Pigs by Sheila Crosby

Sheila Crosby lives on a small rock in the Atlantic. She's a mother, writer, photographer, tour guide, translator, gardener, belly dancer, English teacher and software engineer. Consequently she rarely gets time for her hobbies, which are cooking, laundry, ironing and cleaning the house. You can read more about the island she lives on at http://lapalmaisland.sheilacrosby.com .

The waiter brought my quemada - 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 flavored firewater. The island is part of

Spain

but lies two hundred miles off the coast of

Morocco

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 there was something different here. Undercurrents of shock and embarrassment swirled around this baby.

I went and looked at the cigarette machine, but I didn't buy any because I don't smoke. On the way back I made a detour via the baby's table and looked over the mother's shoulder.

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 piglets. It had to be real.

This woman was sitting in a public bar with a piglet wrapped up in a pink baby blanket in her arms. She'd drawn the blanket over the piglet's head so that it looked 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 recognized 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?" We English are like that; polite at all costs. Half the time it deceives nobody, but we're more comfortable with small pretenses than with too much brutal honesty.

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. "They are very affectionate animals, very intelligent. And so much cleaner than most people imagine." Two months ago the sow had produced a litter of piglets.

"Where are the others?" I asked. I had a mental picture of twin strollers with snugly wrapped piglets inside.

So 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 before the laughter exploded out of me.

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 centerpiece of many large parties and 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, 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 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 a night on the town!