The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Everyone loved Josefa, even old English spinsters and even Beatrice, who normally kept in check her feelings for fellow humans. And yet this cook had enemies under the Count’s roof against whom she was defenseless. She had two enemies: Beppo the monkey and Lorico, the Inca cockatoo.

  Beppo pestered this roly-poly girl. He leaped on her shoulders from behind and groped lasciviously down between her smoke-cured breasts to steal her pipe, a move at which he was sometimes successful. With such an incubus on her back, Josefa could have earned more money in a traveling circus than here in this anarchic island hostelry, where the clients could watch the entertaining spectacle for free. Of course, Josefa hurled choice epithets at Beppo, but the colorful terms she used were not authentic curses, for she did not permit sacred names to pass her lips. Thus she always lost out, and always got pelted by the screeching Beppo with all sorts of objects that weren’t nailed down. As if to excuse her defeats, Josefa would say that if only the monkey didn’t look like somebody’s kid, she would long since have slaughtered him with the big kitchen knife that she whetted every morning on the stone staircase in the courtyard. During this process she was regularly spied upon from up in the palm tree by the crafty Beppo. Too meagerly endowed with human sentiments after all, the sacrosanct temple animal was of course unaware of her sacrificial yearnings. With all due respect for Josefa’s man-fearing Christian attitude, it must be said that even without such inhibitions she never would have skinned this monkey alive, simply because he was her master’s favorite pet.

  Her conflict with the cockatoo was of a different sort, although here, also, human-all-too-human impulses broke through the barriers of animalhood. Lorico had a loose tongue. His former owner, a Portuguese ship captain, had taught him two words that probably meant the whole world to someone who had nothing but water and sky around him for weeks on end: porra and puta. With these vocables the bird assaulted everyone who approached his perch, each time raising his red and yellow crest feathers as if emitting these words in a state of highest excitement. Not even Count Hermann Keyserling, who on one of his visits to the island inspected the palace of his renegade fellow nobleman, was able to discern whether Lorico was enunciating his words in rage or in jest. Years later he remembered this bird when I mentioned in his presence the phenomenon of animal speech, thinking that I might offer him some novel zoological perspectives for his work on The Cosmos of Meaning.

  Josefa was hated by this Inca blood, and she hated the bird too, and thus the animosity was mutual. The bird’s reasons must remain obscure, but the cook’s were an open book. Josefa took offense at one word in the educated bird’s vocabulary—a term that is probably the one most frequently used in the whole Spanish language: the little disyllable puta. In Spain, nothing at all will work without this word, simply because things will not work without the thing that the word signifies. The more often our distinguished anarchist cheated on his even higher-born spouse with the types thus signified, all the less did Josefa tolerate the use of such colloquialisms in his house, where she went about her work with the touching loyalty of servants who often are more solicitous of their employers’ reputation than the employers are themselves. It goes without saying that she also had personal reasons for wishing to gag the bird. Josefa was a chaste person, and her primness was in no way vitiated by the acrid smoke from the noxious shag that at times wafted up out of the crater of her bosom. That nasty word puta wounded her sense of shame just as severely as did the monkey’s habit of letting his hands rove around in imitation of human lechery.

  With the other term that he learned in the Portuguese ship captain’s language school, Lorico was rather less conspicuous among Spaniards. A Portuguese Josefa would have wrung his neck on the spot. In Spanish, porra can mean walking-cane, truncheon, boasting, obfuscation, thunder, and several more things, but never anything that one wouldn’t utter in the presence of the most innocent of young female souls. In Portuguese, on the other hand, porra is not presentable. The Portuguese vernacular, by means of an embarrassing process of localization, has confined the word’s meaning almost exclusively to its etymological root. Lorico was not a linguist in any academic sense; he used the term in its Lusitanian definition, just as it had been cherished by the old salt who knew his way around all the oceans and all the harbor brothels of the world, and who in all his seafaring days had probably never once heard of semantics or metaphorical discourse. Here on the island, Lorico remained loyal to his original tutor by parroting forth his rudimentary ABC’s even after the captain had jumped ship and taken off somewhere with his puta without paying the harbor innkeeper’s bill. The illiterate Josefa had no inkling of the curious processes that allow a language to use one and the same word to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes.

  To be honest about it, I wasn’t aware of such subtleties at the time, either. But years later I was vividly reminded of our grandee’s Inca cockatoo when Pascoaes, whose parents had been close to the Portuguese court, told me the story of how King Don Carlos felt obliged to reject the credentials of an Italian emissary who bore the resounding name of Conte Porra di Porra. From a Portuguese perspective the surname indicated a lineage of the most suspect kind. Might the Italian court, the King inquired with a fine sense of humor, not have sent a less insistent nobleman? A simple “Porra” was perhaps acceptable, but such a painful reduplication, Porra di Porra, was too much of an affront even to the emissary himself.

  British ladies, ignorant of the Iberian languages, had great fun listening to this squawking bird, and often inquired as to what it was saying. Again and again I was asked to interpret His Master’s Voice, and this was not at all an entertaining assignment. Each time it happened, I was stymied by the inevitable question, “Does he really mean it?”

  Beatrice had the same effect on the bird as a red cape on a fighting bull, or the sight of a priest on Don Darío. On the bird’s part, it was hatred at first sight, and this drove Beatrice into alliance with the cook. It was probably due to Lorico’s alert intraspecific instincts, which sensed in this new guest a degeneration of the Inca bloodline, abetted by an official action of the Immigration Service in Basel. Lorico was outraged at such a corruption of his race. At first Beatrice was oblivious of such connections, but when I explained them to her, she treated this bigoted bird with the same contempt that she was later to present to the Nazis, who would likewise accuse me of “profanation of the blood.”

  I have yet to mention Pepe, a young errand-boy and jack-of-all-trades, whose extended notions about the meaning of “it all” brought considerable dishonor to a house that he served as adroitly in his blue livery outfit as Beppo did in his scarlet one. Like the monkey, he was a thief. Today it is not easy for me to give an accurate portrait of Pepe. With his agile fingers he already points us in the direction of Portugal and the vintner’s palace of the poet Pascoaes, where a similarly caparisoned diminutive lackey was also prone to confusing mine and thine. This Lusitanian Pepe, Victorino by name, with his pranks and his thirteen-year-old bravado, obscures my image of his less cunning Mallorquine counterpart, so I think I will save him for a book on my Portuguese adventures. There were of course differences between them. Pepe got trounced daily by his exalted master, whereas at Pascoaes no one laid a hand on Victorino, since according to the castellan’s thesis, proclaimed in all his books, man is not to be regarded as a sinner but as sin itself. Pepe stole on a small scale, Victorino in a big way. The anarchist’s clients thought of the modest drain on their funds as a kind of visitor’s tax, levied by the management under the table in return for the privilege of witnessing highly dramatic scenes of chastisement that were gleefully applauded by the monkey and the cockatoo.

  I never blamed the boy for playing fast and loose with other people’s property. What was he to do, living in a community where bombs were manufactured for the violent redistribution of the world’s wealth? Unfortunately we were ourselves the cause of Pepe’s getting thrown out of the palace personally by Don Alonso. I had left a fairly larg
e sum of money in our room, unlocked, and the little thief’s anarchistic tendencies veered rather rapidly toward a dangerous capitalistic karma. He snatched our cash, was caught by a cleaning girl, but wasn’t told on until after he had blown all the pesetas. The scene of dismissal was grandiose, and compensated us to an extent for our no less grandiose loss. Pepe scratched and bit and, using Lorico’s vocabulary, spilled out to all within earshot the most intimate secrets of his revolutionary employer—this in the presence of Doña Inés, whose morose features remained stony. The cockatoo went wild with joy on his perch, sending his feed pellets flying through the breakfast room, which was the site of these leave-taking festivities. Over and over again the wise-acre bird let go with his two words, which now became truly germane to the situation. No doubt, the parrot felt transported back to his old teacher’s below-decks cabin, where goings-on of this kind were the order of the day. Captain von Martersteig, summoned forth by the martial hubbub, shuffled in wearing his huge fur slippers, but he went directly to his room when I told him that Pepe had just been convicted of stealing a considerable amount of money. The old soldier wanted to make sure that the little pilferer hadn’t made a visit to his musette bag, where he kept the meager pension sent down to him through special channels by Field Marshal Hindenburg himself. But nothing was missing. The cook prayed. Beppo, waiting in sleazy ambush on the courtyard stairway, tossed dirt in his fellow miscreant’s face and then leaped back up, barking and screeching, into the palm fronds. Nevertheless, his simian freedom was not to last much longer. A few days later he was put on a chain, but one that allowed him to continue his business of keeping the tree free of dust.

  After all: Beppo, too, was a robber. An English lady was busy painting the romantic interior courtyard when with a lightning leap he went at her hair to swipe a beguiling silver barrette. Instead, her entire head of hair remained in his grasp. The lady became quite exercised, trying with both hands to cover her bald skull, while the shameless thief set to plucking her wig to pieces. For a long time afterward her scalp hung like a hunting trophy from a thin strand of the coconut palm, to the silent amusement of a sickly Dutch plantation owner, Mr. van Beverwijn. He had lived for many long years among the headhunters of Borneo, probably none of whom was as threatening as his Mevrouw. Mijnheer van Bewerwijn was now reminded of life in the jungle, and for a time he regained his spirits. But then he relapsed and atrophied further like his sclerotic kidney, which was the reason he had left the colonies. I daresay I bestowed some light on his darkened soul during the weeks we spent together at the rooming house. I was the only one with whom Mr. van Beverwijn could hold a conversation in his native tongue. He preferred not to listen to his wife, because she spoke in the tongues of Christian Science. In Book Three we shall again encounter these guests from the East Indies; Mijnheer will be even more withered and lonesome, and Mevrouw will have made further advances in her increasingly un-Christian hyper-Christianity.

  II

  At about three in the afternoon there was a commotion outside, overpowering the sedative effect of our household apothecary. I woke up, and at first had no idea where I was. But this condition of de-identification lasted only for a moment. My eyelids descended once more, and I dozed on without losing the sound that had lifted them. It got louder; it was a series of reports like the clappers used by penitents during Holy Week. Beatrice awoke too; she went bolt upright and screamed, “Vite, vite, Zwingli is being killed! Let’s toss some water…!”

  Now I was wide awake. I got up and calmed her by placing my hand on her forehead. To this day a laying on of hands is for her the most effective technique for getting rid of nightmares.

  “You’ve been dreaming, chérie. There are no Pilars here with daggers and axes. There’s a storm over the island, and the shutters are loose in their hinges—alles kaputt!”

  But outside was bright sunshine, and it blinded me when I opened the shutters. At the very same instant something hit my face, and I was in pain. There was a strident screech, a hairy something swung through the air, and seconds later I saw the glazed rear-end of a mid-sized monkey gleaming down at me through the leaves of a palm tree. The object that had given me this belated matinal greeting, a plaited wicker fan for keeping charcoal fires aglow, fell to the ground. What an ingratiating way of saying hello to new arrivals!

  “You stupid beast!” I yelled up to the palm tree. But the reply I received came from down below, from whence I expected to hear nothing from out of the subtropical light-filtering palm branches.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Down below stood a gentleman, presumably also a house guest, wearing a white suit that contrasted markedly with his polar footwear, which consisted of animal pelts and, seen from above, looked like two furry plaster casts. He stuck a gilt-framed monocle to his left eye, but then let it drop again on its black ribbon and looked up at me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said a little shakily and in German. “I was talking to that fellow up there who just molested me.” And I pointed to the monkey, who in the meantime had discovered something on his own person that held his full attention.

  “I’m quite sure that you meant that fellow up there, that damned little clown, the guy that all of us hate so much. Well, sir, we’ll have to get together and talk about this. Can we wait until later for the introductions? It’s unpleasant this way, at such a distance and with the two of us occupying different standpoints. My greetings to your spouse. Just take care, though, let me warn you. Beppo can tell the difference between the sexes, but he has no respect for any such difference. At your obedient service, sir!”

  He squeezed the single lens to his eye, let it fall again, and disappeared limping through the house portal.

  “For God’s sake, chérie, did you hear that? This is turning out to be quite something. Once again you are correct with your generalization about my fellow countrymen in foreign lands—the familiar and all-too-familiar ones, and the remote ones, and the remotest ones, too. Either they go crazy from trying to act like foreigners, or they get more and more German by trying to out-German the Germans. The character I just spoke with is as German as he is bonkers—an army officer, or maybe a dueling fraternity student. At least he wasn’t able to crack his heels together. He doesn’t have any more heels. The army probably marched the heels off of him. He wants me to convey obedient greetings to my spouse. So I obediently suggest that we get dressed, go downstairs, and introduce ourselves obediently. It looks as if we’ll be living above our means here, to judge by that monkey and this character with the monocle. But over at Pilar’s things just wouldn’t have worked out in the long run.”

  Our room was spacious, and less oppressively decorated than the reception hall—which is to say that it contained only the barest necessities. There was no lack of a sturdy table for writing on; not even Thomas Mann could have found reason for supercilious remarks. It entered my mind that there was even room enough here for a grand piano—and with this thought I had unwittingly brought us back to reality and the events of the previous day. This re-attachment to the world, anchoring us firmly in our insular destiny, forced us into action once again. We had to make decisions. A review of our finances would provide a basis for shaping the future, and now, following such an abundance of misfortune, we had every right to expect better things to come. A trip to the post office, a visit to the bank, a few letters to our creditors…

  “Beatrice, that crazed courtesan and guttersnipe may have thrown us out of her house, but she can’t toss us completely for a loop. As far as I’m concerned, I’m back to normal. What about you? Have you been able to calm down? You don’t seem to trust the air here. You’re sniffing around again.”

  Doña Inés met us in the hall and begged our pardon in the name of her establishment for Beppo’s misbehavior. She had received a report on the embarrassing incident from Don Joaquín, a boarder from Germany. She hadn’t succeeded in persuading her husband to put Beppo on a chain before it was too late. The little fellow from Java, s
he told us, was cunning and unpredictable, and she didn’t like him either. And might she now introduce us to another honored house guest who spoke our language, Doña Adeleide? The countess pointed to a rocking chair in the shadow of the now-familiar easel. It was cradling the person of an elderly lady, who now applied the brakes, let the chair come to rest, and then said in a very natural yet dignified voice, “I am Frau Gerstenberg, and this is my son Friedrich.”

  At first we could see nothing of this Friedrich. He had made himself small in a corner of the room that was darker still than the area behind the self-portrait of the distinguished progenitor and house artist, the man who had already outlived himself. Friedrich’s chair, too, ceased its rocking, and from it arose this lady’s son, a tall, untidily dressed fellow. He was wearing black-rimmed glasses and a matching pitch-black mustache.

  “Ginsterberg!” That is how he introduced himself, with the same kind of ridiculously stiff academic bow that I was trying to rid myself of down here on the island.

  “To avoid any misunderstandings,” the lady now interjected, “permit me to explain that Ginsterberg is the name of my ex-husband. Since our divorce I have legally retaken my maiden name, the one I went under at the Burgtheater in Vienna. I was known there as ‘La Gerstenberg.’”