Breakfast was a sideboard loaded with fresh bread and jars of a sweet something called miel de palma, palm honey. I hated to get a house reputation for being nosy, but I was suspicious. It takes both bees and flowers to make honey, and a palm has nothing you'd recognize as a flower. (A botanist with a good eye would, but not a honeybee.) I mentioned this to the cook, who conceded that it's actually not honey but syrup, boiled down from the sap of palms in just the same way New Englanders make syrup from maple sap. I was still suspicious: palm trees, ancient relatives of the grasses, have no xylem and phloem, the little pipes in a tree trunk that move the sap up and down through the tree. To tap a palm, you'd have to whack the head off a mature tree and let it bleed to death.
The cook was congenial about getting a science quiz at this early hour. He told me that what I'd guessed was partly true--in the old days miel de palma was a delicacy fatal to the trees, and therefore quite expensive. But in this century, North Africans had developed a gentler palm-tapping technique and introduced it to La Gomera. He said I should go see the palm groves.
I went. I drove up into the highlands of whitewashed villages, vineyards, and deep-cut valleys that rang with the music of wild canaries (ancestral species of their yellower domestic cousins). The island of Gomera is a deeply eroded volcano, twelve miles across and flat-topped, with six mammoth gorges radiating from the center like spokes of a wheel. Farms and villages lie within the gorges, and the road does not go anywhere as the crow flies. Often I rounded a corner to face a stunning view of cliffs and sea and, in the background, the neighboring island of Tenerife. From this distance, Tenerife showed off the pointed silhouette of its own grand volcano, Mount Teide, snowclad from autumn to spring, the highest mountain on any soil claimed by Spain.
La Gomera's farmland brought to mind my grandfather's tales of farming the hills of Kentucky: planting potatoes on ground so steep, he liked to say, you could lop off the ends of the rows and let the potatoes roll into a basket. But here the farmers mostly grow grapevines, on narrow, stone-banked terraces that rise one after another in steep green stairways from coastline to clouds. Hawks wheeled in the air currents rising from the gorges.
I stopped for coffee in a country restaurant that by chance was hosting a family reunion. Unwilling to leave me out, the waiter brought me watercress soup and the country staple known as "wrinkled potatoes." The spicy cilantro sauce had personality. So did the waiter. I told him I'd heard rumors of a village where they make pottery the way the Guanches did. (I was making this up, wholesale.) "Go to Chipude," he said, startling me. "That's not where they make it. The town where they make it doesn't have a name, but you can see it from Chipude."
I followed his advice--how could I not?--and at Chipude they waved me down the road to a place unmarked on my map, but whose residents insist it does have a name: Cercado (meaning, approximately, "Hidden inside its walls"). I spotted a group of white-aproned women sitting in an open doorway, surrounded by red clay vessels. One woman wore a beaten straw hat and held a sphere of clay against herself, carving it with a knife. She was not making coils or, technically speaking, building the pot; she was sculpting it, exactly as the Guanches are said to have done. When she tilted up her straw hat, her gold earring glinted and I saw that her eyes were Guanche blue. I asked her where the clay comes from. She pointed with her knife: "That barranco," the gorge at the end of the village. Another woman was painting a dried pot with reddish clay slip: mud from that other barranco, she pointed. After a pot dries, they explained, and is painted with slip and dries again, its surface is rubbed smooth with a beach rock. Finally, the finished pot is polished to the deep, shiny luster of cherry wood. This last was the task of an old woman with the demeanor of a very old tree, who sat in the corner. She showed me her polishing stick: the worn-down plastic handle of a toothbrush. "What did the Guanches use?" I asked, and she gave me a smile as silent as the gardener's and the parrots.
The youngest of the women, a teenager named Yaiza, was about to carry a load of finished pots to the kiln. She offered to show me. We walked together through the village, past two girls sitting on the roadside stringing red chilies, down a precarious goat path, into a grassy gorge. The kiln was a mud hut with a tin roof and a serious fire inside. Yaiza adjusted pots on the scorching tin roof, explaining that each one must spend half a day there upside down, half a day right side up, and then it's ready to go into the fire, where it stays another full day. If the weather is right, it comes out without breaking. After this amount of art and labor, the women were prepared to sell one of these pots for about $13. I told Yaiza she should charge ten times that much. She laughed. I asked her if she had ever left La Gomera, and she laughed again, as if the idea were ludicrous. I asked her if a lot of people knew how to make this pottery, and she replied, "Oh, sure. Fourteen or fifteen." All of them belonged to two families, and all lived in this village.
We returned to the pottery house, and I bought a pair of clay bowls. I packed them into my car with enormous care. I had the strange feeling that a few days from now, back at my apartment in Santa Cruz, when I opened these boxes and took out the crumpled newspapers I would possess only air and dust.
The green heart of La Gomera is the Garajonay National Park, a central plateau of ancient laurel forest. On an otherwise dry island, the lush vegetation here drinks from a mantle of perpetual fog. At some point between the dinosaur days and the dawn of humankind, forests like this covered the whole Mediterranean basin; now they have receded to a few green dots on the map in the Madeira and Canary Islands. A friend of mine, an ecologist who studies the laurel forest, had warned me to watch out for sleek black rats in the treetops. At certain seasons the laurels accumulate in their leaves a powerful toxin the rats crave, against their own and the trees' best interests. The local park ranger confirmed this--his advice was to watch for gnawed twigs in the path, then look up, and I would spot the little drug addicts up there. (The colorful Spanish word for drug addiction is toxicomania.) Eventually, he told me, they get so drunk they fall and lie trembling on their backs.
I hiked into the forest, which, like everything else on this island, seemed enchanted. The laurels are old twisted things with moss beards on their trunks and ferns at their feet. Green sunlight fell in pools on the forest floor. I felt drugged myself. I watched the path closely, where I saw tiny white orchids and fallen leaves but no toxicomaniac rats.
Climbing higher, I broke out of the cloud layer into treeless highlands on a bald mountaintop called Pico de Garajonay. The peak is named for the legendary lovers Gara and Jonay, the Guanche equivalents of Romeo and Juliet, who flung themselves with picturesque fatality from this mountaintop. A keen wind whistled over the peak's stone lid, and in the afternoon brightness I could see all but one of the other Canaries. Beyond them to the east lay a long bank of clouds signifying the coast of West Africa. That close. The easternmost Canary Island is only sixty-seven miles from the Saharan sands of mainland Africa. Spain can claim this land all it wants, but geography still asserts itself from time to time, as a reminder that the islands will always belong to Africa. Strong, dry continental storms bring over hot dust and sometimes even torpid, wind-buffeted locusts from the Sahara; Canarians call this dismal weather by its West African name, kalmia.
But today the air above the clouds was clear as glass, and I felt some electric liquor replacing the blood in my veins. The last time I looked at that long, pink curving flank of Africa, I was seven years old. I'd sat up all night, thrilled and tightly strung in a Pan Am jet, traveling with my family toward the village in central Congo that would be our home for a time. My father pointed at the cloudbank and told me it was Africa. I couldn't begin to imagine the life that was rolling out ahead of me. But I did understand it would pass over me with the force of a river, and that I needed to pin the water to its banks and hold it still, somehow, to give myself time to know it. I could think of only one way to do it, and I've thought of no better way since. I cracked the spine of the diary I'd receiv
ed as a Christmas present and began the self-conscious record of my life with this block-lettered sentence:
"When I first saw Africa I thought it was a cloud."
Now I have a desk drawer filled with those diaries, brightly and flimsily bound, with their effete locks and minuscule tin keys. And I have a long bookshelf of the spiral-bound notebooks to which I graduated, once diaries suddenly seemed juvenile. I am still trying to pin the river to its banks.
I left the forest for the dry, windy side of the island, a terrain with the mood of North Africa. Date palms waved like bouquets of feathers. These were the trees tapped for miel de palma, and I could see that it doesn't kill the tree outright but it doesn't do it any good, either. The new leaves that spring up after tapping are dwarfed and off kilter. I pulled over, stood beside the road, and looked down into the gorge below, at groves and groves of palms with bad haircuts. The North Africans had saved the trees, but made them ridiculous. The Guanches have survived to whistle a secret life among drug-addicted woodrats. And but for a sneeze of history, Columbus might have stayed forever in the boudoir of Beatriz de Bobadilla. There was nothing at all for me to do about history but write down the wonders that passed over. I felt my mind lift up from its center, unhinge, cast out its months-old plague of despair like locusts into the wind. I laughed out loud.
The shoreline at the base of the gorge was windy, rocky, wild, and utterly deserted. If it wasn't the end of the map, you could surely see it from there. In tide pools, fish and crabs scuttled through their claustrophobic soup, frightened by my long shadow, waiting to be rescued by the next high tide. On the black sand beach I found shells so beautiful I pocketed them with the thrilling sense that I'd stolen something, but there were no witnesses. No one else to see the sun go huge and round, then drown itself, burning a red path of memory on the face of the sea.
In the morning, the air was changed. The garden of the parador was quiet, the air choked with pale haze: the kalmia had come in the night. It deepened its hold as we travelers boarded the ferry and headed back toward an invisible destination. The white-block hotels of southern Tenerife and the giant cone of Mount Teide were nothing, not even mirages in white air. If I had a desk, a home, a life somewhere, it existed only in my mind. When I first saw Africa it was a cloud, and it's surely the same for anything at all. It takes time to peer through the vapor and understand.
As our ferry left the port of San Sebastian, the haze closed down behind us, suspending us on a blank sea between lost worlds. The dolphins were there, I knew. I had written them in my notebook, pinning down the record of my fortune.
CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT ROCK GODDESS
In my hotel room in Boston I sat at the window with my chin on my knees, looking down on the Charles River, where white sails zipped under a freeway overpass, rippling like runaway laundry against a backdrop of late-morning traffic and soot-gray bricks.
I couldn't quite work out what I was doing here, two thousand miles from my daughter, whom I missed so badly I felt as if I'd been shot in the chest, and from my empty Tucson household, where the dust bison roamed freely among the piled-up mail and manuscripts and maybe by now were plotting an unopposed takeover. Instead I was in a hotel, pretending to be a musician on tour with a bunch of authors pretending to be a band.
At the moment I was waiting for two grown men named Hoover and Mouse to come pick up my electric keyboard and haul it to the club in Providence where we would be opening our show that night. Mouse and Hoover were our roadies, hired professionals at my service to tote and tune and do all the dirty work so that I--presumably--could preserve my delicate constitution for the performance. This is a joke; either one of them could play a meaner keyboard than I do, I'm sure, with one or more of his arms in a plaster cast.
I'd asked them to bring the keyboard back here after rehearsal last night, hoping some after-hours practice on my own would render me a passable musician, and then, presto, this very weird scheme would fall into place for me. It didn't. I ran through a halfhearted "Nadine," switched the power off, called my best friend up long distance, and asked: "What in the bejesus am I doing here?" My friend said, as friends do, "I don't know, darlin', but you'll think of something." So far I hadn't. My keyboard was hulking over there on the table like the remains of some malinspired room-service party ordered up at 2 A.M. and left for dead on its tray.
I was suffering from sleep deprivation, that much I knew. I recognized the signs: life seemed baffling and mostly not quite worth the bother. I don't have a musician's sleeping skills, among other things. Our schedule said we were to stay up late rehearsing or performing, then sleep till noon. I've never slept past sunrise I don't think, not on my life, for love nor money nor prescription drugs, so on a schedule like that I had no choice but to stay up till three, get up at six, and sit around my room waiting for scheduled late-morning events like "bag pull" (a new one on me), or the impending visit of Mouse and Hoover.
At last they knocked, and I let them in. They were cheerful and embarrassingly subordinate. "Get those changes worked out?" they asked, as if I'd been pacing all night, frowning in my headphones, memorizing modulations and fingering patterns and stunning new chord sequences.
"You guys are great," I said. It was the truth. They were kind enough to pretend there was work to be done and a show to put on and it's all going to be big fun.
If you ask me, making a fool of yourself on purpose is a scary enterprise. That thought had entered my mind right away, when I first got a letter from Kathi Goldmark asking if I'd be willing to get together with a bunch of other authors and play music for the American Booksellers' Convention in Anaheim. Kathi is a media escort, whose profession involves chauffeuring and nurturing authors when they're on book tours; many of these authors, in the weakened condition induced by too much travel, apparently confessed to her their secret rock-and-roll pasts. Little did we know we would be held to these confessions when Kathi cooked up a scheme. Her form letter offered three boxes to check, suggesting these alternatives: (1) Yes, wild horses couldn't keep me away from a concert in Anaheim! (2) No, I am much too dignified to do such a foolish thing. (3) I might have to wash my hair that night; talk me into it. I checked box #3.
I'm not dignified at all; that wasn't the problem. My friends, under pressure or bribe, will tell stories about me that involve, for example, go-go dancer impersonation and flamboyant petty thievery. (I once helped relocate the Big Boy from his post in front of the Bob's Big Boy establishment to the front porch of an archenemy. The Big Boy weighs a ton.) Dignity has never put any rocks in my road. But when I thought over this band idea, it occurred to me that lots of things could keep me away, wild horses being the least of them. I may be fun at parties, but only if I can make it look more or less like an accident; I'm not a show-off. To put myself onstage in some kind of crossover talent show seemed audacious.
I received Kathi's recruitment letter several months after she'd mailed it from San Francisco; I was in the Canary Islands, and out of the communicative loop, to put in mildly. After I checked box #3 and dropped my letter into the bright yellow "We-pick-up-mail-when-we-feel-like-it" box down the street from my apartment, I thought that would surely be the end of that.
In February '92, when I moved back to the U.S., a mound of unforwarded mail was waiting for me, shaped something like a faithful dog but much larger. In it I discovered about twenty hot-pink envelopes containing urgent communiques from Kathi Goldmark. It seemed I was the keyboard player for an all-author band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. Apparently I'd held this position for months. I called Kathi and told her I found it worrisome. Maybe all the other people were first-rate musicians, and I would embarrass them. Or maybe we'd sound hideous. She sent me a tape that Stephen King had made of himself playing guitar and singing. The first of my worries was expunged, and the second, certified.
So we did our crossover talent show, and made a big hit with the tipsy booksellers and publishers of North America, and somebody got the idea we
should do it some more. I pointed out that while hit-and-run is one thing, repeat offenders generally get the punishment they richly deserve. If we kept playing, somebody would notice that the Rock Bottom Remainders sounded like Hound Dogs in Heat, with the advantages of modern amplification technology. My fellow band members didn't think this should pose any significant problems.
That winter it became clear that we really were going to do it, something big, possibly a road tour, in the spring of '93. I felt ambivalent. I was finishing a novel, and knew that soon enough I would have to be on the road way too much, promoting the new book. Also, my personal life had become a protracted crisis. I'm a cheerful person on the whole, but '92 was a rotten year. My marriage of many years was transferred suddenly from intensive care to the autopsy table. I had long since come to terms with loneliness, but now I was also going to be single--something I hadn't been since age twenty-two. The death of my family's hopes weighed down my limbs and spirit like a narcotic. Frightening legal demands--which even questioned my ownership of my own writings, in a community property state--left me reeling. And if I wanted to feel sorry for myself on either account, I'd have to work it in between the tasks of being mother of a preschooler, full-time author with impending deadlines, carpool driver, domestic engineer, good citizen, sole breadwinner, and fixer of all broken things around the house. Every single appliance under my roof that involved water--the washing machine, hot-water heater, bathtub, sink, shower, washing machine again--chose to blow out and cause a flood on its own special day of that long winter. ("This" I announced to my friends, "is a broken home.") Worried sick about cash flow, I tried to fix things myself--with only modest success. The bathtub spigot that I reattached still points skyward, to this day, as though waiting for Mary Poppins to come along and draw a whimsical bath on the ceiling. But Poppins never showed.
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