<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Maria Escalas]]> 10 <![CDATA[The last times]]> Save to the phone the conversation with Pilar. They are silly phrases, a selfie, a joke, four laughs. We always said goodnight to each other, but that time we didn't, and the communication is interrupted abruptly, without any goodbye, without any transcendental phrase, without any word of thanks for all that has been. It would surely have been different, if I had known that the next day she would die in a sudden and absurd way.How many things do we do for the last time without knowing it?Among other moments that I regret not having retained, there is, for example, this one: I cannot remember the last time my son nursed. What a pity not to have said goodbye to that chubby, laughing baby who would party every time he saw me unbutton my shirt. He has returned a man with a booming voice and assertive gestures, and it seems incredible that there was a time when all his happiness was having a full belly and a clean bottom. What a pity not to hold in my heart the last time I fed him with my body.Many times we live by closing our eyes to the evidence that we are losing things forever on a daily basis.Surely my grandmother did know, the day she left Mallorca for the last time. Years ago, my grandparents had moved to Barcelona to be with us, and every summer we all returned to La Ràpita, to that house they had bought in the 70s and which had gradually grown, as the family grew. Every year we visited all the relatives who were still alive, we went to Consolació, we made suckling pig for the Virgin of August, we roasted the fish my father caught. In the evening, the old people would sit in the corner of the terrace where there was a breeze and watch time go by.And so, between everyday gestures that we didn't give any importance to, the last summer they would come ended. Grandparents should be eternal, but they are not, and you understand it too late. I didn't know it yet, but I would say that grandmother was aware of it.I would portray her: small and nervous, with pale, thin skin, that dress with a print that is now back in fashion, and flat shoes. That day in early September she got into the car with her fan in hand, and when I had already started it and was adjusting the rearview mirror, she turned to look out the window at what they had built with so much effort, and said, so softly that she must have thought I wouldn't hear her: “Goodbye, little house”.He never returned again. And I always think of her when I lock up the house, her legacy, and I call her grandma, we still come, I still seem to see you in the corner of the terrace where the evening breeze offers a little respite.It's curious to have grown up in a house like this, because even though everything has changed so much, I can still see it as it was before.When I was little, all the backyards of the house in La Ràpita were garrigue. I had played there so much! I can still tell you the pine trees that were there, the stones, the prickly pear fig trees, the walls. My world, as a child, was made of concentric circles that grew wider and wider as I grew: first I only went swimming in the cove, then I could go to the caves, and little by little the reach widened more and more, and in adolescence we went swimming at the beach, and on the way back we cycled up the coast with that slightly rusty bicycle without gears that, I don't know why, we had left tied up at the entrance of the club, as if there were any danger that someone would want to take that wreck.Every year, when I returned and went out to play in the scrubland, I saw it a little changed. A new wall, a construction where there used to be pines, streets that led nowhere and absurdly crisscrossed the chaos.I remember a pine tree with great fondness. It didn't grow straight, it was perfect for climbing, the trunk was just like a little ramp that allowed me to reach the top, where I would turn into a princess, or a fairy, or an owl, or whatever we felt like playing that day.I don't remember the last time I climbed it and, in fact, I don't know if some summers passed waiting for me, while I had already grown up and wasn't playing by climbing trees. The truth is that that crooked and ugly pine no longer exists. Now there is the swimming pool of a French couple's house.It annoys me that they don't know what was there before them, about the huge house they have built. It could be that someone would say the same about our home, that it certainly also required cutting down pines and also must have changed the landscape that someone loved.Speaking of landscapes I love, I couldn't go to the demonstration in defense of El Trenc. I would have gone for sure.I don't know if it happens to you, but it does to me: every time I go to those beaches I'm afraid it will be the last time, that one day the greedy will achieve their evil plans and we will lose this magical space forever.May the greed of a few not harm the treasure of all.

]]> <![CDATA[The June crisis]]> When I worked at the secondary school, the same thing always happened to me in spring: work consumed me in a brutal way, I felt I wasn't getting there, that this wasn't what I wanted to do, that my life was slipping away in emergencies I didn't love, in bureaucracies and paperwork that filled the days with tasks that had nothing to do with what mattered.

]]> <![CDATA[The nun aunt]]> In our home, as I suppose in 70% of Mallorcan families during the 20th century, we had a nun aunt. Ours was my grandfather's sister. I had always called her “the nun aunt”, but she had a civil name: Magdalena Bernat Gomila, and she was from the congregation of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (forgive the pomposity of the name).

]]> <![CDATA[Four and a half recommendations]]>

What do you want, to sell a lot or to write well?Speaking of the difficulty of living off what I write, a colleague posed this painful question to me.Let's be clear: publishing houses are not charity organizations, but businesses like any other, they have to pay salaries and survive in a complex cultural context: surrounded by two very powerful cultures, the authors of this small country insist on writing in Catalan, without any powerful state to support us, with Portuguese institutions that don't quite believe in it, with booksellers who have limited space and receive new releases every week with the support of large groups with a powerful promotional machinery that usually prioritizes non-literary criteria.I suppose the goal would be to make culture in Catalan profitable. And this is where consumers have a lot to say. What books do you buy? Are you aware that we hold in our hands the most effective way to make Catalan culture profitable? Well, buy a lot of books, and buy books written in Catalan.To make an impact, I'll give you four and a half recommendations for books written by Balearic authors that, if we had a normal country, would be among the bestsellers.– Winter Sun. Dora Muñoz. Edicions Xandri. July 1939: a group of Majorcans heading to the popular Olympics in Barcelona found themselves caught between two worlds, quite literally: Republican Catalonia and Francoist Mallorca. They left for three days, which ended up being three years.Muñoz shows us her great versatility (have you read Errada de comptes, her latest crime novel? It's also fantastic!). Here she changes register and hooks us with a great command of narrative tension, which is not easy at all. Sol d’hivern is a story based on a real event, and life very often doesn't fit literary tempos, but Muñoz knows how to keep us hooked on the story.– How do you want, brothers, for me to sing? Joan Pons Bover is doing fantastic promotion for this novel, with a piercing lyricism, a tribute to lost loves, to the grief of what never was. Published by Illa Edicions, with two temporal arcs, from the desolate routine of a nursing home to the despair of losing one's first love in post-war Formentera. A breathtaking book, written with a careful and precious language that you won't be able to stop reading.

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