The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Zwingli must have been rubbing his hands in anticipation. The champagne was at just the right temperature. Pilar, the Venus of the Island risen from the ocean foam, was to let a few corks pop against the mirrored ceiling as a signal that the ceremony has begun. Our theater director thought up this terrific stage effect: first the exploding corks, then, through a crack in the front door, a beautiful hand would appear, followed by a gorgeous arm, then champagne foam would spill on the ground, and finally the Goddess Herself would step forth…

  Unscheduled, like so much else in life, there now burst onto the scene, dressed in juvenile ceremonial array, the Goddess’ daughter.

  Julietta had pleaded with her mother and foster father, amid tears that bespoke her serious devotion to the Fourth Commandment, that her real father—the General, Don Julio—should be allowed to participate in the opening celebration. In truth he would have been in excellent company among the dignitaries who had now arrived in numbers that exceeded all expectations. And if he had brought along his frictionless spouse with her campfollower’s bosom, her varicose veins, and her ivory fan, we might have caught sight of that item of the General’s house furnishings as well.

  But the defender of his Mediterranean redoubt was deemed unworthy to lick ice cream in the new bar named after his resurrected kitchen fairy. Julietta fumed and cried and shouted, she bared her teeth and uttered dire threats (children always have lots of material they can use to blackmail their parents) for weeks on end. But to no avail. The lord and lady of ice cream could not be softened up. Worse yet: as Julietta tried to sneak in through the crack in the afore-mentioned door, at the critical moment just before the champagne foam was to start flowing, her mother shoved her back outside with a hoarsely hissed curse. The poor child was repulsed, disowned before the multitudes, whose eyes had been staring expectantly at the front entrance. No more scenes, Helvecio! Tell us yourself that there’s too much at stake!

  Children are as unpredictable as the love I was speaking about just a moment ago. And generals are as unpredictable as both together: love and the fruits of love.

  Julietta, hurt to the quick and publicly humiliated in her love for her father, ran up the steps of the Calle de la Seo, and just seconds later was inside the Cathedral, lying at the feet of the statue of Our Lady on the Column, the Virgen del Pilar. The nuns had taught her how to pray, and she hadn’t forgotten. In the ardor of her despair she invoked her father: “Help me, stand by me! I am abandoned!”

  Those who, like me, have forgotten how to pray, are all the more fervent in their belief in the efficacy of prayer, since they have no reason to fear the trial of disappointment. Julietta, still in the initial phase of her piety, still believed in the succor offered by the denizens of Heaven. If an entire nation, “in the fear and misery of a war that threatens the very existence of all peoples and all nations,” can turn to God with a request to decimate another country, then why can’t a little girl place all her trust in the Mother of God, especially when we consider that the latter was the Patroness of her own mother? Julietta never doubted that her frantic prayers would come true, precisely because the Virgin bore her mother’s name. When she had finished praying, she immediately stamped her foot, thus putting the Virgin Mary under pressure to act fast. And on her way out of the Cathedral she stopped to put in a brief insurance prayer with San Antonio.

  It was Julietta herself who later told me all this. When her tale was done, she said to me, “Vigo, if your mother had done something like that with the Madonna in your parish, then maybe you wouldn’t have had such hard times.” Oh, Julietta! If you only knew how obstinate our lovely Lower-Rhenish Madonnas are! You can’t force them to do what you want, not even to get you enough money to buy a genuine 13th-century specimen for your living room!

  Don Julio was also repulsed, despite his imposing figure with plumed helmet, epaulettes, sash, saber, medals, jackboots, and the rapidly waning glory of his public fame. Yet though he may have been rejected in body, he had very palpably arrived in spirit. His bastard-child had conjured him, though the girl was totally ignorant of occult practices. The Hand of Heaven was without doubt responsible. Thus a dematerialized General came to aid his twice-repudiated daughter, and in doing so foiled his enemies’ strategy. Which is what generals are for, after all.

  Here at the Bar Valencia, on a Saturday afternoon, one second before a champagne salvo and without the customary “Tirez le premier, Monsieur!” Don Julio appeared in a form and with an effect that are probably not even familiar to our most advanced parapsychologists. I am revealing this occurrence here out of a sense of twofold obligation: first, toward Vigoleis’ recollections, and secondly, no less earnestly, toward science. Don Julio came, as if conjured by a troll’s whistle, or like a cordial to cap off the meal named after him. Just as the Holy Spirit descended upon the assembled disciples, causing them to speak in all languages, so did the General let himself be called forth from his spectral headquarters to visit the couple. And behold, they began to seethe, as if a powerful gale were howling through the back room at the bar, and with all the fibers and tongues of their bodies, they started loving each other.

  Zwingli had just enough time to pull the bolt on the door-door—the outer world had vanished, and they knew each other in their flesh. They knew each other, in fact, so intensely that they didn’t know themselves any more, perhaps because their bed of love was anything but comfortable—cool enough, to be sure, but not with the coolness of genuine horsehair. Or perhaps because of the darkness in this area, which they were utilizing for the first time for lovemaking. They bumped against all sorts of paid and unpaid plumbing and machinery. If love-making is to happen in an extravagant location, a padded cell in an asylum would have been preferable.

  The Bible tells many stories of how love can be transformed into hatred. Friedrich Nietzsche filled ten thousand or more pages concerning the same problem. Therefore, let us be content here with the brief announcement that Zwingli’s love for Pilar, and Pilar’s love for her Helvecio, soon reverted to intense mutual animosity. And who wouldn’t be seized by a frenzy of anger if, at the moments of highest ecstasy, your skull kept banging against a centrifuge and your foot tipped over a container of ice, causing your limbs and members, throbbing in the heat of lust, to be cooled off with infuriating suddenness, just as Pastor Heumann advises in his Manual of Personal Hygiene: Cold compresses! And if hatred has once made its ugly appearance, it strives to do away with its own immediate cause. Spinoza understood this perfectly. The person I hate must be exterminated, he must go, permanently, and there is no other solution: It’s either me or him.

  There is every indication that our two shop owners behind the door-door had intentions of acting according to this tried-and-true philosophical insight. Each of them wanted to remove the other from existence—a terrible idea right before the festive ceremony, or rather virtually during the ceremony, for the front door had already been opened to allow the champagne christening to take place.

  Both of them, the young man no less than the blossoming young woman, wanted to kill each other, and to take with them to their graves all the hopes they had every reason to trust in. How did they plan to carry out this double murder? I happen to know exactly how; I have been able to reconstruct everything, partly on the basis of reports from those who were directly involved, partly by my own conscientious research into the contributing factors. It is not for nothing that I have sat at the feet of the Münster criminologist Profesor Többen and his live subjects at the penitentiary in that august city. But the results of my detective work do not belong here. Even the most scandalous chronicle must have certain limits, within which everyone may freely exercise his own fantasy.

  The General had won a victory, incidentally the very first and the very last of his much-beribboned career. He instantly returned on the wings of his emanation to his fortress, and to the murky marital moods of his old lady. Julietta, too, had won a battle, the very first victory of her life. It wouldn’t be her las
t.

  The invited guests left the battlefield slowly—the uninvited ones even more slowly. The bartender listened at the door. What he heard was confusing, allowing no firm conclusions as to what was going on inside. Antonio had no better luck when he held his ear to the thin panel, but they both agreed that turbulent events were taking place behind it. But precisely what? If that pump would only stop whining! The two people inside weren’t dead, but they wouldn’t respond to their two employees’ knocking and shouting. Dead people are mute, whereas inside the ice-cream machinery room there was talking going on—and groaning and screaming besides. How odd; such noises do not belong in the copa of a bar. Civilization has provided other venues for such behavior, although often enough people regress to primitive habits and choose just about anywhere to gnash their teeth and wield their tomahawks.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Antonio, after a whispered conference with the bartender. “Honored guests, there has been a slight mishap. An unforeseen malfunction in our mechanical plant has forced the management to postpone our opening until next Saturday.”

  Just then Julietta returned to the scene and began to dance. She threw her little arms in the air and snapped her castanets. Music started up, and no one left for home. Antonio served his café negro from the kitchen over at the men’s club, and more and more people filled the terrace, including individuals who had no membership rights. Pepe, who ran a little fonda for donkey drivers and laborers next to the ice-cream bar, waited on the tables in his tavern and raked in the cash from customers who otherwise would never be seen drinking from his glasses. And Julietta danced without a stop. She whirled with flying skirts, approached the men with her hands suggestively at her hips, stamped her feet—a little-girl Argentinita, who today is probably vying with that great star, for I hear that in the meantime Julietta has become famous through appearances at theaters on the Spanish mainland.

  Her audience drove her on, olé, olé! But she needed no special encouragement to let out all the spunk and snappiness that the General had passed on to her, or the Valencian fire that was her mother’s legacy. Her improvised performance reached its climax when a young man pushed his way through the onlookers, took off his jacket and placed it on the ground in front of the dancing imp. He caught her in mid-twist, and like an infatuated dove began dancing in a circle with his dovelet. The audience applauded thunderously, for they had long since forgotten why they had come here. The boy was Pedro, who back then had the ambition to become what he has since indeed turned out to be, a painter known far beyond his native island. We shall meet up with him again often in these pages.

  María del Pilar, who wanted to deny this celebration to a child who longed for her father and for art, was treated by Zwingli to ice cream and love in their hermetically sealed love-nest. Amid moans and sighs and repeated invocations of the Virgin Mary, her spirits finally revived, though in a body that by now was black and blue all over, no different from that of her Samaritan partner. In active lovemaking, as in the art of forging steel, the tempering coloration can determine the quality of the product.

  At seven o’clock Julietta collapsed in mid-pirouette, and Pedro had to carry her over to the men’s club. A doctor quickly put her back on her feet. Attempts to resuscitate the Bar Valencia, on the other hand, were without success; the enterprise never survived the erotic crisis of its whilom founders. It died in labor, not unlike the Asra tribe of Northern Africa, of whom Heine once sang that they die while making love.

  Using Swiss francs, Beatrice later had a simple cross placed at this second gravesite with this pious caption: All debts are now forgiven.

  VII

  Having arrived at this chapter, my reader already knows more than we did at that night-time hour when we took leave of Anton Emmerich with Tschüss! and Ciao! And I was once again ahead of Beatrice in this lubricious chronicle by a few pages. These were pages that even the dirty-minded fugitive from Cologne considered too risqué to spread out in front of Beatrice. She noticed that her presence was tying his tongue, and so she absented herself for a while. Mr. Emmerich confessed to me straightaway that he was unsure how far her nerves could be stretched. But then he started right in again.

  These days Beatrice was letting herself be seen in public with that woman friend, arm in arm. In certain male circles a rumor had arisen that the city’s commerce in pleasure had undergone an augmentation; a newcomer of indeterminable yet indubitable pedigree had been observed on several occasions in Pilar’s company. No one was quite sure whether the novice was freelancing or, on the other hand, adding yet another exotic fragrance to the bouquet offered by the Casa Marguerita. Perhaps she had decided to reconnoiter the hotels first. People were making conjectures, and he, Emmerich, had learned that certain rich blimps had hired scouts to find out more about this female stranger. It was surmised that she hailed from Switzerland, where the laws of the Confederation permitted only indoor prostitution, but still, one had certain notions concerning Swiss women. And besides, this bird looked expensive…

  “Are they talking prices?” Vigoleis could not resist inquiring.

  With a snicker, Emmerich mentioned sums that the Mallorquin gentry would be prepared to place on the night table for my unsuspecting consort. Pretty chintzy, to use a favorite expression of those women whose market value was often haggled over shamelessly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world—which, in fact, it was. If Vigoleis had been forced to cough up cold cash for his Chosen One, he would have slapped down considerably more than these islanders, the ones who sat around on their sacks of money and on their club porches. And yet, if truth be told, he could never have matched even what those fatsoes were offering, not even with the discount that he could claim as a private household consumer—never in his life! As for the fact that he was not forced to enter such commerce, this had to do with a certain passage in the Epistle to the Corinthians, where Paul waxes as lyrical as a troubadour. And yet this selfsame Vigoleis, instead of being grateful for having a woman who commanded such a price with strangers—and an even higher fee according to his own reckoning—this same Vigoleis had turned his eyes to that other female, the bitch-in-quotation-marks. In spirit he had already committed adultery—if we can regard as a marriage the bond that tied him to his aforementioned consort.

  Adultery, committed already in spirit? Truly in spirit? I wonder whether the Church (I’m mentioning this out of respect for Pilar), having set forth in its canonical regulations concerning marriage the neatest and most meticulous differentiations between spirit and matter, would grant Vigoleis absolution for a spiritual transgression against matrimonial fidelity when, one fine day, he found himself alone in the house with the lusty siren, and then proceeded to do what he didn’t end up doing at all. For what did he do by not doing it? That would fascinate me, too, as his sometime double. For as far as I know, when it comes to women, he is as shy as Monsieur Henri-Frédéric Amiel himself.

  Judging from what little we already know about Pilar, but also from the abundance of information to be found between our lines, it was probably this woman who had her mind set on action, who couldn’t wait until her new victim was maneuvered in flagrantem. I can, of course, be mistaken, and where are mistakes more to be expected than in the labyrinths of the heart? What is more, if the paths inside this maze are slippery, a man is bound to end up flat on his kisser.

  Everything would indicate that the events involving Vigoleis and Pilar occurred in a manner very similar to the biblical story of Joseph, who, contrary to God’s wishes, declined to sleep with his master’s wife. I make this allusion solely with regard to the outer circumstances. Vigoleis’ inward thoughts are as yet unexplored territory; and anyway, our biblical interpreter of dreams, purchased by Egyptians for twenty silver shekels, has never allowed anyone to look very deeply into his soul, not even his voluble biographer, Thomas Mann. His master’s wife is said to have done her utmost to cause the foreigner to yield to her concupiscence. Thus at her words, “Come, lie with me!�
� we are allowed to peer into the very bottom of her heart. I assume that Pilar made a similar entreaty to Vigoleis, taking him by the scruff of the neck, as it were, and pulling him down on the pallet of her Eternal Spring. Whereupon this fellow with the two souls (alas!) in one breast will have departed in haste, leaving his cloak in her hands. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  “It wasn’t at all…”—at this point Vigoleis begins to speak in person, to prevent any further spinning out of legends at the site of the evil deed. It wasn’t at all the way you think it was. I’ll grant you that I am a master of the botched opportunity, whether it be with women or with books written by someone else. It’s also true that I’ve made a big mistake in the century to be born in, and in the blueprint of my second sight. But that woman Pilar, who had already had God knows how many gentlemen beneath her little golden slippers—she was not going to escape me. On the afternoon in question all signs were propitious for my ambitions, my animal curiosity, my comparative scientific bent, and my literary thirst for material from the world of genuine human experience—which my imagination has a habit of playing tricks on in any case. All that is clear. What remains foggy is how I found my way into her bedroom. Between the vestibule and the scene of my sinful conquest stood the dark hallway. And that is where we met, for I had awaited just the moment when we would bump into each other’s arms. Her mouth was pressed to mine—what’s the big deal? The hall was narrow, and then my hand rested on her breast; the cool fabric of her albornoz parted; surely the wearer of this garment helped out a little, and as my hand came to rest on her nakedness I began to see stars before my eyes—in the darkness an altogether natural phenomenon, just as the entire sequence of events I am narrating here had nothing whatsoever to do with supernatural forces. Besides, all that was happening was as unoriginal as Nature itself, which, as we all know, must repeat itself over and again in order to remain immortal. I began to sense more and more urgently the wish that the remainder of her clothing might descend as well, and in a trice we were in her room, jostling against her bedstead. The word “magnificent” flashed through my mind, “you are magnificent on your extended récamier.” Perhaps not the entire world, but certainly Vigoleis will henceforth borrow your name and call the pallet of love a pilarière. Just let me get to work. First, all these buttons. It’s taking an eternity! You foxy woman, you’ve sewn them on just millimeters apart! Underneath her peignoir she was—well now, what was she? She was the goddess I had been yearning for, right down to her stockings, which were held in place by violet ruffles.