Colourful flourishes of citrus trees lined the busy Palma streets. Car dealerships and fast food outlets plied their trade between crumbling stone villas, meadows of cottage and poppy seed blew in the wind in waves of light and shadow. Tourist buses passed every few minutes; with ruby red ducos and double decks they would have been more at home in London. Whitewashed churches – grounds overrun with cats – stood shoulder to shoulder with five star resorts and pottery stores. Castell De Bellver and the Majorca Cathedral keeping quiet sentry, it felt as if Palma stood on a plain of unparalleled antiquity. Home to more than four hundred thousand, it was half metropolis, half Paradise. And a faint smell of excrement mingled with exhaust fumes and the sea.
The tour was unexciting; few members of the public turned up. For those that did, Friends of the Earth stickers and postcards were handed out in earnest, and they were encouraged to wear a badge for the demonstration as a display of unity. A crowd of around forty converged on the Ajuntament with picket signs and megaphones.

As things stood, recyclable material from all the islands had to be transported to Majorca first before processing, an added step which Phillip had railed against as environmental laziness. And political bias towards the largest island too, he claimed, since it was a “Sisyphean effort” for the people of Formentera to reap – except in the way of grocery imports – any of the benefits associated with that plant. Bryan, who even in his time as a student had never been one for campaigning, was glad enough to go but would have preferred to stay back and keep picking and raking towards the ravine. He hoped more than anything to see new crops sown into his soil before his stint there ended. Still, with a touch of awe he enjoyed listening to his more impassioned counterparts talk on the ferry, which had left porta a little after 9. They didn’t talk about what had to be done, should have been done, but what would be done. Managing to keep every person onboard in the loop, Phillip was probably the most alive human being Bryan had ever met. So alive, however, that he seemed of another order somehow, like a scattering of genius academics, or, in a different sense, his daughters. While he inspired and instilled confidence, he also necessarily betrayed a sad truth about the average man or woman- that an overwhelming majority could never be as he was or do as he did. Perhaps that was a blessing when it came to his girls, but looking now at Phillip, pressed against the bow railing proudly like a master at the helm of his ship, Bryan couldn’t help but think that if the survival of the planet depended on the concerted effort of men like him, it was hopelessly outnumbered. The same train of thought quickly returned to his daughters; Bryan was angry with himself for having used them so uncouthly in that comparison. He missed them, worried for them. He missed Wendy. Calm as glass and blinding, the Balearic Sea that day reminded him of the lake in Peter Camenzind- a relatively tiny, restful body of water dividing islanders of more or less the same creed, Catalan in this case, from each other. Even though the Ibizan shore could easily be made out, there must once have been a time when that glimpse was like a torturous vision of an otherworld, as if an exotic treasure were dangling a finger’s length away from fingers in chains.

Another minor bugbear involved the toilets. In most respects they were okay; spacious, equipped with running water; even their odour was inoffensive, as Phillip had installed exhaust shafts to prevent the build-up of methane. And if the condition of La Solitaria Caseta Verda’s crops were anything to go by, the composting of human waste was worthy of full-hearted praise. What bothered Bryan about the toilets were their doors. From the waist up, the only barrier between him and anyone else was a piece of translucent Perspex. This was, as Phillip said, an attempt to “naturalise an act that religion and plastic society have deemed shameful, ungodly but which is inseparable from who we are. By poking fun, we make it less serious. If it isn’t serious it is no longer a vice.”
Bryan found this position over the top and rather unnecessary. If cats, who had never postulated the immorality of shit, could still appear so private in the act, then surely there was something natural about a human not wanting to be ogled either? And besides, few questions were asked when a person wanted to shower – or think, for that matter – alone: Phillip’s logic appeared to consider those instances grounds for naturalising as well.
One day, returning from the valley for lunch, he noticed in the distance that one of the volunteer builders was standing by a cubicle. He had already moved on when the door opened. Dagmar, the new masseuse, greeted Bryan on her way out. She was pale-faced but in high spirits. They walked to the main building together. The incident was quickly forgotten; the ravine and – and his desire to reach it – dominated Bryan’s thoughts.

As planned, the entire La Solitaria Caseta Verda contingent boarded a small Balearia ferry on Saturday, headed for the Majorca Recycling Plant. A public tour had been organised, followed by a demonstration to promote better recycling practices and the benefits of decentralising the archipelago’s waste management.

On the first official day of his tenure Bryan woke before the communal alarm. The dewy valley looked resplendent under the first rays of the morning sun. Birds trilled, roosters crowed. Oats and honey were served in the dining room to all staff and volunteers, before everybody broke in unison to begin the day’s activities. Having stipulated to Phillip on arrival that he would prefer manual work, Bryan was given a pickaxe. Its handle was encrusted with dry red mud. “Turn over the soil everywhere you see these,” said Phillip, holding a wooden stake painted yellow at the tip. “They indicate the plots emptied by the last harvest; the sooner we prepare them again, the sooner we can start growing.”
Bryan was a way down the first path when he heard another instruction:
“watch out for snakes!” He turned and gave Phillip a thumbs-up.

Finding the closest stake to the main building, Bryan got to work. He figured he would begin at the top and work his way down towards the ravine. The soil gave way like warm butter. Pulse quickening, beads of sweat beginning to fall from his brow, Bryan suddenly felt hyperaware of how far from home he was. How the blissful exhaustion of labour, performed by the body at the behest of knowledge, not just about gardening but about those convictions overarching it all, could make one forget one’s problems. Gruelling periods of study had had a similar effect on him once, but now that effect seemed partial, monistic, concerned only with the mind while the heart and lungs went unnourished. Plotinus’ famous desire to be a mind with no body was nothing but ignorance. Never had he experienced such total catharsis.

At midday a ploughman’s lunch of fresh bread, cheese and salad was eaten outside. After his second helping Bryan fell upon a wonderful truth: his appetite was back, as if an inner voice was telling him he’d done the right thing by coming. For the rest of the afternoon he toiled in a state of near-elation. Dinner consisted of a potato curry, hummus, and stewed pear crumble for dessert. By starlight, sharing a joint with the others as Phillip sang songs and played the guitar, Bryan’s thoughts turned to Wendy, his girls. He felt no anxiety. His body was too tired and sore for anxiety. All that his fatigue admitted was a fond, loving nostalgia.

A week passed in much the same vein, a week of unbelievable soreness and giddy joy. Bryan was still barely halfway to the ravine. On Sunday morning he made a cardboard cutout of a raincloud, painted it and attached it to the end of a stake he had taken out of a finished area. He spent the day at the solar fountain, where groups of children, whose parents were perusing the market stalls or drinking Masala Chai, watched on in amazement as the stream of water stopped, started, stopped again. He thought of it later as a teaching role equal to any of his lecturing appointments at university. In an entire week Bryan’s only negative experience was also one of the most benign. Ingrid, the cook, a beautiful Austrian woman of perhaps sixty years old with thick grey hair worn to her hips and an azure Indian sari, would bring him lemon and aloe juice at regular intervals as he worked. Each time, she cheerily recalled the exploits of a different Australian who had come to La Solitaria Caseta Verda. Though he could understand her reasons for doing so – and they were only too innocent – Bryan would have preferred to downplay his ties to that country, or any country at all. He found his positive reactions to Ingrid’s stories false and jarring. It was sad that even in a place where harmony prevailed, there were still situations where it was incumbent upon him to be, in a manner of speaking, dishonest.

A lot of people donated their time to La Solitaria Caseta Verda that summer. So many in fact that Bryan Gables was not put up in a cave or tree house as he’d hoped, but rather one of the four caravans borrowed from a local resort to cope with extra personnel. They had been parked temporarily in a muddy lot converged upon by the public every Sunday for a swap market, free tours, produce tasting and live music. And even though the shower and toilet were inoperative, it was difficult to feel as green as the others amongst those Laminex fittings and that linoleum floor.

Many of the newcomers held Phillip and his pioneering facility, which had garnered great media attention over the years, from newspaper articles to a feature documentary on the National Geographic channel, in godlike esteem. Others arrived with prearranged roles; two Japanese horticulturalists were overseeing the production of carob syrup at the island’s only factory, a Chilean builder was turning a shallow cave that had recently been discovered in scrubland on the outskirts of the property into another volunteer housing, a beautiful Norwegian woman would be the resident masseuse, an events organiser from Chicago had turned the office into a promotional headquarters for Earthdance, which was to take place in early August. And some, like Bryan, were uninitiated Westerners, hitherto the definition of all that La Solitaria Caseta Verda stood against, hoping to be afforded a glimpse of a better, more natural – and therefore more human – way of existing.

Predictably I left for last
the orange given me by your mother
as I walked out the door;

eyes awash with tears that she
believed – in error – were lunatic
tears of gratitude for an overripe fruit:

eaten at the end of lunch
in segments, knifed free
of its pithy membrane; a wrecked
boned body collapsed in a puddle
of sweet juice – drunk
in eery similitude to the way I drank you.

13/06

La Solitaria Caseta Verda was an ecological commune set some two kilometres inland, which on so diminutive an island was roughly equivalent to 90 Mile Beach from Melbourne. Perched on the rugged slopes of a valley abounding in olive and carob trees, vegetable gardens and irrigation channels, it was a postcard image of the Mediterranean where the sun beat hard and beyond the rocky hills on the horizon was a thin glimpse of the sea. At the bottom of the property, a rainwater flume serving both irrigation pumps and a small but sophisticated hydroelectric generator was housed in a manmade ravine. Drinking water tanks dotted the landscape. Contrary to the usual clayish, infertile soil of the region, La Solitaria Caseta Verda grounds were all of a maternal richness, dusky in colour, so-kept by the flume, the sustained efforts of volunteers – of whom Bryan was soon to be one – and the compost produced every three months by a block of organic toilets, whose insides were decorated ironically by mosaic pictures of dolphins and other creatures of the water.

The main building – including the eating quarters – of the commune smelt of incense and aloe vera; extracted aloe juice was blended with lemon and served to drink at all meals, venerated as a sort of elixir. On its flat white roof were seven large solar panels, which along with the hydrogenerator supplied power to the entire facility. But except for any technological apparatus – including the broadband cables, laptops and printers inside the media and communications office – every single edifice had been constructed to the greenest of specifications. That was something Phillip, the South African founder of   La Solitaria Caseta Verda and a former nautical engineer, whose inquisitive eyes and strong, wiry build suggested a great zeal for life and work, had stressed with tremendous pride to Bryan when he first arrived.
“Look around you,” he said, repeating everything in Catalan for the local arrivals, “and you’ll see the value placed here on finding new uses for old things, on avoiding, as much as we possibly can do, the need to purchase brand new items when a similar or better result can be achieved with so-called rubbish and just a little ingenuity. This is the Friends of the Earth Headquarters for the whole Illes Balears, and it is our duty here to showcase green living as practically as we can. These buildings here, yurt, Gaya centre, toilets, head office and the kitchen to your right, have all been constructed using the very earth we’re standing on as bricks, and old glass bottles from the Ibiza Recycling Plant for fortification. The ceilings are shored up with satellite dishes headed for landfill; the windows are, as I’m sure you can see, car windscreens from the scrapheap. The mosaic art on our paths and in the toilet and shower was done by Ingrid and her son Matthias, using tile factory off-cuts and an adhesive made from carob. Ingrid also cooks for us using all the beautiful vegetarian produce we grow onsite and on a neighbouring farm by agreement with the owner. In the twenty years I’ve been here there have been no major structural problems, knock on wood. And speaking of which, all our tables and chairs I made using wooden palettes that someone had dumped thoughtlessly on Cala Saona.” And as he led Bryan and the others around the facility, Phillip proudly brought a host of other initiatives to their attention: children’s play areas and educational demonstrations; solar-powered fountains; nature shower that was entirely translucent and commanded a breathtaking view of the valley (with an ancillary gas heater to ensure the water was always warm); another two toilets nearing completion; music area – with DJ equipment for occasional psychedelic raves – and a resident cat which, he swore on his good name, had been trained to steer clear of native wildlife.

What impressed Bryan most about La Solitaria Caseta Verda, however, were its various volunteer accommodations. He was swept into a sort of second boyhood at the sight of tree houses, caves, tepees, even an old clay limekiln split in two by a massive oak branch, transformed into simple, beautiful spaces with Spanish throw-rugs, books in English, French, German, Swedish, Catalan, and views like he had never seen from out a bedroom window.

12/06

A world that looked and felt so familiar supervened upon by new circumstances that rendered it illegible, lowered the sky onto his head, made the air heavy and sombre; getting on so poorly in the mess, Bryan finally decided to take a holiday. The thought occurred to him at dinner one night like a bolt from the blue, benumbed as his mind had been by all that had transpired. Afterwards it seemed so blatantly obvious, since he was wallowing inertly in money and time and unease, and soon it became impossible for him to think about anything else.
At the beginning of June Bryan flew to Barcelona via Singapore, where he had listened to a female concert pianist dole out Billy Joel covers in the terminal lounge between connections. While listening he contemplated a likeness between the pianist and himself as human beings who had devoted a lifetime to a passion whose riches weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Grading papers, Billy Joel covers, the underhandedness of academics, audiences forever in flight. But, literary criticism being no art form, it couldn’t possibly stand together with music in that analogy, since in music the very act was the ultimate reward. He left Changi in a philosophical mood. From El Prat he boarded a light aircraft that shook rabidly in the wind. It took him as far as Formentera, a tiny sliver of an island in the famous Balearic archipelago. Except for a conference in Wellington some years back, Bryan had never left Australia.

In many respects those twenty-five years had been hell, a hell of hospital waiting rooms and police stations and courtrooms and the Melbourne Clinic three times a week, holes smashed into the plaster walls too, detectives interrupting their breakfast, God help them, and Wendy’s weeping suffusing his dreams with the worst of it. In hindsight he seemed to have been peering through a looking glass into someone else’s bizarre nightmare. But if the works of Huxley or Orwell had any relevance today, it was to demonstrate that people could grow accustomed to just about anything if given the impetus and the time.

Months went by. Academia grew intolerable. Grading mountains of essays and exams had never been an ambition of Bryan’s, not to mention the job – the office, the lecture theatre, the smell of fresh photocopying – was tied to Wendy and the girls so intrinsically that he came to think of it as the final stumbling block on the road to some vital, undefined change. So he retired; the payout was big enough for him to spend a year out of work, to choose his next move carefully. The super was humungous. But that vast freedom, such as he had never known, was an immense rift in space and time that Bryan had no idea how to close. What else was there to do? What else was he good at?

He tried to write fiction but found the effort of transferring his ideas to the page exhausting, as if there was a fault in the wiring between his fingers and his brain. He re-read Tolstoy with far more difficulty than when he was a student and couldn’t bear to look at Chaucer. He sorted every bookcase in the house into alphabetical order. He took walks but felt weighed down by lethargy moments after starting, and thereafter couldn’t shake his obsession with how fake all the ‘scenery’ was, knocking on tree trunks and car bonnets to compare the sound and feel as he went. Three times he looked at the job classifieds; it was like looking at a broadsheet in another language.

03/06

“Borderline personality disorder”.
“Attention Deficit Disorder” (there was no hyperactive back then).
“Bipolar depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”.
And night after night Wendy sobbing herself to sleep: “I knew I should never have had kids, I knew the family bloodline should have ended with me!”
Clinical evaluations pockmarked by tears piled high on both bedside tables. What consolatory words could he, engulfed by such misery and fatigue, have given her? Understanding as he did that a woman could bear or admit no greater suffering, whilst at the same time being scarcely able to keep his eyes open? Instead he would hold her tight and read the Wife of Bath’s tales – they always made her laugh – or a poem:
Pretty, Pretty Robin!
Under leaves so green
a happy Blossom
Hears you sobbing, sobbing,
Pretty, Pretty Robin,
Near my Bosom.

After the last girl left home, burning – like the others – with hatred for her parents, it took less than a week for Bryan and Wendy to understand that their love too was gone. Intact for as long as was needed, it could not survive the onset of retrospect, of reflection, of unfettered self-judgment, just as a human being fares no better in a dramatic loss of pressure than they do in a dramatic heightening of it. Their love had served its purpose – sending the three vulnerable beings it had engendered safely into adulthood. Bryan had laboured through that PHD chiefly to provide for his partner and baby daughters.

Everything he had was because of her. All the same though, when Wendy left not a single tear was shed by either of them. “Maybe in six months, or a year,” she had said, “we’ll be able to look at each other again the way we used to”. Now alone, Bryan was forty-six years old but tired as the dead, with only the sense of tragedy and absolute relief – and his photographs – for company.