IN SEARCH OF PARCENT, IN SEARCH OF IBIZA

In southeastern Spain, about fifteen minutes by car from the electric-blue Mediterranean, the village of Parcent rests in perpetual siesta. Nothing moves through the narrow streets, not even the cats, each of which is curled up tight on its own windowsill. The air hangs motionless. A man’s voice emerges from one doorway, two children’s laughter from another, and these sounds merge as they echo off the walls, as though the man and the children are in the same room, speaking about and laughing at the same thing. Somewhere a television is on. On a weekday in early September, 1998, I witnessed this siesta, and that afternoon became my own perpetual Parcent.

I made the trip with my parents. I was thirty-three and an only child. They were in their sixties and a pair of orphans. Both of their widowed mothers, as well as my father’s sister, his only sibling, had died within the past two years, just like that, and these losses, this decimation of the family, had left us rootless and adrift. The deaths were toughest on my parents. My mother suggested that the three of us travel to Europe and, guided by my father’s feeling that renewing ties to the past would ease her grief, we began our trip by flying to Spain to visit the legendary Jacqueline de la Torre.

As far back as I could remember, Jackie’s name—not her full name, not even her full first name, but simply Jackie—was different, more important than other names. It was the highlighted word in a sentence. It was lingered over. It was an open sesame, like The Sun Also Rises or the original cast album of Cabaret, its connotations exotic, its implications otherworldly. When my parents spoke about Jackie, they were referring to someone unlike anyone else they knew, someone who was to the inhabitants of our town on suburban Long Island as the Empire State Building was to the one- and two-story houses in that town.

Jackie was a celebrity, a mythic figure from the past, a character out of my mother’s early life—the one she led as a single working woman in New York City in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Jackie was an English expatriate who’d lived in Manhattan (for however long) before moving to the island of Ibiza, far off the coast of southeastern Spain. At that time, Ibiza was wild and unclaimed, a bohemian utopia where artists lived cheaply and freely. Back in New York, Jackie’s American friend and roommate, Valerie Adams, read about this scene and decided she wanted to live on Ibiza and pursue a writing career. Jackie agreed to go with her. Valerie quit her job in book publishing, and Jackie quit her job at the oil company where she had befriended my mother. They sublet their apartment.

Some forty years later, by the time my parents and I arrived in Spain, Valerie was long dead. Whatever she’d written had never been published. The party she’d invited herself to was dead as well, the island having been overrun by tourists in search of a paradise their money not only couldn’t buy but helped destroy.

Jackie had stopped teaching (English to the Spanish, Spanish to the English) and had moved to the mainland. She’d bought a house in Parcent and settled into what she thought would be a quiet and healthy life. But then she fell and broke her hip, and the doctors who repaired it damaged a nerve, perhaps through negligence, perhaps not, and the leg was left all but immobile, permanently stretched longer than the other. She wore a leg brace and a pair of special boots that allowed her to stand. She moved with a walker. She was an older woman now, unable to care for herself or her hundred-and-fifty-year-old house and its grounds.

As a result, Jackie’s sister, Dita (short for Eduardita), her only sibling, came to live with and care for her. Unlike Jackie, who as a young woman had eagerly rejected parents, home, and country, Dita had remained in England, close to the de la Torres. Unlike Jackie, who had rejected a conventional life in favor of an exotic one, who had traveled in artistic and intellectual circles, who had chosen to accompany Valerie to Ibiza, Dita had married, raised a family, and run a business with her husband. Now a widow, a grandmother, and a former proprietor, she was free to change the texture of her entire life, to leave her suburban town in green and rainy England for a tiny village in brown and arid Spain, to direct her considerable managerial energy toward the well-being of her once fiercely independent and now utterly dependent sister. Dita never came to share Jackie’s passion for the landscape, language, food, and people of Spain; never grew accustomed to the lack of order with which business, domestic as well as public, was conducted or was not conducted or was interrupted and never resumed in this romantic country. Here, for example, they might start construction on a highway, lose interest in the project, and simply stop working, so that the road would come to an abrupt end in the middle of nowhere, and no one in authority would do anything, and this situation would go on—or not go on—indefinitely.

By the time my parents and I made our pilgrimage to Parcent, Jackie and Dita were nearly on the move. Now a great-grandmother, Dita wanted to be near her family. She wanted to call England home again and not end her days in Spain. When she broached this subject with her sister, what could Jackie say, given both her inability to care for herself and her immense gratitude toward Dita? Of course they’d go.

When my mother wrote to Jackie and broached the idea of our two-day visit, Jackie’s response initially convinced her that we were making a terrible mistake in traveling to Europe, especially in revisiting the past. Jackie wrote that she and Dita would be happy to put us up but might not be the best of hosts. There might be chaos, their belongings in boxes, because shortly after our visit they’d be returning to England. And Jackie herself was, as she put it, a cripple. Jackie’s infirmity and the upcoming move were news to my mother. She feared that we’d prove a burden and that the trip would plunge herself further into despair.

My mother had been to Europe three times before. The first time she’d gone as a single woman in the late ’50s, on a kind of whirlwind tour; the second time she’d visited Portugal and Spain on her own; and the third time she’d traveled with her husband, my father. On the first and last trips she’d stayed briefly in Madrid, and so our two days there were her third (and least inspiring) visit. Her spirits picked up as we traveled south by train, through the fierce Spanish landscape, past expanses and rock formations straight out of the American Southwest, past castles and windmills straight out of Don Quixote. Maybe midway through the country she thrilled to the sight of a medieval castle, a spiky structure high atop its own butte, whose name was her maiden name and, not coincidentally, my middle name.

On the train they’d shown the classic American movie Roman Holiday, dubbed into Spanish but still recognizably charming. I’d made friends with a talkative woman who’d been visiting her sister in Madrid but was now returning to her retirement home in the seaside town of Benidorm, which she described (unrealistically, it turned out) in idyllic terms. The train delivered us to the seaside town of Alicante, where we caught a cab to the airport. We rented a car, and from there—my father driving manual for the first time in thirty years, as I attempted to navigate—we cruised along the winding coast. The views of the hills and the sea were awe-inspiring. We thought our next stop would be Parcent.

The hand-drawn map Jackie and Dita had sent us proved adequate in presenting the big picture but less comprehensive when it came to the details. A gas station that was supposed to confirm our turn off the highway no longer existed, though we wouldn’t learn about its disappearance until we’d pretty much come to that conclusion on our own. We took a right turn, then looked for but failed to find our landmark. Instead, we found ourselves on a twisty country road that could have been taking us in the right direction or could have been taking us off the map, beyond even the possibility of a gas station.

We’d risen early, bid a quick adios to Madrid, caught a cab to the train station, and then pleasantly glided away the day. Now the afternoon, or at least the prospect of afternoon and with it the inevitability of sunset, was hovering over us. After some hesitation we returned to the highway. Still in search of the gas station that would mark our turnoff, we continued on, eyeing the road, the landscape, the horizon, and of course the map, which revealed that Calpe, the town just up ahead, was not in the direction of Parcent. At that point we pulled in to a gas station—not a phantom but also not the one we were seeking—and I used what remained of my high-school Spanish to talk with the attendant.

Minutes later, we were back on that twisty country road, which took us down into a level valley, past farms green with trees bearing almonds and olives and lemons, through villages, over bridges, and finally to within sight of the chicken house. La garanja de pollos existed! And according to the map, that structure and the refuse bin across from it marked the road to Parcent.

The road to, or rather into, Parcent was a steep incline. Through the village, past the sort of classic Spanish buildings, made of white stucco or whatever they are, that you think exist only in the movies, in old Hollywood’s idea of what such buildings in such a village would look like, the road narrowed so that only a single compact car could fit. But no other vehicles were competing for Main Street; not a single thing appeared to be moving in all of Parcent. The map indicated that at the summit of this hill we’d find a compound, a few buildings surrounding a small parking lot, and in one of those buildings we’d find Jackie and Dita. But the small square we drove into, with what appeared to be a nonworking black-wrought-iron fountain at the center, bore no relation to the little drawing. We knew the house number, but it didn’t match any building in the square. My father parked near the tiny village church, and the three of us got out. We were standing in Parcent, and the sun was still shining—shining brighter and higher, in fact, than it had seemed from inside the car.

Because we’d arrived toward the end of siesta, the village was shut up tight, but three people were talking in the square. A squat middle-aged workman, perhaps a carpenter, was standing by his truck, and above him, on their balcony, stood a middle-aged couple who looked as though they’d just thrown on their clothes. The three-way conversation continued despite our arrival, until I approached the workman, map in hand.

“Buenas días,” I said. “Por favor, Señor.”  I pointed at the drawing of the compound, said the house number in Spanish, and asked, “Donde está?”

He looked at the picture and looked away. “Yo no sé,” he answered, embarrassed. I don’t know. “Lo siento.”  I’m sorry.

“Señora de la Torre?” I asked. “Señora Jackie de la Torre?”

He shook his head. In this tiny country village, this dusty corner of a place, where you’d imagine everyone would know everyone and an infirm older Englishwoman who’d moved here from Ibiza and now lived with her sister would be a major figure, this man had never heard of Jackie.

The woman on the balcony tightened her robe and asked the workman a question. He answered, and then she and her husband spoke to each other.

“Señora Jackie de la Torre?”  I shouted.

“Inglés?” someone asked.

“Sí, sí, Inglés,” I said.

“Pita?” someone asked.

“Pita? No,” I said and turned to my mother. “Jackie’s sister’s name isn’t Pita, is it?”

“Dita,” she said.

Above, the woman spoke to her husband, who indicated that he’d be right down. The workman sighed with relief and tended to his truck, accepting my thanks with a quick nod toward the balcony.

The man from above, grizzled, wearing a dark blue suit and light blue slippers, seemed only slightly less embarrassed as he looked over our map. He wanted to take us to Pita, and Pita was close enough to Dita for there to have been some connection, for this to be yet another step in the right direction. The notion of a house number—even though each house, each building, was numbered—seemed, well, foreign to him. We proceeded on foot, and then the man turned around, wide-eyed. He pointed at our rental car and said something in Spanish.

“Does he want us to drive?” I asked my parents.

“He wants us to lock the doors,” my mother explained. We’d walked away with the car doors wide open, our luggage and perhaps even the keys inside.

Our guide and I tried to make conversation as he brought us back down Main Street. About halfway down the hill we came to a high black-wrought-iron gate, through which we could see a flora-filled courtyard and the white stucco house beyond it. None of us tried the gate, and our guide hung back as I walked up to a narrow black-metal mailbox attached to a nearby wall. The number on the box was nearly the one we were looking for, but the name was mystifying: the last name meant nothing to us, and the first name wasn’t Jacqueline or Jackie or Dita or even Pita but Peta. As we stood in the street pondering this oddity, a small commotion approached from behind the wrought iron, and it turned out to be an older Englishwoman, and she turned out to be Dita. The house facing us was the one she shared with Jackie, while the one next to them belonged to Peta, a painter and an elusive figure, who we never glimpsed during our stay, just as we never managed to ask how, with all the houses in this village, all the villages throughout Spain, two English women with short rhyming names ended up living next to each other.

An aristocratic great-grandmother wearing a pastel sundress, Dita welcomed us and opened the gate, which hadn’t been locked. She and Jackie had just begun to worry because of our lateness, when they’d heard voices outside. Their own little parking lot was behind the house, just around the corner, so rather than riding straight up Main Street we should have veered into the driveway to the right.

As my mother entered the courtyard and made her way to the house, my father and I started back to pick up the car. Our guide and I shook hands. “Muchas gracias, Señor,” I said.

“De nada,” he answered.

“Y pardon,” I added. “Porque yo hablo Español un poco solamente.” Because I speak only a little Spanish.

“That’s all right,” he answered, in Spanish, with a laugh. “I am French!”

During those two days, we joined Jackie and Dita’s household. We mainly did a lot of listening, to stories about their life together, about Dita’s family, and about the past. We experienced life in Parcent as they were living it in those last days, as though a small band of lost Americans had wandered into a green and rainy and impermanent oasis of Englishness within brown and arid and unmoving Spain.

Satellite television was their lifeline, and via CNN we learned the latest about the royal family and about Bill Clinton’s involvement with Monica Lewinsky (“CLINTON: LO SIENTO MUCHO,” read a newspaper headline I’d seen on the train), and meanwhile, a hundred feet from us, beyond this house, its grounds, and its fence, a different world existed on its own time.

Life here wasn’t always quite this way. Jackie and Dita recounted bitterly, for instance, the days during which Parcent turned itself into a tiny Pamplona and ran small bulls down Main Street. This ritual would have seemed charming, except that the bulls didn’t belong to Parcent. They were trucked in from somewhere, perhaps after having been run there, and afterwards they’d be trucked off and run somewhere else. The villagers tied firecrackers to the bulls’ tails and lit them as they ran, and they poked the terrified animals with sticks to make them go faster. It was an atrocity, a monument to stupid cruelty, and we could have come and gone and never known a thing about it.

Reading the signs can be hard enough, but what if there are no signs? If Jackie and Dita hadn’t told us, would we have known that during festivals the villagers threw lit firecrackers against the walls to make the explosions louder, that afterwards they whitewashed away the marks? Would we have known that two men died digging the well, now a huge planter, in Jackie and Dita’s courtyard, and that for this reason the villagers, superstitious, refused to pass through their gate? Or if my parents hadn’t filled me in so fully about the past, and I’d met Jackie and Dita in their guises as cohorts, as cohosts of what could have been a BBC series, would I have guessed at their other personas, their accomplishments, the paths they’d taken to this place? Would I have had any sense that Valerie Adams, the reason all five of us were here, ever existed?

“My bête noire,” Dita had called her.

We were back at the house after taking a car journey deeper into the country, to a village perched high atop its own mountain, where we’d eaten a splendid lunch, from gazpacho to helado the most delicious food my parents and I found in Spain. Upon our return I took my walk through the empty streets, and later that afternoon, our final one there, I sat next to Jackie in the den while my parents and Dita sat and talked on the patio just outside. The television was off, and I was making my way through Jackie’s photo albums, each of which was a short silent film about its decade, each focused more on the people in her life than on Jackie herself.

A woman whose last name was Buñuel appeared in shots from the ’60s, and I asked if she was related to the filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

“She was his sister,” Jackie said. “You know Buñuel?”

I did. Had Jackie ever met him?

“No. He was living in Mexico at the time.”

I also recognized the name of Hans Namuth, who appeared along with his wife, Carmen, and their children. I’d spoken with Namuth over ten years earlier, when I was working in book publishing and needed to secure permission to reprint one of his classic photos of Jackson Pollock painting. Perhaps through her friendship with the Namuths, Jackie had once attended a luncheon on Long Island at which Pollock, drunk, had overturned the table and smashed the dishes. “He was a bastard,” she said.

Alongside pictures of these people and of so many people unknown to me, there were shots of my mother, not in New York but on Ibiza, which she’d visited on her own and on her second whirlwind—though Jackie, to her great embarrassment, had no memory of my father’s having been there or even of having met him before. (My parents actually mailed her an old photo as proof, and she apologized repeatedly for her failure to remember.)

Valerie figured prominently in the albums from the ’60s and the ’70s, of course. One early photo of her grabbed my attention, and I took it outside to show my parents, who were delighted, and Dita, who refused to look at it. In the picture, Valerie stood in her New York apartment. On the wall behind her was a painting that had hung in my parents’ dining room for over thirty years, facing me whenever we ate there. It was a striking black-and-white portrait of Valerie that her father had done, but it didn’t look a bit like her. In one corner he’d written in pencil, “Don’t paint any more on this canvas.” When she’d moved to Spain, Valerie had placed her paintings in storage, and some time later, my mother stored them in her own home. My father loved Valerie’s portrait, and when he mentioned this to her after they were introduced on Ibiza, she gave it to him. First-time visitors at our house would often admire and ask about the portrait, which came to serve as a backdrop to all the stories I’d heard about her, Jackie, Ibiza, and such peripheral figures as Ging the Artist and Deaf Henry the Yachtsman. Happening upon it in this utterly different time and place was like having part of my childhood home flash back at me from a movie screen. Valerie suddenly seemed both real and larger than life, and her portrait became a linchpin holding all of us together.

After our trip, my parents and I returned to the U.S. Jackie and Dita returned to England, where they lived in a small, comfortable suburban home, in a community that regulated the exterior color schemes of people’s houses. In 2006, one after the other, my parents died, just like that.

After my mother’s death, I discovered a box of handwritten and typewritten letters that Jackie, and occasionally Valerie, had written to her in 1960–61, between Mom’s first visit to Ibiza and her return with my father. The letters are mainly about details of daily life and about business matters: packages sent from Ibiza to the New York City borough of Queens, where my mother lived with her parents; packages sent from Queens to Ibiza; favors my mother did for Jackie and Valerie; accounts of how much each item and bit of business cost, until finally Jackie admits to losing track of the accounting. The letters also offer glimpses into life on Ibiza, Valerie’s stillborn writing career, and the lives of these three single, cosmopolitan women on the fringes of artistic and intellectual circles.

Jackie mentions Carmen Namuth frequently. The English writer and scholar Robert Graves makes an appearance in September 1960, when Valerie writes: “I at least meant to accept the invitation from Robert Graves to visit his olive orchard and family there in Deyá (2 hours away by bus?), but I felt shy and self-conscious at the idea of going there alone, etc.” Nico—the model, actress, singer, and archetypal bohemian—makes an appearance in June 1961, when Jackie writes: “We saw [Fellini’s] ‘La Dolce Vita’ last year in Milan. . . . One of the girls in it (tall slim blonde with long straight hair) lives here part of the time—her mother, for a long while—they are German and I only know them by sight—girl often models in French magazines—last time I overheard a conversation between her and someone else (some months ago) she was running down the U.S. and saying she was probably off to Cuba!” (Nico died on Ibiza in 1988.) In that same letter, Jackie notes that more and more tourists are arriving, restaurants are opening, and “Ibiza is booming (worst luck!).”

The previous summer, Valerie’s portrait first becomes a topic. Before leaving New York, Valerie had deposited two of her father’s works with a restorer and framer. My mother offered to pick up the paintings and store them in her parents’ house. “These paintings are about the most important (for me) things I own,” Valerie explains in August 1960—who knew they were that important? Two months later: “About the paintings: I worry you may not like them yet you say you’ll put them up in your dining room—though you have not seem them. The larger one is an oil sketch of me, done when I was about 19. My father did it quickly as a basis for the future painting. But he liked it enough to leave it as a sketch, and paint another one later.” The other work in storage—which hung in my childhood home for most of my life, until my parents returned it to Valerie’s relatives—was an odd, dark landscape. I remember it as a black locomotive atop an elevated tressel in a canyon, painted in thick strokes on a palette.

Early in these letters, Jackie and Valerie refer amusedly to a sign my mother made while in Ibiza, which accused Valerie of being “a slouch” for not writing. In September 1961, Jackie notes: “Valerie is now trying to paint and enjoying it very much—She got stuck in her writing—”

Also early on in these letters, my mother appears to be interested in someone named José. Jackie is pleased when my mother hears from him. Then it’s “too bad about José’s wife. Always the way.”

My father first appears on November 3, 1960, when Jackie writes: “Who is Charles with his psychology lecture? How was it?” Later that month: “Dear Marilyn: Seem to have three of [your letters] in front of me. WHO IS THE CHARLES YOU WENT TO DINNER WITH? I asked before but you did not tell . . .” October 18, 1961: “What exciting news—and what a surprise. I still don’t know who exactly Charles W. W. is?! Maybe you did write to us but I’ve now forgotten . . . And where are you to live?—I mean—where is the apt.? Anyway you sound very happy—and that is the main thing—We shall expect to see you both on a delayed honeymoon in Ibiza—but when? Your present schedule sounds fearfully busy to us tranquil islanders!”

The letters stop suddenly, for no discernible reason. My mother kept no other correspondence from anyone, just that small cache from Jackie and, occasionally, Valerie. Exactly what did they represent to her?

For four or five years after my parents died, Jackie and I continued exchanging Christmas cards. I once offered to send her the cache of letters—hoping to connect further with her, to spark her interest in that period and perhaps prompt more revelations—but she turned me down. I doubt she could stand contemplating the past. Her notes grew briefer each year, but her constant refrain was “Getting older and more feeble! Can’t hold out much longer!” Finally, her cards stopped coming. Valerie’s portrait hangs in the entryway to my apartment, and first-time visitors often admire and ask about it.