serio?” Really?
“Oh yes. It’s the best. Es un digestivo!”
I shake my head. No, gracias.
Petra rolls her eyes. She pulls out her iPhone. “Jägermeister es malo,” she states authoritatively. “The best drink is from my country—Czech Republic. Berenchova. See?” She shows us a Google photo of a fancy blue bottle.
Manolo’s emits a gravely laugh and waves her away. Luckily, he drops the idea of Jäger shots. We talk instead of Garafia and La Palma, and his job as a guide for the island’s tourism office. It is one of the rare non-agro or shop jobs in Garafia.
“La Palma is not Spanish,” he says decisively. “Es todo. It’s everything.”
“There is a diverse mix of cultures here—Portuguese, French, Spanish, German, African, Eastern European.”
He digs in his satchel, pulls out a worn, leather pouch of tobacco, and begins to roll a cigarette.
“Regarding our island—“ He licks the rolling paper. “I am an expert here. Whatever you wish to know, I can tell you.”
Behind the counter, Petra arches a delicate brow and bites back a smirk.
*
When Antje is finally ready, she exits her shop, pulling an empty suitcase behind her. It’s for the handicrafts she will buy at the mercado, she explains.
As we stand in the plaza, her son, Pablo suddenly appears. Where he has been all day, I couldn’t say. He is quiet, shy. and industrious. I often see him around their property—toting grasses, composting, digging, raking, planting. Yesterday, we sat in the sun outside the kitchen house surrounded by a tribe of cats. I bumped along in stilted Spanish as he patiently corrected me. I learned that he likes chess and hiking, is fluent in both German and Spanish, and teaches futbol to kids at the grade school.
“Pablo, kommst du mit uns?” Antje asks him teasingly in German. Will you come with us?
He shakes his head and with a faint blush, nods toward the bar that Manolo and I have just left. It seems to be the place where the entire town goes when work is done. Pablo is a homebody, his mother has told me, and will always choose the familiar.
Behind us, Manolo’s voice crescendos. He has been on a diatribe for some time, but I stopped listening after we left the bar. Now, he is ranting about something a German tourist did; a thing of no real consequence, other than it gives him something to shout passionately about.
“Ay de mi!” he roars, suddenly. Inexplicably. His voice echoes across the plaza and a table of tourists looks up curiously from their plates.
“Tranquillo, tranquillo,” Antje whispers, tugging his sleeve.
We pile into the car. Before we leave town, Manolo asks to stop by the bank. I park across the street and we wait for him, windows down so that the sea air blows through. He stands at the ATM with his legs apart, as if he is facing off against an enemy. After a few moments, he bangs both hands down on the machine.
Antje and I turn to watch him. She was in the middle of telling me that this particular ATM once had a small, slim opening beneath the machine for trash—receipts and such—and that people (tourists, mainly), thinking that it was the card slot, kept throwing their cards in the garbage by accident. We know that this is not the case with Monolo, the savvy local. The Expert on All Things La Palma. Suddenly, he begins cursing loudly in Spanish. Turning back towards us, hands to the sky, he yells: “It says—I am not enough!”
“Fondos insuficiente,” chuckles Antje. As in: no dinero. We stifle our laughter and shrug sympathetically through the open window. Manolo is a flurry of action as he tries different cards. After several more minutes of cursing and banging, he finally trots back to the car. By some magic he has procured a fistful of Euros.
“Vamanos!” He exclaims, a triumphant gleam in his eye. “To the festiva!”
*
As we drive, Manolo leans forward between the front seats and expounds on La Palma’s incredible natural features—its abundance of caves, mountains, lush forests, beaches, the diverse flora and fauna. There is even a giant caldera—a collapsed volcano—at its heart, Caldera de Taburiente. It's clear that Manolo wants all visitors to love the island as much as he. I’m not a hard sell, however and tell him that La Palma is definitely a place that everyone should see once in their life. As he rattles on, I focus on hugging the road's snaking curves and then—Antje abruptly tells him to stop talking.
“I would like to speak to Richele now, por favor, since she is gone tomorrow,” she says.
“Really?” Manolo sounds surprised. He nudges me in the shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“Barcelona and Valencia, then on to Granada.”
“So yes,” Antje repeats. “I would like to tell her some things.”
“Claro, claro.” Manolo leans back and placidly rolls another cigarette. I glance at him in the rearview mirror as he stares out the window with a gauzy expression on his face, his thoughts already floating elsewhere.
Antje begins to talk. She was a young mother when she first came to Garafia.
She had three boys and soon after, gave birth to a fourth. Her sons thrived on the island; the older two are now back in Germany, one a museum curator and the other, an outdoor educator for children. Her youngest sons—Pablo and his little brother—split their time between Berlin and Santo Domingo.
Before Antje came to Garafia, she lived a bohemian life. She made art and handicrafts and became a self-taught photographer. Once, she had a job driving trucks through the Andorran mountains. It was in Santo Domingo that she learned how to polish dragon tree seeds in the natural stream that runs through the kitchen of her renovated goat barn. She then turns the lustrous seeds into jewelry which tourists are only too happy to buy.
Now, Antje enjoys a simple life on La Palma. She runs her shop selling artisan goods but still travels as much as possible. An addiction of sorts, she admits.
What she loves most is going to Africa by boat from Grand Canarias. She has visited Gambia and Senegal several times and loves both countries. She even tried to adopt an eight-year-old boy—a Gambian orphan she came to know on her visits—who called her “Mama” and begged her to take him with her as tears rolled down his cheeks. The paperwork went on for years. She prepared her house, applied for the requisite approvals. But it never happened. She found the boy a good school in Gambia and paid for him to attend until he graduated. He has since grown up and has a daughter of his own.
"And the cycle of poverty repeats," she murmurs.
We talk more about this as we sit, sipping Cokes at the café outside the mercado in Puntagorda. Youssour N’Dour is blaring from the loud speakers as the stage is readied for the main act—a Senegalese band.
Later, we wander through the mass of dancers, drum circles, and artists, and stroll the farmer’s market where I buy a slab of rosemary goat cheese, chocolate, pears, and anise crackers.
The air is thick with colliding smells—the sweet haze of pastries, tang of cheeses, the keen pinch of spices.
Outside, Antje steers me toward a stand where a woman is selling Gambian curry. In exchange for three euros she hands us plates laden with saffron rice and tender chicken swimming in a froth of coconut milk, dates, currants, and cumin.
*
That evening, after we we have returned from Puntagorda, Antje comes to my little cabin bearing a steaming pot of Lemongrass tea. She is glad, I think, that I am so happy here. That I find it to be the kind of place I might return. When we were at the café earlier, she took a deep draw off her little pipe and said, “We should meet in Fuerte Ventura next year. There is a nice place on the beach to stay and there will be music and art and handicrafts. And dancing.”
It sounds like magic. And as she says the words, I would like nothing more. Yet, I suddenly realize: there is no such thing as ‘all the time in the world’. We can only see as much of the world as our brief time on earth will allow. Both relief and desperation settle over me as I ponder this.