The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  But to return to my twerpish terrorist brother Jupp: for years I had to share a room with him, and for a time a bed, and thus not even the nighttime afforded protection against kicks and punches. Before the age of mandatory school attendance, I was already aware that man can find no privacy even in the hours of the night. We must retreat ever further into the darkness if we are to escape the wiles of the world. Like the fertile kernel inside the seed prior to the sowing, our secret, safe place can be found only deep within ourselves. Some are successful in this quest for the innermost locus of being; if they are blessed enough to be able to map out this experience for others, as certain artists can, they thereby become immortal. Immortality: to me that is a terrifying idea!

  My toys were no safer than I was from the two pint-sized barbarians who were my brothers. They located my most carefully selected caches, and then waited in hiding for as long as it took, until they could revel at the tears that slowly began to flow when I removed my hand from the empty place of concealment. Eventually I decided to react like a chameleon, although this infantile mutation didn’t last very long. I started playing with dolls, but shied from the girls who habitually did the same. This behavior elicited nasty teasing and constant reviling from my know-it-all brothers and their equally disgusting neighborhood buddies. But at least there was an end to stolen toys—after all, boys just don’t rob little girls.

  This is how I learned early on to walk with a pronounced stoop. I sometimes shudder to think what might have become of my gait if my mother had emulated her biblically fertile mother-in-law, who gave the gift of life to nineteen children. I imagine that, having stooped to the level of a dachshund, I would have crawled inside a badger hole, never again to be snagged out, not even by the most bloodthirsty ferret.

  At home I was referred to by one and all as “the scaredy-cat,” and I have to admit that, with this new name, these anabaptists were right on the mark. And if it occurred to them today to sprinkle me once again with their water of misfortune, I am certain they could still be just as resourceful. It will be apparent that by every significant measure I take after no one in my family. If my reader feels moved to inquire further as to the nature of that family of mine, I’ll concede that I would probably be a happier man today if I had indeed “taken after” my family, as one might concede that a stone is happier than a plant. But to answer the query directly, I would be forced to go into further detail about my childhood. That would cause me pain, and I would rather spare my reader a mess of masochistic pottage. I do not wish the application of my recollections to go so far as to include the exhibition of my earliest post-hatching phases. Besides, I am no great fan of childhood memoirs; I much prefer intelligent stories about animals. It isn’t important what anyone experienced as a child. What is of importance is how such experiences are interpreted. Since that would entail applying psychology of the depth-sounding variety, for me that would mean nothing but trouble. I confess to being content with a single eviction from Paradise. In terrifying dreams I have often seen Sigmund Freud as a cherub with flaming sword. Poor heart of mine, enshroud thy pain in silence!

  Julietta, who has forced me to take this detour into my girl-less childhood, when compared with my own development at her age was already a condemned soul, and not just because the little sexpot had already begun sprouting her quills. My reader will be no more flustered than I was when I report that once, in despair at my bumbling efforts to produce a rolling Spanish rrr, she suddenly threw her arms around my neck and gave me a resounding kiss. This brought an immediate end to our experiments with rolling phonemes, and had other things been equal, we ought to have practiced cooing together. Seated on my lap, she plagued me with Spanish verbs, beginning with the classic paradigm of all language instruction: amo, amas, ama, amamos, amáis, aman. My rusty Latin readily flew to my aid, and I was overcome with gratitude as I recalled the academic deadbeat who, in the pigsty of a grammar school that I attended under privilege of Kaiser Wilhelm II, beat into our backsides the profoundly sage motto Non scholae sed vitae discimus. By the time of my linguistic tête-à-tête with Julietta, this cane-wielding taskmaster was already dead, rotting away somewhere like the stuff he was paid to teach us. Had he been still breathing, I would have sent him a picture postcard from Palma, begging his pardon for the impassioned, quasi-atheistic prayer I once uttered in the schoolyard, wishing him a speedy and painful demise. I was joined in this diabolic incantation by the rest of the entire class, with the exception of two execrable teacher’s pets. These classmates of ours were also “learning for life,” but for a sharply truncated life; they wanted to be priests, and that’s exactly what they got.

  Julietta was proud of the success her Vigoleis had achieved after only a single week’s lessons. He was in command of a handful of polite phrases, was able to exchange a few minimal words with her mother, and had mastered the all-important statement “I love you.” Understood purely as part of my language instruction, such an assertion might never have caused complications. But actually it did, because Pilar and I had already held wordless conversations on the same topic. There are glances of a certain type that one can project; one can bring one’s shoulder imperceptibly in proximity to hers, and no sooner does limb approach limb when the spark jumps the gap. We shiver, our lungs labor like some old, worn-out bellows, and if language were at all available, it would have to be severely forced. Nature has arranged all this in masterful fashion: when the sexes come near each other, the human animal immediately reverts to primitive behavior.

  No, Julietta, there is no need to conjugate that meaningful verb with your mother. What is going on between her and me is taking place in rather special tenses and modalities, in a very tricky form of the pluperfect subjunctive: Hubiera amado, “I might have loved”—if I had been lucky. But I hadn’t been so lucky, at least not yet. That would require a little more time, the right opportunity, and—“Well, what else, Vigo?” Julietta, my child, you wouldn’t understand, even though you already understand more than your mother approves of. The time factor is no great problem; we’ve got nothing to do here, we’re living the life of Riley, dolce far niente. It’s really a question of opportunity—which, as the proverb says, makes a thief. It can also make an adulterer, though the methods of the two criminal types may differ slightly. Our house is small, we’re constantly bumping up against each other. We’ll just have to wait; we’ll have to put this one on the back burner. Are you familiar with the expression ‘the back burner’? Of course not, and I’ll be happy to provide a full explanation as soon as my three words of Spanish have turned into three thousand. What I mean is that pretty soon, our little sight-seeing promenades through the city won’t involve all four of us adults. Such things are only for the time being. We’ll soon be over the stage of being guests who get treated to festive banquets. Soon we’ll have our own house key, and all of us can come and go as we please. You know what that means, don’t you, you little renegade? Then I’ll be ready to start reciting that verb with your mother, and nobody will rap my knuckles if I sneak a few irregularities into the very regular conjugation. But that’s again too much for you to grasp, mon poulet. Just a few more years and you’ll be offering a course for advanced students, and that will be so far beyond Vigoleis that he’ll go right back to your mother, and that means big trouble. I can see it coming…

  “Vigoleis! Don Vigo! Where are you?”

  “Julietta, forgive your absent-minded pupil for letting his thoughts wander. Where did we leave off?”

  As a clairvoyant observer, Beatrice had long since noticed that I had lost hold of the instructional thread. Zwingli, too, sensed what was going on. In a real school, the inattentive culprit is first given a verbal reprimand, then a note is sent home to his parents, and finally a bad mark is entered on his report card. For life itself there are no marks as such, but that didn’t keep Vigoleis from dreaming of an unusually sublime category of marksmanship here in his German-Iberian Arcadia.

  Comparing two lengthy tex
ts, for example a translation with the original, is just as time-consuming and tedious as proofreading. Such a chore becomes literally mind-numbing when you are seated at a table that holds pages and pages of your own writing, thousands and thousands of words you would simply like to be rid of, or perhaps never to have set to paper in the first place. This type of post-creative heartburn can become so unpleasant that some writers pass on their manuscripts to a publisher with instructions never to bother them again. Their works are like fledglings that get tossed from the nest to seek the world of art and beauty on their own. No matter if they perish. Next year’s mating season is sure to arrive, and after a period of deaf and blind gestation, a new chick is guaranteed to see the light of day. It is different with another species of literary nestling. Besides regular meals at the nipple, this type requires constant loving care; its diapers need changing, its bottom has to be powdered, and you have to offer the supplemental bottle if the little tyke isn’t kicking just right. There is trouble all the time, and not only with seven-month preemies that have to spend time in an incubator. Flaubert and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer are prominent examples of writers who have exercised this kind of admirable, expert baby care; both of them pampered their little darlings into solid maturity. The literary infanticides, on the other hand, one of whom was Vigoleis, are members of a category that the scholars have yet to investigate.

  As we collated my translation of ter Braak’s Bourgeois Carnival, I sat at one end of the table and read the text mezza voce. The vestibule was dark and cool, impervious to flies and the noise from the street below. The workers in the post office across the way were busy sorting and pigeon-holing without much fuss, which is to say, quietly. María del Pilar was asleep, her “señorito” was asleep, and Julietta, who used this term for her house-uncle Zwingli, was also asleep—unless she was lying on her bed watching the crack in the folding door and awaiting the arrival of her new benefactor. For meanwhile, that is just what I had become in her eyes, with my regular good-morning kiss: her fatherly friend, innocent of any ulterior desires. On this particular morning she had not yet received her matinal smooch, for I was mindlessly intoning, like a deacon at solemn high mass, the text of ter Braak’s chapter on “The Carnival of the Faithful”:

  “The love that transcends all reason; the ‘light,’ the ‘word’ that ‘was with God in the beginning’… and poetry; all of these are revealed to us through hatred, darkness, silence… and bourgeois existence. What meaning attaches to such feeble phrases as ‘transcends all reason’ or ‘was with God in the beginning,’ other than that we strive, using the coordinates of space and time, to give expression to concepts that ultimately defy verbal designation?… It is the bourgeois who, by inherent nature, swear by and upon mere words: ‘transcend,’ ‘in the beginning’…”

  I recited the Dutch text mechanically, all the while picturing to myself, in another stratum of my consciousness, a less abstract, less dialectical, less doggedly philosophical kind of Carnival. A carnivalino, one without masks, and at the present hour one without costumes, too—or rather, in the costume of Adam, which is no costume at all. I pictured Eve’s costume as an even more naked one, although generally speaking the barest woman is one who has yet to let fall her last item of clothing. In order to relish my erotic breakfast-table fantasy to the utmost, I had to imagine her conjugal Adam, him of the luxuriantly hirsute chest and the magical claw, as banished from her enchanting company. At certain moments this mental repast became so delicious that, to continue with my extravagant metaphor, I began to smack my lips. But then the thin partition separating the two regions of my consciousness suddenly dissolved. I stumbled and halted in my chanting of ter Braak’s lines, and I heard an objection spoken from the other end of the table, where every linguistic and emotional deviation from the written or unwritten Urtext was being duly registered.

  As a woman, and on such a morning as this one, one must be firmly convinced of one’s own worth, and be in possession of considerable inside information besides, to refrain from throwing every last manuscript page, the book, and the table itself at the dreamy numbskull sitting opposite and shouting, “Go ahead! Move right in with her, why don’t you?”

  Why didn’t Beatrice do that? Was she the masochistic type who seeks to intensify pleasure through suffering? Was she a superior being who was offering herself in sacrifice to Vigoleis, in the grand tragic style: “Tread upon my bleeding heart, pass over my corpse and enter your beauteous lover’s bed, that despicable venue of empty infatuation, etc. etc.”? To finish this renunciatory outcry of hers, I would have to quote from the novels of Hedwig Courths-Mahler, which I don’t have right at hand and wouldn’t inflict on Beatrice in any case. Even after twenty years such a comparison would annoy her greatly. If asked to choose between Pilar and Hedwig, she would undoubtedly take sides with the illiterate against the woman who spent a lifetime in concubinage to the alphabet. No, Beatrice is not one to grab at the petty stratagems of bourgeois marital discord. She is, I must repeat, a woman of cosmopolitan background and, most decisive of all, she is familiar with the writings of her Vigoleis. When necessary, she is capable of pulling this fellow back from the edge of the abyss. What means does she employ? Have patience, dear reader! Her curatives differ from those of normal, traditional medicine. We often read the familiar exhortation, “Shake well before using”; with Beatrice, the shaking gets done after the fact, and that is the source of its amazing therapeutic efficacy. Not for nothing is Beatrice the granddaughter of a famous homeopath.

  Pilar began to abhor our literary morning devotions. Owing to her increasing irritability, we had switched our collating activities to the later forenoon. I have never comprehended what caused all that anger over a week of boring professional drudgery. Zwingli came forward with an explanation that struck me as patently unconvincing. But then, his knowledge of women was never more than skin-deep, though he had often performed in-depth research on the skin itself. He was, for example, an imaginative expert in the nomenclature of the erogenous zones. He entered long lists of terms in his anatomical atlas, which he intended to put to use, not like Mr. van de Velde in marriage manuals, but for purely aesthetic ends in his future Academy of Nude Modeling—an idea that escaped even Leonardo da Vinci, who overlooked hardly anything amidst the skin and bones of the human erotic machine. With Zwingli’s technique, the models were presumably made to assume the appropriate aesthetic attitudes by a carefully mapped-out tickling procedure. And, it is fair to ask, why not?

  It was Zwingli’s considered opinion that Pilar felt put upon, in fact she felt demeaned in her illiterate womanhood by our constant nerve-racking recitations of literary verbiage in a foreign tongue. What nonsense! But perhaps I am mistaken. To err is human, wrote St. Jerome in one of his letters, a dictum that I, Vigoleis, prefer to revise upwards a degree or so by stating that to err can also be divine, an insight I have attained through unbiased reflection upon what the Creator has made out of me. Anyway, what Zwingli said couldn’t possibly be true. Pilar’s lack of education in reading and writing actually was a distinct advantage. What is more, it turned out that she got just as annoyed by the tight-lipped, wordless sulk I had been wallowing in for days now. This behavior of mine became all the more obvious, the faster I made progress in Julietta’s oral language method. With Pilar things were now at a standoff. Most people react to the kind of potent abstinence that Vigoleis was practicing by finding it either ridiculous or pitiful. That’s not how I construe it. To me, as a poet, it is like the timorousness felt by one rhyming word in search of another.

  Still to come was my secret tryst with Pilar, my smuggler’s tour to her inner sanctum. I was waiting for the opportune moment, which I foolishly thought of as imminent, once Beatrice and I had finished our comparative textual ordeal. It was as if I were expecting my Carnival ritual to imbue me with the courage to descend into the real world of Ash Wednesday. That was insane, and a palpable example of how one can overestimate the power of literature. And we were still w
orking our way through the “Carnival of the Faithful”—it would be days before we dealt with the “Carnival Morality” in ter Braak’s final chapter. Vigoleis was hoping to achieve two goals at once.

  “Vigo, what are you reading? I can’t find anything like that in your translation. There you go again, engaging in bizarre textual behavior!”

  “Oh, sorry, Beatrice! I skipped a section, ten whole lines. It’s because I have to drone on like this, and it’s dark in here. Literature should always be read in artificial light, the same kind it gets written by. But listen to this, ha ha! Here it is, black on white, this is why I got ahead of you. Just listen, and we can go back to where we were in just a minute. Here it is:

  “Mysticism is the natural opponent of the Church. The bourgeois community of the faithful can tolerate such an intruder only if the former is willing to forgo its claim to uniqueness in the game of words. For the bourgeois as for the poet, words mean only what is to be found behind them.”