Autor:    Enrique Arroyo Villegas

PAPERS OF MALLORCA - LIVING 500 YEARS

Behind the Lonja, the old seat of the money changers, on the shores of the Mediterranean, there around 1450, the elegant wealthy lords built their mansions, three-story buildings with Arab portals and spacious courtyards for carriages and horsemen.

Everything was field at that time despite being near the Bastion, which was a fortification destined to the observation and punishment of pirates from Algiers.

Between mansions and mansions, there were spaces that little by little were filled with houses of another size, fishermen´s houses and merchants.

The house that the gods have assigned me on my arrival from placid Costa Rica, belonged to that first class, house of gentlemen, which I have not entered to investigate in the ecclesiastical archives because of my little interest.

The current restorers had the good taste to respect the arches in the garage, or those of the facades. So in the morning when I get up I caress the stone of the seas, corroded by time, of that amber color that resembles gold powder, and that so many stories, like ancient mirrors, must preserve.

I gently touch the portal of my bedroom, which overlooks an interior patio, I caress it as if it were the back of a horse dotted with golden mane, and I speak to it, I ask about its ancient knowledge; the house is clean of trapped spirits, but I know that if I continue with this practice, like the one that caresses the belly of the Lucky Buddha, it will tell me things of the past.

A few meters further on, in the same street, lies closed and silent, the mansion that belonged to the Mallorcan pirate who tried to disembark in Algiers and whom Carlos III named Admiral, Antonio Barceló y Pont de la Terra, a chubby tiparraco whose awards and blazons, did not remove him the face of a man of people, of a pig seller. And it is not that I have something against the sellers of pigs, our illustrious March, smuggler and pirate, architect and leading hand of the landing in Africa of General Franco, began the noble history of him as such.

And it is that everything sticks —tell me who you hang out with and I´ll tell you who you are, the saying goes— and from so many pirates and Berbers, the heirs of cultured societies such as the Arab and Jewish, who lived in these parts —those who once arrived of the peninsula, those who populated the land under the orders of the lords— discovered that being a smuggler or pirate gave better returns than plowing the land.

And I am happy to live and return to my life in the Mediterranean, the one through which so many civilizations have passed; in the end it is a joy to search, looking back, who we are and where we can go.