A Gentle Touch Of Colic: Senses working overtime

"All I could hear was the strange hum that hovered behind every other sound throughout that summer."
Tim Pears, "In The Place Of Fallen Leaves".


What are the sounds of summer? The bass from a system pulsating across vast acres of Mallorcan land as the local fiesta turns its back on tradition and admits DJ Headcase and a legion of party-goers, tanked up from the botellón. The Canadair growling low as it transports its Mediterranean payload towards smoking finca land that some fire-starter has thoughtfully taken a cigarette end to. Joni Mitchell's hissing of summer lawns, gyrating tops and spikes of water thrown around erratically and splattering the persianas. The enthusiastic keep-fitter on morning reveille duty, bellowing across a hotel pool and coaxing lard buckets with hangovers into movements more suited to the Rocky Horror Show.

But there, in the background, is the hum. In summer you can only detect it when the general silence briefly descends, usually at eight minutes past five in the morning. Earlier or later, and you'll miss it, thanks to the almost constant whoosh and splutter of coaches, motos or autos on what is the most densely populated part of Europe when it comes to car ownership. The power station hum. It's always there, as ominous as the chimney that rises above the nature park of Albufera.

The sounds of Mallorca are part of the sensory overload that the island lovingly bestows. What are the smells of summer? A grill wafting succulently and charcoaled as evening evaporates into night, the unexpected fragrance like vanilla from an unidentified plant, the sulphuric combustion of marsh gas and the insidious stench of sewage. The latter is at its most extreme when Colis comes a-calling: the drain-unblocking people who can inspire a stomach-churning or cramping retch.

But strangely you become inured to malodorousness. You don't exactly crave it but you are reassured by its mysterious presence, the unseen force of a primeval chemical reaction, albeit one sometimes influenced artificially or orificially. The bad smells form a nasal entertainment; they are their own tribute acts to an ecological and semi-ecological world that created the island in the first place and its second, industrialised and urbanised life.

A bit of a pong is not to be sniffed at. It's a reminder that not everything is or should be sanitised. Mallorca doesn't deserve to be sterilised, scrubbed and sealed hermetically. Its very imperfections are what give rise to its perfections or near-perfections, those revealed through the other senses - the sight through the transparent light of Pollensa that inspired the local post-impressionists; the radiance of white, rose or russet-bracted bougainvillaea but with its duplicitous enticement to touch the shock of its thorns; the ambrosial taste of a fig during its all too brief harvesting period.

The sights, sounds and other senses of Mallorca are too easily defined in terms of the superficiality of brochure-style beautifulness, but they ignore what can be a natural or part-natural, maleficent intoxication - that of the Mallorca that isn't quite right, an environmental quirkiness that should be bottled, if only anyone could stomach the Colical, great smell of sewage. And then there's that hum. The power station's isn't actually the only one. From Albufera, if you listen carefully when the traffic abates, you can hear a regular murmur in the darkness beyond the puff monsters of pines silhouetted against the distant lights of Muro and Sa Pobla. It's always there, just as the smells are always there.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.