LITMIR.BIZ

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affiliations have for many years intrigued him. He has written a famous essay about Unamuno’s brief Canarian exile to Fuerteventura, under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. That distinguished Spanish academic had unwisely made a public protest about the preferential treatment of one of the dictator’s courtesans, La Caoba, ‘the Mahogany Girl’, and Unamuno had ended up on a boat from the mainland to what was then the dullest and scruffiest and least visited of the islands. Ivor and Bennett have been several times to pay homage to him in his humble dusty museum-house in Puerto del Rosario, a port formerly known as Goat Harbour, and they have seen his carved wooden desk and his carved wooden bed with its white lace coverlet.

      Unamuno’s white, massive and strangely Fascist statue rises up on the lower slopes of the great and stately Montaña Quemada. That too they have seen, from the vertiginous road, many times.

      Unamuno’s sojourn had been brief, to merit such memorials. A matter of months. But Fuerteventura had lacked celebrities, and it makes the most of him.

      Ivor has never been able to follow the ups and downs of Unamuno’s posthumous reputation. He remains an ambiguous figure. He knows that Unamuno symbolised for Bennett something about the caprice of fortune, the humiliation of academics, the dangers of political vacillation, the neglect of posterity, but Ivor has never known precisely what, or why.

      Ivor knows less than Bennett about the Canaries, but he is learning, perforce. And he knows some aspects of the Canaries that Bennett does not know.

      He has learned a lot over the years by typing up Bennett’s mid-life works, published in the 1970s and 1980s. When Bennett was writing them, manual and then electric typewriters were still the favoured means of home-based reproduction. But Ivor has learned a lot more about technology since then. He is fairly good, very good for his age, on the email and the internet. They are his lifeline. Bennett has tried to learn email, but he is not fond of it and tends to leave it (and everything) to Ivor.

      Bennett Carpenter and Ivor Walters have made this island their home. They have invested in it. It would be hard for them to go ‘home’ to England now. The Spanish property market has crashed, and the island properties, even pleasant and remarkable properties like Bennett’s, are currently unsaleable. The English property market, in contrast, has soared, and even unpleasant properties in undesirable neighbourhoods are un-affordable. They’ll have to stick it out here. They’ve made their bed and they’ll have to lie on it, though, thank God, they’ve got room for plenty of beds and don’t have to lie together on the same kingsize mattress any more.

      They have burned their boats.

      Bennett’s house is, in fact, almost unnaturally beautiful, and most of the time Ivor loves it. It had been a find. He reminds himself of this, when he gets, as he does, restless. When he gets restless, he gets into his little car and drives off, as he has done now, to find a bar or a café or a beach where he can sit alone or exchange banalities with local characters or, decreasingly frequently, to solicit other kinds of contact. The last of these possibilities interests him less and less.

      Ivor sometimes looks back to the happier days when he and Bennett were house-hunting on the island. Bennett’s health was already impaired, but it was extraordinary how he perked up in a hot dry climate, and Ivor had driven him around gaily, as they fantasised about their new life in the sun. They had inspected the most bizarre and improbable dwellings: modern terraced apartments banked up high on hillsides above noisy Thomson Holidays resorts, old nineteenth-century white and green and blue street houses in desolate silent spacious inland towns, fishing cottages on pebbled beaches where the pure turquoise and white breaking waves of the Atlantic washed upon the whitened doorsteps and at stormy high tides surged through into the kitchens. A ruined medieval tower of rubble filled with sheep, a bright yellow Gaudi-esque house built perilously on the shifting sands, a farmstead on a volcanic slope overlooking a vineyard and a sea of lava. They had been entertained by estate agents of various nationalities and of engaging chutzpah (it was boom-time then) and they had met householders and tenants of mysterious ethnic and social origins. They had explored building plots of windswept scrubby grey-green plastic-bag-littered goat pasture, and rocky shores, and malpaís of many descriptions.

      Once, on their travels, lost on a cinder track as they circled through the swirling peaks of the black tormented tufa around the pale-brown wrinkled elephant foot of a volcano, they had seen the strangest of sights: a small, low stone cottage, all alone, planted in the midst of the waves of dark and frozen ash. It was surrounded by a low garden wall, a dry stone wall such as we know well in England, but the garden blazed with red and orange tropical blossom and sprouted with spikes of aloe and cactus and giant euphorbia. A stocky old man, naked, his broad back and shoulders towards them, was trundling a wheelbarrow full of weeds towards a small smoking bonfire. His back was the burned red brown of red clay, he was Adam, he was the first and last man in Paradise. The red sun was setting, tingeing his solid elderly ruddy flesh with its radiance. He was a sight not to be forgotten.

      A fortifying sight, an augury.

      Ivor had looked in vain, year after year, in a desultory fashion, for that cottage and that solitary gardener of the sinking sun, but he had never found them. They had been a mirage, a trick of the light. But the vision of the old man had encouraged him to agree to settle here. And the house, when they found it, was special. It was exceptional, it was beautiful.

      A man could die even here.

      The house was inland and a little upland, but with a view down towards the sea. On the small island, nowhere is far from the sea. It stood on the outskirts of an undistinguished village, near a roundabout marked by one of the playful moving sculptures created by the island’s dead gay magus, the artist César Manrique, and it was built on one storey, spreading over a series of volcanic bubbles and caverns. The irregularity of the black pitted lava and the whitewashed walls enchanted Bennett. The shapes of the house were organic, fanciful, natural, devised by the natural surrealism of the eighteenth-century volcanic eruptions. It was the perfect house for a man who struggled for breath climbing stairs. It had been designed and built to a high standard in the good years, and was complete with pool, sun terrace, palm trees, a well-planted euphorbia garden of many colours, a fish pool, a tennis court. It had a gaiety and a lightness of spirit, and it seduced them both. Water from the desalination plant on the east coast of the island poured ceaselessly, merrily, from fountains and taps and shower heads. The sea was before them, and behind them the volcanoes, and their gardens were full of the music of running water. At night the sky was bright with the stars that had guided Columbus from La Gomera towards the unknown west.

      A man could die even here.

      Bennett had said this line when he first saw the house and he was fond of repeating it. Ivor knew it must be a quote, but had never worked out where it came from. He kept forgetting to try to find out. He didn’t really want to know.

      The house was called La Suerte, Good Fortune, and they kept the name.

      Bennett liked to say that you couldn’t say the house and its grounds were in bad taste, or vulgar. Anywhere else on earth they would have been monstrously so, but here they weren’t even camp. They were part of the fantasy of the landscape. They were ahistoric. They weren’t in any kind of taste at all. They were elemental.

      Bennett and Ivor were happy there, or for some years they were happy. Bennett was finishing what he said would be his last big book, a merging of cultural history and his later and enjoyably acquired scholarship of art history, and he was well enough to fly back once or twice to see his editor and his publishers and to check references and illustrations and copyright and to give diplomatic and convivial lunches to a colleague or two. The airport was hell, but the flight itself was not too taxing, and the island was in the same time zone as London, so there was no problem with jet lag. And there was Ivor, to make the bookings, to see to the bags, to cajole the women at check-in and to chat up the air stewards about extra leg room for Sir Bennett.

      The island, away from the ceaselessly busy airport and the false golden sand of the tourist beaches, had a curious emptiness that was in itself soothing. The silence of noon in the unfrequented colonnaded piazzas of the small inland towns was profound. The green and blue shutters of the houses were perpetually closed, the

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