Clank, clank! Two firm knocks of the bronze door clapper downstairs always meant Pilar’s apartment. Who can it be at this early hour, which according to Don Helvecio’s erotic timetable is still the middle of the night? Don’t those people down there know that the absentee boss of the Hotel Príncipe can’t be roused from his bed by two knocks, especially since he’s sharing that bed?
Those people down there seemed to know all this very well. And they were even better informed than that, for they also knew who would open up for them. That’s precisely why they decided to knock at this hour.
Just as “those people down there” expected, our door was opened for them—by Beatrice, let it be said, who was just the opener they were hoping for. But it was only one person who had come, a gentleman, a resplendent specimen of Mallorcan male worthiness. He was clothed in a black suit that had shiny spots here and there from long wear. He had on white hemp sandals, identifying him as a member of a lower social class. He spoke fluent Spanish, not the insular dialect that is related to Catalan, and which I, incidentally, despite years spent on the island, was never able to master. This man was polite, in fact he was gracious in the extreme. He had just the proper manners, a not unusual trait among the common people anywhere, and certainly not among Spaniards of his social standing.
This gentleman knew just how to behave in the presence of a woman who appeared before him in her morning negligee. She inquired what he had come for, then listened and watched as he reached into his pockets and took out a clutch of soiled papers. These documents were decidedly greasy. Our messenger must have carried them around with him for quite some time, and surely this was not the first time that he had drawn them out and shown them. He started searching through the papers with his knobby fingers. Oh, please, said Beatrice, just put them on the table and sort them there. So there they lay, next to my manuscript translation of The Bourgeois Carnival, which suddenly took on the pale, remote aspect of anemic philosophy.
The man then drew out two sheets from his deck. For a split second I had visions of an itinerant fortune-teller who has a trained canary pull fortune cards out of a drawer. Our own visiting itinerant, whoever he was, clapped one hand down on the two sheets of paper. He didn’t mean this gesture in an unfriendly or threatening way. Rather, he remained quite the gentleman and started talking in the most cheerful manner. Soon he would be in a state of pure rapture; you might say that he had foretold his own future with the greatest exactitude. Beatrice and I, intrigued by this strange visitor, recognized the gaudy strokes of Zwingli’s signature, the symbol of his extraordinary business acumen, compared to which my own scrawling way of signing documents seemed picayune indeed.
“Debts?”
Not at all, said the dunning agent. That was too harsh a term for the minuscule credit balance he had come to straighten out. And yet, he averred, the time was soon approaching when this matter ought perhaps to be taken care of, for otherwise, mmm…
Mmm… This “otherwise” is an all too familiar expression. In the form of “Get a move on!” Tied to a fist, it had befogged my childhood, and now here it was again, accompanied by a stranger’s hand spread out on our table in the interest of an amicable business settlement. Every country in the world harbors these vestiges of the caveman with his club. When we translate their message, it always comes out reading “distress warrant,” “bailiff,” “debtor’s oath,” or time in the tower. I understood precious little of what this gentleman was explaining so suavely, but the bills spoke their own clear numerical language. As a matter of fact it was a negligible sum; I seem to recall that a hundred-peseta note would have sufficed to get rid of our intruder.
With his permission, we repaired to a corner for a conference. As it happened, it was the corner next to the corridor door. Beatrice quickly disappeared through the door, and returned just as quickly with the pesetas. She had fished them out of our moneybag.
“You’re going to…?”
“Of course I am. He’s my brother.”
Of course. Some brother! The man took the proffered banknote, held out a few coins in change, and stuffed the papers back in his pocket leaving us the papers with Zwingli’s signature, which for him had now become worthless. Here on this far-flung island, we had just rescued the honor of a Swiss national.
Peering carefully at the receipts, and with the aid of my sparse Spanish vocabulary, I discovered that Beatrice had handed over to the man the monetary value of twelve dozen drinking glasses. Drinking glasses?
“Isn’t that right? Copas means glasses, doesn’t it? Or can it mean something else?”
“No, it means glasses. Why?”
“Then the two of them must own some kind of shooting gallery. Twelve times twelve is a hundred and forty-four, right? When we arrived here, there wasn’t a single glass in the cupboard. That’s what I call the kind of love that knows no bounds. Shall we bound on over to their arcade and try our luck?
The door opened. Zwingli’s queen of the night marched through the room.
And it was the beginning of a new day.
Never expect any thanks in this world of ours. When Beatrice showed Zwingli the paid receipts, he went through the roof. She presented them to him with a gesture of sisterly confidence, as if to say that such a favor between siblings was the most natural thing in the world, and that she expected no recompense. “But tell me now, twelve dozen drinking glasses! It would be cheaper to buy an electric dishwasher!”
“You mean you actually paid that crook? You are both chumps! You are weak-kneed suckers and greenhorns, the two of you!”
Zwingli’s wrath was quite genuine, not the theatrical kind at all. His anger was, however, directed most fiercely at the dunning artist whose nefarious scheme he claimed we had simply fallen into. But this was not the case at all, Beatrice interjected; the man had a perfect right to demand payment. “God damn it all,” countered Zwingli, and then he started assaulting the absent functionary with the type of maledictory vocables of which he had made himself a connoisseur. It was as if his International Lexicon of Invective lay open before him, supplemented by his domestic Dictionary of Swiss Dialect Terms. Just what did that bilking chaib think he was up to? He could easily have been left waiting a whole year more, and then either the statute of limitations would pass by or the affair could be settled fifty-fifty out of court. “Just think of it! He comes in here and attacks my sister with business matters that concern men only! And he probably pulled a fast one on you, too. I wouldn’t trust a Glunki like that as far as…”
But then Zwingli looked over the receipts. When he was through, he not only was satisfied, he was actually beaming. He found a mistake in our favor amounting to 12 pesetas. With pride he announced that we had made a profit for the day.
It’s not everyone who can earn 12 pesetas while still in bed. Such things, I said to myself, are possible only in Spain. We really ought to celebrate, I declared in the spirit of my father, who always liked to reach for the bottle and had a marked preference for the more insignificant occasions. I brought forth two shiny silver duros and the remainder in copper coins to cover our little libation. “Manzanilla?” No, said Zwingli, that wouldn’t taste right at this early hour.
“Julietta, why don’t you zip around the corner and ask the old lady for a bottle of the usual for Don Helvecio. She’ll know what you mean. And bring back some eggs and a string of sobrasada.”
Eggs and sausage, that was the ticket! As the saying goes, where there’s a will there’s a way. But Zwingli had obviously begun to run out of both, for recently the best will in the world had been unable to provide him with regular sausage. The sobrasada Julietta was out fetching was to be paid for with the money that had fallen so unexpectedly into Beatrice’s lap.
Those glasses, Zwingli told us, that was a story all to itself. He would be glad to tell it to us sometime, and Vigo would die laughing. You could write a whole book about the vagaries of his life here on the island. But first, he would have to realize his serious p
lans here, and we ought to drink a toast to that.
Pilar was going to cook up the eggs in Menorcan style, mixing them with the sharply pimentoed red sausages—à la Général, as Zwingli called the recipe. When Pilar heard him use this culinary term, she turned livid, and there ensued a rat-a-tat of verbal volleys and counter-volleys sufficient to decimate a whole regiment. I couldn’t understand a single word. Beatrice let me know that it was a rather delicate matter, which was why Julietta had been sent outdoors.
Scenes like this one became more and more frequent. Whenever the subject of “the General’s eggs” came up between Pilar and her señorito, Julietta would be asked to leave. This happened more often than was good for anybody’s mental and physical well-being.
Just what was this business about “the General’s eggs”—los huevos del General?
These memoirs of mine, whose basic outlines I have been planning throughout all the inexorable vicissitudes of my life, were meant to contain a separate chapter on the life and times of our vulture of a hostess, Pilar. My design was to present a unified, coherent portrait of this woman. But I have long since realized that my best intentions in this regard have been for naught. Sometimes the mere lifting of someone’s eyelid can interrupt my narration and propel my thoughts in a different direction, just as it happens in real life. Hence, my frequent digressions are not the result of tensions between poetry and truth, but arise from a desire to make plausible for my reader the implausibility of truth itself—an ambition that reaches into the realm of theology. “The General’s eggs” played such a fateful role in my insular life that I am moved at this very moment, now that Zwingli has ordered them for his table, to serve them up in their double aspect for the reader’s gustatory delectation. Standing here behind Pilar’s back as she cracks them into the frying pan, I’ll relate a few details about their previous existence; there’s hardly any danger that they will be spoiled in the process.
Zwingli had named this egg dish after a specific general—a second Benedict, if you will, although in this case the eponym has yet to enter our gourmet cookbooks. The General and his unit had their base, or their post (I’m unfamiliar with military usage; perhaps “base” is the more fitting term for the Spanish army) at the citadel of Mahón on Menorca, the smaller of the Balearics. And it was in his household that Pilar had the position of kitchen nymph.
Under supervision of the General’s spouse, the girl Pilar developed into a superb cook, whose skill I have never let up praising to this very day. The Iberian entrees we still concoct, in order to keep the lowly potato from our door, we owe at least indirectly to the overlord of that little neighboring island. It was the Commander himself who trained the girl in the other art she was devoted to, and in this effort she likewise proved to be an eager pupil. On one occasion, however, she was apparently a little careless while washing the dishes (in Spain, hygienic conditions leave much to be desired). Nine months later the Generalissimus of the Balearic fleet headquarters, first established in the year 206 B.C. by Hannibal’s brother Mago, had a child.
Are we now to picture the assembled uniformed guards presenting arms, as the General’s aide-de-camp appears before him with the official announcement, coming to attention with all the snappiness that Spanish corporals are capable of? (Not much snappiness at all when compared to the German army, but nowadays even the Spanish military has been thoroughly Prussianized). Did the proud new father fire off the few dozen fieldpieces at his bastion, proclaiming to the island and to His Majesty’s gunships, anchored in port, that heaven had sent him, from the womb of his pretty kitchen maid, a child to be baptized Julietta?
No, dear reader, nothing of the kind. On this occasion the General twirled his oily mustachios just as on any other day. And just as on any other day, he made his way to the barracks, the officers’ club, or the bordello—the usual routine for a Spanish general. What did get fired on this particular day was the kitchen maid. Taking with her all her belongings, her severance pay, and her baby, she departed the little isle of her misfortune and set sail for the larger Balearic, where she planned to continue practicing her culinary arts in other houses.
She had learned her manners at the highest level of the military, and perhaps this would be of help as she picked up the pieces of her life. I personally have my doubts on this score, but that’s probably because I am prejudiced against all mercenaries with their flashy gold braids. Our ten-star General naturally wanted nothing more to do with his child. Generals are persons of privilege, like priests. When they breed offspring, they do it, as the untranslatable Spanish phrase has it, a la buena de Dios, and it’s up to the offspring to look after its own welfare. Generals and priests are in the professional service of death, and why should they concern themselves with every thing that creepeth upon the earth? If there were no such thing as a death cult, no such professions would be thinkable; and but for the Balearic field marshal, there would be no such person as Julietta. But for Julietta, Pilar would have stayed on Menorca; but for Pilar on the island of Mallorca there would have been no Zwingli to cower under her erotic cudgel, etc. etc. There you have the chain of cause and effect that has led right down to this line in my book. In sum: without the General, my second, insular aspect would have remained forever concealed beneath the mask of my first.
It is quite some panorama, when you come to think of it. Here is a high-ranking soldier, beribboned with decorations earned by his saucepan-rattling heroism, sporting the stars of his rank and the stripes on his pants, and confident of the respect of his nation. He’s stationed somewhere on a romantic island in the Mediterranean. He’s bored with his worn-down wife, and so he orders a pert little recruit, in between stretches of K.P. duty, to perform certain types of hygienic drill several times a day. Thirty years later, somewhere in an attic flat in the decidedly unromantic city of Amsterdam, there sits a man by the name of Vigoleis—nary a star, nary a rank on his trousers, only the blotches and rumples of his sedentary lifestyle, and heroic (sadly heroic) solely in the pages of his book. He sits and writes himself sick with the ague. If that isn’t divine predestination, then I haven’t the faintest idea what we mean when we speak of God’s miraculous ways. But we haven’t yet reached the end of the ways and byways of this island. So let us whittle ourselves another staff and press onward in our text.
It was of course rude of Zwingli to use the term à la Général for the egg-and-sausage mixture that Pilar had been asked to prepare after each service maneuver carried out on her strapping body. It was doubly impolitic of him to do so in the presence of Julietta, who was proud of her highly-placed father, a public servant whose career was already giving rise to adulatory legends. How I envy illegitimate children, who can have kings or cardinals as fathers, while the rest of us who are born safely within legal wedlock must forever be content with Smith or Jones. We humble products of bourgeois normalcy are forced to invent our own personal myths, including important elements of our dream-lives, in order to escape the corruption of contemporary society. Pilar was a good mother, this much I can say for her. She was good enough to give her child the General as her father, rather than some bootlicking subaltern. Julietta knew her male progenitor only by means of a magazine photograph, which showed the commander of the land forces standing in full regalia next to his seaborne comrade-in-arms, a Grand Admiral by the name of Miranda (if I remember correctly), who looked like a latter-day Kapudan Pasha with saber and horsetail, ready to take on the combined armadas of the whole world. Legend has it that he performed meritorious service by expanding the harbor fortifications on Menorca. Someone even suggested that as a tribute to this man, the island should be promoted to the geographical status of a continent.
One day I upbraided Zwingli, for although I myself can often wax quite cynical, there were times when I felt he was going too far when conversing about Julietta’s relative in the military. After all, I felt sorry for the girl. She was still at an age when she could feel ashamed for being a come-by-chance. But Vigoleis, mon ch
er (this is roughly how her artificial father reasoned with me), Julietta is now approaching the age when she herself will have to start cooking that recipe I have named after her procreator, and she’s better off learning about the consequences in advance.
Nevertheless, my scolding succeeded in making the two lovers more careful. The scenes came to an end. What is more, with a single stroke I was able virtually to rehabilitate the reputation of Julietta’s father within the family circle. I promoted his press photo to the rank of room ornament, soon acknowledged by all as a secular votive image. This cost me a few pesetas, a sum that, back then at least, was hardly worth the fuss the others made about it. The girl was so delighted that she could scarcely be pried loose from around my neck. At this moment she was again the little child in need of a father she could look up to, even though this father might well be a simpleton.
I cut the General out of the magazine and had him enlarged by a photographer, then tinted and framed. Afterward I gave the original back to Julietta, and it found its way into a cardboard box, where it yellowed in the company of other mysterious trifles of the kind that girls collect when they begin to realize that Paradise is drifting away.
On Julietta’s birthday, which as her mother told me coincided exactly with the General’s, the icon was unveiled. To dignify the event, I lit a few candles in the rejected daughter’s bedchamber. In the dim light, her martial ingrate of a father appeared to gaze down sternly on his child’s bed, the logistical focal point of his extramarital campaign. The scene had something of the atmosphere of a burial service, complete with weeping in the congregation. Julietta wept for joy over the symbolic promotion of her papá. Pilar wept for reasons we shall leave unexamined here. Beatrice and Zwingli behaved like Protestants at a Catholic mass: they were decorous but uninvolved in the liturgy. And I? My eyes, too, remained dry, but I felt my chest starting to expand and was suddenly seized by the impulse to deliver a short speech, something I hadn’t dared to do since I committed an oratorical faux pas at my parents’ silver wedding anniversary dinner. Here I could make the attempt without causing misunderstandings about my actual intent, unlike on that earlier occasion when, as a growing young man making his first Faustian pilgrimage through Western intellectual history, I had recently arrived at Spengler’s morphological theory of the destiny of civilizations. Here in the little bedchamber I was understood well enough, in spite of my stammering and slips of the tongue, precisely because my tiny Spanish vocabulary was unequal to the task. Zwingli came to my aid. Incidentally, this was the first time in my life that I had ever taken part in a military action. The simple ceremony ended amid universal mirth and cork-popping. From that day forward the virginal bedchamber was referred to exclusively as “The General’s Room.”
The Island of Second Sight Page 11
