The house in Palma where I went to live into when I was a few weeks old and where I spent my childhood and adolescence was bought by my great-grandfather towards the year 1880. Built with sun-dried bricks from Santanyí, which until recently were typical features of Mallorcan architecture, the house is situated right at the end of the street that begins at Weyler Square and prevents it from staying straight as far as the Rambla. To get there one needs to turn left and carry on some fifty metres along Oliva Street, between the convent wall of the Capuchins and the walls of my house.

[…]

Our street is narrow, like many of those in the Ciutat’s centre, and short. About a hundred and fifty steps, I used to count them when I walked back home from school. As the bend that communicates with that of Jaquotot i Oliva is sharp, it impedes the traffic of four-wheel vehicles, which is why there are hardly any cars around here.

Temps d'Innocència (Time of Innocence), 2013 

Translated by Núria Cohen.

(Barcelona, 1948). Carme Riera is a storyteller, scriptwriter, philologist and lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Among her novels are Te deix, amor, la mar com a penyora (1975), Dins el darrer blau (1994), L´estiu de l´anglès (2006) and Temps d´innocència (2013), this latter depicting scenes from her childhood and memories from the island of Mallorca. She has been awarded numerous prizes, among them, the National Prize for Literature (2001) and the National Prize of Letters (2015). In 2012 she became a member of the Spanish Royal Academy with her speech Sobre un lugar parecido a la felicidad.