Bob Rosen and Mary Lyn Maiscott in Fornalutx, Mallorca, photographed by Terry Bisbee.If you’ve listened to my song “Midnight in California,” you may have gotten a sense of the beautiful Spanish island of Mallorca (where, in the song, an expat longs for her lover in far-off Malibu). In the lyrics, I tried to conjure up the intoxicatingly fragrant jasmine, the town squares with their bars and cafés, the ubiquitous lizards and sheep, the turquoise Mediterranean Sea—the special qualities of this Balearic Island (the other Balearics are Minorca and Ibiza, the celebrated destination of ravers and rock stars). I wrote the song in a 16th-century house in Fornalutx, a Mallorcan village in the foothills of the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range. For our delayed honeymoon, my husband and I spent the month of June 2002 in that house—a friend’s—set at the top of a steep ancient street that ended in an emerald-green, stone-fenced meadow. The house led out to a courtyard with a separate kitchen, a wonderful little structure that looked out on a small garden. There each morning we’d drink strong coffee and eat blood-red oranges bought from a man who lived nearby, in a sloping section of town reachable only by wide stone steps—built for donkeys, not cars.
Fornalutx, with its sand-colored, green-shuttered homes—the big wooden doors generally left open so as to welcome guests—also inspired me to write a short story called “Pueblo Piedra” (stone village). The story is wholly fictional, but I could not have written it without experiencing the magic of the area. I’m happy to say that “Pueblo Piedra” was recently published in The Portland Review, a literary magazine, and is now accessible on its website. I hope that you will read it and that it takes you to a place even half as entrancing as Mallorca was for me.
