SCOTS Project - www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk

Document : 1440
Title    : Mountain Music - Chapters 1-4
Author(s): Sheila Mackay

Copyright holder(s): Sheila Mackay

Text

Prelude

Sineu & the Market Towns

SINEU IS A SCINTILLATING PLACE, AT LEAST ON WEDNESDAY MARKET days. Its
honeyed stones appear gilded when the world and his wife are there, moving
from shadow to illumination and colour, vivaciously in step with the
dance.

Loudspeakers blare a throbbing mixture of Spanish pop and flamenco. Gypsies
hiss their wares. Encircled by beaten copperware, a voluminous señora
nonchalantly chews gum as she barters. Exotic blue-black Sengali men,
handsome as stallions, proffer electronic goods, embroidered leatherware
and hand-made stringed instruments from prime position stalls.

The Sengalis appear Othello-like beside smaller, swarthy Mallorcan
stallholders selling traditional market goods: olives, almonds, farm
implements, straw ware, fruits, vegetables, cottons and all the
accoutrements anyone could possibly need to set up a smallholding.
Bric-a-brac stalls display antique bowls and other people's throwaways,
which might do nicely in a corner cabinet. Here are local olives from
enormous vats, orange, lemon and olive trees, and vines ready for planting.
Over there, caged birds, and in the animal section, you can buy anything
from a goat to a donkey.

Sineu, one of the island's market towns, was once the agrarian centre of
the Mallorcan universe with its own royal palace. Jaime II, Mallorca's
inspired king at the end of the thirteenth century, developed the towns of
the plains as production centres and depositories for the island's fabulous
produce: Sineu, Inca, Arta, Alcudia, Binissalem, Petra, Algayda and the
others. But Sineu was the King's favourite. None of the other towns boasts
a lion rampant on a monumental plinth.

The lion once looked down on desert caravans arriving from Timbuctu to
trade gold from the distant kingdom of Mali which the Mallorcan king melted
down into the real of 1309. The real's carats rivalled even the prestigious
Venetian ducado as well as the Florentine florin and Parisian denier.

Produce was shipped out of the coastal ports through vigorous trading
routes opened up with the Levant and North Africa. Mallorca was a trading
force to be reckoned with in those days, its people less insular than they
are today. By all accounts Jaime II was a far-sighted and gifted ruler who
introduced the island to democracy, to agricultural and commercial
improvements and ensured farm workers a minimum wage and a parcel of land.
Influenced by Ramon Llull, the great medieval poet, philosopher and
Arabist, whose patron was the King himself, Jaime II's court reflected the
best that contemporary culture could offer. Llull's name is still revered
in Catalunya and by philosophers the world over. You'll find institutions
and streets named after him in Palma and most of the island towns. The
freeing of slaves, the limitation of aristocratic privilege, the
establishment of free trade and home ownership, the regulation of military
service and the administration of justice were the primary concerns of the
1230 Mallorcan Cartas de Franquicias. Benefits like these, awarded by the
Franquicias, laid the foundation of new communities which owned the
cultivatable lands, in exchange for small tax payments, and assured their
inhabitants a fixed wage. They owned their own homes and enjoyed free and
liberal use of water, firewood and grazing lands. By the fourteenth century
the king's territories were productive earthly paradises.

At a cornucopic vegetable stall, an ebullient young Mallorcan offers me a
Spanish lesson:

'Espinacas.' Holding up a bundle of dewy green leaves.

'Medio kilo, por favor.' 

Then a bunch of plump green beans:

'Judias verdes,' he smiles as I repeat: 'Hoodias berdee'.

The lesson continues, my basket fills, and so pleased is he with our joint
effort that he throws in extra mandarins as a reward.

Wandering the market, warm sun easing my back, the prospect of returning to
Scotland in December was something I preferred not to think about. But I
was expected in Edinburgh before Christmas. There, the great Norwegian pine
tree would stand at the top of the Mound, illuminating the northern
darkness with hundreds of white fairy lights. Consumerism would be rife in
Princes Street shops and there would be scarcely room to move in Jenners
Christmas bazaar which would resemble a gigantic Victorian greetings
card... its own Christmas tree chittering inanely with mechanical birds.

My shopping spree would be here and now, at Sineu. Sugared almonds were a
must. What memories their sweet kernels would hold during short dark
Edinburgh days. Soon several bags were mine, delicately coloured in pastel
pinks and green, and several turrones, Catalunya's marzipan-based festive
treat.

Pael's stall was opposite the almond section. He was around twenty,
luminescent as a black tulip. His wares were African: embroidered leather
belts, bags, batik and the like. I bartered for a belt. Pael and his
colleagues took me aback at first, just as they would had they appeared in
the markets of Berwick-upon-Tweed or Lanark. Sengalese men make their way
north every year through Tunis, cross at Gibraltar and radiate through
France and Spain, to eke out a living from markets like this one today.
They are gradually being accepted as landworkers round the market towns as
prosperity based on tourism increasingly frees Mallorcans from the land.

We blethered in French, our only common language. He spoke of an arduous
journey, many months long, over deserts, dusty roads and the sea itself, to
get to Palma where he lives now in a barrio with other Sengali men. Later,
I bought UV sunglasses from an older man who told me he had a wife and
several children back home and that it would be one year and one month
before he could go back. He was counting the days. His eyes seemed sad and
soulful, though I knew cynics would say 'it was all put on' and that what
the Sengalis really hoped for were Spanish wives and girlfriends. He
tempted me with a magnificent necklace of leather, brass and copper, fit
for a princess, and a small stringed instrument like a lute made from a
gourd decorated with tiny cowrie shells. The reappearance of Africans is a
recent phenomenon, though their dark vivacity was a feature of ancient
Mediterranean markets.

In 1281 Mallorcan ships sailed to the British Isles and by the early
fourteenth century commercial traffic from England, Flanders and Paris came
south by Montpelier or Perpignan bound for the territories of the sultans
of Magreb, and crossed through the Balearic ports to Genoa, Tuscany and
Venice. Strategically located between Europe, North Africa and the Levant,
Mallorca was known as the 'the turning point'.

The lion still dominates a sun-filled world: Sineu's medieval Plaza de San
Marco. Though its view has changed somewhat, it's still as fine a lion as
the legendary beasts of Venice. Today the base of the plinth is draped with
bolts of coloured fabrics: acid-green, purple, orange, yellow and black. A
line of tersely coloured satin knickers hangs incongruously, like prayer
flags, on a string below.

The lion commands the plaza in front of the octagonal Romanesque church
built, like the square itself, from stones the colour of pale honey.
Standing above the melee of the market it seems to symbolise Mallorca's
history and its key role within the ancient Mediterranean trading world.
The identity of the Mallorcan people has been shaped by successive
invasions. First came the Greeks, followed by Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals,
Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards and, in recent times, tourists. Nowadays the
islanders bask in new-found prosperity, mainly derived from tourism and
they display their ancestral heritage and abundant produce every Wednesday
at the Sineu market.


A FEW MILES FROM SINEU, MARY'S HOUSE, CA NA MARIA, STANDS ON a ridge above
the wide plain of Inca and the mystical mountain backdrop of the High
Sierras. The other side of the mountains I knew well, having recovered from
a car accident there several years before. The experience which changed my
life. And I had returned to Mallorca again and again. The plain and its
market towns, though, were new territory.

Ca Na Maria had a forlorn appearance in the photographs Mary showed me when
she urged me to stay there. Like a small dude ranch set in barren
scrubland. Frankly, I cared little. I reassured myself that Mallorca would
be more clement than Scotland in the winter as I scraped thick ice off my
car windows and melted out its door locks before heading for Glasgow
airport. As I would discover, this new retreat offered unexpected pleasures
and tasks.

Above all I felt released from the magnetic pull of the mountains.

Down the hilly road to town, the hedgerows burgeon with wild flowers and
shrubs. Carob trees drop leather-brown pods into a potpourri scatter of
scarlet rosehips and tiny holm oak acorns on the road. John the Baptist
survived forty days and nights in the desert on the sparse, date-like
deliciousness of carob (St John's Bread) with a few locusts thrown in.
Beyond the drystone dykes, almond orchards display darkly slender trees,
bare now, against pistachio and emerald green chequerboard swards. Here and
there, rough land harbours scrubby hawthorn, holly, rosemary and broom.
Havens for thrushes, warblers, finches, magpies and the exotically crested
hoopoe. Today all sing bel canto in bright sunlight.

Mary is one of a handful of foreigners with houses here. Smallholdings
along the road to town belong to local folk and to Palma people who arrive
on Friday afternoon and depart on Sunday or Monday morning. Most of the
orchards include a random rubble building of traditional design. Sometimes
it is a substantial house, or, at least, an outbuilding large enough to
contain implements or animals. Weekends present a pastoral idyll of small
groups working away on the land, the air filled with the voices of children
and the barking of dogs. By the end of the year, most of the weed encrusted
orchard swards have been grazed by flocks of sheep or pigs and turned over
by a mechanical plough to reveal dark red glistening clods, ready for
spring grass planting.

They drive saloon cars or designer jeeps, wear boutique country-clothes.
These Palmesanos have bought or inherited their rich parcels and few come
in time to harvest the almonds and figs, to prune the trees, to clear the
earth of weeds, sorrel, grass and lady's mantle. Their holdings look
unkempt. Unpruned, lichen-laden almond limbs, encrusted with velvety nuts,
mark a sky-blue manuscript with stacatto-like notes. Stocks of last year's
asphodel straggle woodenly amongst dried fennel heads and thistles. 

By contrast, an orchard like Señor Moll's is a model of orderliness. Local
folk do their work as it should be done. On time. The time of the season.
Like other neighbours, he has harvested his almonds in the traditional
manner, hitting the branches, click-click, with a stout bamboo pole, until
the dark darlings scatter onto the green plastic net, vividly spread below
the trees. His pigs have grazed the ground clean of insects and undergrowth
and the plough has done its work, so that now - today - the time has come
to prune gnarled limbs.

'Bon dia,' calls Señor Moll in Catalan. Everyone here acknowledges anybody
who passes on the other side of a drystone dyke.

'Hola! Buenos dias.' I'm impressed to see such a swarthy, well-set man so
precariously balanced on one of his almond trees, brandishing the saw that
does its work so expertly in his hands. Piles of sawn-off limbs, flayed
like helpless living things, lie scattered, ready to be gathered up into
bundles of kindling by the teenage son who halts his lusty taunting until
I've passed out of earshot.

The pigs are in the next orchard. I grew fond of them and often stopped en
route from the town back to Ca Na Maria to give them a titbit from my
shopping basket. These are pigs in clover. Pigs as pigs should be. Two
mothers and two litters of squeaking, dancing piglets, clean and pinkly
experiencing the delights of the land. When I stop by the wall, the two
matronly sows snort a signal to their broods to stand still. Spryly they
check me out and then snort the signal that sends them stampeding to the
wall where all enjoy communing and munching. No wonder jamon tastes so good
here.

Here, on the other side of the mountains, I discovered a landscape and
culture so different from the tourist invaded mountain towns, that it felt
like another country. Here almond trees proliferate in well-tended
orchards, with only occasional olive or citrus trees, so prevalent in the
north. In the town near Ca Na Maria, there are no signs of tourism. Not
even a small hotel, or a taxi, or menus translated into German and English.
Yet not so far away, the coastal towns of C'an Picafort and Puerto
Pollensa, boast 'Wiener Schnitzel' and 'Fish and Chips' on hundreds of
hoardings. Here a visitor is someone to be remarked on. I know this from
the turning heads of old men gathered at a corner of the square and from
the curious gaze of children as I pass. 

My heart was soon lost to this town which, on the dusty surface of my
arrival appeared unpromising, closed-up and provincial. It was a town which
had not yet absorbed tourists clad for trips to the beach. It felt more
appropriate to wear trousers or a skirt. It was still the sort of place
where women over forty looked matronly, their hair neatly coiffed and
permed, their clothes subdued. The older men invariably wore cardigans with
cap or beret and pottered about the main street in the comfort of carpet
slippers. Now, in November, all wore warm clothing, even in what I
considered a heatwave.

'Hace frio,' people would murmur. 'Don't you feel the cold?'


Ca Na Maria was an abandoned farm building. Now, converted to domestic use,
it consists of two main rooms: a kitchen and bedroom with bathroom off, and
a 'bothy' with its own entrances from the garden or the terrace at the
back. The floors have been tiled, the walls painted white and the doors
restored. On warm nights the louvred shutters cut out light and let in air.
Mary has hung traditional Mallorcan lace curtains over the French-style
windows which are closed on cooler nights and which protect against the
heat of the day.

In the mountain-enclosed town where I recovered from the car accident,
sunset was discernible only when the grey and silver-ochre ridge of Teix
turned golden-red, as if its surface had been rubbed with rouge. Here, from
my seat on the terrace, I watch the entire mountain range - Mayor,
Massenella and Tomir - turn violet under a flaming sky.


One day when I was pottering about the lanes, a sound primitive and strange
as a banshee's call, rising from a nearby orchard, glued me to my tracks.
Swooping, guttural cadences interspersed with arcane yodels masked the
songs of the birds.

What on earth?

Then, raising a cloud of dust, sheep rampaged on drumming hooves towards me
under the Argus-eye of a mean-looking dog which, mercifully, headed off the
flock into a field before it pinned me to a dyke. All fell silent. The
singing shepherdess, who stood amply in front of me as the dust settled,
extended a hand. All the warmth of the Mediterranean lay in her grasp as
she introduced herself. A large bashed sunhat protected Elena Bonet's
polished-apple face, her eyes bright as dark olives. As the uncanny hound
held to her heels I recalled a cryptic footnote in a guide book: 'Mallorcan
dogs sound fierce but love their owners'.

Then I remembered. Mary had mentioned Elena's singing in her last letter:
'The noise might sound disturbing until you meet Elena. Pero and Elena work
the farm next to Ca Na Maria'. Elena's strange ululation was inseparable
from her shepherding; something extraordmary now, that was once universal,
like a primitive form of flamenco soaring in the Mediterranean landscape.

After this initial meeting, Elena always stopped for a chat as she guided
the flock in its daily round of grazing the orchards up to a kilometre
beyond her farm. I joked that it would take me five years to learn Spanish.


'And Mallorcan ... ten years,' was her pertinent reply.


How closed up everything is in town, yet it is past siesta. The long
sloping streets leading to the main road, and rising just as steeply out on
the other side, are strangely silent. Through soft-focussed eyes, the
piling up of small houses resembles some early Cubist painting: soft-brown,
eau-de-nil, ochre and blue. The town was once two communities, each
operating from its own high hill, separated by the valley. Several
centuries ago a 'dangerous wolf' menaced both places and the people joined
forces to fend it off. When this was achieved they declared that in future
there would be only one town. When Elena's daughter Luisa told me this I
understood why there was a square, a stone cross and a church on both sides
of the town.

People come and go carrying bundles, their shadows cast long and dark in
the afternoon sun: 'Hola, buenas tardes.' Everyone I pass acknowledges me.
The mini-market is open and Señor Garcia greets me from the checkout,
sending his assistant into convulsions over his linguistic confusion:

'Hola, comment allez-vous, Madame?'

'Muy bien, gracias,' I reply determinedly in Spanish. Señor Garcia likes
to use his school-learned French which was of great assistance when I first
arrived in town. But now I am determinedly tuned to Spanish.

But where is everyone? Leaving the shop I see what I take, at first, to be
a colourful and festive procession coming down the Carrer Esglesia. As the
group approaches, I realise that it is only the children of the town,
wearing track suits in purple, pink, yellow and blue, like children nearly
everywhere nowadays. The end of the school day revives the town. Mothers
with babies and toddlers soon emerge to meet them and suddenly everyone is
going about their late afternoon business.

This afternoon I have decided to act on my invitation to visit Elena
Bonet's daughter, Luisa, who lives in one of the sloping streets of artisan
houses and speaks English. Luisa worked in a travel agency in Palma before
her son was born earlier in the year. I ring the bell. She opens an
upstairs shutter and a moment later stands at the door to welcome me.

'My Mother told me about you. She said you were a writer.' At this, Luisa
looked me up and down, an edge of doubt in her voice, and I wondered what
it was about my appearance that differed from her image of the British
woman writer abroad. She welcomed me into a cool hall lined in
white-and-grey marble. She was recognisably Elena's daughter, despite her
urban-European gear: purple-velour monogrammed blouson, leotard and ankle
boots. 

Now my preconceptions were turned upside-down. I suppose I expected her
house to follow traditional style with some late-twentieth century
accretions. A sound-system perhaps, certainly a television. Yes, these were
in evidence. But I wasn't prepared for the shock of the new as Luisa led me
into a post-modern interior. I could scarcely believe my eyes.

'Everything is white and black,' I wrote to Mary later. 'The entire house
is tiled in white, the walls are white with white marble dados edged in
black. It is open-plan, the whole space lit by a cupola, spotless and
dazzling. A chrome and glass dining table with six black Mackintosh-style
chairs dominates the reception/dining room. The telephone is a
designer-accessory on another chrome and glass side-table under a stylish
plant. Elegant black-and-white framed architectural prints line the walls
of the high-tech staircase which ends in a balcony surrounded by plain
white metal railings. This house would not disgrace the pages of "World of
Interiors".'

As it was, I followed Luisa upstairs, subdued. Perhaps she had picked up my
astonishment, for she said: 'Many people in our town find our house
strange. Though young couples engaged to be married visit us, to see it for
themselves. They want modern things too.' My mind struggled to imagine the
earth-mother Elena here, coo-ing over her sweet grandson, Jaime, whom I
meet now, contented in his portable baby-chair. This upstairs room is
sparsely furnished too, with a round table and Jaime's designer playpen as
the main focus.

Two youths sit in front of a pile of papers and books.

'This is Arturo and this is Tolo.' Luisa introduces me and instructs them:
'Say 'it is very nice to meet you'. You are very lucky to have a visitor
from England today.' The boys dissolve with teenage embarrassment. My eyes
catch the title of the largest volume on the table: ' Ingles'.

'An English lesson?' I apologise for interrupting.

'It's an exam really,' Luisa tells me. 'But they will not behave seriously
today and so we will have to repeat it next week. Can you talk with them
for a bit?'

As the baby sucks contentedly on his rusk I take the opportunity to tell
the students that I am Scottish not English. They find this odd since I
speak English. They think it's a joke: 'You speak English but you are not
English?' I avoid going into detail about the Act of Union, and discover
that they fully understand when I explain that Scots are, in fact, in a
similar position to Mallorcans.

'Scotland, like Mallorca, is far from the centre of things. Scots find that
decisions made in London are not helpful. In the Western Islands and the
Highlands of Scotland, a language called Gaelic is spoken which is quite
different from English. I'm learning that Mallorcan is different from
Spanish.'

Mallorcan, a variant of Catalan, was rigorously suppressed under Franco's
regime but has been revived in recent years and is spoken throughout the
island.

Luisa and I talked above the students' heads until Tolo interrupted to say
that he could understand Luisa, but not me. Yet I was a true British
person. Was that not curious? The boys' mischievousness was palpable. Their
naughty implication was that their young teacher was not teaching them true
ingles.

'I speak too fast, that's all,' I said reassuringly, adding that I must
leave. I invited Luisa to come for tea at Ca Na Maria the next day. Luisa
was delighted. She turned to the boys with satisfaction:

'You see, it is just as I taught you. Real British people take tea in the
afternoon.'

The town was all bustle towards dusk. Intriguing noises issued from open
workshops next to the houses all the way up the hill: banging and
hammering, machine stitching and nut cracking. Some stood open, offering
glimpses of piles of potatoes and onions, neat sacks of kindling, heaps of
wood shavings under a carpenter's bench. In one, three matrons sat folding
cotton. In another more women were constructing soft fleecy slippers. It
was disconcerting to hear them answer 'adios' to my 'buenas tardes' until I
realised that they knew that I was leaving town. Word had got round. I was
'la escocesa' who was living next to Pero and Elena's farm.

In the gathering dusk it seemed a long way home. A last glow of sunset
bathing dykes and farm buildings with diffuse, pink-tinged warmth
encouraged me on. But violet-blue darkness descended fast, and before I
could reach the top of the first hill I was dodging flitting bats under the
carob trees and the wind came soughing through the almond orchards. A
whoosh in the hedgerow made me spin round. Only an owl. I might well have
felt afraid, but in truth my thoughts were more taken up with Elena's
daughter's house than with the apparitions of the night. The contrast
between the living styles of the parents and the child couldn't have been
more stark. The parents lived in a sensuous, tumble-me-down dwelling with
earth floors, so ancient that the building had almost become part of the
landscape itself. The daughter's was an Apollonian interior which would
have been perfectly acceptable in London, Paris or New York.


For several days I watched my few neighbours coming and going to tend their
land. The sense of fulfilment exuded by the agricultural area of the
Mallorcan plains is not an accident of nature. Rather it reflects bounty
tamed and improved by sensitive development. The land system here is still
small and beautiful and has worked well for centuries to provide the island
with fruits, vegetables, nuts, meat and poultry with enough left over for
export. Mallorcan olives and almonds are prized by gourmets and judged by
some to be the best in the world, but they struggle to compete with more
lustrous looking produce from elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

But for all that, there appears to be a crisis in island farming. Farm
subsidies are unrealistic. Take Pero and Elena for example. There was a
time when they were younger, worked hard to produce crops and raise flocks
of sheep and looked forward to slowing-up towards a restful old age. After
that they hoped to live well on what the farm produced. But now it's a
different story. In order to survive Pero has had to take on drystone dyke
work, getting up before dawn and travelling many miles to the mountain
towns, where skills learned over a lifetime are required in tourism-related
ventures and a new sewage plant. And Elena, in her fifties, has had to take
on some of Pero's farm work, in addition to her own. Behind the romantic
idyll of the sunhatted shepherdess lies a harsher reality.

Mallorcan cultivation is still based on the system inherited from the Moors
(a heady mix of Arabs, Syrians, Egyptians and Berbers) who swept up through
southern Spain in the seventh century expansion and stayed for several
centuries. Under the inspiration of Jaime I, Mallorca's conquerer in 1229,
the watering and gardening enterprises initiated by the Moors blossomed.
Harvests of fruits and vegetables follow in continuous round throughout the
year. To counteract erosion the Moors constructed drystone dykes and miles
of straight and undulating terraces for the cultivation of almond on the
plains and olives on the slopes of the High Sierras. They introduced
irrigation. Their wells and channels are still in operation today,
conveying water where it's needed.

The traditional well at Ca Na Maria is fully operational with its
characteristic overhanging wheel and chain which allows pails of
accumulated rainwater to be raised with minimum effort. When the solar
system which supplies Ca Na Maria's electric power is low or
non-operational, the pump cannot pull up water from the cisterna, and the
ancient well provides an essential back-up. 

Los lunes. I write it in my notebook. Monday seems to be the quietest day
of the week in Mallorca's country towns. Does the weekend invasion of
Palmesanos which spreads as far as Pollensa to Port Andraitx so exhaust
local communities running cafes, bars and shops, and provincial relatives
and friends providing hospitality, that the first day of the week has to be
taken at a slower pace? 'Yes,' asserts Luisa. 'This is what happens.'

Los lunes. Even the barber shop is closed. But, later in the week, a
visiting artist entered its portals with understandable trepidation. The
poster hanging behind its closed and curtained facade did little to enhance
his confidence on this first visit to a Spanish barber: six virile young
men with clipped executive haircuts and the incongruous words 'Work Hard to
Play Hard' in English. These were the only English words I ever saw
displayed in the town. My visitor had a hard enough time going to a
Scottish barber, but his maxim was: 'If I'm going to wear a beard I should
look after it.' Scrutinising the shaggy growth thrown back by Ca Na Maria's
bathroom mirror he announced that he would submit to the chair while I did
the shopping.

Leaving him at the barberia, I relished the delights of the fish shop,
their names chalked up on a blackboard: sardinas, sepia, merluza,
langostino. Large plump sardines, grilled with the juice of a lemon freshly
plucked from the garden and garnished with fennel, which grew like a weed
in the orchard, would be tasty. At the panaderia I was relieved to find
crusty baguettes. Typical Mallorcan bread is particularly unyielding to
mature teeth and is usually softened by dipping in olive oil, café con
lêche or Sopas Mallorquinas.

That much achieved, I called in at the barber's to see if my visitor was
ready for a reviving carajillo (coffee with brandy) perhaps? Under the
circumstances? Opening the lace curtained door, as if to a secret world,
the artist rose from a silent queue of seated townsmen engrossed in
magazines to tell me he was next in line. Continuing the shopping,
Magdalena in the mini-market corrected my pronunciation. This would be
helpful in the long term but had the immediate effect of obliterating
nearly all known Spanish from my mind. Gingerly I worked up to her section
Queso y Carnes via the fruit and vegetables which were always a joy: big
tomatoes, tasty and substantial, too ungainly for the uniform packets sold
in British supermarkets, small, shiny purple aubergines, artichokes costing
next-to-nothing, plump green beans, pinkish-green sweet grapes, locally
grown spinach and melons. 

Magdalena could not be avoided: 'Buenos dias, Magdalena. Como esta usted?'

'Muy bien, ' she replied sweetly.

Good. That had passed muster. Now: 'Quiero un medio kilo de queso, por
favor.'

'Kay-so.' She had the kindly patience of a primary school teacher. I
repeated, obedient.

'Frances o Mahones?'

'Mahones, por favor.' I was eager to eat lots of this delicious Balearic
cheese which is produced in both Mallorca and Menorca.

'Es todo?'

'No. Jamon, por favor.'

'Ha-moan,' she enunciated firmly. Then: 'Jamon York o Serrano?' And so it
went on. Magdalena should have been a school teacher.

Back at the barber shop, he had, at last, arrived in the chair. His back
was towards me, his shoulders draped with a huge white towel while el
barbero stippled a large brush, white and foaming, over the bearded area.
The barber nodded like a conspirator through the mirror, indicating that
the operation was going well, so I gently closed the door. I would wait in
the café with the Diario de Mallorca, the outstanding island daily.
Turning to the weather report, I saw that yesterday's temperatures in
Britain registered between nine and nought degrees and I pitied my Scottish
friends living under the Diario's symbol of a black bank of cloud with no
sun peeping above it. The Mediterranean was blessed with full sun symbols
and basked in unseasonably warm temperatures of 22 degrees.

Before long a suave, Don-like figure appeared. It had not all been plain
sailing, he told me. The barber was an artist like himself, he said, and
therefore took a great deal of trouble over everything he did. There had
been the initial lathering and surface trimming. He had risen from the
chair thinking that was that. But el barbero had pushed him back. Then came
a further soaping and cleaning off and again he rose only to meet the
restraining hand once more. This time the barber wielded the straight razor
above his head.

'No, señor, there is still the fine trimming to do. And the pomading.'

'Señor', as I shall call him throughout this book, leaned towards me. Sure
enough he smelled wonderful and we made our way back through the loveliness
of the country lanes towards Ca Na Maria for lunch and siesta.


THE ALARM CLOCK WENT OFF AT EIGHT O'CLOCK. SURFACING INTO consciousness I
fumbled for the now-cold cup of tea deposited some time ago on the bedside
table. Ah, yes, it all came back to me. This was Friday, viernes, the day
señor (soon to be my partner), would soar out of Palma Airport back to
Scotland: dark-grey, wet and cold in mid-November.

He had left on foot, pulling his transitional elderly suitcase on a pair of
wheels into the star-filled dawn. It was almost five kilometres to town.
After he had shouted the final farewell through the bedroom window's
louvred shutters I remained enveloped in the wadded coverlet. Hearing the
squeak of the metal gates of Ca Na Maria's almond orchard, I imagined him
rattling along the stony track past Pero and Elena's ramshackle farm. Yes.
Sure enough their dogs had barked, raising the chorus usually led by the
cockeral at some God-forsaken hour of the morning. Silence fell. He was out
of canine earshot and out of my orbit too now. He had reached the end of
the track and turned into the main road to town. Adjusting to this fact, I
sat up against the polished mahogany bedhead, inlaid with marquetry
depicting Dido and Aeneas. The simple whitewashed room was tinged with the
dusty-pink of dawn. The blue louvred shutters overlooking the orchard and
the garden were slightly open. The sky was slate-blue streaked with almond
pink, the oranges seemed luminescent as black-headed Sardinian warblers
arrived to swoop and dance around split pomegranates dispersed on the
terrace wall.

It would not be so bad. I had work to do: two weeks in which to write...
and try my hand at almond gathering. The activities should combine well, I
told myself briskly sweeping Ca Na Maria's main rooms after breakfast,
pausing as a plane gathered momentum beyond the clouds. Perhaps he was
flying above. My brain processed an image of his lithe-figure, soaring
Icarus-like into a cerulean sky, dragging his battered brown suitcase. We
had decided to spend the coming winter in Mallorca and would return here
together a month from now. 

Señor Bauza, one of my Palma neighbours, came late to harvest his almonds
under my eager-apprentice eyes. I watched him at work over the wall. The
ingathering of the almonds and work on the garden was the quid pro quo -
'only if you feel like it' - attached to Mary's offer of the use of Ca Na
Maria for a month. It was time for me to begin. The orchard ground had been
cleared of tree limbs and hollow wooden asphodel stalks which were piled in
bundles for kindling by the wood pile. I had removed large stones and
placed them near the mini-gardens that Mary's green fingers had established
all round the house. Roses and carnations, orange and lemon trees,
rosemary, lemon balm, marjoram and lavender thrived in a herbarium within
easy reach of the kitchen. Geraniums, planted last year were already
shoulder high. 

Surely it would be easy enough to gather fallen almonds from this cleared
ground? I set forth with the required implement for the job - a 10-foot
long bamboo pole. The trees at the top of the orchard were the first
objects of my attack: click-clack, click-clack. I strove for the
castanet-like rhythm that had come to me from Señor Bauza's orchard. Lean
and rakish in his straw homburg, I had half-expected him to break into full
fandango at any moment. As it was, a few almonds encased in their hard
velvety husks fell obligingly over my shoulders. But not the full scatter
I'd hoped for. It was hard work clicking that stick against the high
branches. I should have known. Most human endeavours which appear
straightforward and effortless are, in fact, the result of years of
practise. I hit harder, warming to the task as click-clack became
thwack-thwack and dozens of nuts cascaded to the ground. Newton and his
apple. David and Goliath.

Mallorcan trees, particularly olives and almonds, can take on a peculiarly
human aspect. As I continued to perform a beginner's version of
gathering-in the almond harvest, I felt like a wrestler in a ring. I hit
with the stick, harder and harder, until the ground was strewn, and
retreated with gladiatorial satisfaction to enjoy a libation on the
terrace. A small rock to hand allowed me to break husks and shells and to
sample the ginger-coloured, nourishing kernels whose ancestors can be
traced back to the mass plantation of almonds around 1765. There are six
million trees in production today. It takes seven years for a tree to show
profit and Mallorcans are thrifty and ingenious in using all its products.
The outer casing is milled for oil, the discarded shells used for fuel. The
kernels themselves are sold au naturel, roasted, salted or sugared, baked
into turron (that delicious festive confection) and other cakes and
preserves.

Mary's words from our last telephone call now rang in my ears: 'almond
harvesting can be a back-breaking job'. I had enjoyed the shaking of the
tree limbs and the scatter of almonds with all the enthusiasm of a novice.
Now I needed to devise an equally pleasant means of gathering up the nuts
tomorrow. I planned to move round each tree, sitting on a cushion from
which I might gather the nuts within reach. But, discomfort apart, this
method was time-consuming. There must be a better way.

Señor Bauza had a fine net which, after a friendly conversation over the
wall, was mine, delivered neatly folded in a huge plastic bag. Opened up,
it was an enormous, oblong sea of green-plastic filament net. It reached
two or three trees planted up to ten feet apart. The prospect of the
collection net encouraged me to return the task with vigour and I never
looked back. The pile of gathered almonds grew daily beside the stone
trough outside the bothy. My next challenge was husking, a slow, sedentary
labour, effected with just the right degree of pressure from a small stone.
There is an almanderia in town where de-husking and shell-cracking is
performed mechanically. I had noticed a high pile of husks spilling out of
a skip beside a small workshop. Husking was a ritual performed every autumn
to process the town's almond harvest. To get Ca Na Maria's almonds there
and back by bike would take several trips. Hardly worth it, I reasoned,
cracking away at husk and shell. And I enjoyed this mesmerising task
performed for an hour each day before sunset. It brought me closer to the
landscape which had become the focus of my new notebook:

At dusk I walk past the almond trees associated with my late afternoon
labours. Away to the east the sky is tangerine-red and orchards stand
etched against it, a filigree of purple-black marks. The gentlest tinkling,
as if from temple bells, draws me to the wall beyond the gate to the other
side of the lane. The chimes are concentrated in one part of the field
where I dimly discern the dusky-soft mounds of Elena's assembled flock. The
gate creaks and squeaks as I close it behind me and walk towards the house,
set now against the sturdy inky backdrop of the High Sierras. As I approach
the house the twelve lighted candles on the kitchen table are visible, my
evening altar in the absence of solar power. The battery is flat. Each
evening I am becoming braver. I dare to stand on the darkened terrace and
even to walk down the steps at the back of the house to the field beyond,
which in daylight is a tangle of scrub, olive, thorn bushes, fennel and
asphodel. My feeling of being safe, protected even, by the blanket of the
night, allows me to listen to the night songs of owls and hawks. I have
given up the fantasy that plagued me earlier in the week: that some lusty
lout or drug-crazed Palmesano might emerge from the thicket intent on theft
or worse.


It is a privilege to be invited to a Mallorcan house. You can live on the
island for years and never get to know a Mallorcan family. It's the same,
of course, for incomers to remote parts of the Scottish Highlands and
Islands. On the day before I left the plains to return to the mountains, I
felt privileged to be invited to lunch at Luisa 's house.

Most days at one-thirty Elena's family gathers to eat a communal meal at
Luisa's house. The women take turns to cook. Today Luisa's grandmother and
aunt have gone to a festival in Inca but Pero is at home. He arrives in the
Fiat van with Elena, fresh in jeans and a cotton shirt. Elena is
resplendent in an pink and navy overall similar to one my own mother wore
when I was a child. The gleaming chrome, marble and white of the kitchen
accommodates us well and baby Jaime, already fed, coos at Grandfather Pero
with little bursts of postprandial hilarity from time to time.

Elena has cooked today. She has carried the enormous, tinfoil-covered black
pot from the farm and now unveils a magnificent, traditional paella of
saffron-coloured rice, shrimps, black olives, indigo mussels and pieces of
chicken. Numerous questions, answers and small talk bandy back and forth,
taxing Luisa 's powers of translation. Before dessert arrives, a cornucopia
of sweet melon, grapes, mandarins and persimmons, I learn more about the
harsh reality behind Pero and Elena's pastoral idyll. They examined my
photographs with great interest, particularly scenes of shepherding in the
Scottish Borders where I have spent the summers these past few years. Pero
observed that the herding skill of Scottish sheepdogs is famed throughout
Spain and that he would dearly love to own one. We parted friends, and,
although I was leaving for the mountains next day, I knew I would return.

The almonds are garnered, their ginger kernels stored in huge pottery jars
in the shed. It's time to leave Ca Na Maria. From the terrace I watch the
waning moon enter the theatre of the starlit sky. On the illuminated plains
around Inca, patterns of lights resemble the Milky Way fallen to earth. I
pack away the sunhat tied with its black and gold scarf, the diaries and
the pile of books associated with my work. The last household chores are
accomplished in the tulle of a rosy dawn and I am ready to steal away to
catch the first Palma bus before the sun has replaced the moon's silver
fingertip. My journey will take me back to the far side of the Sierras,
whose theatrical moods witnessed from a distance of fifty kilometres have
engaged me for nearly two weeks: cloud and clarity, distant thunder and
lightning flashes and glorious sunsets. My car accident in the mountains
several years ago has become a dim memory. The mountains hold no terror
now.


1. The Sierra de Tramuntana & Sa Calobra

THE PLAINS OF MALLORCA HAVE BECOME FAMILIAR TO ME, BUT several years ago
when I first came to the island, I was heading for the mountains. Palma
basked in unseasonal January heat. After crossing Las Ramblas with its
muted facades, decorative-iron balconies, flower booths and avenues of
plane trees, I headed for Calle St Jaime to book into the Hostal Borne. The
street is a subfusc cavern shafted with apricot light from alleyways
leading off. Half way down, Saint James, the pilgrims' saint, surrounded by
the gear he took to Santiago di Compostella, is framed in stone below a
curvaceous scallop shell. He wears a wide brimmed, pilgrim's hat clasped
with the symbolic shell. A water gourd tied to his staff. He looks a little
baffled as I scuttle below. We are on the same wavelength, he and I.

Just before the Plaza Borne, a grand arched portal leads into the hostal.
On my first visit, Hostal Borne had all the faded grandeur of a former
Marques's townhouse and provided an enticing stopover for travellers on
limited budgets. Its vaulted and colonnaded reception hall, floored and
lined in deep-apricot veined marble, gave a view through plate glass doors
onto the cloistered courtyard where four ancient date paIms yearned towards
the sun. Furniture was sparse, but solid and antique. Fittings were
original: tooled brass gleamed against dark-mahogany doors.

For me, its faded grandeur evoked Agatha Christie, perhaps because I had
once stayed at the similarly fin de siècle Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul.
It was there that the enigmatic genius wrote A Murder on the Orient
Express. That was the time she disappeared on her travels. No one knew
where she had gone. A considerable time passed, then a key was found
concealed behind some white tiles in the bathroom of the suite that Agatha
Christie had rented. The key gave the game away. I saw, fascinated, the
very tiles and the very bathroom, and the Pera Palas's desk clerk showed me
the key to which was attached a faded label bearing her name. Her signature
in inky copperplate.

The Borne's dimensions, vast near 'front of house' , diminished
progressively as the stairs ascended further from reception. Long-stay
guests inhabited suites behind thickly studded doors - Daniel Hartmann
invited me into his after we became friends. Passerines like me were
directed down dark harem-like corridors to the small doors of modest rooms
that were, nevertheless, interesting and adequately supplied with clean
white sheets, thick cotton towels and bedspread monogrammed with the
initials 'HB' and an embroidered coronet.

Hostal Borne. That first morning as I lay relishing the strange sounds of
the city beyond the courtyard and the warmly pungent odours peculiar to
Mediterranean ports, my eyes surveyed the Thomas Cook-ish room. A slatted
leather luggage rack suggested untold journeys: to North Africa or the
Canaries, to Casablanca, Barcelona or some other Iberian port, to Greece,
Beirut or Alexandria. Diffuse sun cast oblique shadows onto my bedspread.
Here, in the heart of Palma's old Arab town, an adventure might begin, on
however small a scale.

The enormous frond of a courtyard palm thrust into the room like a playful
cat when, at last, I got up and opened the shutters. After showering in the
mahogany closet lined with tiles, and wrapping my body in a voluminous
towel, I tied my damp hair under a patterned scarf and lolled on the edge
of the bed painting my toenails. Sun warmed shoulders, scent of black
tobacco. Looking-up, I caught myself in the mirror. I liked what I saw. My
reflection resembled my northern self scarcely at all. At last I had shed a
disguise, sprung the trap. My warm semi-nakedness, the sunlight fingering
through the palm frond, the absurd turban, the sense of fantasy made real
ineffably transformed that moment.

'I know you' the reflection seemed to say. 'Away from home, you're given to
adventure.'

Scotland, inhospitably wintering, was behind me now. little did I realise
that I was poised at a frontier whose exploration would reveal more than I
could possibly imagine.


That morning I would climb Puig Tomir, one of the highest peaks of the
Sierra de Tramuntana, with Louis and Liv, new friends from Barcelona. A
notice in the Borne's foyer had reassured me that a decent breakfast could
be had before the trip: Desayuno 8-10. That suited me fine. Breakfast at
eight o'clock would allow me to meet Louis and Liv at the car hire place.
We'd be in the mountains by ten. I had met them for the first time on New
Year's Day, two days before, at Ca Na Gaia, the home of a mutual friend,
Alice Knight. We'd planned our ascent of the Puig, over five thousand feet,
in her garden. Louis worked for ICONA in Barcelona (Spain's nature
conservancy organisation). Now, he and his Swedish wife, were on a romantic
visit to the island where they had first met. Louis and Liv had not been
able to join Alice for Hogmany but had arrived in time for a barbecue on
New Year's Day.

All four of us sat round the fire's musky embers, drinking wine in the dusk
under the shadows of the almond trees. Alice told them about the drama. It
was her first New Year at the House of Gaia, a time when she felt it was
important to have friends with her. As she told Louis and Liv, five of us,
all women, had come together to celebrate. After dinner, we set off in high
spirits, arm-in-arm down the moonlit road to the village. The stars
constellated brilliantly over the nearby mountain of Galatzo.

'Starry, starry night,' someone sang. Magic afoot. The townsfolk would turn
out to see in the New Year, as they always did, and, as a newcomer to the
area Alice Knight wanted to join them.

She had told us what to expect: the mayor would serve champagne at
midnight, the custom in towns throughout the island. But what actually took
place astonished us all. Sure enough, a crowd had gathered in the town
square, dimly lit by low wattage bulbs suspended between date palms. It was
about eleven-thirty by the time the five of us stood among the throng.
Alice was greeting her neighbours, introducing us, exchanging pleasantries,
speaking Mallorcan, a dialect of Catalan based on Provençal French...
when, suddenly, a mob burst onto the scene, leaping and whirling, cracking
whips above their heads. They wore red from head to foot and weird pointed
hats and thick black moustaches. The crowd shrieked and scattered as the
weird figures claimed the plaza in a frenzy of action. Within minutes a
thick grey-red pall obliterated the centre of the square, and spread
stealthily outwards. Into that hellish pall there came bursts of
firecrackers, alternating with menacing thwacking whips as the devils
provoked the crow. Suddenly, a huge three-wheeled vehicle, like an enormous
tricycle, came whirling through the smoke its wheels seemingly powered by
bursts of lightning. The devils held the centre in an awful macabre dance
for some ten minutes then rushed to harrass the huddled crowd, the whips
lashing the air, their firecrackers scorching the ground. People screamed
and ran in all directions. To stand still would have been to court an
uncertain fate.

At this point Alice rebelled. Even now I see her standing at the centre of
the square. That was the safe spot she reckoned. I wasn't so sure and
stayed at the periphery, fascinated by her dark silhouette standing alone
in the smoke. She confided later that she wanted to show what she was made
of. That she knew about storms, that she could deal with the dramatic,
overbearing, often menacing forces of nature which her valley projects in
plenty, and still hold the eye of the storm. She needed to demonstrate this
and, slowly, the rest of the crowd began to creep back. The centre had
become safer than the devil-menaced spaces beyond the square. 

Just before midnight the banging of drums, the crashing of cymbals and whip
lashing reached a peak of frenzy as the devils followed the crowd back to
the centre. like infernal monkeys, they swarmed up a flagpole where they
let off twelve rockets on each stroke of midnight and the old world - the
world of the Inquisition and, before that, of pagan primitivism - had been
symbolically expiated. Everyone in the crowd swallowed twelve grapes.
Twelve small moons symbolising the year gone by and the months ahead. The
smoke subsided, lights were switched on, the devils disappeared as swiftly
as they had come. Out of nowhere, back to nowhere. The mayor arrived with
helpers to pour champagne. The New Year, that year of 1989, began with
celebration.


On the second day of January I left Ca Na Gaia to walk the 13 kilometre
mountain road to Esporles where I caught the bus to Palma. That's when I
spent my first night at the Hostal Borne, before meeting up again with
Louis and Liv to climb Puig Tomir.

At first the countryside was obscured by fog. At a stop beyond Esporles the
doors of the bus swung open to admit an ardent old man carrying a package
with a linen cover. He paid his fare and took the seat next to mine behind
the bus driver. As we sped towards Palma the fog cleared, but the
countryside looked alien. There was a dusty reticence about the hamlets we
passed, with here and there something outrageous: a handsome palm inclining
its turbanned fan to shade the ochre cube of a finca, a cemetery with
star-studded domes, high stone dykes bordering lush orchards set in emerald
swards, mysterious cloaked copses undergrown with rock rose and rosemary.

Seeing me turn from the window to steal a glance at his bundle, the old man
lifted a corner of the cloth with a toothy grin. A yellow canary balancing
on its perch broke into song with the sudden illumination of cage. We
smiled at one another:

'The bird sings,' he said, 'but it is sick. Malo. I am taking it to the
doctor.'

Soon he bade me good-bye, gingerly leaving the bus on the outskirts of
Palma, and I could only marvel that a bird no bigger than a sparrow had
inspired such a frail old man to go so far out of his way.

At the Hostal Borne, I didn't give the devils a second thought. After all,
this was my first holiday for a long time. There would be time to recover
from stresses left behind in the north. Luxuriating in the comfort of my
room at the Borne, I anticipated the ascent of Puig Tomir which would be
followed by leisurely days at Puerto Soller during which I had only one
definite appointment. A colleague in Scotland had urged me to visit her
friend, the count, who had recently exchanged his estate in Scotland for a
spectacular cliff-top house on the mountain coast near the port. As a
symbol of that transition, he had brought a Celtic harp, or clarsach, to
Mallorca. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to play it. Intrigued, I
promised to write up the count's story for local newspaper. Perhaps that
would bring a harpist to light.


'Desayuno, por favor.' I am standing under the notice in the foyer jabbing
my finger at it, a harried desk clerk by my side. 'It says Desayuno will be
served at eight. Please, I am in a hurry.' I am beginning to lose my
temper.

The desk clerk was apologetic: 'I know Madam. But not today. I am sorry.'
He retreated to the safety of the mahogany reception desk where he
pretended to shuffle papers; and just as I was about to give up, a
courteous, accented voice sounded from the stairs above:

'Catering can be a problem here, but don't worry.' I craned to catch a
glimpse of the owner of the voice above the silvered balustrade. Then he
stood before me, his hand outstretched.

'Good-morning. I am Daniel Hartmann. If you like, I can show you a place
nearby where I eat breakfast.'

Pale and somewhat dishevelled, his lank brown hair was neatly parted above
a pallid and secretive face. Shabby sophisticate? Shifty entrepreneur?
Perhaps both. Yet, something beguiling brightened his eyes and overrode any
initial misgivings I might have had. What could be seen of his clothes
under his too-large Acquascutum raincoat indicated an individualist: rough
tweed waistcoat, linen trousers, a dark blue cotton shirt. I decided to
follow as he swept out of the Borne's arched entrance into the shaded alley
and we dodged the traffic of the Placa Borne, until we sat side-by-side at
the counter of Bar Bosch where he ordered a Mallorcan breakfast. Desayuno.
Café con lêche and ensaimadas. Only ten minutes to exchange brief
autobiographies before I had to leave. Then I thanked him, waved him
good-bye and set off on my journey never for one moment imagining that we
would meet again.


The day on the mountain remains vivid in my memory, the clear air scented
with pine, rock roses and rosemary as we climbed. Louis identified rare
plants growing near Puig Tomir's silver-screed summit and we watched
falcons, vultures, and small birds including finches and warblers through
his field glasses. At the end of the day we stopped at the ICONA finca
where his colleague Helena was based to study Mallorca's indigenous black
vulture. 'Not so long ago, there were enough mammals on the mountains to
satisfy the vultures,' she said. 'But nowadays they only survive by picking
the bones of carcasses dropped from helicopters.'

That night, by candlelight, we ate a lamb and onion casserole beside an
enormous olive-wood open-fire, with that heightened contentment which
follows physical effort. Eventually fatigue got the better of me and I
pulled myself out of their generous company into the black night to drive
the tedious road to Puerto Soller.

Next morning, the weather had turned much colder. I breakfasted indoors at
the Hostal Es Port and decided not to delay my visit to the count while I
still had the hire car. He was not on the telephone and there had not been
time to write. What if he wasn't there? It was a risk I was prepared to
take. After all, what was one day out of the many that lay unplanned before
me?


THE BACK OF THE BOTTOM DRAWER OF MY FILING CABINET AT HOME IN Scotland, I
keep a small notebook covered in black leather, with a red spine. For a
long time I needed to examine its contents regularly. It contains the notes
and drawings I made after the accident.

The first drawing shows a small figure (me) standing in a cove off Sa
Calobra road. Nothing is open and no one is there. I have driven over 2,000
feet down a snaking road to visit a man who is not there. Maybe he is there
but I cannot for the life of me find his house.The directions my Scottish
contact gave me are inadequate. There is a housing development on the
cliffs above the sea and the cove is fringed with orange trees laden with
fruits. The setting is lovely. The count lives somewhere here. Later, I
chose orange, azure, terracotta and dark cypress-green crayons to sketch
this scene. And yellow for the rented car: a Ford Fiesta. All the houses
around the cove look closed up. Las casas están cerradas. The place is
deserted.

The car had played-up in the morning before I left Puerto Soller and I had
needed the help of a mechanic to get it started. Suddenly I felt
frightened. What if it wouldn't start here, miles from anywhere with no one
to help? My eyes swept the great height and weight of the vast Sierras, a
terrain so steep that, craning my head to look up, up, up, I still could
not see the peaks. All I could see, above me, was a strip of blue sky
beyond the mountains and I could hear the cry of wild birds and the
mysterious hollow bleat of mountain goats reverberating between rock
ravines. I had to get the hell out of there. Fast! Back the safety of the
Hostal Es Port.

The car started. Laudate Domine.

The second drawing in the notebook includes a small church with living
space attached, several kilometres above the cove, where I stopped before
tackling the return I dreaded. Many kilometres twisting, uphill, hairpin
bends. One of the worst roads it is possible to imagine. Smoke circling out
of the chimney attracted me to stop. I approached cautiously. Rosemary
grows around the building which, I discovered later, is one of the oldest
buildings in Mallorca: the thirteenth century chapel of San Lorenzo.
Perfumed evergreen exquisite pale-blue flowers: 'Rosemary for remembrance,
even if the stars forget'. We'd had a rosemary bush outside our house in
the good old days. You knew who wore the trousers in the house if there was
a rosemary bush outside, he said.

No one answered my knock. Peering through the half-open shutters, I could
see a wooden table laid with sturdy implements and wooden bowls. Three
people expected for a meal, but no one there. A pity. At least they might
have been able to tell me where I could find the count's house.

I drew a yellow box for the Ford Fiesta, then sketched the church, the
mountain landscape, the road winding up like an uncoiling snake.

I depicted myself walking towards the church, a matchstick figure.
Fortunately, I was well-dressed that day: white silk blouse (a fine-silver
Celtic brooch pinned at the neck), black crêpe trousers, leather jacket,
and tartan scarf. I remember. I stood at the church hoping someone would
come. The hill was encircled by larger hills, rising towards the mountain
peaks of the Tramuntana range. Claustrophobia. All that landscape pressing
down on me. I needed to get out of here. I wondered whether to fasten my
seat-belt. Would it not be better to have freedom of movement to tackle the
hellish bends that lay ahead? Thank God I fastened that belt. Without it I
certainly would not have survived the abyss.

My marks on the next drawing (in black and white) resemble a cross-section
through the brain showing the corpus callosum, the strange walnut creased
texture of the cerebral cortex and the brain stem. It is not, though. It is
what I thought the road was like at a particular bend on the Sa Calobra
road. What looks like cerebral cortex or walnut kernel is a mix of rocks
and stones. Still, yes: it does look remarkably like a cross section of an
enormous brain. A sliver of the world brain perhaps? In this representation
which is neither drawing nor diagram my car approaches the steepest and
most twisting curve of the brain stem, sorry, the snake-like road.
Hairpin-bends like you have never seen them. A devilish place. Later I saw
the spat marked on an old map as 'clot infierno', the grave of hell.
Ignorance was bliss.

Draw quickly with no regard to technique, I instructed myself. In order to
come to understand and thereby accept what has happened.

Forget finesse.

You must make a record of what has happened. As a matter of urgency.

I selected a red pencil to depict the car that had drawn up behind me. I
could see the driver clearly through the windscreen mirror: an older man
with a dark-haired young woman at his side. Driving slowly in first gear,
and using all my skill to control the vehicle up and round that tortuous
bend, it was impossible to get round that loop-the-Ioop without going onto
the wrong side of the road. My entire being concentrated on the task. It
was imperative to get back onto the right side of the road. I knew that.
But the car behind me was pushing, pushing, giving me no time to think, to
consider.

'Stupid, bloody idiot. IDIOT!' I yelled inside the car. No one could hear
me of course. In my agitation I lost control.

Sange-froid.

My blood ran cold. There was evidence and no doubt: I was about to be cast
over the mountainside. An awful plunge into a void. For a long time
afterwards, I would recall my inward scream. But, these days, all I can
recall is my horror turning to acceptance. The world froze, became
suspended, seemed to hold its breath, as I went over the lip in a
micro-second of sublime beauty. Slowly, very slowly, with the grace of an
acrobat in slow-motion I entered the abyss.

Every detail of the terrain was revived in the next drawing: every stone
every rock, terracotta and gold, the grass, green tinged with gold, bushes
and scrub, rosemary, pine and rock roses. Scree. It seemed important,
later, to capture every detail of what might have been my last moment on
earth. Why was it so important? Later I drew what I saw from windscreen,
furiously with brisk, short strokes: the moment I went off the edge of the
world. A grain of sand, tossed in a boulder fall.

The car somersaulted. The roof hit the rocks, peach-coloured, they
closed-in, loomed large through the windscreen. I saw every mark and
fissure. My head hit the roof. The rock repelled the metal Fiesta the
yellow intruder. Tossed it carelessly onto the road below. Yes, that's what
happened. The roof hit the rock. My head hit the roof. Then the world
stopped turning. Everything went black.

When we come to an edge, we reach a frontier beyond which will become more
than we have been before. 

When we go over the edge what happens?


Nothing made sense when I woke up in a stark room of the Clinica Miramar,
Palma de Mallorca on the 5th of January 1989.

'Desayuno' called a brisk voice.

'Breakfast' my semi-slumbering brain translated, roused from a drug-induced
sleep.

'Desayuno.' I repeated the strange word. 'Desayuno can be the best meal of
the day.' I recalled breakfast at Bar Bosch with Daniel Hartmann.

'Desayuno'. This was not Daniel's voice.

I opened my eyes. A nurse leaned impatiently over me wielding a
thermometer. I stared at her in astonishment.

Where the hell am I?

'I don't feel like breakfast,' I uttered between teeth clenched over the
thermometer. The nurse said nothing, propped me up on plump white pillows
and left my breakfast tray on an invalid table, a bridge over the crisp
white bedcover. Thrusting thermometer and table aside, I got up, surprised
by the weakness in my legs, and slowly approached the bathroom where the
mirror confirmed the reality of the throbbing inside my head. What anxiety
I felt, and fear, faced with an image I scarcely recognised.

'You look like a victim of machismo,' Daniel would say later.

Dried-blood coloured my hair red. A large yellow-blue-black bruise had
spread over my right cheek and round my eye. A white padded bandage was
strapped to my right forehead with sticky tape. Another covered the crown
of my head. I almost tripped over my bloodstained clothes lying in a
forgotten heap on the floor and guided myself tremulously to the window to
draw back the curtains. To the north, beyond the plains and a built-up
urban area, lay the distant backdrop of the Sierra de Tramuntana with Puig
Tomir, Massenella and Puig Mayor. I was in Palma.

Now I remembered. I had been the victim, not of conventional machismo, but
of mountain machismo on the Sa Calobra road.

My brain processed a flashback of a small yellow Ford Fiesta tumbling over
a tortuous bend, hitting the rocks and landing back on the bend below. I
had been rescued and taken to the Red Cross station at Soller, examined by
a doctor and sent in an ambulance to Palma. It was on that journey that I
lived through the most fear-ridden hours of my life. Would I survive? If I
did would I be 'normal' or was my brain so severely injured that some vital
capacity or the other would be impaired? Would I pass out any moment and if
I did, how would anyone know my identity? I guided myself slowly back to
the sanctuary of the clinic bed and thought of Ruth amid the alien corn.

Like a Möbius strip, my conscious mind played the same tape again and
again. The minutest details. Over and over again. A feedback loop winding
up that snake-like bend and twisting over the edge. Depositing me back to
the road below like a grain of sand. Back to where I had just come from.
Minutes before I went over the edge I had unwittingly driven past my
future. Or, looked at in reverse, I drove past my future only to be tossed
back into the past. My brain needed the device of repetition, as if to play
the events over and over again would help me to understand this seemingly
senseless intervention of fate, or whatever it was. It seemed outrageous.
How could this happen to me? Alone in the Clinica Miramar room I dipped in
and out of sleep all morning. The 5th of January. I wrote it on a blank
page in my notebook. 

In my semi-conscious state, a shadowy figure plagued me, arms outstretched,
as if struggling to pull me down, down into a dark abyss. Only with
tremendous willpower could I restore consciousness and escape the fear that
the apparition induced. A primitive terror. Had the 'thing' stalked me ever
since New Year's Eve in Alice's town, following me on the snaking road over
the mountains to Esporles and even on the ascent of Puig Tomir, watching,
waiting, for an opportunity to destroy me? And did it linger still, perhaps
in this very room, furious that its intentions had been thwarted?

Frightened lest this 'force' take me over, I struggled to sit up against
the pillows. Irritable, I fumbled for my haversack, lying like a faithful
dog on the bedcover. A stark trail of terracotta crayon on the bedspread.
Sudden urgency prompted the drawings in the black and red notebook. I had
to expiate this apparition somehow, lest it overcome me. Drawing might
help. I remembered helping my daughter to come to terms with 'witches' that
haunted her dreams when she was eight years old, by encouraging her to draw
them. I found my coloured pencils in the recesses of my haversack and,
feverishly, drew. A classic devil figure, as caricatured by our
post-primitive culture, appeared on the page. Had I not seen him only days
before in the square of Alice's town? I studied the drawing and decided I
could deal with that. Then drew another of myself, a tiny figure tucked up
in bed with a view of the Sierras beyond the plate glass window.

The door opened to admit my first visitor. The clinic was accustomed to
receive wounded and sick foreigners and employed interpreters to liaise
between patients and doctors. Juanita introduced herself, made notes on a
form from information I gave her and asked for my insurance documents. I
thought these were still Puerto Soller where I had hoped to return after my
abortive visit to the count. As if by magic, a bellboy from the Hostal Es
Port arrived with all my belongings and a bill. The insurance documents
weren't there though - a circumstance that worried Juanita (X-rays, brain
scan, examinations, tests had already run up a big bill) until I remembered
that they were in a bag I had left at Alice's house.

She encouraged me to use the telephone at my bedside and said she would
attend all the visits of the doctor, Doctor Gonzalez, to avoid any
misunderstanding of my case. The sombre-spirited doctor joined us later,
carrying several large sheets of photo-negatives.

'The results of the brain scan we took when you arrived,' he announced in
broken English, holding up the dusky negatives against the light of the
window and the backdrop of the mist-encircled Sierras.

Each small square represented the interior of my brain taken at different
depths, from crown to brain stem. Breathtaking. The brain in X-ray. How
much the human brain resembles a walnut kernel. Frisson. That skeletal
image might have been my reality. A hair's breadth had kept me on the right
side of life.

A hair's breadth from death.

Doctor Gonzalez said at last: 

'Your wounding is not permanent. No damage to the neo-cortex. None of your
functions will be impaired. You are very lucky.'

Nun Danket.

Juanita told me that I would remain in the clinic for a few more days after
which a nurse would accompany me home to Scotland.  I contemplated
Edinburgh in January - short, dark, cold days - and a house which once I
had shared, empty now. But I was in no fit state to dissent.

Devilish dreams plagued me during the night. But my will to live had
outwitted whatever force had tried to bring me down. Morning brought the
same routine. Impotence. The silent nurse thrusting the thermometer into my
mouth. Pulling back the curtains. Light invading the room. She left. She
returned. She deposited trays on the invalid table. No-thank-you. I don't
want it. Tea, perhaps? Even tea tastes too strong to stomach. Water. When
she comes back I resolve to say: 'Agua, por favor,' but the words won't
come. I am left in silence, the room flooded with strong white light which
drains me. Lying on my side, the mountain range of the Sierras, blue-grey
and silent across the valley, looks ethereal. I long for the mountains of
home. Coigach, Cul Mor:

A mountain is a sort of music: theme
And counter theme displaced in air amongst
Their own variations.
Wagnerian Devil signed the Coigach score;
And God was Mozart when he wrote Cul Mor.

The nurse brings lunch. I lift off the metal lid covering the dish on the
tray, but the plain white fish, the boiled potato with its sprinkling of
parsley, has no appeal.

The alien corn is ten-feet high.

I lie in a stupor until the piercing ring of the telephone beside the bed
startles me out of my misery:

'Hola! Here is Daniel Hartmann. I heard you had an accident. How are you?
Well, I'm glad that you are alive, at least.'

There was a pause. My disbelieving mind heard his almost familiar, accented
voice and my being surged with hope. I might after all, be luckier than
Ruth. Might not be alone in the world. But how had he heard about the
accident?

'Don't worry about that now. May I visit you? Tomorrow is the Feast of the
Three Kings, a big celebration here in Spain. You should not be alone.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Please visit me.'

Someone to get me off that damned feedback loop even for an hour or two. 

I asked him to telephone Alice Knight and laid the receiver back on its
cradle with unashamed tears of relief.


That was a long time ago now, a biographical episode set down in a black
notebook with a red spine and only dimly relived when, for example, some
feature of the landscape or a stunt in a film clip reminds me: you were
there. Or, more potently, but for a hair's breadth, you would not be on
this planet earth.

'There is no such thing as an accident,' Daniel would say later. Was he
right? I played with the thought for a long time and I'm still unsure of
the answer.


2. Puerto Soller, Soller & Environs

THE SUN SOARING BEYOND THE HIGH SIERRAS SMITES WINDOWS IN the old quarter
around eight o'clock. An early tramcar clunks into town.

Secure within the encircling folds of the mountains, silver now in the sun,
Puerto Soller is nearly itself. Ultramarine sea laps the cusp of its shore,
shaded by fruiting date palms. 

This is the tranquil time, before the daily tourist invasion off-loads
hundreds, from bus and tram, into the small indigenous community.
Off-season, most hotels are closed, a circumstance which forces this deluge
of human flotsam and jetsam back to Palma before sunset - another tranquil
time.

But in summer, hundreds of holidaymakers stay on for a week or two. There
is no respite then, from alien noise and merrymaking, seabathing and
boating, loving and parting, getting and spending. Güten Morgen, Bonjour
and Hello. 

The employees of the Barcos Azules set to, swabbing decks and rails for the
morning sailings. Plate glass windows get polished-up in bars and
restaurants, brasses are burnished, patios swept, and plants thriftily
watered. Aproned women emerge with shopping baskets, fishermen mend vivid
blue nets, cross-legged on the quay. Animated children cluster towards
school. Chatter and banter hover over baker, butcher and grocery store.

The old quarter, several streets of artisan and fisherfolk's houses, forms
a backwater of no-nonsense homes, with couthie balconies and wooden doors,
and, in the absence of garden ground, abundant terracotta pots produce
everything from the succulent sempervivum and cactii to dark-orange clivia,
and culinary herbs: lavender, rosemary, parsley and thyme. Small birds,
budgerigars and goldfinches mostly, chirp in cages, sparrows sing on
pantiled roofs, seagulls keen. Radios offer snatches of pop music or
flamenco. A ginger tomcat urgently promotes his sensuality and disappears
under a hail of stones.

This is the music of the morning, to which the cluck-cluck of secateurs
adds a basso continuo. A young fisherman prunes his vine pergola hard back,
to an unpromising tracery of wooden stalks. These will miraculously sprout
around April, providing a perfect shelter over his entrada against the
punishing heat of July and August. What with the heat and the tourists, the
port is an inferno then. Everyone agrees. 

Puerto Soller was once so mountain and sea secure that only a handful of
seafaring families had dwellings here. The Romans held sex-orgies in its
pitted caves. An early jump-start to its more recent history arrived in the
mild mannered form of Saint Ramon de Penyafort, a hermit from Barcelona,
who 'utilizando su capa como vela' (using his cape as a sail) crossed the
Mediterranean in a crudely constructed craft and disembarked here. An
exquisitely simple church in the old quarter marks the spot at the end of a
street named after him. Penyafort was one of many missionaries sent to
convert 'the infidel', Arabs who stayed on in Mallorca after Jaime I's
conquest in 1229. Catalina Tomas was another missionary, and by 1342 an
oratorio had been constructed on the hill above the port to give thanks for
Penyafort's miraculous sea crossing, and for Catalina, his colleague.

Utilizando su capa como vela.

In Spanish, vela means both 'sail' and 'candle'. I note that in my diary.
Both are powerful symbols of the early Christian church. Sails in the wind,
candles in the wind. 


After the destruction of Carthage, the western Mediterranean was ruled by
Rome. Quintus Cecilius Metellus conquered Mallorca and Menorca in 123BC and
incorporated Mallorca into the Roman world with the construction of two
cities: Palma and Pollentia (now Alcudia). The decline of Roman rule
coincided with the infiltration of Christianity and after the
disintegration of the Roman Empire the islands were occupied by Vandals in
the fifth century, Byzantines in the sixth and Visigoths in the seventh,
after which a period of semi-independence was enjoyed until the Islamic
period.

The Moslem occupation of the Balearic Islands began around 902-903 when
Isam al Jawlani disembarked in Mallorca and attached the islands to the
political-administrative system of then emirate of Cordoba. From then on
they were governed by a Wali who lived in Medina Mayorque, the old Roman
Palma. The annexation induced an Arab Islamisation process, and the
archipelago soon became a naval base for the Arab raiders led by Al-Andalus
against the Catalan and French coasts.

After 1077 the Balearics became an independent 'taifa' kingdom dedicated to
piracy. The republic of Pisa, whose trade being damaged by pirates,
organised a reprisal raid (1114-5) which devastated the Medina Mayorque.
However, the Pisan-Catalan fleet quickly withrew when more than a hundred
North African Almoravide ships arrived. Without renouncing their plundering
activities, the Almoravides signed peace treaties with Pisa and Genova and
turned to harassing the Almohadesa until they annexed the islands in 1203.
By 1321 the Genovese pirate trade had become a serious danger to island
traffic and friendship degenerated into war by 1348.


In the sixteenth century, pirates plied the Mediterranean with merciless
cunning, and soon slipped through the harbour's vulvic entrance. In their
frenzied search for booty, they destroyed the port's oratorio. The bay's
inhabitants speedily rebuilt, adding a hospice for pilgrims, a defensive
tower and a niche for the statue of Santa Catalina Tomas which the pirates
had failed to find. Defensive sighting towers were hastily constructed all
round the Mallorcan coast at this time, and the 1561 Torre Picada above the
port became the small fort you see today, with splendid views in all
directions.

I have returned to Puerto Soller for the first time since my car accident.
Contentment imbues my rented room: a balcony overlooking the harbour, a
tiled floor, an old-fashioned wooden desk, an oval mirror, a bookshelf, an
antique dresser which resembles a polished chestnut. Jasmine and rosemary
perfume the air. Here is a perfect place to assemble what I have discovered
of Mallorca in several years of coming and going. Signifiers tease my
imagination, like mementos of a love affair, from the aquatic theatre
beneath my balcony: the womb-shaped harbour, near circular, with a narrow
outlet to the open sea, mountains climbed, others that beckon, the garigue
that lies beyond the lighthouse on the cliff, characteristic of this coast
with its incredible chthonic views, a jumble of grotesque rocks and hardy
growth: straggled pines, euphorbia, cistus, rosemary and grasses high above
the sea. There are cliff places strewn with debris, as after a battle of
nature gods: hundreds of trees, tumbled like fallen soldiers, boulders cast
downwards in frenzied destruction. Vengeful nature's toll. The gigantic
pieces of wood and stone, the fractured rock slabs and sea carved caverns,
remind us that we are, after all is said and done, less than grains of sand
in nature's scheme of things. The car accident is almost forgotten.


A day comes when the sun is so hot that my neighbours have covered their
bird cages. Underneath the white cloths, goldfinches flit from perch to
perch and budgies lurk narcissisticly in front of small plastic mirrors.

A goldfinch in a cage... puts all heaven in a rage.

'It's too hot for February,' everyone says. 'We need rain. Not this heat
and sun.' 

What am I doing here? I have left my tracks in the snow of the Scottish
border hills, crisscrossing the cloven imprints of deer, because I need
sunlight. Once again, I'm drawn back to Mallorca like a migratory bird. To
begin with I have rented this place and I placate my spirit with daily
explorations. It's springtime here. On mountain foothills behind the port,
almond blossom erupts as if by magic. Dense groves of orange and lemon
trees display fruit and flowers against a backdrop of deeply green leaves.
Olive terraces contour the mountainside as high as man could build.

Outside one of the grand fincas, the señora tends the earthly paradise of
the garden she has known for sixty years, ever since she was brought here,
a bride, from Fornalutx on the other side of the mountain. She travelled
then, to Italy, France, Germany, Holland and Belgium with her husband whose
business was fruit exportation. Citrus from their terraces, tomatoes from
Valencia, bananas from the Canaries. In the house and the garden, where
sugar pink blossom shades luxuriant potted palms, time stands still while
the señora and her retainers work ceaselessly to keep things as they
always were. Passing strangers pause to sit in the garden, refreshed by
tall glasses of orange juice, and to converse with her in one of the six
languages she has picked up on her travels.

The peace here brings relief, after the turmoil of my return to the port.
In the vast whitewashed entrada, religious paintings dominate the handsome
Mallorcan furniture and a polished flagged floor. Intriguing doorways lead
to a chapel, to the old flour mill and olive press that once supplied the
house and to kitchens and living accommodation. The ancient finca attunes
visitors to its ancestral heartbeat. They go away delighted with purchases
of marmalade, black olives and honey, prepared by the señora herself.

'I like to work,' she announces, patting down her black-and-white apron.
And she is always on the go. Invited to guess her age, you look at the spry
figure, honed like a bird, and know the answer must be a miracle. It is. 'I
am eighty-six,' she says modestly, in almost any European language but
English which, somehow, she ever managed to learn. And she regrets this a
little, for, as she says: 'English is becoming the language of the world'.

You would hardly think so, here in the Soller region, where so many Germans
have settled and take their vacations, walking the vast mountain range of
the Sierra de Tramauntana as if it were a gigantic fitness training centre.
Here, the constant assumption that I must be German, by both Germans and
Mallorcans who address me: 'Können Sie, bitte ..." tries my patience and I
stubbornly answer in what Spanish I know. Underneath it all, though, I
admire the Mallorcan flexibility to adapt to yet another invasion.

A secret track leads me to another finca, as fine as any Italian equivalent
drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. A collonaded wall bears a wisteria-draped
pergola, loveliness which begs to be recorded against the ochre harling of
the house and the mountains beyond, rouged by the setting sun. Another old
lady emerges behind the barking of a tethered dog.

'Yes,' she says. 'You may walk by. People don't usually ask.'

On my return from the high olive groves she tells me that she looks after
the citrus farm for an absent landlord. Times have changed in ways she
never dreamt of. She extends her hands in every direction: to a grand house
there, another on the hill above, one across the valley and the house next
door. 

'All owned by Germans. Who would have thought it could happen? I can't
speak German, can you? There is no one for me to talk to now.'

Her ancestral memory is a litany of conquest. But there is no self pity in
her voice, no moistening of the eye. She is matter-of-fact as she
communicates the reality, that, in the absence of her own kind, her earthly
paradise is diminished.

On the way back to the port I mull over Alice Knight's opinion. Alice has
lived here for thirty years and speaks Catalan, Spanish, German, French and
English - the complete language kit for Mallorca. Germans, she says, are
much more interesting to talk to than the British, who bore her. In her
opinion, Germans are better educated these days. And, she adds, Little
Germany contributes far more to the island culturally and economically than
the British. Yet it was the British who began the tourist boom to Mallorca,
the nec plus ultra for honeymooners in the 1950s. They still come in almost
equal numbers to the Germans, many of whom have settled in the Tramuntana
area, while Little England can be found in Pollensa and its port,
settlements on the mountain slopes above the plains, and near Palma. 

Mind tripping over the High Sierras I alight in a particular small town in
the almond orchards near Ca Na Maria. Where citrus trees are as few as the
almond blossoms here. Where almond and carob rule and, except for the
throngs at the Wednesday Sineu market, tourists are few. But I rein in my
imagination. I have unfinished business on this side of the mountains: a
desire to explore Soller which has been called 'the most beautiful town in
Mallorca, and one of the best in Europe', where 'one encounters everything
in beautiful harmony'. 

Visitors frequently observe that Soller feels and looks like a town in
France. I agree, but it has taken time to understand why. Many people speak
French here, not simply because they learned it at school. And the roadsign
at the port reads Port de Soller, though it is also referred to as Puerto
Soller. That is not all. The pastry shops here, and particularly the one in
the port, sell delectable 'French-like' produce, outstandingly better, it
has to be said, than the bland cakes and heavy bread sold elsewhere on the
island. Younger schoolchildren wear French-style smocks with white collars.
Older women wear casual elegance. 

Mallorca is part of Catalunya and, as such, has always felt itself
different from the rest of Spain. Catalunya includes all the Balearic
islands, the vast hinterland of Barcelona, the coast as far south as the
Ebro delta and north to the French border. Eager to resist Spain itself,
France was only too willing to pop round the mountain barrier of the
Pyrenees, and over and through them if necessary, to give Catalunya a hand
over the centuries, to ward off Castille. In Mallorca, the rugged, isolated
geographical situation of the Soller valley held off James I of Aragon, El
Conquistador. The only place in Mallorca to repel his invading forces. Many
Arabs stayed on here, and most of the Moorish artifacts in Palma Museum
derive from the Soller valley.

Communications between the mountain towns and the rest of the island have
always been difficult. This historical advantage had become a pressing
disadvantage by the nineteenth century when the economy of the region
declined. The solution was to develop accessible sea markets for the
valley's bountiful produce, particularly citrus fruits. Until recently the
Mediterranean coast of France, and particularly Marseilles, was Soller's
business partner. Soller families emigrated to Marseilles and other parts
of Southern France. Their menfolk sailed over with their produce and stayed
on to work in the French harvests. Although the export bubble had burst by
the turn of the century, the mutually advantageous partnership continued
until tourism developed during the 1950s, particularly in the burgeoning
resort of Puerto Soller.

But what of the centuries directly after the conquest? A few medieval
towerhouses were constructed, fortified dwellings, such as the core of
today's Hostal Es Port and the grand fincas of Sa Figuera in the foothills
behind. There were the arrivals of hermits and pilgrims, piratical
skirmishes and, presumably, many unrecorded short-lived disturbances, but,
by and large, the harbour folks' daily round continued much the same until
the nineteenth century. Two watercolours from that period show a straggle
of thirty houses, Penyafort's church, the oratorio, the Torre Picada and
the two lighthouses. The long pier, with the good view of the town I have
now, a palette of blues and white, sand-pink and terracotta, had not yet
been built. An accretion of buildings, nineteenth century and ugly
new-build mostly, now dominates the ancient terraces which survive on
either side of the old sandstone hospice on the hill. There, olive trees
mingle with Corsican and other pines in a typical Mallorcan conflagration.
This glimpse of terracing indicates that the houses of the old quarter
below were built along the contours of the terraces, all the way down to
the sea, and round the crescent of the bay as far as the jetty. A shingle
bay provided anchorage for wooden fishing boats and yachts where the port's
small fleet of motorised fishing vessels now haul in at a quay beside the
Art Deco style naval base. 

Late nineteenth century houses swelled the old hamlet, and villas sprouted
along the route out of town towards Soller, proclaiming the prosperity and
taste of their owners. At first glance nowadays, these edifices resemble
decaying teeth in the badly made prosthetic maw of new-build hotel and
apartment blocks of the mid- to late-twentieth century. But look closer and
you will see that their sheltered courtyard gardens, mosaic decoration,
arches, pillars, Art Nouveau and Art Deco railings and balconies are
redolent gems of a gentler time.

In its hey-day, the evocative Soller tram transported Thomas Cook
travellers past these old houses to the port, in wooden panelled carriages.
Today, it plies back and forth packed with holidaymakers in T-shirts and
shorts. In the 'good old days', passengers were immaculately turned out in
white cotton and panama hats, their leather suitcases and trunks taken by
donkey perhaps, or a horse drawn carriage, up to the old Hostal es Port.
Their lifestyle might well have inspired an adventure in the vein of Death
on the Nile or A Murder on the Orient Express. The fact that Agatha
Christie's books sell in staggering quantities in Palma and Barcelona,
attests in some degree to a longing to transcend the brash face of late
twentieth century Mediterranean travel. Certainly, ambience lingers on at
the Hostal es Port, where tennis balls ponk-ponk below cafe terraces set in
a sub-tropical garden. Here Hercule Poirot would have felt in his element,
where latticed windows, and Moorish-style arches and courtyards hint at a
world more mysterious than it seems at first glance.

Around midday and the Barcas Azules, the Blue Boat fleet, has set off
towards Sa Calobra laden with holidaymakers, keeping the regulation 25m
distance from the naval base. Todo Por La Patria it signals, lest there be
any doubt, in letters so large they can be read across the bay.

Some people in the port have raised a petition to have the naval base
removed. Yes, I naively say, I'll sign, thinking that it would be a fine
thing to do away with even a hint of military dominance of the port. That
would be more green, more in line with ecological thinking. Don't be silly,
says a Spanish friend, staying the pen in my hand. The ones with the
petition want to construct a huge marina instead of the base. Then fumes
and refuse from the boats would further pollute the sea. Another friend
tells me later that the naval station is intended to be a cultural centre.
Who knows if that would be a good thing? There is never an end to it, the
construction and deconstruction, the restoration and renovation, the
balancing act that Puerto Soller and nearly every other part of Mallorca
engages in every day, as it teeters, overloaded with tourists, increasingly
polluted and short of water, into the twenty-first century.


People living in Mallorca talk about 'sun places' and 'moon places'. The
Soller valley claims the sun, though the Carrer de Sa Luna, one of its main
streets, incises a deep gash into the main square, the Plaza Mayor. A
stone-carved moon icon presides above a lintel half way down the street. I
thought, at first, the valley's very name reflected the sun, but no; more
accurately, the name has Moorish roots and can be translated as 'golden
valley' or 'golden shell'. The latter is my preference, for I imagine the
town, constructed in the centre of its scallop-shaped valley, to be an
architectural equivalent of Venus, rising in a fertile valley awash with
luxuriant farms and smallholdings, densely productive. Shell like, the
valley scoops narrowly under the mountain foothills at Fornalutx and
Binniaraix, and opens out curvaceously towards the sea.

Soller is protected from winds, thanks to the mountain range of the High
Sierras. To the west the dramatic Puig of Teix, to the south the Sierra of
Alfabia and eastwards, the summit of Puig Mayor. In winter the atmosphere
is humid, as it is in all the north coast towns, particularly when the sky
is overcast. People who forget to empty their dehumidifiers find them
overflowing at the end of the day. A torrente, traversed by two bridges,
carries off rain water and melted snow which occasional harsh winters
deposit on the sierras, an increasingly rare phenomenon as Mallorca's
climate shifts from temperate to sub-tropical. A snaking, coastal road
leads out of the valley towards Deià and the Valldemossa, and on to Palma.
Two mountain passes exit southeast and southwest - the Coll and the Barranc
- the former now the tortuous road to Palma, the latter an arduous,
magnificent climb to the Cuber Valley.

A nineteenth century traveller described the landscape broadly as I have
done, and he referred to the bienestar (well being) which the people of
Soller have, by and large, managed to retain into the late twentieth
century. Despite the odds: the explosion of tourism, rising prices,
ever-increasing traffic absurdly pushing through ancient, narrow streets.
Mallorcan families aspire to have three cars. Despite all this, you sense
the wellbeing. It permeates the bustle of young and old, as they wend in
and out of rustic houses, mostly three-storeys high, with wrought iron
balconies and polished stone entradas displaying antique furniture, festive
curtains of Mallorcan cotton, and views to gardens beyond engraved or
mirrored glazed doors. On winter evenings, woodsmoke, beeswax candles and
the drifting scent of orange blossom from outlying smallholdings incense
the air as the church chimes the hour of the last down-tram to the port.


One day a sky of glowering cloud brings rain, and, before your very eyes,
rose bushes send out shoots, geranium leaves double in size, tentative
alyssum and toadflax form mini-hanging gardens in wall crevices. The houses
are not built for the cold which comes. Draughts find passages under
entrance doors, and the cool interiors, so valued in the relentless heat of
summer, feel chilly now. The two cypresses guarding the entrance to Ramon
Penyafort's church, dance awkwardly in winds which whip up waves in the bay
and tease garments off balcony washing lines. The fishing fleet stays in
port and the tourists vanish.

I take my cue and spend time browsing in the Soller library. Groups of
schoolchildren giggle in the ground floor reading room. On the floor above,
there are few distractions. The only book I have been able to find with any
English text is a volume of Robert Frost's North of Boston, complete with
Mallorcan translation. I cannot resist looking up old favourites: Apple
Picking, Birches, and The Road Not Taken, a traveller's lament. How I
identify with traveller who comes to a crossroads and has to choose one of
the routes.

What am I doing here? 

There must be a volume on these library shelves to give me a bearing. I
riffle through the Mallorca section, in a dimly recognised search for other
travellers' books, writings that might spark off ideas for roads to travel.
An impressive set of three volumes, Las Baleares, put together, complete
with watercolours and engravings, by the Archduke Luis Salvador, engrosses
me. Then I wander dazed into the sunset, and stand outside the building
that shares a courtyard with the library. The Red Cross Centre. 

Cruz Roja. I was brought here, concussed and traumatised after my accident
on the mountain road beyond Soller. I have passed the building often but
have not allowed myself to take it in until now. Here my head wounds were
dressed and it was from here that I was taken in an ambulance, over the
Coll, to the Clinica Miramar in Palma.


DANIEL HARTMANN. I LITTLE THOUGHT WE WOULD MEET AGAIN AFTER I LEFT Bar
Bosch that morning feeling like a liberated captive. My holiday haversack
swung from my shoulders as I headed for Calle Archduke Luis Salvador to
meet Luis and Liv and pick up the hire car which would take us to the
mountains.

Daniel told me later that he sat musing at his customary seat in Bar Bosch
for some time after I left. Our meeting, he said, had sparked off memories
of his Aunt Rose, a Scottish island-woman, part-Celtic like me, whom he
felt close to as a child. She, too, was someone who liked to escape to the
mountains. Rose became a respected academic in America. Her daughter,
Daniel's mother, married a German whom Hitler decorated for bravery after
he held a pass in the Alps. 

'After the war the family came to live in Mallorca. But father was
emotionally and physically wrecked - confined to a wheelchair in the
garden. My mother had to extract lighted cigarettes from his seared fingers
- he had lost the capacity to feel.' 

Clinica Miramar, Palma de Mallorca. The sixth of January 1989, the Feste
Des Reis, Twelfth Night. Daniel Hartmann appeared: Balthazar, Caspar and
Melchior all rolled into one.

'Girl, how are you?' He peered into the room, hovered uncertainly at the
end of my bed in his too-large mackintosh. Then, with sleight of hand and a
formal bow he presented me with a bouquet of cinnamon-orange carnations. He
sat on the edge of the armchair by the window and eyed me thoughtfully. His
gawky theatricality rested on genuine feeling, I felt sure of that. I was
impatient to know how he had heard about the accident. 

'Oh, I had just got back to the Borne and Gonzalo - you know, the desk
clerk you asked about breakfast the other day? - said: "That woman you took
to breakfast had an accident" ... You gave the hostal as your address to
the car hire place? Yes? And they of course phoned to say you would not be
coming back. They said the car was a write-off and they didn't know whether
you were alive or dead.'

Daniel paused and lit another cigarette. 'To tell the truth, I didn't the
know what to do but Gonzalo said: "Come on Daniel, she was a nice woman."
He passed me the Yellow Pages. Phoned all the hospitals first. No luck.
Then the all the clinics and voila! here you were.'

He conjured a bottle of champagne from his raincoat pocket and fetched two
plastic cups from the bathroom. We drank a toast to the Three Kings and to
my great escape. I told him the good news. The brain scan. I would not be a
cabbage. There was no damage to the neo-cortex. It was a relief to laugh
with him, disguising the event with a cloak of fantasy, as if it had been a
stunt from a James Bond movie. We considered an escape from the clinic.
Supper at Eduardo's fish restaurant in the harbour, perhaps, from where we
could watch the Three Kings arriving by boat to distribute presents to the
children of Palma. But we realised I was not up to it. So he stayed for an
hour or two, pacing the room, telling me stories edited from his life.

This is the use of memory, that we live to tell the tale.

Juanita arrived with Doctor Gonzalez who asked for a nurse to change my
bandages and glanced disapprovingly at the thimbleful of champagne on the
bedside table. He examined my head wounds and conveyed, through Juanita,
that the glass still embedded in my scalp would take a long time to come
out, but these splinters would not harm me. Then Juanita stayed to explain
the plans for my journey back to the north at the weekend.

After she left, Daniel considered me through the silvery haze of his
cigarette smoke: 'Girl, surely you are not going back to the cold north
when you could stay here in the sun?'

That hodden, precipitous city. Edinburgh, Athens of the North. The
black-cobbled cavern of the Old Town where I lived. A ghost-town in winter,
haunted by the spirits of Jekyll and Hyde, where, at nightime, the only
movement up and down the street was of some spirit wandered in body or mind
or an outrageous occasional drunken mob or predatory cat. I imagined the
cold emptiness of the house itself. My partner would be gone. I had pleaded
with him on the telephone that morning to come south, that I needed him.
But he quickly reminded me that it was I who had left. I broke off the
conversation by slipping the receiver gently back on its cradle.

City of everywhere, broken necklace in the sun, you are 
caves of guilt, you are pinnacles of jubilation. 
....Your buildings are broken memories, your streets 
lost hopes -

'But my work...' I protested.

'It will be some time before you can work,' Daniel countered. 'How can you
work well until you have come to terms with this traumatic event? All this
added to the breakdown of a six year old relationship? Do you really think
you can start work next Monday? That's crazy. And what about making peace
with the island. With Mallorca?' He persisted and I knew he was right. I
didn't want to return to the north like a defeated child accompanied by her
nurse. 

'And what are you going to do about that Sa Calobra road? It'll be
dangerous for other people too.'

I told Daniel that, just after lunch, Juanita had shown me a newspaper
cutting. She translated the heading: 'Foreigner has serious accident at Sa
Calobra'. The article implied that I might die. Half an hour later she
brought two Civil Guard policemen to my bedside. Their peaked caps and
petrol-green uniforms banded round with leather straps and supporting
holstered pistols seemed shockingly out of place in the sanctuary of my
room. They removed their caps and held them under their arms.

'They want to ask you a few questions.'

When they had finished I asked them about the condition of the road at the
spot I had gone over. They told me that I was the fourth person in a year
to have a road accident there.

'Si, claro,' they agreed. 'Something should be done.'

'They told me that the camber of the road rolls downwards on that curve,' I
explained to Daniel. 'That makes me so angry... but still, it's a relief to
know that it wasn't my driving... I mean, I really didn't want that
accident.'

Daniel rose and came over to my bed.

'The best driver in the world wouldn't stand a chance if his wheels hit
that incline,' he reassured me.

He was right. I must do something about that road, take action as soon as I
was fit.

'Also, you should consider that what happened there was an extremely
significant event in your life. Perhaps you should have a drawing of the
place?' 

We were on the same wavelength, he and I. I showed him my drawings. He
could see the value of these, he said, but it was obvious that Daniel
wasn't satisfied: 'I think you should visit an artist friend of mine. He is
German and a wonderful draughtsman. I believe he could depict that place,
the line, the form of it, and give it an emotional charge as well. Why not
chat it over with him?'

Why not indeed? I wrote the artist's name in my diary: Nils Burwitz. To the
arriviste allowed back into the world, as I felt myself to be, nothing
seemed too fanciful. I would think about it, I said. Meanwhile, Daniel
continued to press me to stay on the island, pledging his support like a
conspirator. Eventually I agreed and Daniel went off to explain my decision
to Juanita and the doctor, promising to return on Saturday to take me into
exile.


ALICE KNIGHT PHONED THE NEXT DAY, SHOCKED TO HAVE HEARD ABOUT THE accident
from Daniel Hartmann. Yes, of course, she said, she would bring the
suitcase that I had left at Ca Na Gaia straight away. Waiting for her, I
recalled my arrival there less than a week before. How extraordinary it
seemed that I had known her so briefly, yet already she seemed like an old
friend.

Over the Christmas holidays, before leaving Scotland, I had started to read
"Winter in Mallorca" by George Sand, who had stayed on the island with
Frederic Chopin in 1848. The intrepid Sand had started out on the road to
Alice's valley, presumably by horse and trap. Her words, which I looked up
later, came back to me as I drove through a lovely avenue of plane trees
near La Granja:

'If one of our great landscape painters ever visits Majorca, I recommend to
his attention a country house named La Granja de Fortuny, the vale of
orange- and lemon-trees extending from its marble colonnades, and the
entire extent of the road leading there. But without going so far as this,
he could hardly take ten steps in that enchanted island and fail to pause
and every bend of the path, now before an Arab reservoir shaded by
palm-trees, now before a delicately carved fifteenth-century stone cross,
now on the edge of an olive grove.'

The road beyond La Granja was lovely too, a largely unspoiled valley of
open meadows graced with cypress and pine. As the road began to climb, the
terrain supported pine trees, rock roses and rosemary whose scents combined
in the warming damp of morning. The open road began to snake sharply
upwards, until it finally reared a summit-head view far down to the next
valley, backed by the mountain of Galatzo. I knew from the map that the
house of Alice Knight lay somewhere there.

The downward undulations of the road now required all my concentration. Off
with the car radio. Messaien was not for me that morning. Silent mountain
air wafted through widely open windows as I guided the car, round and
steeply down. Carefully, surely, round each formidable twist of the road.
Sudden sharp sun shafted through the cloaking undergrowth of tall trees
which grew on either side of the road. As I reached up with my right hand
for the sunshield above the windscreen I felt the car go momentarily out of
control, towards the wrong side of the road, and fear rushed through my
veins. At the same time I saw a figure coming toward me on the next turn of
the road below.

Controlling my panic which seemed to intensify in the blinding sunlight, I
manoeuvred the car back. The figure was some two hundred yards ahead of me
now at the far turning of a straight stretch of road. I identified myself
with that figure. A woman in walking gear: boots, shorts, haversack,
sunhat. The car went towards the bend as if in slow motion as I drove it
with inheld breath to the corner. As it turned, I saw there was no-one
there. I was tired, having just flown to Mallorca from Scotland, but, God,
was I also losing my senses?

I braked, threw open the door and sprang to the verge, peering into the
trees, into the shadowy pine veil, drawing in quick inhalations of scented
air to steady myself. There was nobody to be seen. Only the dark treescape
standing in its silence.

That incident, recalled several days later from the clinic bed, now seemed
like a prevision of myself walking that same road to Esporles several days
later, the day after New Year spent with Alice Knight and Louis and Liv,
and of the car going out of control on the Sa Calobra road two days later.

When I arrived at Ca Na Gaia, Alice had been sanguine about my story:
'Obviously just a hiker who left the road at the bend and took a shortcut
uphill to the next bend, rather than tediously follow it round.'

This was our first meeting. The thirtieth of December 1988. The first entry
in my Mallorca notebook. That elegant, slim black, red spined book.

Ca Na Gaia had been featured in a magazine I wrote for occasionally, and I
reckoned it would be a good place to spend a few quiet days of my holiday,
before moving up to Puerto Soller and the mountains. Alice left off hoeing
the almond terrace near the house as my car negotiated the steep gradient
and greeted me warmly. She led me into the almond tree encircled garden.
Two house cats played in the branches overhead, knocking down unharvested
nuts. A simple lunch was set out under the trees: salads, bread and cheese,
served with beer.

'You are the only guest, but Louis and Liv, friends of mine from Barcelona,
are due to arrive on New Year's day.' Her luminous dark eyes surveyed me.
She was perhaps a few years older than me, her fair hair greying and
tightly curled, and her generous features proclaimed an attractive,
intelligent woman. She was open and direct with me from the beginning.

'Why did you decide to come here?'

If, at first, I was surprised by her directness I was also grateful to have
a conversation which focussed my tired mind. A break from publishing, I
told her. Time to come to terms with a broken relationship. Time for
myself, to walk in the mountains, to read, write, draw and generally
recover. I ran through the list quickly, told her about my intention to
visit the count, then changed the subiect.

'Ca Na Gaia? What does it mean?'

'Gaia' wasn't on everyone's lips seven years ago, as it is now.

'C'an or Ca No is Mallorcan for house and Gaia is Greek, meaning Great
Earth Mother,' she explained. 'Some people use Gaia as the name of planet
Earth itself. It was first used by a British scientist, James Lovelock,
whose friend, the writer William Golding, suggested the name. The Gaia
hypothesis holds that the earth is a self-sustaining mechanism, rather like
the fur of a cat. I heard about Gaia quite by chance when Lovelock was
speaking in Inverness.' I looked surprised. 'Yes, I was in Scotland three
years ago. It's a beautiful country you have.'

'Anyhow,' she continued: 'coming to grips with Lovelock's concept at a
retreat set among the fantastic scenery of the Scottish mountains, helped
me to realise that we humans make a false distinction between mind and
matter. When I realised that there is no separation, I felt mind-blown. You
have to feel your way into believing that there is no separation between
mind - the minds of humans and animals - our  minds and matter, all matter,
any matter: these stones on the terraces, the trees themselves, the fruits
they bear - almonds, oranges, lemons. The nourishment they draw from the
earth, all matter, anything that exists on earth. We're just a tiny part of
it all. Human beings are important, yes, of course, but in actuality we're
only minuscule cells of our living planet.' 

I admired her conviction. Here was someone attempting to live according to
these ideals.

'When I returned here from Scotland, the idea of building a self-sufficient
house dedicated to Gaia took seed in my mind and continued to grow. I
couldn't quash it. It was as if a force much stronger than myself was
willing it to happen. Of course, I had tremendous misgivings. But this
something kept pushing me on despite the necessity to risk most of my
capital and give up other possibilities. To be honest, I was fear-ridden
then, and still am now. From time to time. Such are the real or imaginary
limitations with which we humans, and women in particular, are bound
round.'

I knew only too well what she meant.

'After months of searching for a suitable site to build the house on, I was
about to give up looking. On that very day, I found it.'

With a wave of her hand, she indicated the house and the land around it.
'And, here it is... I can assure you it didn't look all that promising. A
half-built building site. But I felt certain this was where C'an Gaia
should be. Two years later my faith remains unshaken despite all the
setbacks and burdens I've had to overcome in supervising its development.
And people seem to emerge out of the landscape, as it were, just when I
need help. For the first time in my life I've experienced the joy of others
arriving, when I need them most, to join me in reconstructing terraces,
harvesting almonds, preparing the earth for vegetables.'

She told me that it had taken the awful shock of a heart attack to
precipitate James Lovelock into synthesising the Gaia concept.

'Dramatic changes in people's lives are usually precipitated by crisis,'
she observed and went on to confide that, after two failed marriages, she
had been about to enter a third when the warning bells rang. She realised
that the second half of her life would have to be dramatically different
from the first.

'That third marriage wouldn't have worked either. I had to reconstruct
myself and that's why I went to Scotland: to get away from everything
familiar and find some way of getting back in touch with my childhood. Most
of us have the experience, to some degree or other, somewhere down the line
in childhood, of the shutters banging shut on beauty. Don't you agree? The
beauty of the world which the small child experiences so intensely is
gradually closed-off by ever-stricter parental controls which divorce us
from our bliss in life. Prevent us from being whole human beings. Most of
us never recover it. The bliss. Instead we're handed, bound and gagged
across the railroad tracks to live stunted lives.'

As she spoke, I found myself recalling my own childhood days in Edinburgh.
The flower-filled garden that bordered the Water of Leith, the Botanical
gardens nearby, the park, the summer picnics, that incredible sense of
being welded to a golden land of promise. Although it was wartime, there
had been an abiding richness. Then, as Alice continued - perhaps it was the
effect of the sun and the beer - my mind reinhabited that helter-skelter
world of jump-ropes and apple-tree sailing ships and the intense intimacy
of unfettered responsiveness. Perhaps I had come to Mallorca to recover
some sense of this? It struck me as ironic that Alice Knight had gone to
Scotland of all places, to recover what she called 'her bliss'.

'So now,' she continued: 'although I refuse absolutamente to be bound,
gagged and handed over the railway tracks ever again: for instance, by
getting bogged down with administration, bookeeping and the like, the house
is ready for groups and individuals. You'll see a group in action tonight,
if you like. See Ca Na Gaia as a place of healing.'

'What sort of groups?' I asked.

'Well, esoteric groups, if you like. But bird watchers and mountain walkers
are particularly welcome since they already understand instinctively what
Gaia is all about. And they have the distinct advantage, too, of having
their feet firmly planted on the ground.'

'But, hey. That's enough bombardment for now.' She got up, stretched, and
carried our empty plates towards the kitchen door. 'How about a siesta and
a walk towards the magic mountain of Galatzo? We'll talk more later.'

In the white bedroom I lay down on a beautiful oriental bedspread depicting
a tree of life, befuddled by sun and beer. Gaia. Mind and matter. One and
the same. Drowsiness took over and I wakened an hour later to a softer,
less intense world. The cats were sleeping by the open door in a pool of
late afternoon sunlight and Alice was sorting out supplies between the
refrigerator and the cupboard. Preparing for the meditation group. Galatzo
seemed to challenge Ca Na Gaia from the opposite side of the valley. Alice
came to stand at the kitchen door, one arm encircling a huge pottery bowl,
the other rapidly beating a mixture.

'Miguel de Vargas, an eighteenth century visitor to the island, wrote that
Galatzo was once covered with the finest trees in the world. He mentions
olives, and oak trees with a girth of forty-two feet and a diameter of
fourteen. But the forests were decimated by naval carpenters who turned
them into an entire flotilla of gunboats for the Spanish expedition against
Algeria.'

'Didn't I read that Galilleo had something to do with Galatzo.'

'I don't think so, but another astronomer was sent by the king to measure
the earth's meridians from its summit.'

By the time I returned from my walk, the New Age group had assembled in the
upstairs studio: a large open room whose plate-glass windows reflected the
risen full-moon and the galaxy set in a navy-blue sky. Alice was priming
the enormous Swedish wood-burning stove. Galatzo had dropped out of sight
into the darkness. At first I joined them, sitting on one of a circle of
plump cushions set on the stripped pine floor: a Spanish masseuse from
Palma, graceful as a ballerina, a Mallorcan with heavy disappointed
features, who carried a briefcase, a small plump Englishwoman, blond and
earnest as a six-former, a serious German woman who said she was a poet, an
emigré Frenchman with a goatee-beard who had sufficient private means to
do nothing, he said, but heal his soul.

'There is nothing that cannot be achieved by inaction,' he whispered in my
ear before bending stiffly at the waist to sit lotus-fashion on his
cushion.

And there was a couple: a Mallorcan woman with a wealthy husband. He ran a
restaurant on the mainland. She taught natural dance, and before everyone
lapsed into the shared silence of the meditation, she invited everyone to
take part in a ribbon dance later. Through the medium of silence, this
small group united with a circle of similar groups around the world. I
declined to join the ribbon dance later and retired to my room.

Alice and I had time to talk again the next day, and, waiting for her to
arrive at the Clinica Miramar, I remembered some of the things she had told
me. It struck me as extraordinary that Alice Knight had gone to Scotland to
recover 'wholeness': 'Back to that lochside ... With time to reflect, to
dream, to listen to echoes from the past, I became aware that it might be
possible, even as an adult, to regain that childhood sense of wonder.'
Alice had embarked on a process that I would have to engage with now. This
car accident. Could this crisis be the catalyst that would lead me to
change my life?


Here she was now, lugging my suitcase into the clinic room. She sat down on
the edge of the bed: 'You look as if you've had one helluva trip. Do you
want to tell me what happened?'

I sank back on the pillows... hesitating to bring it all back again... my
subversive mind running sub-titles to the main storyline:

'Well, the first thing I remember after going over the edge was a Spanish
voice speaking English.'

Kind, concerned, breaking through the darkness of concussion like a rising
sun: 

'You are safe. It's going to be alright.' 

'A touch on my arm. My hand moved instinctively to grasp it. Then I
came-to. Traumatized, I raised my dazed head. It felt so heavy. I stared
through the windscreen that was no longer there. Shattered glass, a scatter
on the yellow bonnet of the car, over the dashboard and around the controls
at my feet.'

I peered out, uncomprehending, into a mountainous world.

'The man (I could see his beige slacks through the side window) shouted:

'Llamen a un medico. Es urgente!'

There's a stranger wounded in paradise.

'That, I remember. And people leaving their cars and running towards the
scene, crowding anxiously round. I looked for the older man and the young
girl but they weren't among them.'

'Who were they?' Alice asked.

'The man was driving the car behind as I negotiated the bend. He was right
on my tail. The girl, young woman really, was his passenger. Anyway,
nothing made sense when I came to. My shoulder was jammed under the
steering wheel. The man reached further inside the car and moved his arm
round my shoulders and eased me gently out, sideways. Towards him.'

I lapse into your protective embrace with the infinite gratitude of a
wounded animal.

'He reassured me that I'd be OK. Told me he was an off-duty policeman.'

Blood.

'There was blood everywhere.'

Blood falls richly down my cheeks like enormous tears. I tremble with fear
and cold.

I was so cold. He, whoever he was, removed the scarf from round my neck.'

Gently as a lover.

'He tied it tightly round my head to stop the blood.'

Stop the blood. Oh, please stop the blood. I want to keep my

'Perhaps I blacked out again? At any rate, the next thing I remember is
being laid out on the back seat of another car. I could see my bloodied
face in the driving mirror as I struggled up, holding onto the seat in
front.'

My beloved, whose name I will never know, has vanished. And I would have
followed him to the ends of the earth.

'I was with strangers.'

They cover me with a dark-grey greatcoat which is blotched with blobs of
carmine. My blood. My hand reaches up to my head. It hurts. It feels very
strange. My hand is covered with blood. Talk to me. I'm aggressive with
weakness and fear. Who are you? What's going on? Where are you taking me? I
shiver, knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am living through the
worst moments of my life.

'Where are you taking me, ' I demand: 'Who are you?'

Speech and thought failed then, until Alice prompted me back: 'They told me
they were called Juan and Mercedes. I scrutinised their faces as they
looked back at me; good-looking, dark-haired Spaniards on holiday from the
peninsula. They seemed to be a fine young couple.'

I depend on you utterly. Complete strangers. Good Samaritans. Thank you.
Thank you, Juan and Mercedes. Don't let me pass out again. No one knows my
name, or who I am, and no one may ever know again. A cigarette? Yes, oh
please, I'll take one. It might stop me from... if I lose my strength I
might lose my life. I'm so afraid. The cigarette tastes foul. But nothing
is pleasant in a nightmare.

'On and on we travelled, back up the twisting road.'

That snake-in-the-grass of a road.

The road to Hell when Eden had been on my mind.

'I managed to pull my haversack towards me. Found my notebook. Wrote down
your phone number, Alice, and other numbers of friends in Scotland. 

Juan and Mercedes, these are 'phone numbers to contact if I black-out
again. My friends: Dick O'Connell, Julia Laing, Myra Whitson ...

My hand hesitated to write the name and number of the man I'd lived with
these past years. I wrote it down through a miasma of thick tears,
forgetting that he wouldn't be there.

Broken lives, broken dreams.

I glanced over at Alice as if to say: 'Please let me off the hook I don't
want to go on'. But something about her composure gave me the confidence to
continue.

'The drive seemed to take forever. I recognised the blue ravine, the peaks
of the Puigs, the twisting descent into the Soller valley. At last, the car
stopped. Juan opened the back door and helped me out. I clung to him, too
weak to stand alone and vomited at the feet of a white-coated doctor. He
led me into a surgery where he dressed my head wounds and sent me here, to
Palma, in an ambulance.'

I looked at Alice. 'I feel spaced out.' I was crying then.

'Just what you need,' she consoled. 'Get it out of your system... What gets
me is that I nearly came with you to the mountains, and if I had I almost
certainly would have stayed at the port and...'

Her drift was so rivetting that I was able to complete her sentence: 'And
you would have come to visit the count and you would have been with me in
the car!'

A passenger in that car would certainly have been killed.


Saturday. The hour of my dismissal from the clinic. Sitting in the armchair
waiting for Daniel. What if he didn't come? After all, I hardly knew him. I
tried to remember some of the things he had told me: that he had trained as
an architect in Dusseldorf; that an early marriage to a Dutch girl had
failed; that they had a grown-up son. Later he had married Maria-Louisa and
they had two children. That relationship broke up and Daniel went to the
Far East and married an exotically beautiful Indonesian woman whom he
brought to live in Germany. 

'She took to the West like a duck to water,' he said, 'gave me two more
children. But eventually swam off into her own pools of opportunity. I
thought she'd stay if I kept her pregnant.' He shrugged wistfully: 'But it
didn't work.'

These days there was Sophie, his lover. She ran the German end of his
Mallorca operation. He had described the institution he wanted to establish
in Palma as a cultural institute of the arts and sciences based on ideas
that were current during the Italian Renaissance. He believed that the West
had taken the wrong turning and over-developed the rational at the expense
of a more mystical attitude to life. Daniel had touched on these ideas the
first time he visited me at the clinic.

'That wrong turning led eventually to industrialisation and man's
increasing alienation from himself and the natural world which he's bent on
destroying now. We have to go back to that fork on the road where we took
the wrong turning, but without throwing out the baby... the incredible
technological discoveries of our own times. If we're going to survive we
must get people to break down the barriers between science and art and
landscape and themselves.'

He felt it was important to base his institute in Mallorca: 'One of Man's
first Edens', rather than in the over-rational north. These days he spent
all his time in Palma networking, fundraising, trying to lift the venture
off the ground. It was hard going. But he said he had letters from several
Ministries now, promising support.

As I waited, it struck me that my two contacts in Mallorca, Daniel Hartmann
and Alice Knight, were both engaged, in different ways, in a similar
struggle. Mine was just beginning... I told myself I had made the right
decision... not to go back to the distorting life I had been leading in the
north. Although my reprieve, my great escape, the fact that I was still
alive and relatively unscathed, made me feel elated, I was still weak. I
couldn't make the transition without help.

Daniel was already an hour late. Time seemed suspended in the stillness of
the room. A plastic carrier bag beside the chair contained the brainscan
negatives which Doctor Gonzalez had instructed me to give to my own doctor
when eventually I returned to Scotland. He also gave me six pills that I
was to take if I felt faint. 

Here he was at last. He knew of a hotel in a mountain town where I would be
looked after. Slowly and carefully, he drove me there. But he was dismayed
to find the hotel closed for the winter. Just as we thought we might have
to return to Palma, he remembered a small house on the edge of town that
might be available for rent. 

'Oh, if it were, it would be too good to be true,' I responded, for I
sensed that I could recover here in Deià.

'But don't you need looking after?' he protested. 'Someone to bring you
meals. You can't shop and cook and all that in your condition.'

Yes, Daniel, I can, I can. I'll manage somehow.

I followed him through wrought iron gates, along the flower-strewn path
where I waited while he went to the next house to find the owners. Waiting
in the garden, I felt its enchantment. Daniel reappeared:

'Yes, it's OK. You can stay... Luck o' the Irish... the last people just
left for the airport. They tell me the stove's even lit.'

His words were the 'open sesame' which marked the turning point in my life.
My ladder had been against the wrong wall for years. Here in the small
house, the cassita called the Music Room, I might put my foot on the first
rung of a more authentic structure.

Daniel fumbled with the key until it opened the arched oak door leading
into the thick-walled, warm interior. There was a harpsichord, its keyboard
waiting to be played. Even the slightly musty earth smell and dusty
spiderwebs in the corners of the groundfloor room felt oddly comforting
after the stark lines of the clinic. There was a woodburning stove and a
kitchen overlooking the olive terraces. My eyes traced the stairs leading
up to a balcony bedroom and shower-room. Daniel urged me up there, carrying
my bags behind me, and then banked up the stove against the damp chill of
late afternoon. 

He had promised the doctor that he would stay overnight in case I lost
consciousness. 'An unlikely event,' Doctor Gonzalez had said reassuringly.
'You have had a miraculous escape. You are a lucky woman.

A hair's breadth.

Sleep was fitful. Eyes smudged with tears of exhaustion. Tears of relief
and joy to be alive. Tears of weakness. Tears of dependence. Tears of hope.
Tears that had been damned up for years. When Daniel woke me gently, laid a
tray of tea, toast and eggs on the candlewick bedspread, the room already
smelled warmly of woodsmoke and darkness had fallen.

'Eat up, girl. You must get your strength back.' 

His concern masked the anxiety he was bound to be feeling on his own
account, struggling on the edge of survival to bring to fruition his
cherished dreams. He was an idealist and, like many of his kind, would
cling to his dreams through thick and thin. His complexion revealed the
beers he usually drank from mid-morning until the wee small hours. The
fingers of one hand were stained with nicotine. The other frequently ran
through the fine, lank hair in a puzzled gesture. His clothes hung on him
like a scarecrow's garments in a late summer field.

Like many idealists, he had sacrificed the intimacy of women for his 'Holy
Grail'. His girlfriend in Germany was a fine figment for his imagination.
Doubtless he loved her in his own way, but he was unable to sustain ongoing
everyday contact, preferring the casual company of women like Lola. She who
approached Daniel and me as we dined together in the city several weeks
later. Sidling up suddenly from behind a pillar. I didn't notice her
leopard-coated presence until Daniel, who was expounding theories of the
Renaissance which linked with his own, looked up, irritated, and snapped:

'Can't you see I'm busy. Not now, please.'

He offered no explanation as Lola slunk away through the restaurant but
continued, doodling Leonardo da Vinci's encircled man on a white paper
tablenapkin as he spoke. 

Was he destined to become an old city roué? He wore the scarf of one now,
proudly like a flag. It was of houndstooth check, silk, expensive. One of
old Humphrey's last treasures given generously as a gift to Daniel.
Humphrey was an expatriate, a permanent resident of the Hostal Borne. Tall,
distinguished, silver-haired and wraithlike. He and Daniel would conspire
in one of the banyos as they did their laundry. Then they would climb eight
floors up to the roof to set smalls and socks fluttering in the breeze high
above the date palms. Rewarding themselves with a beer or two, they would
discuss the intricacies of hostal management and how its system could be
bent to their own requirements. One of Daniel's privileges was to use the
impressive entrada as an impromptu office. Seated on the velour sofa with
its macramé fringe, behind a brass-bound table, he could receive the
people he wanted to impress, especially those who might put up money for
his institution.

That first evening in the Music Room, Daniel entertained me with stories as
I sat propped up on the bed's red velvet cushions. One of these stories
came close to answering a riddle. Why was he taking so much trouble over
me? All in all, we had known each other only for a few hours, and his
concern went far beyond mere acquaintance. Certainly, it met my own needs
and I felt grateful for his company. Daniel paced the bedroom, back and
forth, drinking beer, smoking, pausing frequently to gaze at the floodlit
church set high on its crest beyond the window. I watched from the bed, too
weak to be anything other than the captive audience of his virtuoso
performance. There was an uncomfortable brightness in his eye. Something
agitated. He seemed scarcely able to contain anxieties usually held at bay
with nicotine and alcohol.

As I listened, I realised that my accident had re-awakened memories of
another in Daniel. He did not, of course, say so specifically. But the clue
lay, in one of the stories he told me. He had been away in Dublin pursuing
an entrepreneurial rainbow which appealed to his Celtic soul. One night a
telegram had been delivered to a remote pub in Killarney where he was
staying.

'Return immediately. Roberto seriously injured.'

To my enquiring gaze he answered: 'No. There were no more details. Just the
message.'

He recounted the incident which still, years later, drew tears to his eyes.
He brushed them away with the back of his hands.

'Wouldn't you just know it? Talk about the luck of the Irish! I had to wait
two hours in Dublin Airport for a flight. Then a two hour flight from
London to Frankfurt. Then Barcelona and finally Mallorca. Waiting, waiting,
waiting in an agony of uncertainty at each stop... I didn't know what the
hell had happened to Roberto... smoking endless cigarettes at each stop.
Looking at my feet most of the time... inwardly paralysed with anxiety. So
much for the fucking global village... pardon the expression, girl... if
you can't make human contact quickly at a time like this. Oh, I tried to
get the various check-ins to rush me through... told them it was a crisis,
but they were too damn bureaucratic to hear me.'

Daniel was very upset and I realised that this was the first time he had
recounted the ordeal which had been dammed-up inside him for so long. He
sat on the edge of the bed and reached for my hand. I felt a powerful rush
of warmth. I think he did too. The power of human touch we both needed .

'We: me, my wife and my son, were living in the old family house in the
mountains then. That house I showed you on the way here?'

I remembered. He had stopped in the nearby town of Valldemossa to deliver a
letter to his niece. That's when he had pointed out the ancient house where
he'd once lived, which stood off the main road. It's facade soft-stuccoed.
Orange, with dark-green paintwork which echoed the pinnacled cypresses
pushing through the lush vegetation of its garden.

'Maria-Louisa was stitching and mending in the downstairs parlour. She
loved the siesta hours when the house becomes partly darkened and the
village soundless. I can see her now, biting off a thread and choosing
another colour to embroider a smock. She was pregnant with our second
child. Little Roberto was upstairs having his siesta. It was almost time to
get him up. His mother believed in putting small children into a darkened
room in the heat of the afternoon. She needed a rest, too, after all. Time
to think, sew, sort out plans, ideas, attitudes in her head, I suppose. She
was probably thinking part fondly, part resentfully, that I would be back
from Ireland in a few days with me banter, me blarney and me presents.
When, clunk, something fell beyond the slightly parted shutters. Silence.
Then a whimper.

'She must have started up in a terrible state then. 'Oh, My God. Something
terrible.' She told me later she had a prevision of what happened almost
before it happened. Yes, Oh God. Yes. She fled into the yard. Yes. Roberto
lay silent on the ground. She ran towards him, her hands half-cupped over
her eyes. She hardly dared to look. Roberto's little body lay akimbo on the
terrace.'

I pressed his hand, encouraging him to finish the story. He stared down at
his feet for a moment then stretched across the expanse of the embroidered
cover to kiss my brow... making up, perhaps, for the kiss he had not been
able to give the distressed mother and injured son. How terrible to have
been so excluded, to feel so impotent at a time when he was so much
needed.

But the story got better. Daniel rose to his feet, poured another beer and
his theatrical tendencies resurfaced. When, at last, he had reached the
Palma hospital, Roberto was lying in a life-support machine. His small
naked body swathed in white bandages. Tubes were attached to his nose.
Looking down at his son through the plate-glass window of the operating
theatre, Daniel felt his whole life darken. It was the worst moment of his
life. looking on helplessly at his son poised between life and death.

Roberto recovered. 'And, really,' Daniel confided, more relaxed now: 'I
should never have doubted that he would. I'm not superstitious, or even
that religious, but, you see, Santa Catalina, the patron saint of
Valldemossa is the protector of children. Even in war none of her young
people lose their lives. None. Not one. They all return. A delegation of
elderly townswomen arrived at our house to remind us of this, implying that
we must make a thanksoffering. We planted a rosemary bush at the spot where
Roberto fell. I think you should plant a tree at your accident spot too.'

Daniel was still asleep on the stone settle by the wood-burning stove when
I woke next morning as the first cock crowed over the valley. The stream
underneath the bedroom window whispered in the breaking light and the
church bell tolled. An hour later I heard him stir and soon the kettle was
boiling merrily. Looking down over the balcony, I watched him carrying-in a
pile of logs. He caught my gaze with a shy smile:

'I need more of this. This country air, the proximity of nature, the woods,
the tranquillity. Palma seems so dirty, noisy, relentless.'

He brought me a cup of tea, made sure I was alright and announced his
departure.

'Will you come back next weekend?' I asked. 'We can sit by the stove, have
a meal, take a walk along the coast?'

Yes. A chance to repay his kindness. Yes. Then he was off, back to the city
to wrestle another round of his dream-game, killing himself slowly with
nicotine and alcohol. But perhaps it wouldn't be like that forever.


TWO ROADS OF MY LIFE CONVERGED THERE, AT THE RED CROSS station in a Soller
courtyard in the scented dusk.

Mallorca. Scotland.

I thought I might never have to make the choice. But seven years of coming
and going have made me feel rootless as well as stretching my finances
alarmingly.

Scotland. Mallorca.

This year the choice must be made. In the meantime, my footprints lie
frozen in the snow of the Scottish borders and here I am in Mallorca, in
Puerto Soller, where almond blossom erupts everwhere. Señor and I have
lived together these past two years - since Sineu - but now he's working at
a Madrid print studio. I'm alone and I'd like a companion. Literary, if not
spiritual. That nineteenth century traveller who described Soller's
beinestar, the author of Las Baleares, the Archduke, could be my man. These
days S'Arxiduc is promoted as the pioneer of Balearic tourism. Certainly
the Archduke, the last Hapsburg, was one among few early tourists, but,
more importantly, he was the first 'white settler'. George Sand and
Frederic Chopin came here before him but didn't stay on. The received
wisdom, recited at dinner parties all along the nothern coast today, goes
something like this: the Archduke bought up several of the best houses,
mainly along the mountainous coastal stretch of the island, as well as
parcels of land including mountains. He was an environmentalist who forbade
the felling of trees on his land, and he ordered the planting of thousands
more. He was a Victorian gentleman amateur: botanist, writer, artist,
traveller. He installed a mistress at one of his houses (which nowadays
belongs to Michael Douglas), a peasant girl of Arab descent, planted a
vineyard for her... but, nod, nod, wink, wink - he was probably bisexual.

There is always, to every story, more than meets the eye.

That's what intrigues me now. I'm filled with intuitive certainty that to
choose Salvador as a travel guide (a more friendly name than 'The
Archduke') would be to choose adventure. Every traveller craves the
excitement of discovery. And to follow, more or less, in Salvador's
footsteps, with his prosaic but detailed account of the island to hand, is
a device I need. With a literary 'map' to follow I might be able to rein-in
my own imagination.

Also, Salvador's spirit might hedge against any sense of aloneness, unless
I should require that state as a luxury.

Fate begins to take a hand when I call my Belgian friend, Eliane. She and
her husband, Tolo De Montes, belong to the family which run the Hostal Es
Port. She is a recent friend. I didn't know Eliane when I checked in
several years ago, the day before the accident.

'Come and join us for a drink after lunch tomorrow?' she says.

I have never met Tolo, a direct descendant of the Viceroy of Sardinia who
came over to Mallorca seven centuries ago to assist Jaime I in his
conquest. Eliane guides me through underground vaults before we emerge onto
the sundappled terrace where he waits, a bearded, piratical figure,
enjoying a splendid cigar, sipping cognac from an ample globe. He doesn't
speak much English.We use French which puts me at a disadvantage, but
Eliane fills in the gaps.

I haven't been able to tell either of them that I booked into their hostal
for a week, years ago, stayed only one night and never returned... about
the accident. No, this pleasant, postprandial, pre-siesta encounter is not
the time for that. We talk about the port's history, of how it is being
spoiled. Tolo recalls his grandfather's story of the day when Archduke Luis
Salvador sailed into the port in an incredible beauty of a boat and, bold
as brass, asked to buy the Hostal Es Port which was then the family home.

'Of course, as you see,' Tolo says, including the buildings, the gardens,
the tennis courts, the swimming pools, the terraces where we sit, with a
sweep of his hand: 'Eliane and I have reason to be grateful that
grandfather didn't sell. This Archduke already had many properties on the
island. He was creating a sort of empire for himself on Mallorca.'

A sleek sloop has skimmed into Puerto Soller harbour in the night and is
berthed below my balcony, beside the Barcos Azules. A prince among
peasants. A beauty of a boat. 

I can't take my eyes off its elegant navy-blue and white lines, its
incredible grace. I long to go with it, to sail away from my desk.

Later, walking in the mountain foothills, a man approaches who must have
been incredibly handsome once. He's still a striking figure, although
overweight and silver-haired. His nautical blazer is buttoned high on his
chest. He smokes a cigar, he has an air that tells me what I want to
believe: he is the voyager on that sloop, Beaugeste. A contemporary
Salvador.

In the Soller library, I inspect an engraving of Salvador's beloved
steamship, Nixe, which puts the modern counterpart under my window,
Beaugeste, into perspective. Nixe was three times the size, with twice as
many sails, three sets of deck cabins and, of course, a huge steam-belching
funnel.

Two passport size photographs permit me to join the library and to borrow
the Mallorca volume of "Las Baleares" from the set Salvador produced and
published, first in seven volumes, "Die Balearen", in Leipzig between 1869
and 1884. The Mallorca volume tells me that Salvador got around Mallorca in
els carrils (unique Mallorcan horse drawn carriages you still see drawing
tourists around Palma) or by sea, in one his private sailing ships, Nixe or
Miramar, which he berthed at Palma or Puerto Soller.

"Las Baleares" documents island life in its grand sweeps and details:
fishing and agriculture sections accompanied by superb etchings. People
living in different parts of the island shown stiffly wearing local
costume, the women in strange high hats and black dresses edged with lace,
the men in sturdy jackets, breeches, and the collarless shirts still sold
today. Varieties of basketwork are represented, and sports... how small
birds are trapped in mountain nets by grown men in camouflage gear. Another
story.

Why did this aristocrat, one of the last Hapsburgs, who died the year after
his grandfather's assassination sparked off the First World War in
Sarajevo, want to record this island so thoroughly? Certainly, there were
precedents, such as Daniel Defoe's "Tour Through the Whole Island of Great
Britain" and Boswell's "Tour of Corsica". And the aristocratic traveller of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was expected to produce a record of
some sort. Nevertheless, the publisher in me stands astonished by the
extravagant illustrations - the fine watercolours and engravings - the
expense Salvador lavished on his undertaking.

After the library, the tram takes me from Soller station back to the port.
I go about in the world now as if with two sets of eyes. The ones borrowed
from Salvador strip things back to the nineteenth century, not a difficult
task in the Soller region. Take the station, for example, a gem of the
great railway age, with a Moorish style entrance constructed on the site of
an inn and its sixteenth century well. A plaque declares that King Juan
Carlos recently awarded the restoration a prestigious Gold Award. The whole
is a film set, ready made for a director. So too, are the environs of the
station where the backs of Soller houses display long verdant gardens,
plentiful with roses and fruit trees, and gates wrought in exuberant Art
Nouveau and Art Deco designs. The gardens border the torrente, often
unpleasantly littered with plastic and paper, and, worse, stinking of
sewage which, however, does not deter the families of ducks congregating on
its oozy reed banks. A walkway on the opposite side leads intriguingly
towards a covered passage. Closer-inspection reveals a row of traditional
ancient wash houses. The maids from the houses worked on the laundry here
and carried it back to dry in the gardens or under the eaves of open roof
spaces.

Hand painted Art Nouveau lettering above the ticket office, ornamental
painted ironwork, original enamelled signs, a café fitted with black and
white tiled floor, slatted doors and sunblinds are all original and
well-preserved. Polished wood and brass in trains and carriages evoke
childhood in older travellers and fascinate the young. This civilized train
route between Soller and Palma has miraculously survived, long after other
European towns and cities have foolishly thrown out their tracks and
sleepers, their wonderful old trains and carriages. Mallorca realised what
other countries failed to: people love to travel by train, and particularly
through the countryside. The slower the train the better. By the time the
Beeching plan had led to the destruction of Britain's small railway lines,
the Soller to Palma line had become one of the island's main tourist
attractions. However, both train and tram serve not only thousands of
today's tourists but also the local population who are sorely tried in
their struggle to get a seat.

Coincidentally, during an early visit to Mallorca, Salvador discovered that
his childhood friend Eusebio Estada was in charge of railway development.
When the train reaches Palma it literally takes to the road, a road named
after Estada himself. Mallorca jumped on the railway bandwagon with the
first line, Palma to Inca, opening in the mid-1870s, followed by
branchlines to Manacor and Felantix (1879) and Santany (1917). Laying
railway tracks across the plains was fairly straightforward. Constructing
the Soller to Palma line, however, took courage and imagination: loops (180
degrees in one stretch), rock cutting and tunnel blasting through the
Sierra of Alfabia, were involved in the five-year project. In April 1912
the line was officially opened with the steam locomotives 'Soller' and
'Palma' pulling coaches of the Ferrocaril company filled with VIPs out of
the capital. To the people of Soller, who had made sacrifices, taken risks
and invested savings in the venture, this was, understandably, 'their
railway'. The Soller to Puerto Soller tram was added in September 1913.


The Mediterranean world wakens to refulgent brilliance. The winds that
buffeted for over a week, bringing clouds to glower over the High Sierras
like great angry gods... and rain, much needed rain... have disappeared, as
it were, into the bosom of the sea, and all seems cleansed and transformed.
To celebrate this awaited morning, Maria, my neighbour in the old quarter,
puts on a favourite record. Pulsating erotic rhythms, melodic trills and
nasal discords, rend the douce morning air, and are carried out over the
sea, signifying Maria's pagan worship, which, unrecognised as such, annoys
the neighbours.

In the recent cold spell, over in the Hostal es Port, gloomy tourists,
mostly German, have felt badly done by: 'We did not come all the way from
Düssledorf for this, ugh!' Now that the weather is warm and sunny again...
what they expected, what they paid for... they are off in packs wearing
breeches and carrying wandersticks, to conquer yet another mountain crest.
You can almost hear them singing, too, but their's is a different song from
Maria's, who embraces everything and everyone today.

Their's is an 'I' song, egocentricly northern: I love to go a wandering...
I love to swing my knapsack on my back.'

In the good weather, I leave my desk with a sense of relief. Time to lace
on the walking boots again. Time to choose where to go. To test the idea of
following in Salvador's footsteps, I decide to walk to Fornalutx and the
Barranc. Like travellers today, he probably approached the small towns of
Fornalutx and Binniaraix on foot, by way of the Carrer de Sa Luna, with its
line-up of small shops selling everything from wine and beeswax candles to
lingerie and handmade shoes. Under the primitive stone carved moon at
number fifty, past the street fountains with their drinking pans, inviting
the traveller to taste the spring water, and the lovely approach to the
bridge, where Salvador noticed fertile vegetable gardens irrigated by
waterwheels. 

He records, on the slopes to the left, the Arab settlement of Binibasi,
which produced exquisite fruit: ' All the countryside here is very fertile,
thanks to the fountain of Binibasi. Vineyards at regular intervals, groves
of lemon trees and palms, combine to form an outstandingly beautiful area
of southern vegetation.' The description is true today. All the way from
town 'Gaian' street names suggest pagan origins: the street of La Luna
herself, Carrer de les Animes, Carrer d'Ozonas.

The 1911 Art Nouveau house, C'an Grunera, its florid decoration similar in
design to many gates, railings and balconies in the Soller area, was
completed only four years before Salvador died, and other houses in the
street display restrained Art Deco balconies and carved stone decoration.
He never saw these, nor, thankfully, the uncompromising, economical
box-style apartments of our own times. Salvador's favourite house in the
Soller region was Son Angelats, standing proud behind a stand of date palms
at the top of the twisting road to Deià. But it might have found a rival
had he known the 1918 red-brick house, with tile mosaics, projecting
pantiled roof, pagoda-like, and eaves with pendant decoration, standing at
the junction of the Fornalutx and Binniaraix roads. In its hey day it would
have been set in an equally inspired garden but, sadly, today all
vegetation has been buried under a concrete forecourt.

At Fornalutx Salvador noted '903 inhabitants and 265 cassitas, all rising
on the slopes of the mountain and the majority only one storey high'. Here,
as elsewhere in Mallorca, from the beginning of the new century
construction moved apace, reflecting industrial prosperity and export
initiatives. On the Carrer Joan Alberti Arbona a splendid 1919 house
prefigures the restraint of Art Deco in silver painted decorative
balconies, a pair of carved lions and other stone carvings, all expressing
the prestige of an owner who wanted an up-to-the minute façade for this
house set in a line of traditional others.

Fornalutx today has a large immigrant population including English,
Scandanavian, French and German. A tiled plaque erected in 1983 declares
that it is a 'Placa D'Argent per Defenser i Maintenement' - a protected and
conserved area. The towns's restored and exemplary streets lead up to, down
from, into and away from the evocative church, set high above the square
behind a symbolic lemon tree and date palm. Nothing jars the senses. Indeed
the lovely small houses, which wend up the slope on which the town is
built, display flowers and plants in tubs and pots outside front doors to
increase the delight of the passer-by. Closer inspection of the rebuilt
church of 1634, reveals a memorable painted Virgin and Child above the
arched entrance, with additional hand-painted decoration, and above the
side entrance, a painted sundial and pantiles underpainted with talismans
of that more primitive era whose heartbeat still pounds away on this
island: the moon, a devil, animals, plants, flowers and cultic symbols.

'According to several informants,' Luis Salvador wrote after his visit to
Fornalutx: 'this church was constructed by the inhabitants in 1365 on the
anniversary of the birth of Mary, or as she is called in Mallorca, the
Mother of the September God' ... Ah, yes, and is she not the Black Virgin,
celebrated in Mallorca at LLuch and many other sacred sites on the island,
and at Monserrat near Barcelona... and la Sybilla of the Christmas Eve
service in churches all over the island... and the figurines found in
painted caves from Altamira to Avignon. She embodies Mother Earth
herself... the Goddess... Gaia, if you like... Maria singing in the port's
old quarter.

My first outing with Salvador is proving successful. Many features of
landscape, architecture and technology of the region are still common to us
both. Ever since Salvador and I conspired, my consciousness has been filled
with views and senses similar to his and, in addition, with this century's
contributions that he could not have dreamt of.

'This village is build on the crest of a hillock,' he wrote of Binniaraix:
'which emphasises the bell tower of its whitewashed church. The houses are
small and dark and most have arched entrances. The church was constructed
in 1602, one of the altars is adorned with a beautiful cross of Santa
Catalina and there is a an antique missal with Gothic lettering in the
sacristy.'

The church was firmly closed when I arrived in Binniaraix. No matter. Like
Salvador, I was just passing through on the way to the astonishing Barranc,
a sort of stairway to paradise, a precipitous flight of stone steps leading
to the summit of a lesser mountain below Puig Mayor.

It seemed something of a miracle that so many people spryly passed on the
way down the Barranc: the old, the obese, the frail, and even children.
Then someone mentioned that a favourite local outing involved getting
someone to drive to the other side of the mountain. Then it was an easy
matter for passengers to walk a short way and reach the summit. After that
it was downhill all the way. My leg muscles ached to the point of stiffness
back at the port, but stunning views, vegetation and other-worldly rock
formations made the climb worth the effort.

I soon realised that Salvador, the aristocrat, had terrific advantages over
me. There was probably a horse with companion waiting for him at either
end. And drifting off to sleep, Salvador turned up, elegantly dark-suited,
with a cape (yes, the introduction to "Las Baleares" describes him
travelling Mallorca 'utilzando su capa como vela'. Hang on, that was "Ramon
de Penyafort". Ah, well ... editor's artistic license).

In my hypnagogic state Salvador combs the forsaken valley of the Gorg Blau,
soaring vultures overhead, his fieldglasses sweeping the horizon towards Sa
Calobra, that snake-in-the-grass road... the road to Hell when Eden had
been on my mind.

But I don't want to.follow there yet. Instead of counting sheep, I mull
over the litany of Salvador's names: Luis Salvador Maria Jose Bautista
Domingo Raniero Fernando Carlos Zenobio Antonio of Hapsburg-Lorraine and
Bourbon.


Notes have been made. I have studied the fine illustrations in Salvador's
Mallorca book. My visual sense is satisfied. But no person emerges from
Salvador's written text: the number of houses he finds in a certain village
is interesting only up to a point, and the number of people living there,
for example, and how they earned a living, the history of the church, etc.
Very occasionally, something fascinating jumps out: like the three women he
discovered in a settlement on the top of a mountain cone, who worshipped
the Mother rather than the Christ. But I want to know more about him.

To be honest, I am having to reconsider the prospect of slavishly following
Salvador's footsteps through the whole island of Mallorca. My curiosity
about the man himself is becoming insatiable. Who did he travel to Soller
with, for example? What was his personal life really like? And what of this
Arab mistress, Catalina Homar? Now, there's a story, friends assured me.

At my request the librarian's hands and eyes skim the Mallorca shelves for
a biography of the Archduke Luis Salvador. But she shakes her head.

'No, I'm sorry. There's nothing here.'

Later, in the Soller bookshop I find "El Archiduque Errante" (The Wandering
Archduke) a biography by B. Ferrà Juan and purchase it. My Spanish is not
good, and this book was written in 1943. Even so, with a dictionary I
should get the broad sweeps of the man's life. Many hours of painstaking
translation lie ahead. Sitting at a table outside the Café Paris in the
square near a group of elderly Scottish tourists, the women in colourful
cotton dresses, I feel oddly comforted by their broad and familiar
accents.


SALVADOR, AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN, FIRST SAW MALLORCA FROM THE steamboat
Jaime II after he had explored Ibiza. It was the beginning of September
1865 and he was accompanied by Eugenie Sforza di Montignoso. More than
simply guardian, valet and travelling companion to Mallorca and elsewhere,
Sforza played the father figure until his death, aged seventy-four. On that
first morning in Palma, Salvador presented himself at the house of
Francisco Manuel de los Herreros, Director of the Balearic Institute for
Secondary Education, to whom he proposed his intention to explore the whole
island. Herreros responded by producing a bundle of letters of introduction
to people in the towns and villages who could help him. He also gave the
young aristocrat a tour of everything of 'historical, monumental or
picturesque interest'. The Institute's library, and other manuscripts were
put at his disposal and Salvador left a calling card with the librarian
which bore the alias: Ludwig, Graf von Neudorf. 

It's a start, but the Ferrà Juan biography makes me uneasy. I sense its
partiality, even in a language that is not my own. There has to be a better
biography. Back in the library, I make a thorough search of my own which
leads, at last, to "S'Arxiduc" a more recent biography by the late Juan
March - in Catalan. Why hadn't the librarian been able to find it? No
matter. Now I might discover why Salvador used that pseudonym. Count von
Neudorf? What was he running away from? There's something I'm determined to
track down. Something awful I've picked up but not fully understood from
the Ferrà Juan book. To begin with I study the illustrations in Juan
March's book, portraits mostly, hauntingly superior, of the players in
Salvador's life.

I'm frantic to find a portrait of the Archduchess Matilde, but she's not
among this photographic gallery of Salvador's ancestors and relatives:
Fernando VII and Queen Gobernadora, Empress Maria Teresa, Luis I of
Bavaria, Maximiliano and Carlota, the fugitive rulers of Mexico, the
Duchess of Berry, dukes of Parma and Madrid, etc. etc. and Luis Salvador's
father, Leopold II of Tuscany.

Salvador has quite a pedigree, as the family trees in the book indicate.
One line traces the House of Tuscany (descendants of the Duke of Lorraine
and the Grand Duke of Tuscany who married Maria Teresa of Hapsburg, Empress
of Austria). A second line traces the Imperial House of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and the third the House of the Two Scillies,
descending from Luis Salvador's grandfather, Carlos III of Spain and Maria
Amelia of Sajonia. It's an incredible lineage with several links to
Napoleon. There is a photograph of the Pitti Palace in Florence where
Salvador was born in 1847 and another of the Boboli Gardens, the playground
of his youth.

Tracing the list of his nine brothers and sisters, I see that his younger
brother, Juan, born in 1852, adopted a pseudonym too: 'he passed into
history as Juan Orth after his bizarre disappearance in 1891', says the
author. I make a note to follow up that story another time, fascinated that
two brothers adopted aliases: one disappeared completely, while the other
sailed to a new world, Mallorca.

What little information I'm gathering about Salvador's life in Mallorca
intrigues me now, as it might a sleuth. It's obvious that Salvador had more
guises than most to shed: an over-refined inheritance, a world where
emotion was frowned upon and reason ruled. His early playground bred, no
doubt, an appreciation of form and design, a feeling for Apollonian beauty.
But the classical Pitti Palace and the formal Boboli Gardens lacked 'Maria
warmth'. George Eliot described the palace as 'a marvellous conjunction of
the cyclopic and solemn regularity'.

Was it his inspiration that by journeying round the island, and documenting
what he found, he might begin to transform, to enrich, his inner world?
Such, after all, is the hope that every traveller carries in the depth of
his soul. The venture is always fraught with risk.

But why did the young Salvador adopt the desperate measure of a false
identity when he came to Mallorca? What happened to the beautiful
Archduchess Matilde, daughter of Archduke Albert, who had recently become
his fiancée? Juan March's biography, lays out the whole gruesome tale.

In March 1867, two years after his first visit to Mallorca, Salvador was
studying in Prague. Matilde was at Weilburg, preparing to take part in a
fiesta. She put on one of her first ballgowns, made of gauze, and went to
the library for her father's approval. Albert was smoking a cigar, waiting
for guests, when his daughter appeared, dancing before him. The alcohol
with which she had dressed her hair caught fire, and she became a human
torch.

Immolation.

Like Joan of Arc, Matilde became a pile of ashes, but hers contained the
precious gems of her jewellry, a ghostly prefiguration of the end of the
Hapsburg era. For Salvador, the harrowing event contained the seeds of his
release and broke, once and for all, the unbearable umbilical Hapsburg
cord. He had a reason, at last, to leave the stultifying, power-mad world
of his youth, but he carried the nightmare with him. His pseudonym
'Neudorf' (new village) reflected his need to start a new life. Like
Odysseus he chose to travel by sea. Like Byron's Don Juan, Salvador's
mental turmoil might be mirrored by the adventure of  tossing and turning
on the ceaselessly changing sea. Speed, space and sea breezes - a heady
conflagration, after a lifetime's confinement in the Hapsburg court.

Salvador's generation was the first to experience speed in transport.
Locomotion applied to sailing ships became his passion. Before his second
visit to Mallorca he sailed in Nixe I. Nixe... a siren, a sea-creature, a
mermaid, a sexless femme fatale, fascinating and unthreatening. Matilde,
perhaps, reincarnated as objet d' art.

At the end of June 1871, Salvador had written to Señor Herreros of his
intention to spend the winter in Mallorca - in fact, he would linger
longer, as many visitors to Mallorca do. Herreros invited the Archduke to
stay with him because the Palma hotels 'lacked any decency'. But Salvador
preferred to rent a house near the sea. Thus began his love affair with
Mallorca, which would be the umbrella for numerous dalliances as well as
committed friendships, conspiracies and tragedies.

'I have always been a nomad, without fixed residence,' wrote Salvador. 'I
circle the seas, driven first of all by my affections, a circumstance which
has turned me into a wanderer, so to speak, on the fringes of humanity.'

As for me, I need a break from this distasteful detective work, with its
mundane and horrific revelations, to take to the road again.

Salvador, that pioneer of Balearic tourism and passionate environmentalist,
would be aghast to see so many feet trampling the adopted landscape he
struggled so diligently to protect. Even in  his wildest dreams he could
never have imagined seven million visitors arriving by air to the island
every year. Even five years ago, you could wander the coastal paths and
mountain tracks and be sure of sensing that quality of nature which Robert
Graves, who also settled here, called 'enchantment'.

Like Salvador, and every northerner who has come to live here, Graves's
search was for wholeness: a longing to re-engage with richer dimensions
which the rational north sweeps under the carpet. To unify mind and matter.
Gaia. Maria.


I went through the port's old quarter, opening the cages of the
goldfinches, setting them free...

Alas, it was only a dream.

This ineffable morning in late March, my form of praise is a radio produced
Bach cantata. When I open the small door-within-a-door, I find Maria
sitting on one of the white chairs - everyone in the street has at least
two on either side of the door - with a new neighbour, aged around
nineteen. She's wearing a pink candlewick robe, her fresh washed hair is
tied up into an unruly pile. They have never come to sit at my door before,
and I'm delighted. They've been drawn to the music.

'Le gusta la musica,' Maria states.

Any well-felt music, be it Baroque or Spanish flamenco rock, is acceptable
to Maria.

Vine leaves have sprouted on my neighbour's pergola. The young woman, an
immigrant from Murcia, has moved in with him. Roses in bud are climbing
high out of their pots, sea fennel rampages, the succulents send out
suckers, thyme is in bloom. The sea gardens, set atop the rubble walls,
sense summer.

The time has come for me to leave the Soller valley, by tram from the port,
and by train to Bunyola near the garden of Alfabia, and on to Palma. That
is my intention, though, who knows, when a book begins, or when a journey
begins, what might unfold. A book is a journey of sorts, its pages like
feet, endlessly exploring as the reader turns them.


3. In the Mountain Towns

THE ADDICTION TO NOMADIC LIFE IS IMBUED WlTH UNCERTAINTY, BUT also with
thrilling certainty. The person of no fixed abode ventures into an
unfamiliar landscape with the certainty that his or her life may be changed
irrevocably, from one minute to the next, for better or for worse, by an
unexpected meeting, by accident or simply by the sight of something
astonishing.

Luis Salvador's second visit to Mallorca in 1871 followed a hectic year of
travel and study in Prague. By August not only had he finished the Ibiza
section, but the general introduction to "Las Baleares" as well. Earlier in
the year, the death of his father, Leopold II, had brought a sort of
freedom. Salvador ordered the construction of Nixe I at Fiume, near Venice,
but, pending its completion, it was on the steampacket Mahones that he
arrived in Palma. On Don Herreros's recommendation he rented the
magnificent home of a count, Ca's Formiguera, on the city walls near the
Cathedral. By the end of November he was ready to set out for the mountain
coast.

Salvador had travelled there four years earlier and he now retraced his
steps to confirm the impact of a certain place that had impressed him most,
and which he had paused to sketch: Son Morroig.

This time he saw other houses too: Son Galceran, Can Calo and Miramar. To
Sforza, his stalwart companion, he said: 'If that house [Miramar] is for
sale I want to buy it.' Son Morroig was not for sale at the time. Later, it
would be his. Salvador sensed intuitively that this particular landscape
held the key to the new life he craved.

Not only that, here he would learn about that giant of medieval thought and
philosophy, Ramon Llull, who had lived and taught in this landscape six
centuries earlier. Llull was the figure upon whom he would attempt to model
his life.

After he bought Miramar, Salvador wrote to his mother: 'Come to see
Miramar, the place where the ancient college of Miramar was established to
teach oriental languages, with a view to converting the infidel, founded by
the mayor gloria of the Balearics: Ramon Llull (Raimundus Lulius)'.

Ramon Llull is revered in Mallorca. Most towns include a street named after
him. In Deià, Calle Ramon Llull leads up to the church and the main street
is Calle Archduke Luis Salvador. Presumably it was the theological student
Antonio Vives, born in Deià in 1855 and nine years younger than Salvador,
who first filled his master with enthusiasm for Ramon Llull. Salvador had
made Vives his secretary in 1870. The ageing Sforza, unable to accompany
Salvador on all the trips connected with the preparation of Las Baleares,
conceded that this younger companion should go in his stead. Vives
accompanied Salvador on trips to the mountainous north coast, this area of
outstanding physical beauty, its coastline peppered with hermits' caves,
which, long before Salvador put down roots had become smugglers' lairs.

As Salvador notes, they travelled simply, cooking up eggs over a wood fire
in a clearing near Deià, staying overnight in village houses. Juan March
suggests that the 'libidinous' Vives made advances to Salvador, who was
not, however, interested in his 'fatuous and slippery' seventeen year old
companion. He described Vives as depraved: 'his hair impregnated with the
smell of wax'. Vives's presence would be a thorn in Salvador's flesh for a
long time, but the relationship matured with age and Vives inherited most
of the Archduke's wealth. Vives's descendants own Son Morroig and Miramar
to this day.


I am finding the painstaking translation of Salvador's biography in Catalan
frustrating, but the gist emerges. Salvador had found his paradise.

'The night was clear, one of those January nights in which the stars are so
clear that they seem almost within reach,' wrote Salvador when he reached
Miramar, increasingly enchanted by the contrasts in the landscapes, by
olive trees, flowers, stone relics. Not only that, he would discover a
'cultural alibi' here in the enigmatic figure of Llull. Salvador soon read
his "Book of Blanquerna", which contained the seeds of an astonishing
revelation.

Once upon a time, Blanquerna met a juggler on foot, accompanied by a
horseman with a lance in his hand and his sword hanging from his neck. The
juggler told Blanquerna that this horseman was an emperor and that they had
visited many places together. He spoke with affectionate respect for the
caballero.

After relating some of their adventures to Blanquerna, the juggler asked
where they could find something to eat. They had neither eaten nor drunk
for two days.

'Señor,' Blanquerna said, 'over there is a fountain of delicious water and
you can eat the fresh herbs growing round it.'

The Emperor refused, saying he couldn't drink without eating and that he
wasn't used to eating herbs. They would die soon if they couldn't get the
food they were accustomed to.

Blanquerna led them to the fountain. Then he produced three loaves of
bread. While the emperor was eating, Blanquerna asked if he preferred the
bread he was eating to his empire. The emperor replied that here in this
place, he preferred the bread.

Blanquerna challenged him saying: 'How little the empire is worth when its
leader values bread more than his empire'.

This character, frequently referred to under the name of 'the Emperor', as
the archetypal Christian monarch, Llull had modelled on Rudolph of
Hapsburg, Landgrave of Alsace, whom Rubens later immortalised.
Astonishingly enough, Salvador was the tenth generation descendant of
Rudolph, Llull's Emperor.


THE RUGGED NORTH COAST OF MALLORCA REMAINS AN EARTHLY paradise today,
though late twentieth century tourism and expansionism stealthily
threatens. Approaching from Palma the visitor first crosses a rich alluvial
plain planted with thousands of carob and almond trees. Then, tortuously,
the road snakes towards a dramatic silver-crested cleft high above Arcadian
fields and ochre-harled fincas graced with date palms and cypresses.
As-if-by-magic, the town of Valldemossa reveals itself. Has a gigantic
stage flat been pulled apart by mountain gods? It looks magical now, but
often in winter the town shrouds itself under cloaks of the mists that
suddenly swirl-in from the sea.

The turquoise and gold-studded mosaic dome of the Carthusian monastery, the
simpler stone spire of the church of Santa Catalina Tomas, the huddled
houses and the swirling terraced landscape all conspire to make Valldemossa
appear Tibetan from afar. Its centre reveals a prosperous place filled with
outdoor cafés, tourist shops and the monastery which attracts thousands of
visitors every year (mostly German) to swarm through cells where Frederic
Chopin and his then mistress, George Sand, lived in great discomfort for a
few brief weeks during the winter of 1839. That far from romantic
interlude, described by Sand in "Winter in Mallorca" (an island bestseller
sold in several languages) nets the town a hefty revenue, its success
backed-up by bus tours, car parks and new housing, all of which swamps the
graceful aspect of the town, except in early morning or late afternoon when
the Carthuja closes and the town returns to itself.

No one has surpassed George Sand in describing the island's rare beauty:
'green Helvetica set under a Calabrian sky, with all the solemnity and
silence of the East', she wrote. It is unlikely that Salvador knew about
the couple's stay in the Carthuja at Valldemossa. Certainly, Salvador
doesn't mention their visit in his detailed description of the town. He
described 'picturesque' Valldemossa, 437 meters above sea level, as a
summer place, cold in winter with frosts and fogs. A small and humble
village then, it had one thousand six hundred inhabitants and three hundred
and twenty seven houses. Its surrounding countryside was possessed by
wealthy Palmesanos. Some of the houses date from the seventeenth century
and have wooden eaves and painted tiles in a variety of rustic forms, he
notes, and he describes the plazas and the church of Catalina Tomas,
founded in 1245, which, even in Salvador's day, had undergone many
transformations. Ceramic tiles depicting scenes from the saint's life are
displayed outside nearly every house today, for, as I had learned from
Daniel Hartmann, Catalina Tomas is first and foremost the patron saint of
the young.

The monastery of the Carthusians fascinated Salvador, who describes its
primitive Moorish roots. 'Los soberanos arabes', the ruling Arabs, had a
summer palace here before the Kings of Aragon built another in its place in
1321. Its first incumbent was Martin Montaner who enjoyed the sport of
falconry. In 1399 the king ordered the foundation of a convent, which
survived until the nineteenth century, and two churches were constructed in
1446 and 1812. Several tall defensive towers dominated the valley below,
during the fifteenth and sixteenth century. 

When Salvador arrived the monastery had been divided and sold to people who
came to live in the cells in summer. Salvador describes the place as
abandoned, its cells neglected, so he spent an uncomfortable night in an
inn. The luxuriant valley of La Coma, beyond Valldemossa, was verdant in
spring when Salvador took the route towards Son Morroig: 'cedars, spring
shrubs and rosebushes mingled with exotic plants and huge conifers shading
the ways.'

Beyond the Valldemossa valley an enchanted land of caves, towers,
magnificent mountains and seascapes stretches all the way to Soller and
beyond. Gustave Dore, famous for his illustrations to Dante's Inferno, was
inspired by this landscape. But George Sand never saw round the Valldemossa
corner. Nor did she visit the town of Deià which tops a geological cone
under the embrace of the magnetic parabola of the Teix range, nine
kilometres away. Until the tarmacadam road was built in Salvador's day
(1880s) the area was virtually impenetrable except by sea or mountain
track.

The cone of rock on which Deià is built spirals upwards like a conch-shell
from the sea, enfolds Moorish-inspired houses and undulating streets
incised into fertile terraces, where citrus fruits, olives, figs and
persimmons flourish. People the world over have been cast in its spell and
return, whenever they can, to wonder at its genius. Deià elicits symptoms
not unlike an extraordinary love affair. Indeed, Gertrude Stein warned
Robert Graves, who arrived in 1936, that the place was a paradise whose
hold would remain intense until the release of death. Certainly this
stunning coastal theatre has inspired innumerable love affairs, legendary
and mundane. The mythic figures of Artemis, Aphrodite, Apollo and the
others might be as at home here as in any Hellenic landscape. Thousands of
ordinary and extraordinary romances have been enacted and re-enacted here
by lovers sensing the fecundity and other-worldliness of the landscape. The
coastline's star-crossed figures include Chopin and George Sand, Luis
Salvador and Vyborni, Catalina Homar and Captain Singala, Robert Graves and
Laura Riding, and, more recently, Michael Douglas and his wife Diandra, who
grew up in Deià.

This is goddess territory. Robert Graves intuited that, and wrote "The
White Goddess" here. He himself was inspired by several real-life women
whom he called his 'goddesses'. But the true goddess, the Great She, can be
traced back to an unlovely blind female who dwelled in darkness, seething
with fecundity. Like an embryo. Her earliest representation in art is the
bulging Venus of Willendorf: all belly, breasts and thighs. This old Stone
Age relic, like a chip of the landscape itself, this cult-image, symbol of
the abundance of nature, was designed to be the salvation of the cave
dwellers who created her around 30,000 B.C. Her belly was her cave, her
ropes of corn hair prefigured the invention of agriculture.

Thousands of similar statuettes - this one is under five inches high - have
been found in caves throughout Spain and the rest of Europe, from Altimira
to Avignon. Caves incised with the scratching claws of mountain bears and
paintings of bison, buffalo, deer and elephant in muted earth colours,
which gracefully follow fissures and bumps on the calcified walls. Some
archeologists believe the cave paintings were the work of women. Whatever
the truth of this, the broad hipped, faceless figurines, found buried near
excavated bodies, often painted with red ochre beside carefully arranged
cowrie shells, reflect ancient human awe in the face of nature's chthonic
power to create and destroy, which primitive people related to the power of
women to give birth.

Chthonic means 'of the earth,' but of the earth's seething interior, not
its surface.

Earliest people believed that the Great She, if propitiated, would allow
them to survive by hunting and harvesting. Some researchers hold that the
earliest societies were partnerships between men and women, whose religious
expression was still focussed on the Mother Earth Goddess. By then she was
intimately bound up with the celestial spheres, like a Venus of Willendorf
unmasked, allowed to peep out from the cave mouth and wonder at the sky.
Men hunted according to the moon cycle that triggered women's menstruation,
and ultimately, childbirth, and worship of the Great Bear became a
predominant religion. Ancient awe and inspiration continued until the
discovery of metal allowed powerfully muscular nomadic males to compete for
new territories and enslave women and children.

Egyptian art was the first to break free from nature's thrall by ordering a
rational society with a god king at its head and stylish art to reflect it.
Day and night were equally honoured until the Greeks split the harmony of
earth and sky by setting their Gods in earthly temples and pitting the
Olympians - Apollo, Artemis and Athena - in a war against the chthonic
whose chief protagonist was Dionysus, son of Zeus. Although she was a
direct descendant of the Great Mother, Artemis represented a new
idealisation of woman precisely because of her resistance to 'nature's
sexual flux'. She is thus, perfectly on-line to become a model for the
Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa... and Robert Graves's 'personal
goddesses'.

Inevitably, the subject of Graves's 'goddesses' crops up again and again,
and not just in the bars of Deià. The Scots poet Norman MacCaig remembers
Graves sweeping in to address an Edinburgh Burns Supper, a striking figure
wearing a black cloak and black homburg, a young woman at his side. There
are said to have been four major goddesses not counting Laura Riding. One
is 'very old'; two have refused to speak about their liaisons with the
poet; and the fourth, a dancer, keeps a house in Deià. But later in his
life, Graves became intrigued by what he called the Black Goddess.

Roman culture produced the words mater and materia, semantically linking
mother and earth. But by 415 A.D. the Great Mother had gone underground
again, an outcast, eventually to be evoked by medieval witches. At
Monserrat, near Barcelona, the Black Virgin is still worshipped where the
spiritual heart of Catalunya beats strongest. The ropes of corn have become
a simple carved crown, the dusky features, movingly open now, are covered
by a hooded cloak painted with stars.

At the monastery of Lluch the Black Virgin evokes Shiva, graceful as an
eastern figurine. After Jaime I's conquest of Mallorca the altar to the
Lluch Virgin was probably erected and guarded by the Knights Templar.
Later, sixteenth century pilgrims created a stairway representing 'the
seven joys of our lady'. Seven lamps light either side of the altar of the
Black Virgin of LLuch today. Seven. The seven stars of the Plough, the
Great Bear, Ursa Major, worshipped by Willendorf's cave people. Seven. The
symbolic number of the Knights Templar.

Twelve. Symbolic number of the first Christians. Twelve stars punctuate the
diadem above the Lluch Virgin's thirteenth century crown. In 1884, twelve
thousand pilgrims travelled through the mountains to assist in her
coronation.

At the end of the twentieth century the Great Mother is staging a comeback,
a further transformation, worshipped under the name of Gaia, by individuals
and groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, who revere the
landscape and recognise the chthonic in nature. At best, their members
acknowledge basic forces in their own human nature, and dedicate their
lives to protecting the planet from loss of resources through pollution and
heedless urbanisation.

Thus we return to the Virgin of Lluch. She is the Great Mother holding the
Christ child, symbol of vulnerable humanity, on her lap. Maria. sensuously
worshipping the coming of spring in the morning music of Puerto Soller,
embodies Gaia.


Beyond Deià, the toad winds treacherously towards Soller. Although the
drivers are fantastically skilled at fitting the huge bulk of the local bus
in and out of tight corners, up hairpin bends and over fragile bridges, no
one can pretend that his or her heart is not in their mouth for much of the
time.

Travelling in the bus, I watch tourists cower in their seats, or else they
sit bolt upright, as if full attention might prevent disaster. They clutch
at their partner's arm, their eyes amazed to see little between the bus and
the sheer cliff drop below. The question they ask themselves, their tongues
trembling:

If we go over the edge what happens?

I would answer, if they asked me:

Who knows, but, certainly, nothing will be the same again.


AFTER DANIEL LEFT THE MUSIC ROOM FOR PALMA, I STAYED IN BED ALL day,
dipping in and out of sleep, between endless cups of tea, absorbing the
peace within the space of the house, allowing thoughts to come and go.
Suspended in that state, willing my restless being to stay in one place, I
was aware of music from the radio, each note distinct like falling
raindrops. Despite my exhaustion and my bruised aching body, the notes
seemed to promise liberation, as if they were keys to doors which had been
locked for a very long time.

The view from the window of the balcony bedroom looks across incredible
textured terraces constructed, stone-by-stone, by subjugated villagers and
Moors. There is no trace of linearity in the terraces which spiral round
the rock on which the town is built. Lush citrus plantations occupy the
terraces above the bird haunted banks of the torrente. Finches and warblers
find a safe haven here, and owls and hawks hunt above it. The olive groves
peter out at the rocky summit where the church dominates the settlement in
every direction. Except from the cove road where it cannot be seen at all.

Did the first settlers of the mountain town land through the mouth of the
cove, which on certain days has a beauty so azurely intense that Aphrodite
herself might emerge from its great sea-bedded rocks? The first swarthy
settlers of the high mountain village would pull their primitive craft out
of the gleaming sun-shot sea onto the rocky shingle and perceive a place so
mountain-protected that they might live here, hunting and gathering in
relative safety. Did the semi-circular cove itself seem like the mouth of a
conch-shell whose inner spiral would lead them to the hilltop haven where
they could celebrate the nature spirits of this extraordinary landscape
while holding their devils at bay? The path of their interior landscape
would spiral round and up for almost a mile, wide at first, narrowing at
the summit. What spirits might lurk in its unexpected hollows, cliffs and
caves? What mysteries might unfold in that magical valley?

For me each day became an adventure beyond the Music Room. Each step
forward mirroring the print of a tentative returning footstep. The path
above the torrente, a mere footpath, seemed high and treacherous in my
still-recovering state. Eventually it led to the first olive grove where
sheep and lambs wandered, unafraid of my approach. I sat here for hours, my
sun-warmed back supported by an ancient olive tree whose gnarled boughs
gathered protectively around me. On the third day I was able to cross the
wooden bridge three feet above a water course, apprehensive as an ageing
acrobat returning to the tightrope. Now all that prevented me from
following the twisting path for a mile to the sea was my lack of stamina.

Time, once my adversary, was now on my side. Time to recover in the fullest
sense. There would be time, when I was ready, to discover the town which
itself seemed suspended in a timeless dream. Each ochre-stone house on the
fecund terraces seemed to dream the lives of its inhabitants behind louvred
shutters closed against the bright light of day. One morning I climbed
further up the slope to the town, past groups of old women, gossiping on
corners or coming and going to tend their garden plots.

The people I passed and the children playing all said: 'Hola! Buenos dias.'
All but one, a silent solitary man wearing a woollen hat, a rough-hewn
jacket of black-and-white checks lined in red and a wicker bag slung across
his shoulders. I often passed him on the road to town but he exchanged no
greeting and never looked at me.

After climbing the hill, I came to the town's main street which had the
atmosphere of places in the outback. Places where every arrival and
departure is noted by someone who just happens to pull back a lace curtain
or leave a shop or bar or hang out over a balcony. There are bars at
regular intervals along the route where cars and buses arrive and leave the
town. Eventually I summoned enough courage to enter their dark, rich
interiors. To order cognac and café con lêche. And afterwards, I bought
supplies of olives, cheese, bread and biscuits which kept me going until
suppertime.

I resolved to start working for a few hours each day. Drawing and writing
my way back to confidence. Every morning I would sit in the olive groves
lost in a world of shapes, textures and colours. The trees, twisted and
textured with a thousand years' growth and pollarding, became my
companions: solitaries, family groups, entwined couples, combatants. The
flock of sheep came and went, munching the lush carpet of grass and sorrel
at my feet. Beyond the grove, high on a terraced hill, I could see a house
with an arched lintel painted cobalt. That house would have a view to the
sea. The sea.

But, these delicate days, I preferred my landlocked encampment, enclosed,
secret, safe, as I needed to be, in silence broken only by birdsong. To
begin with I confined myself to straightforward sketching. But the dense
grey-browns and silver-greens, intense purples, yellows, deeper greens and
terracotta so vivid it was almost red, encouraged me to think of starting
to paint. Light and shadow played among the trees as sketches of particular
trees emerged, sharply focussed in their peculiar rocky encampment, and
wider views of the grove with the sheep and the house on the hill.

I would be glad of these carefree mornings. As the drawings progressed my
emotional strength returned. But a day came when heavy mist shrouded the
mountains and the sun disappeared as I walked down the road to the cove in
the silent, oppressive warmth of early afternoon. On my return, all nature
seemed suspended. No birds sang in the grotesque cliffs which dominate a
twist of the road and the only stirring was a flicker of butterflies on
wayside shrubs. I avoided looking into the mouth of the great cave which
rises above the road, ochre and alluvially smooth at its entrance, lest my
imagination run rampant. For might this not be the cave of the Goddess and
did she not eat poets for breakfast and night-flying bats for supper?

Next morning the heavy atmosphere persisted. But I returned to the grove to
finish drawing a tree of peculiar strength and strangeness. Familiarity
with the place where I always sat allowed me to become quickly absorbed.
The sheep with their lambs accepted me as an element in their landscape and
came to munch, ever-closer, beside me. When I was drawing I thought I
caught a flicker of alien colour, a flash of scarlet, behind the tree. No,
it was a trick of light. Then an arresting crack, like a pistol-shot, from
behind the tree startled me. In portentous silence I stiffly approached it.
A small bent figure darted away down the terraces towards the torrente. Man
or mountain goat? Nothing but a broken branch lay behind the tree. Mounting
rage overcame my lingering apprehension as I went to pack-up my equipment.
How long had I been under scrutiny, thinking I was entirely alone? Trailing
a sense of dismay back to the Music Room, I knew I would be unable to
return to the grove with anything like my previous ease.

A series of powerful dreams plagued me that night. But they were different
from the devil-dreams in the clinic. In one dream I fumbled down, down,
down, into the earth, following a flight of rough hewn steps into a
subterranean cave. At every step afraid to take the next. From the window
beyond my bed I absorbed the star-filled small hours and grappled with my
enslaved imagination. Who or what was the strange creature of the groves? I
might never again feel the ease of my early encampment. But surely I would
be a coward not to return.

Over the next few days I forced myself back, for shorter periods, to the
grove. This was small bacon compared to the accident, I told myself. I
would start work as the sun broke free from the great silver curtain of the
Teix mountain and continued to draw until the terrace became unpleasantly
bright. Then I would hide my gear behind a pile of boulders and walk,
unhampered, down to the cove. This ritual pleased me. I heard no more
breaking twigs. When a figure finally did emerge into that landscape I
wasn't afraid, for he approached shy as a mountain goat and sat beyond the
rooted cusp of my tree when the ground was peppered with purple-black
olives. It was the silent solitary. I watched him roll a cigarette and lick
its paper into shape thinking that it did not matter that he was almost
certainly the figure that had disappeared with the cracking twig.

'You are already aware, I see, that the world is a stranger and more
magical place than it appears to be at first sight.' That was all he said
by way of an introduction.

I nestled further into the tree, my bones sweetened by the morn sun, but
didn't reply. My arms curved upwards to support my head. Perhaps I seemed a
curious sight, still altered by bandages and bruising. It didn't matter. I
felt no requirement to respond to this encounter with the first person I
had met since Daniel left the Music Room. The stranger sat puffing his
cigarette in silence and then disappeared, as it is so easy to do in this
landscape. He merged with the olive trees, became one of them for all I
knew. Every particle of matter surrounding me seemed to resonate. Gaia.
Mind and matter indivisible.


There were difficult times when I longed for company, but I was making
progress. Daniel had not returned yet, but I knew I would see him in Palma
when I was well enough. My back ached painfully with what seemed like a
hundred knotted muscles. I checked my appearance regularly in the bathroom
mirror. They had shaved the crown of my head above the wound and it upset
me to think that my hair might not grow back. The other wound would
probably heal, concealed by my hairline. Every day I picked a lemon from
the tree in the garden and rinsed my head believing that its antiseptic
properties would hasten my cure.

So easy to remember. So hard to forget.

A lithograph hung on the bathroom wall showing two primitive women on a
shingle beach, their backs turned to the the sea beyond. One woman stood
strong and tall, the other was crouched, her hand on her head. I identified
with both women. One of the figures represented the part of me that dwelled
on the outrageous event of the accident, trying to understand why it had
happened, appalled by the thought that I had almost died, or worse, been
maimed for life. The other woman expressed a vibrant realisation: she was
not only egotistically human, but also part of the natural world around
her. Gaia. Mind and matter, one and the same. I resolved that, however
difficult it might be to extract myself from the life I had been living up
till now, I must do so. The accident must not be in vain.

At night I often felt hysteria rise as I pulled the blanket over my head.

'Am I going barmy like an ageing Ophelia?' 

I might wake in the dark, feeling cold. The moon and the northern star
might not yet have entered the theatre of the window frame above my bed.
Pitch-black. Waiting. Eternity. Does it matter where one waits? Here or
there? I'd make tea then, covering my shoulders with a blanket. I knew if I
were to create something out of this lull in my life, it would be necessary
to remain still, with time to think, to dream, to re-listen to echoes from
my past.

I moved my encampment to a headland on the sea terraces above the cove.
Every day I sought out this particular place, a small pirouetting terrier
at my heels. Fiddle belonged to my neighbours. He would have followed me to
the ends of the earth if necessary, to share a picnic. Reward for his
patient companionship. Rust-coloured, he sat on guard beside me as I
attempted to write.

A long flight of steep steps, hewn from the sea-cliff, skirts the cove of
the mountain town. Fishermen prepare nets of faded turquoise and garnet
beside boats poised to slither down wooden ramps into the sea. The steps
took me round the headland through a lush, almost pasture-like copse of
heather, pine and rosemary. Heather and pine of my northern home in a
different guise: expanded, delicate and more expressive. I stayed on the
headland: a mystical, theatrical sea-terrace of burnt-sienna earth which
commands a fabulous view of pure-white rocks embedded in viridian water far
below. Aeons from now the sea's lapping will topple these rocks.

Here I struggled to write the words that lay behind the welter of my
thoughts. But words wouldn't come.

Elegant silver-barked pines shade the place where I sit lapped round with
sea-sound, hedged with voices. I wander further along the coast where
soft-purple mud oozes into a clay pool. Here someone fabled, Cleopatra
perhaps, smothered her face and body with the stuff, let it dry, cake-hard
in the sun, and bathed in the sea until she emerged cleansed and
beautified. Tourists still do this today and so would I if the weather was
warmer. Unseasonal warmth carries the underlying threat of winter now. I
dip my fingers in the purple mud and paint it onto the rough red rock. My
recovering nervous system is put to the test by areas of scree (reminding
me of Puig Tomir as well as the Sa Calobra road) high and precipitous above
the sea, which I cross and re-cross to re-discover the world.

'Better take walks in the landscape than spend hours on the psychiatrist's
couch,' as Guittarez the French philosopher said.

Ahead was the great cliff headland west of the port. Here island
collaborators ordered Civil War refugees to walk, and walk, and walk until
the edge. Yes. And to keep walking... over the edge. A hair's breadth. Into
the abyssal sea. Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers, parents, grandparents.
People living in the mountain town and all along this northern coastline
remember to this day. The awful fate of relatives and friends.

This fate almost befell a particular man who evidently had his wits about
him. He pleaded with his executioners to allow him to pray at the very edge
of the cliff.

'Saint Peter,' he called, on his knees. 'Save me, Peter.'

No one knows his exact words. The words that rang out. Then suddenly Peter
appeared on the cliff, his hair long and straggly as his beard, he carried
a staff and wore a rough-hewn garment. His executioners took to their heels
and fled and, no doubt, the man who said the right words at the right time
ran to embrace his friend Peter the Hermit who lived in isolation near the
clifftop.


The imaginary conch-shell spiral route through which the first settlers
discovered the mountain town eventually brought me half-way up, to the
point where it widens out to encircle the village. It would be some time
before I reached its dramatic high pinnacle crowned by the church. Resting
on a wall along the cobbled route, kittens played under a hedge of morning
glory, dried black olives mixed with golden leaf-fall at my feet. Sunlight
felt soft and diffuse on my skin. Streets here follow a curvilinear
pattern, like the ancient terraces, with Moorish-style houses all along the
route, vernacular and constructed close together, some grand, some modest,
ochre-harled in exotic gardens of flowers and shrubs, lemon, fig and
orange.

A woman comes out to buy fish from the van which has stopped outside her
house.

'Hola! como esta usted?' the merchant calls.

'Muy bien, gracias. Si, pescados ...'

On a parallel street, a man approaches, about to enter the doorway of the
house opposite my resting place. Does he think I look odd, with my
yellowish-blue bruises and bandages? He asks me where I am from. A
publisher? So am I, he says, and invites me through the lace-curtained door
into a room dominated by a large French printing press. I notice a sign as
I enter: New Seizen Press.

The publisher introduces me to a young Englishman. He is the artist who has
illustrated the book about to be editioned. A book of Hungarian poems
called "Winged By Their Own Need".

What wings brought me here out of my own need?

He shows me the exquisitely simple bird illustrations, some page proofs.
Invited to stay, I watch silently as the pages move through the rollers.
Slowly they assess them, publisher and artist. No. Something is
unsatisfactory. Tissue paper folded up beneath one of the letters will
raise it sufficiently to achieve perfection. It takes, perhaps, seven
minutes to perfect the letter. I think of the business I have left in the
north. Of the continual pressure to acquire ever more sophisticated
computer technology. To spend ever-lengthening periods keying in words,
chapters, books. To design them on screen using computer software. To come
to the end of a session with aching shoulders and buzzing brain and a new
set of problems to solve next day. And telephones ringing. And faxes
arriving.

'What sort of runs do you publish?' he asks

'Oh, four to ten thousand depending on the product,' I reply: 'How many
copies of this volume will you edition?'

'Two hundred.'

Two hundred beautifully crafted copies winged by their own need. By the
poet's need to express his interior landscape within the perfect object
they are creating before my eyes, each letter, each word elevated on a bed
of tissue paper if necessary.

The publisher interrupts memories which have set my teeth on edge. He
touches my arm: 'We'll take a break here. Let me show you some of our other
work?'

He leads me to a backroom containing a desk, paperwork, a chair a
ceiling-high bookshelf, the window shaded by a thick crocheted curtain. He
introduces me to his vivacious partner, Carmen, a bookbinder. The New
Seizen Press bindings, too, are hand-crafted works of art. Then he asks me
about my accident. The journey into the abyss and back. From space into
grace.

Something strange happens then. Browsing through the beautiful handmade
books the music I heard that first day in the Music Room plays on my mind.
This exquisite harmony must be a pointer to something else? But what? Here
I am, talking rationally about business in the north and my experience of
publishing while another part of my brain is struggling to reach, to
construct or re-construct something deep and rich and long-forgotten.

In front of me is a box covered with fabric, yellow and white Mallorcan
cotton. The paper is thick, French paper ordered specially for this, he
tells me.

I read Chopin. Sand. Graves. Suite. I realise that the publisher is Tomas
Graves. I turn over each of the hand typeset pages. First an English
version of Robert Graves' annotated notes to accompany George Sand's
"Winter in Mallorca", with French and Mallorcan translations. Then a set of
etchings, each an illustration of a significant aspect of the couple's
experience of the island.

The first: the word Mayorque under a shimmering sun.

The second: a poetical map suggesting adventure, spiral shells, two
crosses, black and red, and an inkstain. Chopin and Sand were studying an
ancient map of the island as a special privilege at the Almudaino Palace in
Palma when a bottle of ink spilled on it like an omen. The map was later
restored.

The third: a series of tortuous roods, hellish caminos on the plains
leading to the mountains. Like my road. The roads of Chopin and Sand, of
Robert Graves, of all of us.

The fourth: musical notation, quavers on a score signed F. Chopin.

The fifth: an oil-lamp, perhaps. Dark shadows on the wall. The shadow of a
writing quill. George Sand's quill.

The sixth: a salamander, with sleight of the artist's hand, appears on both
sides of the paper.

The seventh: the corridor at the Valldemossa Carthuja, haunted, as Sand
experienced it. Ghostly forms, demons, apparitions, shaking foundations.

The eighth: the wheel of the wagon and the Pleyel piano fetched from Palma
by Sand and her son on the tumultuous day when Chopin wrote the 'Raindrops'
prelude.

The ninth: the dimly discernible figures of star-crossed lovers walking in
an avenue of cypresses under a full moon.

It astonishes me that Chopin is cropping up with such regularity. Then I
remember, for the first time in years, that Chopin lived in my childhood
house, a century and a half ago.

The artist who executed the etchings - Nils Burwitz - had signed each one.
Recognition ignited the name.This was the artist Daniel suggested I should
approach to commission a drawing of the spot on the Sa Calobra road where
my accident had happened.

I found myself telling Tomas about my childhood home where Chopin stayed on
his visit to Scotland in 1848, several years after the break-up of his
affair with Sand. And after I returned to the Music Room, the two central
illustrations from the Chopin. Sand. Graves. Suite stayed in my mind.

A quill in an inkstand. Hers. The symbol of George Sand the writer. The
other page was his. Frederic Chopin the composer. Exquisitely graceful
notes on a manuscript for the music which had haunted me these past days.
Chopin who possessed the power to tune the delicate perceptions of human
intuition to their highest pitch.

In the small hours of the night, I wrestled with images as if with clues
which might open the Pandora's box of my childhood which had been firmly
closed when my family left the house. Now his spirit claimed an echo of
mine and brought me face-to-face with that prematurely closed door. I knew
that I had to go through it. I stood in the sea, in the azure mouth of the
conch shell cove, blowing into its spiral interior, sending sonorities
soaring into the mountain amphitheatre. And that image merged with the New
Year devils, the meeting with Daniel, with the old man and his canary, the
wrought iron dragon gates leading to the Music Room, the music itself and
the symbolic imagery of the Chopin. Sand. Graves. Suite.


I return to the still point of the headland, Fiddle at my heels. 'Sit,
there's good dog.' He's panting from our climb. He eyes me, pleading for a
morsel from the picnic.

Jamon? Good dog. Stay now! Sit still. I consider the power of words and
meaning while Fiddle eats the ham and curls up to sleep.

Music filtered, distant and evocative, through diffuse fronded shadows of
the pines. A pianist practising in a house high above the cove. It sounds
like the Chopin prelude again. Fiddle slept, one ear cocked, in a cusp of
rock.

On the sea terrace where I sit, memory reinvents my childhood house.


MY FATHER RETURNED FROM DAD'S ARMY WHEN I WAS THREE. HE HAD BEEN home on
leave before that, but this is the only return I can remember.

On the mystical headland where the terrain is rough above the sea, Fiddle
at my feet, I struggle to remember: 

Sitting on father's knee, the thick rough khaki of his uniform bunched
between tiny fingers, clinging on uneasily. He smooths the silken cap of my
hair with large strong hands and talks to my mother on the other side of
the room.

My mother stirs porridge on the New World gas cooker wearing a floral
bibbed-apron. Father and daughter sit peacefully beside the black-leaded
stove. My brother, Robert, plays with father's army cap which falls over
his eyes and makes the adults laugh. I take all this in, seriously,
silently. Ever after, when the children in the street made paper boats to
sail on the Water of Leith I remembered father's hat.

These were the blackout years when Edinburgh citizens wandered pitch black
streets like ghosts guided by the light of torches shining down, always
down, just in front of their shoes. A whole city hoped to disguise itself
and fool Hitler, who was intent on bombing the Forth bridge until someone
told him his time would be better spent razing Clydebank. My father often
told us when we were older that the only strike made on central Edinburgh
hit the German Church near our childhood home. He always laughed heartily
when he remembered this.

At three years old I was sent to nursery school every morning with Peggy,
the Irish maid who was a deaf mute. My childhood landscape was almost
identical to Robert Louis Stevenson's whose first home we passed every
morning, me trailing sulkily at Peggy's heels. RLS was born here two years
after Chopin left our house round the corner. The world I shared with RLS
was the park, the Botanical Gardens, the Georgian terraced street. His
world displayed no tramcars trundling along on high wires though, nor
motorcars. Only horse-drawn carriages.

Peggy would deliver me, my white-socked legs twisting with shyness, to Miss
Hutchings' nursery school, a primer for the private school for girls where
my parents aspired to send me. Here I sat at a small wooden desk near the
back of the class, silently learning. A for Apple, B for Ball, C for Cat. I
can recall, even now, the large coloured illustrations that went with each
letter. We learned simple addition and multiplication and how to fit wooden
blocks into identical shapes. But I never spoke. At home there had been no
one to hear me.

Then one day Miss Hutchings went to my grandfather's shops where mother and
the shop girls were cooking huge quantities of beetroot in vats for the war
effort in one shop, and preparing wreathes and flowers for the near-by
cemetery in the adjoining shop. The fruit and vegetable shop smelled
strangely musty but the flower and seed section was sweetly honeyed. Miss
Hutchings was tiny, frail and birdlike. She dressed in pastel colours,
powdered her face and wore rouge and lipstick. Her silver hair was pulled
off her face into a bun. She delivered a letter to my mother to the effect
that my silence was disturbing the other children. If I refused to speak I
would have to be removed. This letter was kept in the same drawer as the
poem my father wrote when I was born. I can remember the way the letter
looked when my mother flapped it in front of me in a state of agitation.
And in years to come I would take it out of the drawer and study it and my
father's poem: the first two documents relating to my life. A lesson in the
importance of words.

The piece of paper with the poem written in father's copperplate hand got
lost but I will always remember the way it looked: the paper blue-lined and
marked with brown tea-stains: 'Twas in the month of June, When the cabbage
was in bloom...'

My earliest feeling memory, apart from a kaleidoscope vision of chestnut
leaves above my pram in the Botanical Gardens, was of the courage it took
to put up my hand and then to stand up in Miss Hutchings' nursery classroom
to answer a question. In the hushed silence that followed, I felt empowered
for the first time. My words dispelled the myth of my dumbness. Miss
Hutchings went triumphant to grandfather's shops later that day and told my
mother that not only could I speak, but I might be intelligent as well. I
had answered a difficult question. My mother rewarded Miss Hutchings with a
hand of bananas, black-market Canaries, fingers of wartime gold.

The blackout world my brother and I existed in was, in general, serious and
silent. What pools of pleasure there were we created together. Except for
the occasional Argus-eye that Peggy turned in our direction, we were left
to our own devices. In their separate ways, our parents were engaged in the
war-effort. We conquered the slopes and open spaces of the park, giving the
'parkie' in his authoritarian uniform a wide berth, or taunting him, so
that his large black boots would pursue us, terrified, down the bush-lined
path where we would hide in the shelter of leaves and bird's nests, holding
our breaths until he passed. From our dappled sanctuary we watched him
scratch under his cap, as, thwarted in his pursuit, he looked this way and
that, till he gave up glumly and went back to the kiosk from where he
policed the comings and goings on his territory.

We played 'tig' and fished the silky, weed-encrusted Water of Leith for
tiddlers and frogs. We sat on the doorstep of the sheltering house, Robert
reading to me from "Sunny Stories", shafting shadow and light playing
around us, the fluffy white cat asleep at our feet. 

There was little music to be heard in wartime Edinburgh, save for the
occasional burst of hurdy-gurdy tunes from the cart of a passing trader and
the songs which infiltrated our play in snatches, floating up the stairwell
from the wireless in the kitchen:

Underneath the lamplight 
By the barrack door

Vera Lynn singing "Lili Marlene" and "Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of
Dover" as Peggy laboured over her chores.

We knew, though, that our house was also the house of the 'music-man'. My
father had told us that a great composer had lived in our house. He used my
brother Robert's bedroom (more of a boxroom really, with a fanlight set
into the ceiling) to prepare for concerts in the drawing-room next door.

Our musical offering to Chopin was a mumbo-jumbo of hymns and psalms, sung,
jumping and twirling like dervishes, on the springboard of Robert's bed.
The tunes must have come from our strict but kindly Sabbath-observing
grandfather who wore a dark waistcoated suit decorated with a silver
watch-and-chain and had a long silver beard. The words we sang came from a
navy-blue hardbound book embossed with the image of a burning bush above
the mysterious words: Nec Tamen Consumibatur:

After the war, we moved from the Chopin house to live in a hotel my father
had bought in the West End of the city. That year my father and the
Edinburgh Polish Society had a plaque erected near the front door as a
memorial to Frederic Chopin's Scottish tour.


We were glad to leave behind the air-raid shelter and the gas-masks in the
garden shed which made us look like weird elephant-headed creatures. Robert
stopped acting as a conspirator in the discovery of life's pleasures.
Instead he announced sternly one day that it was sissy to play with girls
and he began to indulge in teasing his still-adoring victim. For a time he
had me cowed. I would hunch-up my shoulders, twist one foot around the
other, suck-in my cheeks and try not to cry. It was both a desolation and a
relief that he became an increasingly remote figure in my life. Life became
earnest. It was called growing-up.

'You will realise one day,' said my mother, 'that these are the happiest
days of your life.'

The private school became the focus now. There fun was frowned upon, even
as a reward to the academically gifted. Here were no rivers, no flower
gardens buzzing with summer bees, but formal West End streets filled with
buses, cars and traffic fumes. My brother and I learned to play the piano
and eventually he would render Chopin's Marche Funèbre over and over
again, so that I inwardly groaned. Oh, no, not that again. looking back I
understand that this music was Robert's way of expressing the sadness we
both felt at leaving the childhood house, the house of the 'music-man'.


Edinburgh. Mallorca. life and love. Snakes and ladders. RLS. Chopin. The
broken necklace I attempt to mend has guided me like Ariadne's thread to
this enchanted headland. Here truths long buried come to mind like
shimmering streamers of light rising out of my childhood river. But the
sun-dappled sea terrace grows cold and Fiddle is restless to return to the
Music Room for a proper dinner. It's time to end this self-absorption.

Alice Knight came over to Deià to see me. I told her about the
ups-and-downs of my mental state, of the cracking twigs in the olive groves
as I sat drawing, of the silent solitary, of the coincidences relating to
Chopin:

'It's so good to see you. I guess I've spent too much time alone.'

'No problem. I'll come more often. Perhaps you'd like stay in my flat in
Palma soon? But today let's picnic at Mike Livingstone's house. He's away
at the moment. There's a big table in his lovely garden where we can spread
our feast and talk. He won't mind.'

We picked up her large wicker basket and walked down the road towards the
sea. I hadn't met Mike Livingstone yet, though I knew he would be a
neighbour when he came back from his travels. Alice led me through an olive
orchard and up a scree covered slope to a simple stone house with a verdant
patio garnished with terracotta pots of flowers and shrubs. She seemed
puzzled that it was not quite as she remembered. But the large table under
a mimosa tree was perfect for a picnic. Her basket produced wine, bread,
black olives, tomatoes cheeses and sobrasada, a Mallorcan delicacy.

I listened as Alice speculated about what life would have been like if she
had stayed in Australia: 'I would have been bound and gagged in some
domestic, suburban hell, I don't doubt!'

I understood what she meant. It's so easy for women to become trapped in
one way or another, I thought as she continued:

'Oh, I've been bound and gagged most of my life. Only these past few years
have I felt anything like myself. Is one ever, always, truly oneself? What
does that mean anyway? And freedom? If you are on the way towards it, as
you seem to be, just by being here, you can't expect results too quickly.
You're engaged in a process, not a fait accompli, after all.'

I refilled our glasses: 'To process then.'

The glass caught the light of the sun in shafting, fracturing
concentration. Alice eyed me: 'We don't know each other well. But I detect
that, at least until now, you've been a great one for writing the script?'

I looked puzzled: 'Oh, you mean the script of life?'

'The very same. Perhaps you'll give that up now and let life take over?'

I raised the glass again. 'To not writing the script. Maybe that was one of
the messages of the Sa Calobra serpent?'

'I do have a few plans,' I continued. 'When I return to Scotland I think I
should take a look at my childhood home, if only from the outside, and in
the next few days go to Valldemossa and visit the Chopin museum.'

'Perhaps you'd like to take a look at this over the next few days?' Alice
pulled out a book from her bag.

'"Mallorca Magico". It's just been published and it shows, I think, that
this island's even more mysterious than we imagine.'

We examined the maps in the book which were covered with strange symbols.
Ca Na Gaia's valley had a star designated lugar encantado which Alice
translated as 'enchanted place', Galatzo's duendes were 'goblins' and
buried treasure was indicated near the village. There were no symbols near
the mountain towns, though the surroundlng sea was marked with a dolphin
symbolising leyendas marinas, literally seafaring legends, which we took to
mean every imaginable sea magic from mermaids to incredible voyages. The
coastline boasted no less than three symbols which the legend designaled
ovnis.

'I need a dictionary for that' said Alice, then: 'No, wait, hang on... I've
got it: objeto volante no identificado. Ah, yes. Unidentified flying
objects. UFOs.'

'Perhaps Icarus did his flying here?' I joked wryly, thinking of my own
plummet over that hairpin bend.

Some mountain people believe to this day that there is a sort-of undersea
hangar for ovnis off this coastline.

Of course I was fascinated by the symbols on the Sa Calobra road which read
both clot de l'infierno, 'the grave of hell', and had two stars denoting
lugar encantado. An inferno and a doubly-enchanted place. Alice exclaimed:
'You sure chose the worst and the best of all possible places for your
tumble!'

The sunshine in the garden had weakened and we packed up to go. Alice wrote
a note for Mike Livingstone. 'Thank you for the use of of your picnic
table. Come and use mine at Ca Na Gaia soon?'

We wandered down to the cove where we collected sea-weed to fertilise Ca Na
Gaia's garden, packing it in plastic bags which Alice collected in her jeep
later.

When I finally did meet Mike Livingstone a week or so after the picnic he
led me to his garden, a different garden, and I realised that Alice and I
had used the table of a stranger.


A poster in the village store gave details of the concert at Son Morroig,
the former property of the Archduke Luis Salvador, not far from the Music
Room. Mingling with German tourists in the vast entrance hall I bought my
ticket and prepared to enjoy my first outing since the accident. Unlike the
tourists who frequented the local bus, these people were elegantly dressed
and groomed, their figures, by and large, trim. They drifted in animated
exchange round a long table where chilled fino was being served. The room
was richly decorated with ceramics, oil paintings, a map of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and heavy curtains partly closed against the glare
of sun and sea. In this sophisticated gathering a little black number would
have more appropriate than the cotton T-shirt and jeans I was wearing. But
I resolved not to let self-consciousness spoil my pleasure in finding
myself back in the world.

Soon we were ushered into the adjoining hall where exposed walls supported
huge arched windows behind a colonnaded terrace high above the sea. I read
that: 'Chopin composed most of his preludes in Mallorca, at Valldemossa,
and he finished other works he brought with him to the island as well.
These works include the Second Ballade in F Major, Opus 38, which the
composer modified on his visit here'.

In "The Story of My Life" George Sand wrote that the Carthusian monastery
at Valldemossa was 'full of ghosts and horrors for Chopin but
paradoxically, it was here that he wrote his masterpieces, in their
melancholy, some with a sadness so bleak that it pierces one's heart even
as it charms the ear. And one of them, which came one desolate and rainy
evening, produces a terrifying depression in the hearer's heart' .

From my seat on a raised dias at the back of the hall I pondered George
Sand's predilection for romantic exaggeration. Times change though, and you
could scarcely say nowadays that the so-called 'Raindrops Prelude' , which
I knew from its repeated soundings in my mind, could produce 'terrifying
depression'. On the contrary its delicacy perfectly expressed to me the
miracle of man's existence on planet earth.

Sand's account of the journey to Palma to fetch Chopin's piano was
inspiring though. You had to hand it to her. She was a plucky woman. A
Pleyel piano, sent from Paris two months earlier to replace the diabolical
one at the monastery which Chopin had been forced to use, arrived in Palma.
George Sand set off with her son Maurice to fetch it, leaving Chopin alone
in their cell. On the return journey they were caught in an appalling
storm. Torrentes overflowed their banks and quickly became impassable so
that they were forced to abandon the horse and carriage and return to the
Carthuja on foot. They arrived late at night to find Chopin in his cups:
'condensed into a kind of quiet despair and he sat there weeping as he
played his amazing Prelude'.

'When he saw us come in he stood up with a loud cry, and then he said to
us, with a bewildered look and strangely, 'I knew it, I knew you were
deadl' The piece he had composed that evening was full of the raindrops
beating on the sounding tiles of the Cartuja, but in his mind and in his
music they had become tears from heaven beating on his heart.'

Critics have never reached a consensus about which prelude evokes the scene
described by George Sand, but the majority agree that it was the Fifteenth
Prelude in D-sharp minor. But now we were to hear the Ballade in F Major of
which another critic said: 'I have known children leave their games to
listen to it, and one would think that it was really a fairy-tale
translated into music'.

The grand piano held centre-stage. The audience clapped appreciatively and
the pianist lifted her hands to play. You could hear a pin drop, It was as
if Suzanne Bradbury was about to perform a ritual within a sacred temple.
The room was uncurtained, its great unglazed arches open to the sea. The
music swirled about this inner sanctum then seemed to soar with power and
brilliance beyond the confines of the hall, to mingle with the elemental
sea, sky and mountains. The audience sat entranced as the sun began to
set.

In Valldemossa next morning I was leaving the café near the bus stop at
the same time as a blond young woman entered. Her look of recognition
stopped me in my tracks. 'Hola,' she said. 'How are you? I heard about the
accident.' Of course. This was Sylvia, Daniel Hartmann's niece whom I had
met briefly on the way to Deià through Valldemossa from the clinic. My
story spilled out. Of how I was here to visit the Cartuja at last, of my
recovery in Deià, of visiting the New Seizen Press, of seeing the Chopin.
Sand. Graves. Suite there and the work of Nils Burwitz.

'Daniel was peculiarly insistent that I meet Nils Burwitz,' I said. 'But
perhaps it is too late since I leave for Scotland next week?'

Sylvia shrugged: 'No, it is not too late. If you want to meet him he is
here now.' She pointed to someone deep in conversation with a older man at
the back of the restaurant. I had noticed the pair as I sat drinking my
coffee alone, envying their conspiratorial camaraderie. The older man left
as we approached and Sylvia, too, left me with Nils Burwitz who listened
attentively to my story after ordering more coffee and cocas con patatas, a
potato-flour bun unique to Valldemossa. He suggested that I carry on with
my visit to the Carthuja and that I return in a few days, when he would
have something to show me.

The following Thursday, Nils was waiting for me when the bus pulled-in. On
the way to his studio I told him that I had ordered a copy of the "Suite"
from Tomas Graves.

'A good idea. And I'm giving you something which you can add to make it
unique.'

He presented me with a collage created on the backdrop of pages from the
"Suite". The Sa Calobra road was represented as a huge snaking dragon with
a devilish head. The twisted hulk of the Ford Fiesta was a used-up tube of
yellow oil paint. A ladder was depicted rising upwards. 

'Life is a game of snakes and ladders,' he said. 'You have gone down as far
as it is possible to go. Now you can only go up.'


PATRICK MEADOWS AND STEPHANIE SHEPHERD, AN AMERICAN couple, founded Alma
Concerts at a time when few recitals took place outside Palma and, more
recently, they have organised the annual Deià Festival, which attracts
musicians from all over Europe to play classical and contemporary music.
Patrick Meadows is studying and collecting medieval and contemporary
Catalan manuscripts and Stephanie Shepherd also sings in a madrigal choir.
They have organised concerts at Son Morroig, at the Hotel Residencia in
Deià, in the chapel at Soller and elsewhere on the island. It was their
inspiration to use Son Morroig as a concert venue, and to time recitals -
in 'the Archduke Series' - with the hour of sunset.

Salvador eventually bought Son Morroig. His personal paradise radiated from
'the best situated house in Mallorca' as he judged it, though the
melancholy beautiful Miramar continued to be his main residence. Stunningly
perched above the promontory called Sa Fordadada, whose sea-carved hole
might have inspired Henry Moore, Son Morroig's architectural style is
neoclassical with a white marble rotunda in the garden.

From here, or from the open arched terraces overlooking the sea, Luis
Salvador surveyed his tremendous territory: the silver-screed mountain
crests of the Teix, its cave pitted lower slopes, once the province of
saints and hermits, of smugglers and pirates, and the extraordinary
Sardinian-style mansion, directly above the sea, where - much later - he
installed Catalina Homar. Here Catalina enchanted Salvador with a song. But
long before Catlalina, there was Vyborni.

Settled on the Miramar coast, Salvador no longer needed the alias Count von
Neudorf. In Ramon Llull he had found a figure to identify with, and he
gradually began to reconstruct himself. He was an archduke ordering a
society as archdukes are supposed to - but one as different from the
hierarchical, power ridden Hapsburg societies as would be possible to
imagine. Inspired by the Llullian community, he could put into practise his
vaguely formed idea of the 'new village' which he brought with him to
Mallorca. Now he could construct his ideal community, inspired by Ramon
Llull whose feet trod these same stones of Miramar, and who worshipped in
the chapel of La Trinidad in its grounds. To begin with, Salvador would
model himself on Llull, as well as revive the island's interest in Llull
... Llullism.

Savador had already developed a disciplined approach to life, through
writing a daily diary, regular letters to his mother, family and friends,
and research for "Las Baleares" and other books.

Ramon Llull himself turned to scholarship and isolation after a fearful
disenchantmen. Married with a family, he nevertheless fell headlong in love
with a young Christian woman, presumably in the Cuitadella de Mayorque,
ancient Palma. For a long time she would not return his glances, refused to
acknowledge him, it is said. Llull pursued her hither and thither, such was
his obsession. In desperation, he decided to ride into the church where she
was worshipping. He rode in with great display, past his love, to the altar
where he wheeled round and, approaching her pew, reined in the horse... as
if to say: Surely you see me now? We can only guess at her desperation as
she tore open her blouse to reveal the reason for her dismissal of the hot
blooded Llull. Her breast was ravaged by cancer...

Such a horror story echoes of the immolation of Matilde. Yet Salvador was
to suffer again, even more profoundly.

He took to the sea. His steamboats were like lovers, transporting him to
pleasure domes unknown. Or the boats themselves were pleasure domes. Once
Salvador bought a slave to entertain the travelling companion of the second
half of his life, Antonietta Lancerotto. Nixe I and Nixe II were floating
caves, sea wombs. But they skimmed, too. Out there, on the ocean, severed
from the shackles of court and manners, Salvador tasted freedom. Caverns
measureless to man, a limitless sea.

The seafaring nomad abandoned ship briefly to visit Prague in 1871. He
travelled to the home of a fellow student, nineteen year old Wlatislao
Vyborni, at Kiittemberg. Vyborni, remarks Juan March, had perfect classical
beauty, 'enhanced by a happy childhood and balanced adolescence'. You
notice this, in photographs of the young man, and in his marble memorial
which is secreted within the private buildings of Miramar to this day. For
Salvador, Vyborni was the beautiful boy of classical antiquity incarnate,
whose image was all the rage among European aristocracy after The
Benevenuto Boy - the first century BC sculpture found at Herculaneum, his
hyacinthine hair entwined with sprays of wild olive - was purchased in the
1860s by Count Tyskiewicz from a Naples dealer. Vyborni was Donatello's
David, Mann's Tadzio in Death in Venice. Salvador called him Amigo.

Salvador (deprived of intimacy and love, and haunted by the double deaths
of Matilde and his father, the first still plaguing his sleep with
nightmares) found Amigo, his golden hair luminous as a god's, irresistible.
He had spent so much time alone, studying, researching, writing, that his
need to find someone to share his appreciation of the Miramar coast and its
beauties must have been overwhelming. 'Vyborni cut a perfect figure...
appeared above the luminosity of a scandalously red horizon,' says Juan
March in his book "S'Arxiduc".

Salvador's homosexual affairs - there were others, before and after
Vyborni, but Vyborni was the passion of Salvador's life - were an esoteric
secret known to very few: Don Herreros presumably, Sforza certainly, the
young gentlemen of their cultural circle, and, in all probability, the
monks of La Trinidad.

Alas, Nixe was not ready for the long voyage of 1873, but a fine yacht was
commandeered to transport Salvador and Vyborni on a journey of mythological
scope, which included Constantinople, the Bosphorous, Cyprus, Damascus,
Beirut, Baalbek and Jerusalem. They visited the great memorials of the Holy
Land before travelling on to Egypt, through the new entrance to the Suez
Canal. They toured Cairo, the pyramids, the sphinx of Giza, whose muzzle
Napoleon's soldiers are said to have shot off, the obelisk at Heliopolis.
Benjamin Baker, of London Underground fame, had engineered the canal, and,
in a prodigious feat, had an obelisk trawled to London. Within a decade, he
was at work on his greatest project, the design of Scotland's Forth
Bridge.

Egyptian style with its inventive and elegant genius had been
rediscovered.by Napoleon's invaders in 1798 and taken up with passion in
Europe. It became fashionable for nineteenth century travellers, including
Byron and Napoleon himself, to be painted dressed in Oriental splendour.
Byron's Don Juan experiences his most incredible exploits in the Near East.
Salvador, a descendant of Napoleon, was one of these travellers, and
similarly caught up in the fantasy of Byron's emotionally expansive Orient,
which melted the edges of sexual identity.

The journey took almost a year. Salvador returned to Mallorca accompanied
by Vyborni where they found Antonio Vives jealously put out. The presence
of the sensitive young blond disturbed him. However, they lived in a whirl
of happiness, for four years, in the incredible Miramar landscape and on
frequent journeys to Europe and, in 1876, to America.

The grand Duchess of Tuscany, Salvador's mother, finally visited Mallorca
and all was a round of affable social activity. Salvador continued to visit
other parts of the island for the Mallorca book.

The grand Duchess of Tuscany, Salvador's mother, finally visited Mallorca
and all was a round of affable social activity. Salvador continued to visit
other parts of the island for the Mallorca book and took two months to sail
round the coastline with Vyborni and artists, collecting data, watercolours
and other illustrations for "Las Baleares".

Salvador and Vyborni - 'the Archduke and his secretary' - became the toast
of Palma society, Vyborni took on the role of secretary after Vives left
temporarily to continue his studies in Palma. The ever-faithful Don
Herreros continued to gather data for the Mallorca volume of "Las Baleares"
when Salvador was away. Now the general introduction, which included
customs, art and artefacts, archeology, agriculture and fishing, religion,
education, transport, etc. was complete. The following January, the two men
were in Corfu. Salvador writing and researching each morning and visiting
gardens, cypress and olive groves with Vyborni later in the day. They
sailed through the Greek islands and spent a week at Ithaca, the country of
Ulysses. By March they were in Athens, Salvador collecting data for a book
about the Gulf of Corinth.

Herreros also took charge of expanding the lands of Miramar in the
Archduke's absence, Salvador described this later in a book called "What I
know of Miramar". Later, he owned Son Moragues as well as Miramar and, by
the middle of August, was involved in deals to purchase Son Galceran, Can
Calo and Ca na Matgina: 33 hectares of the lower lands of Miramar and a
large tract of the coastal land including S'Estacca, now the home of
super-star Michael Douglas.


OWLS, FROGS AND CICADAS SANG TO THE INDIGO NIGHT AND SATURN hung away to
the west, solitary and refulgent, its ring dimly discernible. The sky was a
curvaceous pre-Gallilean dome pricked with the diamond constellations of
Casseopia, the Plough, the Bears Orion and the Seven Sisters. It occurred
to me that the same sky hung over the familiar places of Scotland where I
would soon return.

The wrought-iron gate squeaked as I entered the garden of the door open.
Almost simultaneously the gate squeaked again and I knew that someone was
coming up behind me. I stood behind the half open door. A cone of light
from the room was cast woefully into the darkness. I waited with what
composure I could muster. 

The silent solitary stood in the pool of light: 'Hello, I'm John Biram. May
I come in for a moment?'

Opening the door wider I motioned him towards the settle by the woodburning
stove. He entered tentatively and I poured him a glass of wine. He was
about my height, verging on the dapper, with stoical carriage and a good
head of grey hair, precisely combed.

'You should be careful when you go on the mountains,' he said, diffidently
seating himself. I must have looked surprised for he continued: 'I have
seen you up there. It's very dangerous unless you know the paths. Spent
years tracing them myself... many people have been lost up there, some
killed.'

'Oh, I don't go far these days. More of an afternoon stroll really.'
'Still...' He stared into the fire then asked abruptly: 'Why are you
here?'

I told him about the accident, the hair's breadth, my decision to stay in
Mallorca rather than return to Scotland. I told him of my realisation over
the last few weeks that my life in the north had become untenable.

'The accident was a turning point...' I began, wondering how much detail of
the past weeks would sound plausible. It turned out that my new friend had
arrived in Deià many moons ago and stayed to write a book called
"Teknosis" with the encouragement of Robert Graves who wrote the
introduction. 'Teknosis was what Robert hoped to escape by coming here,'
John explained, adding that he himself had coined the word teknosis. 

I knew that Graves had had first hand experience of the syndrome which has
afflicted western society with ever-increasing tenacity throughout this
century. Teknosis seemed a good word to describe it. 

'I retired to a mountain village in Majorca where I hoped to avoid the more
shocking sights and sounds of pluto-democratic civilization,' Graves wrote
after finishing his valedictory biography "Goodbye to All That" in the late
1930's.

John iurned out to be a neighbour. Later he showed me into his sparse
tower-like home where in the course of several conversations, before I
returned to Scotland, I outlined my life and explained my dilemmas as best
I could.

'You are a victim of teknosis,' he insisted. 'You've got to get yourself
out of all that. Life's too short.'

I wondered how long it would take to disentangle myself from my situation,
from my own personality, so imbued with the Calvanistic work ethic. The
conundrums thrown up by my car accident would take a long time to resolve.
In the meantime our conversations took a lighter turn.

'Why did your friend Robert spell Majorca with a 'j'?' I asked John once.

'Because the ancient name for the island was Majorica: 'the largest
island'.'

'And why does the church bell ring twice?'

'It rings once for the townsfolk and a second time for the people in the
fields, in case they missed it the first time.'


4. Palma & back to the mountains

IN RAMON LLULL'S DAY, AS IN SALVADOR'S, THE ROUTE TO PALMA from the
northern Miramar coast was the hot-line to commerce and culture. What was a
mountain track for LLull became a tarmacadam road for Salvador in the
1880s. After Jaime's conquest, Lull knew the old Arab town, Medina
Mayorque, as the Cuitadella de Mayorque which by Salvador's time had become
Palma de Mallorca.


Under Moslem domination, Medina Mayorque was one of the eight most
important cities in the West. Its inhabitants engaged in piracy and trade
linked with various tribal agricultural settlements throughout the island.
These al-qarya (alquerias - farmsteads) and rahl (rafales - country houses)
supplied cotton, rice and vegetables, thanks to the intensive use of a
complete hydraulic network.

Jaime I's conquest in 1229 ended the era of Moslem domination. The Balearic
Islands were incorporated into the feudal world represented by the
Catalan-Aragonese Confederation. But many Moslem innovations, relating to
agriculture and horticulture were retained.

For less than a century Mallorca had its own kings. After Jaime I's death
the dominions were divided between his two sons. The independent Kingdom of
Mallorca was ruled by three kings between 1276 and 1349. It was a period of
insecure political independence, brought to an end when Pedro the
Ceremonius overcame his brother Jaime III in the battle of LLuchmajor and
reincorporated the Kingdom of Mallorca into the Catalan-Aragonese crown.

After the purge of the Medina Mayorque by Jaime 1, El Conquistador, its
booty had been auctioned off, to the great joy, it is said, of the
citizens. The 1228 Court of Barcelona and the 1229 Court of Tarragona
ordered the island to be divided into eight parts, four of which were to be
the king's, with the palaces and castles and sovereignty of the conquered
area. The other four regions were given to the Count of Rosellon, the
Bishop of Barcelona, the Count of Ampurias and the Viscount of Bearn, all
of whom had participated in the conquest. 

The king's territory included the mountains and half of the Medina Mayorque
(renamed the Cuitadella de Mayorque), as well as Inca with Selva, Campanet
and Sa Pobla, Pollensa with Alcudia, Sineu, Petra with San Juan, Arta,
Montuiri with Algayda, Lluchmajor, Campos, Santanyi and Porreres.

The Count of Rosellon's districts were Valldemossa, including Esporles and
Banyalbufar, Bunyola and Manacor with Felantix.

The Bishop of Barcelona received half the Medina Mayorque and all the west
coast to Banyalbufar: Calvia, Andraitx and Puigpunyent

The Count of Ampurias controlled the district of Muro with Santa Margarita,
one third of the district of Soller, including Deià and half of Albufera.

The Viscount of Bearn controlled the Canarossa district: Sencelles, Santa
Eugenia, Santa Maria, Consell, Binissalem and Alaro and a third of Soller.


BY THE THIRD WEEK IN JANUARY I FELT STRONG ENOUGH TO RESPOND TO Alice's
invitation to visit her in Palma for the Feast of San Sebastian, the city's
patron saint. I clutched the directions she had given me like an eager
schoolgirl invited to a dance. Life in the outside world could begin again.
The bus maintained its steady pace, gliding the steep curves of the coast
road and on through the great mountain cleft with its distant view of Palma
and the Mediterranean beyond.

I yearned for life. My taste was returning for cavernous alleys shocked
with light, for crumbling palacios with pastel facades and ornate iron
balconies drawn in dusty greens and blues. I longed for glimpses of the
harbour with flotillas of every imaginable craft, dockside wharfs and
restaurants, the palm-fringed corniche in front of La Lonja, Palma's
ancient bourse. I would walk through mini-Alhambrian gardens to the great
Cathedral rising like the barque of God himself out of ancient Moorish
sea-walls. The Cathedral, El Seu, with its soaring buttresses and internal
architraves and treasures. Gaudi's inspired toy: the fairytale baubled
altarpiece, suspended like so many ships of fools, to play among icons of
saints and the crucified Christ.

I re-read Alice's instructions as we neared the terminus.

'Go through the Old Town, past the Baños Arabes... turn right behind the
Cathedral... into a twisting calle of vast arched doorways. Enter number
twenty into a small courtyard with a stair leading off. Ring bell on first
door on right.' The man with the disappointed features who had been at the
Ca Na Gaia meditation stepped out as the door opened, still carrying his
briefcase.

Alice showed me into a strange, gloomy interior. This was her town house
which Ca Na Gaia's expenses were forcing her to sell. An ancient mosque,
undisturbed and unused in a courtyard garden, was visible from the kitchen
where Alice served me tea.

'Glad rags tonight?' She eyed me with a grin. Yes. Glad rags.

After dinner we pushed through bustling crowds assembled outside
restaurants and bars. It was a sepia world, drained of the intense daylight
colour of the island. A scene painted in browns, blacks, greys and beige
with touches of ochre cast in the unattractive brownish-orange of
hallucinogenic lamplight. The alleys resembled unlit funnels, filled with
people thronging from square to square. Each plaza had a raised dais where
a band held forth. In one, there would be heavy rock, in another folk
music, here flamenco, a string quartet round the corner, perhaps.

Santa Eulalia's carved stone facade dominated a world that, but for the
microphones round the dais, might have belonged to the Renaissance.
Numerous braziers glowed with coals below roasting chestnuts, sausages and
bread. Wine from carboys was served out in paper cups. The crowd thronged
thick and heavy round the square and, among family groups and groups of
students, friends and tourists, solo guitarists and accordionists held
court with partying citizens. Dark-haired youths, who had learned to dance
flamenco at the knee, strutted their stuff.

'Gitanos,' said Alice. 'They are gypsies.'

The vibrant cadences of flamenco began reverberating in the square as they
had once echoed in the rugged landscope. Once upon a time, these songs and
dances of life and love, punctuated by the heartbeat rhythms of flamenco
guitar, were repeated daily and endlessly into the very air they breathed
by shepherds and gypsies, sending a chain of music and shared experience
throughout all the landscapes of the south. A gypsy sang, his mouth
scarcely moving to project the accumulated vibrations of his chest, throat,
tongue and mouth. The flow of sound, now nasal, now poignantly pure and
strong, seared the psyches of the audience in a vivid affirmation of life.
Like a call to prayer.

We are here to sing where prayer has been answered.

The vibrations gradually awed the entire crowd. At first hushed and
reverent, a few people began to clap rhythmically, then swayed and stamped
their feet in time to the music. Soon, as if drawn by some power beyond
themselves, by a force that they seem to have almost forgotten, the whole
square participated in a dance of life. When the dance came to an end, a
little girl, pale and slight, about eight years old, her long dark-hair
pinned-up with a red carnation, held centre stage and began to dance to the
man's next song.

'He is her father,' Alice confided in my ear. 'They come from a gypsy
encampment near the airport. They live in poverty, eke out a living by
performing in the tourist honeypots.' Later she observed that the sheer
quality and brilliance of his performance went largely unappreciated in
these places.

The child is Carmen in the making, her embryonic coquetry gleaned from
mimicking the gestures of older sisters, mothers, aunts; the female
carriers of the tradition. 

She is required to dance.

Her small rhythmic body sways this way and that, head tossing, one small
hand punctuating the guitar beats with clicking fingers, the other swirling
the tiered-flounces of her cotton dress as she works immaculately through
the zapateados. She carries her slender torso still and proud as she moves
this way and that from the waist, knees bent to lend power to her steps.
Innocence fused with previsionary experience .

I feel incredibly moved by her, by her blue sandals and her white
knee-socks.


The gypsies left their original homeland in northern India some nine
hundred years ago and reached Europe four hundred years later; crossing
from Asia Minor by way of Crete and the Peloponnesians, westward and
northwards. No one knows why they left their original homeland. They
dispersed into groups throughout Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and
Spain, disguised as penitents on pilgrimages of expiation, soliciting alms,
performing magic, telling fortunes. They worked as and how they could, as
smiths and cobblers, for example, and they traded horses and resorted to
petty thieving to survive hard times. At first they were protected, given
safe-conduct in their nomadic wanderings, by the Holy Roman Emperor and the
Pope. But their status soon changed dramatically from protected guests to
persecuted outlaws with the passing of savage laws for their expulsion and,
in some cases, the death penalty. Their persecution goes on throughout
Europe today.


The crowd applauds the child's dance. The man sings on. She steals shyly
away to lose herself in the crowd. Stopping directly in front of me, she
sighs and her small body trembles with emotion. I long to put my arm round
her shoulders, to give her a hug, to tell her that her dance was well-done.
Perhaps she senses my presence? She turns her head to look at me and
wistfully returns my smile. Then she moves off like a gazelle to sit
impassively on the wooden dais beside an older girl, dangling her legs over
the edge. As Alice and I walked away from the square it struck me that the
lives of these gypsies, even in urban poverty, still resonate with the
landscape - with life itself. But their songlines are more tenuous with
every passing year.

'Gitanos are becoming a threatened species,' echoes Alice.

Under the floodlit Cathedral in an open-air restaurant it is one o'clock in
the morning. We drink rum toddies. Alice's favourite. 'To life, then,' we
say. Yes, to life.

Next morning I left Alice's flat and walked down Las Ramblas where the
stalls burgeoned with roses, carnations and lilies under the regimental
line-up of plane trees. I took the curvaceous sloping wynd near the Theatre
and met an old woman, hobbled on her cane, half-way up.

'Buenos dias,' I said. She returned my greeting and said in passing that
there was a terrible smell. I turned, perplexed, to watch her struggle up,
a bag of shopping over one arm. What did she mean? The street seemed clean
and fresh in the morning sun. Then, looking down, I noticed through the
metal bars of a sewer a horrible spawning of disposable syringes and
hypodermic needles. The city's scourge. Subdued, I crossed the Borne to the
tourist office where I had an appointment to see one of the directors about
the Sa Calobra road. A pile of brightly coloured brochures displaying the
island's attractions entertained me as I waited my turn on a wooden bench
in the bustling office which looked little changed from the days of Mr
Thomas Cook himself .

A familiar figure shuffled in:

'Daniel! What are you doing here?'

He put a finger to his lips and sat beside me: 'In this world of
coincidences you should not be so surprised to see me anywhere, girl. But a
serious answer to a serious question... I am here for a meeting about my
institute. There may be funding... it looks good.'

'And when will you come to the mountains? Next Sunday? I leave for Scotland
next week.' 

Before Daniel could reply, a secretary approached to usher me into the
official's office. He was pale and immaculately polite. I flapped the
press-cutting reporting my accident in front of him. He studied it of
course. He would contact the appropriate authorities. Yes, it was a serious
matter. The road was dangerous. I must understand, though, that it was not
really the concern of his department. He would do what he could. But he
himself could not guarantee that anything would be done.

Daniel had disappeared by the time I came out.

He arrived at the Music Room on Sunday morning. We walked along the coast
and, later, after supper, I sewed up the fallen cuff of his trouser leg as
we sat on the settle by the wood-burning stove. I suggested that we dine
together in Palma a few days later. It was time for me to return to
Scotland and I planned to stay at the Hostal Borne on my last night in
Mallorca.

As soon as I swung into reception I saw him at his usual place in the
foyer. Almost before I could drop my holdall we were in each other's arms:

'It's great to see you, girl. Now you look recovered.'

Then held me at arm's length and fixed me with perceptive narrow eyes:

'Tonight we celebrate. I've finished the European submissions for the
institute.' He whirled me round. 'You look great, girl. I like you in that
jacket.' It was blue and green tartan.

For the first time I saw the courtyard of the Borne illuminated. White
tables and chairs were arranged in the palm courtyard. I went upstairs with
my bag and looking down through the fruited crowns of the palms I could see
Daniel pacing the courtyard, thoughtful, impatient.

We ate at the family-run restaurant next door. The waiter pulled back
chairs as we entered and welcomed us with a volley of hyperbole.

'I am invited tonight, by the señora,' Daniel announced, leaning a little
back in his chair. He dropped his voice:

'The waiter, Carlos, started life cleaning horse-shit in stables associated
with the bullring. The bullring. Carpe Diem. The matadors go to their
appointments with death. Or not, as the case may be.'

Daniel eyed me and I knew he was referring to my recent avoidance of that
particular appointment. 

'Alive, the bullfighter carries within himself a sensation of immortality,'
he continued. 'Dead he is a hero heaped with pundonor, or personal honour.
Do you carry within yourself now a sense of immortality?' 

'Yes, Daniel,' I said. 'It's a dangerous sensation.' 

'Ah. And do you make love with your eyes open?' He looked at me intently,
leaning forward now, elbows on the table. 'Well?'

I laughed, disinclined to take the question seriously. 'It depends on the
lover,' I eventually replied. 'But, yes, mostly yes.' 

'That I envy you. It's never been possible for me.' He rose abruptly and
strode over to the counter to pick up the bottle of wine and two glasses
which Carlos had set up. 

I shifted the conversation back to Carlos, and Daniel leaned an forward on
his elbows, seizing the lead:

'A very poor family gives a poor start in life, don't you think so? Can you
imagine? But now he has this restaurant. And, knowing the misery of
deprivation first hand, he turns no-one away: clerks, businessmen, to
musicians, gypsies. All come here and can be sure of not going away with an
empty stomach.'

The food, brought to the table by Carlos's two teenage sons, tasted
wonderful: pots of soup, a steaming vegetable casserole, seafood, leg of
kid. Daniel talked, as always, of the theory behind his institute and it
was then that Lola suddenly emerged from behind a pillar and Daniel told
her to go away. Later, in the Borne, I was getting ready to turn-in when
Daniel knocked softly on my passerine's door. 

I whispered firmly in his ear: 'Tonight I need some shut-eye.'

Daniel had left for a meeting when I checked out of the Borne next morning.
Over the next months he telephoned my office in Scotland several times with
pleas for urgently needed contributions to the institute's funds.


PALMA ACCEPTS LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY TOURISTS, EVEN THOSE who look oddly
out of place: ungainly but comfortably dressed, their sun-reddened limbs
projecting from shorts, their pink faces under daft hats. They can visit
but they stay in ugly resorts that gave tourism here a bad name in the
1980s: Magalluf, El Arenal and the likes. Palma craves elegance, culture,
savoire faire, disciples willing to sit at the feet of her history. Linen,
straw hats, crêpe-de-chine.

Chopin loved Palma. He wrote to his friend Julian Fontana in Paris: 'I am
in Palma, surrounded by palm trees and cedars and cactuses, by olive-trees,
by orange-trees and lemon-trees, aloes, fig-trees and pomegranates... A
turquoise sky, emerald mountains,and the air from paradise. The sun shines
all day long, people are dressed as though this were the summer, and it is
hot; at night guitars and singing can be heard for hours on end.'

The old Arab quarter, clings just as intensely down six centuries to the
world of Ramon Llull. The Cuitadella de Mallorca was the turning point for
trade north and south: road links headed south from London via Bruges,
Montpelier and Perpignan. Sea routes striated from the city's port to
almost everywhere: directly, to Barcelona, Valencia and Nice, round the
Spanish coast, north to London and south to the Illes de Fortuna, from Nice
to Naples and Genoa, overland to Venice, and back through the straits
between Corsica and Sardinia. Other sailing routes traded directly with
Algiers, and Tunis, via the north coast of Africa, and on to Palermo,
Constantinople and Alexandria.

That ancient city is intact, more or less, today though bound round by 18th
and 19th century architectural accretions. And it's as easy to imagine
Ramon Llull, part-concealed in a hooded brown habit, long grey beard,
benign and earnest, on a mission through the cavernous streets behind the
Cathedral and the Baños Arabes, as it is to imagine Vyborni, in frock coat
and stovepipe hat, eye-catching and devil-may-care, striding towards the
Theatre.

Salvador and Watislaw Vyborni had been the toast of Palma society. But by
1877 Vyborni was chafing against his dependence on Salvador. Juan March
notes that at a Naples carnival Vyborni was 'not allowed to mix with the
multitude, and became frustrated and languid. He resembled an iris.' During
their long trip to America in 1876 Vyborni's need for freedom had been
awakened. By the time they returned to Mallorca, the relationship between
the two men had altered. Salvador had become possessive to the extent that
he vetted who Vyborni could associate with. As Cocteau remarked, the
privileges of beauty are enormous... as long as the admired remains the
objet d'art of the contemplator.

A sense of entrapment, then, fanned the flames of Vyborni's new love: a
young Palma woman, Magdalena Janer, whom he first noticed walking with her
mother in the Borne. Her mother was an innkeeper's daughter; her father a
wine merchant from Binissalem. The family were moderately well off and
lived in Calle on Apuntadores. The Archduke agreed that Magdalena was
beautiful, but his disapproval of the affair forced Vyborni to keep it
secret until his confession at Miramar. Enraged, Salvador threw Vyborni
out. Salvador brought forward his plans to leave for Austria in a week. He
would leave immediately.

A further command went out: no one was to offer transport back to Palrna to
Vyborni who was determined to return to the city, to set the date of his
marriage. He walked the twenty-five kilometres under a merciless sun,
drinking ice cold water on the way, so that by the time he got to his
lodgings he suffered sunstroke and heat exhaustion. 

One source says he died at C'an Palou, his lodgings. But another source,
Juan March, tells a different story.

The day after their confrontation, the 24th of July 1877, Salvador set sail
for the mainland. That afternoon he had chanced to see Vyborni walking in
the Borne in the company of two young men of their circle.

The day after that, July 25th, Vyborni was found dead... from sunstroke...
in his lodgings at the inn of Barnils, Ca's Frances, in the Calle Victoria.


When a beloved beauty, contained as objet d'art, shrugs off his or her
shackles and starts to live, who knows what chaotic forces might be
unleashed? 

Whatever the finer details of Amigo's tragic death, it preyed on Salvador's
mind for a long time to come. The first source has it that, C'an Palou was
closed up after Vyborni's death, accessible only to, the Archduke who,
every year on the anniversary, spent the day there alone. 

There is always more to any story than meets the eye. Can one die so
quickly of sunstroke? Let alone a fit young man in his twenties? Why is
there a day's delay in Juan March's version? Vyborni seems to have been
well enough, walking down the Borne the day before he died. Was there a
sinister side to Vyborni's death? As Juan March relates in "S'Arxiduc",
Vyborni's body was dealt with swiftly in Salvador's absence.

On July 27th the embalmed body was taken aboard Nixe and on the 28th mass
was celebrated as the boat steamed towards Trieste. Memorial services took
place at Palma Cathedral, and at Miramar on the first of August, presided
over by Don Herreros with the mayors of Valldemossa and Deià in the
presence of many local people. Afterwards, alms were given to the poor and
a donation to the monks. Later Vives would take Vyborni's place as
Salvdor's secretary.

From Trieste, the body went by train to Vyborni's home town, Küttemberg.
The Archduke, obviously affected by the disgrace of the affair, attended
the funeral, delivered a desultory tribute, ordered a statue in Carrera
marble and departed for Prague the next day. Later he offered the statue,
depicting Vyborni at the feet of an angel, to his mother. She refused it,
sending it back to the Archduke, whom she held responsible for the death of
her son.

But I am a traveller, not a detective. I must leave it to others to
re-examine the details of Amigo's death. It's time to return to the
mountains.


AN OCTOBER HOLIDAY IN MALLORCA I FELT IMPATIENT TO SEE DANIEL Hartmann
again. The occasional telephone call had kept us in touch. I abandoned the
car in an underground parking place, anticipating Daniel rising from the
peach-velour sofa with its macrame fringe to greet me in the Hostal Borne.
'Girl, you look great,' he would say, scanning my face and kissing both
cheeks. I swung past the Church of Santa Magdalena relishing the sight of
Calle San Jaime with its crumbling elevations and the statue of Santiago
himself, only to find Hostal Borne's facade obliterated by plastic sheeting
hung from scaffolding. I edged round it to stand before the familiar portal
and was about to ring the bell when a workman called down:

'Sorry, señora. The hostal is closed. Cerrado.'

My disappointment was palpable. Was it the end of an era? The Borne was
being restored. Soon it would be relaunched as Hotel Born. So much for the
welcome I had anticipated, certain that Daniel would still be sitting on
the sofa in reception 'like a stone on a log' as he used to say. Gonzalo,
too, had gone. I rang the number the new desk clerk offered me explaining
that Daniel had rented an office.

But a stranger answered: 'No es aqui. He returned to the north some time
ago. No, he left no forwarding address.'

And so I crossed the Plaza Borne to Bar Bosch where Daniel and I had
breakfasted together three years earlier and ordered what we had then:
sugared rolls coiled in whorls and cafè con lêche. The skies clouded over
and cool rain splattered my forehead. The scene before me in Plaza Borne
soon resembled Renoir's Les Parapluiex in late twentieth century dress.
Citizens unfurled umbrellas as-if-by-magic, those without them ran for
cover. Hastily gathering up my gear, I left the pavement tables for the
shelter of the bar's sepia tinted interior. The waiters, trim in black
waistcoats and white linen aprons, bustled to prepare lunchtime tables,
balancing silver salvers.

'More coffee, señora?'

I looked at my watch.

'Yes, please.' There was no hurry.

Watching the procession of the city pleased me. Palma, one of the
wealthiest cities in Europe, a fascinating mix of sophistication and
dereliction which restoration schemes in the centre of the city were
salvaging these days.

After scanning the faces in the bar to confirm that Daniel's was not among
them, I trailed a sense of disappointment through the traffic of the Plaza
Borne and took a taxi to the Calle Archduke Luis Salvador. German and
English tourists, predominantly middle-aged, waited to climb aboard the
familiar beige-coloured bus.

'Hola! buenas tardes? A Deià?'

'Bueno! No, a Soller por favor.'

Miguel, the bus driver, remembered me from previous visits. This time I
intended to have a proper holiday and stay in a pension in the mountains.
The tourists sat in row after row of neat coupledom while I took a window
seat behind the driver and soon the city lay far behind the green-leaved
almond orchards as we sped towards the mountains.

Mallorca's elderly men are one of its joys. They give the impression that
they go out into the world in cap or black beret, comfortable in carpet
slippers, expecting that, before they've gone far, something hilarious or
fascinating will turn up. Here was one, sitting at the window across the
aisle, occasionally casting a gaze in my direction. At first I didn't
return his gaze which seemed intent on gauging my response to the landscape
which had become so familiar to me. The old man might have sensed my
excitement as I craned my head to absorb the superb vista of Valldemossa
which announced that I was back on the edge of one the loveliest places in
the world. He leant towards me an enquired

'Te gusta?'

'Si. Me gusta mucha.'

Now we would travel on along the mountain road with its sheer cliff drop
and witness the vast spread of the Mediterranean's azure cloak at the feet
of its compelling coastline. Elements of the landscape beyond the window
inevitably rekindled memory: hairpin twists in the road, sheer drops down
to the sea, the colours of the landscape, the mountain towns. It was
impossible to dispel the car crash entirely from my mind, nor did I wish
to, but it was a relief to no longer experience a rush of adrenalin every
time it sprang to mind.

The pension's aura of formality was not so dissimilar to guest houses in
the British countryside. It was a family run-affair and the major decisions
were taken by the two señoras, the sisters who managed it. In the gleaming
entrance hall a black-and-white chequered tile floor supported antique
furniture below a gilt candelabra, oil paintings of local scenes, Victorian
portraits and rampant plants. A grandfather clock ticked loudly and the
entire interior seemed to resound to my pull on the bell. I remember
thinking 'island fin de siècle' when Señora Ortiga, whose appearance was
a study in devout mediocrity, came nun-like down the tiled treads of the
wooden staircase to sign me in. I learned that she did 'front of house'
while her sister, whom I never set eyes on, cooked and served up the
meals.

I was shown a simple top-floor room and told that dinner would be served at
eight-thirty precisely. No, it was not possible to eat at seven-thirty or
even at eight. Eight-thirty, she said, firmly closing the door. At least
there would be time to shower and change and read. I discovered in the days
that followed that every evening the choice of main course was the same.
Fish or chicken. Pescado o pollo. There was a grandfather clock in the
large airy dining-room too, and guests spoke in lowered voices as if
participating in a ritual for which Señora Ortiga was the servitor. I took
out a book at my table-for-one and didn't look up again until the chicken,
glazed on a bed of rice, was put down in front of me. Much to my surprise
one particular evening, I met the gaze of a man at the next table. He told
me later that he was an English journalist, the father of a family which
had departed earlier that day.

'Are you lonely, too?' he enquired loudly, not minding that everyone could
hear. 'May I join you?' 

I felt the eyes of the dining room upon me, rivetted for my response as the
señora hovered disapprovingly lest her careful table arrangements be
disturbed. I dabbed my mouth with my napkin to cover my confusion as 'yes'
vied with 'no' in my mind. I could hardly say no and, besides, I did need
company. I nodded. 

Barry Jones picked up his glass but as he approached my table, he tripped
on the Turkey rug and stumbled into the señora. He gave her an appeasing
look, murmuring flattery about her household and how tolerant they were of
wayward foreigners like himself.

'What a hypocrite,' I thought when, at last, he sat triumphant beside and
me. He seemed to sense what I was thinking:

'It's just good PR. Señora Ortiga knows me well. We come here often. She's
a frosty old maid and like all of their kind, whether in Maidenhead or
Madrid, a bit of a duffing up puts them back in the humour. What are you
drinking? Water? Nonsense. Let's have some wine.' 

He went towards the kitchen to exercise further the privileges he had
earned as a long-time patron of the pension and returned with an opened
bottle. 'Local red - Binissalem - isn't bad.' He eyed me: 'See what you
think.'

The solemn atmosphere of the dining room had been thoroughly dispelled by
Barry Jones' refusal to kowtow. The other guests chattered away like birds
in an aviary now, and a young German couple, recently arrived and unaware
of any lingering solemnity, sat enraptured in a corner. The girl leant her
elbows on the table, revealing elegant, brown, braceletted arms and gazed
adoringly at her Romeo. 'Ja! Ja!,' she purred, responsive to his every
word. 

My unexpected companion was a big man, not overweight, with a craggy Celtic
face and amused eyes. He talked with loving familiarity about his
experience of Mallorca: 'This is the finest of the Mediterranean islands.
An Atlantis, without a doubt. The other islands - including the Greek - are
so treeless in comparison. Mallorca has everything. And I like,' he added,
'the Mallorcan sense of humour and mysticism, their amazing ability to fuse
elements which other nationalities find contradictory.'

At this I looked quizzical: 'Oh, let's see. They have an ability to fuse
the rustic and the divine. They manage to be both realists and idealists. A
real achievement, in my book.'

Señora Ortiga approached and we asked for a pot of coffee.

'Why do you think they love money so much?' he asked.

'Islanders everywhere are understandably hoarding and conservative,' I
replied. 'Also if what you say is true, that they love money, perhaps it's
because they were so constrained under Franco.'

'I suspect that's part of it. He had been a Governor of Mallorca and by the
time he made himself Generalissimo, I suspect they didn't know half of what
he was up to on the mainland. Times were tough for the islanders, most of
whom were still bound to the land. And foreigners, English and Americans
mostly, did very well out of the Franco era, zooming-in to buy-up wonderful
properties and terraces for next to nothing, which are worth a small
fortune now. The Mallorcans did well too, and sales of land all over the
island have made some of them rich beyond belief.' A year or two later,
after I got to know Luisa Bonet and her family, I realised that on the
other side of this 'love of money' lay a tremendous fear. Fear of being
dragged back to the land. Fear of earth floors.

'Ever since I was a little girl,' she told me, standing in her luxurious
and well-equipped kitchen, 'I've realised how hard life is for my parents.
Work on the land is... backbreaking. The continual daily round. And for
what? They are not even well-off after all those years of work.'

Luisa works in the tourist industry. For her, that's where the money lies.
Her command of English has transformed her life. Her arms tinkle with gold
bracelets, her fingers gleam with gold rings. She and her husband, who also
works hard in the city, feel themselves to be part of the late twentieth
century. Barry continued: 'The land's virtually worthless now. It's become
a thankless task to manage olive, carob and citrus crops. The terraces are
worth far more sold to Germans nowadays. They're the Europeans with money
these days... though the recession'll probably strike them eventually. In a
year or two I predict the north coast will be a Little Germany. That means
that building will go on and on like the proverbial piece of string unless
the and EC comes in with land preservation restrictions related to the
environment which, as you know, is of quite exceptional beauty and
importance.'

What Barry said was true. Since I first came to Mallorca, I had noticed
what amounted to a building boom. Valldemossa's car and bus parks, new
housing and 'retail outlets' had all been predicted by Daniel who had
muttered about local politicians tied up with the building trade on our
drive from the Clinica Miramar to the mountains. I thought he exaggerated
then, but had been dismayed to see otherwise from the bus window. The visit
of Chopin and Sand to the monastery gave the town a perfect tourist trap. A
Chopinland. Chopin spent as much time in Scotland as in Mallorca, yet,
apart from my father's plaque and the occasional performance of his work in
the childhood house, there was no outward evidence of this. Certainly no
trace of a tourist trail. How absurd to think that Chopin and Sand had
lived in Valldemossa for only for a few weeks yet that short stay had left
behind a living legend. Of course, a monastery is more romantic than a town
house, and in Edinburgh Chopin had no illustrious mistress.

A hush descended as the residents of the pension began to settle for the
night. I slithered between the cool sheets of the vast bed, under a framed
print of a suffering Christ which I had turned to face the wall, preferring
to contemplate the silhouette of a date palm beyond my balcony, dusky in
the light of a half-full moon and thousands of Levantine stars.

The pension fell silent. I wondered if we might be in for an experience
like one described by a friend who had stayed here recently:

'The señora was the last one up. I could hear her footsteps move through
the dark and silent house, creaking stairtreads as she climbed to her
quarters on the top landing. Then, gradually, a different sort of creaking.
The sound of activated bedsprings and a female voice. The walls of the
pension were thin as paper, and even though the noise came from the
opposite end of the landing, lusty grunts and groans and increasing
turbulence were all too audible. The pension, an old family house, was not
designed to muffle rapture, as you'll probably discover if you stay there.
Surely it'd stop soon, I thought. But no, it gathered momentum and then,
thump. Señora Ortiga's feet went thump, thump on the ceiling above my
head. I heard her stomp towards the window above my own. Then: thwack!
thwack! thwack! - she hit the wall of the building with mighty strokes from
a leather strap or something similar. Silence. I imagined the beautiful
couple, naked and hot, clinging together like a Rodin sculpture on the
large white-sheeted bed, their unfulfilled passion held in a suspension of
disbelieving outrage. The rest of the night was silent.

'First out, into the lily-scented morning, I reached my breakfast table on
the terrace overlooking the mountains. As I was about to sit down the young
Romeo brushed past me carrying all the luggage of the pair, his face ablaze
with suppressed emotion. His beautiful, blond-tressed mate followed and
said a soft 'guten morgen' from a serious, lowered face. I smiled back
sympathetically. Then the two roared off in their open-sports car without a
backward glance. Their departure left a pall in its wake and when the
señora brought coffee and rolls to my table, she looked so grim and
tight-lipped that I couldn't raise the usual greeting.' 

Next morning I was recollecting my friend's story - on the same terrace -
when Barry Jones came and sat down beside me.

'What did you make of that?'

I raised my eyebrows. 'Of what?'

'Oh... you must have heard it! ... that sort of thing happens all the time.
It's one of the sports laid on here. Coitus interruptus with the thwacking
strap of the Inquisition.'

And I had slept through it. 

'Buenos dias. Some coffee please, señora!' 


OVER THE YEARS, I HAVE ATTENDED CONCERTS AT SON MORROIG, AND have stood on
the fabulous balcony and the mirador temple which Salvador constructed to
overlook his sea of dreams. He wrote that this temple was, for him, the
best thing at Son Morroig. On previous visits I had been distracted by
conversations and fino sherry, and, although I had sensed the house's grand
atmospheres and the garden's delights, I had not explored them. I had
always been a figure among many. Now I wanted to experience the house
alone.

An old man and I got off the bus early one morning. 

Primavera. Spring. 

The air from the sea felt chilly. The music of the morning was all birdsong
from the pines and cypresses, and the click-click of the old man's cane on
the road behind me. Then different music as I opened the restaurant door.
'They called it paradise', a pop song I remembered from the sixties, issued
from the radio as the staff made ready for the day. Paradise. The place to
be. Fortified by café con lêche, I ventured into Son Morroig, now a
museum dedicated to the life of the Archduke Luis Salvador.

The old man had installed himself at the ticket table beyond a small side
room whose blazing olive wood fire incensed the cool, dark entrada. He
pointed to a notice, in English. On the wall, an extract from Paolo
Montegazza's book "Human Characters" (1901) was 'dedicated to an Archduke
born at the foot of a throne, who in the whimsical turning of the wheels of
history could even have been a king.' Then the next paragraph:

'I feel the need to tell everyone who reads my book, at the top of my
voice, that I love thee, a deep understanding joins me to thee forever -
thou art one of the rare men who have achieved the ideal in life, always
associating with fruitful, lucid and sincere thoughts...'

Mmm. Another sycophantic Archduke admirer. But I couldn't follow up
everything. I must rein in the instinct in me that was in danger of being
taken over by a fascination with the undercurrents of Salvador's life.
Swamped even. After all, I had chosen his book, "Las Baleares", to provide
a format for the roads I would travel. I was in danger of losing that sense
of purpose. I resolved that this would be my last foray into Salvador
territory.

Montegazza's declaration read like a love letter. How astonishing that such
a pretentious declamation had been framed here. Yet, two hours later, when
I emerged from the house, I could confirm that Vyborni had been whitewashed
further and further beyond the pale, with every rearrangement of the rooms
of Son Morroig. There was nothing to represent Vyborni. No photograph, no
momento even, of the part he played in Salvador's life.

In the absence of visitors, the silent house seems to hold its breath above
the sea. Salvador was guided by the proportions of a smaller ancient house
in his remodelling of the one that exists today. Along the walls of the
upper corridor hang appropriate framed botanical prints of Balearic orchids
and useful plants and herbs. There is a map of Spain dated 1873, an early
panorama of Palma, and in a bedroom off, an incredible four poster bed with
intricate mashrabia work and dark red hangings. Meeting the chatelaine in
the hall I asked:

'Was that the Archduke's bed?'

She didn't know, and it didn't matter she said, for, as they all say: 'The
Archduke was a simple man, modest and sincere.'

Why do people continue to whitewash Salvador, to make him less than he is?
A plaster saint. And why do Mallorcans, as well as white settlers, insist
on believing the story, which has no foundation in fact, that Catalina
Homar was Salvador's mistress? The truth of the matter is that Salvador was
gay and surrounded himself with like-spirited companions, some notoriously
homosexual. In later years, Antonietta Lancerotto, who had worked for the
household of Antonio Vives's first wife, Luisa Venezze, in Venice, was the
woman he chose to travel with him while Catalina Homar stayed behind at
S'Estacca.

The artist Santiago Rusiñol, precursor of Spanish modernism, the poet
Ruben Darío, the painters Gasper Vuillier and Erwin Humbert were all, at
one time or another, members of Salvador's European 'set'; and even
Francesco Spongia's obscene calligraphy found its way to Miramar.
Antonietta Lancerotto, who had a daughter by the artist Baptiste Corot, was
no more Salvador's mistress than Catalina Homar. Though she has far greater
claim, if Mallorcans insist on fabricating a mistress story. A mistress
story with Lancerotto, an Italian, as its Scarlett O'Hara wouldn't be the
same, though.

After Vyborni's sudden death in 1877, Salvador threw himself into
improvements and expansions on the Miramar estate. Seven miradors were
constructed and two or three follies. A bas-relief of Ramon Llull was
commissioned from the sculptor, Dupré. But Salvador was gone by the
following January, to Venice then to Egypt, and he took more than a year to
return to Mallorca. Then he began exploring the astonishing Caves of Drach,
whose excavation he funded, and was away again by May. The Caves of Drach,
a Neptune's lair, with the largest underwater lake in the world, must have
been truly astonishing in their unadulterated state. Now floodlit and
filled with sentimental music, gondolas plying the lake, the caves are one
of Mallorca's biggest tourist attractions.

A further year of travelling followed - the year was 1881 - to Ceylon,
Australia, Honolulu and America. 

It's another Archduke 'myth' that Salvador adopted Mallorca as his home. In
the forty-four years, between 1871 when he settled for the first time and
1915 when he died, he was away a lot of the time. Though dedicated to the
environmental protection of his estates he became an absentee landlord.

These days the grand salon is furnished formally under a panelled roof.
Billowing white cotton, inset dead-centre, suggests the Orient and sheds
light over a fine collection of paintings and drawings, mostly by Ribes and
two portraits of Salvador by Erwin Hubert. There is a watercolour by
Margaret Hall-Sweeney who painted in Mallorca earlier this century. There
is a fantastic collection of bronzed Mallorcan plates, a touching display
of early Greek goddesses, each on a pedestal within a glass dome, lots of
small vessels and Near Eastern blue beads, talismen against the evil eye.
There is also a collection, under glass, of Salvador's books.

A map indicates his residences: Zindis near Florence, Brandeis and the
Mallorcan properties.

Another map pinpoints his travels, and another the Austrian Empire.

An early photograph of S'Estacca, shows the house much smaller than it is
today.

A framed award announces that 'Su Alteza' won a silver medal at the
Balearic Exhibition held in Soller in 1897 for 'his honey and bees'.

A photograph tucked into the corner of the room shows Catalina Homar
peering gauchely over the shoulder of a taller woman standing beside
another. All wear broad brimmed sunhats, paisley-style shoulder scarves and
rough working aprons.

Life must go on. So it was with Salvador after Vyborni's death. It is said
that he had a penchant for the young girls who worked on his lands. They
were instructed, so the story goes, to raise their petticoats to reveal
their ankles as Su Alteza road by. Several, it is said, bore him children
who were all provided for. I don't believe a word of it. Although people
living near the Miramar coast today claim to be descendants of the
Archduke, there are no provisions for bastard offspring in Salvador's will.
Such stories are apocryphal at best, decoys at worst.

But what of Catalina Homar?

Catalina Homar was the daughter of Salvador's carpenter at Son Moragues.
Once, when her father was working on a special job at Miramar, Catalina
would bring him his lunch basket, covered with a red cloth, every day. One
day at the astonishing rock of Sa Fordadada, Salvador, bereft of Vyborni,
was listening, enraptured, to birdsong when a clear human voice blended
with it. Catalina, gathering salt from the rockholes after a storm, stopped
singing and approached Salvador with a natural, winning grace. From then
on, Salvador took an interest in educating the young woman, who was
undoubtedly attractive and of fine character. He took her to Miramar, as
Llull might have done six centuries earlier, where she was taught to read
and write. The last thing Salvador wanted was a mistress. But it is likely
that, from the beginning, he had a position in mind for her. The grand
seigneur, after all, was used to matching houses and people and he needed
an administrator and guardian to oversee S'Estacca. 

Salvador started constructing the ornately styled S'Estacca in 1878, the
year after Vyborni's death. Perhaps he aspired to live there, but he never
did. The Vives family had been installed at Son Morroig, Salvador lived at
Miramar, the Herreros family at Son Galceran. S'Estacca lay empty, perhaps
because, as Salvador eventually observed, the sun didn't hit its
territories until eleven o'clock in the morning. 

Who better than Catalina to run S'Estacca: intelligent, educated,
responsible, a devout Catholic, and attuned to the landscape and its
agriculture? Installed there, after the death of her father in 1882, she
soon won the respect and affection of everyone, from the landworkers to the
Empress of Austria who visited the house. It  was important too, that she
knew the ways of the smuggling community of the tiny secreted fishing
hamlet nearby. The forests above the area, peppered with caves, were their
lairs. Catalina Homar, knew that trade in smuggled tobacco was an important
additional source of income for the smugglers, most of whom had families to
support. The vineyards Salvador had established, now under her supervision,
won prizes for their wine (Moscatel and Malvasia) at fairs in Paris,
Madrid, Barcelona and Chicago.

That Salvador depended on Catalina for the smooth running of S'Estacca, and
held her in great esteem, is not in doubt. She was taken on short voyages
on the Nixe. Later, he acceded to her fervent wish to visit the Holy Land,
a journey taken with several of Salvador's 'set'. After the group parted at
Venice, Catalina returned to S'Estacca while Salvador travelled on to the
Riviera and later to Egypt where he bought a house at Ramleh, near
Alexandria. He hardly ever returned to Mallorca after that.

Catalina sent letters regularly with news of S'Estacca. But as one
historian points out, the letters contain no indication of an affair.
Neither does the book the Archduke wrote about Catalina Homar after her
death. Helga Schwendinger adds that she can't understand why Mallorcans
keep insisting that Catalina Homar was Salvador's great love when none of
her researches give any foundation to this fantasy. Salvador even called
Catalina the Madonna of S'Estacca, and the soul of S'Estacca. For the short
time they knew each other, she soothed his troubled soul and had the power
to lift him out of his frequent depressions.

Juan March says that Catalina fell for the captain of the ship that took a
small party of the Salvador 'set' on a trip to mainland Spain in 1897.
Captain Singala, corpulent with a full dark beard, appears to have been the
love of Catalina's life. She raved about him in letters to her mother and
sent the captain apples and wine from S'Estacca. Don't get involved, warned
her mother. But Catalina did. 

In October 1899, Singala sailed the Nixe towards Mallorca, where he would
spend the winter. The Archduke was away and Singala and Catalina indulged
their passion. One afternoon, though, he surprised them on the sofa. His
madonna defiled, Salvador took refuge in anger and illness until he could
reconstruct his world. Sad, ill, disillusioned and living with the
notorious Spongia, son of a Venetian gondolier, Salvador chose Antonietta
Lancerotto as his travelling companion at this point, in order to avoid a
new scandal.

The brilliant days of Salvador's Miramar had ended with Vyborni's death.
Now Catalina Homar was lost to him too. He replaced Miramar with Ramleh.

Meanwhile the new road, from Palma to Soller encouraged a mini-tourist boom
of aristocrats, artists and travellers to the mountains. Salvador was made
President of the Society of Tourism based in Palma, in 1909. Son Moragues
had been turned into an agricultural museum displaying objects described in
"Las Baleares". 

At the end of the century the S'Estacca vineyards were blighted by
phloxera. And in April 1905 Salvador learned of Catalina's death from a
disease which was said to be linked to leprosy and caused her terrible
suffering. Although he knew about her illness, he never wrote or visited
her. In a tribute, after her death, he wrote they that it would be
impossible to find anyone with a better heart than Catalina Homar but he
never set eyes on the statue of her kneeling at prayer, which he
commissioned and is now displayed in the garden of Son Moragues. Matching
people with funerary objects and was another of Salvador's penchants.

The centrepiece of the room at Son Morroig is a heavy bust representing the
Archduke in later years, sculpted in 1952. Salvador as objet d'art reminds
me of Chopin as objet d'art at the Carthuja. But here, at least, there are
no signs that the present incumbent, a descendant of Vives, has any
intentions of spoiling the place. The admission charge is modest and the
atmosphere of the house is tranquil and moving.

Downstairs again, the old man asks if I have a camera:

'It is beautiful to take photographs of the temple in the garden.'

I nod, but reply that I will carry the image in my head. The temple
fascinates me, reminds me of the one in Rome, where I was photographed,
standing in its centre, on my honeymoon. This one, of Carrera marble, was
commissioned by the Archduke and brought over from Italy. I must find out
when. Eye seducing, coolly pure, startling white against the blue
Mediterranean beyond, it invites the visitor to leave the flourishing
herbaceous garden behind to stand at its centre.

Here a flat-topped dais waits to receive something significant. It must
once have held a container of flowers, or an exotic plant at least. A
memorial. Ionic columns encircle it. Standing back, I see that under the
classical dome is an engraved frieze of ram skulls linked by garlands.
Surely this was intended to be a memorial pavilion to Vyborni? Viewing it
from a distance, eyes half-shut, I see Vyborni standing there, the flowers
on the dais a living reminder of his beauty. For Salvador there was no
escaping this past.

Later, from the terrace below Son Morroig, I scan the coastline for the
tower of Ramon Llull which has been struck by lightning at least twice. I
have been there on foot. From this distance, it resembles a Casper
Friedrich image, a romantic folly atop its pine swathed crag. My eyes shoot
imaginary lines from the garden temple of Son Morroig to the Ramon Llull
memorial and I see that they line up, one with the other, and I wonder if
Salvador's secret memorial to Vyborni, something far more esoteric than the
dreadful necrolatry sculpture which he buried in Ramon Llull's chapel at
Miramar, was this: that the spirit of the man he passionately loved, and
that of Llull, the saint who inspired him to construct his new life in
Mallorca, might merge in intricate sky-geometry above the genius sea.


In 1914, Archduke Luis Salvador was asleep in a hotel in Trieste when a
bomb exploded under the carriage of his uncle, the Emperor Ferdinand, in
Sarajevo. It was the end of a world. The end of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. The beginning of the atrocious war. Cut off from Miramar and
Mallorca, Salvador died at Brandeis Castle the following year.
Arteriosclerosis and chronic ulcers were given as the cause of his death.
The end of a life, the beginning of a legend.


This work is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The SCOTS Project and the University of Glasgow do not necessarily endorse,
support or recommend the views expressed in this document.

Information about document and author:

Text
Text audience
General public: Audience size: 1000+

Text details
Method of composition: Handwritten
Year of composition: 1994
Word count: 50638

Text medium
Book: 
Text publication details
Published: Publisher: Sancho Press
Publication year: 1997
Place of publication: Scotland
ISBN/ISSN: 0 952 8837 0 8
Edition: 1st

Text type
Novel: 

Author
Author details
Author id: 1063
Forenames: Sheila
Surname: Mackay
Decade of birth: 1940
Educational attainment: University
Age left school: 17
Place of birth: Edinburgh
Region of birth: Edinburgh
Birthplace CSD dialect area: Edb
Country of birth: Scotland
Father's occupation: Businessman
Father's place of birth: Edinburgh
Father's region of birth: Edinburgh
Father's birthplace CSD dialect area: Edb
Father's country of birth: Scotland
Mother's occupation: Businessman
Mother's place of birth: Edinburgh
Mother's region of birth: Edinburgh
Mother's birthplace CSD dialect area: Edb
Mother's country of birth: Scotland

Languages:
Language: English
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: 
Language: French
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: 
Language: Scots
Speak: No
Read: No
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: 
Language: Spanish; Castilian
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: