Mooring Words

My uncle had given me a typewriter; grandad would send me letters to Barcelona; grandma continued to smile as only she knew how; dad had determinedly ripped up the forms; I was the twisted tree trunk that had to be straightened. Doña Aina and Don Joan, my primary school teachers, forgave the dyslexia of a mind that had recently recovered from toxoplasmosis. “Write, write”, they urged me, convinced that I had fallen down the stairs once or twice a week.

My high school Latin teacher was not so convinced. A school trip to see a sundial and that conversation: time is a row of Polaroid photographs that are gradually revealed as you watch them. I got an idea from one of the translations: two fistfuls of the reddish soil of Algaida would be coming with me to the hall of residence at the Autonomous University.

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There is an Arab proverb that says that nobody can step out of their shadow, and there is Josep, the French father of the son I gave birth to during my second year of the degree in philology and whose name is Marcel. Throughout my pregnancy, I looked to Proust for the time that I still had not lost. The other day, Josep said to this son, who is so grown up that he is on the verge of celebrating his 27th birthday, that he can’t understand why I gave everything up to return to Algaida, the place of those early problems, just to end up working as a cleaner. “Your mother used to get top marks; at Barcelona University she won a creative writing competition where the chairman of the panel of judges was Joan Perucho; she published her first book at the age of 20 and won a poetry prize, five novels…”

This conversation between father and elder son, passed on to the younger one, who is 14 and has a different father, reminds me of when I sing in the cistern; as clear and sharp as with the two fistfuls of earth, right in the middle of life and death, and smile. Everything can and cannot be communicated — like those polaroid photos I am now flicking through because I have been asked to reflect on writing and the land, and this is the result: each new metaphor requires the same effort as that of a plant creating leaves in a different shape; transmitting the true importance of the land and writing and whose conservation is never costly. Sweating as I have this summer is next to nothing: brush in hand, sweeping away reflective shadows; Mallorca and its lands have never been easy to farm, scattered with stony dry soil, and the same is true of the Mallorcan people.

Dry stone walls. We leave our problems at the side of the road and continue on our way. I have jumped over them so many times that I have become a seasoned round-trip athlete with the solid constancy and the precious monotony of also being roadside matter; all the words and earth I have, had and will have under my desk on plastic tray filled with stories.

One day I received a visit in the tray in Barcelona’s Gracia district, a blond bumblebee that had travelled all the way from Africa, like a hummingbird, telling me to return. They spend the winter huddled in cracks in the rocks, trees and building and resume their journey from the Mediterranean and North Africa to Algaida and Gracia when the wind starts blowing in a southerly direction.

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Another day, this time in 2020, I was asked to recite the opening speech for Algaida’s town fair, an honour that took place in January last year. It went down well, and I did away with some fantastic ideas about what I would say; I explained “victim of domestic violence”, followed by “victim of gender violence” of the father of my second son, Joanet. Such things are not for festive speeches, and I spoilt things even further when I returned, literally fleeing back to the house where I had been born 46 years previously, practically empty-handed, and things became even more complicated: my uncle, a walled-up well, cannot bear the sight of me with or without my typewriter and tells me to get back to my abuser; the council protests and revictimizes me for a whole year for daring to seek help that goes beyond the food bank. And when I enrol at university again, I am questioned and the object of rumour; maybe they are all right and I should learn a lesson. However, I am still unsure as to what that lesson is.

I can wait. In an optimistic frame of mind. I wake up at 4.45 a.m. to go to work, happy as a lark because I still can’t see any wasted time anywhere, I write this and that. This lesson and the Mallorcan rondalla tale of the girl who left her homeland 28 years ago, who never married and who returned with only the books of all those years, dedicated to the forgiven people, uncle and parents. I love them, Algaida and every stone of the road that is unable to bear me, Roser¹, far too wild: “that’s what happens when you try to be so independent”. As prickly as the weeds that take root in any crack and survive all weathers, still writing with or without a land, like a miracle.

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¹ Play on words with the author’s name, Roser, which in English means “rose bush”.