I suspect I was violating some rule of etiquette by having Chris come over to Ibiza -- he was piggybacking on hospitality that had been extended to me. Though Silka agreed to his coming, clearly she did so as a favor to me.

"He must apologize," Silka judiciously decided, "and not just to Isabella, but to everyone."

"How?" I asked. "On Radio Ibiza?"

She wasn't in the mood for jokes. "To our friends, to Isabella, to everyone who was there last night. And not just for his sake, but for yours as well. Remember, you brought him here. It's your reputation."

She was right. For four years, we had been spending our summers on Ibiza. I had dreams of buying property there, maybe settling down. Before coming to Ibiza with Silka in 1991, I had been to some of the best resorts in the world: Koh Samui (before it was ruined), Goa, Mykonos. But Ibiza was somehow different. Not just the women, and the liquor, and the rich people, and all that -- that was part of it -- but what I had seen in Ibiza was a softer, more refined world than any to which I had ever been privy. Silka knew everybody and had turned me on to the fastest crowd and the hottest scenes. At Pacha, the hippest nightclub in Ibiza, we got free drinks. At Divino, a French restaurant affiliated with Paris' notorious Bain Douche, we were seated at the best tables on the night of the festival de la virgen de las nieves (the virgin of the snows), when fireworks were launched over Ibiza's old fort and the yellow battlements glowed green, red and blue. At the renovated finoas (farmhouses that had been converted to luxury summer homes) of wealthy Germans and French, we were treated to good meals and given access to cellars of fine wine.

Ibiza was paradise, the first place on earth where I felt like I knew the right people and had access to the sanctums of the elite and privileged -- the nightclubs, yachts, dinner parties.

It was also beautiful -- that's the part you can't get over. The natural splendor of the beautiful beaches and terraced olive groves, the winding cobblestone streets and the sleepy, sun-burnt hamlets built around white-washed stucco churches. After years in Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo, I was a sucker for old world aesthetics. Forget the Epcot Center, this was the real thing. There were Ibicencan beaches where I had been swimming -- in the nude, like everyone else on the island -- that surpassed anything I had ever seen, even in National Geographic or those airplane magazines. Banearas: a wide, sandy shore between verdant, gentle hills. Cap Falcon: a rocky cove surrounded by precipitous cliffs. El Diablo: a shallow inlet wrapped around a giant, dagger-shaped boulder. Beaches, coves and inlets so exquisite that in the middle of my daily half-mile swim, I would sometimes stop, float, and just gaze up at the cliffs or the craggy rocks or the sandy peninsulas, because this was paradise, this place, this time, this instant. Nothing compared. I could not allow Chris' misconduct to jeopardize this lifestyle, nor my relationship with Silka that made this lifestyle possible.

"Tomorrow," I told Silka before going to bed, "we will make amends."

But by the morning, Chris was gone. He had woken up with the sun and hitched a ride into town. A promise was a promise: I had to find him, search for Isabella, and then have him apologize. My relationship would be safe. My summer would proceed as planned.

I had introduced Chris to my custom of spending summer mornings -- or early afternoons, or however one refers to that time between sleep and siesta -- in the marble lobby of the six-story Montesol hotel and its adjoining cafe. At its best, this first-class, wedding-cake hotel evoked the luxury, decadence and opulence of pre-Castro Cuba, and at its worst, reminded one of the inefficiency, rudeness and corruption of, say, pre-Castro Cuba. The service around the Montesol bar was the second worst in Ibiza -- only at the Montesol's own sidewalk tables could a customer feel more neglected. But the bow-tied, heat-stroked waiters could afford to be surly because they were backed by the cachet of their establishment; for the Montesol was the epicenter of Ibicencan daily life.

The majority of the belly-up crowd who stood by the Montesol's oak bar that morning were elderly Spanish men. They gossiped, smoked Fortuna cigarettes or Cojiba cigars and downed more coffee than a Bogota Narcotics Anonymous meeting.

The bar was where the local players wheeled and dealed. Sooner or later, everyone on the island, from Polanski to Princess Fergie, turned up. And consequently on this morning, so did Chris. "I remember drinking at that bar," Chris said and then shook his head when I recounted more details about the navel incident. "And that's it."

"You bit someone," I told him. "Someone important."

"Did I draw blood?"

"No." "Then what's the big deal?"

A waiter deposited a cafe con jello in front of me. "The people you were with, those were my friends, but more importantly, they were Silka's friends. You have to apologize."

"To the girl?"

"Yes, to her, to her family, before everyone thinks we're assholes."

Since Chris had bitten the powerful Don Manuel Estrapulos' granddaughter, we were off to his gentlemen's club to offer our apologies.

There's a small, greenish bronze plaque in front of the four-story, white stone building that reads Sociedad Cultural Y Recreational Ebusus (the old Phoenician spelling of Ibiza). The Sociedad, located half a block down Ibiza's main drag from Montesol, was the island's oldest and most prestigious men's club. In high season, these clubs serve as a velvet sanctuary, shielding members from the tourist onslaught. There are numerous sitting rooms filled with plush green and red velvet armchairs and long 19th century coffee and end tables. The vast majority of paintings lining the dusty brown walls are second-rate copies of famous portraits of Ferdinand, Isabella, the Duke of Alba, Genoan Prince Emmanuelle, obese Pope John IV, a forgotten archbishop, some minor inquisitor and, yes, Francisco Franco. But a keen eye can spy, scattered among the tedious rows of copy-cat art, a few genuine masterpieces: two original Velázquez etchings and even a small Goya.

The club has a movie theater, a library filled with Franco-era texts, a full bar and a functioning restaurant. But the club's only room that is in constant use is the gaming room.

There, members of the Estrapulos clan, owners of Banco Estrapulos -- a one-time currency exchange operation that has expanded to become one of the largest private banks in Spain -- and the guardians of Isabella Estrapulos' dignity, gather to play tute or brisque, card games similar to trumps and whist but requiring a 36-card baraja deck that has swords and trees as suits instead of spades and clubs.

Today, if you need a liquor license in Ibiza -- an Estrapulos has to approve it. If you want to open a nightclub -- Don Manuel has to have a piece.

He sat in a corner, reading El Pais and drinking red wine. Several younger men, lesser members of the Estrapulos clan, sat around the patriarch. They chewed cigars and looked like they were wanting to be told what to do. Periodically, a waiter would carry over a phone and plug it into the jack next to Don Manuel's table so he could make or take a call.

"Let's just apologize and get this over with," Chris suggested. "I'll say sorry, and you use your Spanish."

"Pardon us, sir, for a little moment," I said in the best Spanish I could muster. "But my friend has to your daughter's daughter, made a --" I didn't know how to go on.

I touched my midsection.

Don Manuel studied Chris and then pounded the table. "She has been impregnated?"

"NO!" I almost shouted. "No. With teeth. It was achieved with teeth. I deliver many apologies and regrets, to your person, and the person of your daughter's daughter --"

"Of what is he talking?" asked one of Don Manuel's cronies.

Don Manuel shook his head. "Of that, I have no knowledge."

Driving back to the house, we were blinded by the dazzling Mediterranean sun and choked by the dry, suffocating heat. It was a kind of heat I had never experienced in Los Angeles, surpassing even a hot San Fernando Valley afternoon. This was African heat; Saharan in intensity.

We drove along narrow, curved roads and over steep hills -- hills like beige hippopotamuses -- where cars passed each other recklessly. This was despite the roadside evidence that passing blind could be fatal: I counted seven stripped car hulks along the potholed way. The flora resembled that of California's coastline. There were even black scars in the hills where brush fires had burned the chaparral.

Silka had left a note tacked to the front door: "Went to San Carlos." I dropped Chris off and took off after her.

The San Carlos Hippy Market is a bazaar sprawled over the expansive Las Dalias paella restaurant and two adjacent lots. The dusty blue, red and orange caravan tents, blaring Pink Floyd and a pungent incense odor, suggest a black market where anything, illicit or otherwise, can be had: gold dubloons, bricks of hashish or AK-47s. Actually in the offing at this flea market are boutique goods and local bric-a-brac in an exotic setting. In between hanging plants and racks of tie-dyed clothing, German and Dutch tourists fingered overpriced silver earrings and little twisty-bags of cinnamon, or posed while local artists sketched their caricatures in charcoal. Silka, wearing wraparound Persol shades that gave her a Schwarzenegger-like stolidity, had stopped at a store selling leather goods. She was trying on a vest.

"We apologized," I told her.

"Did he apologize to Isabella?"

"Uh -- no, not actually her." I touched a red leather jacket.

A Spanish version of Procol Harem's "A Lighter Shade of Pale" was playing: Tropizei las luzes fandango. Silka strolled to the next stall. "Then everything's not yet OK." I bought some puka shells.

Ibiza is the only place in the world where the sun doesn't set. Instead, at around 8:30 every summer night, the sun explodes. Just as it touches the horizon, our nearest star detonates, dispersing a gaudy pink and orange blast that whips through the sky, covering the island with a flamingo-colored roof. There have been times, as I wound my way into town along narrow ribbons of road between olive groves, that I've pulled onto the shoulder to stare at the sky. The explosion of the sun, in most places, would signal the end of the world. But here, it means the beginning of the night.

Chris and I were on our own, on a crawl through the bars of Dalt Villa. The main city of Ibiza is terraced around Dalt Villa, a gigantic fortress built to repel the corsairs (and, I'm convinced, the sort of people on package vacations who flock to Majorca). The massive, dusty granite and mortar citadel rises from the Pasea de Vara de Rey, the tree-lined avenue marking the center of Ibiza's old city. Like so many of the world's great monuments, this castle -- haunting like Mont St. Michel and imposing like Alcatraz -- is an eloquent architectural justification for lavish defense budgets. If it weren't for the constant fear of invasion, Ibiza's masters, from Phoenician to Roman to Gaelic to Vandal to Moorish to Sardinian to Hapsburg and finally to Spanish, would not have invested in the stunning network of battlements, keeps, parapets and towers that dominate Ibiza's skyline.

We stumbled into The Rock, the last bastion of cheap drinks before water's edge, where you can gaze out at the reflection of boats in the harbor. The white, yellow and red running lights usually cast a positive glow on my petty problems.

But that night it didn't work.

We continued our desultory pilgrimage of contrition. I was miserable: Ibiza was no fun without my girlfriend.

Finally we dropped into Amnesia, a hard-core techno club off the road to San Antonio, where the dance floor shook with heavy bass and everyone in the club seemed to be tripping. Amnesia is famous for Espuma, the foam parties. Three nights a week, a giant chrome cannon -- like a 19th century naval artillery piece -- shoots out a steady stream of white bubble foam that is actually a carbon dioxide-based flame-retardant, similar to a home fire extinguisher. The foam, in mounds six feet high, envelops the dance floor for hours. (I have seen two girls pulled from the foam, momentarily asphyxiated.)

The crowd, as the cannon began firing ejaculatory streams of foam, started whooping, chanting, reveling. Boys went shirtless. Girls went topless. The disc jockey kept shouting, "Spuma, spuma, spuma!" Viewing the white bubble-coated arms, legs, torsos, breasts, faces and hair swirling around the dance floor, I felt I was watching a washing machine, with the dial set on "mosh." But the crowd of Italians, Germans, French, Dutch and Spanish loved it.

Then we saw, coming through the foam -- or did the foam actually part? -- a navel, with a gold hoop dangling from a gentle mound of stomach above the seam of white jeans. This was the navel of Chris' desire. Isabella was here. Walking fast. Toward us.

I drove home alone, content, for all was well with the universe again. Amends had been made, contrition offered, absolution was now mine. At home was my girlfriend, and I would be back in favor, and the finest days of summer were ahead of me.

Chris had apologized to Isabella. Then she bit him on the stomach.

They were together for the rest of the summer.