Autor:    Enrique Arroyo Villegas

PAPERS OF MALLORCA - LONELINESS

What impresses me most about this quiet city, closed by the pandemic, is its silence. I didn´t think I would ever see it, and I say see, like someone who can see silence, because everything becomes unreal; the narrow streets of the old Arab quarter, the squares with some parishioners sitting close to the ground guarding a small bar that serves drinks or coffee through a small window.

In this darkness, in the absence of the usual light from the balconies and open windows, the noise of strident music, of voices, I can perceive the speck of cigarette light from those who are smoking almost hidden like criminals. And above their heads the yellowish lights of improvised bulbs in metal and glass lanterns, those that once housed oil lamps; because this was a small city without gas lamps like in big cities.

I have walked tonight through the darkened city, feeling the need to open myself up to freer spaces, by the sea, to reach La Lonja, old, made of marés stones eaten away by saltpeter and air. The angel of the merchants, the one who presides over the front door, was there, cold as night. Poor angel of stone, he was not lucky enough to accompany the sirens plethoric of busts and crimson, blonde hair in the wind, splashed by the sage of the seven seas, honored by shipwrecked and drowned, powerful, defiant as prostitutes in a seaside inn. The lights that illuminate the feet of La Lonja caress only the stones where the dogs do their bad arts, and the angel with wings attached to the world remains in the dark.

Solitude of silence in a city worthy of a good photographer; the one that will never exist to capture the silence of a closed city, oblivious to all eyes, where probably invisible walk old Arab merchants, converted Jews, inquisitorial monks and pirate knights, who shake their souls —those that did not get anywhere— between alleys or stops at their ancient portals; they meet again in the absence of ordinary people, the living, who lock themselves up for fear of death.