Taking parental responsibility to extremes, some policymakers in the U.S. have seriously debated the possibility of requiring a license for parenting. I'm dismayed by the notion of licensing an individual adult to raise an individual child, because it implies parenting is a private enterprise, like selling liquor or driving a cab (though less lucrative). I'm also dismayed by what it suggests about innate fitness or nonfitness to rear children. Who would devise such a test? And how could it harbor anything but deep class biases? Like driving, parenting is a skill you learn by doing. You keep an eye out for oncoming disasters, and know when to stop and ask for directions. The skills you have going into it are hardly the point.
The first time I tried for my driver's license, I flunked. I was sixteen and rigid with panic. I rolled backward precariously while starting on a hill; I misidentified in writing the shape of a railroad crossing sign; as a final disqualifying indignity, my VW beetle--borrowed from my brother and apparently as appalled as I--went blind in the left blinker and mute in the horn. But nowadays, when it's time for a renewal, I breeze through the driver's test without thinking, usually on my way to some other errand. That test I failed twenty years ago was no prediction of my ultimate competence as a driver, anymore than my doll-care practices (I liked tying them to the back of my bike, by the hair) were predictive of my parenting skills (heavens be praised). Who really understands what it takes to raise kids? That is, until after the diaper changes, the sibling rivalries, the stitches, the tantrums, the first day of school, the overpriced-sneakers standoff, the first date, the safe-sex lecture, and the senior prom have all been negotiated and put away in the scrapbook?
While there are better and worse circumstances from which to launch offspring onto the planet, it's impossible to anticipate just who will fail. One of the most committed, creative parents I know plunged into her role through the trapdoor of teen pregnancy; she has made her son the center of her life, constructed a large impromptu family of reliable friends and neighbors, and absorbed knowledge like a plant taking sun. Conversely, some of the most strained, inattentive parents I know are well-heeled professionals, self-sufficient but chronically pressed for time. Life takes surprising turns. The one sure thing is that no parent, ever, has turned out to be perfectly wise and exhaustively provident, 1,440 minutes a day, for 18 years. It takes help. Children are not commodities but an incipient world. They thrive best when their upbringing is the collective joy and responsibility of families, neighborhoods, communities, and nations.
It's not hard to figure out what's good for kids, but amid the noise of an increasingly antichild political climate, it can be hard to remember just to go ahead and do it: for example, to vote to raise your school district's budget, even though you'll pay higher taxes. (If you're earning enough to pay taxes at all, I promise, the school needs those few bucks more than you do.) To support legislators who care more about afterschool programs, affordable health care, and libraries than about military budgets and the Dow Jones industrial average. To volunteer time and skills at your neighborhood school and also the school across town. To decide to notice, rather than ignore it, when a neighbor is losing it with her kids, and offer to baby-sit twice a week. This is not interference. Getting between a ball player and a ball is interference. The ball is inanimate.
Presuming children to be their parents' sole property and responsibility is, among other things, a handy way of declaring problem children to be someone else's problem, or fault, or failure. It's a dangerous remedy; it doesn't change the fact that somebody else's kids will ultimately be in your face demanding now with interest what they didn't get when they were smaller and had simpler needs. Maybe in-your-face means breaking and entering, or maybe it means a Savings and Loan scam. Children deprived--of love, money, attention, or moral guidance--grow up to have large and powerful needs.
Always there will be babies made in some quarters whose parents can't quite take care of them. Reproduction is the most invincible of all human goals; like every other species, we're only here because our ancestors spent millions of years refining their act as efficient, dedicated breeders. If we hope for only sane, thoughtful people to have children, we can wish while we're at it for an end to cavities and mildew. But unlike many other species we are social, insightful, and capable of anticipating our future. We can see, if we care to look, that the way we treat children--all of them, not just our own, and especially those in great need--defines the shape of the world we'll wake up in tomorrow. The most remarkable feature of human culture is its capacity to reach beyond the self and encompass the collective good.
It's an inspiring thought. But in mortal fact, here in the U.S. we are blazing a bold downhill path from the high ground of "human collective," toward the tight little den of "self." The last time we voted on a school-budget override in Tucson, the newspaper printed scores of letters from readers incensed by the very possibility: "I don't have kids," a typical letter writer declared, "so why should I have to pay to educate other people's offspring?" The budget increase was voted down, the school district progressed from deficient to desperate, and I longed to ask that miserly nonfather just whose offspring he expects to doctor the maladies of his old age.
If we intend to cleave like stubborn barnacles to our great American ethic of every nuclear family for itself, then each of us had better raise and educate offspring enough to give us each day, in our old age, our daily bread. If we don't wish to live by bread alone, we'll need not only a farmer and a cook in the family but also a home repair specialist, an auto mechanic, an accountant, an import-export broker, a forest ranger, a therapist, an engineer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a doctor, and at least three shifts of nurses. If that seems impractical, then we can accept other people's kids into our lives, starting now.
It's not so difficult. Most of the rest of the world has got this in hand. Just about any country you can name spends a larger percentage of its assets on its kids than we do. Virtually all industrialized nations have better schools and child-care policies. And while the U.S. grabs headlines by saving the occasional baby with heroic medical experiments, world health reports (from UNESCO, USAID, and other sources) show that a great many other parts of the world have lower infant mortality rates than we do--not just the conspicuously prosperous nations like Japan and Germany, but others, like Greece, Cuba, Portugal, Slovenia--simply because they attend better to all their mothers and children. Cuba, running on a budget that would hardly keep New York City's lights on, has better immunization programs and a higher literacy rate. During the long, grim haul of a thirty-year economic blockade, during which the United States has managed to starve Cuba to a ghost of its hopes, that island's child-first priorities have never altered.
Here in the land of plenty a child dies from poverty every fifty-three minutes, and TV talk shows exhibit teenagers who pierce their flesh with safety pins and rip off their parents every way they know how. All these punks started out as somebody's baby. How on earth, we'd like to know, did they learn to be so isolated and selfish?
My second afternoon in Spain, standing in a crowded bus, as we ricocheted around a corner and my daughter reached starfish-wise for stability, a man in a black beret stood up and gently helped her into his seat. In his weightless bearing I caught sight of the decades-old child, treasured by the manifold mothers of his neighborhood, growing up the way leavened dough rises surely to the kindness of bread.
I thought then of the woman on the airplane, who was obviously within her rights to put her own comfort first, but whose withheld generosity gave my daughter what amounted to a sleepless, kicking, squirming, miserable journey. As always happens two days after someone has spoken to me rudely, I knew exactly what I should have said: Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.
PARADISE LOST
The Canary Islands weren't named for birds, but dogs. Pliny the Elder wrote of "Canaria, so called from the multitude of dogs [canis] of great size." In Pliny's day this archip
elago, flung west from the coast of Morocco, was the most westerly place imaginable. All maps started here. For fourteen centuries Arabs, Portuguese, and eventually the Spanish came this far, and no farther; it remained Meridian Zero. When Columbus gathered the force to head west and enlarge the map, it was from La Gomera, in the Canaries, that he sailed.
I went to the Canaries for nearly a year, to find new stories to tell, and to grow comfortable thinking in Spanish. Or so I said; the truth is closer to the bone. It was 1991, and in the U.S. a clamor of war worship had sprung like a vitriolic genie from the riveted bottles we launched on Baghdad. Yellow ribbons swelled from suburban front doors, so puffy and ubiquitous as to seem folkloric. But this folklore, a prayer of godspeed to the killers, allowed no possibility that the vanquished might also be human. I grew hopeless, then voiceless. What words could I offer a place like this? Five hundred years after colonialism arrived in the New World, I booked a return passage.
Subtropical Europe seemed an idyllic combination of wild and tame: socialized health care and well-fed children, set in a peaceful tangle of banana trees and wild poinsettias. We settled in Tenerife's capital city, Santa Cruz, in a walk-up apartment that was tiny by U.S. standards, average by European, and anyhow what we could afford. I soon got used to living in a small space. The walls vibrated pleasantly with my upstairs neighbor's piano sonatas. I planted tomatoes and basil in pots on the balcony. My daughter became bilingual without realizing it, continuing to chatter in Spanish as I walked her home from kindergarten. In the afternoons she and I made forays to the bright, rowdy markets, to the beach, to wherever the green city buses would take us. We sat in sidewalk cafes on the harbor, watching cars go by. Behind the cars, enormous ships passed by on a lane of water not visible from our vantage point, so it looked as if ocean liners were sliding majestically up and down the Avenida de Anaga. In the park we collected round wooden jacaranda pods with toothy openings like small dragon mouths. We grew accustomed to the remarkable habit of walking there, perfectly safe, after dark. We did not miss the New World.
I set my writing desk against the apartment's front window, from which I could look down into the tops of the great fig trees that lined the street below--a broad boulevard named for General Franco, the distinguished despot and friend to Hitler. (My friends who sent me letters there will vouch for this, my astonishing fascist address.) So much for the innocence of this place, whose Spanish charm--like the whole world, apparently--is built on the bones of the vanquished. What new stories were here to tell? Instead of writing, I took to staring at the apartment across the street, also three floors up, where at night a fellow insomniac haunted his spartan balcony. I considered blinking my lights at him. I began to imagine a whole secret world of signals: A woman who sits on her balcony each morning drinking coffee, while the stranger across the street does the same. One day she buys a fern for her balcony, and the following day so does he. Then she buys a geranium, so does he. She fills her balcony, crowds it with flowers, so that he will too. Why? To watch him prove his devotion? Because she feels sorry for him, and wants him to drink his coffee in the lively embrace of a garden? Or simply because she has power over him? If that is the case, then she will take the plants away again, one by one, leaving him with nothing in the end. In my despondent state I could think of no happier ending. Power, like space, it seemed to me, would always get used. People expand and bloat to fill it.
My mind staggered and found nothing of use to tell. A small, squat spider patrolled the window casing above my writing desk. Its two white forelegs moved continually in a single repeated gesture: a scooping motion toward its mouth, like a mute beggar asking for bread. The spider became the muse of my empty page, asking, asking, asking to be filled.
In September Camille made plans to spend a weekend with a school friend. Given the chance to get away, briefly, I found I needed to go. I didn't know why, but I knew where. La Gomera.
Six of the seven Canary Islands have airports, the better to accommodate hasty visits from European sun worshipers. But any traveler who wants to approach the seventh, most secretive Canary--La Gomera--must take the sea road as Columbus did. I found myself that kind of traveler, in no particular hurry on a bright Saturday. I'd been told dolphins liked to gambol in the waves in this channel, and that sighting them brings good luck. I was ready for some luck. The sun on the pointed waves was hard as chipped flint, but I stared anyway, awaiting revelation.
The ferry from Tenerife to La Gomera churned away from a southern resort town with a bleached, unimaginative skyline of tourist hotels. For reasons difficult to fathom or appreciate, the brown hills dropping away behind the port displayed giant white letters spelling out HOLLYWOOD. An hour and a half ahead of us lay tiny La Gomera, where the hills don't yet speak English or anything else.
Among urban Canarians, La Gomera has a reputation for backwardness, and the Gomerans themselves are sometimes likened to Guanches--the tall, blue-eyed, goat-herding aboriginals whom the Spaniards found here and promptly extinguished in the fifteenth century. No one knows where they came from, though it's a good guess that they were related to the tall, blue-eyed Berbers who still roam the western Sahara. Throughout the Canaries, the Guanches herded goats, made simple red-clay pottery, and followed the lifestyle known as Neolithic, living out their days without the benefit of metal. They were farmers, not fishers; anthropologists insist these island people had no boats. On La Gomera they used a type of language unique in the world, which was not spoken but whistled. This exotic means of communication, called silbo, could traverse the great distances that routinely separate neighbors on an island cut through and through with steep, uncrossable gorges. (Whistling carries its subtleties over distance in a way that shouting can't.) I'd been told by many Canarians that the silbo has died out completely. But others claimed it still persists in some corners, along with pottery making and farming with the muscle of human and ox. I made a pact for the crossing: if I see dolphins in the channel, I'll believe the rest of the story.
The blue cliffsides of La Gomera seemed close enough to Tenerife to reach by means of a strong backstroke. It's hard to imagine living on islands this small, in plain view of other land, and never being stirred to build a boat. In fact, I know of an anthropologist who studied the archaeological record of the Guanches, but could not convince her colleagues that their culture shunned the sea. People with such mysterious motives seem more legendary than real. That's the great problem, I suppose, with becoming extinguished.
Just beyond the rushing ferry's shroud of spray, the dolphins appeared to me, slick and dark, rolling like finned inner tubes in the Atlantic.
San Sebastian de La Gomera is the port from which Columbus set sail for the New World. Elsewhere on earth, the approaching quincentennial anniversary of that voyage had been raising a lot of fuss, but here at the point of origin all was quiet. Fishing boats sat like sleeping gulls in the harbor, rolling in the ferry's wake. A store in the port sold T-shirts with the ambiguous message "Aqui partio Colon"--Columbus departed from here. So did everyone else, apparently. San Sebastian's narrow streets were empty save for long shadows of fig trees and a handful of noontime shoppers. I claimed my bantam-weight rental car and drove up a steep, cobbled hill to the parador overlooking the harbor.
The hotel, Parador Conde de La Gomera, is an old, elegant replica of an estate that stood here in Columbus's time. The massive front door leads to a cool interior of cut-stone archways and dark carved woodwork. Passages open to bright courtyards, where potted ferns grow head high and higher, brushing the door frames. The hallways turn out everywhere onto hidden sitting areas dappled with light, each one arranged like a perfect photograph. Easy enough a life, to stay forever in the paradise of San Sebastian. Columbus came close to doing it. Gomerans love to tell the story of how he delayed his first historic voyage for many months--nearly cashed it in altogether--having settled down here comfortably with the widow of the first Count of La Gomera, Beatriz de Bobadilla.
The
balcony of my room overlooked the tops of palms and tamarinds leaning perilously over the edge of the cliff, and far below, the harbor. From a rocking chair on the balcony I watched the ferry that had brought me here, now chugging back toward the land of white high-rises. I tried to read a botanical account of La Gomera, but in the midst of a day so bright white and blue, some crucial, scientific part of my mind seemed not to have made the crossing with me. A steady rattle of wind in the palms hypnotized me into the unthinkable thing for a chronic insomniac: an afternoon nap.
In my sleep I heard a conversation of birds. I woke up and heard it still: birds in the garden, asking each other questions. I shook my cottony head and leaned over the banister, looking down through the trees. From my hidden place I could see only a gardener with bristling white hair. As I spied on him, I saw him thrust a finger into his mouth and make a warbling, musical whistle. In a minute, an answer came back.
I threw on my shoes and hurried downstairs to the garden. It was as deep and edible as Eden: guavas, figs, avocados, a banana tree bent with its burden of fruit. Another tree bore what looked like a watermelon-sized avocado. I located the man I'd seen from up above, but I felt unaccountably shy. I asked him about the tree with outsize avocados, not so much for information as to nurture my fantasy that he would stick his fingers in his mouth and warble the answer. He explained (in Spanish, disappointingly) that the tree comes from Cuba, where they use the fruit as a musical instrument. I asked him to tell me its name in silbo. His mouth turned down in a strange pinch and he stood still a long time. Dragonflies clicked in the palms overhead. Finally he said, "She doesn't have a name in silbo. She's not from here." And walked off toward the guava trees. A parrot in a wrought-iron cage behind me muttered barely audible Spanish words in monotone; I whistled at him, but he too held me in his beady glare and clammed up.