CHOPIN’S MONKEYS

AND THE NUDISTS FROM THE NORTH

            When I last visited Mallorca, in 1967, Franco was in charge, condoms were illegal and anyone speaking Mallorquin was liable to imprisonment. None of this seriously troubled me: I was four and busy discovering garlic and crazy golf. I excavated the beach at Camp de Mar and put together a collection of extraordinarily life-like fruit sorbet tubs which, tragically, the hotel maid mistook for rubbish and looted. Despite this set-back, I found everything to my liking.

 

         My parents had a splendid 1953 guidebook by one Jose Ferrer. His “Island of Calm” was inhabited by friendly peasants who wore baggy pantaloons and lacy shawls. His visitors tumbled out of ships and into cars with white-walled tyres and sat on beaches wearing swimsuits chopped out of old tweed. Already, Jose boasted, Mallorca was one of the Most Frequented resorts in the world.

 

         As I dug away at the beach, I, like Jose, had no idea that we were but the vanguard of an army of 4.5 million sun-warriors that would invade each year. There are now so many Germans that they even plaster the autopista with Bundestag election posters. So many Britons have been left behind that they now have their own newspaper, The Bulletin, where they can grumble about the price of butane, order bulk Yorkshire puddings and catch up on who’s drowned.

 

         On the day Jayne and I arrived, 760 aeroplanes conveyed 115,000 passengers in and out of Palma airport. The place seemed to be in the grip of a Sunstroke Carnival. We immediately fled to the north-west coast, to the Serra de Tramuntana, 54 miles of limestone that burst out of the sea during a Palaeocene rearrangement of the Mediterranean. It was a Karst landscape beaten into frothy shapes by the elements and then dressed in garigue, a cool covering of Aleppo pines, helm oaks and carobs. Little villages perched up in the hills, out of reach of Moorish pirates and, in one of these, Deia, we stopped. We had shaken off the hordes.

 

         We found no floppy-hatted peasants in Deia: it is the home of artists. Here, six thousand years ago, Beaker Man knocked out Europe’s first crockery and the creativity has never ceased. Here, the artist Rusinol became ever more delightfully impenetrable; in Mallorca, he wrote, “even Milady Moon walks more slowly contaged with laziness.” Then came Robert Graves, in black hat and Trilby, writing popular books (“I, Claudius”) and unpopular poems. He sought artistic inspiration in the beds of young ladies and is buried under a thick slab of concrete, his epitaph inscribed with a sharp stick. After that, more artists arrived and, with them, skips, potted geraniums and Siamese cats. Deia is now more blissfully pastoral than it ever was under the goatherds. That said, old values prevail; a boy with a throaty moped can still turn a pretty head and the old ladies still wring their smalls in the washhouse over the stream.

         “You can’t get scandal out of a washing machine”, they observed.

 

         We stayed at the Es Moli, a large, slightly prim German hotel that was pleasantly overwhelmed by lemon trees, figs and bougainvillaea. It was small enough to engender ferocious loyalty in it guests, some of whom had been coming for 20 years, but large enough to have a resident coiffeur, who resurrected tsunami hair-dos when the frauen were a little over-vigorous with their swimming .

 

         The hotel guide, Pepe, led a party to Dragon Island, a waterless hump of rock surmounted by an abandoned lighthouse. It was 100 and the guests, who wore cufflinks and Bengazis, flip-flopped queasily to the top, over the carcasses of rabbits, torn apart by ospreys. An Absolute Nightmare, one declared but, later, generously and rather intriguingly conceded that it had “sorted out some digestive problems”. Our ebullient troop then sat down to Martinis and grilled mullet on the quayside. The bread baskets blew away and Pepe rose unsteadily to his feet to recite Graves.

         “His eyes are quickened so with grief...”

         But all eyes were fixed way below, on a magnificent Spanish lady who was clambering out of the limpid sea, wearing nothing but her jewellery.   

 

         I’m uncertain what the islanders made of the changes to their landscape over the last 30 years. They were notoriously hard to fathom. When they fought for Hannibal, they demanded payment in women and wine and yet, when Chopin’s girlfriend, George Sands, wandered around in trousers, smoking cigars, they pelted her with stones. Chopin thought them thieving and crafty and called Mallorca “Monkey Island”. This was over-reacting. However, it was not always easy to understand what they were up to. Why do so many motor-cyclists wear velvet riding hats? What is the “Big Game” that the road-signs warn us of? What do they mean by “There are more days than sausages”? One thing is clear: “No soms Espanyol” (“We are not Spanish”). It is sprayed all over Palma.

 

         One day, I slogged up Teix (1062m) to find them. Among the broom , myrtle and rockroses, I found their charcoal burners, olive terraces and Caza a coll hunting tunnels but I heard no-one all day except firecrests, crossbills and warblers. The next day, I scrambled down to the beach at Cala Deia, where two blonde figures were darting among the rocks, quite naked. After them, I saw no-one until Port de Soller, three hours away along the pine-wooded cliffs. It was thrillingly beautiful, I told Pepe, adding that it was also hard.

         “If you want to eat fish, you have to get your arse wet”, he shrugged.

 

         Port de Soller is a beach resort for those too delicate for the by-now raunchy south coast. Sunbathers wore their jewellery with swimsuits and climbed up onto the promenade to hunt not for the rave scene but for a good bowl of Guisat de Peix (Fish stew) or a dish of snails. They snoozed under a giant Spanish navy slogan, “TODO POR LA PATRIA”, and at dusk they took the ex-San Francisco tram back to Soller. The townsfolk allow themselves one day of insobriety, each May, when the 1561 slaughter of the Moors is celebrated in a riot of gunfire, bunting and interesting green liqueurs.

 

         Early one morning, we took the ancient train from Soller through a cleft in the Serra to Palma. Our fellow travellers, the Germans, were so delighted that the tried to video every one of Mallorca’s six million almond trees along the way. If they have the right tweeters and woofers, the whole of Dortmund can thrill to the sound of cicadas. Palma, when it came, seemed cool and quiet. We disembarked and found ourselves in the Mercat de L’Olivar, shoulder-deep in chilled prawns, and then shady art nouveau streets of curious shops; Biggie Best Furnishing, the sausage-maker and a cutler of improbably large hunting daggers. Nazis and communists busied themselves with scrubbing out each others graffiti and the police whistled around on mountain bikes, chasing the old drunks off Miro’s “Egg”. It was cooler still in the cathedral, where fantastic silver reliquaries housed not only Christ’s thorn but also his sponge, his whipping post, St Sebastian’s forearm and an arrow-head extracted from his saintly flesh. Palma has been pulling in the crowds since the Crusades.

 

         On the way back into the mountains, we stopped at Valdemossa, founded by the asthmatic King Sancho. Chopin, too, believed that the air would be good for his “pulmonary consumption” but the local doctors put him on a diet of marshmallows and he never really thrived. In the Carthusian monastery, where he and Sands nested for an insufferable year, the Valdemosans have put on a brave display of admiration; there is a clump of Chopin’s hair, his comb and the “wretched” Mallorcan piano on which he composed “The Raindrop Prelude”, all, I fancied, abandoned in flight. In 1835, the monks too had left in haste, abandoning an equally intriguing assortment of hair-shirts, skulls, cherubs and whips.

 

         On our last day, we flogged a hire car up into the Serra. In Fornalutz, we overtook a builder, concrete slabs clamped to his moped and ladies’ sunglasses wrapped around his face, off to patio another ex-patriate. We stopped for coffee in Conception Place, Biniaraix, and were admonished by an American who looked like a little parcel of scrunched-up Manila. We were parking in her shade.

         “It’s not like other countries,” she shrilled and she was right. As we climbed higher and higher, the Mediterranean paled and the road signs warned of snow. 4.5 million visitors and 600,000 islanders had suddenly vanished. At the turning for Cala Tuent, we waved our windscreen wipers around to show that we were a hire-car trying to indicate left, and dived into a ravine of fantastical bubbling limestone, nine miles down to the sea. There we celebrated our incredible deliverance with llomb amb col, a steaming hash of pork, cabbage and raisins, washed down with goblets of fruity Binissalem.

         At sunset, we strolled round to the throat of Torrent de Pareis, a river that crashes 2500 feet through the cliffs down to a pebble beach. In winter, we’d all have been drowned like kittens in a froth of ice-melt. But this was summer and, as the sun lurched into the sea, the Mallorquins huddled in the last flickering rays, offering up arms, breasts and faces in a final supplication of pleasure.

 

MALLORCA FACTBOX