Viva

Time is flying by! 12 more days and I’ll have been gone an entire year.

In some ways I feel like my Watson experience has been out of time sequence. The 4th of July passed without my realizing it, tucked away writing in a tiny café in the old capital of Teguise where I ended up staying for several hours sipping a mojito and chatting with the Brazilian/Cuban band, a tarot-reading yoga instructor and a girl from Armenia. There was the waiter with long blond ringlets and a silk handkerchief around his neck, who reached out to grab my chin when I lifted my head from my writing to order a coffee. And the old man, his hairless head covered with red scabs, too stiff to join in the retinue of wispy, tambourine-playing hippies that swarmed the microphone, but strong enough to turn in circles and pump his fists, eyes smiling.

“Notaste todo?” (Did you get everything?) yelled the base player as I unlocked my bicycle to head home. “Casi” (Almost!) I replied, laughing. He blew me a kiss, and I let it chase me down the sun-bleached streets with their stern stone archways and tiny wooden doorways, to evaporate into the desert and the blue, blue sky. Hobbling down Calle Zonzamos (the last majo king), was the old man, fists still swinging.

I felt so full then, but also somehow sad.

So many times this year tiny worlds have cropped up in my journey, pitched like circus tents in a roadside bazaar, each unique and to be savored, however fleeting the moment. Yet inevitably they are disassembled and scattered, moments that are never to be recreated in the same manner, or under the same circumstances.

Last week I attended the opening of the documentary, Holidays, about the rise of tourism in Lanzarote. The screening was in la Cueva de los Verdes, deep in the labyrinth of an old volcano, in an auditorium in one of the larger caverns. The film, as well as the venue, were fabulous. The film was narrationless - incorporating tourist home videos, archived footage from historic Lanzarote, including environmental protests and Cesar Manrique’s public manifestos.

I arrived early to walk around a bit. In the south this landscape is called Malpais, which literally translates to the badlands. Writhing lava courses in streams to the sea, frozen over the landscape in twisting limbs. Bright red mosses and cactus with yellow flowers settle into the folds. Wind sweeps down the volcanoes and out towards the sea.

Outside the Cueva I meet Viva – a security guard from the Spanish Sahara, who moved here after Spain turned the coast over to Morocco. His name is Mohammed he told me, but here everyone calls him Viva, like “Viva el amor, viva la revolución.” In his hand he clutched a smooth stone – black with flecks of orange. When I asked him about it he handed it to me, folding it into my palm. “This comes from the Sahara. Squeeze it and it gives you energy. Three days I can stand in one place no problem with this piedra.” I watched him flex his fist, his veins rippling up past his elbow. “Wow,” I said, impressed.” “Not Wow! It’s true!” We talked for nearly an hour. True to his name, Viva was full of teachings about life. A devout Muslim and Aikido enthusiast, he told me about his travels as a mariner from his homeland in the Sahara and up to Europe. When I left to enter the auditorium, he handed me a book - El Arte de La Paz, by Morihei Ueshiba (Fundador del Aikido). “Remember: A Word can give life,” he told me, “a word can kill. Read this and learn.” “How will I return it to you?” I asked.

“If Allah desires, we will meet again.” And I left him there, descending into the volcano with the image of his red tie curling in the wind.

One of my favorite of Ueshiba's teachings, that makes me think of Viva: "La vida es crecimiento. Si detenemos crecimiento, técnica y espiritualmente, somos tan útiles como cádaveres. El Arte de la Paz es la celebración del enlace del cielo, la tierra, y la humanidad. Es todo lo verdadero, lo bueno y lo bello." Thank you Viva!

Yesterday I met Jorge Reyes Duchemin at the port of Arrecife. I found him leaning on a railing counting ripples in the bay. “Any fish?” I asked. “Pescados?” he boomed, opening his palm to answer, “por aqui, por allá” (here and there). His face was dark with years of sunlight, and hairline wrinkles spread like rays from his lips. “Are you from here?” I asked. “Si, nací aquí, por allá,” he swept his hand away from me now all the while nodding proudly. “August 3, 1912. I’m 98 years old.” He pulled out his wallet to show me then. The leather was black and thin with age. He handed me the license and I nodded, smiling. Two photos slipped out – matchbox sized and creased as though they had been examined many times. “Me when I was in the army, when the grandfather of the King fled to Italy,” he explained. There were a group of them, playing cards below the Sierre de Guadarrama, in central Spain.

I sat down with Don Reyes then, in front of his home, over looking the bay. “I remember everything,” he told me, “from the day I was born. I remember the bed I was born in.” (It was a collapsible bed).

He told me about his mother’s mother who had married a Frenchman named Duchemin who had arrived to Lanzarote escaping from the tumults of French revolution. His life as a marinero “en la mar” (not el mar, which is masculine, but la mar, feminine). There was no boardwalk when he was born, water ran right up to his doorstep. The houses were few, and there was a mill on the corner. People fished to eat, then.

Once he was out at sea off the coast of Morrocco when another ship was shipwrecked. “We were playing cards and it was nine o’clock in the evening when we began to hear sounds. The cook turned to me and he asked me if I heard them.” I opened the little door and listened to the wind, the moans sounded as though they were not from this world.” Sure enough a boat had been shipwrecked on the bottom. The next morning they found seven of them, clinging to driftwood, their skin as blue as the shorts I was wearing. One of them had a watch, the hour hand frozen at the time of the shipwreck.

I left as the church bells sighed 6:00 across the bay. “Thank you,” I said. May we meet again! “You come whenever you like, señorita. I remember everything.”

It’s the spontaneity, these small, scattered moments of intimacy that I will miss most when I return home. I am always sad to leave these worlds that I encounter, but I also know there are more to discover, more people to meet and paths to cross.

So: these next few weeks: Voy a aprovechar (take advantage of life; carpe diem).


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