A week in Majorca

Soller, Mallorca

Margot and Bill urged us to go, and Bill said it had a beautiful garden that I’d love and Bob could sit in.

And so Toby drove us to Southampton Airport, and really it is dreadful that a supposedly enjoyable holiday should be book ended by airport Security, of taking off belts and jackets and watches and storing them in a box – it’s like being admitted to prison.  Even with Assistance, where someone shepherds us, B in wheelchair, through, and someone else takes over the other side.  You’d have to be a sadist to enjoy working in security.

So the flight, EasyJet, Squeazy Jet they call it, to the vast and uninspiring airport at Palma, Mallorca.  All the world goes there, and all of Britain.  No taxi, as promised by hotel, so eventually we get a taxi from the taxi rank which is rather cheaper. Along this palmy (so that’s where the adjective comes from!) road and then under a mountain and here we are in Soller, and proceeding up a dark alley, so narrow with buildings louring over us the driver has to reverse when turning a corner as if he were doing a parking manoeuvre.  Here, he says looking at his satnav.  Here?  Huge ancient door.  He presses button, and the door opens to a golden atrium with a fountain and dripping Buddha, sofas and baskets of oranges.  ‘Sarah’ says Felix.  We have arrived.  Felix brings us a sparkling drink.   Then to garden, flight of stone steps to our wide balcony.  Sun beds.  View through palms of the garden to mountains.  (Think of view at Delphi up to Parnassus, Athens up to Acropolis, up to the sacred).  Room with four poster bed.  The kitchen is closed so I walk to piazza to buy very edible pastries and beer.

It’s Monday, the day Ca’n Roses do supper, so we eat in the garden, in the dark surrounded by more Buddhas.   So good.  Breakfast and sometimes lunch is also in the garden, but because of the various steps to the help yourself we usually eat inside, in this old olive mill, looking out.  Garden glows with ripening orange and lemons, there’s a flowering bird of paradise and a yucca, and so many palms, bigger than I have seen, and a pool.

By day B reads his iPad and does its puzzles, and I explore.  I usually bring lunch to our balcony, and in the evening carefully arm in arm we walk over the cobbles to the piazza with its elaborate church and choose a cafe/restaurant.  The ceviche with lime, ah, the food is delicious here.  Sometimes there’s music and singing.  Frequently like a ghost train a near empty wooden tram rolls past.

One day I walk out of town along paths through citrus and olive groves, and over a main road, then stumble up a stony col and down to Port Soller.  The sea.  All very modern.  Then I take the ancient tram back up to ancient Soller, about 5 km and am glad to be home.

I visit the Botanic Garden, full of Mediterranean plants.  There’s a massive cactus which can’t be a cactus because cacti are not old world.  Euphorbia?   It has a museum, so now I know all this mountain range is limestone.  On the way to the Garden I pass a tattooist and piercer (looks quite luxurious inside), where they will  insert objects into male or female genitalia for €250 (amazed, the thrill of natural orgasm not good enough?).  To enhance pleasure, including (look it up later) a Prince Albert…(don’t ask).  Return not through narrow side lanes twisting here and there, and suddenly find I’m at Ca’n Roses.

Then one day, in heavy rain, I walk to the station and take the old train, c.1920, to Palma – I start counting the tunnels but too many – we emerge from them and I peer at towns rimmed by cliffs, then the train finally descends into the eastern plain full of warehouses and industry, and into the city of Palma.  Heavy rain still.  So along, into flower shop and buy an echeveria succulent, exotically dark, and find it has been sprayed with dye.  Odd here in BTY!  A high rise department store, so in to get out of the rain, and up to the top floor cafe.  I only want a coffee with milk, but can’t remember Spanish for milk.  Leche.  They are not as pally to tourists here as in lovely Soller.  I can just see through the windows the distant fat cathedral.  So back to the station for train back in the rain – a boy aged 4 and I make faces at each other – my face returning to normal whenever the mother turns round to wipe his face, put on his jacket, pull him back from putting his head through the window, feed him, fuss over him, apologise to me.   A great train, because you can tip the seatback so you are always facing the direction you wish.

In Soller I often walk down Carrer de sa Lluna, which I thought was just full of tourist shops until I looked up – hello, a tea party taking place in the air, an odd woman’s head above a doorway and then here, a pig has lifted his trotters to gaze down from a balcony.  Surrealism lives!.  Elsewhere, at the station a bloated red figure sits disconsolately on the iron bench.

Also in Carrer de sa Lluna is an art nouveau museum which I thought was a grand hotel until a fellow guest puts me right.  Well it was a house for wealthy art loving folk, walls studded with paintings and a Joan Miro sculpture of  ‘Woman’ who is just a round head with an imprinted star and a comma, while on the other side donkey ears (what hell to be as an artist’s muse), and sterile bedrooms (like all museums which were houses, you can’t imagine them actually lived in with shouts and songs and magazines lying around, and people sleeping let alone making love on these hard beds).  Worth visiting for its utterly beautiful spiral staircase.

Soller Station gallery – at the station there is a large gallery of paintings by Miro and ceramics by Picasso.  I was told about this at Ca’n Roses where fellow guest says there are art works by Picasso and a woman.  Who?  Joan Miro he says.  Roomfuls of blobby paintings by Miro, ovoids overlapping other ovoids, offspring of amoeba, merging and splitting.  Geometric shapes in bright primary colours.  Dots and dashes, they make me think of night sky charts, with stars linked into constellations.  Born in Barcelona, he lived and died in Majorca, and the island is proud of him.  I like them, they’re bright and pretty, that’s what Miro is.  One handy painting or diagram interprets his symbols, eg dark winged gash is a vulva, and so on.   But … maybe I like something more intellectual.  Maybe he is, and I just don’t understand.  

Fine ceramic jugs by Picasso are buxom women, and an owl.   His plates are brilliant, there’s a matador and bull, and here is a furious woman, gosh she certainly is, the hard surface of the plate rumpled into facial folds of fury.  What his fingers could do.  (I can see him watching, distant, intrigued, as the tear splashed  woman rails at all his infidelities and misdemeanours ).  All this in a railway station.  And utterly appropriate here in Majorca, home of majolica.

And so we come to the end.  A 3.30 am start.  Bob is warned – this is what he hates, early starts.  Bags packed and to bed, while a storm rages, rushing in from the mountains, the rain splashing and lightening shooting through the shutters and thunder growling like a Rottweiler.  Will B manage the stone steps in the rain?  With his suitcase?  After a restless night, up at 3.30 am, carry my case then Bob’s case down to the lobby.  He manages the steps in the rain, and the taxi comes at 4 am, ah relief, with a nice taciturn driver.  Airport.  Dark, bleak and wet.  Assistance.  Squashed seat on plane.  Flight, and darling Toby to meet us at Southampton.

Would I go to Majorca again?  Of course.  It may be touristy, but it’s beautiful.  The mountains!  The orange groves.  The plains of olives!  And nothing but charm from the people of Soller.