If you could still locate the olden specimen that sets to travel the world and amass a scrupulous journal on which to chronicle all those little anecdotes and chance encounters he comes across, you would find it there. Most undoubtedly in the guise of a florid depiction studded with all the colours of ebullient adjectives and peppered with an indulgent extravaganza of flamboyant baroque adverbs and verbiage. But if no longer in travel journals, fear not, there’s still a fair change you might stumble upon it in its synthetic surrogate offspring of Facebooks and blogs, or, not entirely unconceivably, on Instagram.  In fact all it would take was someone to sneak a sly pic, not in itself an implausible feat since there were no empty tables in the restaurant of the Hotel Cala Luna that evening, hence those who witnessed it all being quite numerous.

 

One could see he was seeking to keep his cool. You don’t expect them to fall straight to their knees these days. Nor to declaim with their eyes lifted to the moon that yawning thread of budget poetry of yore, thank goodness we somehow survived that age more or less unscathed. The rest, however, was all there. A glowing balmy al fresco evening, the tempo of the lackadaisical waves breaking close enough to evoke the convenient atmospheric impressions, the platters adorned with origami food on the table – all in all a well-rounded late-springtide aura glided over the simpatico restaurant. There was a ring involved and a bulky book that went with it. The ring caused the usual commotion as news of it spread around the tables. The book, though, generated far more interest as some mystified beholders at once stopped showing any pretence of being immersed in their own affairs and set on getting to the bottom of it. Not with a great degree of success, it should be stressed. He exuded a light scent of edginess and she shed a few conventional tears whilst nodding avidly to the question. The rapturous kiss never came up nor was there too much ado to follow the whole act, but she did keep holding his hands affectionately for a long time and a great deal of mellow formulations were exchanged. A real shame indeed that no-one could truly make sense of the words inasmuch as it wasn’t one of those easy to grasp languages, even if they cared to articulate them slowly, loudly and clearly, which they didn’t. Which resulted in not many options remaining open other than to go into foreign film mode and come up with your own subtitles.

 

The reason for the book. They had met almost two years earlier. Both were members of the same mountaineering club in Maribor and both dutifully paid their subscriptions for more than a decade without once setting eyes on each other. A group of daredevils got inspiration from some YouTube videos and decided that, as a sure means of risking their life, not many places offered the possibilities the Caminito del Rey did. To Spain they flew. Until that occasion all they had was some sporadic online contact, but seeing her for the first time at the airport terminal jogged his memory of the real advantages of the offline cosmos. He was spellbound by her freckle-sprayed surfer blonde look on the spot. The Caminito del Rey didn’t disappoint, and after three hours of trying she had a close call when a dubious stack of shaky rock gave way and her knot failed. She had to be rushed to Malaga after a laborious rescue operation that involved a helicopter and a complementary dozen firefighters and paramedics. And in Malaga she would remain for a few weeks after the rest of the party went to catch the return flight. And so would he. Her parents wouldn’t make it until a few days after the incident, a fact that didn’t troubled her greatly insofar as she had him coming to visit. Which he assiduously did. He tended to her broken arm, and to the dreadful looking cuts and bruises on her right leg, the very ones he’d observed with a frenzy of alarm as he saw her being lifted from the scene. Mostly, though, he tended her deeply scarred ego, the one wound she never fully recovered from.

 

It’s factually true that it didn’t start with a book. One, however, lay on the bedside table, the very book that had to be removed to make room for the monster vase the nurse found, the single one capable of accommodating the morbid apparatus of flowers he brought into her room. Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. That’s some hard stuff you’ve got in there, are you sure it’s the right medicine to boost your recovery? It took her a while before she twigged that he was referring to the book she’d just slipped into the drawer. Hard stuff indeed. She conceded it wasn’t entirely for amusement sake.

 

Her eyes warmed and her aches receded. He knew Sraffa. He was quick to state that he’d never really taken the time nor had the inclination to go through the Production of Commodities in detail. Nor had he any intention of wasting his sacred time doing such nonsense, he, a proudly liberated part-time Misean as he fancied describing his persona. The staunch Neo-Ricardian standing in front of him seemed for a second to take aim and to be getting ready to pounce, but a new bout of aches and pains took hold and she had to rely on him to be helped back to the bed. Opportunities for them to slay each other proliferated in the days that followed, but regardless of his fixation with the regression theorem (which she discarded as plain unimpressive rudimentary circular tautology) and her propensity to format daily life events into a set of input-output Leontief matrices (or, as he would insist on putting it, the surest and most pompous path leading to indigence), they did strike common ground with some of the classics, though, granted, not with much else. And so it was that he asked her to marry him. To which she blurted yeses whilst glancing over Gary Becker’s A Treatise on The Family, open on chapter four, ‘Assortive Mating on Marriage Markets’, that he’d just stuck in front of her with a ring on top.

 

That was the day before. Now, irrespective of the amount of lush shimmer the passionate sun that had just finished taking its place above them could force upon the surf of the waves, or how much awe the array of polychromatic vegetation that swathed the whole of Cala Fiuli plus its surroundings could generate, his spirits are getting gloomier by the hour and prove themselves hermetic to whatever lyricisms happen to flutter around. He assesses the tiny cavities that populate the rock. A slight miscalculation and all would wind up in a happy, neat, freak accident. That’s how things are supposed to be. Simple, lucid, no-frills. When they are not, misery will only nest and breed.

 

She’s a few metres below, sandy bob basking in the sun, tensed, delicate biceps as she hauls herself up a few centimetres. She checks the carabiner, after which she reaches for the pouch of chalk, then their eyes meet to trade worn-out smiles. He’d got the email days ago. Ironically, indeed. He’d seen it on the very day he had made plans to propose. Couldn’t have felt the complete idiot more, carrying the ring and the book in the rucksack everywhere for days, waiting for a flicker of bravery to fire up. Bravery as in absconding from her life for good and allowing her to chase her bed of roses in a place where it could be found. Instead, he lured her into a heart-shattering sleepwalk into which she stepped nodding blithely.

 

The wording used was dry and sparse. In a less traumatic context it could have passed for the most banal request for some additional info on a few transactions. But the email had all the makings of a very traumatic context, and not a lot of it was intended to be left to the imagination. The agenda of the meeting being set up and the reasons behind the request for further detail on an attached list of accounting journals were, for him, self-explanatory enough.

 

He’s positive that for the time being he can still dodge the issue, after all, over the years, he’d been sufficiently scrupulous to ensure that his tracks were discretely effaced or, when not, that sufficient mud had been spread on top that months would need to pass before someone could start making any sense of it. But what he also knows is that mud and wiping out tend to leave a distinctive lingering stench. And that’s mainly from where his problems emerge. Not only has the new financial director revealed himself to be sharp as dagger, but he also has this thing with noses. There are of course a few alternative scenarios for him to play with, the problem being that, from where he stands, all involve the inescapable inconvenience of a fair amount of time inside.

 

Every penny he loaned himself had been religiously repaid, every movement recorded with pious devotion. Until he lost faith. What started as manageable naïve sums had in due course mutated into an ever-swelling behemoth that called for increasing amounts of creativity and risk to be rolled over. Until he couldn’t, because he got in the crosshairs. So that when the time arrives for the unceremonious sundown to come crashing over this spell of living beyond affordable prospects, other than the pile of debt that he’d duly stockpiled over the years, no enduring taste of affluence will be found. How deep can one sink? For that one he can’t yet offer an answer since the descent is still ongoing, but evidently a lot. His mind keeps wrestling with the notion of a context. There was a context of letters with an increasingly up-to-the-point choice of terminology, a context that included an Audi TT two months in arrears and a prolific mortgage on the cusp of following suit. And there was her, a couple of weeks before, weary eyes after one of those days, desert spoon just laid on the table to signal the meal was finished. Got to go to the loo, keep an eye on my bag, will you? He did as told. The two cheques remained in a drawer for three days because he didn’t dare. Until he dared.

 

She cried. Tears suited her face. At the sight of the ring the mascara first became moist and then commenced widening beyond the rims of the eyes, though careful enough to avoid venturing wildly far. A primal Pavlovian reaction, that’s how in only a few hours she found herself reassessing the unbridled crescendo of yeses. By then the mascara had gone feral. When it first arrived, the text included a link to an online news article. She went back to the text, then again to the news, then embarked on a fanatical search for any other scoops on the subject stalking any elusive subtleties that might have been left out. From what could be gleaned, the whole matter was still vague and contained, even if the direction it was already taking could easily be discerned. The immediate impetus was to call him to try and get some clarity on what on earth might be going on, but she was quick to nip that one in the bud. What’s really the point? After all, the text itself told her pretty much all there was to know. No need for making a fool of herself. For all practical purposes that was already being taken care of.

 

Instead, she spent most of the night staring at the reflection the moon left over the small harbour whilst appraising the why-possibilities: Vainglory? Is that it? Was it all just some kind of mischievous play at the end of which he got annoyed? What does that make her now? A trophy? By the look of the way things were unfolding, not even a trophy. Spoils. Loot. Was there some twist of revenge in it? Revenge for what? The last they spoke he seemed to be in his usual good spirits, and she could not for the life of her think of any grounds for vengeance or reprisal of this sort. Had he gone mental? Was this a black comedy? Would they all end up laughing like mad after the dust settles? She could think of reasons aplenty to cry, sob and howl, to shed tears of blood and bile, but to laugh – none whatsoever. As for the dust – no way it was going to settle.

 

An MP was alluded to in the main piece she had come across, though no names had so far been disclosed. She knew of the MP, he himself had mentioned her several times and they had even been introduced on one occasion in some social setting she cannot recall. For the time being, at least, there was a good chance this could play in her favour because the scent of the impending fall of a high-flying media darling definitely offered more prospects and would keep the newspapers busy chasing after a far more unctuous casualty than her less than newsworthy self. But they would come round. If not the papers, the Rector’s Office wouldn’t forgo the opportunity to feast on her.

 

That arid, holier-than-thou, manichaeistic media tilt sickened her to death. The candid truth was that, in spite of the sordid innuendo that was starting to fly around (a stage the newspapers were actually skipping), the little she’d achieved had been out of sheer drive and back-breaking work. Einstein she wasn’t, but nonetheless she’d flown through the PhD program and proven herself competent enough to hold the chair of micro-economics at a middle-ranking university. He’d taken the role of mentor long before becoming formally such. Over time they grew to be close friends, casually, and even more casually they became intimate. She’d become increasingly dependent on this sort of oracle-like figure to steer her through the spells of worthlessness she not infrequently grappled with, and to assist in taming her bouts of erratic lack of focus.

 

If, on occasion, it all came to resemble a quintessential muddle, most of the time it truly fell neatly into place and couldn’t feel more like the one sound and transcendent path she was meant to march along. Never had this been as pronounced as that previous January the very moment she stepped out of the Vatican Museum. While still in her teenage years, for reasons she could not put her finger on she developed a bit of an obsession with Raphael’s School of Athens. A precocious child, by the age of seven she was filling canvases full of flowers, swans and lambs and getting her father into a frenzy of excitement as to the possibilities the budding talent might unleash. She didn’t live up to the high expectations set for her because, for one, she never possessed a truly creative vein, but mostly because she was much keener on copying the old masters than coming up with pieces of her own. By her late teens she was deeply immersed in the Italian Renaissance, and from Giotto to Michelangelo pretty much everybody visited her easel – the lush Botticelli female portraits, angels and Madonnas in all shapes and colours, courtesy of Fra Angelico, quite a few takes on Del Cossa’s St. Lucy’s flowery eyes, and various tolerable attempts at some cunning Da Vincis. Most of all though, Raphael, and that School of Athens that had matured into an idée fixe. She’d spent two days in Turin attending a seminar organised by the Einaudi Foundation on the early work of Pasinetti, at the end of which, instead of going back home as planned, she took the train to Rome with the sole purpose of visiting the Stanze di Rafaello. And there she stood, for a full twenty minutes, in devotional reverie, oblivious to the crammed busloads of selfie-taking sociopaths. Before her entranced eyes, old Plato dressed as master Leonardo wandered the Academia hallway alongside the chosen disciple. There and then, within that ancient venerable institution, she could discern her place. No muddle. Shadows transmuted into a vivid glow, and what had been blurred, now shaped into its purest acute form.

 

Very platonic indeed were the escapades to Lake Bled and the hiking weekends in the mountains, brimming over with all kinds of transcendental considerations which could range from n-1 walrasian market equilibria to ninety-three-percent-labour-value theories, as well as fertile insights on how best to measure levels of total ophelimity. But the bit of the fresco she undoubtedly underestimated was the far more secular Aristotelian element in it. After all, if, after sundown, they ended up having a couple of beers or sitting around a candlelit table in the hotel restaurant, one just about expected to see the peripatetic philosopher lurking in the door frame, and surely it had to be his fleshly hand and none of the platonic extraction that would lead them to their room. A similar belief appears to be held by the media, they themselves heirs to a no-less venerable tradition of snubbing dainty allegories and being sceptical of metaphysical subtleties, a tradition that spans centuries from Maquiavel all the way through William Randolph Hearst III to the present.

 

Fundamentally it was all about the papers, or, as the headlines were naming it, favours. The Achilles’ Heel was, and had always been, the econometrics jam she’d got into. There was this nineteenth-century august éminence grise in charge of the chair, an oxymoronic living relic of a bore that made the task of taming that overhanging erratic lack of focus of hers impossible. In all fairness, she did all right enough in coming out of it with the mandatory decent marks required, but without really bothering to take the time to warm to the thing. Quite the contrary, she’d tended ever since to grade it as an overrated ancillary gimmick that gets in the way of proper economics (husband-to-be would be so proud of such a Misean slip). But it wasn’t, not if you’re expected to publish a few papers every year. He’d come to her rescue when she got stuck and couldn’t finish her thesis, as one expects of a PhD supervisor worthy of its name. She’d got herself entangled in a quagmire of contradictory heteroscedasticity test results and marvelled at him as he magically guided her gently through the heaps of data until every single variable got bridled and acquiesced compliantly. They wrote and signed papers together, and those were the halcyon days. Then he became generous and she got increasingly reliant on him to comment and review everything she would write. He would review, and would modify, and would extend. The end result of it would acquire the logical and formal elegance she could never replicate on her own. You publish this stuff under your name alone, so just go and make that career for yourself. No need to argue. Sooner than later I’ll be retired and, at any rate, I don’t need to be part of this game anymore. She protested, he insisted. When the time came for him to retire he got even more generous. In a few instances he’d take up the whole research and come up with a complete draft ready to be translated into the unambiguous writing lingo she was known for. Equations and tables generally involved less conversion input, and most of the time a straight copy and paste plus a small dosage of formatting would do the trick.

 

And now it was all being brought into the open under the flashy bold lettering: ‘Favours for Papers’. And in a few weeks she most definitely would find herself summoned to face a committee of heartless top brass, whereupon she will crash big time, even before they get the chance to start querying her on any material she might have neglected to research or could hardly make sense of. And in quick succession soon after she’ll come face to face with a different type of future from the one she’d got used to taking for granted – one where people are disposed of, find no place to work, credibility, prospects or purpose. And in her finger a stunning brand-new ring scintillating an accusing radiance of deception and fraud. If asked, she wouldn’t be capable of explaining it to anyone, but when she started flicking through the Treatise on the Family he’d offered her that evening she almost choked in a spasm of demented laughter as she came across the tenth chapter: ‘Imperfect Information, Marriage, and Divorce’. For the remainder of the night, though, she mostly sobbed.

 

She looks up, drained, beaten. They have reached an unclimbable stretch of steep rock and she knows they’re taking reckless risks for no obvious advantage. Can we stop now? We ought to go back. He looks down, breaths in the placidity of the pristine rolling ocean and then surveys the wall of slick limestone at length. I know, let’s just give it another go. Let’s try and see how far we can go.