In every Canary Island family there is a brother-in-law —it needn’t be a literal brother-in-law, it’s more of a spiritual office— who at every family meal delivers the same verdict: “well, life’s better on the mainland.” He says it in January. On a terrace. At twenty-three degrees. In short sleeves.
You look at him, look at the blue sky, look at the sea in the distance, look at your own arm tanning in the middle of winter, and you don’t know whether to laugh or ask him to explain himself. But the brother-in-law doesn’t explain: the brother-in-law pronounces. That there’s more culture over there, that here everything arrives late and dear, that there’s the ferry, the plane, that we’re cut off from the world.
And he has a point, let’s not kid ourselves. Here a parcel takes about three reigns to arrive and shopping online is an act of logistical faith. But from there to pining for the cold of a plateau in the middle of February is a distance only the Canary Island brother-in-law is willing to travel.
The best part is that he will never leave. That’s the detail. He has spent twenty years saying life is better on the mainland and there he still is, putting down roots by the sea, complaining about paradise with his mouth full of wrinkly potatoes. And deep down we understand him, because complaining about the place where one lives wonderfully is, perhaps, the most honest national sport there is.
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