The Pillars of Hercules

“An English poet lived in Deyá, isn’t that so?” I asked a man near Sóller harbor.

“Robert Graves,” the man said, without hesitating. “His house is still there. Now his son and daughter live there.”

“I think he was a wonderful poet. Do the people here know his poems?”

“Yes. We have a high regard for his work. We compare him with the great poets, not just of Spain but of the world.”

It seemed a pleasant idea to make a trip to Deyá—maybe walk there along the cliffs, and look at the landscape that Graves had praised for so many years.

I found a hotel within the sound of the harbor. Sóller had such a placid harbor, such magnificent cliffs, I decided to stay a few days and catch up with my note-taking. I hadn’t written much since Alicante. I had lost a night’s sleep on the Punta Europa. I was delighted to find this peaceful place. On most trips I kept rolling until I found a place I liked, and when I got a certain feeling I came to a stop. This was another reason I traveled alone, because it was rare for two people to see the same qualities in a place (“Why do you want to stop here? I thought we were supposed to keep going”). Sóller was pleasant. But even in this low season there were some tourists here—hikers mostly.

That seemed a good idea to me. I bought food in the supermarket, yogurt, sardines, fruit juice, picnic food for homemade bocadillos—fat sandwiches. I bought Sóller’s prized oranges and a topographical map; and when the rain stopped and the sea glittered with sun, I spent two days hiking, looking at birds, making notes, glad that I had found such a lovely corner of this supposedly hackneyed island.

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. But seldom-visited places where people were still living settled traditional lives seemed to me the most worthwhile, because they were the most coherent—they were readable and nearly always I felt uplifted by them. What I had missed most of all in my trip so far was a chance to look at a landscape that was not wall-to-wall hotels and condos and clip joints and “English Spoken Here.” Perhaps I was too ignorant for ruins; whatever the reason, they did not interest me greatly, nor did tombs, nor churches. It was not my philistinism, it was my desire to see the life of the coast, no matter what form it took. I made some exceptions. Big crumbling Roman or Greek amphitheaters were another story. They looked absurd and ancient, and there they lay with all their ambitious symmetry in the oddest settlements. “Here is where the gladiators entered.” “Notice the ruts of the rich people’s chariots.” (I was to see such structures in Albania in a slum in Durrës and in the south of Tunis in the otherwise ramshackle town El Djem.)

Not long before I had been thinking that it was seldom possible to be alone at any point on the Mediterranean coast; and then, by chance, I found this part of Mallorca. True, it was dotted with villages and parts of it were jammed with houses, but it was the prettiest coast I had seen so far. I hiked to the village of Fornalutx on the slopes of Sóller’s mountain, Puig Mayor, in the shape of a witch’s hat, and went bird watching on the vertiginous path along the sea cliffs.

At the end of my two days’ hiking I caught up with my chores, my notes and laundry. If it seemed strange to be alone on the cliffs, no sounds except sea birds and the occasional Teutonic squawk, it seemed even stranger to be in a launderette in Sóller, with young mothers and children, folding clothes.

“Hello. How are you?”

“Very well. You are a visitor?”

“Yes. I like Sóller. Very pretty.”

“Not spoiled,” the woman said.

“I wonder why.”

“Because there are no flat places. It is all cliffs and crags and steep slopes. The few hotels we have are all at the harbor and on the road leading out of the village.”

That seemed a good explanation. It was not possible to put up a big hotel here, and there was no money in a small hotel—no room for the package tours.

“It’s a quiet time of year.”

“Mostly the Germans now.”

Only Germans, really, big chunky waterproof hikers, pairs of them, in parkas and knickerbockers, carrying walking sticks and binoculars. And when I saw Germans like that I did not think of hiking but invasion. They were Germans, of a robust pink-cheeked sort, wearing thick-soled hiking boots, taking advantage of the cheap rates and marching up and down the mountain paths, as though unintentionally auditioning for a production of The Private Life of the Master Race.

“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.