Free Abandon by Pico Iyer Page B

across the classic Western landscape of ridges and orchards and valleys: California, before it had a name.
    In the car, meanwhile, the men bowed in black ties and the ladies’ dresses swirled around a dance floor off at sea. Lovers met under tropical moons, and reality was nothing that couldn’t be wished away. He thought of his coming trip to Spain, and then, catching sight of her looking out towards the town and ocean, bit the truant thought back.
    “You still wish you could travel.”
    “Of course,” she said, with more conviction than the question had deserved. “I wish I could do many things.”
    “You can, can’t you? That’s what California is about.”
    “For some people, I guess.” The wistful tone softened the traces of bitterness. “I believed all that once upon a time—”
    “Now?”
    “Now I don’t know.”
    As they turned onto Painted Cave Road, an ancient canyon on one side, poison oak, thick trees, a gurgling stream at the bottom, they were taken farther from the world than ever, the road closing in on them on both sides and the rocks above enforcing a kind of sovereignty. The switchbacks were harsh, and up above, when they stopped beside the canyon, the markings in the Chumash cave showed scorpions, circles, snakes. Whatever you might believe about California was here, on this shaded road: the ancient signs, the open bright sky. Farther up, nothing but rolling hills and mountains in the distance, Cachuma Lake blue in the sultry afternoon.
    “Can we walk a little?” she said as they went up higher, and her manner was so uncertain, so far from the local presumption, that he was touched; the way she asked for favors carried with it the tremor of an expected refusal. He parked the car under a tree and followed her, scrambling, up to a rough, dusty path that cut a thin trail towards a farther hill. They walked and walked, thirty minutes or more, everything falling away from them, and then the trail ended at what seemed to lie at the terminus of every mountain path here: a ruined house. Once upon a time, someone had tried to build a Roman villa here, it seemed, commanding the valley below, and so far from the city that no rules applied; now they could see broken bottles, torn condom wrappers, a few uneven stones poking out of the worn grass.
    She took herself down to a flat open space—once a living room, perhaps—and slipped through the broken arches, bending down to pick up rocks now and then, or peeping out at him and smiling from behind a shrunken red-brick chimney. She loved to gambol through other people’s spaces, it seemed, the actress again, free as long as no one took her for herself.
    “Tell me a story,” she said at last, having scoured the site thoroughly and settled down on a line of broken wall, the sun beginning to sink behind them. The wind had come up, as it always does on summer dusks in the hills, and with its bluster came a trace of chill.
    The flat open space looked strangely like a tiny open-air stage, made for recitations, and so he went down to it, stood before her, maybe thirty feet away, and said, “There was once an old man, who was young in years, and who lived in the old city of Konya. He was a respected teacher, a father of two, a pillar of the local courts. He led a good and pious life and was famous for the judgments he passed on religious matters.”
    The words came easily to him, and from a place he couldn’t name. Learn and master all the rules, Sefadhi had said, and then throw them all away.
    “But one day, for the first time ever, without warning, the man of religion found God. It sounds like a dramatic thing—a thunderbolt from the heavens. In fact, it was a very simple thing: he met a stranger who gave him back a sense of who he might be. ‘Who is better?’ the rough traveler, much older than he, called out in the marketplace. ‘The one who studies God or the one who is God?’
    “It was a strange question and perhaps a heretical one, and it