Ibiza Surprise (7 page)
Austin Mandleberg’s gallery was in the Dalt Vila, the walled bit of the town on the hill. I’d seen the main gateway, flanked with broken statues at the edge of the fruit market, but I hadn’t been into it yet.
Physically, there’s no break between the old bit of Ibiza and the new, except for this whopping great wall built around the base of the hill. Actually, it’s about a thousand years’ difference. Janey edged the Maserati through the raging turmoil of the Mercado and up this long, narrow ramp to the portals, and the moment we crawled in under it, we were in quiet and shadow. An old woman in black, and two girls with long hair and brown boots flattened against the grey, peach-mortared stone of the buttresses, and then we were turning sharp right into a tall, shadowy room, half-arcaded, and roofless to the blue sky, at the other end of which was the only exit: another arched portal giving on to the sunlit cobbled plaza of the old Moorish town of Ibiza, under the lee of the tall white houses lodged in a cliff of dazzling masonry on our left.
I hardly had time to take it in: the round glassy cobbles, the kids playing, the pump, the washing hanging high in the sun, a grocer’s, a little, dark wine shop, a cafe with tables out in the sun, a lot of songbirds in cages. Then Janey swung left in a hairpin bend that rolled me on to her shoulder, and we were going up a perpendicular alley about six inches wide, with the wall of the roofless entry room on our left, and on our right, small shops ̶ I caught a glimpse of antiques ̶ broken by stretches of wall. Suddenly the passage widened, and the cobbles gave way to tarmac, and we were in a small square between more little antique shops and bars, with stepped lanes and paths leading up on the right, and a stony slope on the left which seemed to go up to the ramparts. From the square led a broad, garden-lined avenue, still rising steeply, labelled Avenida General Franco Beyond the strip of park on our right, you could see a low-level dirt road, lined with crowded four-storey houses and bars, with small, low, broken doors and children crying, and flights of steep steps overhung with low trees and bougainvillea and cacti. Strings for washing draped every wall, with plastic clothes-pegs in bunches, like lovebirds. The two roads joined with steps at another hairpin bend, and I lurched to the right as Janey fluted the Maserati’s horn and spun the wheel coolly, her dark glasses flashing. She had been here before. She had been to Austin Mandleberg’s gallery before, often, but hadn’t bothered to mention it until a minute ago.
It wasn’t much further. The tarmac road went on, with a pavement, past a patch of garden and a green-shuttered church and up to a flat place facing some broad, grassy steps. There, Janey changed gear and swung right. I had a glimpse behind us of a wide, modern square with a lot of trees and a long white building with arches, and even of a sudden flash of blue sea at the end; then the Maserati swung its back to the view and went on climbing, this time past beautiful two- and three-storey houses linked together, painted brown or dazzling white. As the convertible crawled slowly onward, I looked from side to side at green double-leafed doors and wrought balconies, spilling over with red potted geraniums and creepers. Some of the windows had elaborate grilles: behind one, somewhere, someone was playing the piano. We passed, on our left, a flight of broad white-walled steps, and then a long stretch of white wall over which the garden above spilled its treasures; cactus creepers, a trail of white roses, a mat of pink and scarlet geraniums. Above the steps, you could see palm trees, purple blossoms, and a lemon tree, its globes like gold disks in the sun.
‘It’s plastic,’ said Janey sardonically, and drew in just past the garden and halted.
The antique and art businesses, it was clear, were doing all right. Austin Mandleberg’s antique shop and gallery was three storeys high, with an open, arched door with a fanlight which gave on to a deep pillared hall, paved with black-and-white marble and dotted with eight-foot jugs, young palm trees in them. Against the wall on the left were two antique chairs flanking a large panelled door and a Spanish lantern that would have floodlit a ship. On the right wall was merely a small painted door, closed. Straight ahead, a palatial set of white marble steps rose up and swirled to the right, showing a lot of elaborate wrought-iron balustrade. A neat notice at the foot of the steps said, simply,
Gallery
7, and another, to one side of the panelled door, said Austin M. Mandleberg. I pulled off my headscarf and got out.
I’d changed to pink slacks and a long-sleeved, chain-store blouse, with a heavy link belt I take everywhere. Janey was in thin, ice-pink suede, sleeveless and fringed at the ends. She had one pale, square ring and a pair of thin, twisty gold earrings. It wasn’t that she was making a special effort for Austin. Janey makes a special effort all the time.
She walked straight in and opened the door on the left, while I hung about after, catching it as it crashed back behind her. She didn’t warn me that there were three sunken steps just inside. I nearly landed in Austin’s antique shop on my pink Courtelle pelvis.
The little man with dark crinkly hair who came forward to greet us turned out to be Senor Gregorio. The resident manager wore a tight-fitting suit and white collar. He had a big nose and bushy eyebrows and bags under his eyes you could have kept shoes in. He had hardly finished cooing over Janey when Austin ran down the steps, came across, and kissed both our hands. Continental stuff. Then he took us around.
Actually, I can’t tell you a thing about that room, because I was so sorry for Austin. I mean, he’d be busy talking about an alabaster coffer with the apostles carved inside the lid, or some Punic pottery, or a silk shawl, or a bunch of swords, or a painted Saint Peter, or some old maps and keys and pieces of spidery embroidery, and there was Janey ̶ making challenging statements which had nothing whatever to do with what he was saying and making him laugh when he knew he was supposed to be talking to me. I got in a few shots as well, but Janey nicked the ball whenever I paused to draw breath, and it was such a pain in the neck watching poor Austin’s native American courtesy struggling with his commercial desire not to offend the daughter of a confirmed ikon buyer, that I dropped out of the game and lingered around, watching him topping his drives.
Anyway, Janey was the expert on antiques. Going about with Daddy, of course, I’ve picked up a bit, and when I’m around cooking in a decent-sized house, I know what to admire. But, of course, Janey had been finished and trailed all through the Uffizi. The first man she ever went to bed with was a waiter in the Piazza VittorioEmanuele: she said she didn’t want to practice on her friends.
At any rate, we took ages to get to the silver, which was the only bit that seemed faintly interesting, and when we did, Janey and I both did our stuff well enough, anyway, to be presented with two dangling chain earrings apiece. Austin was still standing there, flushed with the success of his great thought, when Gregorio appeared, beaming, and took Austin off to the telephone.
He was away for a while. Janey sniffed around and after a bit, started opening cupboards and trying things on. I felt in a mood for adventure and walked up the steps and back into the hall again. I tossed up, mentally, between the marble stairs and the little green door in the opposite wall, and in the end, picked the door.
I crossed the hall, which was empty, and turned the door handle. It opened. Inside was a dark flight of steps running downward, with a half-landing and a twist at the bottom. I went down, out of curiosity, but it only gave on to a long, dirty corridor leading to rooms where Gregorio or someone probably lived. The door at the foot of the stairs was half-open, but that was a dead loss as well: an empty workroom, full of benches and litter, with one or two bits of jewellery being mended or cleaned or something. An old man, who had been hidden inside a cupboard, moved out, and I scuttled before he could see me. A pity. I felt a view of Austin Mandleberg’s bedroom, for instance, would have put me definitely one up in the race. I bet Janey hadn’t seen it yet, anyway.
By the time I got back, Austin and Janey were drinking big sherries, and I made out I’d been to the loo. I had a big sherry as well and asked craftily if Austin lived in the basement, but he said: ‘No, only Gregorio,’ but if I liked to go down I should meet the company craftsman. Jorge. Dead loss.
Then Janey said: ‘Christ, look at the time. Austin darling, if you’re going to show us your balloons, you’ll have to do it on wheels.’ And we got back into the hall and climbed the white marble stairs to the gallery.
The shop on the ground floor had been dark. The shiny landing at the top of the stairs had a door on each side, and when Austin flung open the one on the right, the flood of ripe yellow light was quite blinding. In the first place the room was big, with long windows looking on to the street. And at the far end, standing open, were shuttered doors leading out to the garden, the gorgeous garden we’d spotted below, full of little pineapple-shaped palms, and pink and white roses, and a magnolia tree. And, oh Maurice Woodruff, arum lilies.
This time we got in a rut, Janey and I. We both rushed towards the French windows, emitting girlish expressions of joy, and this damned thing first whacked me hard on the head, and then bounced back to do the same thing for Janey. Janey sat down, and I ducked, and we both glared at Austin, who swooped on us, cawing. I thought he was going to cry. The thing that hit us was still swinging. I got to my feet and examined it.
The label said Cumulus Cloud with Tartan Carrying Case, and the label was a hundred per cent on the ball. It hung from a string on the ceiling, an irregular, inflated pillow of tartan with handles, maybe eight feet, in all, round its zip. At a distance, I suppose its outline could be regarded as cloudlike, but the tartan was a definite caprice. It stopped swinging, and Janey and I gazed at it without comment.
‘People,’ said Austin, ‘say the artist today has no sense of humour. On the contrary, while most of his work is sober and sometimes even tragic, he has his moments of gaiety. One may smile, while enjoying the freshness and spontaneity of the idea. I do hope it didn’t give you a bruise?’
‘No,’ I said. Janey was speechless. Austin looked at her compellingly. ‘There are more.’
There were, hung along the whole gallery. They weren’t all clouds. One had cotton Easter chicks in all sizes inside it, and one a pailful of blue water and a lot of toy plastic ships. There was another thirty feet long.
‘I like them,’ said Janey. Austin floated before us in a sort of high-voltage, intellectual euphoria.
‘I knew you would,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they just darling? Now come and see these.’
The fish for the Russians had to bake for thirty-five minutes. I’d rolled and stuffed it with shrimps, with just a flavour of onion and mushroom, and a little minced celery. There was an American salad to go with it, and a sort of orange cream with Curaçao to follow. They were also getting stuffed artichokes and a croquet-monsieur as starters. No-one was going to go away from the Casa Venets starving. It was the first meal I’d done for the Lloyds, and I wanted it to be just right. It had been after twelve when we got to the gallery. But in spite of that, I stared at Austin’s big, regular well-shaven face, and his shirt with the button-down collar and a very faint shiny stripe, and the grey nugget cuff-links, and I got the link between Austin, the wolf in the Cadillac, and the travelling exhibition of Art in the Round.
It wasn’t the tapestries of goats’ hair and feathers. It wasn’t the towering lanes of green plastic bosses, the labyrinths of quilted-cloth hangings based, said the card, on recurring genitalian contours, or the rows of nailed wooden disks on which lines of verse, or at any rate original expressions, sober, tragic, or gay, had been stencilled. I walked between ‘Masculine Presence,’ made of welded car grilles and bumpers, and ‘Little Eyes,’ a board studded with pairs of dolls’ eyeballs, and down an avenue of stamped crates and plumbing fixtures, before I found it. ‘. . . perfectly legitimate,’ Austin was saying, quoting Apollinaire, ‘to use numbers and printed letters as pictorial elements soaked with humanity. ‘ I passed by Arteriosclerosis, forks and spoons in a glass-covered box. I turned through an avenue of life-sized cloth figures, and there was Austin’s psyche, plain as could be, all among the big hoardings that showed us Op Art.
Op Art was just black lines on white: whorls and spirals and fine jagged mesh that did something to the backs of your eyeballs and sent your optical nerves into a frenzy. Or it took the form of fifteen-foot circles of plywood, spiralled in thin bandings of shocking pink, lime green, and orange. Janey stood before one of those with her eyes under the contact lenses so dilated that I thought she was going to faint, and Austin asked her if she was all right.
‘Frankly,’ said Janey, ‘I think it’s procuring.’
‘Now, this interests me,’ Austin said. ‘I consider that this art shows a person his innermost being. Great art is a catharsis.’
‘All I can say is,’ said Janey, ‘if I had that in my bedroom, I’d need Dutch caps for my eyeballs. She-she, we’re going to be late.’
He saw us into the Maserati, holding Janey’s hand, and then mine.
‘You’re coming to dinner,’ said Janey. ‘I’ll ring you. Who was the boy who did all the quilting?’
Austin told her. He was, as I remember, a male nurse in a Sun Valley health farm.
It had been a tough match. My opinion is, Austin won.
The fish was a howling success. I helped Anne-Marie serve it, and Janey’s father introduced me to all his guests, two silent Spaniards and four pasty, rectangular gentlemen with hearty smiles and uncertain English. One of the latter group was the commercial attaché at the Russian Embassy in Madrid, and the three others were straight from Moscow on a trade fair excursion. The attaché, whose Spanish was fluent, finally lapsed into that language and interpreted for the other three. It was a dead groovy lunch, I can tell you.
Janey sat at the head of the table, speaking Spanish as well and looking quite elegant. I suppose she’s been her father’s hostess half her life: her mother died before I even knew her, and her father seems to have gone on just as if nothing had happened, only assuming Janey would carry on in her place. She’s been away a lot, of course, but on every return home she seems to have taken control. She has a good brain. And of course she’s had Anne-Marie and Helmuth, and any other help that she wanted.