Zoe Wicomb: October

Mercia did not choose Lanzarote. Rather, it was the fact of a direct flight as well as the reduced cost of apartments in a fishing village some distance from the designated resorts that decided their destination. There was no time to do any other homework on the island, so that they were both delightfully surprised at the beauty of the place. For all the island’s inhospitable volcanic heritage, Father Culture was kept well in check, forced to doff his hat respectfully at Mother Nature. Surely the Lanzarotian architect and artist César Manrique should be proclaimed an international icon, should have been a Nobel laureate, Craig enthused, for managing tourism so strictly and sensibly, for the architectural restrictions he imposed, and above all for his aesthetic development of natural phenomena and disused structures. Why has the rest of the world not followed suit?

They lounged and basked under a moderate sun and argued companionably about the merits and demerits of stifled individualism. Craig was emphatic. If people are allowed to paint their houses in their chosen colors, with no regard for the collective appearance, you should expect the triumphant ugliness of English streets. At least in Glasgow there was uniformity in tenement colors. Aesthetically pleasing, the black window surrounds and woodwork against blond or pink sandstone. But look at your country, he said. It’s criminal, the lovely coastline wrecked by rich people with no taste, who have the freedom to design and build monstrous houses with no regard for the collective outlook. Is there no town planning? Are there no architects in South Africa?

Ah, but there are strict regulations for RDP housing for the poor, plenty of sad uniformity there, Mercia said.

It was true that on the island the uniform white of the houses with their green paintwork inland, or blue at the seaside, was lovely, and that adherence to traditional low-rise buildings made for picturesque towns. Three cheers for Manrique, Craig called, and filled their glasses with exuberant bubbles of a bargain Veuve Clicquot that he had bought at the airport. She had fortunately stopped herself in time from asking whether he could afford it.

We drink too much, Mercia said, but Craig said no, they didn’t drink enough, that another bottle was better than following the awful middle-aged trend of giving up alcohol for health reasons. Imagine being teetotal in order to extend impoverished drink-free lives. Mercia reached out for his hand; she couldn’t have agreed more. They would siesta on the private balcony. The Mirador del Río could wait for another day.

It was then she asked, In Scotland, does the word yes count as a greeting? Or is that just used in Glasgow? I don’t remember coming cross it in the south.

What do you mean? Where are you greeted with yes?

In public places — shops, restaurants, libraries, dentists’. The person at reception, often a woman, will ask in a rising tone, which is to say a puzzled tone, or even something of a bark, Yes? As if you had stumbled into the wrong place. And that before you’ve got round to saying anything. Perhaps it’s not said to men?

Well, I can’t say I’ve ever heard it. Could it not be a friendly tone? Perhaps it’s your paranoia — you really should watch yourself, not watch out for the imaginary slight.

In some ways they might as well have gone home to the Cape. Mercia was surprised by the familiarity of the island, the wide plains of dry earth and sparse growth. Apart from black volcanic rock and the black dust through which determined flora burrowed its way out, the place was uncannily like that of her childhood. Good old Kliprand, she exclaimed. But no, distinctly more lush: fields of prickly pear for the cultivation of cochineal; ghanna bush hardly recognizable with plump parcels of rolled-up leaves; and gray old Jan Twakkie sprayed green, with branches tapering into elegant fingers of yellow flower, but familiar all the same in the way that prosperous relatives are familiar. Mercia had a vision of her entire extended family appearing on the horizon, scrambling over black rock: Murrays and Malherbes of the malpaíses. There’s no escaping us, they chanted in chorus.

Craig nodded sympathetically; he had after all met some of that weird clan. Well, we are so close to Africa, only a hop and a skip away. The Canaries must have been used to ships from the Cape popping in for a bite to eat and drink, he said. Bet the islands had a reputation for being hospitable. That’s what seafarers would have needed them to be, even as the natives turned their backs and clung for dear life to their fruit and veg. Pretty Polly, pretty Polly, he twittered, such hospitable canaries.

Actually, Camões has many stories of treacherous natives who thought nothing of plotting death for their visitors.

Ah, but did they show hostility, or did they smile treacherously, was his riposte.

Mercia remembered that Craig did not like being corrected by her. There surely is a difference between canaries and parrots? he asked.

Dunno, she said. She hoped they would not argue about parrots.

See, he said, stabbing at the map, here in the south it’s called Papagayo, that’s parrot. A Papagayo beach for nudists and French writers.

Craig had found in a cupboard a raunchy French novel about Lanzarote with which he had struggled for a few hours. She pretended to have dozed off.

Mercia wandered off, impatient with Craig’s enduring desire for sitting in cafés, drinking coffee. Actually, they argued about coffee. She thought she had gone off it — another sign of aging — never again would she touch coffee, but Craig said that such physical responses should be resisted, that the pleasure of sitting in cafés was more than the enjoyment of the drink. Mercia could see no sense in that.

The malpaíses, arid wastelands of volcanic lava, a moonscape of broken rock hosting nothing other than dry lichen, stretched ahead as far as the eye could see. The smooth curves of volcanic mountains in the distance seemed to disown the jagged terrain they had once upon a time spewed up. A long way below an icy blue Atlantic thrashed against black rock, the same stuff that the elegant Mirador was crafted from, and Mercia, shivering on a promontory, buttoned up her inadequate jacket and clutched at her lapels. In spite of the cold these badlands were strangely familiar. The windswept malpaíses felt uncannily like home. Gazing down at a series of socos, semicircular windbreaks built of volcanic stone where farmers coaxed who-knows-what into growth, mollycoddled against the wind, Mercia’s eyes watered. Was it self-pity for the child who escaped from the sand-scouring easterly wind, who hid behind a thornbush, telling herself tales in which Nettie was cast as the wicked stepmother? The icy wind batted her between past and present.

How to keep ice out of the heart! No dead metaphor, that. Like the newly arrived arthritis that gnawed at her wrists, there was a clenching sensation, a ripple of pain through what she imagined to be her heart, presaging this very day, the now of picking over Craig’s departure, looking back across volcanic runes, where scabs of lichen spelled out a future. How could the islanders take comfort in the outcrops of lichen? According to the brochure those scabs of barely live organisms promised, simply by being, by tenaciously surviving, to break down through eons of time the rough crust of volcanic lava into crumbly earth where life will one day, once again, take root. Some distant day, it promised, ghanna and Jan Twakkie and prickly pear will triumph, and transform that wasteland. Flooded inexplicably with the misery of the badlands, Mercia shook her head in disbelief. She was no artist, no poet like Craig who could imagine such a time. She rushed off to the next venue, Manrique’s house, where he had captured forever the flow of black lava. There it appeared to spill over a window ledge, lured into culture’s space of pristine white paint, and remain suspended in a building called home.