In Mallorca, beauty is incidental, in the corners. The fuchsia petals of spent flowers, sweetly collecting in the gutters. The artist’s sculpture garden, where rough-hewn faces peek out between the date palms. The gilded altars, shimmering within the dark shells of churches like uncracked geodes.
It’s easy to forget that you’re an animal until you walk into the Mediterranean up to your neck and must navigate its insistent push and pull. Bend your knees to yield to it; avoid getting salt up your nose; feel with your toes for the telltale slick of seaweed and the rocks ready to reveal the blood just under your thin skin. Think about never looking at your laptop again. Think about throwing all of your screens into the water, silted-up on the seafloor, fish enraptured with their reflections. Up close the waves’ movements turn jellied, their silver flowing like liquid mercury under a matrix of netting.
In somebody’s real life, the sea is just something that happens most days after breakfast. It is always paella for dinner, and rosé for lunch, with locally brewed Helles, sweet and bright, in between. There is no drive back to the airport on a creaking bus, no grit and grime. Swelling strings ring out from the verandahs of the houses, and it might be because the state funeral is on, though maybe they just live this way. Even when the rain comes—in sudden tropical deluges or in purring thunderstorms that peel off from the Catalonian coast—it is the right kind.
