As for our living quarters, we could of course take up residence in the Príncipe Alfonso; or if not there, then someplace else. He would prefer, however, that we chose a domicile not quite so far out of town. His strongest preference, in fact, was that we should share his own townhouse quarters, for this would be in keeping with the plans he had already outlined. He had indicated as much in the telegrams he had sent, admittedly in somewhat encoded form, but trusting in Beatrice’s intelligence to decipher the intended message. As to the person he called the “bitch,” the same person whom Beatrice referred to as the “individual”—María del Pilar was a simple girl from a humble background, who was not yet quite what Zwingli intended to make of her, but who was on the way toward becoming the very center of Mallorquine society; only a very few more obstacles remained to be surmounted. She had a certain past—a consequence of her beauty and her liberal attitudes towards living and loving, a state of affairs he was certain we were prepared to ignore. Now it was his intention to obtain access for her to exclusive circles, groups consisting for the most part of the nobility, and surely we could be of assistance in this effort. Music and literature would open doors on this island almost as readily as a master key made of money. He wished to liberate the young lady from the confines of her talent, and educate her up to his own level. This would best succeed if we would consent to move in with him—or rather with her, for she was apparently the one in charge. An increasing familiarity with persons of intellect, good conversation and the like, all this could not help but soften her up for cultural advancement. But we would now have to take an immediate first step toward creating this Pedagogical Province: we must go into town together and buy a bed. We were to note further that the necessary wool mattress, as was the practice here on the island, would have to be custom-made, but that this could no doubt be ready by this very evening…
Vigoleis as the cultural mentor of a beautiful woman, as a prop that was to foster this vine’s voluptuous growth—there have been cases when the tendrils have overgrown their artificial support and strangled it completely.
Beatrice thought that we should stay on, for only in that way could she accomplish something for her brother. Did she intend to minister unto him in true biblical fashion, as Martha and Mary had done with their moribund brother Lazarus, secundum Joannem? “Lord, by this time he stinketh” was equally applicable to Zwingli, although he seemed to have been dead for longer than four days, and had not been transported by angels to the lap of Abraham. On the contrary, his lap was still very much of this world—more specifically, of this island—most specifically, of this city of palms, Ciudad de las Palmas, a name that refers to the palms of victory planted here by the Roman conquerors of yore.
And it was beneath the city’s palms that we now strode forth to purchase a bed, at the hottest hour of the day, a time when anyone who possibly can do so will take shelter in the shade. The well-to-do circles in particular, known on the island by their Catalan nickname butifarras (blood sausages), are quite invisible in the noonday sun; they have disappeared behind the imposing portals and closed-draped windows of their palaces, the very abodes that were supposed to be opened up for Pilar by the power of Beatrice’s music and my Vigoleisian literature. But wasn’t Pilar’s beauty alone sufficient to cause this to happen? If I were a king and lord of a castle, with a simple gesture I would have the drawbridge resoundingly lowered just as soon as my tower watchman, with a blast on his horn, announced the approach of such a specimen of pulchritude. And since, according to Schopenhauer’s persuasive dictum, intellect is the enemy of beauty, María del Pilar would not even have to be smart in order to subjugate the petty grandees of the extinguished monarchy of Mallorca. If it is true what the chroniclers say about Catherine the Great’s thighs (and what earthly reason might they have for telling fibs about such a tangible part of the body?), that she had but to spread them, and whole dynasties would perish—if this is true, then Pilar certainly could at least put her thighs to use forging the little golden key that would defy the craft of the most expert locksmiths. Why employ Beatrice as a cudgel, or Vigoleis as a battering ram? Why Vigoleis, who as yet has no heroic exploits attached to his name, unlike his eponym Wigalois, the “Knight of the Wheel” in the courtly epic by Wirnt von Gravenberg? I was not yet aware that Pilar kept a dagger sweetly concealed against one of the extremities in question. Nor did I realize at the time that she had been a registered member of the professional organization that ever since Don Quixote has been referred to as the “fair guild,” a sodality that maintains headquarters in every city in the world including, of course, Palma—here, as in so many places, in the twilight shadow of the Cathedral. Sin prefers to ply its parasitic trade at the very place against which the Gates of Hell shall not prevail. That is how sin secures for itself an earthly existence unto all eternity.
In a country like Spain, where worldly goods are distributed very unequally, those who cannot afford a siesta comprise a scandalously large majority. In a city like Palma, with well-nigh 100,000 souls, the majority is sufficient in numbers to make the street scene picturesque in the extreme, even during the hour of well-heeled snoozes.
The closer we got to the inner city, the livelier became the traffic, the crowds, the hurly-burly of the masses of scrawny little people who are forever in a rush to get out of the sun—or to get out from under poverty. But sociological conjectures such as this are never very reliable in countries where the sunset turns nighttime into daytime. Little burros trotted past with lively gait, everything on them ashake—ears, tail, and the burdens they were made to carry: baskets, burlap sacks, large clay jugs filled with water, mother and child in the perennially touching pageant of a Flight into Egypt, Joseph with his walking-staff taking up the rear. Yet how unsaintly these patres familias looked with their motley sashes holding up their pants beneath their overhanging bellies! The biblical ass always and everywhere makes for a charming sight; even outside the realm of literature, Cervantes has granted protection to this animal all over the world against verbal and other kinds of abuse. To me, asses are also a delight in the intellectual-artistic sphere. Their numbers there are probably even greater than in the animal kingdom, where I am told they are doomed to extinction. In art and the life of the mind, they are not bound to a particular climate. Having evolved upwards into beasts of gluttony, they will perish only with thought itself. They are a romantic fauna, and I feel that I have a certain consanguine relationship with them, Is this mystical vanity? Perhaps, perhaps…
It wasn’t only the little burros that held my attention here in the mid-city. I was registering everything. Each and every step provided me with material for the travel articles I was going to write for a Dutch newspaper. I had already peered into a few courtyards, making mental note of them for special visits later. Then I discovered a merchant who, besides the usual rubbish, was selling devotional wares. His hottest item was a self-illuminating crucifix for one peseta, unmistakably “Made In Germany.” If you peeped through a pinhole in a cardboard box, you saw Our Savior surrounded by rays of light. The inventor of this phosphorescent masterpiece, a carpenter’s apprentice from Saxony, had become a millionaire in just a few short years. Next to the peddler of sacred images, a commercial scribe had set up his table. A girl was dictating to him—presumably a love letter, and what a shame that I couldn’t understand a word.
“Beatrice, come over here and make yourself useful. I am consumed with curiosity as to what that child is getting the old man’s pen to write for her. What do you mean, indiscreet? There are a whole lot of other people standing around and listening. It’s a public institution here. But what’s going on? What’s the rush? That bed’s not going to run away!”
Zwingli had dashed off on the double, Pilar likewise and, locked arm in arm with her, Beatrice perforce also. Then all three made a sudden turn—eyes right, for’rd march! Whereupon the trio disappeared into a murky passageway. I had all I could do to keep up with them. The narrow pavement was cool underfoot.
By stretching out my arms, I could touch the houses on both sides. These houses seemed to be leaning toward each other—that’s how very tall they were, and that’s how very black the strip of daylight was that closed off our view of the sky like a shutter.
I stopped and took a breather in the shade. And then I lapsed into one of those alleyway reveries that befall me whenever I enter such a narrow urban defile. This has happened to me ever since I made the acquaintance, some thirty years ago or more, with the writings of the German arch-lampoonist and “autocogitator” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Among his aphorisms concering the human countenance I once found a passage that amuses me even today: “In Hannover I once took up lodgings in a flat whose window opened out on a narrow street that connected two broad thoroughfares. It was pleasing to observe how people’s faces changed expression as soon as they entered this lane, where they thought they would be unobserved. One fellow would take a pee, another would adjust his stockings, still another would laugh to himself, and yet another would shake his head. Girls would break into a smile as they reflected on the previous night, and would rearrange their underthings preparatory to further conquests on the adjacent avenue.”
It goes without saying that I did not recall this passage quite as literally as I have quoted it here. But I remember clearly drawing a mental comparison between the typical connecting passageway in a typical German town and this Spanish metropolitan chasm that snuffed out one’s eyesight completely, blinding one even to the shafts of intense light that held shut each of its entrances.
But of course, I mused, Pilar has to make a habilimental adjustment of the kind that requires women to enter a dark doorway or step behind a lamppost. “Don’t look!” cries the purely symbolic lamppost when approached by a woman, who then executes the classic motions of lifting and shifting, perhaps displaying for a split second certain visible attributes that otherwise, were it not for the presence of the chaste lamppost, might cause a minor traffic snarl. I am one of those men who dutifully avert their glances whenever a lamppost forces citydwellers into strict observance of their puny morality. This is an embarrassing vestige of my careful upbringing, the worst imaginable training for the struggle of real life. It was so wrongheaded, and in its wrongheadedness so ineradicable, that it pursued me over and across the Pyrenees as far as—well, as far as Africa, if we grant any credence at all to the theories of those ethnological savants who draw Europe’s southern border at the aforementioned mountain range (probably because they know so little about Europe and nothing at all about Africa, which they refer to as “Europe’s subconscious”).
And thus my childhood superego followed me across the sea all the way to this island, where it was totally out of place. It pursued me right into this confined and confining alleyway, where at this moment María del Pilar—and in spite of the murk and the gloom Vigoleis shut his eyes, just like a newly-ordained curate hearing a young female confess her transgressions against the Sixth Commandment. At precisely the right moment, however, the neophyte priest suddenly loses his resolve, interrupts his pious thumb-twiddling, and peeks through the screen. Vigoleis, too, was unable to resist earthly temptation. He now peered toward the place where a shapely hand was about to raise a skirt and a lissome leg would—but instead he sees both legs, still very much covered, tripping along ahead of him. In fact, to all appearances they have never stopped tripping along. Not a sign, my dear Herr Lichtenberg, of garter adjustment, not a trace of indecent activity of any kind. It remained to speculate whether my dear friend Pilar was having any thoughts of the previous night, or of the coming night. Was she smiling? My only view of her was from behind. And how she did dash onward! All three of them were playing the disappearing act, that was the only word for it. Good heavens, what can possibly be the matter? They shot around another corner and were swallowed up by the next street. Gone in a trice was my quasi-literary reverie, my semi-erotic noonday fantasy and canyon meditation.
After running through the alley and out into the light, I spotted my quickstepping relatives well ahead of me, so I immediately took up the pursuit. Giving both elbows to fellow pedestrians on the way, I finally got to within a few paces of the trio, only to notice Zwingli taking another right-angled turn, this time disappearing into a store. Pilar, whose regal stride we earlier had occasion to marvel at, sped in after him, with Beatrice, manifesting an air of resolute dignity, not far behind. Willing or not, I followed them in.
The establishment was a furniture emporium, with a selection ranging from potty chairs to bridal beds to caskets—in short, every single item of its kind that might be required by a creature that has descended from the comfort of the treetops to join the civilized world. “So that’s it,” I thought as I entered. My brother-in-law is actually going to have his measurements taken for a mummy-case! You see, I was still preoccupied subconsciously with the image of Zwingli as a terminal patient. But I soon located the fugitive trio in the sleepware department—of course, that’s what we came downtown for. We were looking for a bed, the biggest bed we could find, one that would at once satisfy one’s craving for individual identity, plus the requirements of conjugality. One yard’s width for each of us—to me that seemed about the proper democratic dimension for a life of mutual happiness.
We were soon discussing this subject of size with a salesman who, as I could tell by his tape measure and the accompanying gestures, was proposing that each of us sacrifice several inches of our individual liberty. Since I lacked command of the language, my own doctrine of dimensions got nowhere. No one made eloquent pleas for its validity, least of all Beatrice. Back in the Middle Ages, when kings shared bedsteads with their vassals, I might have deemed such parsimony appropriate. Each partner, the furniture mogul was explaining, should be willing to forgo a full twelve inches of space—this would redound to the benefit of nuptial harmony. Pilar contributed expertise in her rapid, euphonious voice. Zwingli flashed his horned pinky and, to conclude the negotiations, I flashed my money. The entire parley had taken up no more than half an hour. But it was too long a time considering what we ended up with. It was not a bed of the sort I was used to, not one of those on which, in my Lower Rhenish homeland, babies get conceived and born, or upon which I myself, Vigoleis, first saw the light of the world. I have in mind my ancestors’ gargantuan slumber-chests, which permitted their lovemaking, like everything else in their lives, to be a truly earthbound enterprise. What we purchased here was, instead, the equivalent of an army cot, a frame with wire springs and four metal feet that you screwed up to the desired height. I squatted down to indicate the proper distance from the floor, announcing to all and sundry that this contrivance, which more sophisticated personages might designate a “couch,” would be just right for sitting on.
A “couch”? I was strongly reminded of Shakespeare:
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
“Incest”? From time immemorial, both civil and ecclesiastical law have sentenced its perpetrators to flogging or to the gallows itself. I could hardly expect anything different, if I should choose to christen this couch with Pilar in the appropriately ceremonious fashion. Would I like to? Did I have any such secret intention? Even before Vigoleis placed the agreed-upon sum in the furniture salesman’s palm, he had already incurred—in his imagination, at any rate—the direst retribution in body and soul. L’acte fût brutal et silencieux, but at least not on a bare floor as in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.
Pilar blushed; she fingered distractedly at her black lace veil, and freed herself from Beatrice’s arm. Vigoleis, too, was unable to stop the blood from rising revealingly to the roots of his hair. No one noticed as he slowly released his pent-up breath through his nose. Zwingli, who had reverted to Don Helvecio throughout this entire scene, was already out the door, trying to scare up a Little Helper or a jackass to carry the bedframe. Beatrice was the last to leave the store.
Out on the street she said in a language known only by me—whi
ch is to say, in language addressed to me and me only—“I don’t like the looks of this.” She loves to utter obscure prophecies of this kind, each time in an irritated tone of voice, implying that we shall allow her premonitions to go unheeded at our own peril. Whenever her predictions come true, everyone, of course, suddenly comprehends what she meant in the first place. Prophets are seldom original. If her auguries don’t turn out, then she too keeps silent—the inscrutability of all sibyls. The immediate state of affairs “didn’t look good to her”—well, small wonder, for I can’t imagine what could ever “look good” as long as our lamebrained friend Vigoleis, that arch-practitioner of Weltschmerz, has his finger in the pie. Or perhaps rather, in the language of a paltry fatalism, if the pie has devoured his finger.
Come to think of it, our adventures had just begun. Or just begun to begin.
Our sprint through the city of Palma continued, at the hottest hour of the day, and, so it appeared, with ever more burning urgency. Our pace accelerated, and I took pity on our coolie. He had jerked our bedframe to his head, which was protected from the springs and wires only by his jaunty beret. He held the dangerously dipping edges of the cot with outstretched arms, avoiding collisions with pedestrians right and left by means of timely yells. With us in the train, he also took on the role of herald, announcer, and strident dispatch-bearer of our headlong hegira. Oddly enough, nobody seemed to take notice of us. After various detours through alleys and courtyards, at times losing sight of our agile delivery man, we eventually arrived at the next store. Somehow this fellow seemed to intuit our destination, for soon we caught up with him at the door of a fabrics shop, where he stood at attention, presenting arms with our metal bedframe. Apparently he had no interest at all in the courtyards of rich people’s abodes. But were they, for that matter, of any interest at all to our family? Without so much as a glance, we hustled our way through this noonday idyll of cats, palm trees, and beggars basking supine on the sidewalks. Those out front gave rapid signals to each other with looks, now and then tossing a quick smile back in my direction, as if to reassure me, then pressing onward in mystifying haste. No slouches they! It was a Saturday, and perhaps that made our shopping tour such a trial of speed.
The Island of Second Sight Page 7
