Time Won't Give Me Time
In Alcúdia today I was able to congratulate a happy new father. Frederick runs the Bistro Bell in the old town. He was full of praise for Inca Hospital, commenting that concepts of service do seem to be thriving in some sectors of Majorcan life. I had also stopped by the bistro to collect something. It was a book that had been left for me. It was, and is, "Beloved Majorcans" by Guy de Forestier, some of you might know it. Published in 1995, the book is one of those rare insights into Majorca, one that does not take as its raison d'être a brochure approach of the island, typified, for example, by Thomsonisms that can give us something as pretentious as the "a hop, skip and a jump away from the shimmering sands of Muro beach" as can be found on the Thomson website. This is not Majorca through rose-tinted, glass-bottomed boat but nor is it Majorca to hell and back. It is non-pompous, it is culturally, historically and linguistically literate and it is coloured with the ease of a journalistic style and a wit that is all too absent from mostly anything one reads about the island. It is also authored pseudonymously. The guy is not Guy. The author is in fact Carlos García-Delgado, born a Catalan but adopted by Majorca. Though more or less native, the book - in translation at any rate - feels something other than a work by a Majorcan (Catalan). It is though an insider has looked in from the outside, informed by that insider status.
As I scanned through the book for the first time, I was struck by certain coincidences to pieces have appeared in my AlcúdiaPollensa blog over the now years. The coincidence of Chapter 8 - "The Concept Of Time" and Chapter 9 - "Buying And Selling" (doing business if you like). When, for example, I had spoken in the past about the non-existence or flexibility of time and indifference/ambivalence towards time, it hadn't necessarily occurred to me that someone else would have been there before. To quote: "What is certain is that in Majorca - and the sooner you realize this the better - minutes don't have sixty seconds, any more than days have twenty-four hours". Mañana may be a Spanish concept of non-time, but the Majorcans have made of it a high art of abstraction.
The advice for those coming to live in Majorca is such that I wonder to what degree those from northern Europe in particular can ever go native. Much of what García-Delgado says will be familiar to expats, some of whom will claim to have indeed gone native in adapting to, for instance, non-time if I can call it that. But I doubt them when they protest so. I also wonder whether, 13 years on from publication, the book still holds true. In many respects it does, but in others? Take Frederick and Inca Hospital. Service, if one follows García-Delgado's thesis, should hold no place in Majorcan society, yet it does. But if anyone wants to experience, first-hand, "the slow pace at which things are done here - be forewarned if you have to go shopping, do business or deal with bureaucracy", then you can test and prove the thesis in respect especially of bureaucracy. Go to the office for foreign affairs in Palma, stand in the boiling sun or the rain in the queue to wait to get in, and then spend three hours waiting to get that residency certificate. I had been inclined to think of this as indifference or lack of respect; it isn't, or well it is, indifference at any rate. Because that time spent is not time; it is neutral, it is indifferent.
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