March 5, 2007--Monday On Mallorca: "Hoy, Aquí"

I always suspected that one reason I have never lived abroad is because I have such difficulty learning new languages. Unable to speak French or German or Spanish, feeling incapable of learning any of these with enough proficiency to converse with anyone except a waiter (and at times my inadequacy with even restaurant-German has meant I once needed to eat fried finches for dinner) causes me to worry about feeling isolated and under-stimulated. Much less being able to tell a doctor where it hurts (I have stories about that too which I will spare you).

So, when we impulsively bought a flat on Mallorca, a small island right in the middle of the Mediterranean, closer to Algeria than Barcelona, thankfully I did not allow my language phobia to interfere with the romantic or real estate impulse.

Some of this anxiety and inability to acquire, in this case, Spanish (forget any thoughts about Mallorquin, except maybe Bon Dia) I am certain derives from my disastrous experience struggling with French during high school. Not only were we forced to use a French chemistry text as our reader since I was enrolled in a technical school (no fancy literature for us—we were being prepped to build bridges) and not only had none of us yet studied chemistry in English (which would have at least been some help), but my teacher, I’ll name him so he can gone down in historic infamy, Emile Tron was a brute and was thus not the best person to lean anything from, especially chemistry in French. There is no other way to put it—he was a brute. Whenever any of us would stammer or mispronounce a word (frequently in my case), he would order the other students surrounding you (me) to, “Give him a treatment boys!” Which meant flail away at the poor stammerer with fists and elbows.

If there was any thought or educational philosophy behind Mr. Tron’s pedagogy beyond suppressed homoerotic sadism, even as I became an educator myself, I have never encountered anything to contradict that “treatments” of this kind will assure that the victims, because that is what we were, will ever relax enough when overseas to learn much more of the local language than is necessary to order coffee in the morning.

On Mallorca this has been true for me for the seven years we have been coming here. My case proves the theory—I am quite capable of getting my cortados every day. As a matter of fact, I had two this morning. But that’s pretty much it.

I have managed to avoid feelings of social isolation by developing a series of friendships with expats and Mallorcans who speak English. For example, there is Jennie, from the middle of England who first came to the island 17 years ago as a for-hire crew member for some of the legendary yachts that ply the waters of the Mediterranean—she now maintains villas and flats for absentee owners. There is her husband Sebastian, who is Mallorcan; and though from a family of esteemed physicians, he avoided too much schooling and instead until his early 30s played tennis and soccer professionally (including coaching the very-young Rafael Nadal), and now is a successful landscaper and contractor.

Then there is another Sebastian, this one from Cologne, an architect, and his wife Aurora, from the Philippines, a designer and artist. Both retired in their middle 40s after building and selling more than 350 villas on Mallorca; and they now divide their time between the island, New York City, where Aurora’s sister lives, and Ecuador, where Sebastian and his family own many thousands of hectares of rainforest where, among other things, they grow bamboo in an environmentally sustainable way.

Karin and Werner alternate months between Hamburg and a villa perched so high on the cliffs of Mallorca that they can see the full sweep of the sun as it traverses the sea and sky. He owns a consumer electronic business that is so successful that it allows them to live in this sumptuous way while remaining as unpretentious and joyous as if they just met as struggling, youthful lovers—this latter quality they still very much retain.

There are also Victor and Lynn, our neighbors, from Leistershire, he an accountant, she a social worker, who have had a flat on Mallorca for almost 30 years and thus know all the stories and gossip about the part-time residents and, equally important, steer us toward out-of-the-way haunts where the fish is freshest and all the meat is cooked on open wood fires. Of course to get to these places it would be good to have a four-wheel drive vehicles; to get home, after carafes of raw, young wine, it would be good to have a chauffer.

And there are Juan and his wife Antonia, he from Cuba and she the daughter of the legendary El Oso (the Bear), who was asked in 1927 by the then King of Spain to open a restaurant in our town. At that time it was a very isolated fishing village but one the king and his friends came to each August to fish. There was a modest place to sleep, a small hotel that El Oso owned, but no good place to eat. Nothing fit for a king! So he, who was a huge man and just as jovial, was “encouraged” by the king to add a restaurant to his hostal, and, as some claim, with royal subsides, opened the Miramar Restaurant. And until today, owned now by his daughter Antonia and her husband Juan, and soon to be taken over by their son, Horado, it is superb. If Michelin were to write about it they should say—Worthy of a trip.

Every time we visit, as if we are adopted members of their sprawling extended family, they make a special dinner for us and invite all of their relatives. Last June, we were swept into the christening celebration for their first grandchildren, the twins Carmen and Lorenzo; and after the ceremony in the small stone church just up the street from Miramar, the 30 of us, as if in a procession, ambled with linked arms, down to it, where we sat together at an immense table and devoured, among many other delights, crackling shanks of lamb, hacked from the bone, and drizzled with a honey-mint sauce that would make us all rich if we could bottle and sell it—all from Juan’s finca.

So in spite of not knowing much Spanish, we are not short of acquaintances and friends. But since we cannot meaningfully converse with local residence who speak only Spanish, much less true Mallorcans who speak almost as little Spanish as we, preferring their own exclusive and allusive Mallorquine (no one knows for sure its linguistic history), we still at times, though we are more and more feeling blended into the life of the port, we still sometimes feel like visitors.

Thus, as a way to enter more into the lives of villagers who we are likely never to get to know, we make up stories about them, the people we see every day, smile and nod greetings to, but with whom we remain in other ways mute.

There is someone we have named Señor Hierbas, after the green liqueur made on Mallorca, which allegedly contains all of the 500 or 50 or so herbs that are indigenous to the island. Who cares how many! What matters is that it a delightful intoxicant with which he begins each day. We find him mornings, always at the same table which is informally reserved for some of the elderly men of the village who gather at La Consigna for coffee or something stronger.

When we first came to the port Señor Hierbas was still working, it seemed to us as a ship’s carpenter because we would see him rummaging around with hammers and chisels among the boats of the fishing fleet. If we walked by La Consigna in the late afternoon, we would find him at his familiar table, mostly alone at that time of day. And on Sundays we would occasionally notice him, again always by himself, wandering along the waterfront, with his head down, as it always is, as if deep in thought, perhaps talking to himself, and smoking, always smoking.

We do not consider a visit to have properly begun until we see him. So you can imagine our distress this time when we were back on the island for ten days and had not as yet encountered him. We do not know his real name nor does our inadequate Spanish enable us to describe him adequately in order to ask anyone if he is all right, or . . . .

And then thankfully there he was. On his bicycle, weaving his way up and down the hills that rise from the harbor and lead to the fishermen’s cottages that fill the backstreets. Still with his head lowered, still dangling a cigarette. We were relived to see him. Our visit could now commence. But we also noticed that behind the seat of his bicycle he had crafted and installed a wooden basket in which he was carrying a few copies of Diario Mallorca. Other than noting how well built and perfectly sized the basket was for the job we did not wonder what he was up to—we were just happy to see him appearing to be so well.

But when we spotted him again a few days later, peddling about, still with the basket half-filled with newspapers, we needed to know what he was doing. Fine, he was healthy and alive, that was most important, but what was this about?

In a town such as Puerto Andratx, there is no way to ask anyone about something of this kind, something seemingly so eccentric—I suspect even if we spoke perfect Spanish and even some Mallorquin it would not be acceptable to ask about anything so personal. And there is less sanction for us to consider following him, even from a discrete distance, because the distances are such in such a place are so limited as to defy discretion. Thus we were left to our imaginations.

He must, we thought, be delivering the morning papers. But, we thought, since he appeared to carry so few—ten, twelve?—that whatever pittance he might make from this would not pay for even a single morning Hierbas. Thus, we thought, he must be doing this as an act of kindness. He must be taking papers to the many widows of fishermen who no longer can walk the steep hill from their houses to the shop at the end of the port where papers are sold. Rona thought that not only doesn’t he make much from doing this, but don’t you think he buys the papers himself and distributes them without charge to all these home-bound señoras? I like Rona’s story.

There are many such widows in town. The sea, when stormy, is unforgiving and many men have been lost when plying their heavy nets in turbulent waters. Including an elderly woman, bent almost in half from, we assume, osteoporosis, who laboriously makes her way each morning down the steep hill from where she lives, by La Consigna where we sit with our coffees, to the small market where she shops for oranges and cheese and water, and then back again. She is tiny and frail and it takes her quite some time to make this round trip. She supports herself by leaning on the shopping cart that she pushes along halting step by step.

We do not know that she is in fact the widow of a fisherman lost at sea; but that is the story we have made up, again, since we are not capable of learning the truth about her life. We think he perished, swept off the heaving deck, at least two decades ago. Maybe, even longer than that. We think it may have been so long ago that it was before they had the chance to have children. So, we imagine, she is alone in the world, still mourning the boy she loved and married and then lost.

We are now convinced that we are right about the story of her life because just two weeks ago, though again resisting the temptation to follow her home one morning to see where she actually lives, as we were parking our car up in the hills among the fishermen’s cottages, we by chance saw her returning to her house. It is a charming place, perfectly maintained, in a small garden full of fruit trees and flowers.

So after that, without doing so all that consciously, we began to look for places to park near her home perhaps so we could, without appearing to, by observing her, learn more. Enough to add more fuel to our imaginations. And over time we did observe a few more things, without I hope being inappropriate, that allowed us to add to the story about her life that we had been shaping.

We noticed, for example, that though it was only late February the air was beginning to heat up so much by early afternoon that one would expect that by the evening she would open some of her shutters in order to bring cool air into her cottage. But none ever appeared to be open—even much later in the day. She seemed to live sealed up in her house, cut off to the world outside except during her morning trips to the bodega. Rona surmised that this was yet more evidence that she had chosen a life saturated by memories of earlier, happier times, when the world for her was full of love and promise, and that she had opted to live in this hermetic and mournful way in order to close off as much as possible the distractions of contemporary life in the port. So she could remember and honor her love. Again, I like Rona’s version of her story.

Finally, there is the Mallorcan man who moves between cafés in the morning. Beside the places that serve what Karin, our friend from Hamburg calls “important coffee”--expensive cappuccinos where the steamed milk is so consistently perfect and solid that it rises at least an inch above the rim of the cup and on its foamy top they artistically drizzle some liquid chocolate, in addition to these places that cater to the wealthy third- and fourth-home owners, there are two cafés where locals feel welcome and where the coffee is less fancy and more affordable—La Consigna and Bar Central.

Pretty much everyone chooses one or the other for coffee and then remains loyal to it year after year. It becomes quite a local scandal and subject to years of gossip if someone abandons La Consigna for Bar Central or vice versa. So it is beyond unusual that this man, who we haven’t as yet assigned a name to, moves casually from one to the other. We are loyal to La Consigna and see him there a few days a week. On other days we notice him at the rivalrous Bar Central, a mere hundred meters away. He appears to be comfortable at either place, and they seem comfortable with his idiosyncratic alternations.

He speaks only Mallorquin and we are thus again forced to make up a story about him. I am convinced that because of his apparent age, at least 80, and a pronounced limp which could only, I fancy, have been caused during a war, that he was wounded in the 1930s as a Republican partisan fighter in the Spanish Civil War, while resisting the oppression of the forces loyal to Franco. Though Mallorca is hundreds of miles off the Spanish coast this war was fought ferociously here and many were killed and wounded. Including, I am sure, our café friend.

Over the years he began to acknowledge us with a nod on those mornings when he came to La Consigna. And when we would walk by Bar Central and see him there he would nod to us as well. Then at last, during this visit, he began actually to speak to us. Again, though we have no language at all in common, he would each day call out a few words to us. The same ones.

On Friday, for example, he was at his usual table at Bar Central; and when we passed by, after having our cortados at La Consigna, he nodded a greeting and, pointing to his table, said, “Hoy, aquí"; and then pointing up the street toward La Consigna, with a grin that exposed all of his many gold teeth, added, “Mañana, allí.”

We do know enough Spanish to understand these four words, and they are enough to begin to build some sort of a relationship. And thus we are beginning to feel when we are here that we belong.