World literature is rich in depictions of two people meeting in the straits of evil opportunity, performing what nature has prescribed for them, as if they were simply flies or squirrels. Poets have exploited the scene, and some of the greatest prose treats of this eternally unique topic. Just leaf through the canon with this in mind, and you will soon hit upon the suggestive line speaking of “broken flowers and grass” and the lava of love, surging over page after page. Albrecht Schaeffer, through all his years of creative activity, had a constantly inventive pen when it came to making two people into one. When I first read his Helianth, I waxed breathless in the chapter entitled “Ecstasy”: Georg scoots up a ladder and enters Anna’s room, whereupon neither the writer nor the couple wastes any time. They go all the way: “He heard her moan softly. He felt pain himself. He was confused. But then arrived the instant of inchoate sobbing. Suddenly he was urged on by some invisible giant fist towards mad spasms of lust,” etc.
“The instant of inchoate sobbing”—superb! Experiencing tingles of bliss, I lowered the book. I meditated on this inchoate instant, I let it pass before me; I relished it. The instant became a whole minute, then another and yet another. The couple was already finished, Georg, arising from his depletion and torpor, had long since jumped into his duds and scrammed. But I kept on savoring that instant, I re-read the passage until all of a sudden—the magic burst. What I was reading was a totally banal sentence. I heard a voice urging haste: “Come on, my friend, get on with your inchoate sobbing! On the double!” and I closed the book. If ever you take a word with familiar meaning and repeat it several times out loud, it loses its sense; it says no more, it becomes hollow noise. In just the same way, you can repeat a line of verse or prose to the point of jibber-jabber, and all that remains is pure kitsch. My “inchoate sobbing” had turned into kitsch, just as love itself will, if you film it in slow motion.
What I was sensing there next to my Pilar’s pilarière, a few moments prior to the crucial one, would, if written down word for word, yield some highly dubious literature. Even in its primordial, pre-verbal state it was problematical enough, but—it was real!
I was still attempting to strip away the last mundane trappings from my goddess, when the Divinity Herself bent down, grasped her right stocking, and drew forth a dagger. I shall be brief, and shall refrain from creating steamy depictions out of this confession of my weakness of the flesh, which was to end in cowardice of body and soul. Otherwise my chronicler might be accused of pornographic intentions, a charge that has not even spared the Song of Solomon. What Pilar held in her hands was a blade of finest Toledo manufacture. She stood there like Charlotte Corday, ready to bless the hot bath before I stepped in. Never would I have imagined a stiletto at such a breathtaking location on the female body! “Breathtaking” is in fact the single appropriate word here, doubly significant in this context. For one thing, the sight of her beauty choked me up; I became almost numb, as if I were standing before the portrait of a solemn, monumental Madonna. And during these inchoate instants of impending suffocation, the tiny remaining gulp of air that might have rescued me also vanished when I saw the glint of steel before my eyes. The knife had caught a beam of light that had crept in through a knothole in the shutter to take part in this biblical tableau. The thought of murder flashed through my mind: a crime of passion! She wants your blood, she’s crying for your blood! She wants revenge for having kept her unsatiated for so long! She will make love to you, and then plunge the blade up to the hilt between your ribs. Yet this shimmering Fury could also dispatch you before any thought of climax. Would there be a more beautiful death for a melancholy poetaster?
Before I could answer this question to my own satisfaction, I myself turned biblical. Like the Egyptian Joseph, I fled, but in somewhat variant fashion: rather than leave my cloak in the hands of the chippy, I slipped through her door holding her albornoz, got entangled in the garment, and would almost have collapsed in the hall if a benign spirit had not lifted me up and guided me through the dark passageway, one breathless step ahead of my potential murderess. Great heavens, I have barely escaped the treacherous needle of her unrequited love! You have viewed her nakedness, Vigoleis, and have renounced it. You must die!
Thus far, Vigoleis’ own account of these happenings. His appearance here has been just as naked as that of a poet within his own stanzas, which is perhaps the most blatant showcase for human exhibitionism. If questioned whether he still believes that Pilar lured him to her bed in order to get rid of him, he will be in a position to reply that just a few weeks into his Spanish sojourn, he had familiarized himself with the habits of several women. Pilar was simply about to place that avenging blade on her little night table, so as to allow no sharp foreign object to come between herself and her taciturn purveyor of lust. Permit me to add that this episode’s hasty denouement diverges in one further respect from the trial of the chaste biblical dreamer: Potiphar threw Joseph in prison, whereas Vigoleis got off scot-free—for the time being. Later, he was to feel the humiliated woman’s vengeance sorely enough. A separate chapter will recount how María del Pilar showed Vigoleis the truth of a saying, still controversial among theologians, that has long since found its way from the Bible into sensationalist literature in the grand manner: “Vengeance is mine!”
But now back to the question, juris utriusque, that has necessitated an excursus leading us very close to union with a Divinity: did Vigoleis commit adultery in spirit? And this brings us, in strict consequence, to a second question: how, afterwards, did he stand before his Beatrice, who, after all, was not some arbitrary choice of partner who could be casually cheated on with “another woman.” To be honest about it, our hero didn’t “stand” before her at all, but was lying on the pilarière in their own room when Beatrice returned from a walk through the city with Zwingli. She wanted to rent a piano, and had tried out several instruments, but now she came home to some atonal music in ultrasonic registers: what on earth had been going on? Because the apartment alcove was not a tailor’s shop, the albornoz lying in a heap on the floor spoke the expected volumes, whose pages we shall simply leave uncut. A clever reader can snatch something of their contents by rolling a leaf or two into a tube, and peering through. It is not false modesty that prevents me from employing a page-cutter. It’s just that my reader, too, ought to exert himself a bit and apply his imagination. Such cooperative effort can increase the pleasure of reading, as I have myself experienced with others, and engender a certain sense of comradeship that can sustain a spirit of exploratory enterprise all the way to the finis operis. Since these pages of mine contain so much talk of coupling and conjugality and cohabitation, perhaps I may be permitted to beg my reader quite unequivocally for a kind of connubial understanding.
In the text I’m speaking of there is one little term that easily stands out because it is printed in bold italics. After twenty years, reproduced verbatim from the source, it now reappears here in these jottings of Vigoleis as a singular indication that, at the time, did not fail to make an impression. That term is: mal de France.
Every Spaniard carries this disease, but for centuries now, it hasn’t harmed these people at all. They have become immune to the dreaded poison, just as experienced apiarists do with bee-stings. Entire sequences of generations have brought this about by dint of selfless, indefatigable preventive therapy. Their motto has not been “After us, the deluge!” but, more fraternally and humanely, “After us, immunity!” Still, whoever arrives from abroad as yet unstung can get pounced upon by the bacilli, just as flies search out meat in the marketplace stalls. In Cologne I attended a course on the dangers and problems of venereal infection. Right after World War I courses of that kind, along with related medical examinations, were required for students of all disciplines at all German universities. At the time Germany was thought to be the most seriously threatened country in Europe, and as a good European in Nietzsche’s sense, I washed my hands religiously. It won’t be my fault, I told myself, if the Decli
ne of the West is going to happen on account of this disease. I became a syphillophobe, and came to think of myself as already corroded, in fact already eaten up. As gladly as I might often wish to venture beyond the Stygian stream—still, please, not this way! Experts were speaking of the devil, and so I became careful, or if you will, just plain scared. If it was to be imbecility for me, I would prefer to have incurred it as the result of a poetic parthenogenesis.
Is it any wonder, then, that Beatrice’s mention of this term electrified me? I flew to the kitchen and began scrubbing my hands like a surgeon before an invasive procedure. Using my feet, I dragged the albornoz up to the door of that dangerous carrier of microbes. Let her pick it up and don it again over her seductive leprosy, I shall never again touch the one or the other!
There are certain kinds of window pane through which somebody standing outside a room cannot see in, while those inside can watch everything that goes on outside. Pilar was that sort of thing: a distorting glass, an enticing toxic blossom, hemlock, a center of contagion and a diabolical swamp, a highly evolved plantlet of the family droseraceae, commonly and eloquently known as Venus’ fly-trap—and Vigoleis was the insect whose juices the goddess was going to devour! It was enough to make one speechless. Meals presented a delicate problem. Was it safe to eat off her dishes, with her forks and spoons? Did it make any sense to wipe them off surreptitiously with the tablecloth, as we did in railroad-station restaurants? Perhaps we should place on the table a sterilizing apparatus, just like an electric toaster, and put on face masks and rubber gloves. And then? Then there would be a public fracas. Contagious persons get very sensitive if they notice that other persons have noticed what nobody was supposed to notice. Pilar the Witch realized soon enough that Vigoleis, the fugitive from her bed, always washed his hands whenever she crossed his path. Haha, this little coward is forever washing his hands, in the stupid innocence I was unable to rob him of! Just wait, I’ve taken care of many another, and I’ll get to you in my own sweet time.
“Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord. That is an audacious figure of speech, and it has often given the theologians much to think about. They have come up with an erudite term for the obvious ascription of lowly human feelings to the Divinity; they call it “anthropopathy.” But with God we can still negotiate; we can try to change His mind. People ask Him in prayer to keep His eye on their concerns, to send down in the Great Lottery the number we own one-tenth of; to destroy an enemy of ours or to help us pass an exam. If I believed in God, I wouldn’t care to sully a feeling of that kind with commercial transactions, but that is of course a private matter. Pilar, who likewise would eventually take vengeance, couldn’t be negotiated with, because her emotions were not the subject of learned semantics. They defied any and all systematizing, and could never be lifted out of their natural urgency by means of complex conceptualizations. For this reason she smote Vigoleis, sending him from the frying pan directly into the fire.
The first to pay the price was Zwingli. To be sure, he was the one who had brought to their house these clean relatives of his, with their firm views on hygiene. But beyond that, he was not responsible for my fears, and even less responsible for the term Beatrice had used to send back to her bed of straw the Cinderella we were supposed to be improving and educating. Once Helvecio’s bedtime pet, now this animal began sucking the juices from his body. He rapidly lost weight, and neither omelets à la Général, wine, nor fancy aphrodisiacs were of any help. He turned into a rattling cadaver of love. If he refused to obey on the pilarière, he got stomped on like a bale of peat. Their bedroom was gradually transformed into an erotic clinic. Scattered around lay packets and vials marked with notations about optimal dosages, but none of this helped a bit. More than once, I sat at his bedside offering him pious consolation, and recommending certain home-baked nostrums once employed by a student friend in Cologne who pursued life in all its manifestations. I failed to mention, of course, that the youth in question had been unable to control his progressive deterioration. But Zwingli just laughed at these bits of wisdom from a bookworm’s almanac. The “bitch” would never succeed in placing him six feet under. One day, he appeared at table for warmed-over omelet missing his magic nail, and I took that to be an evil omen. I noticed it right away, for that is how visibly this otherwise insignificant horny accretion determined the man’s entire bearing. He couldn’t have looked more fully disrobed if he had worn a beard and suddenly appeared clean-shaven. He noticed my glance in the direction of his talisman—well, it had broken off in the heat of the fray, just another month and it would be back in all its magical prowess; he’d just have to wait things out sans horn. I could not rid myself of the dreadful feeling that he would now go swiftly downhill. And we had not even reached the portals of all the palaces where we were planning to introduce his lover by means of our new-style art. The only progress we had achieved was the piano that a few days from now would resound in the vestibule, to Julietta’s delight.
As committed to two-fisted techniques as Pilar was by reason of her profession, when it came to sating her instinct for revenge, she chose other methods. Her second victim was Julietta, who now got slapped around at least once every day, causing her to scream like a sow tied to the carriage wheel while getting ever so slowly stabbed in the throat, a practice still quite common in Iberian climes. Her mother differed from the long-knived butchers only in that she screamed along with her victim, so that an outsider could never tell who was threatening whose life. We knew, of course, and Zwingli knew also, but so little was left in him of Don Helvecio, the Citizen of the Confederation, that he was unable to take up arms against this violation of human rights. His attempts in this direction ceased abruptly after his first fatherly objection, which he meant to sound like a peal of thunder. Heavy objects got thrown to where he was standing; if he hadn’t ducked, a motion he fortunately had already been trained in, his handsome male visage would have suffered some damage. Pilar’s throwing skills were scarcely up to the legendary Balearic hurling tradition—but then again, she was not a descendant of those famous Balearic Slingers.
Julietta henceforth preferred to go dancing on the street, rather than serve as scapegoat for her mother’s erotomania. Yet whenever she got caught doing her precocious turtle-dove turns, the little golden slippers came at her more pitilessly than ever. One such occasion made Zwingli conclude that things had gone just too far, and so he resolved to interfere. If he had acted with swift determination, there would have ensued a three-way bout of fisticuffs. As it happened however, he gave the infuriated woman reason to hurl an unusually massive object at him, the third member of this family triangle, as a signal that he had no right to interfere in her pedagogical methods. She selected a flatiron. Zwingli ducked, thereby keeping his attractive head safe and sound for loftier ambitions. The iron followed a trajectory calculable according to the laws of ballistics, shattered the apartment window, soared across the Street of Solitude, produced a more distant sound of splintering glass, and finally a hard thump. The projectile had zoomed into the Main Post Office, where it came to rest with its sharp point piercing the desk-top of Don Fernando, the Chief Secretary. The following day it was delivered by the district letter carrier at the routine hour, bearing a label that said, “Refused. Return to Sender.” Don Fernando, whose acquaintance we shall make shortly, was the author of this little stunt.
The piano seemed to bring salvation. Peace returned to our bel-étage. Bach, Beethoven—
Pilar listened with the air of a connoisseur. She soon learned to sit in such a way as to suggest profound comprehension and rapt attention with inner and outer ear. If she could strike such a pose in the palaces and music salons, Don Helvecio was bound to be gratified. She would, he said, be staying right on course for the role his hopes were shaping for her, and which she herself was aiming toward. Just don’t applaud, Pilar, even if you think the piece is over. It’s those long pauses that reveal whether a listener is familiar with the score, so don’t make a fool o
f yourself! No, Pilar would not applaud too soon, for the simple reason that she never applauded. Her own profession, which deeply unites performing artist and appreciative client, meant that she was accustomed to the noiseless morendo that always follows the grand final chord.
Beatrice began to practice. Every day she sat for seven hours at the instrument with a tense, contorted facial expression that was enough to cause fear and trembling. And Pilar feared and trembled. Up to now she had experienced only pianolas, and the bar ladies who would tickle the keys if you tossed them a coin. Here she encountered rather different performance standards, and the whole thing was no less weird and demeaning than watching people compare two texts in foreign languages. And all this under her own roof! No more playing up for little Argentinita’s dancing. For a while this state of affairs reunited mother and daughter—a dangerous, because unpredictable, affiliation. The brief one-acters staged in the dormitoire had little calming effect on the irritable woman. On the contrary, the wilder things went on in there—or at least appeared to go on—the nastier the lady snarled in the interim phases; she snapped at anyone who approached her. The atmosphere of jungle and cave became more and more stifling. I caught a sharp whiff of game whenever this lascivious panther strode past me amid the strains of Beatrice’s music. When will she raise her paw, extrude those claws, and tear off a strip of Vigoleis’ cowardly flesh? One day Julietta said to me, “Vigo, watch out. Mamá doesn’t like you any more. And if I were Mamá I wouldn’t like you either!”
The Island of Second Sight Page 16
