Up and Down

Very few things were destroyed during our final days in Mallorca. Sadly, one of the items that did bite the dust -- literally, which led to figuratively -- was my beloved camera. Dropped on the hike to Soller by someone who shall remain nameless, its lens became stuck in the extended position, rather like men in those Viagra ads who are urged to seek medical help after four hours. I could not fix it, so we turned to my tablet for photos, and then, when that ceased to work, to Klauser's iphone.

the Graves house

The highlight of the trip was our visit to Robert Graves' house in the nearby town of Deia. It's now a well-maintained museum, but Klauser had many childhood tales of the time he spent there after befriending Tomas, one of Graves' sons from his final marriage. These included Graves telling him that he'd had a dream about the emperor Claudius, in which Claudius told Graves that if he were good to Claudius, Claudius would be good to him. And so the emperor was: I, Claudius was by far Graves' most successful book and subsidized much of his other writing. Robert Graves also told Klauser that the ghost of a local saint, Catherine, rose out of the sink drain in the kitchen in front of him. (St. Catherine, we learned later, was famous for very little, but she apparently didn't decompose after death, and her limbs were still flexible centuries later.)We spent a good deal of time discussing the scandals that drove the Graves family out of England to Mallorca (infidelity; an unorthodox family setup) and those that happened in Mallorca (a dive from a fourth-floor window by a besotted lover; a dive from a lower window in response by a maddened Graves). And we were able to see exactly why Graves chose Deia as his home: the view, the sea, the quiet were in direct contrast to his tumultuous life and gave him the peace he needed to

the view from Graves' window

write.

Phil, Chopin, and Sand

We stopped in Valdamossa to view what used to be a monastery and is now a series of museums. It was where Chopin and Georges Sand fled for their own bit of peace in their hectic and scandalous lives.





After a long and tasty lunch featuring lamb kidneys (translation error, but yummy) and tabletop drawings (see below), we drove back to Deia and parked the car at the top of a road that led down to the sea -- down and down and down and down, in fact. Klauser and I realized about a quarter of the way to the bottom that there was no way we were going to make it back up, and Phil realized that he would have to drive down and get us. In the
meantime, though, Sue and I took a brief swim in the cove, where the waves were high and the undertow fierce (and we were coated with black flecks of seaweed from head to foot). Phil made it down to rescue us, and then he and the standard shift made it back up, with the passengers honking like Roadrunner at each impossibly steep hairpin turn because no actual honking was allowed.

We ate our final meal at an excellent restaurant in the Fornalutx square, a three-course extravaganza that we all agreed was Michelin quality (none of us ever having eaten at a Michelin restaurant). And then to bed early for our six o'clock wake-up before a very long day of travel back to London -- to our apartment, and to the inevitable soggy downpour that would greet us on landing.