Do you know the country where the lemon, the golden oranges sparkle among the dark leaves, a gentle breeze blows under the blue sky, and can you find the silent myrtle and the tall laurel? Do you know it? There, there I would like to go with you, my love! (Goethe)
“Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn, Im dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn, Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht, Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht? Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! dahin Möcht ich mit dir, o mein Geliebter, ziehn.” (Goethe)
At dawn I go to the orchard next to my house and sit right on the edge of the patch to contemplate the almond trees, the olive trees and the beautiful mountains that can be seen in the distance.
My father scolds me because he believes that I should not waste time on these things, but rather feed the animals and prepare the utensils to go to the field to work, but I cannot forget that moment of the day when, for a few seconds, all the animals in the house estate They hold their breath as the first rays of sunlight peek out from behind the mountains.
Our house is small, my father built it. great-grandfatherThere is not much room to sleep, my grandmother and I sleep on a cot very close to the home and my little brothers sleep on the other side of the room next to my parents.
“llar tancat” to Capocorb vell. Drawing taken from the book
“Cases of possession” by García Iniesta and Oliver Sunyer
So this winter, my father and the “master of works” The villagers began to build new rooms and a hall with a very large stone portal facing south. I am happy because now I will be able to see the sunrise from the entrance of my house, and maybe then they will stop scolding me.
They say in the village that we are rich, but it doesn't seem that way to me; my father has inherited some land and that is why he is now building a portal huge, with some sandstone stones that I don't know where they brought them from, but it had to be with a cart because of how much they weigh.
I like to watch how the men raise the walls of the new house, placing the stones one by one, and how between each row they throw the mud that my brothers and I kneaded the day before.
Yesterday my grandmother whitewashed the portal is red, it says that the priest demanded it this way, but I don't really understand why.
When the walls are high enough, they will cover the house with wooden planks and tiles that they brought from a “teulera” in Inca.
But today the “mestre d'obres” is angry with me and won't let me help. All because a few days ago, while the men were busy building the main wall, and one of them wanted to take some stones from the round houseI started to cry and scream so they wouldn't do it.
Remains of the talaiotic wall of the Cas Eixamer i des Puig site,
Elevation and plan of a Talaiot
www.spanishart
I call it the round house, it's just a few steps from my own house, on the side of the road. You should see it, it's built with very large stones.
Some winter evenings, while we eat dinner by the fireplace, my mother tells stories about the giants who built it. The village teacher gets very angry when he finds out.
He says that these stones have been here for thousands of years and that this is not the work of any giant but of our forefathers who came from very distant lands where they learned to build like this.
Sometimes, when no one is looking, I go through the doorway and stay inside for a while. I sweep the floor with a branch, pull up the weeds that grow between the stones, and sit in the middle of the room. Then I feel the hairs on my neck stand up and I feel like crying.
If I close my eyes and try really hard, I see the women and children of yesteryear warming themselves around the fire, eating or playing, walking and stepping on the grass as I do every day.
Because I know that when I am dead and my children's children are dead, other people will live in the home that we are building today, perhaps they come from other lands, perhaps they do not speak the same language that I speak,
But when they find themselves between these walls of stone and mud, and close your eyes for a while, you will imagine me sitting next to the red portal looking at the mountains and the sea, so far away.
“Here it is still easy to distinguish the harmonic sound and separate it from the spurious, from the noisy chaos, and we are allowed to travel effortlessly to an original paradise still close, for which millennia are but moments.”
“The Majorcan popular house” Carlos Garcia -Delgado Segres
We start the year 2015 with a new restoration project sustainable and decoration in Mallorca. This is an old house in the Es Raiguer area, a house that is more than two hundred years old – part of the house is even older.
On the other side of the road there is a Talayotic site, and there is undoubtedly a relationship between the enormous stones of the talaiots and the walls of old houses.
This house underwent some rather inappropriate restorations a few decades ago, such as the main façade being plastered with cement and plastic paint, the concrete beams on the porch, or the cement cladding on the interior walls.
The house is beautiful and as soon as we started it gave us a joy: beneath the cement and plastic paint that covered the sandstone portal, a whitewashed old ochre-colored.
Well, as we said yesterday, many Mallorcan houses were whitewashed with colour and here is the proof.
As we already told you through the photograph in #Houses_we_would_love_to_restore Let us all make an effort to preserve this rich architectural heritage that we enjoy in Mallorca.
Text: Marie-Noëlle Ginard
Photos: Robert Lopez Hinton
April 2015
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