They left Barcelona on a tub crammed with Spanish tourists, nary a one speaking Catalan Ibicento. Kit recognized them as city-dwelling slugs, already sunburned and dazed by the sea. He wore an aqua-marine paisely shirt, blue denim bells and white Keds. His windbreaker bore an advertisement for Cinzano.
"You look like a patio umbrella," Cassandra teased.
She was reading a book on diet and longevity among the hunza. Subsisting on millet and yogurt, these men and women of the Himalayas could live a healthy span of a hundred years. They were not lamas with powers of mind over matter or yogins dwelling in bliss. They were peasants, harvesters of grain and herders of dairy animals, living day to day upon a harsh land. Cassandra opted for the diet over the new sensation from a Doctor Atkins.
The Hunza diet was exotic and most definitely not American.
*
They rented a lovers aerie above a village of cubic bungalows chisled in tiers from a stone summit overlooking the most azure bay Kit had ever seen. He wondered if he could live on the figs and olives that grew up and down the slopes. Probably not, but they would be supplement to what he could buy from local fishermen and bakers.
Ibiza would be Eden.
*
Bicycles were sold and resold. Kit obtained two. He and Cassandra explored the countryside around Ciudad de Ibiza, discovering white sandy beaches to the north of Playa Talamanca and to the south of Playa d'en Bossa. As they pedaled along, the hilly terrain revealed secluded cliff sites and secret bays.
Cassandra pontificated upon the merits of her Hunza diet, claiming she had lost several pounds almost overnight, filling her gut with plain yogurt and Moroccan nano-pasta in lieu of Himalayan millet. Kit suggested that she may have shed fat through starvation. Toning her muscles by pedalling uphill.
On the third day he offered her roast lamb kabob, and she devoured it, smearing grease across her face. That night as tides and menses moved she burned her black clothes, and from then on her blouses were white and her trousers matched the hues of the Sahara. The midnight blackness of her hair seemed irksome, somehow, so she bleached it platinum.
True at noon she was the essence of transfiguration.
*
Kit's room was Spartan, and Zen blank. A sea-captain's chair and desk sat before a wide white-framed window. The white wall was of Mediterranean plaster and the desk bore cryptic inscriptions etched into its ancient wood, using a penknife. Previous visitors, he gathered, had been literary folk.
Perhaps I'll find a QED equation carved somewhere in this room.
He felt a warm breeze. Anise and mint.
From how far had it come? From where? Majorca? Corfu?
The view through the window expanded like CinemaScope, pulling him into a realm of imagination. The gnarled tempest-slain fig tree on the lawn became the centerpiece upon an empty stage. (Again without realizing it he was being derivative. This time from Beckett, before that from Lagerkvist.) His tree had been blasted by lightning, its sap boiled away, its limbs shriveled into claws, desperately clutching for another go at life. He remained focused upon his imaginary plastic tree until an absurd little man in a tattered coal suit shuffled like Chaplin in from stage left.
Oh, no! Not another Everyman!
*
While Kit grappled with the efficacy of Deus ex Machina as dramatic device, Cassandra pedaled down to snoop around the Lilliputian bodegas and boutiques. She wrapped her Nikon and specialty lenses with care and stuffed them into a rucksack.
Franco's Spain, with its facist-inquisition mindset, was far behind. Ibiza, cosmopolitan, hedonistic, buzzed with Vespa scooters. Blonds everywhere! Couples with matching colors of hair, accenting their androgyny, sauntered in loose clothing. She saw scarves and caftans, white duck pants and straw fedoras.
Antic Ibiza intoxicated her soul.
Pagan as the Visigoths of ancient rhyme.
She pedaled hard, feeling her calves burn.
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