Oh la la! Daughters who speak their mother’s language! Vigoleis, gird on your rapier and stand your ground with weapon in hand!
Now it was impossible to remove Julietta from the streets and the Donkey Square in front of the fonda. Spies were set out to warn of Mother’s approach; that was exciting, and increased the pleasure of the forbidden dancing. The child had long ago stopped clinging to me with the affection of our military alliance in the General’s room, a bond that I had thought was a life-and-death matter between us. But pacts exist to be broken, for otherwise nobody would need to arrange them. Her mother didn’t like it when we were often together. She even made certain remarks on this score, which I interpreted as stemming from her lack of education and psychological acumen, until Julietta clued me in: Mamá was jealous.
You see? Our setup was rapidly threatening to go to wrack and ruin. Beatrice now accompanied her reluctant lady friend less and less often on her jaunts through the city. Her musical instrument had now gained the upper hand. Incidentally, the rich geezers’ mutterings didn’t bother Beatrice in the slightest. In private, this sort of thing amused us both, though I no doubt got more fun out of it than the woman directly concerned. Pilar, however, gave it her own interpretation. If, in addition, she had known that Anton Emmerich had related to us her picturesque life history, there would have been a massacre.
A new ray of hope arrived in the form of a public announcement that three of Spain’s most renowned bullfighters were coming to Palma. We decided unanimously to reserve prime seats on the shady side for the five of us. I as a neophyte—Beatrice had already been to corridas in southern France—was to be introduced to this national art by witnessing the likes of Lalanda, Ortega, and Barrera. For days we spoke of nothing else. I soon learned the entire untranslatable vocabulary. I knew that the bulls came out of the ganadieras; I was told what cabestros are, and what a picador, a chulo, or a mono was supposed to do; that there were cowardly and “tired” bulls; and much more. Julietta latched onto me again. She was tireless in explaining and miming for me the various phases of the spectacle. Zwingli, too, began lecturing me, and for a while there he was once again in one of his elements. I had to shout Olé! every time Julietta impaled her foster father from the standing position, al quiebro. Pilar contented herself with the role of audience—a ravishing audience, by God, in her towering tortoise-shell comb, the precious silk mantilla (a gift from the prelate) cascading from it, and her ivory fan, which she wielded with a style inimitable even for a Spanish señora.
The ice was broken; on all sides jollity prevailed once more, even in the recesses of Vigoleis’ being that Beatrice’s ominous pronouncement had up to now kept under sterile quarantine. It won’t be all that bad, he thought. But then with the very first approach… Pilar sensed the onset of spring like a June bug in early March. All her nastiness melted away. Her features brightened. For an entire week Julietta was spared humiliating chastisement, and both of their noses, mother’s like daughter’s, began to sniff around like guinea pigs on a new bed of straw. Even Zwingli began peeking forth out of his bag of woes. The nail on his pinky had grown back sufficiently to require the silver thimble as protection against doubly painful breakage. It had still to achieve its full magical length, but not by much.
On commission from an illustrated magazine, I wrote a sizeable travel article on Mallorca. Zwingli provided me with source material, for up to now my familiarity with the island was pretty much restricted to a single house interior. The editors accepted my article, but requested illustrations to accompany it, preferably line drawings. For this, too, Zwingli was ready at hand: Knoll, better known by his press-artist’s name of “tiroteo,” would supply the visual material for my reportage. We decided to look him up in Barcelona, a trip of two days’ length. The travelers: Zwingli and Vigoleis. At this news Pilar hit the ceiling as if she had been gored. Her tarantella lasted the better part of an hour. She didn’t extract her dagger, although the crazed cutie flailed about with her arms, and I imagined more than once that she would reach beneath her skirt and dispatch one or the other of us. Jealousy is a passion that bids no quarter—there are no puns or witticisms in Spanish for such an overwhelming emotion. The battle is fought differently: I’ll cut your feet! I’ll slice your heels, both of you, and then see if you can traipse off to Barcelona!
Well, nobody sliced our heels. But nobody left on a trip to Barcelona, either. Julietta offered to go along with me, since she had noticed that without an expert guide I could get lost even in a tiny village. This suggestion enraged Pilar even more. I tried to calm her by proposing that the best solution would be for her and me to make the journey and leave the two siblings under Julietta’s protection. A terrifying glance shot at me from the implacable woman’s eyes. It revealed murderous intent and sexual lust at one and the same time, and it would have skewered me alive, had it not been for the mitigating effect of those long flies’ legs on her lashes.
A telegram brought our travel plans to naught. Beatrice’s mother had closed her blind eyes forever.
For a week Beatrice kept to her bed with a high fever, nursed by Pilar with rare solicitude. Pilar was good at this type of ministration, something I never would have expected of her. Zwingli remained unmoved. I got the impression that his mother’s passing simply hadn’t reached him yet, for he was anything but a cold person. Now that peace had broken out, although it was of course an armed peace, he took advantage of the new situation by cherishing his leisure. He began frequenting the Príncipe more often. In a hotel, even when business is brisk, you can always locate a bed somewhere to park your body on. He always returned from these “inspections” strengthened in body and spirit. Julietta made the streets her exclusive home; we hardly saw her any more. I myself stuck to the apartment, though still lacking the private study that Zwingli had promised me when we first arrived.
Eros was banished from the Street of Solitude, and with him the General from the other island. The oil in the frying pan, which had so often mirrored the renowned officer’s second visage, turned rancid. Only the fly in the vestibule remained the same. But since one fly resembles any other fly as a fly resembles a fly, perhaps it was a different fly after all. In Spain anything is possible.
Beatrice recovered quickly from the blow. What gave her the most anguish was to have been so distant from her mother during her final weeks, caught up in involuntary adventures that one might call uncomfortable. All of us felt that death had brought release, a thought that caused the woman most directly affected by its occurrence to downplay her own personal concerns. She was further plagued by the idea of having failed to accomplish during the period in question what she had set out to achieve with Zwingli. His own life’s path had yet to be smoothed out; to get this done, someone would have to come along with a heavier earth-roller than we ourselves could pull. And to tell the truth, I had become a useless draft horse.
Time, said Beatrice, will take care of everything. First her poor brother’s debts would have to be paid off, and then she would see what could be done for his physical and mental well-being. Beatrice as an apostle of salvation—why not? People have made worse mistakes about their own capabilities. It was true that our exchequer was beginning to dwindle badly; soon I would be reaching into my pocket like Zwingli, and coming up with nothing. We would have to lay out considerable sums for gas and electricity, now that workmen had come by one day to shut off both utilities. Several print shops presented their bills and were promptly paid. Vigoleis thought for a second. With that money you could have published your poems in a bibliophile edition, along with a blurb sheet composed by Zwingli, and in no time at all you would be as famous in the literary world as Pilar was in the demi-monde of the island. But fate does not permit such meddling in its affairs, least of all on the part of versifiers who take their greatest delight in watching their works go up in flames. The lyrical effusions of the scribbler in question had nearly all turned to ashes; they were but dust, and unto dust they did return. Some fe
w of them tried to escape this earthly auto-da-fé; they set out for other parts, pleaded with editors and publishers for the right of asylum, got shooed away, and after extended wanderings returned dirty, tattered, and maimed to their progenitor in the Street of Solitude, the scene of agonies and anguish. These stanzas could have had much to say concerning affronts, insults, kicks administered in arrogance, the executioners’ sardonic laughter, and so forth—but they remained silent. They were discreet; at most they just shrugged their shoulders as if to say, “We’re back! Nobody likes us!” Occasionally the Main Post Office in Palma took pity on these rejected children and allowed them to disappear amidst the frightful welter of confusion that prevailed in that decrepit building. They never resurfaced. With human beings, the legal condition of permanent disappearance used to commence when the missing person would have reached three score and ten years, the statistically assumed point of life’s termination. But what is the assumed point of termination for a poem? When must posterity declare Vigoleis’ missing verses as non-existent, as “disappeared without a trace”? This is a question that will be answered in near-miraculous fashion in a later chapter. When we arrive at that point, my reader will be advised to recall Pilar’s blasphemous plagiarism: “Vengeance is mine!”
One extraordinarily fine day, Pilar and Zwingli had finally attained the moment when they could pass through the city of Palma in all directions without fear of being waylaid by a creditor, getting yanked inside his shop and then confronted with the debit side of their existence. The soft cushion that, according to the German proverb, a clear conscience places beneath our head, ought to have benefitted Zwingli’s slumber. But other demons arrived to plague this condemned man’s nights.
Our stockpile of pesetas was rapidly melting away, and so we avoided larger capital outlays. Beatrice regarded the healing of her kid brother’s economic condition as a matter of highest priority. As I have mentioned before, she hates any kind of dirt, be it in the form of a speck of dust on the piano keyboard cover, or a smudge on the neck of someone close to her. Such grimy deposits were, by the way, regularly removed, and further cleanups occurred daily. Thus the little gold bracelet on Zwingli’s left wrist no longer had to serve the purpose of a leather strap around the axle of a bicycle wheel; once again it played an aesthetic role as pure ornament, although it would be incorrect to think of its wearer as a dandy. The bracelet became him, in the same natural way that a nose ring becomes a Papuan or a golden ear chain becomes a Volendam fisherman. Just how Beatrice imagined the installation of an internal sewage treatment system for her brother, she did not reveal to me. She was not inexperienced at this sort of thing, she said, and I ought simply to let her do what she wanted to. I readily obeyed. She headed off toward her goal with the determination of a migrating bird on its way to a remote destination. Any ornithologist can tell you that every year countless thousands of birds end up crashing into lighthouses; nowadays such hazards are illuminated faintly from the outside and surrounded by safety nets. Beatrice had not reckoned with Pilar, our own gleaming pillar. Nor had Vigoleis.
I had sufficient publishers’ fees outstanding to keep us alive until the guarantee for an enormous honorarium arrived from the film company in Berlin. But no money found its way to us, neither via the bank nor via the mails. Soon we would be high and dry. Had I been blowing soap bubbles?
There came a dawn like any other: the same sun, the same fly circling around the fleck of sunlight in the vestibule, the same heartache at still being among the living, the same hunger for stupendous literary renown, the same Beatrice practicing her instrument. Yet in one respect this day was different. Beatrice began practicing quite early, explaining that she had to work through a particularly difficult passage. I had long since become used to the idiosyncrasies of practicing pianists, and thanked my lucky stars that Beatrice didn’t sing or play the alpenhorn, for in that case I would have taken to the streets with Julietta. So I stayed home, even on this particular morning—a morning that, by Spanish standards, was still in its diapers. I communed with a medieval mystic, worked a bit on my posthumous literary works, conjugated a few irregular verbs with mutating consonants, and wrote a picaresque letter. Time had of course not stood still while Beatrice and I each practiced on different instruments. But I first became aware of this when Pilar, with elevated arm, strode through the room balancing her matinal greeting. Beatrice didn’t even notice her; one of her piano fingers was misbehaving.
Later Zwingli came limping in. He too had been practicing, and his legs were misbehaving. Such a workaday family, my reader will be thinking, in which each member crams away separately, riding this or that hobby horse with cries of “giddyap!” and “steady there!” and “whoa!”—trotting off toward some goal or other, with a feedbag that gets emptier all the time. Zwingli’s goal on this particular morning, the one that began so inauspiciously, was obvious: eggs, sausage, and wine. And where was that chaibe Julietta, who was supposed to go fetch him this stuff? Zwingli had once been what Don Darío liked so much about him, and he had reason to believe he would soon have to be that special something again. Julietta was more eager than usual. She realized what faced her if things went wrong again in there behind closed doors. She’d prefer, she said saucily, a mother who was hitting the bottle. I had given her some money (Zwingli couldn’t quite locate any of his own); “she” was in the kitchen, and, well, within the family you just don’t bite on individual pesetas. So step on it, girl, this is a rush job. The girl stuck out her tongue and vanished. Everything was happening smoothly.
After another hour Beatrice closed the cover on the keyboard and lit a cigarette—a familiar gesture of hers. She said she was gradually getting her fingers under control. But performance in public, even in front of a tiny private audience, was as yet out of the question. For such things she was still much too rusty; it would be better for her to start taking lessons again. Zwingli told her of a local musical priest, our later friend Mosén Juan María Tomás. The foreign colony on the island, he explained, was enchanted by the good reverend’s a capella choir.
Julietta was late. Instead of the hoped-for omelets, the two of them ate whatever they could find in the pantry—which wasn’t much in the summertime, because they had been forced to sell the icebox. In any case it wasn’t what both of them needed most. Pilar’s nostrils quivered. With Zwingli, what quivered was the hand that was re-sprouting the magic wand. Beatrice, too, was quivering, but this was a residual tremor from her musical acrobatics. Vigoleis was the only one who, on this forenoon, got the tremors in anticipation of what was about to happen. He suddenly developed the gift for second sight: boy oh boy, if Julietta doesn’t hurry back with the necessary provisions, things are going to get very hot in here. Pilar trembled more and more. Zwingli also lost control, and they began a violent verbal exchange that culminated with a saucer of red marmalade, called membrillo, getting aimed at Zwingli’s skull. Zwingli forgot to duck, and thus the confection ended up sticking to his face. Lucky enough for him, for it might well have been the ceramic side that struck him, in which case some blood would have been shed, and not just jam. For us, this was a signal that Pilar was declaring an end to the meal. We departed discreetly. Hasta luego! Ciao! Tschüss!
Spats are the worst thing that can happen inside four walls. It’s better to experience a stopped-up drain, a burst water pipe, or a smoky oven! Such things can be repaired. Spats are irreparable. We were just about to board a tram for Ca’s Català to enjoy some open-air peace at the shore, when we heard some commotion. A bunch of wild kids were after a girl, Julietta of course, who once again was raising dust on the square. She coursed back and forth with huge dancing leaps, swinging her straw shopping basket over her head. With a daring fling she suddenly tossed it over the heads of her half-pint audience into the dirt. I went up to Julietta with the intention of scolding her. As soon as she saw me, she leaped up and embraced me with such force that both of us almost tumbled into the dust. She called me “Don Vigo,” impressi
ng the assembled urchins with her foreign acquaintance. I asked her why she hadn’t taken the groceries home. Her impudent answer was, “Whaddya mean?” Those snots over there had filched them from her—and she pointed to her swarm of fans, a horde that was capable of anything. She just didn’t dare to go back to Mom without the stuff. The two of them back home, she said, should go ahead without the usual tortilla. “Well of all the…,” I thought, and was sent into further shock. I gave her some money, told her to go shopping again for what the gang had stolen from her, not to forget the wine that the kids had swilled, and to get home just as fast as her legs would take her. With a rapacity that was quite out of character, she grabbed the money, brandished it in front of the kids who were watching her every move, and then heaved it among them. They scrambled like cats for the loot, a sight that Julietta seemed to enjoy and that held me breathless. Then the girl began dancing again. The dust clouded upwards to shroud the scene from my sight.
Beatrice had witnessed my defeat from a distance. We gave up the idea of a stroll at the seashore. We went slowly down to the harbor, where we saw the snazzy yacht belonging to a French billionaire specializing in smells—Coty, if my memory serves me right. What a gorgeous ship! Oh, wouldn’t it be grand to go aboard and set sail! We saw some people on deck, no doubt millionaires one and all. I was overcome with amazement and adventurous fantasies. Beatrice remained calm and sober. She had already had her experiences on oaken decks such as these. Once, for several months, she had accompanied millionaires from ex-royal families on board a gilded ark like this one, along and across the azure depths of the Adriatic. Never again, not even for twice the wage! She would prefer to drift along, rudderless on a naked raft, with her Vigoleis! Bolstered by this bright prospect, we returned home. It was a hot day, like all the days here. In the evening the wind subsided, and this meant that the night was going to be unbearable. Since the day we arrived, not a drop of rain had fallen. A remarkable experience for people who, back in Amsterdam, had often been confined to quarters by deluges.
The Island of Second Sight Page 17
