First memory

By the late 1950s, the writer Ana María Matute was spending some time in Mallorca with her husband and son, staying at a small hotel in Porto Pi. One day, when she returned to the hotel, she discovered that her husband had just pawned the typewriter she used to write the novels that (barely) allowed them to make a living. That day, Ana María Matute had had enough. Her husband was a chancer—very charming, as all chancers are—who spent his time holding forth in cafés and tapping anyone he could find for money to fund his nightly revels. Ana María Matute sent him packing, but she then found herself with no money at all and no idea how to pay the 8,000 pesetas she owed the hotel. Fortunately, Camilo José Cela and his wife Charo rushed to help their friend—whom they already knew from previous stays on the island—and not only paid the hotel bill, but also took her into their home in Son Armadans.

But what interests us here is something else: thanks to her stays in Mallorca, Ana María Matute set her novel Primera memoria (First memeory) on the island. It was published in 1959. The novel did not name the island explicitly, but it was clear from the descriptions of the landscape and from the place names (and the presence of the xuetes, people of Jewish-convert descent) that it was Mallorca in the summer of 1936, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War. Everything that happens takes place in an area that any Mallorcan reader will recognise as lying between Porto Pi and Cala Major (Matute refers to it simply as “the slope”). The novel does not mention Captain Bayo’s landing at Porto Cristo, although it does recount episodes of the brutal repression carried out in the rearguard. It is, without a doubt, one of the greatest novels ever written about our Civil War (and, incidentally, about the strange way in which teenagers become definitively adult). Primera memoria could be compared with El mar by Blai Bonet, published around the same time and also featuring adolescent protagonists, but Matute’s novel has a magic that El mar does not. Few novels have described with such mastery the moral rot that makes denunciations and slaughter between neighbours—and even relatives—possible.

“This is an old and wicked island,” one of the characters says. “An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of leeches and charlatans. Oh, miserly traders. In the houses of this town, in their walls and their hidden partitions, everywhere, there are gold coins buried.” The speaker is a resentful, self-conscious former seminarian who is no doubt exaggerating (if only there really were gold coins buried, because I never managed to find any), but anyone who knows Mallorca will recognise the essential truth hidden in that passage. Read Primera memoria, believe me. It’s worth it.