The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  In this second store we purchased linens and several yards of a kind of ticking, the latter intended as the cover for our woolen mattress. This job, Pilar explained, would be done by a certain upholsterer of her acquaintance, whose shop was located— But presto! Our human donkey was already moving out, with our textiles piled on top of the bedframe. So back we went, snaking our way through the commercial district of Palma. Following our leaders into the gloom of alleys, doorways, and twilight patios, now and again we lost hold of any sense of reality. It was all as in a dream. Only our cargo-carrier, who at first had struck me as a fugitive from the realm of spirits, regained his earthly solidity. He had placed the package of fabrics fore and aft on top of the frame, thus giving the whole construction the proper swaying balance. His head pushed up almost to shoulder depth in the center. Once we got this mess of wires home, I would have to tighten it all up, commensurate with our bed-weight.

  From the upholsterer we elicited a vow to deliver two pillows and a filled-in mattress on the same evening.

  Passing through the market square on our return trip, Pilar decided that we should get a few victuals for our supper, in particular some meat. As yet there were no butcher shops in sight, but a certain atmospheric aura clued us in that we weren’t very far. The booths were shielded from the sun with awnings. The entire area stank like a glue factory. As we approached, the shouts of the proprietors and haggling housewives assaulted our ears. As we stepped into this enclave of the meat vendors, Beatrice gave me a high sign. She was green in the face, just about to vomit. Zwingli had a quick word with his inamorata, whose nose, like my own, was apparently able to withstand a few more degrees of odoriferousness. And thus the couples separated.

  Having no less interest in Pilar’s flesh than in the flesh offered for sale here in these shops, I gave the girl my arm. The pushing and shoving of the assembled crowds took care of the rest. We squeezed our way from booth to booth, holding each other tightly. Strictly speaking, I ought to have been overcome by tingles of ecstasy, if you realize that I held my right arm in such a position as to allow her left breast to press against the back of my hand, the pressure increasing with the size of the multitudes gathered at the cheaper butcher stalls. I ought, in other words, to have reaped sensual profit from the low-grade viands being hawked at these crowded shops; like the mob surrounding us, I should have been feeling certain inner surges and swellings. Yet oddly enough, my blood pressure remained normal; there was no danger that the channels and spillways of erotic energy might burst. I ought to have been on Cloud Nine; instead, we found ourselves amid billowing clouds of flies. As for the olfactory ambience, I shall refrain from describing it, fearful that I might forfeit readership among those who, habitually and as a matter of principle, suppress all natural fragrances of the human body with the aid of sprays and ointments. And anyway, Vigoleis, you carnivorous old cockroach, beware! The stink of decomposing meat signals without fail the defeat of fleshly pursuits!

  We remained arm in arm, a relatively innocuous form of human contact. Finally Pilar spotted the hirsute meatman she had apparently been looking for, and I was glad when she let go of me. Cupid and raw chops are simply not compatible, especially if the noonday sun threatens to scorch the meal.

  Despite the advanced hour of day, this shop was still filled with meat products of all kinds. Large pieces of carcass hung from iron hooks, and smaller items lay out on boards. Large or small, nothing in this display gave the appearance of being flesh of its own flesh. The single clue to its identity was the blood-drenched human character standing behind the counter, wielding hatchet, saw, mallet, and long knives. Everything was blanketed by a thick layer of flies; those that weren’t busy sitting and sucking were buzzing about, waiting for the change of shift, which was set in motion every time the butcher let his hatchet drop to slice off a new chunk for a customer. Then the protective blanket vaporized, and for the length of a lightning stroke, the customer was able to see a greasy cut of beef, pork, lamb, or fowl. Then the shimmering curtain descended once again. Any particular fly that wasn’t on the qui vive would have to circle the landing area until signaled by a renewed blow of the hatchet; an emergency landing strip presented itself every now and then in the form of the slaughterer’s blood-spattered arm. My fertile mind suddenly conceived the idea of butchers with bovine tails for swatting flies. Why hadn’t the Good Lord completed His job when he created Spain?

  Pilar blew expertly on a cluster of flies, bringing to light just the cut that she knew would do the trick for our Sunday fricco. In addition, she purchased a variety of giblets, tripe, liver, ovaries, hens’ feet, cockscombs, turkey wattles, and the like, all of which smelled no sweeter than the more respectable items. I paid a modest sum for the lot, and then it was Pilar’s turn to take my arm and press it softly. Did she mean this as a gesture of gratitude, simply for my having provided the few necessary pesetas? Had I been able to speak her language, I would have refused her thanks—Oh please, it’s hardly worth mentioning, happy to be of service, and can’t we now take leave of this rotten, fly-ridden inferno?

  Instead, I contented myself with a tender bit of counter-pressure against a sensitive portion of her body. The girl’s eyes, enticingly embellished with pencil and mascara, met mine from below with a glance that traveled up and down my spine, and then down again and up again—strange behavior for a glance, when you come to think of it. So strange, in fact, that I do believe it was the kind of “first sight” at which, as the popular phrase has it, love steps in. Lord, how I began to yearn and burn for this woman! Her sheer presence made me forget the flies and all that they concealed from my gaze, which was busily engaged with other visible objects. The charnel-house stench became a seductive aroma; the package of meat in my left hand I now imagined as a tangible pledge of what my right hand was able to express but feebly. Shoving, getting shoved back, squeezed together and bathed in sweat, we left the meatseller’s lane that now took on the aspect of a haven of purest bliss.

  If we can believe the Old Testament, which knows all there is to know about such things, sweat is just as integral a component of love as is our daily bread. Be that as it may, huge drops of perspiration now covered my brow. Luckily, Pilar soon spied the siblings sitting in the dusty shade of a sidewalk cafe. Our coolie was with them, drinking weak beer and talking a blue streak. Zwingli was gabbing away at the same time, likewise the waiter, likewise the guests at the neighboring tables, and it was hard to tell which part of the body was more active in conversation, the tongue or the upper extremities. Quite a lively gathering, I thought; one false word and we’ll have a donnybrook on our hands. Tables and chairs will start flying out on the street, knives will be brandished, bottles will descend on skulls. Throats that came here to be slaked will be neatly throttled instead.

  But nothing of the sort happened. All the noise and gesticulation was simply a public manifestation of Spanishness itself, an outer show masking the peaceable heart that resides within. It was merely a pyrotechnic exhibition, replete with whistling skyrockets and fiery pinwheels, but destined to fizzle out promptly in the midday sun. The little flame glowing in my heart was actually more dangerous. Still waters, as the saying goes, run deep; still fires burn even deeper.

  For the homeward trek, which turned out to be another lengthy detour, we grouped ourselves differently. Each male was assigned to his proper female, in keeping with the injunction that thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s. And here I was, coveting like crazy! An exchange of the sort that occurs in certain novels was out of the question, unless Vigoleis was inclined to force the matter. Let him try things out with this babe, just once! He’ll soon see how feathers can fly…

  Pilar, I mused, as we marched through the streets, had a guilty conscience towards her new female friend. No need, she surely was thinking, to embark right away on adventures with Vigoleis. He won’t run away, and tonight he’ll be sleeping under my roof. It’s just a matter of time until we can say “sheets” instead of “roof.” It w
as as simple as that.

  At eight o’clock the mattress would arrive. But before we stretched out on it, we would have a fine feast, including the wine we were buying just now. Zwingli knew all the vintages the world over, and he knew just which one would be best to accompany the contents of the package I held in my left hand, swinging it like a censer at High Mass. The aroma it exuded was, however, different; to me it was a narcotic, and most assuredly not one to give rise to pious thoughts.

  Presumably, Zwingli had made use of his Italian to explain to Beatrice the true reason for our zig-zagging haste on this shopping trip. The enigma had the simplest of solutions: Don Helvecio was up to his unwashed neck in debt. Not a single street in Palma didn’t harbor some establishment where he had overshot his credit.

  And the streets of Palma are narrow. The owners of stores like to sit out in front, and thus it requires a certain amount of strategy and planning if one wishes to avoid one’s creditors. “You’ve got to hand it to me, Beatrice, Bice, Bé. I’ve done it again! Thanks to my perseverance and knowledge of local affairs, you’ll be sleeping tonight on some genuine Mallorquine wool. A fine layer of horsehair will keep you nice and cool, and you’ll soon find that you won’t want to bed down anywhere else. As for your friend Vigoleis, the congenital pessimist, he can find his peace on any old bunk whatsoever. He’s a great guy, but still a little shy. That hasn’t changed since the old days in Cologne. We’ll soon take care of that. We’ll have to get him to do some hard work. First some Spanish, an hour every day. You can teach him the theory, and the practice, the palaver, he’ll pick up by palavering. He’s not much good at languages; otherwise he never would have started studying linguistics. Or is it the other way around? We Swiss types are born with one mother tongue and a bunch of cousin tongues. But the Germans have to learn everything by the seat of their pants. That’s no picnic for a linguistically retarded country. It’s only when they get outside their borders that they start coming alive. It’s an example of the collective apron-strings phenomenon—pretty sad, really.

  “But we’ll get Vigo to come around, I’ll see to that myself. The main thing is that he has to begin right away to think in Spanish. That’s just the kind of purgative he needs, so he can start working on new thoughts. The little phrases he picks up here in the first few days won’t be enough to start philosophizing with, so there’s no danger of him coming up with some horribly dreary thought-system. On Monday we’ll go buy him an inexpensive textbook at a run-down little German bookstore. That’ll give Vigoleis a chance to hear some sounds from home, so the transition won’t be too sudden. Anton Emmerich hails from Cologne. He’s the real, genuine article, born in the shadow of the Cathedral. He’s been in Spain for years, but at least once a week he has his landlady cook him up a dish of those awful echt Kölsch potato pancakes, and every Sunday he has knockwurst with sweetened rice! Apart from such aberrations, he’s a wonderful fellow, and I’m sure that, with time, he’ll learn some decent habits down here in foreign lands. He’s a good chess player, by the way. We lock horns over the board every once in a while.”

  It was thus, in direct and indirect discourse, that Beatrice reported to me her conversation with Zwingli en route through Palma’s thoroughfares. Well now, that’s just dandy, I thought. We’ll be sleeping on wool with a horsehair filling—without fleas, I presume, without dreams, surely without pajamas and, as far as I am concerned, most definitely without Pilar. Meanwhile I had become so tired that I would have liked to drop then and there on that spanking-new sack and slept a workingman’s sleep right in the middle of the bustling city. But our packman-cum-herald wouldn’t stand still. Continuing his balancing act, he led us in a mad scurry up streets and down streets, upstairs and downstairs, following precisely the tortuous itinerary dictated by Zwingli’s and his concubine’s unpaid bills.

  Soon we approached, from the other side, the little square we had crossed in the morning coming from the Street of Solitude. We heard music being played in front of a café. Donkeys, tied to rings in the walls, slept standing up. Zwingli drew my attention to this odd phenomenon—if only human beings could evolve far enough to sleep while standing! He explained that he had been practicing this art for some time now; but because our erect human knees were missing a locking mechanism or the clever musculature of the horse, the only way to avoid tipping over was by means of mental concentration. But mental work of any kind was of course non-conducive to sleep. Thus, he was still in the stage of using walls, he explained further, for otherwise…

  … Otherwise he’d fall flat on his face, I thought, but any comment I might have made was suddenly preempted. Before us we all saw that girl once more, the very same lanky one of several hours ago. Here she was again, and again she was dancing. A handsome child, with excellent breeding in her whole body. She bent down and rose up again, leapt up in the air and caught herself again in mid-flight. She skipped and showered sparks all about her, stamped her feet and disappeared in a cloud of dust. She couldn’t be much older than eleven. At that age, back in my homeland, girls still play with dolls and toy grocery stores. But here, a child like this one drives the boys crazy. And grown men, too, for it is not only the half-pints who have congregated again here on the square, like the flies milling around the potroast swinging on its hook back at the butcher shop. Quite a few adult men were sitting and standing around, unable to take their eyes off of this fiery female phantom in her pinafore.

  Pilar, too, noticed the whirling imp, and to my great astonishment, she repeated the pious ministrations of the forenoon: she made a double sign of the cross, invoked the names of saints and Heaven itself, in the process dropping to the ground the straw net containing the accessories for the Feast of Resurrection we were planning to celebrate that evening. It’s a lucky thing that I am forever the cavalier in the presence of women, for otherwise our three bottles of Valdepeñas would likewise have bitten the dust and seen their last. Back in the city, I had taken them from her hands—much against her wishes, as it turns out, for she told me that no man carries packages in Spain.

  Pilar’s petrification here on the square didn’t last long. She shot forth like an arrow, and I was just able to make out how the crowd of gaping onlookers closed in on her. I heard shouts, soprano screeches, and men guffawing. The scene ended with a loud report that sounded for all the world like a well-aimed box on the ears.

  “Oh, boy!” said Zwingli as he picked up our prandial delicacies. “There’s going to be hell to pay. Let’s go on ahead. She won’t get home until she’s caught up again with Julietta.”

  “Julietta?”

  “Right. That’s her kid!”

  Next to the little chamber where I had my first enchanting encounter with the child Julietta, there was another small room, windowless like its neighbor. This was to be our new quarters. It served as a clothes closet and rummage room. A naked bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling. Once our bed was inside, there would be just enough room to set up some suitcases as a bureau or makeshift night table. I could easily stretch some clothesline and come up with other contrivances, if they would only let me go at it. But Zwingli hesitated to allow this until Pilar returned; he had no idea where to put our clothes and other stuff. Surely we wouldn’t mind camping out the first night in the hall?

  Beatrice got to work with our luggage, unpacking and transforming the entrada into what soon resembled a fleamarket. We had already loaded our bedsprings with gear of all sorts when, at nine, our mattress arrived. So we unloaded the bed and got it ready for the night. Zwingli expressed surprise that we were about to use the sheets right away, so fresh from the store, where they had been touched by who knows how many hands. Shouldn’t they be laundered first, and oughtn’t we to sleep in the meantime in our clothes? People who never wash have peculiar notions about cleanliness and applied aesthetics. It is not easy to comprehend the principles according to which they live their lives. Just then, Mother and Child made their appearance.

  Certain features of body and tempe
rament (my reader will know which ones I mean), certain attributes that in the mother had reached luscious, bountiful maturity, were also discernable in potential, inchoate form in her daughter. Unless my presentiments were sorely mistaken, the future looked truly auspicious for this fledgling that had yet to depart the warmth of the nest. A magnificent offspring, indeed. She stood there now in our midst, shaking her pretty head, stamping her foot, and refusing to greet her new relatives. To think that you, Vigoleis, actually had this bird in your hand this morning and let it fly away! But then again, how typical of you! Anyone else would have sensed immediately, even in the pitch dark, that this little feathered creature in the hand was worth infinitely more than what that miserly proverb says. Take a good look at her now, in the light of day: her hair is black as a raven’s, her eyes are like shimmering coals and as deep as the night. Inside them are little stars that glisten when she lifts her dainty eyelids.

  I could continue describing the girl in this vein, piling one hackneyed simile upon another until the portrait is complete. The beauty of the human countenance is infinite, unlike the means we use to capture it in words or images. As soon as we attempt to depict something unique for an audience, we inevitably lapse into triteness. This aspiring young soul’s outward attributes were quite simply flawless. And that glance of hers! Were it not for my early-morning contact with her, I might have naively assumed that such a way of looking at another person was merely childlike. But in truth I was biased toward other interpretations. I blush easily, and I am not ashamed to admit that at this moment, in Pilar’s vestibule, I probably turned red as a beet. It was a risky situation, and not only for me. Pilar realized immediately that her recalcitrant daughter saw in me a target for her incipient instincts, and that she intended to continue her rebellious behavior right here at the maternal hearth, before our very eyes. That would have to be nipped in the bud. And nip it Pilar did, using the technique employed by most mothers in this world: another whack on the face. The girl didn’t flinch.