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V. The Englishman Goes Away
I would be straying from my subject if I were to describe that first school year in Paris which came between our two summers in Montefrio. Suffice it to say that the time from September 1961 to July 1962 was full of exciting new things and people, which had the effect of driving a wedge between me and my strong-willed companion. The recurrent presence of my vivacious young mother, herself very much "on the road", didn't help matters, either.
Just before we left for Spain, at the end of the school year, a girl Lilo had studied painting with in Munich turned up at our servant's room under the rooftops of the 17th arrondissement. She seemed alienated, as they said then, and lonely, was very pretty in the wholesome German way, and my reaction was that of any bored young rooster upon finding a comely new hen in his coop. I went out of my way to be amusing and accommodating, Lilo was pleased to lecture Elke about art and what-not, and the girl almost naturally decided to come along with us to Spain for the summer.
These fortuitous romances went very fast back then, and the train called "La Puerta del Sol" had not even pulled out of Austerlitz Station before Elke and I were getting discreetly entwined in the crowded, murky compartments. The combination of the summer heat and our extreme youth had us inflamed, if not to say in flames, and by the time we got to Madrid, Lilo was having a hard time ignoring it.
We memorably managed to get lost in the Forest of Aranjuez for several hours, leaving her and a Spanish friend of mine to search for us along the paths. It was therefore hardly surprising, we all being what we were, that almost as soon as we got to Montefrio things reached a climax.
We stayed the first night in La Fonda until the house was readied for us, and after dinner I took Elke for a walk in the olive groves. In case you didn't know, the expression "to take a girl for a walk in the olive groves" has a special significance in these parts, and it is that meaning which applies here. I have a mental photograph of her milky white body in the moonlight, half-reclining on a slope near the great stone crucifix known as La Cruz Gorda, which once blessed travellers taking the old road to Granada.
When I got back to the room in the early hours, Lilo expressed her rage by falling to her knees in front of me and beating her head on the tile floor, several times over and without saying a word. Of course, I was horrified, but, in my pragmatic Anglo-Saxon way, couldn't help feeling relieved that it was not my head!
In spite of this dramatic, but useless gesture, an external propriety was maintained and Lilo seemed to decide to let things run their course. After all, back in Schwabing, Munich's bohemian quarter where she had lived, such situations were quite common. A month followed in which we did the same things we had done the summer before, except that when night came I waited for Lilo to pretend to fall asleep before joining Elke on her straw-filled mattress down the corridor. I would be back before dawn, and the two women spent the day amiably, or at least politely, painting and cooking together. Since they spoke in German I don't know exactly what they were saying, but was glad to take note that it did not seem to be about me.
The only other memory I distinctly have of that summer, less idyllic than the previous one, was the flamenco party in the cortijo. Manolo and I arranged with the gypsies to have a party in a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village, and we all set off in the night with a big straw-covered jug of wine and a basket of things to munch on.
The fiesta was going full swing, with myself and the Munich milk-maid doing a joyous number in the light of the oil lamp, when suddenly, as if by magic, all the gypsies disappeared into the darkness. When we went out on the porch to see what had happened, I recognized the silhouettes of two Civil Guardsmen approaching in the moonlight, with their gleaming winged hats and rifles slung over their shoulders. It seemed that we had failed to obtain the written authorization that was necessary, under Franco, to hold an assembly of over three persons. And the fact that we had invited a lot of gypsies did not make things better. But even though they ruined our party, I was always thrilled when the images of Lorca's poetry seemed to step, as they often did then, out of the pages of the Romancero Gitano.
But my only experience of polygamy under the same roof did not last long. One morning, I returned to our bedroom and found Lilo gone, with a note under the alarm clock that had been set in time to catch the seven o'clock bus to Granada. She said she was going to Ibiza to find a house for her parents and sister to spend the summer holidays, and that if I wanted to follow...
I was hardly shocked after all the liberties I had taken, but it all seemed suddenly dull and uninteresting with just me and Elke - who, although prettier, was no ersatz for Fraulein Wagner - alone in the big house, and a few days later I decided to send her back to Germany. There was a sad parting at the Granada railway station, as she went north and I took the train to Valencia. Lilo was waiting for me as the boat drew up to the pier in Ibiza, marching back and forth with a defiant expression on her face. But we were soon like fingers of the same hand, once more.
We had been in Ibiza the summer before, to visit another Munich painting school friend of Lilo's, a large, restless creature who looked like Cleopatra just after getting out of bed, and who, by the time we got there, had actually been in bed with half the artistically-minded men on the island. She had moved out to Formentera, a short but splashy motor boat ride away, where we found her living in temporary monogamy with a Dane, in a tiny cement box on a stony field in the middle of nowhere. The two islands were well on their way to becoming the meeting place for all the misfits of Europe, and Formentera was the last frontier.
This year, though, we stayed put under the auspices of Mutti and Fatti in their beach cottage in Santa Eulalia. Across the inlet the surveyors were marking out the site for the island's first modern hotel, while the few foreigners stayed in makeshift cement houses thrown together along the shore. In the one in front of us, the Spanish caretaker spent much of the day hoisting buckets of water onto the roof with a rope, to fill the holding tank that enabled his guests to have showers when they came from the beach. I never shared the rapturous feelings that some people have about Ibiza, and many years later - as you will see a few pages on - my indifference turned into downright aversion. So I will describe the most memorable thing that happened to us there, and get back to Montefrio.
This, however, requires me to move backwards first. When we got to Paris the previous autumn, we stayed in a walk-up student's hotel on the Carrefour de l'Odéon, administered by two old concierges, unmarried sisters. Like many such Frenchwomen in those times, they were unnecessarily nasty and constantly complained about "Mademoiselle Wagner's" boots clattering on the wooden staircase, and my own attempts to bash out fandangillos de Huelva on the guitar. When we left the Nouvel Hotel for the chambre de bonne on the Rue Rennequin, we put these two shrews out of our minds forever,
as you can imagine.Now, in Ibiza - 10 months later - we were riding our rental bikes one morning down one of the island's inland roads, crossing a long stretch of arid fields, divided by stone walls and the occasional gnarled almond tree, when, under the blazing sun, we saw, shimmering in the distance, two stooped female silhouettes heading towards us. As we drew closer, we saw that they were not the native ibizencas one usually saw in the countryside, who still dressed in strange embroidered costumes and wore gold jewellery and headscarves, like Moorish women. Also, these two were staring us straight in the eyes, as if we were a divine apparition.
As soon as they began to babble excitedly in French, "Mademoiselle Wagner! Monsieur Bohme!" we realized that they were the two concierges from Paris. It seemed they had a cousin who stayed in Ibiza during the summer whom they had come to visit. But what we found amazing was that, due to the highly unlikely circumstances and (in their minds) the distance from civilization, they now saw us as their long-lost daughter and son. It was hardly the moment to remind them of how horrible they had been to us when we were their tenants, so, feeling rather sorry for the old fools, we pretended to be glad and wished them a pleasant stay, before pedalling on.
But our last month together in Spain - and, in fact, the second from last of all of our months together - was truly idyllic, in a setting of perfect, undefiled beauty. While living in Granada the year before we had seen an exhibition of paintings which a Frenchman had done in a cluster of mountain villages on the southern flanks of the Sierra Nevada, called La Alpujarra, and, on his enthusiastic recommendation, decided to spend a month there before returning to France.
No foreigner had ever lived in Capileira except an elderly Swede who never came out of the house he had built up the hill, so we were as novel there as in Montefrio. It was in the only, primitive pensión that, after a major decision, Lilo cut my long hair, so that the next day the villagers who saw us thought,
and even said aloud, that the little man had exchanged his large female companion for a large male one with a haircut just like his.We rented the top floor of an ancient house overhanging the deep river valley, from two old farmers, for 25 pesetas per day, a bit more than we paid in Montefrio. The houses of La Alpujarra were originally built by the Moors in the style native to the Altas Mountains: heavy horizontal beams covered with large sheets of natural slate and sealed with a fine waterproof clay, making each roof a terrace where _ because of the very steep slopes - the family from the house above can sit among the rows of drying tomatoes and lumpy white chimneys, overlooking all the other flat roofs which cling, like an undulating staircase, to the mountainside.
We brought water up in a jug from the fountain, cooked on a fire of sticks, and used a chamber pot the contents of which the old folks told us could be thrown off the edge of the terrace into the trees. Like the villagers, we lived on a stew made of garbanzos, dried peppers and tomatoes, with whatever greens our host brought back from his huerta, except each Friday. Then, a tiny donkey came up from the city of Orgiva, at the foot of the mountain, loaded with fresh fish. Everyone came out with saucepans to buy half a kilo as the donkey passed, and soon the whole village smelled deliciously of frying boquerones. It was our weekly treat.
We spent the days as usual, me typing out a novel on my portable typewriter, and Lilo painting portraits of the neighbours. In the afternoons we roamed the paths among the terraced orchards, always green with the waters of the melting snows. When a storm blew up from below, it would engulf one tiny white village after the other in its course, until Capileira seemed to be alone at the top of the world. On very clear days, we could see ships steaming towards Gibraltar, far below on a strip of pastel blue sea.
As long as Lilo and I remained in this monastic environment, everything seemed like it might go on forever. But a few weeks later we were back in the belly of the beast, pre-1968 Paris, among others of our own mind and generation, surrounded by agitation, newness and an endless range of fascinating options - and fellow travellers - to choose from. There followed a breathless school year in Paris without Lilo (or, rather, fleeing from Lilo) and a summer on the loose, very far from Spain.
Then, at the end of 1963, I packed my duffle bags to return to America, first North and then South and then Central, as if I might never return. By the time a conjuncture of chance, curiosity and world-weariness brought me to Montefrio again, I was what some call a middle-aged man.
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