Through the keyhole, through the cat's hole

PalmThings often depend on how you look at them. Defenders of our life as a tourist avatar, who are out there in the Balquena, often say that those who criticize tourism are people disconnected from reality, blinded by ideologies (they, the defenders of mass tourism, have no ideology), determined to pass off as dogmatic truth what are nothing more than subjective perceptions. Overcrowding? I don't know where this is; in my property, renovated by a Swedish architectural firm, we dance quite freely. Lack of water? I have a full pool, and when I turn on the taps, hot and cold water comes out at will. Degradation of the landscape? If so many millions of tourists come, it must be that it's not that degraded. Job insecurity? Gosh, and if they don't work as waiters and waitresses, what do they want to do? Incivility, filth, problems with social distancing? Well, people also have the right to have a little fun, right?

If we look at this beach scene, nothing is out of place. Photographer Ismael Velázquez has focused it in such a way that the image is enclosed in a circle, giving us the sensation of looking through a keyhole. A feeling, therefore, of confidentiality, of indiscretion, of gossip, as if we were seeing what we weren't supposed to see. And yet, nothing we see is objectionable or disordered. On the contrary, it is a harmonious scene, in which the elements that compose it seem to have been placed according to some kind of predetermined idea. The central figure is that of a mature man, standing facing the sea, his back to us, wrapped in a beach towel from belly to toe, as if it were a suit. At his feet lies the sand, a slightly tanned strip that soon gives way to the blue of the sea water in a first dividing line, which further up becomes the horizon line, where the blues of the sea and the sky divide. At the bottom of the image, we see many smaller figures: women's heads soaking in the water, and, more in the foreground, a sports bag with clothes next to it. Then, the other two main protagonists: on the right, next to the man with his back to us, the raised white chair of a lifeguard (who is not there). A buoy floats in the same line as the chair's seat. Further away, occupying the entire upper center of the photo and breaking the horizon line, a recreational boat, on which a group of people enjoy a leisurely stroll under a pristine summer sky.

What are you complaining about? It seems as if they're telling us each part of the photo, and also the whole. What problem do they see here? These are people having a good time without harming anyone, enjoying a break they've surely earned after a whole year of working on everything, in this paradisiacal environment where we Mallorcans are lucky enough to have been born. Should we refuse to share with others what has been given to us by the unsolicited fortune of having come into the world right on this island? Is it possible we're so selfish? And if we not only share it, but—in exchange for giving them access for a few days to our privileged rock, just for a few days!—our visitors leave money here that is the money we live on, what's wrong with that?

A premeditated decision

More than an evil, there is a point of view. A narrowing of the focus, a premeditated decision to see only what suits a particular way of understanding things. The cat goes through the cat's hole because it has no other place to go in and out. The indiscreet person looks through the keyhole because he wants to see what he shouldn't see. Or does he do it to please himself, seeing only what he is interested in seeing? Last summer's rhetoric, which quietly acknowledged that there were problems to be solved, has given way this summer to a blatant triumphalism, which is institutionally present in the media and on social media and tells us that there is no longer a problem. It seems that the Roundtable of the Pact for Sustainability has done an exemplary job, and we no longer have to worry about anything. We live in a permanent summer morning on the beach, carefree, with our feet in the sand or sailing on a fun catamaran.