June 25, 2007--Monday On Mallorca: On Being American

We closed on the purchase of our flat on Mallorca on August 8, 2001. Exactly 34 days before September 11, 2001.

Like many others, after recovering from the initial trauma (the first plane to strike the World Trade Center flew very fast just above our terrace in Manhattan—we were at the time standing out on it checking the weather), after the mourning and anger began to recede, again like many others, we wondered if we would ever again feel comfortable flying in an airplane. In our specific case, this meant would we ever be able to be comfortable with the nine hours of flying required to get to our glimmering new place perched on a cliff high above the Mediterranean. It was supposed to be a sanctuary of tranquilo not a place that we would have to endure anxiety and fear to reach.

On September 12th we received an email from the manager of our Spanish bank, Senior S____. We barely knew him; he knew us even less. We needed a Spanish account into which to transfer dollars and then convert them to pesetas before withdrawing the millions of them required to buy the flat. We had met him casually just one time—on the morning of August 8th when we went to Bancaja in Peguera to pick up a few checks and a literal suitcase of cash.

But his email was written to us as if we had been lifelong friends. In it he expressed sadness about what had happened in New York; and since he knew we lived downtown, shared his concerns about our personal circumstances, hoping that we were as well as could be expected in such horrific circumstances. He also wrote to tell us that there were plans to hold a memorial and prayer service on the beach in Palma, the island’s capital; and a few days later he wrote again to report about the turnout—at least 10,000 he said—and the outpouring of sympathy, emotion, and solidarity with the American people. This in spite of the fact that very, very few Americans come to Mallorca, all the more reason why his wishes and reports made us feel a part of a world community.

After two months we were secure enough about flying, and still feeling his and other Mallorquins’ long distance embrace, that we made plans to go there and stay for the first time in our flat.

There were some difficult moments—for example, we had underestimated the effect that having a place so close by the sea would have on the terrace plants, the exterior walls, and especially on the fabrics within an apartment shuttered for months and thus unaired, that we needed very quickly to find a painter, replace some foundation plants, and get everything out into the abundant sun to dry out. All this while severely jet-lagged and in spite of having very, very little Spanish. Barely un poquito. And did I mention that the telephone in the flat didn’t work nor did our American cell phone—what did I know about Sim cards?

But just above us, anchored higher up on the cliff side, were blessedly the Thomases. As it turned out a wonderful German couple from Hamburg who had been coming to Mallorca for decades and whose new villa had just been totally burglarized—every stitch of their furniture, all electronics, their art work, plants, and even the electric stove-top had been surgically removed. So in retrospect, considering what they had hours before discovered, Karin’s melodious “Hellooo” of welcome was remarkable. They still had a key to their old flat in Apartvillas, our complex of mini-villas, and had let themselves into it as a place to stay while haggling with the police, insurance people, and figuring out what next to do.

They had heard through the very-reliable local grapevine that an American couple had bought a flat in the area; and from our grumbling and moaning on the terrace about our own frustrations, they assumed correctly that we were that couple. So their Hellooo of welcome was in part derived from that knowledge and, we soon learned, from their sense that we could benefit from some immediate assistance and nurturing. During the next few days they supplied an abundance of both, brushing aside our offers to try to be helpful to them, which we felt was remarkable considering that their circumstances were in truth much more upsetting and dire than ours.

And we also later learned, though they until this day are among the most generous and optimistic people we have ever encountered, that they had been extra-concerned about us because they knew that we were Americans and, because of that, extra-compassionate about what they presumed we had recently experienced. As a post-World War II baby and as a Jewish person who had lost many relatives in The Camps, I am reluctant to ashamedly admit now that this was not what I expected from Germans of their generation.

(And I must quickly add that among the many other things we learned about the Thomases as the years proceeded was how much their families too had suffered under Nazism and how they despised Hitler and all that he and his henchmen perpetrated.)

But things about being American changed.

During that first visit and the one a few months later, any time someone was able to make the distinction between British and American English--understandable most couldn’t—we felt waves of empathy and solidarity. We had done nothing personally to deserve that but understood. Something terrible did happen to America, most in the world knew that; and if we were to be the recipients of that shared rage and grief, it felt good and, truthfully, comforting to be able to do so.

Later, though, after America, we, preemptively invaded Iraq, against the best advice of most sympathetic Europeans, we came to share as well some of that collective responsibility. There were few incidents, but enough to make us feel unfairly treated—didn’t they realize that we too opposed the war, hated our government for causing it, and that we, likely more than they, would suffer the long-term consequences?

But after one incident that should have been trivial—a dispute over a parking space which in this small place to some is never in fact trivial—when the other driver who turned out to be British spat at us, though we were clearly in the right, “Just like an American! Thinking you can throw your weight around in the world.” This from one of our Iraq allies! I was raging but quickly, with Rona’s ministerings calmed down and realized if up to that point I had been happy to accept the world’s collective embraces for something that I had not directly suffered, I would now have to endure these epithets, equally for something for which I was only collectively responsible. But responsible nonetheless.

There were a few other incidents of personal anti-Americanism; but as with so many things, over time, these diminished in number and intensity as people began to take the war for granted—that it would be endless, that there was nothing much any of us could do to stop it. And so we and they slumped back into political passivity and once again thought primarily about the sybaritic pleasures supplied to us daily by the Sea, the sun, the air, the food, the wine, and good companionship--including with us Americanos.

In fact, we soon began to become local exotics.

Here there are mainly “native” Mallorquins (which I suppose means at the minimum that your great grandparents were born here), expatriates (mainly British and German), second or third or fourth homeowners (again mainly Germans and Brits), tourists (still English and . . .), and regular, intermittent residents (us, in this case, joining the British and Deutsch frequent visitors).

To us they are the exotics, especially the Mallorquins with their own unintelligible language, foods, music, and customs. But we are finding that we serve the same purpose for them. Partly because the island is small and not much either changes or, for that matter, happens, anything that seems new and different is in hot demand. If only as something to speculate and gossip about.

We got a clear sense of this latter reality when leaving a familiar restaurant the other night with a “doggy bag” of uneaten fish and vegetables. The waitress who brought it to us, new this visit, said, in simple enough Spanish that even I could understand (I’ll translate), “You’ll have this for lunch tomorrow up in La Mola?”

Nothing so unusual about that, except the reference to La Mola, the craggy rock on which our flat is perched. How did she know that—where we lived? We may have some years ago casually mentioned this to the owner of the restaurant with whom we had become acquainted, but this very new waitress, from Ecuador no less, knew this about us! And it is not a tiny restaurant with just six tables—it is a sprawling place that has 40 or 50 tables spread out along the harbor front—and so they have literally hundreds of customers a day.

It made us wonder what got talked about during the break between lunch and dinner. There is nothing that special about us to talk about that they could possibly know since our Spanish is still so limited. What could we possibly have told them about us? Except, ah, except that we are Americans and make the long twelve-hour journey to get here when if all we were interested in was sun and sand Florida would be so much closer.