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Show one thing: that I would return each year to Tenerife, to visit my father's grave. It is never easy for me to think of my father's death. He should have lived longer. And it has occurred to me lately that I am simply using the years that were stolen from him, that I have taken them back. I smoked a cigarette, and for a moment's diversion I told the young man about the whistling. There exists here in the Canary Islands, I said in my tour-guide voice, a most unusual form of verbal communication. Beyond speech, the natives whistle intelligibly to one another. The ancient art depends upon a precise imitation of the tone and timbre, as well as the rhythm and pitch, used in the spoken language. Its advantage is that it can be heard at a much greater distance than the voice. I asked the young man to imagine men carefully positioned all along Tenerife's erratic coast, men standing at the edges of impossible cliffs while barefooted men stood on the sands below, men hiding in cool lush forests while others sweltered on the desert plateau, as the whistled news spun around the island. It was in this way that notice of births and deaths, of family disaster and joy, traditionally traveled from one village to another Now, of course, everything has changed. There is the telephone. There is the radio. |
