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Show are speedboat races between fishing villages, scuba diving in the dynamited waters. There is a helicopter service into the smouldering mouth of the volcano. Tourists. There is no stopping them. They worship the sun and block out the night with neon. And they have no respect. For their pleasure a radio station has been built: the music is bad enough, but it was a blow to my heart to find its tower erected over my father's grass-covered grave. There is only one place on the island I have never taken a visitor. Nor did I mention it to the young man. In Spanish it is called Malpais, the bad land, the dead country. A plain of frozen lava, spilled from the guts of Tiede, it resembles the surface of the moon. Nothing grows on Malpais. There are no bananas, no flowers, no birds. There is no sound. Only the silence of ancient disaster, and the black volcanic debris: hard shiny evidence that nothing lasts forever. We had finished one tape and a second and were halfway through a third. An ice cream man was working his way up and down the beach, weaving his way among the sun worshipers. We were approaching the end of my life. When I stopped talking, the young man leaned very close and I could see the small, dark, sulfuric pores on his face. "Tell me," he said privately, "when do you think you will die?" |