The Pillars of Hercules

“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.”

“I’m reading it because it’s funny.”

“It’s full of lies about Valdemosa.”

“It’s not about Valdemosa,” I said. “It’s about George Sand.”

“Yes.” He was relieved and saw me as an ally. “That is right.”