The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  This meant that the spicy egg dish had now become anonymous, but it by no means disappeared from our hosts’ breakfast table. Pilar was one racy number. She was also apparently insatiable. Nighttime often started over again for the two of them soon after their private roosters had crowed them out of bed; thus the saucepan would get placed over the charcoal fire a second time at about six in the afternoon. Frequently it was I who broke the eggs into the skillet and stirred in the little red sausages to make a tortilla. Hay que ser hombre, “You have to stand up like a man,” was Zwingli’s way of explaining these between-meals snacks that in Spain could—and often did—get ordered in restaurants at any time of night or day. I had learned at least this much: that Zwingli had to stand at attention whenever his chick got horny. On such occasions there could be no loafing, gold-bricking, or deserting—at most perhaps an armistice, following which the trench warfare continued as before. I, Vigoleis, who am also on the skinny side, might devour dozens of the General’s pancakes and I still would probably die a hero’s death out in no-man’s-land, nameless, without eulogy and without posthumous promotion to private.

  A few days later another man appeared at our door, again at the time of morning we reserved for our literary chores. Once again papers were shown, bearing Helvecio’s signature. This time the amount was appreciably larger, a matter of several hundred pesetas, and this time it was for chairs. This new dunning agent, too, got what he came for, and departed with a grandiose gesture of gratitude.

  Zwingli again swore up and down at pushy creditors who could be brought to reason only by making them wait. Spain, he declared, was one gigantic debtor’s colony, and who was he to sabotage the customs of his newly-chosen country of residence by sticking to the cheesy scruples of his insignificant little homeland? Then he laughed again like some sea lion telling a dirty joke, and promised to tell us the chair story, too, at some later time.

  I was getting itchy about all this, for I was reminded of my paternal grandfather, who dissipated a considerable fortune by buying up things sold at auctions and bankruptcy sales: 500 top hats at one mark each from a factory that went broke! Where else in the world could you get a top hat for one measly mark? A few dozen baby carriages from a furniture store that came under the hammer—5 marks apiece. Where could anybody find a baby carriage with bamboo wheel spokes, safety harness, and diaper receptacle at such a fantastic price? He presumably set aside a dozen or so for his own use, since as I have mentioned, he had nineteen children. Their descendants, including yours truly, are for the most part still among the living; otherwise I would be tempted to make known my conclusions about the old man’s rampant collectomania.

  Whatever Gramps didn’t need, which is to say almost everything, eventually found its way up to our attic. But he wasn’t content with just small stuff. A bankrupt velvet-ribbon factory also received his visit and his cash, likewise a broken-down grain-oil mill and a printing press. The latter was actually put back into service later on, and today it is still running under the surname to which I do less and less honor. Even a complete bathroom plumbing outfit joined his other bargain purchases, and this at a time when Gramps’ all-gracious and all-worthy Kaiser, his Lord and Majesty, was still getting soaped and scrubbed daily in a washtub by musketeers wielding hog-bristle brushes. The giant bathtub from this bargain set was passed on to my father, and it remains among the most cherished memories of my family home. Reclining in it at 105º Fahrenheit, I had my first intense experiences of German poetry. With a wooden match stuck in the drain plug, and a sock hanging from the hot-water faucet to muffle the drip, I could retreat to another world, my world…

  In the fullness of time, God took mercy on our sorely-tried family, and recalled this ingenious profligate to the Great Auction in the Sky, which is, in fact, also a collecting-place for all kinds of junk, none of which costs anything because no one wants to buy it back from the Good Lord.

  Was Zwingli, who back in Cologne heard me tell of my grandfather’s economic speculations, now going in a similar direction? The subsequent days would confirm my gloomiest premonitions. Our next visit was from a couple, man and wife, acting à deux as in any solid marriage. Nothing disturbed their connubial harmony as they presented us with their demand: sure enough, two ice-cream machines, never paid for. This delay was, they said, becoming rather intolerable. Beatrice agreed, and handed the couple the not inconsiderable remittance. Husband and wife expressed their thanks and blessings, then quit the stage to make room for a new debt collector. The next one came all alone, but the bill was all the bigger—and odder. No, it wasn’t for baby carriages or ribbon looms, but for small tables with marble tops, two whole dozen in number. And there wasn’t a single decent table in the house! Gramps, this would have been something for you, for once you bought up an entire bankrupt tavern and fitted it out with new vats, pumps, and spigots, only to go broke yourself as the result of your own progeny’s unquenchable thirst for beer.

  Beatrice kept on paying her versatile brother’s growing debts. Did she do this to protect the honor of her homeland? If she had, then today a Swiss lifesaver’s medal would be dangling at her bosom. For she swam farther and farther out on the ocean of her brother’s money problems. I registered no objections. To each his own, was my way of looking at it, and let the chips fall where they may. Should I have warned her? Here, too, the Treasury of German Quotations can offer us just what we need: “Can one forbid the silkworm to spin its thread / as it spins itself ever closer to death?”

  We were covering these unforeseeable expenses out of a modest inheritance that had recently fallen to Beatrice. I can’t remember just how large her portion of the estate was, but in any case it came to her in the form of Swiss francs. Converted into pesetas it yielded an amount that one might jocularly call a “tidy little sum,” using the same linguistic ploy we reach for when we make an “elderly” lady younger than an “old” one—to the delight, no doubt, of many who are much older. Anyway, with this tidy sum we could have kept ourselves going for a few years—not high on the hog, mind you, but perhaps on the common folks’ burro, in keeping with our bohemian pattern of living. Not like God in France, but maybe like one of his small-time Spanish prophets.

  I say “we” paid the bills, for we practiced joint ownership, although my own contributions, coming from the material rewards for my spiritual labors, would have to be regarded in the category of almsgiving. But what, after all, is money when a man’s reputation is at stake? Besides, I was expecting a batch of money, yes indeed, and a big batch at that. In words: four thousand Netherlands guilders, payable to me, Vigoleis, from a film company in Berlin. What difference would a few more bills make? That wouldn’t suffice to unsaddle us, not by a long shot. Just let Beatrice get her lost sheep back on the right path, and if I can be of help clearing rocks out of the way, I’ll gladly do it. It remained to be seen how large an obstacle Pilar would represent. Would I have to help heave aside this boulder too? I had long ago decided to solve this problem on my own. The path to success, I saw clearly, led across the bed of the woman who was forcing Zwingli to overdo everything. There was a possibility that I would be letting my friend Vigoleis do the hard work for me. But in the final analysis it’ll be the same, considering that he and I are two in one flesh. And that’s exactly what this cutie was out for: two in one flesh.

  The manuscript of my Carnival translation was finished and ready for the printer. I sent it off to the publisher with a handwritten blessing: “Take ye and read.” I also wrote a report to the author on how I gauged the market chances for his unworldly stock issue. He and I had not yet become light and cordial with each other. Dr. Menno ter Braak was an extraordinarily erudite and extraordinarily shy person. He was embarrassed, for example, when, in my garret room in Amsterdam, I introduced him to Beatrice as just what she was. I am becoming more and more convinced that self-contradiction is the very essence of life. We do good deeds with an evil heart, and we do our hating with the best of intentions. The author of th
is bitter carnival satire on bourgeois small-mindedness was himself anything but a mardi-gras carouser. In history there has been case after case of a free spirit who in everyday life was the victim of the very same inhibitions that he was battling against. Nietzsche, ter Braak’s idol and spiritual master, was a taciturn bourgeois once he doffed the chain-mail shirt of the Superman. Count Harry Kessler, who knew Nietzsche personally, once described him to me in just these terms, thus confirming and supplementing the image of the man that anyone can absorb by reading his collected letters. My little portable typewriter was now free for new assignments: some travelogues for newspapers, some editorial repair-work for literary journals, a few opinions on manuscripts for book publishers, a few pieces of short fiction for the desk drawer containing my other posthumous works; and finally some letters to my friends, on which I wasted my literary energies for years on end, amazed as I was time and again to rediscover later my own statements, sometimes even entire stories of mine, in books and newspapers. To think what I could have pulled in myself with the same material!

  For the rest, it was now a matter of adapting to life on this island: the infernal heat, the dusty cesspool that was Palma’s inner city, and not least of all María del Pilar and her libidinous static electricity, which gave me more homework troubles than any other subject in my insular re-education. The voltage between us was increasing as in a Leyden jar. Pilar was made of pure amber. His Excellency on Menorca knew very well why it was futile for him to continue rubbing against his marital bedfellow.

  And you, my dear Vigoleis, do you now intend to pull sparks from this tinfoil tart? Watch out that the spark doesn’t get drained out of you—it’s all a matter of the proper polarity and insulation. Both of you are charged for bear, and you have that extra charge that we call book-learning, a force that has never been of help to anyone in real life. And with a woman? You should know better.

  Yes, Vigoleis was fully charged. Just ask Beatrice. But of course you won’t get an answer, so let’s look elsewhere to satisfy our curiosity. This will require a visit to Mr. Anton Emmerich, who at this hour is in his shop down on the Borne. We already know from Zwingli that he sells books and newspapers, that he still clings to the potato pancakes of his native city, and swears by sweetened rice and knockwurst. In addition, he and I are what you might call close neighbors. For when seen from the perspective of Spain, the mere 40 miles that separate his city of Cologne on the mighty Rhine from my little native burg of Süchteln on the Niers could easily allow us to regard each other as kissing cousins.

  This determination of geographic proximity is, however, as far as we ever got, for in the larger scheme of things I am nobody’s compatriot, and potato-pancake chauvinism is not my dish by any means. What does “fatherland” mean, anyway? The events of 1933 in my German “fatherland” demonstrate clearly how little importance such a concept has for those who trumpet it about as the promised site of earthly salvation, and how quickly it can get thrown to the pigs. One of my favorite eccentric philosophers, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who amusingly enough was appointed to the academic chair at Königsberg as the successor to Immanuel Kant, speaks of the inherent ambiguity of patriotic feeling. There exist, he says, natural, vulgar, and pathological variants of this impulse, in addition to a higher form which is the only genuinely humane type. Its vulgar manifestation lacks all moral value, and can occur even among mindless animals. The less educated one is, the less familiar one is with the qualities of other places in the world: all the stronger is the attraction to the patch of land where one first saw the light of day. In this respect, Greenlanders and Laplanders, Samoyeds and Hottentots must be listed together with the cowherd on his Swiss Alpine meadow.

  This item of wisdom appeared in the second edition of Krug’s Concise Philosophical Dictionary, printed “in Leipzig at Easter in the year of Our Lord 1833.” I wonder what human type Wilhelm Traugott Krug might have mentioned in place of the Swiss cowherd if he had written his book exactly a century later, supported by the “scientific achievements” of the Third Reich.

  VI

  The house where Zwingli rented a piso for his fair damsel was located in a cluster, in Spanish a manzana. Manzana means “apple,” and no one knows any longer why a housing complex of this kind ever received such a name. This arrangement had windows looking out on three streets and the aforementioned small square. Of the three streets, the Avenue of Solitude was the shabbiest. The presentable side of the house faced the Borne. The residents on this side, landlords and tenants alike, could gaze out on spreading palms, rather than into the grubby halls and sorting compartments of the Municipal Post Office. The owner of the cluster was a Count, about whom all kinds of entertaining defamatory stories were in circulation. The rent was collected by an agent who soon arrived to make Beatrice’s acquaintance, a visit that was quite flattering for us. He left us with a thick wad of overdue rent in his pocket. I asked him to convey our greetings to the Count. I love degeneracy, and not only in the poems of Quental or Georg Trakl.

  Zola would have taken pleasure in the congeries of humanity that entered and exited the Count’s “apple” to go about their domestic business—which often enough was monkey business. But the Conde had never sheltered quite so notorious a party under his democratic roof as the confederated Helvecio and his animated partner. This was told to me by Mr. Emmerich, as I sat with him in his bookshop, having sought him out for the reasons outlined above.

  This shop is very important for an understanding of further developments in my chronicle, and so I shall proceed to describe it. It occupied the respectable corner of the cluster. To the right of the door, the Calle del Conquistador began its ascent; to the left, one turned into a short street that opened onto the square where Julietta was accustomed to flaunt her nascent charms to the street urchins. Diagonally opposite the shop was the open terrace of a high-class men’s club, where the members were always sitting at dominoes, drinking coffee, or just snoozing. The long, very narrow bookshop itself displayed inside, at its extreme left end, a door—and I when I say “displayed,” I am not just using fancy language but speaking the truth, for the door pointed to itself with the word PUERTA, which means “door.” The former owner had painted it there himself, in red. Behind the door was a spare room, to which had been added, by means of a wall partition, a lavatory. The whole back area had no window, and thus required artificial lighting.

  Obviously this was a very simple shop. Mr. Emmerich had installed a small counter, a few chairs, bookshelves against the walls, and stands for newspapers. That was it. His store was still new, and still the only one in the city where the increasing numbers of tourists could buy foreign papers and books for vacation reading. The proprietor was happy with his little enterprise. He was planning to expand by adding a small advertising agency, and perhaps someday he might start up a weekly English-language newsletter for tourists. He was hardly an idle businessman. He would like to have rented the floor just above the shop, but this was still occupied by the former owner of the store space, and the Count couldn’t just evict the fellow. He had been served notice long ago, and hadn’t paid his rent for quite some time, but… Don Helvecio, Mr. Emmerich continued, was a well-known personality in the Mallorquine business world, and a respected one, although, er…

  “Pardon me, Mr. Emmerich, but is the name Helvecio very common in Spain? You just said ‘Don Helvecio,’ didn’t you? Or did I hear you wrongly? I happen to know someone here by that name. He’s a Swiss.”

  “I’ll just bet you happen to know him, Mr. Vigoleis! By the way, your own name is a bit out of the ordinary. We don’t hear it very often down on the Rhine.”

  “And less often than that up on the Niers. I was re-baptized with this medieval troubadour’s name when I was studying in Münster, the city of the Anabaptists. But that’s neither here nor there. So, you know the gentleman we were just speaking of?”

  “Of course I do. He’s the same one that both of us are thinking about—or rather all three of us, if
you’ll permit me to say so, because your wife knows him too. You are his brother-in-law.”

  “How peculiar! How come my brother-in-law is the former owner of your store? Did you take over the business from Don Helvecio? But he’s the manager or something of that sort down at the Hotel Príncipe Alfonso. Or at least he was until very recently. But then again, I’m not so sure.”

  “You’re not the only one who isn’t so sure. But most people are sure about one thing: that woman he’s living with will soon be the death of him with her erotic fireworks. They go popping off up there day and night. Pilar—well, let me tell you: our Cologne hookers can’t hold a candle to her, and I’m whispering this to you from experience. And they know, as well as you and I do, that this thing they’ve got down there ain’t no Mary Queen of the May medal.”