As she spoke, her features no doubt turned somber, but we didn’t notice, because the aged count’s autoretrato with its dynastic nose took up all the light here in the hall. Her chair began gently rocking again, as was fitting for her dreams of a distant past.
“Why Madame,” Beatrice exclaimed, “are you the famous Gerstenberg, Adele Gerstenberg? If you are, then many is the time I have admired and applauded you!”
The veil of nostalgia that I had imagined descending over Madame Gerstenberg’s features was now quite visible on Beatrice’s face. What is more, her eyes had taken on a moist gleam that was all too familiar. Thoughts of Vienna always gave her fond memories of her music lessons with Juliusz Wolfsohn, which circumstances had forced her to discontinue. Madame Gerstenberg had caused Beatrice to take a painful look into the past; Pilar and her hatchet-job on the pianoforte were but a trivial interlude.
The ashen artiste rose from her chair, supported by her son. She went up to Beatrice and embraced her warmly.
“My child, do not be angry if I get so emotional. But you are the only person in this anti-artistic country who has recognized me, who remembers me. Oh Golden Vienna, where I was carried aloft! Friedrich, my son, if you don’t know it already, here is someone who can tell you who your mother truly was! I was once ‘La Gerstenberg,’ and so I could not remain Frau Ginsterberg. And is this your dear husband? Let me welcome you, too!”
I kissed the great actress’s hand and led her back to her chair.
“Oh, I am touched by so many thoughts, so much emotion! Herr von Martersteig already told us that you are a writer. That means we make up a little world of our own here together.”
“But Mama, Martersteig was exaggerating. You know that the information he gets from Anton Emmerich isn’t very reliable.”
Aha, I thought. Our chronique scandaleuse has penetrated to the rocking chairs of the Count’s Hostel! But I took solace in the thought that for Friedrich, it seemed a greater scandal to be a writer than to have been chased out of house and home by a hooker.
“Now son, there you go again. You haven’t expressed yourself very well at all. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a certain person is a writer. The important thing is what that person writes. And with the best will in the world, I can’t say that the Captain knows his limits as a writer. You’re acting just like your father, always leaving yourself open to criticism. That worries me. Excuse us, my friends. Here we are once again with our family topic number one. It must seem quite abstruse when we get to arguing about it in front of strangers in a boarding house. Come on, Friedel, let’s get hold of ourselves, shouldn’t we?”
Mother’s and son’s chairs cannot have swung back and forth more than a hundred times before we learned in general outline the sorrowful story of these two expatriates. Friedrich’s father was a renowned Tübingen cardiac anatomist, who once every month sent them 400 marks, a sum that should easily have kept them going. Yet like the aforementioned Captain, but in a different sphere of activity, this son didn’t know his limits. He was consumptive, and had been forced to break off his medical studies before his doctoral exams. They had lived for a year in the dusty Spanish desert of Alicante, where a woman lived from whom young Friedrich simply could not part. Then, for different reasons, they had come to Mallorca, a place that didn’t seem to me to be ideal for a TB case either. Swiss sanatoriums, they explained, were too expensive, and “La Gerstenberg” had no desire to remain in Germany. Staying there would surely take a bad turn; they were Jewish. Hindenburg was a military giant with softening of the brain. The insurgent National Socialists, in league with Hindenburg’s conservative cohorts, would soon stab the old general in the back, and then all non-Aryans would be slaughtered. Considering that these political speculations were expressed in the summer of 1931, it is amazing how prescient this famous actress was in a field outside of her professional expertise. She had keen insights, and it wasn’t for nothing that she kept up with the best of the world’s news media. Friedrich was a faithful customer of Anton Emmerich’s.
That noontime we didn’t meet any other boarding-house guests. Like Beppo, the cockatoo Lorico had introduced himself, and having just arrived from Pilar’s lodgings, we heard the sounds of home emerging from his obscene beak. Unfortunately, we had no time to indulge in nostalgia of this kind. With Pepe’s help we lugged our belongings from the bookstore and carefully set up everything in our room. Beatrice is a genius at the spontaneous management of space; she knows how to improvise and juggle things around like no other intellectual woman. She places boxes and suitcases on top of each other according to a precise plan, in such a way that it is always the bottom-most box that contains what we need most urgently. Before entering the comedor for supper we had made a home for ourselves from which no one would very easily evict us.
“Captain von Martersteig, if you will permit me, sir. From Magdeburg. Joachim by Christian name—that’s why these odd people here call me Don Joaquín.”
“Vigoleis, with a V, as in Victoria. But I’m from Süchteln on the Lower Rhine, if you will permit me in return.”
We made reciprocal bows, very stiff ones—the Captain for reasons that will soon become clear; I myself in a symptomatic regression to childish German manners.
“Vigoleis? And with a V as in Victoria? What does that mean? If I have heard you correctly, you have quite a romantic name. Are you related to that knight of Arthur’s Round Table, the one with the wheel on his helmet, le chevalier à la roue, Wigalois? Medieval Courtly Poetry, 13th century—I own the Benecke edition. Peculiar. Quite remarkable, my good man with your V as in Victoria.”
Smart fellow, I thought, this captain with a literary education. I’ll have to be on my guard. Give a military man some schooling, and he’ll be doubly dangerous. And a Prussian to boot, whereas I am a Prussian only by coercion. Fortunately, the captain was standing before me in civvies, which dampened his pride of caste. Minor nobility, insignificant.
“Related?” I replied to his literary inquiry into my pedigree. “Well, you might say that I am related in spirit to that character in Gravenberg.” But I refrained from adding that the wheel borne by my medieval namesake as an ornament on his headgear was something I carried around inside my head, where it sometimes spins so rapidly that I get dizzy. The captain would notice this soon enough if we were to share the anarchistic Count’s Round Table for any length of time. “As for the V as in Victoria, I’ll explain that some other time, Captain. It’s a purely Swiss affair. My wife, I should explain, is half Swiss.”
“Great Scott!” the Captain burst out. “Then the other half must be a tinge of Indian. When I first saw you, Madame, I immediately thought of the Aztecs—my respects, Madame. Has Madame recovered from the shock of witnessing the greeting her spouse received yesterday from up in the palm tree?”
“Yesterday,” I replied in Beatrice’s stead, who was reacting to the captain with polite hostility. “Yesterday we got our shocks from some artificial palm trees, and today from a real one. Surely Mr. Emmerich has informed you?”
“Beppo is unpredictable, Madame,” the Captain said over my reply. “And he has every right to be. That is his summum jus. It’s his inalienable right by reason of his belonging to monkeydom, something not even an anarchistic Count can deprive him of. By the way, if that scene yesterday had taken place in a French hotel, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a perfidious manifestation of germanophobia. I do not love my fellow countrymen unconditionally, and at the moment I am in open conflict with the fatherland. But any time at all I’ll risk my war-battered spine against the French, the whole crew of them. Not even the gratings of a green cheese…”
His remarks ended with this mysterious allusion, for the dinner gong now invited us to table. The Captain took Beatrice’s arm: a handsome couple, two people feuding against their own homelands. It was enough to make Lorico wax indecent again. I followed at a respectful distance—I who, while not yet totally at odds with my fatherland, was in a constant fiery s
pat with my own personality. Martersteig obediently requested permission to report, à la prussienne, that he had taken the liberty of arranging the table seating in such a way that we could form a little group of our own, together with La Gerstenberg and her pampered son, and not excluding Fräulein Höchst from Dresden, who at this time was still doing healthful Mensendieck calisthenics up in her room.
This Fräulein was an academically certified gymnastics teacher, a mannish type with blond hair and aquamarine eyes who spoke no language but German, and this with an inherited Saxon harshness. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about her. She kept modestly in the background, and was always happy when she could go outdoors to practice swimming and throwing the javelin. “The Germanic Fury” she was called out on the beach at Ca’s Català, where people scrambled whenever she heaved her spear into the ocean and dove in to fetch it like a trained dog. She never took part in mealtime conversation. The patriotic history of German gymnastics was not really a proper subject for our chats, not even in Frau Dr. Mensendieck’s diluted modern version.
I would much prefer to have sat at the indigenous side of this table d’hôte, where things proceeded much less decorously than in our Nordic corner. But I couldn’t have done such a thing to Beatrice. She immediately loses her appetite if somebody slurps his soup or pushes a spoon like a coal shovel straight into his mouth—not to mention the artful characters who eat with their knives without cutting their tongues. If industry could ever come out with a “safety knife,” such a prejudice would not endure for very long in the books on etiquette. Which reminds me of a funny story from among the little episodes of our life together. We were at table in Geneva, and the conversation revolved around Hitler and the Third Reich. Miserable victims of Nazism that we were, it was awkward for us there in the midst of a well-heeled though politically neutral gathering, whose members hadn’t yet realized that if the German hordes ever came stampeding across their border, the jig would be up for them too. I presented a political-philosophical defense of our position, while Beatrice remained contemptuously silent. Our host asked her for her opinion. She replied that she was unable to speak at table about Hitler, a man who ate with his knife. At which our host, who had just placed a morsel of food in his mouth with his knife, nearly choked. “Mais, Madame…,” he said, whereupon the conversation took a sudden turn to the weather and the upcoming grape harvest. It was more than embarrassing.
One master of the skill in question was a boarder from the Spanish mainland, a Spanish Smith or Jones from Burgos, who was vacationing on the island with his wife and two daughters of fetchingly marriageable age. He was not an artist, unlike several who, according to Emmerich, spent time at the Pensión del Conde. But he had connections to the art world as a salesman for Dutch and German paint and brush manufacturers. Everybody who was anybody in Spanish art, Emmerich told us, squeezed paint from this man’s tubes and spread it on canvas with this man’s brushes. Miró, Zuloaga, Puigdengolas, and Sureda were among his distinguished customers. The Count on the easel, too, used to buy his art supplies from him. His hues had a brilliance that even the Old Masters would have been incapable of mixing. This tradesman of the palette was also an expert at mixing things on his dinner plate. My Spanish was too feeble to allow me to join in the discussion across the table. Friedrich translated a few things for me while Beatrice sat at her place with such disgust on her face that not even La Gerstenberg dared to strike up a conversation with her.
Martersteig explained the menu for us. He was familiar with Spanish cuisine, and was particularly expert when it came to salads—not even the tiniest snail escaped his monocular inspection. He would accept responsibility, he told us, for all the ingredients except the typhus bacilli. His earnest caveats on this score meant that most often he finished the entire bowl of salad all by himself. He owed his kitchen finesse indirectly to General Hindenburg. The Reich President had refused an increase in his spinal pension, and as a result Martersteig had to prepare his own dishes in his headquarters at Deyá. Compared to our Josefa, however, or to a Santiago Kastner, he was a culinary duffer, a master of the greasy spoon.
“Martersteig is a writer, too,” Friedrich suddenly said à propos of nothing at all.
“Too?” replied the gentleman under attack, turning around to face the two of us. “This young man no doubt intends his expression ’too’ as a compliment addressed to my person. But this young man is apparently unaware that his mischievous little adverb ‘too’ might also be offensive to you, Mr. Vigoleis. For as we well know, you ‘too’ are a writer. As for myself, I am not a writer ‘too.’ I write because I must. I have a task to fulfill. My writing is in an area quite different from yours, but still I would like you and Madame to hear a few pages of my manuscript sometime. I would be grateful for your opinion—I mean, of course, both of your opinions.”
“Huzzah! Long live our retired Captain, the generalissimo and head chimpanzee of his own army of monkeys! There they are, standing before us in rank and file, and we haven’t even finished our first course!”
It was Friedrich who said this, and it sounded like a victory proclamation. Frau Gerstenberg tried to pooh-pooh this bit of adolescent raillery. There was, she explained, this constant open animosity between her boy and the Captain, and it wasn’t a serious matter. The Army of the Monkeys was the title of the novel that Martersteig had been working on for years. He was continually revising his manuscript. His monkey recruits refused again and again to behave in the manner conceived for them by their author, as fully equivalent substitutes for a force of German national conscripts. Her explanation prompted Friedrich to the equivocal remark that this one-time military man was of course writing from personal experience.
Martersteig remained unperturbed by these words, intended partly as pure information, partly as provocation. Silently he shook his spherical head with its snow-white locks deftly arranged to conceal the bald spots. Then he set his monocle, took his fork, and busied himself with boning a red bream, which he then presented to Beatrice.
“Doña Inés is a clever woman,” said the Austrian Imperial Actress. “Twice a day she serves fish with dangerous bones. That forces our two fighting cocks to give all their attention to the plates in front of them. Otherwise their constant squabbling would be unbearable. Don’t you think so, Fräulein Höchst?”
“Begging your pardon,” said the expert fish-boner, thus relieving the young Dresden lady of the necessity of replying. “Just a few more weeks of your patience and I’ll be returning to my little mill-wheel castle in Deyá. By then my enemy will have calmed down.”
Friedrich, who had finished boning his own bream, started speaking again:
“That enemy of Martersteig’s is a writer, too. Too, I say. And he too has a ‘von’ in his name, but not all the time. Right now he’s one of the island’s most famous residents, although he doesn’t look it. His name is Graves, but as the grandson of our noted historian Ranke, he likes to call himself Robert von Ranke Graves. The Captain, who selects his army recruits so carefully, is also very choosy when picking his enemies.”
“Ginsterberg is a smart aleck, and he’s full of nonsense. By German standards, he’s also amazingly superficial and uncultured. Profundity? Not the gratings of a green cheese! They say he used to be a model student, trying to emulate his eminent father. But now he is sick. We’ll just have to show some understanding. But now let’s change the subject, Mr. Vigoleis. What were you saying a while ago about your V as in Victoria?”
“Vigoleis with a V as in Victoria? Oh, that was just a little joke. I was trying to come up with something to match your elaborate title, with your Captain, your Retired, your ‘von,’ and your Magdeburg. And even for this little bit of fun I had to do some borrowing—I could never produce anything of the kind on my own accord. Through my wife I have a certain liaison with the Swiss Confederation—Basel, to be precise. Basel is famous for its humanistic past, but what’s left of that famous city now is all paper. Nowadays they more than mak
e up for the loss by celebrating Carnival and, probably in the same spirit, by the games that old families play with their names. The House of Burckhardt—I mean of course the one spelled ck-dt, owes its immortal fame to its greatest son, Jacob. But there’s another Swiss family, the k-t Burkharts pure and simple. They’ve got along without any upper-middle-class alphabetical snobbery, although they have had to take a back seat to the others—’literally literally’, you might say. Nobody takes the k-t family for real, and the ‘real’ ones insist on not being confused with the pseudo-Burckhardts. It’s pretty much the same with the Vischers with the soft V, who refuse to be tarred with the same brush as the Fischers from the slums—although it’s ironic that a Fischer with his little guppy-like F has achieved immortality through Goethe’s poem. The Meier family belongs in the same category, with their ei in place of the chic ai or ay.
“My wife had a ck-dt grandmother, and now she has a husband with a V as in Victoria. Incidentally, all this orthographic and phonetic pedantry about our pedigree has yet to be declared legal by a justice of the peace, as Mr. Emmerich has doubtless already let you know.”
As a matter of fact, everyone in the boarding house was aware that the Knight with the Wheel in his Head and the V as in Vladivostok in his medieval troubadour’s pseudonym was living in common-law marriage with his Beatrice, the woman accused by the cockatoo of practicing racial pollution.
The Captain listened intently to my philological, confederative thesis concerning mobs and snobs, all the while gazing fixedly into his glass of Vichy water. Jakob Böhme probably peered in just the same way into his cobbler’s lens, locating there all at once the Divinity and Eternal Nature, Good and Evil. Our Captain, rather less wholly transported to the depths of Being, finally lifted his blue peepers and said to us,
“We shall have to go into more detail, Madame, concerning what your spouse has just elucidated. I also have certain connections to Switzerland, though not to your vaunted citadel of humanism. My mother was a von Tscharner. Because of this misalliance, some of the Martersteig aunts broke off relations with my late father, whereas on the other hand, the Tscharners regard our own family as inferior. Are you by any chance familiar with the Bern dynasty of that name?”
The Island of Second Sight Page 22
