Tom Foran Clark

Of course Pike took Chauncey Moore to be the portent, omen, sign that he'd been waiting for.

He and Emery checked out of the parador that night and woke up the next morning before dawn. They caught the early morning bus departing Santo Domingo de la Calzada, bound for Logroño. There they found a car rental agency on the Calle de Portales, where they got a great deal on a yellow Opel Astra sedan with front seatbelt force limiters, an anti-lock braking system, an engine deadlock immobiliser, and big flapping front and rear window wipers.

In torrential rains the two careened along a winding mountain route that finally dropped them into Barcelona's suburbs. Pike and Emery entered in the evening on the multi-lane superhighway amid a mad flow of cars that reminded them of when they'd arrived in Milan -- it seemed a hundred years ago! Boulevards opened onto boulevards -- maelstrom after maelstrom. Gaudi’s Cathedral towers, viewed through their car's rainsloshed windshield, looked jumbled and crazy, towering like a sand castle in a bad dream over construction cranes and peeling billboards.

They found the Plaça de Catalunya, then drove into the Ciutat Vella, all narrow streets with jumbled budget accommodations calling to us like sirens, spread on both sides of La Rambla. The Barri Gòtic was on the lower half of the eastern section of the boulevard. West was seedy El Raval. In its southern part was the still seedier Barri Xinès, the Barrio Chino, the red-light district.

"This is it," Pike said, stopping the car suddenly. He turned the motor off. "Let's go," he said.

The rain-soaked Spanish sky was gray and ominous. Lightning flashed, followed by rumbling. The two took a room at the Pension Jose-Luis, around the corner from the Restaurant Los Caracoles, where they had dinner and asked questions. They left the restaurant, walked out into the still pouring rain, went up the street just a little ways, and dove in under the awning of a nightclub, the Fernando. There was some kind of a party going on in there. The place was buzzing with conversation. Over the din, the two heard a familiar voice declaiming. They knew this voice very well.

“One tragic comedy after another, all deserving our laughter and our tears," she was saying. "One suffers bitterly -- lovers, devotees, admirers, scoundrels, destitute of talent, vacant of merit, without gratitude, incapable of sensitivity, melancholy, meditative, unflinching, haughty, arrogant, insolent, a pain in the neck more odious than any snake or viper which lifts its head up from the dusty ground. We come into this world of symbols, emblems, mottoes, epigrams, epistles, sonnets, prolific notes, jottings, scribbles, filled wastebaskets, excessive sweat, frenzy, zeal, ardor, lust, ribaldry, vicissitudes, sighs, anger, scorn, hypocrisy, all for someone’s eyes, cheeks, breasts, for whiteness, blackness, and vermilion.”

They entered the club and sat down. Here was highly animated, deeply opinionated Irene, who’d danced on tabletops in Florence. Like some motorized mannequin, topless and bottomless amid the mindless, she waved her arms and espoused.

"This world is but a dream, an enchantment, a phantasm. The eyes of a dove, a neck like a tower, this tongue, shining hair, praiseworthy nose. But beauty comes and beauty goes -- is born and dies, blooms and decays -- is beautiful for a moment and passes. Do I regret my having come into this world? Would I withdraw my sweetness, the petals of this fruitful flower? No, not the snows of Bogong or Mount Kosciuszko could cool my passion.”

Irene was on stage, under dull spotlights, standing naked before a microphone, delivering her monologue like some otherworldly, displaced, naked standup comic. She was speaking to her Spanish audience in her best alligator-wrestling Australian English. There came no laughter, no applause. Everybody in the place was talking, even as Irene talked into the microphone. Apart from her splendid nudity, she was like some humorless dictator at a political rally, long since ignored by her people. If ever she was going to say something funny, this seemed like the right time.

“Everything has its own stability and constancy, its own frame, size, curve, incline, protuberance, weight, measure -- earth, air, water, fire. Existence is derived from essence. The human being moves toward an escape from the temporal into the timeless.”

She seemed to have arrived fresh from outer space wearing this strange, over-robust human form -- this beautiful full-bodied opposite of Donatello’s ragged Mary Magdalen, famous for looking physically ruined, her face a battlefield of degradation, utterly wasted by abstinence and fasting. Irene looked vacantly, utterly mad, yet contrarily just as plump and ripe and rosy as you could like. She seemed to be in peak good health -- but for the awful redness in her eyes.

"I have known them, sky, sea, rock, cave, the things themselves, without beginning and without end. Being reveals itself. Men and women -- each completes the other. The two great thirsts, John Ruskin said, are to be loved and to be praised. It is fitting to respect and honor appetite, the infinite potency of matter, thanks to which love and praise are not in vain.”

In Florence, her eyes had been such a beautiful blue. Emery recalled their drinking scarlet Campari and going to the lush green Boboli Gardens at the top of the world. He remembered the Habakkuk ristorante, where the wine had flowed so freely, and Irene’s outpourings there -- her illuminations of Giordano Bruno, who’d walked from Rome to Paris over Marburg and Prague and then back to Rome again, him saying things to people all along the way that had led to his final undoing, the Jesuits seeing fit to ignite and make ashes of him.

"Male and female, we emerged as equals over long time. Inherrent in us are the maps for our different, equal natures, our equal gifts for reciprocity. Under the maps are the keys, the codes, allowing each of us to generate our own meanings. The things we perceive out there all correspond to the things in here" -- Irene pointed to her head. "The fundamental particles out there are all linked to the fundamental particles in here" -- Irene pointed to her heart. "Our maps and codes are rooted in our neurology, and our neurology epitomizes the essential nature of the fathomless universe.

"The universe is limitless -- countless stars in in infinite space -- and God is infinitely beyond the reach of our knowing. For saying this, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake,” Irene finally got around to him. “It was the time of the Inquisition. Bruno, insisting all that is, is God, was imprisoned in Spain for nine long years. Then, in Rome, the reality-shrinkers burned him up. Burning was the punishment for cuckolding and heresy. Offenders were burned in a sequence: calves, thighs, hands, torso, forearms, breasts, chin, face -- then death. Occasionally, a rope was attached to the neck, then passed through a ring on the stake, so that the victim was simultaneously strangled and burned. It could not have been a pretty thing to see."

Irene paused, staring straight into Emery's eyes, he thought, penetrating through him with her red-mad gaze. A man in the front row stood and made excited gestures in the air with his hands, trying to get her attention, to encourage her to resume talking. "Talk of a sight for sore eyes," Irene changed the subject, "I see in the audience tonight two familiar high-bouncing rascals, Lorenzo and Ricardo, in Spain perhaps to practice the subtle art of dissimulation. How does it happen you just sit there? I thought that he who seeks an angel must arise and serve.”

This last really got to Emery. He walked out.

He went to a little tapas bar on El Cid Avenue where, on the barstool left of him, sat the famous author of the travel guide to Spain that Emery and Rita had so relied on. "You're Juan Armando Cabrera," Emery said enthusiastically. "You wrote Rambling in Spain!" Cabrera looked exactly like the picture of him on the paperback edition in Emery's pocket -- ashen, gouged, and grim. He was dressed in mourning -- all in black. Stinking of urine and tobacco, his fingertips were amber from his smoking unfiltered cigarettes down to stubs. He was coughing like some nineteenth century tubercular consumptive. He poured sherry for himself and Emery, and told him of his love's beauty -- she who had left him. Emery said he also knew this joy and pain of the eternal feminine -- and human female persons. Cabrera now began to cry. For five or ten minutes, Emery cried with him, right along. When he left, Emery clasped Cabrera's shoulders and wished him good health and a long life. He didn't even think to ask Cabrera for his autograph.

Pike caught up with Emery in the morning at a cafe by the hotel. Around the breakfast table, while the two talked, arose the familiar commotion of a new day: kids, women, men, beasts of burden -- a hum and murmur like the surging of the ocean. Pike had a new plan. He’d been out all night with Irene, who’d agreed to sail away with him. Aboard the cruise ship The Corinthia, the two would leave Spain from Cartagena, sail to Carthage, Tunisia, and Apollonia, Libya, then land at Crete, where once the ancient island of marvels and treasures, Minoa, had flourished. Emery felt a sudden lightness in his heart. It hit him that these two seriously mad people were going south without him and he didn't have to be there. He didn't want to go among mad people anymore.

Abruptly, Pike stood, pulling Emery up from his chair. Pike wrapped his big arms around Emery in a great affectionate bear hug, then stood back from him and asked him if he even knew what dog-gone year it was. In fact, Emery had lost track of it. For all he knew, Emery said, it was the year 2000. Maybe -- probably -- 2001? Grinning hugely, Pike turned and loped away. Emery was going to call after him to say something eloquent and lastingly meaningful -- to wish Pike and Irene good luck -- but the words somehow just got all twisted up inside his head, so he didn't.

Emery hitchhiked to Girona and caught a train going north. The clacking on the rails talked to him -- adios Zarzuela, adios fevered Spain, adios riddled histories, sprawling plains, mighty cliffs, plunging gorges, spanning bridges, secret coves, treasure troves, lustrous beaches, bays, and seas -- adios, adios.

Emery got off the train before it reached Paris and hitchhiked under shimmering skies to the shady Fontainbleau forest village of Grez-sur-Loing. He staggered to The George Sand Bookshop where sallow-faced old Walt Lowen was opening boxes at the front of the store. “Hail, Hyperion,” he said tartly. “Have I got news for you.”