Teresa, waitress and proprietor, comes out with a tray of orange juices and coffees, deposits them at another table and pauses in front of him. 'Solito?' This simply asks 'On your own?' but as so often in Spanish, the bluntness of the root word solo is softened with that lovely little ito that has no equivalent in English. 'Sol-EE-toe?' With this single word and a slight raising of her eyebrows Teresa conveys friendly amusement, enquiry and a hint of concern.
He's had a lot of this already. The bakery, the supermarket, the pharmacy, friends and acquaintances he meets in the street… There are other ways of saying it but they all amount to the same thing. The most popular is simply 'Tu esposa?', your wife? - and that expression of surprise.
The point is, he and his wife are never seen alone in public. They do everything together. It's the way their relationship has always been. They cycle into town together, shop together, swim together, sit in cafes together. He read a while ago about a couple in their nineties who died within two hours of each other, unable to survive independently, like Siamese twins joined at the heart.
Seeing him on his own therefore, parking his bike, buying bread, going for a swim, sipping coffee, is cause for remark: 'Solito?' He is deeply touched by all this concern, which taps directly into his inner turmoil. He responds gratefully and at length, providing far more detail than the enquirer needs or wants but the Spaniards, and especially Canarians, are the world's best at listening patiently and with comradely sympathy.
It does him good, he finds, to get out and talk to people, even solito. He needs to share his shock and fear as widely as possible, spread them around in the community. It dilutes them so they don't feel so threatening. Unfortunately his wife can't do that, she's stuck at home, still too wobbly to venture out of the house, so he tries to bring the world back with him to dilute things for her as well. Messages of goodwill from the people he's met: 'Ánimo!' - take heart! have courage!
On one of his solitary expeditions into town he meets Luis. Their paths cross in the pedestrian street outside the covered market, from which Luis has just emerged with a bagful of vegetables. 'Good morning! Where's your wife?' They are about the same age, he and Luis, both retired, although Luis is a local man with a family and grandchildren. One of his daughters is with him now.
Luis and his daughter listen patiently as he recounts in stumbling Spanish what happened, and they react with proper surprise and concern: 'Don't tell me! But she's so strong and healthy.' Well yes, but you know, high blood pressure and so on, one problem leads to another…
Then Luis says completely unexpectedly, 'That happened to me as well.' What, a stroke? He nods. 'A few years ago.' His daughter corroborates it: he was paralysed all down one side, she says. Arm, leg, face muscles, the lot. He's right as rain now, normal as they come. You'd never know anything had happened.
This is tremendously encouraging. He phones his wife to tell her about it. He keeps phoning her anyway, whenever he's out, he can't help it. At last they've found employment for the mobile phone which used to sit silent as a beach pebble in his bag. They've never been mobile phone people, hardly use it except in emergencies, and in normal life you don't expect too many of those. Now he's using it all the time, getting to rely on it: 'You all right?' He keeps imagining her standing up, wobbling and falling over, hitting her head. Or having another stroke, while he's not there to call an ambulance.
'I'm fine,' she reassures him. 'Listening to a programme about Greece.'
Sometimes he passes the phone to a friend or shopkeeper or waitress to say hello to his wife, wish her all the best for a speedy recovery: 'Ánimo!' He's not sure whether she really wants him to do this, but he does it nevertheless because it helps him to spread the load. Being solito is hard to support when for more than forty years you've been half of a couple.
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