Marlene On The Wall

Walls. For a language with such a vast vocabulary, English is linguistically enclosed by its wall. We need adjectives in order to distinguish between our different walls. Spanish, though vocabularily challenged by comparison to English, has built all manner of walls. "Pared" is interior, "muro" is exterior, "muralla" is city. Catalan shares muralla and merely substitutes a "t" inside and dumps an "o" outside. I can claim to actually live in the beach of the external wall (playa de muro). English, it might be said, broke out of the wall enclosure by painting a mural, which is the same word in both Castilian and Catalan, but it otherwise remains stubbornly singular. Not here, unless one remains stubbornly attached to English alone. Wherever there is a wall, there is a different word. That garden wall? "Tapia".

Any study of the Mallorcan wall has to take account of its nounal variation. A wall is a wall is a wall in English, but not so here. The local walls are not just differing nouns they are also structures of competing cultures, geology and manufacture. To categorise the external wall with the broad brush of homogeneity would be to ignore the variety of sand stones that form the brickwork and to forget that such stones are often both external and internal, in neither case having necessarily been subjected to rendering or plastering. There is a certain similarity between some external brickwork with that of, for example, Bath stone, even if the finish is more rugged. Yet, move down the east coast to Santanyi, and there one finds a more golden sandstone which lends to the town a suffusion of the sun at its mellow setting.

The more contemporary external wall, on the other hand, is a stucco or cement render of multi-colouring, sympathetic to the natural environment of sand, earth and flora. Here are the yellows of sun, the light ochres of sand, the sienna turning terracotta of some of the earth, and even shades of bougainvillaea russets and pinks. A further tradition, founded on the reflective properties of white, has been modernised through the uniform chic of neutrality and grey, threatening a retreat of the vibrancy of palette of the nature-inspired wall.

The hotels and apartments, the exclusively tourist ones, tend to the default white, though there are also light yellows and the occasional collision of colour, such as the soothing but striking combination of sky and sun in the pastel blue and yellow of the Alcúdia Garden. Mostly, the hotel exterior walls are colourless indifference; they elicit no response until one is startled by the stylistic affrontery of something such as the dirty red brick and white mix of the Siestas, buildings colour-hewn from the one-time Hungarian national football team strip.

Interior walls are stone or bare. Flock wallpaper, indeed any wallpaper, has failed to garner favour in a climate of winter dampness that infests interiors denied the protection of damp-proofing or adequate insulation. These walls instead are the repositories of generational clash. Religious icons, the sepia of the genealogical line and the austerity of dark canvases are usurped by plasma-ing and also the IKEA-isation of art that hangs from the contemporary interior wall. And art is a regular, not least in some restaurants which have swapped their seafaring paraphernalia for galleries of abstract, impressionism and faux-Fauvist post-impressionism of the Pollensa school. But the interior wall is also the declaration of affiliation, no more so than the British bars which are shrines to the old country's localism. Here, the wall is of synthetics and replica; it is wall designed by label, of sponsor, town, city and club. And different types of icon in terms of merchandise, promotion and product climb other walls - Paris Hilton, say, in a perfumery; Beckham in all manner of stores; Bob Dylan across one wall of Pollensa's Café Illa. Other old icons still have their place on posters or bags - an Elvis or Marilyn perhaps. Marlene on the wall.

The wall in its varieties blinds us with its mere functionality, yet it is rich in history, culture and symbolism. We take walls for granted and fail to look, but there are other walls than just those of buildings and of ancient defences. One doesn't even have to escape to the country to appreciate them. These are the dry-stone walls, the centuries-old crafting of which abounds even in urban areas, and which even have a fiesta in celebration.

Walls, wherever you go, walls; in whichever language you choose. Bang your head against a brick one if you must, just don't ignore them.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Pink Floyd, "Money" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl6NfQyNLto). Today's title - American folk-ish singer; who was the Marlene of the song?

Extra quiz: in which bar was the photo taken?

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