At some time or other in the past I came several times to Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. There I met Acenzio, an old Celtic druid, who lived - with 35 chickens, seven goats and one big barrel of best Lanzarote wine from volcano-ashes-vineyards - in a rotten house near the southern coast of Papagayo. I met him together with Iwan, a ship's cook from Werdohl in Germany, who had left his ship a couple of months ago to stay on the Canary Islands. On that day Iwan stood hitchhiking with two gigantic suitcases on the road near Arrecife, and he didnít really know  where to go. He had only an inaccurate address in the south, given to him from another sailor where he might find a job with aquascooters. Because I had not been in that area of the island before, I invited him to explore it together with my rented jeep and look for this place. In fact nobody knew this address but on the way we met Hilario and his brother Acencio.
 

Hilario ran a bar in an old house in Playa Blanca which he stubbornly rejected to be installed with electricity. Because of the beauty of the landscape and the wonderful beaches of Papagayo it became daily practice together with Iwan, to visit first Hilario in the morning and later Acencio in his lonely house on a steep rocky shore. Every day Hilario put some food for his brother and a sack full of old bread from the day before in his bar for the chickens and the goats in my car, although he was so hard in variance with Acencio that they didn't talk a single word to each other. Several years later I learned from my friend Lu from Lanzarote that the southern third of ground of the whole island belonged to these two brothers.
To be accompanied by Iwan was very helpful on these visits. Apart from six other languages he was able to speak Spanish fluently whereas I could not speak one word of Spanish. I had the opportunity to drink several glasses of his best wine, to have pleasant but more or less unimportant conversations with this old Canarian sailor, and to become a good friend of him. Every evening when we took leave of him, he told us a strange sentence for the road. First we didn't understand the sense of his words but soon we learned that these words became real prophecies which always found their fulfilling the same day.
After he had twice given us some miraculous warnings about the technical condition of our car on the long and lonely way - one time we had two flat tires without any spare wheel, another time we lost the exhaust pipe of the car - we were talking about women in general.
Acencio sang a hymn about Spanish women and praised them with flowery words. Especially their sexual qualities would be unsurpassed all over the world. When I objected that such an opinion might always be very subjective and the quality of sex normally depends  on the two persons who do it together, he asked me wether I ever had had an opportunity to make love with a Spanish woman, if not, I couldn't be allowed to speak about that matter. After I had to deny this, he said to me - with his eyes focusing a point very far away from us - "This will be changed! Today you will meet a woman and later you will understand..."
When we left Acencio´s house that afternoon  with its strange drawings, pictograms ant pentagrams and its bushels of herbs and chains of boons on the walls, we suddenly lost the well-known way home and found us in a big desert of lavastones, where we had never been before. There we met, in the middle of a very large valley,  Feli, walking  in her white shorts and with beach-sandals on her feet over the dangerous,  sharp stones with a big bag over her shoulder. The beach was more than 10 kilometres away, and the next village was in the same distance.
Feli was a lesbian lawyer from San Sebastian on a voyage around the Canary Island. Her ship arrived in the morning at Arrecife and stayed there for two days. Because it was a hot day, she hired a car and because she didnít have a driving licence she asked an acquaintance from the ship to drive the car for an excursion to the south of the island.
They found a lonely place to swim near Acencio`s house. At eleven oíclock they got hungry and thirsty and the young man offered to take the car and buy something. After she had been waiting on the beach until three oíclock in the afternoon, and she never again saw the young man with her money and her car, she decided at four oíclock to walk back to the ship and tried - in her opinion - a short-cut next to the normal road in a  northern direction. This lead her to the endless desert where she met us by chance at six oíclock in the evening with our jeep. She was totally exhausted.
To duly celebrate her return to civilisation - and to fight against her hunger and thirst since eleven oíclock -  a rapturous fiesta of cooking, devouring and hard drinking followed in my apartment in Puerto del Carmen, where Iwan was also living by now.
His confession, to be homosexual made her confess to be a lesbian. After that the evening was filled with comparing reflections about several problems in the life of homosexual women and men. For several hours  the two where only speaking Spanish about their experiences, while for me, the poor heterosexual - they forgot about me and I didn't have an interpreter - was only the wine left, and the singing in the neighbour's garden until Feli suddenly turned to me, nibbled tenderly at my ear and whispered to me that indeed she was a virgin, but she was curious about me that I didnít realise how urgently she was keen on her first heterosexual affair with me, and when we could start with it.
So this day not only hold the adventures in the stony and human deserts for Feli, but also the tender end of her past-life. We celebrated the rebirth in the first light of the following day beneath the glowing eyes of a big black tomcat who had sat down near the open window, obviously to check out if we did it alright.
I didn't know if Acencio had sent that tomcat or if it was he himself but in any case these were his eyes and when we visited him later, he asked me with a look at Feli, if he had promised too much.

On the way to him Feli had the idea to take a photograph to remember that day in which the three of us should be seen naked together in the beautiful prehistoric landscape. I am sorry to say that this photograph is a little bit overexposed, because we had asked a passing tourist to take it. Probably he made a little mistake because he was so excited. I expected something like this, because looking through the camera he got bright red ears while his wife who was waiting for him in the car behind a hill always cried out very loud: "Karl-Theodor, where are you?"

More than one year later I heard something about Feli and Iwan again. Very late in the night I got a telephone-call from Iwans new friends' flat in Verona in Italy. When I left him after my holidays were over he had to leave my apartment too. Later he went through bad time until he remembered his homosexual ways and got a lover. He was supposed be his big love and they stayed together. He was a higher Vatican dignitary and Iwan accompanied him to Italy. Iwan called me on that evening because he wanted to say good bye to me for a longer time. They wanted to go to the south of India for several years to work in a monastery with starving children.
On the way back from Spain to Italy Monsignore had something to do in San Sebastian, and while he was waiting Iwan had the idea to look for Feli and to visit her. He found the house with her office but she was not there. In the house where she lived they told him that madam notary had gone out of town with her husband.
He didn't have anything better to do than to sit in a bar at the corner to drink a coffee. He was really astonished when he suddenly saw Feli - beautiful and still a little bit plump - coming out of her house with a perambulator. He got more astonished when he saw that she really didn't want to recognize him although it was less than a year ago when we accompanied her to her ship in Arrecife for a tearful farewell. After that call from Iwan I could imagine why I didn't get any answers to my letters to San Sebastian. First I sent a copy of that photograph of us three in the volcano-desert...

Uwe Pfannschmidt
December 1983