Pigs

The waiter brought my queimada - three roast coffee beans in a small glass of flaming firewater. Macho types starve the flames of oxygen by covering the glass with their hand. I'm a wimp, so I waited until the bottom of the glass reached blood-heat, and used the saucer. It was a perfect January night for drinking in the sights and sounds of La Palma, not to mention drinking in coffee flavoured firewater.
There was a definite stir at the other end of the bar. A woman had arrived with a baby in her arms. Suddenly everyone near her craned to look. I'd seen babies admired before - haven't we all - but currents of shock and embarrassment swirled around this baby.
Was the it deformed? One of the things I like about this island is that they bring handicapped kids up at home, instead of shoving them off into institutions. I can resist anything except temptation, so I decided to go ahead and be a ghoul, but tactfully.
I went and looked at the cigarette machine. I didn't buy any because I don't smoke. On the way back I detoured via the baby's table and sneaked a look over the mother's shoulder.
Piggy little eyes peered out from a pink baby blanket.
It was a piglet.
I did a double take. It was still a piglet. I mentally added up my alcohol consumption - too much to drive, but nowhere near enough to produce pink elephants or piglets. It had to be real.
This woman was sitting in a public bar, carrying a piglet in her arms, wrapped up in a pink baby blanket. She'd drawn the blanket over the piglet's head, and looked very like a baby's bonnet. From her body language, she seemed to think this was normal.
"Oh hello," said the piglet's 'mother'. Then I recognised her. I knew her slightly because I occasionally bought English tea at her shop. Trudi was German, but like me, she had lived on the island of La Palma for a long time.
"Oh it is you," I said, pretending I'd come over to see her, not the pig. "How are you?" I'm more comfortable with small pretences than with too much brutal honesty, even if it decieves nobody.
I bought her a drink, and managed to talk resolutely about the weather for at least five seconds. Then I asked, "Do you often take the piglet out to the bar?"
"Oh no, this is the first time," said Trudi. "He wasn't big enough before. Besides, I didn't want to get fond of him."
I gradually got the whole story out of her. She had a pet pig, a sow. "... wonderful. They are very affectionate animals, very intelligent. And so much cleaner than most people imagine." Two months ago the sow produced a litter of piglets.
"Where are the others?" I asked. I had a mental picture of twin pushchairs with snugly wrapped piglets inside.
"Kerrk!" said Trudi, drawing her finger across her throat. "Christmas dinners."
No wonder she hadn't wanted to get fond of them!
"I have a nice home ready for this one, but first I must make him tame."
So there she was treating the piglet like a human baby. She carried it around in her arms and fed it with a bottle and tickled it under the chin. If she left it with its mother, it would grow up thinking it was a pig. That, of course, would never do.
I said, "Oh really?" and "How interesting," in all the right places. Then I finished my drink, excused myself, and went to hide in the toilets. I got there just in time before I doubled up with laughter.
Pigs are important on this island. Most farmers keep pigs, or rather, they keep one or two pigs at a time. As each one is turned into sausages, they buy a new piglet. Most pigs here have a rather nice life, while it lasts. They get their backs scratched every day, and eat good food. None of your reprocessed cardboard boxes for these pigs.
When I first got to know people in the north of the island, my new friend Carmen was very worried because the pig was off her food. They'd run out of surplus avocados and bananas, and the pig didn't like pears.
Not surprisingly, these pigs also taste different. Whole roast pig forms an inexpensive centrepiece of many large parties, like weddings. The catch is that two people have to get up early and spend all morning cooking and chatting and drinking, instead of going to church. They dig a pit outside and light a fire at the bottom. When they've got a good layer of glowing ashes, they put the split pig on a barbecue rack over the coals, and then cover the outside with cardboard. For hours and hours the pig is slowly roasted, barbecued and smoked simultaneously. By the time the hungry guests arrive the smell makes your mouth water. It's amazing how much pork you can eat at one sitting.
At the other end of the scale, during the Spanish civil war, farmer's wives used to walk around Tenerife, hiring out pig's trotters. That's right - not selling them, hiring them. For a few coppers, you could put the trotter in your soup for ten minutes, to give it a bit of body. Then you had to fish the trotter out and hand it back, ready for the next person. I still wonder how many families used one trotter before the farmer's wife gave up and went home.
I heard this from my Mother-in-law, who was old enough to remember it. Perhaps having lived through such scarcity was one reason she enjoyed pork so much. As she used to say, "Even the way pigs walk tastes good."
For all that, I don't think it would ever have occurred to her to wrap a piglet in a baby's shawl and take it out to a bar for the evening.

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