The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  “Julietta,” I said in German, forgetting that she couldn’t understand my language, “be a good girl and go to bed. Tomorrow is Sunday, and I want you to show me the city.” And I held my hand out to her.

  Julietta smiled, stepped closer, and gave me her hand. Then she half-bowed, half-curtsied to Beatrice, and disappeared without giving the slightest further attention to her mother or her mother’s chum. Pilar entered the kitchen and took up some noisy activity with pots and pans. In spite of the touchy scenes that preceded it, her meal turned out excellent. The wine, too, was good; Zwingli had brought it to just the correct temperature. Temperature, it occurred to me, was the crucial factor in this household. Domestic comfort, not to mention what we Germans refer to as Gemütlichkeit, was in short supply here. We were all so busy sorting out the threads of our separate thoughts that none of us was able to tie the ends together to produce meaningful conversation. Even if that had succeeded, being in the linguistic minority, I would have been left out anyway. Zwingli was ever on guard that nothing should get said in a language that Pilar didn’t understand. Hence the lingua franca of the evening was exclusively Spanish. The reunited Swiss siblings even forgot to raise their glasses towards the Confederated Cantons, where at that same hour skyrockets and patriotic cheers were rising to the heavens. Here in the Street of Solitude, the mood was emphatically earthbound. I don’t mean to imply that we took our meal in funereal solemnity, but the crisply broiled viands called for far more cheerful diners than we were. Around midnight, when the street outside started coming awake, we went to bed. Each of us lay where he or she belonged—though as we know, not where each of us might have wished to belong.

  Just where might Vigoleis have wanted to spend this first night on the island of his second sight?

  In any chronicle that gets written with truthful intent, with the writer’s hand, so to speak, constantly pressed to his heart, there inevitably crop up certain incidents that the author, out of shame and an awareness of personal imperfection, would rather conceal from his readers. Familiar as I am with the inward and outward factors involved in the present case, and convinced that hushing up the events of the night in question would vitiate the credibility of all that is to follow, I shall now reveal that our hero slept in the Street of Solitude sans pajama, sans fleas, and also sans dreams. But in addition, sans mother and sans bewitching daughter, both of whom come under the ancient Spanish proverb which, in order to avoid flinging open the doors of this bawdyhouse all too suddenly, I quoted at the head of Book I under the disguise of the original language: “The mother a whore, the daughter a whore, a whore the blanket that covers them both.” In Spanish this adage rhymes exquisitely. But Vigoleis is not yet far enough along to combine sound and sense.

  V

  We slept well past noon, which shows how Spanish we had become in the space of a single diurnal rotation.

  A telegram from Basel had a calming effect on Beatrice, but it also requested immediate word on the conditions we found on our arrival on the island. This was a difficult assignment, not one to be carried out with a few select words of cabled reply. So we wired back that Zwingli’s situation gave reason for hope, ending with: “letter will follow.” The task of composing this letter fell of course to Beatrice, and I recall that she chewed up half a fountain pen before signing off her report with the familial greeting “Ciao.” We all know what she wrote about, though naturally she rounded off countless details and kept to herself her negative assessment of the long-range prognosis. But she also included certain statements of a kind we are as yet ignorant of, and which I myself only discovered when reading over her epistle to the Baselers. For example, I learned that she was resolved to remain on this island at her brother’s residence until he was again firmly treading the straight and narrow. Between the lines one perceived a certain tone of maternal solicitude, not surprising when we consider that Beatrice had begun serving her youngest sibling as a mother-surrogate ever since destiny had taken the family into distant regions. She had been unable to carry on this role for very long, she wrote in this letter, and in the intervening years had not been successful at it. On a later occasion, waxing sentimental about what she regarded as her failure at non-professional intrafamilial pedagogy, she once remarked to me that many of Zwingli’s transgressions in word and deed had been just as much her own fault. So she kept on doing for Zwingli as much as she could, and as much as Vigoleis would let her do, although the latter, in his proven and increasingly acute guilelessness, continued for the most part to play the role of cautionary advisor. She closed her melancholy positive report with a promise to inform her brother in Basel at regular intervals about our progress. But our progress, the progress we were all to share in, was exclusively of the downward variety.

  As we set about to furnish our windowless chamber, Zwingli gave me some enlightening instruction about Iberian domestic customs. I had not known, for instance, that in Spain there was still something called a window tax. In order to minimize this levy on daylight, the less affluent property owners deliberately built their bedrooms without windows, or upon buying a house, walled them up. To me it was clear that such a procedure derived from the Catholic Christian concept of life as a perpetual sin against life. Because the propagation of the human race is bound up in our culture with bedrooms and their attendant malodorousness (exceptional instances en plein air are too infrequent to stem the tides of prudishness), it is quite natural to prevent the Eye of Creation from peeking in on the sinful act. Not even Luna, whom we meet so often in poetry as the “eyewitness to love,” is permitted to enter the chamber where ecstasy so often becomes a curse, and cursing almost never helps at all.

  “What about candles?” I asked. They always get blown out, Zwingli explained, right at the start of things, since no Spaniard was interested in watching himself in love, not even one who has read Schopenhauer. In brothels, on the other hand—but perhaps for that very reason—things went on amid an abundance of candles, multi-faceted mirrors, and copulative positions too numerous and various to count. I remarked that this seemed a fairly sensible method of escaping from windowless lovemaking—though I was quick to add that copulation had, of course, nothing to do with love.

  A publisher in Germany was interested in a translation of Menno ter Braak’s Bourgeois Carnival. I had sent him a sample chapter from Amsterdam, and the writer Franz Düllberg, who did much to introduce German readers to Dutch literature, had recommended the work warmly to the publisher. The sample I sent pleased the man in Berlin, at least to the extent that he asked me to submit a complete translation, upon which he would base his final decision. My German version was finished, and needed only to be collated once more with the original. I figured that Beatrice and I could get this done in a week’s time if we could use the drop-leaf table for a few hours each day. This suggestion, however, met with resistance from our gracious landlady, prompted no doubt by this illiterate woman’s instinctual abhorrence of the written or printed word. Be that as it may, Pilar disapproved of my appropriating her table for the purpose of writing. I explained to her that a writer needs a surface to write on, and added that I was a “writer” only insofar as the German passport office was concerned, not in the sense of ever having “written” anything. I hoped that by saying this, I might rise in this ravishing woman’s esteem; I would have abjured the entire alphabet, if doing so would place me at her level.

  Well then, are you a writer or no writer at all? Let’s pay no further heed to what you may have wanted this broad to think about you. Your heart is so abundantly preoccupied with her, that in due course we’re bound to hear more about her from your mouth; no fear of missing out on that. But now, pray tell us in plain language whether you are, or are not, a “man of the pen.”

  Fair enough. Judging by the amount I had already written by that time, I was indeed a full-fledged writer, and a prolific one at that. I had inscribed thousands of pages chock-full with my indecipherable hen-scratchings. Only Beatrice was able to make
sense of the mess, and it was only for her eyes that I wrote anyway. Love letters? Well, it began with love letters; that’s how I was first lured out of my cave, where, bearlike, I had been sucking my paws in willful hibernation, waiting vainly for daylight to arrive. Strangely enough, I started out using the French language—not because it is the classic medium of love, the language in which, by a fortuitous quirk of fate, the finest love letters of the Western world have been preserved for us: the outpourings of the heart ascribed to Mariana Alcoforado. The numerous attempts at re-translation of her letters into Portuguese are simply unreadable, and in Rilke’s German version, an aesthetic veneer has spoiled the radiant power of the “original.”

  Nor was my reason for writing my love letters in French the fact that I had any particular fluency in the language. That was hardly the case. I had to use a dictionary to express what my heart was feeling, but the required precision was not to be found in the Advanced Langenscheidt Dictionary. Was it that I had made impressive progress as a lover? What I needed was not even available in the massive Sachs-Villette, a work that has otherwise served me superbly for solving linguistic conundrums. One of my most indelible intellectual experiences, comparable in importance to my first acquaintance with Karl May, Schopenhauer, Hamann, and Pascoaes, occurred when one day—or I should say one night—I discovered effortlessly, painlessly, and directly, the language for expressing my amorous sentiments—a language I had overlooked as the result of endless doubts and confusions. This language was my very own German. Suddenly I realized that German was not only good for writing poems. And suddenly I found myself filling reams of paper with my mother tongue—which is not to say that I used the language my mother used; mothers generally look askance at their son’s expressions of love for another woman. My average nocturnal emission comprised thirty pages. Once I made it to eighty; twixt dusk and dawn, inspired by the workings of my benighted soul, the words just gushed forth from the Parker Duofold Senior held in my febrile hand, a hand attached to a physically depleted body cowering in the dark, in fear of existence itself. Between God and the Devil, between my heart and hers, from verses of Walther von der Vogelweide to the close analysis of erotic sensations—there was nothing that Vigoleis, like some latter-day Henri Frédéric Amiel, did not commit to paper.

  But did all that activity turn me into a “writer”? No, my dear Self, no, and no again, it did not. But then permit me to inquire what other word there might be for such an enterprise. The compilers of Heyse’s Concise Dictionary of the German Language are quite clear about it: a “writer” is not someone who simply writes, but one who writes “works” and has them published. Had any of my “works” emerged from the press? The only “press” I had been involved with was the press of inner turmoil that had given rise to my writing. Had I been able to gain detachment from all the scribbled pages by having them printed and distributed to a reading public, then perhaps my chronic anxiety might have been curable. A true writer (to continue my thoughts on this subject, despite its having no further bearing on me) who suffers for his work must find a certain measure of surcease by sending it to the marketplace, for otherwise he would hardly go to the trouble of putting his work in saleable form. If God had not suffered during the act of Creation, He would have had no reason to display His product as The World. A “suffering God”—such a notion can shed new light on Creation; it might move you to take pity on the Creator if you were not yourself the most abject victim of the eternal tension between what is and what can never be. By “you,” I once again mean my own self, as well as my friend Vigoleis, who is the incarnation of an even more serious anomaly.

  My Epistolarium nocturnum, and the harvest of my literary frenzy (furor poeticus), would have filled volumes if it were ever printed; that is to say, if I had not withheld the inscribed leaves from posterity, and even (I confess it) from their addressee Beatrice, by committing them to the flames. Whatever portion of my “literature” escaped the coal stove was put into service as garden fertilizer. Neither the onion nor the head of cabbage cared much whether the substance that fed their roots was in verse or prose. In whatever style I composed them, my pages ended up providing nourishment for the fruits of the fields. If challenged, I can furnish the names of horticultural witnesses.

  Thomas Mann, whom I first met in Locarno in the summer of 1938, complained bitterly about the writing desks provided in hotel rooms. He never found one that suited his needs exactly; the more expensive the accommodations, the less reliable was the furniture for writing on. I found the poet Henny Marsman to be less fastidious in this regard; he was happy with a slab of wood that didn’t wobble. The wealthy Pascoaes, who could afford tables of gold if he wished, is more humble still; he has composed his entire oeuvre sitting at a tiny round table of the type that a magician carries around in his valise—symbolic of a higher art form, perhaps. Other writers have done entirely without artificial support. They gaze into thin air, and become famous by means of works they have literally written on their knees. I am thinking of Camões, Slauerhoff, Peter Altenberg, the Portuguese arch-poet Barbosa du Bocage, as well as certain Old Covenant prophets like Job, who is reported to have penned the chronicle of his trial of suffering while sitting on his dung heap. So we see that the writing surface is unimportant. But in Pilar’s house there was no usable surface at all, except for a table that we would have to clear for each and every meal. Where was I going to do my work? I refrain from using the word “writing,” now that I have made it sound so suspect in my personal case.

  Many other things were missing in the house in question, even certain items that were indispensable for daily living. Having brought a considerable amount of money with us to the island, on the following day we went out and bought all kinds of useful merchandise. By late afternoon, busy hands had delivered them to the apartment. Even a good-sized wooden wardrobe was boosted and thrust up the murky stairway, not without loss of plaster on both walls. Julietta, with whom I had spent all Sunday strolling through the city, came forth with so much eager help and advice that we all forgave her. And it was the evening of the third day. And that’s how it went, midst peace and good cheer, for the rest of the week. One item after another was added to the household, and everyone saw what had been accomplished and purchased, and everyone saw that it was good. As in the Creation Account, I have been able to sketch out this initial period in just a few verses before settling down, again taking the Book of Books as my awe-inspiring model, to narrate the events subsequent to this majestic feat of prestidigitation.

  Picture Vigoleis as a beginning student in Spanish. He took his first lessons not from Beatrice, and not from Langenscheidt. As Zwingli had advised, he honed his tongue on the little tongue of Julietta, whose early maturity proved itself also in the field of pedagogy. Of course, I don’t mean “honed” in the literal sense of one surface rubbing against another, although my schoolmistress tried her best to get her pupil’s lips to conform to her own. A professional linguist might contend that Julietta placed particular emphasis on the production of certain plosive phonemes requiring labial closure. But things actually never got that far; our daily exercises never degenerated into the erotic. And besides, I soon got over the steamy confusions of that first day, which is to say that it was no longer impossible for me to concentrate my libidinous longings solely on the mother. My comradeship with Julietta grew stronger once she understood that of the two of us, I was the more childish spirit. Once in a while she played the role of my protectress, and I gladly allowed her to mother me in this fashion. Unfortunately, though, she also soon discovered that she could dazzle me by bringing into play her arsenal of budding femininity. When she found this out, things got stickier for my friend Vigoleis. That’s why he was never able to become as one, heart and soul, with Julietta.

  I grew up in a family without sisters, together with older brothers who, far from cherishing my company, used to beat me up. My worst torturer was the second oldest, Jupp, who later blossomed forth as an unassuming bachelo
r poultry farmer with a long tobacco pipe, an enviable annual egg output, and a love for music and all the arts. Incidentally, he is also the breeder of the first non-hybrid German zero-altitude chicken. This fellow was a tyrant, with a dangerous fist that he would raise and then smash down on his hapless victim whenever his bidding was left undone. In this we can, of course, discern the rudiments of his development toward a successful career as poultryman, a boss who dictates to hens just how high they may fly. Flightless chickens for the Volk ohne Raum!

  A lift of his hand, a look of fury, and a fear-inspiring shout of “Get a move on!” were sufficient to banish any thought of disobedience, and thus little Albert was kept in the vilest slavery. “Get a move on!” was a phrase he had picked up from our father, who often used it for child-rearing purposes and was indeed delighted when things actually moved. Father was an uncommonly peace-loving and amiable man; after a somewhat dissolute, beery stage in his younger days, he had turned rather taciturn, but he was a democrat through and through. He wept when Gustav Stresemann died, and this was the first time I had ever seen that introverted person react in any way to an event in the outside world. I owe a great deal to him, above all the realization that nothing at all in this world is worth hastening one’s pace for by as much as single heartbeat. I never once saw him running. What is more, after my ungainly soul ruined a whole series of chances for earning an earthly existence, he financed my university education—likewise a failure. Last but not least, he paid for all the postage that sustained my aforementioned activity as a “writer.” Yet all of these parental subsidies had to be earned. Once a week, I was obliged to give the old man a haircut, a radical clipping down to one-tenth of a millimeter. This regular task was my father’s discreet method of minimizing my inferiority complex. More than once he complained of how slowly his hair grew. An enemy to all forms of obscurantism, in his enlightened manner he rejected my suggestion to use Salvacran or some other nostrum. As my epistolary literature grew in volume, the good man had no choice but to increase the wages for his court barber. Heaven has rewarded his kindness, his big-heartedness, and his psychologically untutored understanding for his inscrutable tramp of a son, by granting him a painless death in old age.