blue moon.
Every year the Spanish police decide that they must cut down on the floating population of escapists, who regard the island as a slightly more accessible Tahiti, and a purge takes place. Deportation is usually carried out on grounds of moral insufficiency. A fair amount of laxness in the private life is tolerated in Spain so long as an outward serenity of deportment is maintained. A departure from this, whether it be a matter of habitual drunkenness in public places, or brawling, or obvious sexual nonconformity, becomes officially ‘ un escándalo publico ’, and the perpetrator thereof receives a visit from the Commisario de Policia, who if it is a lady who is concerned will kiss her hand, before begging her to depart on the next boat. Annually, Ibiza’s bohemian plant is pruned back to the roots, and with each new season it produces a fresh crop. Most of these Gauguins are both harmless and picturesque. In 1955 the beard came in again and was adopted by all nationalities except the Spanish. It was no longer the furious growth inherited from naval service but a sensitive and downy halo worn on, or under, the chin in true fin de siècle style. The female of the species looked as if she might have woven her own clothes.
A fair number of these refugees from the left-bank cellars of the northern cities drifted up the coast to Santa Eulalia. Our prize specimen, of whom we were very proud, was an English actor who had embraced astrict yoga discipline, and who regularly reached phases of reintegration in our open-air café, El Kiosko. On one such occasion he sank to his knees, eyes lifted heavenwards, in the path of a bus just about to depart for Ibiza, and remained in this position for about five minutes, while the bus awaited his pleasure with the engine ticking over and a pair of civil guards sat at a nearby table eyeing him with a kind of grim connoisseurship. We also had with us for a short time, until he was removed to a madhouse, a genial American who in his less lucid moments believed himself to be Ernest Hemingway, while any evening after five it was unusual not to be accosted in one of the two popular bars by a Russian nobleman anxious to explain his solution of the problem of perpetual motion. Native – or perhaps I should say Spanish – eccentrics were comparatively rare, but they included a massive Catalan who strode through the streets perpetually cracking a stock whip, and a fair-only bullfighter who had found a summer asylum in the house of a local lady of quality and used to accompany her on long walks holding an iron bar in his extended right arm to develop the muscles employed in skewering his bulls.
These were some of the transients who brightened our lives. We also had our small colony of permanent foreign residents who sometimes acted strangely by Spanish standards. The only American resident, for example, a charming lady who loved animals, built a tower just across the water from Ses Estaques to shelter a pony she had found with a broken leg. The tower, in faultless local style, harmonised with the several others that had survived in this majestic panorama from the Middle Ages, but the quixotry of the action was complicated by the fact that it had inadvertently been built on someone else’s land. But the Spanish were as tolerant of all such foibles as if they had been Buddhists of the Hinayanist canon. No extravagances ever produced so much as a raised eyebrow. If they’d had the chance to travel, they’d probably have cut a comic spectacle in the foreign country too. That was how the man in the street saw it. The police sat and pondered whether or not yoga trances in the main thoroughfare constituted a public scandal, shrugged their shoulders and decided to refer the matter to higher authority.
The interest I developed in Ibiza’s eccentrics, both of the present time and of the past, actually provoked me into making a pilgrimage, to the highly inaccessible village of San Vicente,
Every year the Spanish police decide that they must cut down on the floating population of escapists, who regard the island as a slightly more accessible Tahiti, and a purge takes place. Deportation is usually carried out on grounds of moral insufficiency. A fair amount of laxness in the private life is tolerated in Spain so long as an outward serenity of deportment is maintained. A departure from this, whether it be a matter of habitual drunkenness in public places, or brawling, or obvious sexual nonconformity, becomes officially ‘ un escándalo publico ’, and the perpetrator thereof receives a visit from the Commisario de Policia, who if it is a lady who is concerned will kiss her hand, before begging her to depart on the next boat. Annually, Ibiza’s bohemian plant is pruned back to the roots, and with each new season it produces a fresh crop. Most of these Gauguins are both harmless and picturesque. In 1955 the beard came in again and was adopted by all nationalities except the Spanish. It was no longer the furious growth inherited from naval service but a sensitive and downy halo worn on, or under, the chin in true fin de siècle style. The female of the species looked as if she might have woven her own clothes.
A fair number of these refugees from the left-bank cellars of the northern cities drifted up the coast to Santa Eulalia. Our prize specimen, of whom we were very proud, was an English actor who had embraced astrict yoga discipline, and who regularly reached phases of reintegration in our open-air café, El Kiosko. On one such occasion he sank to his knees, eyes lifted heavenwards, in the path of a bus just about to depart for Ibiza, and remained in this position for about five minutes, while the bus awaited his pleasure with the engine ticking over and a pair of civil guards sat at a nearby table eyeing him with a kind of grim connoisseurship. We also had with us for a short time, until he was removed to a madhouse, a genial American who in his less lucid moments believed himself to be Ernest Hemingway, while any evening after five it was unusual not to be accosted in one of the two popular bars by a Russian nobleman anxious to explain his solution of the problem of perpetual motion. Native – or perhaps I should say Spanish – eccentrics were comparatively rare, but they included a massive Catalan who strode through the streets perpetually cracking a stock whip, and a fair-only bullfighter who had found a summer asylum in the house of a local lady of quality and used to accompany her on long walks holding an iron bar in his extended right arm to develop the muscles employed in skewering his bulls.
These were some of the transients who brightened our lives. We also had our small colony of permanent foreign residents who sometimes acted strangely by Spanish standards. The only American resident, for example, a charming lady who loved animals, built a tower just across the water from Ses Estaques to shelter a pony she had found with a broken leg. The tower, in faultless local style, harmonised with the several others that had survived in this majestic panorama from the Middle Ages, but the quixotry of the action was complicated by the fact that it had inadvertently been built on someone else’s land. But the Spanish were as tolerant of all such foibles as if they had been Buddhists of the Hinayanist canon. No extravagances ever produced so much as a raised eyebrow. If they’d had the chance to travel, they’d probably have cut a comic spectacle in the foreign country too. That was how the man in the street saw it. The police sat and pondered whether or not yoga trances in the main thoroughfare constituted a public scandal, shrugged their shoulders and decided to refer the matter to higher authority.
The interest I developed in Ibiza’s eccentrics, both of the present time and of the past, actually provoked me into making a pilgrimage, to the highly inaccessible village of San Vicente,
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