by A Long Walk in the High Hills- The Story of a House, a Dog
She now bounces high off the ground with all four feet, shaking her head with excitement in mid-air as we set off, her nose almost touching my heels, following my feet closely, on one of our fast romps round the mountain, past the ruined remains of the old village and the Font des Bosc, into the village by the back road. We now know, intimately, the dogs who live along the route.
Our first little friend is tied to a kennel under a palm tree on top of a terrace. He’s a brown and white boxer, a lonely dog who guards a house that stands empty most of the day. He always barks a rough welcome. Kendi gives him her biggest woof in return. A little further along and it’s Kendi’s cue to stir up two Mallorquín shepherd dogs who rush out to warn her off, tripping over their chains each time. It is all exhilarating and, for Kendi, thirsty stuff.
Luckily the Font des Bosc is close but even though she’s parched with barking, Kendi hates the cavern where spring water falls into a natural stone bowl etched out over the years. She has to crawl through creepers at the entrance and quivers and crouches, unhappy in dark places with no clear exit. I usually have to go in first and scoop out water in my hands but today for the first time, she’s brave enough to attempt it on her own.
Once she’s tanked up, the walk into the village is downhill and easy. A cheeky donkey in the garden of a pretty house comes trotting out as we pass by. There are banks of wild flowers and sheep grazing the fields on either side of the road. It could so easily be an English country lane although the fences here are made the old Mallorquín way from almond and wild olive branches, which weave and curl up into the hills.
All the land here and into the high Sierra was divided between the Catholic Church and the supporters of King Jaime eight hundred years ago. The same boundary lines still hold, passed on by word of mouth through the generations, marked often with just a large rock at the corner of an old stone wall.
The remains of a manorial chapel, olive mill and threshing floor stand in one of the fields. It is now deserted but was once the hub of a seigneurial way of life. In the ruins, an old, circular olive press made of granite rests on a bed of red earth. Broken from its wooden shaft, it will take a mammoth effort if ever it is to be repaired.
Once we get to the village Kendi’s ears begin to swivel. A different type of dog inhabits the streets, yappy, busy little things free to do whatever takes their fancy. They spend their day checking out the opposition before returning home, worn out, for dinner.
I want to introduce Kendi to a more cosmopolitan way of life. I need her to learn about good behaviour and road etiquette. More than anything, I want her to be admired and the only way that’s going to happen is if she gets out and about.
I’m starting at Sancho’s because as a man of discernment he allows dogs in his café. Kendi has to learn not to go sniffing or growling after his other canine customers but there’s a particular busybody, a black spaniel, who will come and pester Kendi when she’s trying to be on her best behaviour.
This floppy creature barges into the bar with his big flat feet, not realising how hard it is for a dog like Kendi to be neighbourly when she’s been shut off from the outside world for most of her young life. If I talk quietly and confidently to her she’ll soon perk up and tell him in a low growl to mind his own business. What I must do, however, is buy Kendi a new collar so I can ditch the heavy-duty, studded affair which weighs her down and does not suit the dandy my dog has become. I want to find her one in crimson, which means a trip to the vet in the port as this is the only place around here which stocks fancy bits and bobs for dogs.
There is another vet in the district, Matias, a tall personable fellow whose surgery in Andratx opens late in the afternoon. Every bit of space in his waiting room, however, is taken with homeless kittens. There’s always a cage crammed with the latest orphans on the counter. As I can’t bear it, I go instead to Petra, a German vet who is also open during the day. Petra can appear a bit abrupt but her main attraction is her willingness to lend out her cat trap, an oblong contraption with a metal plate at its entrance. When a feral cat spies a lump of fresh meat and ventures in, it puts its foot on the plate, snapping shut a door behind it. Although fearsome, the trap is a godsend when there are so many uncatchable cats in need of help.
Petra was bequeathed hers by an animal charity, and she is extremely possessive of it. I’ve always got to jump a queue of patients meowing in crates and a posse of stray cats queue-ing for breakfast outside her backstreet surgery if I want to get my hands on the trap.
The first time I desperately needed it was the morning I’d fed four cute Siamese kittens who’d made their home in a back garden in the village. They were playing when out from under a rampant passionflower crawled a young ginger cat. As he clambered slowly towards me, I couldn’t, honestly, believe my eyes. He had been so badly torn in a fight his entrails were hanging out. Even now, I can’t quite describe the condition he was in; it was heartbreaking. And yet, in spite of his mortal injuries, he was yowling for something to eat. I gave him what I had and immediately set off to the port to find Petra.
At first she was reluctant to lend someone she didn’t know her cat trap, uncertain if she would see it again, but after I begged, she relented. Unfortunately, when I got back, the cat had gone so I had to wait for what seemed an eternity, with the cage and a piece of fresh chicken, hoping he’d reappear. Half an hour later, he was back, his little face screwed up. He smelled the food and didn’t hesitate. He limped into the cage. Now I had the gruesome job of getting him into the car and back to Petra as he fought manically to break free.
A young Mallorquín, I remember, came over to help, shaking his head when he saw what I’d got. He went to find an old towel to drape over the cage to give a bit of comfort to the creature now wailing inside.
Outside Sancho’s a couple of English women gossiping over coffee also came to see what was happening. They turned away when they saw what I’d got inside. It was left to me to take the cat back to Petra who made me watch as she administered the final injection. It was her way, she said, of making people take responsibility. As if I needed any lesson in that.
The year Kendi with her new red necklace became a fixture in my life I got a black, shiny motorbike, which took me down quiet roads with the wind and sun in my face and all the way to Palma to the salvage yard, before it came to a sticky end when it ran into a boulder on my rocky road. I’d heard about the Chimney Place from Boris who bought most of his secondhand building materials there. It is located in the gypsy quarter of Palma, on the way to Manacor. Small, square houses with washing on roofs line the streets and, heedless of traffic, dirty children dart in and out.
Finding the Chimney Place is relatively easy if I can keep my eye on the tall brick chimney towering above the dereliction. It marks a gold mine of old stone sinks, marble pillars, floor tiles stacked hundreds high, mahogany doors and windows, chairs and tables, all taken from the old homes, palaces and churches of Palma. There must be four large warehouses stuffed with artefacts scavenged during the rampant demolition of old Palma, row upon row of solid pitch pine doors and windows and scruffy sofas from once wealthy households, now well-sprung beds for stray cats and their litters of kittens.
From the Chimney Place I bought old mosaic blue and white tiles, a stone sink, windows, doors and all manner of implements, which I hung on walls or incorporated one way or another in my house. For me it was a magnet, a marvelling at lost architectural gems stacked so wantonly in this grubby backyard. My bike was able to get me there fast for a recce and once I’d found something I couldn’t resist I’d put down a deposit and return with a car to pick it up later. I’d got the bug.
From the flea market in Palma held every Saturday at five in the morning I bought large glazed olive oil jars. Swarthy, bulky men with leathered skin commandeered every street corner leading to the cathedral, selling gear they’d obviously nicked. Doing business with these vagabonds, haggling over church antiques, gilt angels and crosses or oil paintings of bibli
cal scenes, was like dealing with so many menacing desecrating devils. I got so I couldn’t.
I could, however, shop at the flea market in the wine village of Conseil on the way to Inca, the principal town of Mallorca’s central plain. Here was a totally different and fun deal. Firstly, it was on a Sunday and you didn’t have to be there so early. And secondly, a trip to Conseil meant a pit stop first at the market of Santa María. This was another experience I wanted Kendi to savour. Santa María del Cami, to give it its full name, is an ancient Roman town on the main thoroughfare to the north, which in late medieval times developed its own a slave trade. The Moors who followed the Romans made the town one of their principal settlements. It has always been a gathering place for the island. There are piles of welcoming cafés on the main road which look out on an impressive seventeeth-century monastery: the Monestir de Nostra Senyora de la Soledad, its cloister just glimpsed through wrought-iron gates in honey-coloured high stone walls.
Kendi is getting very partial to ensaimadas and café living where she can sit and be served in the sunshine. She takes a piece of ensaimada gently now and chews it in appreciation. I think she prefers, out of all the ensaimadas in Mallorca, the ones made here in this town.
The market spills out round the church a few streets away. On a Sunday a colourful, glorious Mallorca of tomatoes, aubergines, grapes, honey, nuts and flowers blazes in the sun. Melons are sliced with lethal knives as the price of gingols (a rosy and prolific fruit) swiftly reaches the crowd.
I’m here for the honey stall. Bees are big business in markets across the island. Thousands of beehives produce a ton of honey from two main crops a year. First comes the spring flower honey, mille fleurs. Then comes the heavier duty carob honey from the carob trees in November, on All Saints’ Day It is stickier and more substantial and not as sweet. What I want to find is rosemary, ‘romero’ honey or perhaps honey from the almond blossoms, gathered just after the flowers have faded. Miel d’Romero is my favourite, spooned over goat’s yoghurt or poured on warm figs when they are in season. It is hard to concentrate on which out of the many varieties of honey I should buy from Santa María today, there’s a lot of laughter ricocheting and amplifying through the town’s narrow streets.
Many homes in Santa María have pine branches hanging over front doors in various stages of dehydration, as though someone has forgotten to take down Christmas decorations. These branches signal wine fermentation going on in darkened cellars along almost every street. The browner and drier the branch, the readier the wine fermenting underground. Santa María is right in the middle of the wine-growing area of the island but prefers to leave the industrial stuff to other towns. Wine here is personal. Families use their cellars to brew their own and a drying pine branch above the door lets everyone know when it’s time to party.
Kendi’s first experience of an island market wasn’t a happy one. I walked her once to Andratx market where she took on the look of a wolf hunting her prey, pushing up against the heavy bottoms of local ladies as they queued three deep at the stalls. No one dared pat her, but once she’d got weary with the effort and commotion, she relaxed and, although not wildly joyous, she at least managed to buck up a bit and half-heartedly trot, less menacingly, along.
Today in Santa María, she’s cool, so once I’ve loaded my basket with fresh fruit we’re ready to set about the flea market in Conseil, a mile or so up the road. Conseil also makes wine and has a well-known local bread they call pa moreno, a dark rye baked in a wood oven which forms the basis of the simple pa amb oli and so many other Mallorquín peasant dishes. Conseil – like other towns in the central plain, Santa María and Binissalem – surprises with its beautiful homes in its central square, built by wealthy wine merchants at a time when Mallorca exported fine wines to Europe. These houses are discreet, crafted from golden stone with impressive olive wood front doors and cellars and courtyards furnished with family antiques.
The flea market is on the outskirts of Conseil, in the grounds of a nut factory where stalls stack up next to a growing pile of almond husks used for fuel in the winter months. In summer crowds engulf stalls selling iron keys and bolts, or rummage in once neat bundles of embroidered linen. There is no shade here. It’s scorching. In the winter months I’ve bought rolls of striped grey cotton army twill which I’ve had made into cushions and covers for my chairs outside. One day I also staggered back with a pine harrow, an agricultural implement made from a large flat board, which had embedded in it sharpened flints set in perfect rows. I hung it on my sitting room wall. This morning, as Kendi is with me, we’re in a socialising mood, which means we stop and wag tails or give a quick sideways growl to a dodgy pooch or two.
Sometimes, after a Sunday market at Conseil I’ll make for the country restaurant Cellar Sa Sini, on the corner of the main road back in Santa María. It doesn’t open until one but by half past the beamed Mallorquín dining room is packed with local families chirping, building for their happy Sunday lunch. The food is home cooked, and the puddings tempting. It is also cheap, as is the wine served from the imposing oak barrels lining the walls. If I’m with friends, rosado is a favourite. It’s a potent cross between bianco and tinto that arrives in a bottle uncorked that, once emptied, is recycled, topped up for the next customer.
Summer or winter the restaurant is always inviting. In winter a log fire burns in the vaulted fireplace as warming dishes of arroz brut, sopas Mallorquín or frito Mallorquín trundle from the kitchen along with something called a ‘stew of meets’. In summer a cooling fountain flowing down the outer walls of the restaurant makes eating in the courtyard a pleasure for bikers and locals alike.
A Mallorquín family is waiting in the courtyard in the sunshine, the window of the restaurant flung open behind them. Grandpa is wearing his best cloth cap; Grandma, their daughter and son-in-law are busy with a boisterous four-year-old. They’re at a table and the child is running round screaming. I can see the grandfather is irritated, trying to galvanise his daughter, who’s gossiping with her mother, into applying a bit of discipline. She can’t. The child has now barged into the restaurant, climbed on the window ledge and taken to throwing almonds at Grandpa, who, angry, only makes his grandson bolder, inadvertently thumping Grandpa in the ear when he tries to swipe his cap off his head. Grandpa jumps up, dives through the window, grabs his grandson and wallops him across the bottom. The child’s mother carries on as though none of this is happening but the boy quietens, I notice, and all through lunch sits silently by his grandfather’s side, both of them suddenly extremely well behaved.
It’s very much a grown-up pastime this sitting around on pavements. Local people, especially on a summer evening, prop chairs outside their front doors one next to the other in a long line to get air and to gossip, saying how ‘mucho calor’, how hot is the night, something now remarked upon when once it wasn’t. I think everyone agrees the summers are getting hotter but how any of them can happily sit on a pavement, anyway, their chairs wobbling as traffic thunders past, is always puzzling.
I’ve been on the island months now and still have not yet made the sea crossing to mysterious Dragonera about five miles off the coast of San Telm, where King Jaime and his great fleet first ran for cover in the thirteenth century. At sunset Dragonera casts a spell over Mallorca, rippling the ocean, stirring shadows, as the last rays of the day dip down. There is always an audience on the jetty in San Telm as the final curtain comes down in the west.
Apparently Jaime didn’t plan to conquer Mallorca from the waters off San Telm. He had been on his way to Pollensa in the north but a wind blowing from Provence stirred up such an enormous storm he had to change course. Jaime had also heard about a spring of fresh water on the island of Dragonern so made for it instead.
He wasn’t the only one who’s dropped anchor there. A thousand years before, so legend has it, Noah sailed in to repopulate the land. Now no one inhabits the island, although there was once a large estate with a lovely garden at its southern end where pe
acocks and exotic varieties of pheasant were reared. Soon after I bought my house this completely natural island, as Jaime – and Noah for that matter – would have remembered it, was purchased by the government to save it from developers. It is called Dragonera because in profile it looks like a recumbent dragon and it’s been luring me to visit for ages.
Cedric knows a guy who’s just had a refit on his boat and is putting it through its paces by taking it to Dragonera. He’s told him I’d like to come along for the ride. It’s early and I’m in the port being welcomed aboard a white plastic cruiser by Luigi, an elderly guy who apparently is big in textiles in Italy. His mechanic is an English boy, Rick, and also on board is Rick’s mongrel, a dog called Pip. Soon we’re powering out to sea, the men listening to the sound of the motor while I lounge on the brow, warm air blasting as the boat skids across the waves.
Dragonera has three lighthouses, one abandoned and two at either end of the island which still flash their vital intermittent light over the black waters. I plan to walk to the derelict lighthouse at its highest point on Na Popia so we steer towards a landing spot at Cala Llado on Dragonera where I’ll be dropped off and collected later for a picnic lunch while the guys go off on more sea trials.
It is an easy walk, following a broad footpath built by prisoners who had been brought over to construct the lighthouse in the nineteenth century. There is no one around this early, so I have Dragonera to myself, well almost. Out of every shrub and rock there are little lizards. I have never seen so many, there must be millions of them shooting in and out. These lizards are called sargantana and are indigenous to Mallorca. They have no fear but pop up, then freeze, playing games of hide and seek in the heat. There is lots of rosemary and wild olive and cistus, a typically Mediterranean landscape wonderfully unwrecked, and by the time I reach the heights of the island I feel disorientated, unable to comprehend how neatly Dragonera has managed to duck development.