Miquel Bauçà

I was born on 7th February 1940 and, on the 14th of the same month twelve years later, my mother decided to make me an orphan. I don't know if she did it out of revenge or was simply moved by some instinct of imitation. The fact is that, four months before this, I'd got away from home, making the most of the occasion when my father, a most god-fearing man, had arranged to hand me over to a sect of pious rustic barons who were still full of ardour after winning the war.

All this is set against the backdrop of a rural household in the southeast of the largest of the Balearic Islands, a house built by my maternal grandfather with blocks of sandstone that he himself hewed from a nearby quarry. This grandfather had gone off to Argentina in a transatlantic vessel full of Slavs, who drank, sang and sweated in the hold. He got so homesick in this country that he had to come back, empty-handed except for a revolver that pretty soon rusted after being mishandled by the children.

So, winters I spent with those devout gentlemen in the Capital; in summer, however, I helped my father with his most clearly defined passion: constructing dry walls in order to divide and subdivide the bit of scrubland he had bought with his wife's jewels.

That lasted until I was eighteen. After that, I don't think I need to mention anything of particular note.

Miquel Bauçà

"Nota de l'autor" [Author's Note] in Obra poètica [Poetic Work] (Empúries, 1987), reproduced with permission of the publisher