Our day-long drive
across Tenerife has indeed been a wonderful adventure (see posts Autopista With Vista , A Place Called Chinet, and Steve, Beatriz And Columbus),
but it feels equally wonderful to return home to San Juan as Mama opens the
door and greets Zara and I with a beaming smile. It is now early evening
and the warm sun is still caressing our skin, but soon it will dip below
the horizon and bring to a close yet another sunny day on this largest of the
seven Canary Islands. Mama is very happy that her daughter and
granddaughter have returned safe and well back to the family fold (see post Women With Wheels). I
ask Mama how she spent her day, and she tells me that as soon as she got
up she went for a brisk early-morning power walk, followed by breakfast,
followed by a swim at the beach with her retired girlfriends, the infamous
Beach Club, followed by lunch, followed by a nap, followed by her
favourite television soap opera, followed by yet another visit to the beach,
and finally all ended with a relaxing evening walk, also known as el
paseo. Zara and I Iook at one another with quiet awe. Just listening to
this day's program fills us both with utter exhaustion. The seventy-three
-year-old Mama and Grandma standing before us clearly has more energy within
her than her daughter and grand-daughter combined!
As with the
numerous beaches dotted along Tenerife's many resorts, the beach at Mama's own
village of San Juan is the focal meeting point for the inhabitants within its
vicinity. At some time or another, everybody goes to the beach
or walks past it on the daily walking ritual known as el paseo. The
beach is simply unavoidable, drawing you towards it like an invisible magnet as
a place where the microcosm of village life is played out day in and day out.
Mama's own group of companions make up many of the beach's frequent visitors.
Collectively known as The Beach Club, they consist of an assortment
of similarly retired older ladies who spend their days swimming, sunbathing,
and generally analysing amongst one another the minute details of everyday
village life. Free therapy
advise is also dished out to anyone deemed in need, all you have to do is pass
by the beach and make contact with The Beach Club; there's Juana, there's
Morela, there's Maria, there's Juliana, there's Marta, and finally there is
Mama. Everything is discussed in complete confidence and what is
said on the beach stays on the beach. Well, almost. After laying bare the
inner-most core of your soul, it will still take a full twenty-four hours
before the entire village is made aware of the reasons for your divorce, the
name of the woman at the centre of said tsunami, and the contents of last
conversation between you and now ex-husband on That Day (see post Cars With Memories).
If you have a problem, you simply grab your swim wear and pay a visit to the beach. At an appropriate moment, either before, during or after your swim you divulge your dilemma to the members of The Beach Club, and in return you will be rewarded with a wide variety of competing advice coming at you from all directions. Everyone has their own viewpoint on the resolution of said dilemma, so you just listen carefully to each viewpoint and then select the advice that fits your situation best. Or you can follow the path I sometimes take, which is listen in earnest to all said opinions and then simply discard the whole lot. The Beach Club is also a marvellous place for the acquisition and diffusion of general information. Who needs the Google search engine when one has this magnificent bikini-clad wisdom machine with a combined age of four-hundred-and-twenty years?
Want to find a new tenant for your apartment? The Beach Club will take care of that. Looking for a new job? The Beach Club will ask amongst their vast network who is currently hiring. Son not dating the right sort of girl? Worry no more, The Beach Club will run a background check on her. Adult daughter in need of boyfriend after recent divorce? Look no further, every eligible male in the village is on the radar screen of the Beach Club. I have already informed Mama and her companions to cease their futile attempts at matchmaking me, I am quite capable to finding my own company. One of the older men in the village makes the monumental mistake of stopping by to happily inform The Beach Club that he will soon be marrying for the second time. Why on the earth are you bothering at your age? he is asked, everyone is getting divorced! Marriage is like a business, he deftly replies, some close down and others open. The Beach Club fall unusually silent and rest their case; they cannot possibly know everything, and often they don't. Anyway, it's time for a collective swim and in they simultaneously pile into the water, all four-hundred-and-twenty-years-worth. The therapy session has just transferred itself from land to sea.
But for now, the Beach Club members are dispersed amongst their respective homes, the sun has already gone down and Zara and I sit on the sofa besides Mama, our very own specimen who is now indulging in her second favourite past-time after The Beach, and that is The Television. Zara watches Mama who is in turn watching the television, captivated as always by her regular evening show, The Eight O'clock News. How can someone become so excited over a simple news report, a perplexed Zara whispers in my ear. Mama momentarily leaves her ringside television seat to fix herself a small evening snack in the adjacent kitchen, with absolute certainty somewhere amongst this snack will feature the ubiquitous banana. It always does (see post The Banana Bunch). Taking advantage of this absence, Zara leans into me and discreetly share a confidence; she tells me that the telenovelas, or the soap operas that her grandma watches in the daytime are slowly doing her head in;
Nanny cannot seem to comprehend that it is all scripted fiction and faithfully tunes in at the same time each afternoon, mesmerized by a plot that always evolves along the same predictable lines. There she is wagging her accusatory finger six inches away from the television screen as the villain is raked across the coals for his newest misdemeanour by an always-ridiculously-beautiful distressed heroine. 'Sinverguenza!', Mama shouts with simmering rage. That means shameless and is the first word that Julia ever learns in Spanish as Hugo takes his Finnish fiancé on an introductory visit to his Spanish grandma's home.
I tell Zara that her grandma has been like this ever since we got our first ever television in England back in the early nineteen-seventies. And as I share this with Zara, a wave of nostalgia suddenly washes over me, and along with it is swept away the present moment and everything that belongs to it; San Juan, Zara, Mama and Maria del Carmen all vanish, and in their place appears a bewildered seven-year-old girl named Marie (see post A Girl Named Marie). Newly-arrived in a strange land called England, I am once more back in the land of Toast and Television (see post B Is For Bullied).
To be continued...
Next post published on Sunday 27th August: Toast And Television
Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.
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