For the past two months, I’ve been stuck on a tropical island—Surely, this is a sentence many of us desperately wish to be able to say at least once in their lifetime. In my case, the experience was marred with a sense of acute loss, grief, and a case of profound isolation.
This is a story of being washed ashore and stranded in strange places. It’s a story of mind-numbing homesickness — and of how books have the power to carry us through the loneliest weeks of our lives.
Spoiler Alert. This article discusses the following books:
Sensitive Themes. This article contains the following potential triggers:
In the Atlantic, there’s a mysterious place that gleams like a green-golden jewel against the deep-blue sea.
Once wistfully nicknamed ‘the Fortunate Island,’ Tenerife is divided into two distinct zones: one part arid desert marked by beautiful sedimentary layers and the volcanic reds and browns of ancient earth-tones — and one part subtropical lushness sprawling with banana plantations, palms, avocado trees, and misty laurel forests.
In their midst towers the often snow-peaked summit of El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain. Many have climbed it or attempted to do so, but most may not know that Teide — in itself a giant active volcano reaching 3,718 meters above sea — is only a tiny, tiny splinter of a once much larger chain of mountains.
Or, not ‘mountains,’ exactly.
Teide, along with its companion peaks such as Pico Viejo, is in fact but a tiny fragment, an accidental leftover, of an absolutely massive crater rim that once — millions of years ago — belonged to a prehistoric supervolcano.
This I learnt from my father, who loves to watch documentaries, on one of my countless trips to Tenerife.
The supervolcano has long since collapsed into the vast and vastly beautiful volcanic caldera, a plateau now called ‘Las Cañadas’ (‘mountain passes’). The plateau is an otherworldly landscape of barren beauty, spanning from horizon to horizon, in a rough and seemingly endless jumble of solidified lava streams and bizarrely-shaped volcanic sculptures. At night, the sky is alight with the cosmos above, in its center a silver-burning Milky Way.
Today — every day — endless lines of colorfully gleaming rental cars (dwarfed dots of tin and metal) shoot across Las Cañadas, like miniature alien spacecrafts crossing Mars.
Hordes of tourists on quads block traffic and churn up volcanic dust in their noisy quest for an off-roading adventure.
Tiny gondolas zip up and down the peak, insignificant against the forever-blue of a sky above the clouds.
And when you watch all this frantic human activity quietly from a height — knowing that we are dancing around in the collapsed impression of a colossal, unimaginably hot, pulsating gate to the planet’s molten crucible — you’ll begin to wonder what on earth we are doing.
You might begin, as a species, to feel pretty absurd.
Pretty out of place.
Pretty blind to our own condition.
Leaving
The Crone Archetype Is Expelled from Her Forest Cottage
On July 12 of this year my father was diagnosed with cancer.
He is young. He hasn’t even officially hit retirement age.
For as long as I can think, my parents have always wanted to emigrate — pack their bags and leave Switzerland, the place where my brothers and I and most of those who came before us were born and raised.
Thirteen years ago, they took the plunge and moved their belongings to the Canary Islands — an archipelago that is culturally considered Spain, geographically technically African.
For the past ten years or so, my father has commuted back and forth between Switzerland, where he planned to stay put and work until retirement, and Tenerife, where my mother already managed a successful business and a beautiful home embedded in a garden of aloe vera, palms, and orange trees.
Only in December of last year was my father at last able to opt for early retirement and move to Tenerife permanently, joining his wife in their common dream of their beautiful new home at last.
In this new place, buzzing with red dragon flies that have big transparent wings, my father had exactly seven months. As soon as the illness was spotted, the Spanish doctors urged him to seek treatment immediately — in Switzerland.
My instinctive knee jerk reaction to that fateful call was to do what I had learnt from my parents: I decided to pack my bags and fly half-way around the globe.
I can do this at the drop of a hat: I am a search engine specialist running my own business, and so I am professionally more flexible than most. My clients don’t require my physical presence: I live in Oslo, Norway, but I can theoretically work from wherever, whenever.
My setup must be every aspiring digital nomad’s dream — but I don’t consider myself a digital nomad, at least not proudly so.
Rather, I consider myself a ‘youthful crone’. And this, by contrast, quite proudly.
All of my favorite main characters in all of my favorite books are, and have always been, elderly solitary women.
This recurring literary archetype will often be on their own, but they are not lonely. They live great lives. Centuries ago, they would have certainly been burned at the stake for their individuality and their fearless freedom.
Crones are usually bookish.
They throw themselves blissfully into piles of leaves and fall asleep in them (Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner), or they survive entirely alone on a mountain, with only a cow and a dog, after the apocalypse (The Wall by Marlen Houshofer).
They find creative ways to escape the nursing home (The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington), they sort of get into weirdly sexual relations with a tamed bear (Bear by Marian Engel).
Sometimes, they delightfully rediscover themselves while ‘simply’ struggling with menopause, dying spouses and estranged sons (Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout).
I will certainly write about these books more extensively in another issue of the Quiet Pages.
For now, simply know that these women are never up to any good, and they usually have exactly zero fucks to give. Which is presumably why I love them so incredibly, very much.
I adore a good, self-determined witch.
In my heart of hearts, I already am one of those white-haired and wrinkled women, surrounded by dogs and annoying children — not mine — that just, somehow, keep on visiting and that I am curiously unable to shake.
But I am distinctly cherishing my old age in a cabin filled with books and roaming the Norwegian woods in knee-high rain boots, possibly pushing away the undergrowth with a loaded rifle. I don’t know why the rifle has to be there in this recurring fantasy of mine — it is a recent addition, make of it what you will.
Here is a meme I have (for years now) been able to relate to, in absolutely every way:
So this, it appears, is who I am at heart.
And this, then, is the kind of person who offered to transplant her existence, immediately, for an indefinite amount of time, to a tropical island — in order to jump in and run her parents’ business, alone, until a better solution could be found.
What could go wrong?
Everything happened very quickly. There was no time to think.
I was in shock, fearing the merciless loss of a beloved parent who urgently and immediately needed care.
I booked the flight shortly before midnight. I packed well into the early morning hours —one piece of hand luggage only. I boarded the plane at ten a.m. the next day.
Merely breathing now felt strange, and strangely surreal. Everything in my sphere of existence trembled. But I knew what I was going to do, and I knew why I had chosen to do it.
So I did it.
Leaving behind my husband and dog, I boarded the plane.
Norway — where I live — is an unlikely home.
I, like the rest of my family, have always foolishly proclaimed that I was never, ever, going to set a foot on Scandinavian ground.
Why would I?
The sun is practically gone for half of the year. Temperatures don’t have to — but may just — drop well below -20C for weeks at a time, even in comparatively southern areas, like Oslo.
A teenage version of myself (not the crone one) might have ignorantly declared that no one in their right mind would choose to live here voluntarily, when alternatives such as any other, warmer, brighter place were available, in any way.
Having grown up in the alpine East of Switzerland, I’ve had plenty of snow, mountains, firs and spruces to contend with.
My future was going to be a sort of sun-soaked medley of palm trees, easy access to beaches, permanent tans, and breezy tank tops.
Then — seven years ago — my husband and I moved to Norway.
Partly on my initiative.
Obviously, my earlier fear of the climate had dissipated. But at that point, I did not know that this place was going to unlock a side of me that I hadn’t known existed. I had only an inkling, and it surprised me as much as anyone else.
In Norway, much like in Switzerland, there are mountains. But they are — if this makes any sense — flatter. Mellower. For thousands and thousands of years, kilometers of moving ice have filed down landscapes of pure rock and survival and transformed it into a sort of undulating endlessness.
There are forests, but they are vaster, airier. Lighter. They roll on for kilometers and kilometers, seemingly untamed and uncontained (though here, too, there is increased talk of the destruction of Norwegian nature for industrial purposes).
Lonesome lakes gleam quietly in their midst, like lost gems waiting to be found and cherished.
There are beaches, yes — but for most of the year, the water is deep, dark, and cold. This doesn’t stop the Norwegians from swimming in it.
In recent years, the coastline of the Oslo fjord has morphed into an adventure land of floating saunas puttering across the icy water with their chimneys spewing steam and smoke smelling of wood, warmth, and winter.
Even without saunas, however, people — me included — have taken to rituals of ice bathing. We like to take our painful baths in the deepest of winter, feeling the insane adrenaline rush (and heat) surge right after the dip.
In summer, the country transforms into a sphere of light. The sun sets late — around midnight — and rises early, at four a.m. Strolling home from a party in the small hours, you walk under a twinkling illumination of rose and gold.
After a fleeting but gorgeous spring that lasts only two or three weeks, the city turns into a garden shining with the freshness of renewed ivy, maples, ashes, and birch.
The streets buzz with the activity of bicycles and electric scooters. The beaches are crowded, tans are cultivated madly, laboriously sculpted abs are paraded with exceptional pride, and the fjord’s coolness becomes a welcome respite from the heat — which, for Norwegians, delightfully begins at approximately 25 degrees Centigrade.
Anything above it and they begin complaining about not being able to sleep at night, what with the heat.
Oh, the heat…
To my own boundless surprise, I feel very much at home in all this. Not in the temperature part, exactly — not that.
I simply feel at home.
Stranded
The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey (2020)
In 1976, white men — tourists from Florida — brutally pull a young mermaid from the ocean, where she belongs, and drag her onto the shore of a tropical island.
Her hair was the worst part — the book goes — a mess of fire and ropes of this and that. Jellyfish had come up with her, clusters of long blue veins. Sea moss trailed from her shoulders like slithers of beard. Barnacles speckled the swell of her hips. [S]he was crawling with sea-lice. They saw that when her diaphragm heaved, it revealed wide slits which were gills and they looked sharp enough to slice a finger off. All the men backed away [my emphasis].
Had it not been for such viscerally powerful prose, the premise of a novel about a mermaid falling in love with a fisherman would most certainly not have managed to pull me in.
Especially not on this kind of flight, in my particular condition — heading for Tenerife to step in for a newly cancer-stricken father, while everyone else on the plane seemed giddy with excitement, the artificial cabin air electrified with anticipation of sun-filled vacation days ahead.
Luckily, the prose and imagery of Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020) was irresistible, like a sort of shockingly aesthetic traffic accident you can’t force yourself to look away from.
For multiple hours of my 6-hour-flight to the Fortunate Island, I could not look away.
The mermaid lay there, heaving and bleeding. They heard the loud sounds of her gasps. The men stared. [...] Her eyes flicked over them, full of contempt. She’d fought hard to stay in the ocean. Each man felt a deep tug in his crotch. The old man wanted to take out his dick and piss all over her. The younger men fought hard to keep a cockstand from bouncing up their pants. She was like a magnet. She was a woman hooked, clubbed, half-dead, half-naked and virgin young.
Unwillingly, my eyes were glued to the page.
I had not expected this.
The main reason why I was at all in possession of this book was because it is part of the glorious Vintage Earth series, a beautifully curated collection of eight novels marked by ‘outstanding writing on the power and beauty of nature’. The moment I first lay eyes on the stunning cover design of one of its titles — I’ve mentioned it already: The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer — I was enchanted.
I knew I was going to have them all lined up on my bookshelves one day.
Over the years, I have indeed managed to complete the set, and every title I’ve read so far has become a favorite.
And so when I brought The Mermaid of Black Conch aboard my plane, I knew I was in for a special treat — however lame the premise of a love story between a fisherman and a mermaid may at the time have seemed.
Because of its belonging to the Vintage Earth series, I was determined to embark on the novel’s story arch with a completely unprejudiced mind.
And immediately, it became clear that Roffey's work — her choice of the Caribbean setting in the 1970s, her ingenious use of language and local dialect, the hyperrealistic construction of the mermaid — was everything, all the surprise and brilliance, I had come to expect from the Vintage Earth series.
Roffey’s mermaid isn’t another frail fairytale beauty.
She isn’t another hourglass-shaped teenage princess waiting for her chivalrous prince. This is an actual, real mermaid. Her body is powerful; her tail enormous, frighteningly muscular, potentially lethal.
This is a mermaid the way she might exist, were she ever to be found by one of us. Accordingly, we humans — men especially, but also women — behave towards her the way we men and women behave towards what we fear in all parts of the world.
We try to control and subjugate her.
Beaten senseless, they gag the mermaid and bind her, then string her up head-down for everyone to see. The plan is for her to be murdered and gutted.
Hours later, she is cut down and stolen, when everyone else is celebrating in a drunken stupor at the local village pub.
She's heaved onto the back of a pickup truck and carted home by a young fisherman named David, who feels that the mermaid is not a fish to be killed and sold as a prize.
He suspects she is human, or at least something along those lines — and so David feels morally obliged to hide her until he can secretly find a way to release her back into the sea.
He puts her in his bathtub, where she barely fits, and where she bleeds and panics and hides and eventually heals.
But before David can follow through with his plan of releasing the creature back into her freedom, an insurmountable problem arises: she is starting to lose her giant tail.
Soon, around the tub, there was a litter of fruit skins and pieces of her old self. The nest of sargassum seaweed in her hair began to fall off in clumps and underneath was long, black and knotted dreads. Her ears dripped seawater and small sea insects climbed out. Her nostrils bled all kind of molluscs and tiny crabs. She'd been a home to all kinda small sea creatures, and they were slowly, over days, abandoning her, moving out. Small piles appeared by the side of the tub and these piles were active. Crabs scuttled away, sideways. I had to shoo away the neighbour's cat which came sniffing around.
This is when we learn that Aycayia in fact used to be human. She was cursed when still very young, but is now centuries old. She is also charmingly messy, the gradual loss of her massive tail is a week-long disaster, and even after she has transformed back into a quasi-normal woman and begins wearing David’s ‘beat-up pair of old, green suede Adidas with three white stripes,’ she still faintly smells of fish.
I was afraid of what I’d brought into my home. I knew she was from ancient times, from times when people knew magic, when people saw gods everywhere and talked to the plants, the animals and even the fish in the sea.
Aycayia is indeed a time traveler, a lone survivor, from another age. She speaks the language of an indigenous people of the Carribean — one of the historic Taíno tribes — that was, in the sweeping course of Western colonization, eradicated hundreds of years ago.
Exile = to stay away from home
Exile = to be rejected from home
Outcast, cast out
My life was exile from home
Once Aycayia is done shedding her scales (gathering in disgusting piles of slime and rot), ancient tribal tattoos resurface on her dark-toned skin.
Only then I saw better the tattoos on her body, like none I’d ever seen before: fish, birds, and signs like stars in the heavens; they were thick and look like they’d been drawn by hand with charcoal.
She cannot read modern writing, but she’ll learn it. Over time, when she feels more at home, David understands she does read after all — she deciphers nature.
She stared at everything like she seemed to be reading everything: the air, the shadows, the floor, the light. [S]tern and quiet, she watched me smoke my cigarettes, like she know about smoke. I thought her people must once have lived an ital life and I learn in time she was greeting it all back. She saw meaning in every natural thing that lived. She was saying ‘hello’ again.
It becomes clear that she is sharp-witted and smart. She is strong-willed yet tender, breakable yet adaptable, funny yet dead-serious.
And she longs for a home — a time, a place, and a family, a whole people — that no longer exists.
My people long dead
I sobbed
She told me many black people were murdered too
I ask if the Spanish Christians own everything now
She said not any more and turn red in her face
like the whole thing happen in a short time
only five hundred years when the world is very old
This all happen quickly
My family own all of this part of the island she say
Land is not to be owned I tell her
Here then was a strange mermaid, and she was able to reel me in despite — or perhaps precisely because of — my own acute sense of displacement.
My own experience of loss, my boundless fear of all the pain that now surely lay ahead of us, of our family.
Certain parallels, it occurs to me in retrospect, were almost comically synchronous.
While in her first two weeks on her island, Aycayia was forced to painfully shed her dorsal fins and tail, I — in my first two weeks on my island — would sit in the lonesome bathtub of a tropical night, gazing at the terraced banana plantations shrouded in darkness, and I would shed — uncontrollably — tears and layers of grief.
I had, it seemed to me, aged 20 years in under two weeks.
Within 72 hours of my arrival on the island, I'd tried to absorb as much as I possibly could about how the business was to be run. During a three-day migraine attack, I'd called medical insurances, contacted friends who worked in the Swiss health care system, corresponding back and forth with oncologists.
Soon, I'd dropped my father off at the airport, a few days later my mother.
Pretty quickly, I'd realized I might not go home for months: I canceled the lease on my co-working spot in Oslo.
Everything hurt.
In all of this, I could not believe it; would not believe it.
I refused to acknowledge — yet had to — the possibility that this might have already been it.
That I had now dropped off my father at the airport and he might never again set foot on this very island.
Might never again admire the fire-colored blossoms of his beloved jacaranda tree, or turn the keys in the ignition of his petulant 22-year-old Jeep Cherokee Limited Edition, or feed nuggets of cat food to the same tiny little sparrow that has been visiting him for several years whenever he was on the island. This sparrow now, with charmingly insistent chirps, coerced me into feeding her, too.
But never again might my father see her, or devour mountains of fried baby squids in simple bars by the sea, or coax ripe grapes from his own vineyard down in the lower part of my parents' beautiful garden.
Maybe, the ears that put together the tirelessly jazzy / bluesy mixtapes bubbling merrily away in the Jeep would soon no longer exist to hear anything at all.
Maybe everything — this new home which we children have all grown to love, and this magnificent garden — would soon have to be dissolved and sold.
All, perhaps, soon just fragments of a bygone life.
Losing
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie (2024)
I am no stranger to loss.
In a prolonged streak of somewhat disproportionately bad luck, a sense of loss and powerlessness against larger forces have visited me and my husband time and again over the past few years. Friends sometimes comment that it would indeed be nice if, sometime soon, this streak were to stop.
This is not normal, they tell me. Remember that this is not normal, and you will return to a normal life, someday.
Moments of grief have sought us out like dark ghosts coming back for us after having smelled blood.
On an intellectual level, I know loss and suffering are an inseparable part of being alive. I know they are merely the underside of the coin of wonder and love. They are not optional, or debatable. If you are alive for more than five minutes, you will likely experience them both; one cannot exist without the other.
I know also that the longer we get to live, the more we will win — and lose. Losing is a logical result of having had: life, moments, love, belonging.
Grieving is simply a natural consequence tied to the privilege of growing older.
The people and other animals you have in your life now, you will lose.
Options you thought were yours to choose from yesterday, slip through your fingers today, never to present themselves again — life has taken a different turn for you. For you specifically. Everyone else might go on enjoying them.
The moments and places that are real to you right now — weddings, the walls and windows of homes, your favorite cafés and their waiters — will irretrievably vanish, one day becoming invisible memories.
In those long first nights on the island, as I listened alone to the palm fans pattering like raindrops in the mellow breeze, all this loss, this unstoppable change, this pre-programmed avalanche of grief ahead (and at present), became unacceptable to me.
Famously — we have been warned for centuries — time cannot be turned back.
The fact that there is a non-negotiable finality to the course of each of our lives was something I had not grasped entirely in my twenties. But this fact now starkly foregrounds itself in my thirties, and I do know that in this discovery I am not alone.
All around me, friends try to come to terms with this new finality, a sort of ballet between final choices and non-negotiable fate.
In the book I am — at the time of writing these first Quiet Pages — ravenously devouring, Salman Rushdie writes of this dance and its irrevocability:
On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice [...].
In this particular context — taken from his freshly published title, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder — Rushdie reflects on how a simple chance encounter led to him meeting for the first time the woman who now is his wife: the African American novelist, poet, and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Had Rushdie not reluctantly accepted the invitation to attend a social gathering, he would not — in 2017, aged 70 — have met the love of his life.
(Another parallel: I, too, met my husband on a reluctant night out, though I was 24, an age which I now view as astonishingly young).
But of course the larger purpose of Rushdie’s short and sharp memoir is to contextualize, digest and own the merciless stabbing he survived in 2022 at a public event, decades after the fatwa that called for his death was issued in response to the Satanic Verses (published in 1988).
At times remarkably light-hearted and humorous, Rushdie writes of how, just the night before, he was a happy man in love, gazing at the summer moon from earth.
The future rushes at him while he sleeps.
Once the future, in the shape of his would-be assassin, has caught up with him, it changes everything forever, including his body — the thing that makes life on earth possible.
If I look at my chest now, I see a line of wounds down the center, two more slashes on the lower right side, and a cut on my upper right thigh. And there's a wound on the left side of my mouth, and there was one along my hairline too.
And there was the knife in the eye. That was the cruelest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went in all the way to the optic nerve, which meant there would be no possibility of saving the vision. It was gone.
As I watch my father’s body being decimated by endless waves of chemotherapy and life-threatening complications, Rushdie echoes the process that I, from afar, must helplessly observe:
In the next months there would be many more such bodily humiliations. In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won't sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body—to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness—so that you can live.
Rushdie begins explaining this sense of bodily humiliation by recounting how, minutes after having been stabbed over and over again on stage, he heard (however distantly) someone's voice calling for the removal of his clothes, so the wounds could be seen better.
And he tells of this absurd moment where, barely conscious, he was still capable of the deep shame of being naked.
I think of my father (and many millions of others) who must daily go through the same traumatic kind of loss of bodily autonomy. The same rendering of their one and only bodies, naked, to hands that promise to take care of them and save them.
In Tenerife, Rushdie’s words were not my companions yet. I’ve come into their possession just now in September, during my first weekend back home in Oslo.
For a while, I had with me in Tenerife only the things I had packed in the small hours before my flight — a few clothing items that would work well with the climate, a small picture frame reminding me of the time I met my husband, and my most loyal companions and protectors: books.
I had with me:
Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch, and Anne LaBastille’s Woodswoman, and Stefan Keller’s Spuren der Arbeit (“The Traces of Labor”, a non-fiction book on the history of Swiss labor culture in the Bodensee region, from which I approximately originate).
For easy access to instant comfort, I had evidently even had the sense to pack Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume Two — a mind-blowing poetry collection that, to me, feels much like a gathering of beautiful, tiny prayers.
Back in Oslo, I had packed these books hastily, as if the house were on fire, grabbing titles based on pure instinct, part of me knowing exactly what I was going to need in the upcoming weeks.
Where I am from, one of the world’s oldest libraries — the famous Stiftsbibliothek in St. Gallen — was founded over 1300 years ago.
Above its portal there is a Greek inscription that goes: "ΨΥΧΗΣ ΙΑΤΡΕΙΟΝ" (Psychēs Iatreion). Here is a picture I took of it in 2021:
In English, the sentiment can be translated into “Healing Place for the Soul,” or “Apothecary of the Soul.”
Months later, I look back on my months in Tenerife, and then I think of my books and know this to be true.
Portable Homeness
The (Creole) Crone of Black Conch
I never, not in the course of the entire two months I was to stay on the Fortunate Island, ended up reading a single one of Oliver’s poems.
I did not have to.
It turns out that, whilst losing my mermaid’s tail and beginning to wobble about in my own pair of uncomfortable green Adidas shoes — juggling two businesses, my own and that of my parents, whilst trying to process waves of grief — I had a few other, wonderful crones to keep me company.
(We can discuss at another time why Mary Oliver, despite presumably not owning a gun, perfectly fits our picture of the wonderful crone).
I blasted through The Mermaid of Black Conch in what seemed like a minute, but not before thoroughly bonding with my favorite character, whom I have not yet mentioned: a Creole woman named Miss Rain.
It is Miss Rain who — as shared in an earlier passage — tells Aycayia of the murder of her people, and of how white colonizers took the land they now, to this day, 'own.'
I have developed an interest in the depiction and lives of Creole women like Miss Rain ever since I read Jean Rhys’ (herself a Creole) gorgeously written, sharp edged, diamond-like Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) for the first time. I have written of my deep love and admiration for this book in an Instragram post.
Here we meet a more modern Creole, a Creole of the 1970s.
Miss Rain is in her thirties or forties, and thus not technically a crone yet — but believe you me, she will be.
Miss Rain only ever came down to the foreshore in St Constance if she had to. She mostly lived on her own, up in the great house, where she played the piano and read books.
A little later, we learn that Miss Rain actually collects books, and in fact owns ‘thousands of them.’
Talk about a glorious crone in the making.
Miss Rain was a hard woman to fathom. For a start, she spoke just like the local fishermen, in the same slow, rhythmic, broken-down, backward English. [S]he hadn’t been educated up. She was white, milk white, in fact, and freckles had exploded across her face and arms, so she looked a little like an Appaloosa pony.
Never mind googling ‘Appaloosa pony’ — I have done it for you:
Miss Rain’s mixed-race son (her one great love is a black man called Life) is deaf — another solitary outcast who befriends the mermaid fearlessly.
her own son born with no language
so we had that in common
I had forgotten mine
thousands year old language
vanished from my mouth
[...]
Speech is freedom
Miss Rain supports and furthers this friendship, however dangerous of an endeavor this may be, seeing that the villagers are still looking to hunt down and sell the strange creature they have dragged from the sea.
Thus, Rain is precisely the kind of uncompromisingly principled woman whom I revere, who insists on what she instinctively feels is right, and who (like any good crone) owns — and uses — a gun.
And like any good crone, she doesn’t exactly belong. In fact, she struggles to come to terms with her ancestry of whiteness, entailing also the island’s brutal history of colonialism and systematic slave ownership.
White men of varying types arrived again and again, all with inflated notions of their possibilities [...].
The inherited and now crumbling mansion in which Miss Rain still lives was once — long before her time — built on the backs of one hundred and sixty slaves.
It was land she knew intimately, girl to woman, land in which she had come to understand the heinous sins of the white men before her forefathers, and then their sins, the severe barbarity of their pious Christian souls, and the cruelty of the climate, too.
Here, too, I could not entirely ignore certain faint parallels.
Having familiarized myself with Tenerife’s history, I have learnt about how, in the 1400s and 1500s white men — the French first, then the Spanish, and after that several others — have eradicated the Canary indigenous population, known as the Guanches.
I’ve learnt of their systematic murder, or else ruthless subjugation and colonization for white profit and greed.
Rather than surrender themselves to their tormentors, many Guanches would famously throw themselves off those black cliffs and into the cold Atlantic ocean below.
I’ve learnt of the island’s subsequent sugar plantations, too (sustained, of course, by the labor of enslaved people), and of the truly gigantic fleets of sea pirates in the 1700s — at times attacking Tenerife with hundreds of kidnapped battle ships at once — that would sweep the newly-built, newly wealthy Spanish-owned coastal towns.
If you look closely, then, you can discover the inscription of human suffering everywhere in the history of the island, set forever into the dark ravines forged by lava and black volcanic rock.
And while these inscriptions don’t directly have anything to do with me, personally, today, it won’t harm to know how globalized the effects (and profits) of colonization and enslavement were.
As a Swiss especially — the Swiss have never had a naval fleet, nor have they ‘managed’ to acquire colonies — I might be tempted to automatically assume that none of it had anything to do with ‘my’ country.
But, as virtually any schoolkid growing up in the Eastern part of Switzerland is proudly taught, places like St. Gallen, Thurgau, and Appenzell grew rich and powerful during Western industrialization thanks to their massive, flourishing textile factories.
One night in August, while harkening to podencos howling uphill under the Canary stars, I discover the following passage in Stefan Keller’s non-fiction account of Eastern Swiss labor history, Spuren der Arbeit [my translation]:
In Hauptwil, or also in Arbon, so-called Indiennes are produced from the yarns — thin, colorful fabrics with fashionably changing patterns that are in great demand in many countries.
Among other things, around 1800, Indiennes fabrics were an important part of the so-called triangular trade [transatlantic slave trade], in which ships filled with European textiles sailed to Africa, exchanged their goods for slaves there, transported them across the Atlantic to be sold, and then returned to Europe loaded with cotton.
Even for these remote and seemingly idyllic Swiss havens (riddled, at the time, with absolutely horrific numbers of child labor, gruesome working conditions, and avaricious factory owners), one cannot continue to claim that the histories of the Caribbean islands or Tenerife aren't in fact inseparably interwoven with that of the Alps.
The human community has been a globalized network for hundreds, if not thousands, of years — which is why it's been a challenge to dissect then assign responsibilities, or point fingers, for as long as people have migrated from place A to place B (and back again).
Two-hundred years after the Swiss textile boom, in the summer of 2024, I was a stranger stuck in Tenerife at a moment in history when outraged protests against the ecologically and socio-economically destructive forces of mass tourism were rampant.
Forced to live and sleep in mobile homes, cars, and even caves, many Spanish locals cannot afford to grab a beer in a bar, not to mention pay the sky-high property rental prices.
To survive, they have to commute to where there is work, however badly paid.
Thousands of locals migrate daily to the island’s South, where the vast majority of tourists ignorantly bask their foreign bodies on the grill of overcrowded Canary beaches.
Even in the greener, more humid, less meteorologically predictable, and thus less popular North — where my parents live — it is not uncommon to read graffiti tags that say things along the line of Tourists Go Home, or We Are Not Your Colony.
Nor is this dynamic exclusive to the Canary Islands: the detrimental forces of Western mass tourism are assuming problematic dimensions in many popular travel destinations.
Here is a similar tag I came across last year:
Every human interaction I had with locals this summer, I therefore felt a tad uneasy. I did not feel as though I were in danger, I simply felt out of place.
I noticed that I constantly sensed an almost irresistible urge to show my respect for — and perhaps my belonging to, however loosely — this island.
I tried to speed-morph my knowledge of Italian into a fragmentary form of Spanish. When the opportunity presented itself, I’d weave my knowledge of the island’s cultural or natural history into the conversation.
See, I’m trying, my efforts seemed to want to say. I don’t mean to take advantage of you. I have spent time here, on and off, for ten years. I am not a tourist, not really. I am…
But what exactly was I — if not a modern sort of Miss Rain?
I, too, now ironically resided in a beautiful white house on a hill (the wealthy like it white, and they like priceless views; a fact that I've shamelessly incorporated in my as of yet unpublished speculative fiction novel, Offgrid).
Surely I am — we are — somehow part of today’s problem.
Technically, we do not belong. Most of us, me included, don’t even learn the local language — the locals learn ours. If you turn things around and look at them from a different angle, we are somehow bulldozing over and thus indeed ‘colonizing’ the struggling local population.
But should we then — and can we — be asked to go home?
Are we not allowed to move in our lives, to find new places, new homes? Miss Rain does not find definitive answers to these questions, and neither do I.
He’d always thought of the place as kind of slow and quiet, but she had shown him the opposite. Black Conch was the present and it was complicated. [my emphasis]
Tenerife, too, is the present, and it is complicated.
Much like the other central female characters in The Mermaid, Miss Rain is destined never to feel entirely comfortable, never to find her proper place.
She was like the Black Conch people, except white.
In a room full of books, in a house up in the hills, near a forest where she knew the howlers were harmless, she would live till her death.
Stumbling upon Miss Rain, I knew that — however alien and uneasy I felt in my skin, on this island, at a point in time when my presence and its consequences was legitimately questioned — I had found a sort of fictional community, an extended family.
In Miss Rain, I had found a tiny, invisible, portable home.
It turns out I desperately needed that home.
Within a mere twenty-four hours of my landing, I was drowning in something I hadn’t felt since my teenage years: a sense of overwhelming homesickness.
I could not believe it.
It seemed strange, that a 36-year-old could be so thoroughly in the grasp of this feeling that I personally associate with children throwing tantrums and calling their parents, yearning to be taken home from summer camp.
But an overpowering homesickness washed over me like the notoriously merciless waves of Playa El Socorro down below, gradually weakening my body and senses.
I missed — viscerally, achingly — my husband, my dog, every nook and cranny of my home. I missed the familiarity of my neighborhood.
While I was amazed at how my friends never forgot me, and checked in with me daily, I did not have the comfort of having them nearby.
I could not live my own daily rhythm, and I no longer had the freedom of only one job.
My days were often endless tunnels of chores before and after my own work. I’d wake at six and go to bed late and have trouble winding down.
Sometimes, to calm myself, I swam in the pool alone, in the cool rain under clouded skies. Sometimes I went for a walk on El Socorro, observing surfers at a golden sundown. Sometimes, I'd watch a helicopter circling above this notorious beach, looking and looking for missing bodies.
Every once in a while, I went for walks through the village.
Once, I simply sat on the rooftop, listening to the night darkening the island and it was beautiful.
Everything felt very known, and very unknown too.
But if time were a horizon, I felt that I could only see the dark silhouettes of pirate ships drawing close. The treasures of yesterday were, for now, behind me.
I felt that I was going to lose my father. It pained me unspeakably to think he might have to lose his one life so early, and so viciously.
I did not know when I would see him again — or anyone else, for that matter. Needless to say, I did not know how this whole running two businesses at once thing was going to work in the long run (the answer is: it wouldn’t, and didn’t).
I went on to lose my sleep.
When I did manage to drift off, I’d sometimes wake up already crying.
Longing
The Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille (1976)
That night Pitzi [the dog] and I camped at Silver Lake as a salmon sunset glowed above blueberry-dark hills. Loons were calling. The moon was full.
In the first few weeks of this new existence, a thing happened to me.
Like a starving person, my mind began — almost compulsively — feasting on images of what seems to be an inner home: a kind of landscape, a type of mindset, perhaps a certain freedom to move and move unobstructedly, in the wild.
Somehow, my brain remembered that, once upon a time in the early 2000s, there was a TV show called Men in Trees — set in Alaska, and characterized by the sort of lightly digestible narrative style one would know from Sex and the City .
I'd never watched it before. But now I found it on Youtube, and whenever I could, I plastered my aches with it.
There is a scene where a friend, who wants the main character Marin to move back to New York, says:
‘You were born here [in New York], it’s your home.’
‘Is it? Or is it the place that makes you feel most like… you?’
This was good. I needed to write this down.
I then went car camping.
My husband was able to join me on Tenerife for a few weeks — no dog, though, the flight was too long for him — and we drove up into the pristine pine forests, which usually peek out above a sea of clouds below.
Much like the lava scapes even further up, the island’s woods are an otherworldly place.
We celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary there. We had wine and cooked a simple dinner on a portable stove and — for lack of a tent — slept in my father’s Jeep, on an air mattress.
I write:
I sat in the shade and, for perhaps twenty minutes, let the woods and the view soothe me. There was, to my great contentment, always a new thing to marvel at. The sheer, pure blueness of sky above green woods. The flock of crows sailing in a circular column high above the hot, pine-needled ground.
A lizard, causing an incredible ruckus as it migrated from the top of a tree down to its roots. The heat of volcanic ground under my bare toes; the waves of hot breezes alternating with pleasant coolness. The unknown cries of unknown birds. A droplet of tree sap scintillating like a rainbow diamond in the afternoon sun.
This — the tranquility of quiet woods, and a whole planet rounding into an ocean down below — was a sort of home.
It was, as Marin in Men in Trees had expressed, what made me feel most like… me:
Today, sitting in my camping chair in this no man's land, is one of the first days where I see myself again; see again who I am in all of this, though I have no idea where I’m going.
And then there was Anne.
Before buying her 1970s memoir a few months earlier, I’d frankly had absolutely no idea who Anne LaBastille was.
But I’d seen the title — Woodswoman — and the cover — a portrait of a light-haired woman with a German sheperd posing on a rowing boat — and I’d read the following words of the blurb:
Ecologist Anne LaBastille created the life that many people dream about. When she and her husband divorced, she needed a place to live. Through luck and perseverance, she found the ideal spot: a twenty-acre parcel of land in the Adirondack mountains, where she built the cozy, primitive log cabin that became her permanent home. Miles from the nearest town…
Well, the book was already in my shopping cart.
In my new life, I was about as far away from the Adirondack mountains (a New York state protected massif with over 100 peaks) as I was from the Nordmarka North of Oslo.
So I greedily gobbled up LaBastille’s mesmerizingly lyrical documentation of her time in nature, and the woods, and on lakes. I soaked up her reflections on solitude, on cooler climes, on wilderness — and men.
‘For your information—’ shouts an infuriated Anne, carrying a .38-caliber revolver to scare off a group of male intruders— ‘if anyone of you sets a foot on my land or even comes close to my dock without an invitation, I’ll shoot first and ask his name after!’
I turned abruptly and strode away, hoping that my reputation as an ornery, pistol-packing woodswoman had begun.
Oh, it had.
And I knew right away that I had found another, wonderfully premature crone — with a gun, you will notice — in her 30s.
As a consequence, I absolutely inhaled LaBastille. I cocooned myself in the balsam of her words; I followed her faithfully through whatever adventure she’d take me on — taming wild racoons, fending off bears, flying planes, drifting contentedly across the water in canoes while eating hot spaghetti and listening to Beethoven symphonies played in Berlin.
The thunderous chords are amplified by the metal sides of the canoe. They emerge from their 4,000-mile trip, rise ponderously into the air, and move slowly off over the mountaintops. I wonder if the trout rising for flies and the bullheads resting on the bottom can hear this majestic music. A small puff of steam also rises slowly into the air as I take the cover off the spaghetti. Pitzi's nose twitches but he remains motionless. Good dog! I eat my supper drifting light as a leaf on the lake, stretching back on the cushions.
If only she and Miss Rain (and I) could meet!
In the case of Anne LaBastille, this might not have been altogether impossible. When willing to ignore the fact that Miss Rain is a fictional character and LaBastille is not, one could suggest that the two lived close enough from each other — timewise — that they might, if arranged intelligently, have been able to meet.
(Actually set in the 1960s and 1970s, Woodswoman contains perhaps the most beautiful passage about — of all things — the moon landing.
From the warm sand point I gazed across 2 miles of smooth water with nothing to obstruct the view. Millions of people on earth sat indoors before TV sets, but I preferred my vantage spot to watch this most incredible feat in man’s history [...].
I could imagine the astronauts' every move, and it was all enhanced by the contrast of this wild setting. The immediate scene was as it had been fifty, five hundred, perhaps five thousand years ago. Everything was the same in this corner of the Adirondacks, but the moon would never be the same again after this laying on of men's feet upon its ancient dusty surface.
Finally my mind boggled at what was taking place. I looked up and pretended it was just another round, gold, empty summer moon. Then I stripped and took a luxurious midnight swim in the tepid water. I lay floating for a long time, looking up at the orb. Moonlight poured down on me. I felt very elemental.
Doesn't everyone want to relive the moonlanding like this?)
And even though LaBastille seemed to have been most at home in and around her very own Walden-inspired log cabin, she did travel a great deal for research purposes. A trip to Black Conch — what with its uncharted specimen of human fish — might have actually been interesting, and thus Miss Rain and La Bastille might have met.
I believe they would have liked that.
Crones are not incapable of — nor averse to — human contact. On the contrary, they thrive on deep and long-lasting friendship.
Anne LaBastille had over a great many friends, and actively sought out and forged neighborly relationships, sometimes saving each other’s lives in precarious situations without immediate access to emergency care systems.
The crone is often revered and surrounded by loved ones.
But hers are very special people: they purposely keep at a respectful distance, because they adore their crone, and do not want to scare her away.
Connection
Dogs of Summer (by Andrea Abreu, 2020)
Original title: Panza de Burro
Just like a pack of yogurts from the minimarket, she said to me once. She said it about the two of us, convinced I’d not heard her even though I had. Just like those packs of yogurts that always come in pairs.
Not long before I ended up going home after all, I had a friend visit me for a few days.
She had taken four days out of her busy schedule to be with me and make sure I would be more or less fine the first few days after my husband had needed to return to our life in Norway, without me.
She flew in despite the fact that it would be her birthday, with no one but me and a bunch of wild cats, lizards, as well as an annoying stray chicken named Hannah Lene to celebrate it.
These creatures were, largely, my company on the island, in the house on the hills overlooking the banana plantations and the wild sea below.
We indulged in a birthday breakfast at 2000 meters above that sea, up in the mind-blowing lava-vastness of Las Cañadas.
It rained down below, but above the clouds it was a sun-blasting, hot summer’s day. I had brought cooled cava, fresh fruit, and packs of coconut yogurt (it came in pairs).
I’d previously told my friend the story of Teide only being a small fragment of the rim of a much larger supervolcano. I’d also warned her about the immensity of the supercrater everyone, including us, crosses in their shiny little cars.
But once we were up there — and remembering the thing about the supervolcano and the massive crater and the millions of years of history between us and its collapse — she predictably lost her speech.
Oh, she said.
Oh, wow.
In all this immensity, we parked my father’s Jeep and, on foot, veered off the main road that cuts through the crater.
We’d brought camping chairs, a cooling box, and a sun umbrella to shield us from the solar heat burning down mercilessly overhead.
I decided to joke around and decorated a few desert bushes with birthday garlands that I found in my mother’s living room drawers, having known them from my childhood.
There was one garland that, in colorful letters, spelled HAPPY BIRTHDAY, and another that had dancing hippos in hula-skirts on it.
Leaning back in the shade and taking in the panorama of nothing but Teide rising to the sky right in front of us, we spoke of very deep and extremely wise things.
Did you know, I said, that there once were giant rats on Tenerife? Rats as big as cats.
She did not, but was intrigued.
I told her then about the curious thing that I’d learnt (from a book, of course) about the evolutionary phenomenon of the island syndrome: the fact that species on islands tend to evolve into much larger — or much smaller — forms than their mainland relatives.
Why? Because islands are special. They are uniquely finite places, with limited resources and fewer predators. The perfect place to develop into untapped niches.
There were mega-swans on Sicily, I declared proudly. And mini-mammoths on Crete.
My friend was originally supposed to visit me in Oslo, but plans had obviously changed, tickets were cancelled and re-booked. Still, I believe we'll meet up in Norway one day.
In Oslo, I said, thinking now of those aborted plans, we'll go see the fossilized skeleton of a colossal sloth at the natural history museum. It's as big as a bear's, or bigger. Really.
A secret evolution-nerd like me, she seemed impressed, and I was briefly, very, happy.
Gobbling up pre-sliced fruit washed down with cava, we exchanged many more great things about evolution, humanity, geological deep time.
Sometimes, we didn’t say anything for long periods — and that, too, spoke of our incredible wisdom. Certainly, we were at that particular moment the smartest and wisest women on the planet... until park rangers drew up in a yellow truck a couple of dozen meters away from us, shouting in enraged disbelief.
We turned, blushing yet feigning total ignorance, freshly topped cava flutes bubbling in our hands.
‘¡Eso es un parque nacional!’ one of them screamed, gesturing for us to pack up and get lost.
We believe they snapped a picture of us with their cellphones. And rightfully so — what a picture it must have been.
Yet more proof of the detrimental effects of mass tourism and the absolute idiots it attracts.
It is prohibited to set up camp in the caldera, but it is not forbidden to hike. Hikers might, like us, stop to eat lunch — or, in our case, breakfast. But they most likely wouldn’t bring a cooler, pop a bottle of cava and lavishly decorate desert bushes with childish birthday garlands.
Coming across our elaborate set up, the park rangers were bound to lose their shit.
And while I still think we weren’t technically camping, rules don’t actually, in this instance, matter. I do know without a doubt that we were being disrespectful. Hilarious, but disrespectful nevertheless.
A day or two after my friend had left and I was alone again, I bought the brilliantly translated book Dogs of Summer at a small, beautifully curated bookshop called Librería Masilva in Puerto de la Cruz.
This was part of my attempts to make the best of things, alone.
Written — in unforgiving, comical, brutally honest prose — by Tenerife-born author Andrea Abreu, the original title of this coming-of-age novel is Panza de Burro, referring to an annoying meteorological phenomenon that tends to cloud up part of the island for most of the summer months, rendering smaller mountain villages in a sort of permanent and depressing wall of fog.
The novel is really about the sensual intimacies — and rather dirty secrets — of girlhood.
It’s about the unconditional friendship between the ten-year-old narrator and her best friend, Isora.
Much like Aycayia the Caribbean mermaid, Isora the Canarian teenager evokes the notion of a distant past. She ‘looked like a girl from the Guanche period, before the conquest. She had dark-dark skin and eyes like a pair of shiny green lights.’
For a long time, Isora is the narrator's ultimate source of comfort.
when i saw isora coming i felt calm like when i could hear the stew simmering
Dogs of Summer is about the narrator’s at times disturbingly violent obsession with Isora, but it is also about being in puberty during the early 2000s in Tenerife: it’s about mp3 players (‘It was beautiful and red like a hog plum.’) and barbies.
It's about Pokemón and poverty, computer classes, minimarkets, rape, tourists, religion, forbidden homosexuality, about the obligatory forever-commute of locals to the South.
[The parents] went South early and came home late, leaving me and Isora trapped in the jumble of houses, pine trees, and steep roads at the very tip-top of town. It was June and I was sad.
It’s about the tourists who are ‘disgusting slobs who didn’t know how to clean up after themselves.' This is reported by the narrator’s mother, who cleans hotel rooms and holiday homes for a living.
Often, these tourists (the mother calls them 'foreners') were ‘old people, old people roasting in the sun like big, dark crabs.’
Mostly, Dogs of Summer is about desperately wanting — just once, please, only once this summer — to go to the San Marcos beach in the golden sunshine down below.
Instead, imagine being permanently stuck up in the panza de burro clouds of June, July, then August.
You’re dirt poor. Nobody has a car, and today’s extensive network of characteristically green public busses — locals call them ‘guaguas’, or frogs — doesn’t exist yet.
I didn’t like [the holiday homes] because between us there was a barrier of clear clingfilm, of plastic wrap that stopped me from enjoying the best things about the holiday homes.
[T]he holiday homes were to blame for the fact that on the days Ma didn’t have to go and clean hotels in the South she still had to clean the holiday homes, and that meant we couldn’t go to the beach, which is the main reason I didn’t like the holiday homes.
So the two girls have to make do with bathing in the village canal up in the mountains, closing their eyes and imagining for a few seconds that the icy water is the ocean.
We looked out at the centre of town and at the lower neighborhoods, at the lucky neighbourhoods all aglow in bright yellow, and behind them, right in front of the ocean, was San Marcos beach. Chos, said Isora, and her eyebrows arched so high they just about touched her hairline, ‘magine being born near the beach.
While I was hanging about crying in my white castle, young locals dreamt of the privilege of 'being born near the beach.'
When I bought Dogs of Summer, I already knew I was going to be able to fly home soon.
Nearly two months had passed since I’d touched ground on the island, and I had finally found a (more) capable replacement to run my parents’ company.
More importantly, I had understood that I was — despite my paradisiacal surroundings — not in a good place, emotionally speaking. I was burning out with too much work, and almost physically choking on a sort of loneliness I didn’t know could exist.
I was quite lonely because I was literally alone with no end in sight, without family or friends, on an island that I half-belonged to, and half-didn’t.
But I was lonelier because of the changes and losses I was trying to process amidst the turbulence of juggling two jobs (one of them brand-new), a foreign language, an unfamiliar environment that brought unexpected challenges almost every single day.
Chicken (one stubbornly courageous chicken in particular) invaded the house and shat on the living room floor.
One of the wild cats, Barry White — because he's white and my parents like soul and blues — was bleeding all over the place. Barry doesn't like soul and blues. He likes to get into fights and sniff around thorny bushes.
One morning, I discovered that the pool water had become host to small, weirdly diving insects. The pool expert showed up two weeks later.
The Jeep’s engine simply stopped running, right on the left lane of a busy highway. My father's explanation on the phone was that 'oh right, yeah, it's not supposed to be pushed beyond 100 km/h.'
The power went out on the entire property, having me fumble in the dark with fuses.
In The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016), Olivia Laing reflects deeply on the sort of crossover between the loneliness and loss I experienced:
Loss is a cousin of loneliness. They intersect and overlap, and so it’s not surprising that a work of mourning might invoke a feeling of aloneness, of separation. Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage, and fracture. Then there’s the loneliness of bereavement, the loneliness of lost or damaged love, of missing one or many specific people [...].
Certainly, this was me — even if Laing’s book is about loneliness in New York, and I was about as far removed from a place like New York as could be.
I was in the countryside, on a Spanish island near Africa, surrounded by wild cats who would not chase the chickens I needed to be gone for hygienic reasons, but who would instead hunt down the beautiful lizards I loved so very much.
But then, in my last week or so on the island — with my return ticket at last in hand — I sat in a shaded cafe in Puerto, sipping on my cortado and reading with great amusement (and just a little bit of shock) the frankly shit-obsessed novel by a local Tenerife author.
Because, truly, the characters are to a hilarious degree obsessed with shit, and shitting. Don’t believe me?
shit shit she called me shit, jus like that in english because poop was a beautiful thing
And:
Shits, shits, shits, we always wanted the shits.
Or:
I liked [the well water] better than Fonteide water and sometimes it gave me the shits, which made me happy because it made Isora happy.
What can I say? Right then and there, I actually had to laugh.
I had not been prepared for the way Roffey has managed to craft a hyperreal image of a mermaid — and I had not been prepared for Andreu’s feces-centric, unafraid, often unsettlingly sexual portrayal of girlhood.
Amongst other amazing things, the book contains perhaps the most unusual and striking description of a female orgasm:
I went psspsspsspss with my sweatshorts streaked in colours, like a rainbow between my thighs, like a rainbow that rose up above the ocean, all the way down there, where the clouds mixed with the sea and everything was grey, and then it was just our minkies [genitals] left, throbbing like a pair of blackbird hearts buried in the earth, like a forest about to burst into flower in the centre of the Earth.
My oh my, I thought. Would these two little rascals — never up to any good — ever manage to make it to the San Marcos beach?
I knew San Marcos beach, and I knew Icod, and most of the other places that were mentioned.
As I read on, spellbound by Abreu’s outrageously unashamed prose, I started to see that I had begun knowing the island more intimately than I’d been aware of.
I knew what the narrator meant when she said that her mouth went dry, ‘like when you eat powdered milk mixed with gofio and sugar.’
I knew that most houses up in her — our! — part of the island were built without permits (except for Edita’s house, ‘the only one that had a number on it’).
I could see, too, that the houses were ‘Venezuelan-style;’ only in the course of this summer, I had in fact learnt for the frist time that Tenerife has a comprehensive and complex migrational history with Venezuela.
All the houses were ‘bright and colorful, like the squares of a Ludo board [...], they were all imperfect monsters’.
I knew the look of walls gorgeously overgrown with bright pink bougainvillea, and the feel of the pine forests at the foothills of the ‘vulcano.’
I knew Cueva del Viento, and guaguas, and coriander mojo, arepas (also Venezuelan), and the calima — a hot, dusty sandstorm coming over from Africa. For years now, the calima has caused my mother's weather sensitivity to act up.
I had read long ago about the introduction and industrial history of Tenerife’s prickly pears, which Tío Ovi ‘picked for us by climbing into the cactus and knocking the pears off with a broom [...], though he always wound up prickled all over anyhow, even on his eyelids.’
I had always thought the fireworks (illuminating the sky at least, it seems to me, two or three times a week, every week), were a sort of curious thing happening mostly in and around my mother’s village.
But they were a recurring part in the novel, too — the fireworks were like giant stars shivering in the black sky.
(Thinking of these recurring fireworks now that I'm back in Norway, and of the aloe, and the palm trees, and the beaches down below, everything feels strangely warm, my heart ever so slightly aches.)
When the book ended — on a much more serious note than I’d expected — I felt that I had both lost and also won another strangely wonderful thing.
Going Home
Island Syndrome
Islands are mysterious, beautiful and brutal places. ‘Brutiful,’ as my friend who visited me would say.
Islands have the power to isolate, but through this quality of isolation also comes a unique chance to adapt, to make use of unexplored niches in the system. It is why the phenomenon of island gigantism and dwarfism exists; why there once were giant rats on Tenerife, and enormous swans on Sicily.
In my case, I feel that I had not become a giant, I'd been dwarfed.
Or had I?
Just when I was about to leave, I found Abreu's book and it made me see that, perhaps, after all these years of visiting and spending time on the island, I wasn’t so foreign, so ignorant, after all.
In the last week, I had made the acquaintance with neighbors, who said they’d come over for coffee one day — and then they did. (Sadly, I was on a mission to get rid of bags worth of trash.)
The last time I went to ‘my’ Indian restaurant, the waiter recognized me with a quiet nod. He smiled and asked if I lived here. And I — in Spanish, terrible Spanish, but Spanish nonetheless! — explained to him my somewhat complicated situation.
Mi padre es muy enfermo, I stuttered. Yo estoy aqui por el.
On my penultimate day, the staff of my parents’ company came to say goodbye, and hugged me, and rubbed my back, calling me their ‘niña.’ All Spanish locals, they gave me a little golden bracelet adorned with dangling hearts. Others texted to wish me a safe journey home, and days after my departure they still checked in to ask how things were.
Overwhelmed with a kaleidoscope of ever-shifting feelings, I cried bitterly as the plane finally lifted off one September afternoon and the sun-soaked beauty of the island and Teide vanished into my past.
I hid my face from fellow passengers and cried also when, six hours later, I descended into the Norwegian night, diving into patches of fall mist padding the dark fields below.
I certainly cried without restraint when sinking to my knees to be covered in hundreds of very excited little dog kisses at last.
I never understood whether I cried because I’d left, or arrived.
Strolling out of the airport with my husband’s arm around me at 1 am, the foggy air carried a silent prophecy of change — of fall.
Being home, I instantly had the advantage of belonging again. Of knowing what and who I had, and who I was. This, it turns out, is a power that is not to be underestimated.
Often during my time on the island have I wondered how it must feel for those who are forced to migrate to strange places on a permanent basis, involuntarily. Who are then not, like me, 'stranded' in a villa on the lush hills of a tropical island.
There is incredible power in being allowed to live and thrive in the place that makes us feel most like… us. Millions of people do not have that power, and their strength and options are limited for it.
Down in Switzerland, I hear that my father has, for a few days in a row now, stopped vomiting. Soon, I will have slept deeply through enough consecutive nights to have the energy to board another flight and make the journey South to hug him.
Until then, I have loved ones around me and books to help me trust again in the inherent goodness of life.
Anne LaBastille died of Alzheimer's disease in 2011. Back in 1976, she had written:
Slipping over the star-strewn surface of Black Bear Lake, I’m gradually imbued with the ordered goodness of our earth. Its gentle, implacable push toward balance, regularity, homeostasis. This seeps into my soul as surely as sphagnum moss absorbs water.
Surely the entire universe must be operating this way.
Feeling at home, I can begin believing again in something along those lines.
From Oslo with love,
Works Mentioned in This Piece
Read my short and punchy Instagram reviews on:
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
