Bumbling Through the Balearics

By Will Self

In Ibiza, the night proceeds according to plan: we set off in convoy, several cars full of us — true, we’re going to a party in a swanky villa on the other side of the island, but while half our company are teenaged, the rest of us are past the age when we can do any raving — except against the dying of the light.

Then: solid darkness, with headlights gouging it out to expose switchback roads and useless signs. The mobile phone calls begin: like the echolocation of decadent bats. Some Ibizan parties can be found by following lizards stenciled on walls, others by pink balloons, but the turning for this one — or so we’re assured through the ether — will be clear to us because of a strategically placed pile of three white phones.

“Phones!” Our radio operator-cum-navigator expostulates to general in-car hilarity. “Three white phones!” She reiterates — and the mirth continues until, having driven the required kilometer back from San Miguel, we find the pile of three white stones. If only we were — stoned, that is. But we’re simply victims of a contact high as big as the island itself, a tenebrous and fizzing cloud of Methylenedioxymethamphetamine beneath which our hired Seat Ibiza struggles to gain purchase on the bumpy track.

The party is what we’ve come to expect — this is our third season on the island. While most of the guests are fairly decorous, there’s also a goodly proportion of mums, dads and teenage kids frantically circulating; they jig and spin on the end of invisible strings of intoxication, as high as kites that are about to crash into the ground. It’s very Ibiza, this transgenerational narcosis, and it gives the entire mise-en-scène — the pool with its artificial shingle beach; the enormous patio crowded with bohos, trustafarians and aristocrats; the trestle tables laden with truckles of uber-tender beef — a certain Pompeiian air. You don’t have to be a Cassandra to suspect that it’s all about to go “crunch,” as the liquidity is sucked out of the revelers and they’re left freeze-dried in their poses for eternity.

Ibiza, once a lazy and forgotten corner of the Balearics where a few guitar-strumming longhairs (and by “long” we’re talking collar-length here) sheltered from the asperities of Francoism, has long since hypertrophied into a nauseating projection of all the worst roads to freedom. In the immediate vicinity of the main town of Eivissa and the airport there are a score of mega-clubs — Amnesia, Aura, Space — whale-like establishments that suck in tens of thousands of Euro-youth. Ticket touts and drug dealers play the part of baleine, stripping the kids of their cash, their psyches and their inhibitions; then, once in the belly of the beast, they frolic in foam, stagger, then punch the air to the chthonic thud. In this mad realm the DJ is king of the krill, while the only writer that matters is named “King.”

As for walking — forget it; clubland itself is a desiccated zone of dirt and concrete, the only picturesque things hereabouts are… postcards. The beaches are so crowded that they resemble barbecues, with the north Europeans playing the part of prime cut. Even inland, where the country opens out a little, there’s still an astonishing density to the habitation, as if a vast suburb had been scattered over the hills. On earlier Ibizan promenades I had become convinced that behind every shuttered window of every terracotta villa there lurked a Milanese brassiere manufacturer committing some unspeakable act of onanism.

Nevertheless, despite being a guest in a beautiful hilltop villa myself (and one with no sign of lounging Milanese lingerie specialists), I still felt the terrible claustrophobia that descends on me whether I’m trapped in squalor — or luxury. So, the following day I decided to go for a walk around the northern cape of the island. This would be a modest five-miler — given the 86-degree heat — from Cala d’en Serra along the cliffs to Punta d’es Gat and the Caló des Pou, then on to the lighthouse at Punta des Moscarter. From there it looked to be a straightforward amble down to the resort of Portinatx. However, nothing’s ever as simple as that.

My wayfinding — and that of my companion, Mark — was erratic. In retrospect, we missed the beginning of the walking trail, and so set off off-piste through the scrub, sharp rocks underfoot, while to our right the ragged rocks fell away to the sparkling Med. Still, at least there weren’t stencils of lizards — but the occasional real ones. I was also thankful that Mark wasn’t some gung-ho type afraid to admit to any frailties; he had, he told me, suffered a terrible injury as a small child, a cut that festered so badly he contracted gangrene. He ended up in hospital for months, and emerged with one leg three inches shorter than the other. And what, I asked, had caused the injury? He had stood on a solar panel — a very technologically advanced wound for the early 1970s.

We consulted the map, we debated; with each advance we would set off confidently along the path, only to have it disappear in the thorny underbrush. Then we’d backtrack and start again. We made about a mile an hour. On the horizon the superstructure of a freighter piled high with containers wavered in the heat, never seeming to progress: all that stuff, cars and car tires, dishwashers and dialysis machines — the whole lot being thrust through Homer’s wine-dark sea. The sheer inertia of global commerce began to make me feel dizzy — there was this, and also the sense that with our ceaseless advances and retractions we were in some way mimicking the vacillations of our own culture, with its Promethean thefts always being found out by the aeronautical engineering of Icarus.

I began to worry: would we become lost here in the Ibizan hinterland? Meeting perhaps with other Brits who’d gone feral? A lost tribe, stark naked save for denim penis-sheaths, who called themselves “the Ex” and enacted weird psycho-sexual rituals. Mark, on the other hand, remained blithe, and chatted away about how his dad made a fortune buying up ex-Ministry of Defense Cold War bunkers in the Channel Islands, then growing mushrooms in their safe darkness. He also spoke of his own business, which manages car parks on behalf of their owners — his largest client is a ubiquitous fast food restaurant. It occurred to me that this was becoming the purest kind of psychogeography: a contemplation of these other confined spaces, while we negotiated the not-so-great outdoors.

Still, we did at least have the lighthouse to aim for, and so Mark limped and I stumped on, gained it, and then, yes, there was the pleasant amble on into Portinatx along the bluff. We found a quiet — by Ibizan standards — resort, with only a few score tourists wallowing like manatees in the warm sea, and stopped for a restorative espresso at a beachfront café. Then, the dusty bend for our temporary home; as we came along the road that led back towards where our car was parked we saw the sign pointing the way we should’ve taken; the corner of the hikers pictogram was broken off and lay beside it on the ground. Sheer chance, or maybe a willful act by the feral Ex?

Late that day I went to check on the teens who were bunking in a villa about mile from our own. Their villa, as cubicular and white as a sugar cube, was called “China White.” That’s Ibiza for you — a not-so-funhouse mirror of Surrey, where premature retirees live in houses named after varieties of heroin. It was a beautiful evening, the sun lazily declining to the sea. From a villa down the hill floated the hypnotic strains of a song that was ceaselessly played during my own summer of ersatz love: “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star : “I look to you and I see nothing / I look to you to see the truth,” the ethereal girl singer warbled her timeless existentialism. In Ibiza generations, distances, thoughts and fancies — they all fade into you. Or do I mean me?