He says that poetry is like water. If he doesn't drink it, he is thirsty all day. “It is the alchemy of literature.” That is why at Maria del Mar Bonet's house there are so many books of poetry. They are with those of the philosophies of the world in what used to be the dining room, now her study, next to an interior patio – in Mallorca they call it a corral – through which beautiful light enters. She has lived in Ses Salines for eight or nine years. She had a hard time parting with books when moving. She doesn't throw them away. She sometimes leaves them on the street and they disappear right away. Or she donates them to second-hand bookstores. Here are the ones that she loves the most, by theme, unordered. She does this – she picks up any one, this one – and thinks: “Great, I found just the one I needed”. Then he reads it. From morning to night, if he really likes it, while he eats and dines. He doesn't let him. He reads anywhere: trains, ships, cars, now quite a lot on airplanes, and so he doesn't think about what he does.
As a child, with her brother Joan Ramon, she opened the boxes of books that her father received to make reviews in the Baleares newspaper; Joan was a journalist and writer (and a fan of Chekhov, to whose grave she has brought flowers twice). Her mother, Mercè, from the Gràcia neighborhood, had brought anthologies of Catalan poets, novels and Tirant lo Blanc from Barcelona. So her books have always accompanied her, voices that surround her. She reaches them in a thousand ways. She snoops in the library of her reader and writer friends. Or she recommends them to her and she looks for them all over the world. Or she discovers them at a bargain fair. In one of Castelló she found Versions y diversiones by Octavio Paz, with whom she is “absolutely in love”. On the first page she puts who she belonged to. Bonet wrote his name below and the message: "I bought it after you." She likes vivid books. She underlines sentences and, when rereading them, she would underline others.
If I weren't soaked in the Ginard stop – which has its own corner – I wouldn't be able to write songs. It is worth reading all of Costa i Llobera, she says; And at first I found it lavish, too bombastic. Now she enjoys it; Formentor's pi is extraordinary. Also Desolació and La Balanguera, by Joan Alcover. She went to Joan Alcover High School and they never explained to her who she was. A few meters away is the Ramon Llull, and neither: “If they don't teach poetry in schools, we are lost.” Yourdinner is important. And Rilke, and Dickinson, and Montale. She learned French as a child, and it would be the ultimate for her to know how to read the German poets in her language. There are books by Robert Graves, by Maria Antònia Salvà, “very cultured, they revered her, we must recover her”; and Rosalia de Castro. Some show its cover, such as The Creation of Faith, by Joan Mascaró. A Sanskrit translator, he taught Eastern philosophies, even the Beatles consulted him. It is a mortal sin for a Majorcan not to have read it, Bonet chides me.
In a room that overlooks the quiet street of the town, under a collection of siurells, is the small library dedicated to the ancient world, with Greek and Roman mythologies. On a stool, the complete works of Oscar Wilde exquisitely translated by Julio Gómez de la Serna. He saw the book in a rural hotel and asked the owner if she would sell it to him. The woman gave it to him.
In a small room he keeps his instruments, mountains of guitars. He has a habit of recycling, and the recovered shelf next to a fireplace houses popular music and essential volumes of the culture of the Catalan Countries.
Upstairs, in his workshop, are those of art, from prehistory to today. Bonet studied in La Massana, he paints regularly; plants, or a sketch of the corral, or a marina in Menorca. He gives his paintings to his friends. He loves atlases of all kinds. And the guides, and the travel books; He has spent hours in the Altaïr. In some way, libraries are also atlases in which each space has its map: “Everything emerges little by little, and the love for poetry is not that it begins, it is that it is; like life.”
On a chair in the entrance, the latest acquisitions. And next to it, the Mallorcan rondalles. It has all of them. A neighbor, Noreta, told them. He lived below the house, in that ancient Palma between Montision and Sant Francesc, behind the cathedral. Bonet and Gabriel Janer Manila will dedicate an album to fables entitled Bon viatte faci la cadernera. They start like this, "this was and it wasn't". Like poetry, like life.
