Joan Roca, the mountains, the hotels... a bell
“Sadness sleeps on the ground,” these days. Like a blind, old bitch, exhausted by years and heat, “sadness tumbles down like the sky through the stars.” I didn’t know Joan Roca. I mean, I had never spoken to him, nor was I even an acquaintance to him, nor he to me. Nevertheless, he was always part of our lives. He has given rhythm and beat, with his discreet and kind bass, with that almost Scandinavian redness and Viking ruggedness. Without him, Antònia Font would not have been what they have been. And without him, we wouldn’t be who we are, either.
Debon I, Oliver, Manresa, Debon II, and Roca are like a football lineup that we will all know by heart until the last of our days. There will be family mourning and mourning for friends. Intense, because the grief for the departure of such a young person is always imponderable. But alongside it, there is also condolence, the ‘con-dol,’ of public dimension, the musical and cultural ‘con-dol.’ And above all, the generational one. A shiver has run through the spines of the fifty-somethings of Mallorca these days, the forty-somethings, if you will too. It is as if Joan Roca, with his bass hanging around his neck, had placed us before the mirror of our own finitude, of the unsustainable lightness of being that we all carry inside.
The lyrics of Antònia Font are the soundtrack to our lives, to an entire generation of Mallorcans in particular and Catalans in general who have built our collective imagination from what they sang, in a magical symbiosis, because Joan Miquel Oliver’s words did nothing more than reflect what we were all living, and rarely has an artistic expression of the sidereal and stellar magnitude of Antònia Font managed to converge so naturally with the people from which it has sprung. Antònia Font has done what they know how to do and what they like to do, without concessions, with their feet on the ground and their eyes on the sky. Therefore, inevitably, their lyrics are also imbued with the impact that tourism has had on Mallorca, and even more so for all of us of our generation, children of parents who seemed to come directly from the 19th century and who could still tell us stories of an island that we had only been able to suspect, and that today’s young people couldn’t even believe.
“The mountains, the hotels, a bell. I already know what the almond tree smells like”. Because it has been difficult for us, for the forty and fifty-somethings of Mallorca, to understand that where there is now a hotel there was once the almond tree in bloom in January, that we were a land resembling a paradise of wild beauty, of thin soil and Mediterranean poverty. We, who had had godparents who had never bathed in the sea, turned towards the water and the waves, without realizing that we were just another tourist, local, but a tourist. That's why we sang “let the sprinklers turn on, let them water all our courgettes, I don't know if they need watering, because I'm more of the sea”, and we did it lying on the sand while “inside the holm oaks and inside the pine forests, foreign women eat ice cream”. We looked at all that with candor, because “a tourist is a humanist, not a pirate”. We already saw, however, a hidden cat.
Few people, surely no one thought that that “virgin spring” would flood us “all the cubic meters we had paid for with the mortgage”. And now, flooded by a deflowered spring, today's young people can't even dream of starting a home project on the land that was once theirs and is now for sale in more than a thousand real estate agencies. Real estate agencies, they call them, as if the land doesn't move after being sold to rich and powerful hands that neither love us nor will love us.
Ánimos Parrec says, that “tourism saved us”. And there is as much irony as truth in this sentence. It perhaps saved us from having to be ourselves always, from living poorly and suffering. From not having to leave for Havana or Buenos Aires. From not having to return, like tattered Quaquins. What must it have been like, to live in Mallorca in the sixties? What must a solitary white hotel have been like, beautiful within an infinite dune system? What must the usual Mallorca have been like, mixed with that new, never-before-seen Mallorca? We got rich. And we didn't know it. And now, in Mallorca, what is difficult is to live there, to work there, to find a home there and be able to pay for it, while in the cove next door villas are rented for 1,000 euros a weekend.
We are a sick society, if we are not capable of revolting against this industry that has become a monster that devours us alive, that makes us disappear with planes, rental cars, tourists, and souvenirs. We are a sick society if we do not revolt against the shameful detention of two young women handcuffed for having painted on a facade the truth that we all have in our heads. Mallorca will be a wasteland of cement and roads that lead nowhere, if we do not put more measure than the words we hear here, there, and yonder. Let us not allow the dystopia of a deserted island full of empty hotels and abandoned villas every two blocks to come true. Let's look at the land again, let's learn again when the quince trees are watered.
