NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (10 page)

“Once the British came, but when the prices went up, the French and Belgians took their place. Now it is Germans in the winter. Some British people still come in the summer months.”

She knew who frequented Sóller. She was a room cleaner in one of the hotels. Her husband was a fisherman. He caught shrimp in these months and in the spring he would look for sardines. Fishing was a hard living, she said.

Her little girl goggled at us and used a small square of cloth to imitate her mother’s clothes-folding.

I bought gas for the car—four thousand pesetas to fill the tank, about $35 for this tinky-winky Renault 5, another revelation about the high cost of living in Spain. But generally speaking in the Mediterranean a liter of gas cost twice as much as a liter of table wine.

The next morning, my last in Sóller, I woke once again to the sound of the waves sloshing against the beach, regretting that I had to leave.

In my two days of hiking I had walked almost to Deyá. Today I drove there on the narrow winding coast road, and early on, came upon the sight of a head-on collision (no one hurt but a car and a truck badly damaged). I was cautioned by the consternation of the young man standing by his smashed jeep, his face dark with anxiety; the busy movements of the truck driver who had rammed him on the sharp bend in the road. A tunnel was being dug through the mountains. The shout
No Tunnel!
was scrawled all over this part of the island. I agreed. There was a train. There was a road. There were already too many cars in Mallorca.

The village of Deyá was for so many years the home of the poet Robert Graves that the villagers passed a resolution and in 1969 made Graves “an adopted son,” the only one in the long history of the village. He had come there in 1929 on a hunch and lived there for more than half his life.

It is hard for me to work up any interest in a writer’s birthplace, and I hate pilgrimages to writers’ tombstones, but I do enjoy seeing where they lived and worked; writers’ houses fascinate me. And writers often choose magnificent landscapes to live in, whether they have money or not. Henry Miller settled in Big Sur and lived in a cabin long before Big Sur became a coveted piece of real estate; D. H. Lawrence was in pre-chic Taos, Hemingway was in Key West for the fishing, and moved on to Cuba for much the same reason. Robert Louis Stevenson was an early visitor to California and Hawaii and at last a pioneer in Samoa.

In the literary history of the Mediterranean, many places became famous and fashionable long after foreign writers discovered them and wrote about them. Very often the writers were residents. Usually it was a case of
putting a fishing village on the map, and that ended when the tiny port was turned into an expensive resort. This is pretty much the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald glorifying the Riviera, of Norman Douglas in Capri
(South Wind)
, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu
(Prospero’s Cell)
and Cyprus
(Bitter Lemons)
and of Somerset Maugham in Cap Ferrat. There are scores of other examples—people in Greece looking for Zorba or the Magus, literary pilgrims in Alexandria looking for Justine. The reductio ad absurdum of this, and probably the worst thing that can happen, is for the writer’s paradise to turn into hell while he or she is still living there—the hell of traffic and hotels, visitors and literary pilgrims. The writer may have unintentionally caused this to happen, by raving about the place.

In her typical gnomic way, saying that it was “Paradise—if you can stand it!” Gertrude Stein suggested that Robert Graves try Mallorca. And so having left his wife and children he went there, with his lover, the impossible Laura Riding. Graves found this idyllic island in 1929 which, in the course of his lifetime, almost sank under the weight of package tourists. Yet Deyá was still a somewhat remote and pretty village, high on sea cliffs, surrounded by the lovely Teix Mountains. He went there because it was cheap and off the beaten track. It also seemed a happy blend of two landscapes he loved—North Wales and Corfu. He was determined not to leave. He wrote in “The Next Time,”

I easily found Graves’s house. It was named Canelluñ and, made of local stone, it occupied a lofty position on a ledge outside of the village. It was a dignified house on a steep slope, crags behind it, and the rocky shore far below it. There was an unexpectedly luxurious hotel in the center of Deyá, La Residencia, the sort of hotel I had been avoiding, since this was supposed to be a breezy trip. My idea was to press on; it was an enormously long coastline, and I was trying to avoid being corrupted and detained by luxury and lotus-eating.

Graves had bought Canelluñ in 1934 with his profits from
I, Claudius
and had lived there for many years with Laura Riding, who like so many other mistresses in literature began as his muse and ended as a nag. It has been said that one of the reasons this powerful novel of the decline of Caesardom is so convincing is because Graves “used it as a vehicle for expressing the dark side of his feelings for Laura Riding.” He saw her character in the wicked and manipulative poisoner Livia. Laura was known in the village as “a bossy eccentric who wore strange clothes.” After some years and some suffering Graves tossed her out and took up with another White Goddess.

An interviewer once asked Graves a boring question about his living in Deyá.

“Has living in Deyá, isolated from what you call the mechanarchic civilization, led you to what you call handicraft in your poetry?”

This produced an interesting answer from Graves. “I once lived here for six years without moving out—in nineteen thirty to thirty-six,” he replied. “Didn’t even go to Barcelona. Apart from that I’ve always made a point of traveling. One’s got to go out, because one can’t live wholly in oneself or wholly in the traditional past. One’s got to be aware of how nasty urban life is.”

By keeping his head down, he had tried to get through the Spanish Civil War. He had fought in the First World War (and written a book about his disillusionment in his precocious—he was thirty-three—autobiography
Goodbye to All That).
Franco kept threatening to invade Mallorca, and when the time came, and the island grew dangerous, Graves fled.

The village of Deyá is lovely. How to account for the fact that it remained so long after other parts of the island had fallen to the crassest of developers? Perhaps it was as the woman in Sóller had said to me, “no level places”—that and the narrow roads. If a place was inaccessible it had a chance of keeping its identity and remaining untainted.

“Deyá had little to recommend it except the Graves magic,” Anthony Burgess wrote dissentingly in his autobiography, speaking of a period when he had lived in the village. He went on, “A literal magic, apparently, since the hills were said to be full of iron of a highly magnetic type, which drew at the metal deposits of the brain and made people mad. Graves himself was said to go around sputtering exorcisms while waving an olive branch.”

The Mallorcans I spoke to in the north of the island all knew of
Graves, they knew the village and the house. They knew everything except Graves’s poetry. That was the way of the world. The man’s reputation was good enough for them, and it inspired their respect. A celebrated writer who lives in a small town or a village has an odd time of it. It is amusing when the local philistines disparage the writer in the neighborhood, but it is downright hilarious when the writer is strenuously championed by the local illiterates. Graves lived among olive-squashing peasants and fruiterers and shepherds, as well as prosperous retirees and aristocrats. He shocked some, but his love for the island and for the village in particular impressed them to the point where most of the locals were his well-wishers.

Graves’s son and daughter still lived at the house, I was told. I decided not to ring the bell—for fear of intruding but also for fear of being turned away, rebuffed for invading their privacy. Apart from curiosity I had no profound reason for poking my nose in. I was simply interested in what his desk looked like, the room, the books, the pictures; it gave some idea of the writer’s mind.

I looked too disreputable for La Residencia; I had a cup of coffee in the village and spent the day walking around the steep lanes, admiring the fruit trees and the tidy houses. The village had great dignity and enormous physical beauty. It was a place, I decided, I would gladly return to.

Even in Deyá, in casual conversation I did not find anyone who knew Graves’s poetry. But no matter. The question that was in my mind was about Franco, and in particular his hold on Mallorca. Because the Spaniards are so polite generally and reserved it was a long time before I could steel myself to ask. Also, asking about a dictator who had been in power so long was also a way of asking people about themselves, a question like “What did you do in the war, Daddy?”

Anyway, in Deyá, I popped the question. The man I asked was of that generation, in his early seventies, a thoughtful person out walking his dog. I had caught him unawares, while we were discussing the route to Valdemosa. Then he considered my Franco question.

“In that time”—he seemed to be avoiding saying the Franco’s name—“we could not do certain things. We could not say certain things. Some things we could not think.”

“So there was political repression?”

“Yes. We were not as free as we are now,” he said. “But there was
work for everyone and there were tourists. When you have work you are satisfied and you don’t ask questions. You get on with your life. If you have work and food you don’t think about political matters.”

“And if there’s no work?”

“Ah, then you ask questions.”

“So under Franco there was full employment?”

“The country was growing. But that was a different time. Now everything has changed.”

“Was the Catholic church stronger then?”

“Much stronger.”

He was talking about Spain’s entering the modern world. Long after the rest of Europe had joined it, little had changed in Spain. I took
That was a different time
to mean that it was ancient history. And in a short time, only since the late seventies, Spain had worked to catch up—to lighten its mood and learn how to vote; most of all to cope with the humiliation of having lived so long under a dictator who presumed to think for them. It must have been like living in an abusive household.

Rather than spend the night here in Deyá I decided to stay at Valdemosa, another lovely place above a fishing port; more olive trees, more fruit trees and fincas, but an altogether more level town. Part of Valdemosa’s fame rested on the fact that George Sand had brought her lover Chopin here in the winter of 1838–39 and, while he recovered from an illness and wrote his “Preludes,” she had quarreled with the locals. Afterwards she had written a famously cruel book about their sojourn.

This seemed the perfect place to read the copy of
Winter in Majorca
that I had bought in Palma. It was a locally published edition, translated and extensively annotated by Robert Graves—most of his notes were rebuttals or else cleared up Sand’s misapprehensions or her willful judgments.

At the time of their visit, Chopin, younger than George Sand, was twenty-eight; she was thirty-four. Her real name was Baroness Aurore de Dudevant, née Dupin; “the child of a
mésalliance
between an aristocrat and an ex-milliner, was the uncrowned queen of the Romantic,” Graves wrote.

Chopin passed as her husband, but it was known that they weren’t married and perhaps that was why the locals did not warm to the foreigners, who perhaps suspected that she was pursuing a secret love affair. It was
the worst, most rainy winter in years, the olive crop was a failure, and George Sand’s writing was not going well. As if that were not enough, Chopin suffered an attack of virtuousness and began to think godly thoughts. This provoked his anticlerical mistress, who liked to think of herself as a liberated soul. It was not a happy household. The village disapproved. The island was cold.

The book was George Sand’s way of settling scores. She wrote it, raging, after she got back to France. She railed about the vulgarity and spitefulness of the people, she complained about everything from the way the Mallorcans built their houses and looked after their animals, to the poor quality of their olive oil, which she called “rancid and nauseating.” She called them monkeys, barbarous, thieves and “Polynesian savages,” as if the civilized navigators of the Pacific had not already been ill-used enough by the French.

At one point, she quotes a French writer who begins a sentence, “These islanders are very well-disposed, gentle and hospitable,” and suddenly interrupts with, “We know that in every island, the human race falls into two categories: the cannibals and the ‘very well disposed.’ ”

In another aside, she used the Mallorcans in order to generalize about Spain, how easily offended and thin-skinned the Spanish are. “Woe betide the traveler in Spain who is not pleased with everything he encounters! Make the slightest grimace on finding vermin in a bed, or scorpions in the soup, and you draw upon yourself universal scorn and indignation.”

“We nicknamed Majorca, ‘Monkey Island,’ ” she writes, “because when surrounded by their crafty, thieving yet innocent creatures, we grew accustomed to defending ourselves against them,” and then, showing a certain ignorance about the natural world’s distribution of primates, she goes on, “but felt no more scorn than Indians feel toward chimpanzees or mischievous, timid orang-outangs.”

Soon after the book appeared it received solemn rebuttals. It is one of the livelier and funnier Mediterranean travel books, and for gratuitous rudeness it is on a par with Evelyn Waugh’s
Labels
as an example of a traveler’s bad temper in the Mediterranean.

I mentioned
A Winter in Majorca
to a man in Valdemosa. “It’s a silly book. And it’s old. I’m surprised that people still read it.”