THE CHILEAN CLIFF CARVER

Ibiza Spain 1993

by

Lisa Alpine

We met in a bullring under the velvet cloak of night. An evening lit by a pale pearl, bruised full moon. This was where I first encountered the pitch-black-haired Chilean who sported a smirk on his perfectly chiseled face. He stared at me while I was lifted to the heavens yet again. Not a human sacrifice but a contact dance performance I was hired to do at a private party on the island of Ibiza in Spain.

The Chilean and I skirted each other on the dance floor. Like matador and bull. I find attractive men dangerous and try to avoid eye contact with them. They terrify me.

Just as I did allow myself to look into his relentlessly piercing eyes, he swiveled and turned his attentions onto another woman. A real beauty. Slowly, they danced close together. Barely perceptible tendrils of steam were rising from their entwined bodies. He then danced with a man. He danced with the woman again. He danced again with the man. Then he danced with both of them at once. They were svelte and sensual, and wielded sly, flirty smiles. In my direction! Provocative. Especially in the flickering torchlight.

He came close again and grazed my bare arm. Red alerts were going off in my left brain. He looked like a heart landmine. Step toward him and my heart would surely be torn to bits.

This inner torment spiced up my dance routine with Oscar, my California dance partner, who seemed to be getting a little jealous that the Chilean was moving into his territory. Party guests were now standing in a circle around him and me, hemming us in as we increased the acrobatic lifts and spins. This hyper performance, fueled by alpha male competition and magnetic physical attraction, went on until the moon, exhausted, fell into the sea that caressed this limestone island in the Mediterranean. Wiping away the fine grit from the bullring that powdered my arms and face, I did not see the Chilean depart. He had vanished on the arm of another woman. Perhaps another man, too. For the best—I was not there to have a fling. I was there to perform.

My dance troupe did do more than dance on Ibiza. Several days after my encounter with the Chilean, in glaring sunlight, we went in search of the sunken civilization of Atlantis. Local lore had it located off the tip of Es Vedra, an island floating offshore Cala d’Hort’s bay.

The scorching heat of the sun beating on the steep trail that led down to the bay released intoxicating herbaceous oils of wild rosemary, lavender and thyme that clung to the cliff side. When we reached the sea’s edge, salt bream filled our nostrils. It was enlivening to be awake and outside during the daylight after so many all-night dance extravaganzas in Ibiza’s uber-clubs and mega mansions.

As we leaned against the smooth, sun-bleached limestone boulders in this quarry on the sea’s lapping edge, Sana handed each of us a ritualistic tab of ecstasy.  Sana was our group leader and instigator of all things outrageous.  As the zing zip of the drug effervesced in my bloodstream and my defenses dissolved, stifled emotions welled up. The secret burden of my life surfaced.

I had so wanted a little girl child. My son was adorable, but I wanted more kids. The abortion I’d had several years before due to my ex-husband’s wishes was a sore, a gash still bleeding into my veins daily. As the heat emanating from the rocks penetrated my tense body, the iceberg-shard tips of that anguish melted and rivulets of sorrow slid down my cheeks pooling, in the hollow of my collarbone.

My maudlin grieving was interrupted by a shuffling sound. My teary eyes snapped open and there stood a young girl with long dark hair. Not a hallucination. Her jade green eyes stared directly into my sea blue eyes. By god, my wish was being granted. Who had waved the wand?  Drugs are amazing. I’d always wanted another child, a girl to take to Paris. And here she was!

This little girl even spoke French. Her name was Marie-Claire. We bonded immediately. She grabbed my hand and pulled me up. She wasn’t put off at all by the tears streaming down my face or my herky-jerky French. She wanted to play and to show me the crab.

Still holding hands, we walked past my bemused friends who could not figure out how I had suddenly conjured up a child, and waded into a tepid tide pool. She dove down, pale shiny child butt sticking up in the air. She popped up breathlessly and said I must do the same thing to see “him.” Sure enough, once I did as she commanded, the crab was waggling his antennae eyes at me from under the rock through the murky water. Our upside down antics had stirred up the sand.

She then took me up a trail and around a ledge and we both peed on the dirt. Both of us were fascinated by the yellow streams gushing out from between our legs. Suddenly, hearty laughter startled us.  On the boulders above us stood a man who was pointing and laughing. “Papa,” she yelled, wagging her finger at him.

The Chilean! The dark handsome dancer from the bullring full-moon party.

For some reason, I wasn’t self-conscious about having him see me peeing with his daughter, both of us totally naked.  She explained to me that they had a camp beyond the rocks where he was standing.

Marie-Claire grabbed my hand again and ran down to the sea where the gurgling ocean waves sucked in and out over rocks covered in yellow-green algae. She beckoned me to sit on the green seaweed carpet and slide down into the water. A wave caught us and pushed us upward. We slid back and forth with the tide, laughing until tears ran down our sun burnt cheeks.

I’d completely forgotten my sorrows and desires. This happy child had invited me into her world, an enchanted playground of quirky sea creatures and hidden caves.

Then she slipped into the malachite green waters and disappeared. Her silhouette moved below the water’s surface. She looked like a mermaid. Then, there was another larger shadow with her. I worried that it was a predator and dove in swimming to her depth. The shadow was her father. They didn’t seem to need to come up for air. They showed me how to swim deep with the colder currents. These people were fantastical and mythical, dancing through their watery world like manatees or dolphins or selkies.

Marie-Claire was hungry after all her romping in the water and on land. We followed a narrow path that wound between the skyscraper-size Mesozoic boulders to where they were camping. He had created an other-worldly living space veiled in cream-colored canvas roofs, with thin slabs of pink slate as tabletops, white smoothed boulders for chairs, and Persian carpets that lay over the taupe sand.

The only way to get to their Bedouin-style encampment was by foot down the steep trail, or by Zodiac. As he prepared lunch, he told me he came here from Belgium every year and brought his boat and his daughter. They held court in this old-world quarry for the entire summer.

We grazed on large green olives, Manchego cheese, tomatoes, and fresh sardines. He had a soft yet radiant smile and told me his name was Patrice. He was from Dalcahue in Chiloé.

My mouth dropped open like an attic trapdoor. I was sitting in a dream setting of opaque rock and turquoise sea, without clothes, completely at home with a man who had terrified me several nights before. He was also blessed with a fairy princess daughter who was affectionate, intelligent and gifted.

Yet, this wasn’t the reason my mouth was gaping open. It was because Patrice was from my favorite place in all of South America—perhaps the entire world. An island floating off the southern toe of Chile, only accessible by boat or seaplane, and only for six months a year when the savage winter storms subside. A place where the fishermen’s wives knit bulky wool sweaters dyed in natural hues from the blood of walnut husks, moss, berries, seaweed, and mushrooms.

I knew Dalcahue well, as I went there many times in the 1970s to import those handspun sweaters. It took several days on planes, trains, ferries and small fishing boats to get there from Santiago, the capital of Chile. Nobody outside of Chiloé is from Chiloé.

His voice pulled me back to this island in the warmer climes of the Mediterranean. As he sliced ripe tomatoes on a stone slab, he shared that he was a ballet dancer and lived in a church in Brussels that he’d converted into an art and dance studio.

Damn!

Why couldn’t he be pompous or stupid? Or from Milwaukee? This was all too delicious and tempting (and I’m not talking about the sardines!).

He flipped through a photo album and showed me pictures of his sculptural work.  Full-size men and women engraved in the sand on the beaches of Normandy. Tides in the area shift, as described by Victor Hugo, “à la vitesse d’un cheval au gallop”—as swiftly as a galloping horse. The tide comes in at one meter per second. When the long tides were pulled in, Patrice filmed the encroaching foamy salt water eroding the Rodin-quality sculptures he had carved over many days. He chronicled the licking away at their curves, the dissolving of their shapes.

As he ran his fingers over the seashell-gray-toned photographs, describing the feel of the sand as he shaped these voluptuous bodies, his voice soft and faraway, I found him, his lifestyle, his family, all excruciatingly captivating.

A spell had been cast and I completely forgot about my friends back on the rocks.

In the late afternoon sun, after more explorations and a nap in their kasbah, Marie-Claire and I wound around the stones littering the hollow quarry pit they called home. There in the amber afternoon light, Patrice was squatting in front of a carving on the limestone face. It was a man and a woman embracing under water as they swam together. Botticelli delightful, da Vinci beautiful. Classic perfection.

As his golden arms and long-fingered hands chiseled these people into the rock, Patrice told me he was involved with the couple I saw him dancing with at the bullring. The sculpture depicted them. “It is complicated,” he said. I don’t know why he shared this with me but it made me feel very two-dimensional, simple, and boring. And American.

Suddenly, he looked at me mischievously out of the corner of his twinkling eyes and asked, “Would you like to spend the night? My daughter needs feminine company.”

Maybe I wasn’t so boring after all….

 “What about my friends?” I asked in an embarrassing squeak. My vocal chords weren’t cooperating.  I was scared and looking for the exit. The intensity of the connection wiped me clean of sensibility and instead of feeling a resounding thunderclap Yes!, I practically tripped over him as I ran away. I didn’t even say goodbye to Marie-Claire. 

As I speed-walked past my astonished friends, who were halfway up the trail, one-way conversations bounced around inside my skull. You would abandon your young son for a life with a bisexual, polyamorous man in cold, gray Belgium? My mind spun out dramas as fast as it could to distract me from my attraction to this gorgeous man who had just invited me to spend the night with him. I mean, his daughter.

After I plowed over my friends to get in the car, they asked, “He invited you to spend the night? What are you doing here?” 

I muttered something about them worrying about me if I didn’t come back with them.

In unison, they all chanted, “Stupid! Isn’t that what you wanted?”

On my last night in Ibiza, Sana choreographed yet another party. This one took place in an abandoned military fort. She turned each cold cement room into a vibrant temple celebrating various goddesses from Isis to Aphrodite.

Looking up from the flames licking the sky around the perennial bonfire ring, I saw his eyes across the fire’s golden flicker. Panther eyes.

The Chilean and I skirted each other through the evening’s mayhem of rituals and exhaustive dance-a-thons. I ended up collapsed in a sweaty pile next to him on one of Sana’s makeshift temple floors. He draped a pashmina shawl over me as I pretended to sleep. No kisses. No hugs. No sex. No goodbye.

I arose at dawn and Oscar drove me to the airport for my long journey back to California.

***

I can still see the jaggy edge trim of his thick pitch-black hair framing his face.  I can still feel the tidal pull of ultimate attraction. I’m still in love with that artist. Or at least the concept and packaging.

What if I had spent the night in that stone pink-tented wonderland he created? I muse about this every few years. What if I let the artist from my favorite remote island in the world woo me?

At first, I always repeat the same old litany, “No, no! I had to go home to work and take care of my son.” But the blanket of reason that vigilantly guards the door to my heart falls off, and the truth speaks in a timid yet convincing voice, “I don’t want to be swept away by the murderous riptides of love. No heart landmines for me (even if they are just in my imagination)…”

This story is included in my book Dance Life: Movin’ & Groovin’ Around the Globe

Here is a story I wrote about Chiloé, that magical island the Chilean cliff carver came from: The Dwarf and the Otter