The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  “Our next steps? My love, I can’t reveal that to you until after I’ve been to the post office. I’m going back to the city right away, unwashed and unshaven. My shoes aren’t even polished, so you can see what a rush I’m in. You are so very right. Something has got to happen, and something will happen. But don’t forget that as a last resort we still have our ropes.”

  “Our… you’re going to…bah! That would be unaesthetic. And then I would just be on my own, trying to get out of this filthy place. Thanks a lot!”

  Our ropes—oh my dearest, there you go again getting everything backwards! Once again you fail to comprehend how one thing connects up with everything else, or even that there is such a thing as Providence, which leads us to destinations that Providence itself can envision only at brighter moments. Our ropes! I truly had no intention of stringing them up in the dizzy heights of the roof beams and shoving my neck into the noose. In any case, before I could bring off such a sinister feat, I would break my neck scrambling around in the roofwork. I tried to explain this to Beatrice, but with no success.

  I have had suicidal tendencies for quite some time. I have a significant metaphysical interest in the course of my personal planetary orbit, and experience with several botched jobs by way of diabolically conceived attempts to do away with my own person. But this time, any such plausible idea was far from my mind. The ropes were for something else; my idea was to use them as an element of interior architecture, to tie them up not vertically but horizontally, as I then later did. I had a complete picture of how we could convert this box-for-an-hour into a somewhat liveable, perhaps even comfortable habitation. I sensed how, by putting to use all of my failed careers, by combining the intuitions of a paleolithic handyman with the highly involved technical skill available to myself and my century, I could create for Beatrice a home of the kind that otherwise only a Henry van de Velde could offer her. So let us now leave her in her angry mood, pondering her fate with compressed lips (the lower one jutting forward ever so little), with quivering chin, and with one bloodless hand held downward like a fin in a gesture of extreme resentment—but also of extreme misery. Her fate? Having an absent-minded theologian for a father, an exotic cosmopolitan woman for a mother, a Zwingli for a brother, a lady of the streets for a sister-in-law, and me, Vigoleis, the zero-grade writer, for an unmarried husband. Let’s hand her over for a good long while to her devastating thoughts, and listen in the meantime to the story of our ropes. It is briefly told.

  In Lyon we missed our connection. Perambulating on the railway platform I saw a traveler whose suitcase burst just as his train was pulling into the station. The contents spilled out all over the platform, and in the throng of passengers they got partly trampled, partly kicked under the wheels. The man’s catastrophe was complete. He was close to tears, and his train left without him. With a porter’s help he collected what was left of his belongings, but since his suitcase was destroyed, all he could do was tie up his things inside his pajamas.

  Witnessing this anonymous incident was sufficient for me to take measures to prevent us from ever confronting such a disaster while traveling. Quick as a whistle, I entered the city and bought a few yards of leather strapping, some hemp rope, and some narrow belts with adjustable buckles. All this to the amazement of Beatrice, who trusted in the solid craftsmanship of her Swiss luggage, and thus could say that she had already traveled far and wide without ropes and straps, which is to say, far and wide without anything bursting apart—enough to make her complacent. The fact that back there in Lyon, Heaven had thrust a man with suitcase trouble before Vigoleis’ eyes, thus opening them for him; the fact that Providence itself was operative on that occasion—all this did not become clear to us until something of our own burst apart: not our luggage but our entire existence. But I still had the ropes! Here in our naked abbey cell we could now put them to excellent use; Beatrice will soon find out just how clever I was with them. To go right ahead and hang myself with them would, in the light of such possibilities, have been tasteless and, besides, beneath my dignity as an inventor.

  “I’m going with you, I’m not staying here. And that smell is back again—sickening! But first let’s go get our luggage before the rest gets stolen.”

  “Stolen?” I pointed upwards, where anyone could enter freely. And then, with five pesetas in our pocket, we set off to greet the thousands more that could have arrived for me that very day at the Banca March. When the need is greatest, God is often very near—I dare not say that at such times He is closest of all, for otherwise He would not have sent us on the pilgrimage to this cloister of lust. Or was He testing us, like Abraham in the Land of Moriah? Whoever in God’s world is unprepared for the worst, will find that he can easily get the short end of the stick. And on that late morning the heroes of our story picked the very shortest end of the stick of their destiny. There was no money at the post office; no mail at all had come for us, and at the bank our duro had not spawned any children. In monetary affairs there is no such thing as parthenogenesis, and so we were left with no other choice but to break the duro to purchase some necessities. Necessities? What is a rock-bottom necessity for people in our position? The way we solved this problem will give my reader some insight into the very essence of our psychological condition, now that he has paid witness to this and that event taking place behind the curtain of our unsanctified married life of woe.

  In a saloon frequented only by donkey drivers and similarly picturesque barefoot types, we each had an espresso, then another and yet a third, for even though the odor of the slaughterhouse had gone from the atmosphere, it hadn’t left our noses, not to mention our stomachs. Three café negro can do wonders in such a situation. Then we purchased an alcohol burner, which Beatrice called our “lantern”—the cheapest model, not the kind that explodes. Then we bought some fuel and a long-handled pan for frying, boiling, sautéing, and roasting, since we aimed to limit our culinary needs to a half-pint of milk, a fried egg, a sobrasada, and a slice of bread apiece. With our remaining cash we bought a bar of cooking chocolate à la española, cigarettes, and some nautical zwieback. That was the extent of our provisioning for the expedition back to our planetarium. Some few items were no doubt lacking, but even without wine and canned sardines, we no longer were drifting in quite such rudderless fashion. After all, I still had my providential ropes, my inventor’s brain, and my hopes set on Victor Emmanuel van Vriesland in Amsterdam. Beatrice had what was inimitably hers: music in her head, and the somber premonition that she would never have a concert grand. And yet (she thinks) there will still be music, my dear; you can depend on Vigoleis, who calls himself unmusical. On my part, I think: I’ll have to stay ahead of her by one or two paces when we reach that hostel of ours—to remove that trademark from the toilet bowl. First I’ll dilute the mess to soften it up.

  Without delay we set out homewards, planning to reach the cool shadows of our abbey before the hottest hour of the day. It was then that I first noticed how my eyes kept searching the roadway for useful objects. It was worth my trouble: I found a nail, a piece of wire, another nail, and several more rusty things that seemed promising. Beatrice observed my scavenging without saying a word; she was resigning herself to this new phase in her Vigoleis’ life. It was perilously close to taking up the beggar’s staff, and if I am to be completely honest, I’ll have to admit that it is unclear which of us had brought the other to this pass: was I the culprit, with my chronic dialysis as a hermetic poet and intellectual? Or was it she, with her unconditional sisterly love?

  At any rate, as we came within sight of the “Tower,” I was just packing away my last find in my book bag when it all started up again with olé and hallo and how is everybody and we wish you this and isn’t that grand and just this way please. Arsenio’s huge mouth, prolific as always, once again set and dominated the whole scene. He was the perfect highwayman-in-chief with his colorful silk sash wound around his body at the place where, contrary to all anatomical probability, his belly ended
and his thighs, clothed in blue velvet, began. Adeleide, too, made a brief appearance carrying a feeding trough for pigs. That meant that these people kept animals for market, a little farm work on the side for extra income. Here comes the old matron, limping about and yelling at a crowd of kids engaged in fun and mischief. They were playing bullfight with the skull of a real ox, and there was blood on the horns from real lacerations. The old lady was friendly, at once intimidating and amiable. In the course of our stay at this brothel I got to like her very much, although I cannot pretend to have understood her speech on any single occasion. Without doubt, what she had to say every time was profoundly wise. She had grown not only old but ancient in these rural surroundings, close to the heart of nature—or to put it in a more earthbound way, at Nature’s bosom. What is more, she had grown bronzed and stooped. Someone like this has seen much that isn’t contained in the pandects of my philosophers. This “abbey” of hers enjoyed a special prebend, producing income from mankind’s most human activity; this requires plenty of knowledge of the world and its ways. Na’ Maguelida certainly had that kind of savvy.

  Arsenio invited us to join him at table, but we declined. No, we explained, we had had a copious breakfast in the city, a so-called “fork breakfast,” English style—Arsenio was familiar with that, of course? Ham and eggs and all kinds of sharp condiments. No, he said, that didn’t quite suit his palate. At this hour he preferred his sopas, the Mallorcan national dish, a soup that you fill with so much bread that your spoon stands up straight in it. But he wanted us to know that their kitchen and provision cellar offered nothing but the best, and were at our disposal day and night.

  The children crowded around us, more of them than on the previous evening. All of them, without exception, were expected to address Arsenio as “Father,” for he alone was their sire. Altogether he had twenty-three under his legal name, and his virility probably accounted for considerably more in the outskirts of his erotic activity. Three sons worked in his business, all of them husky fellows who were perfect for tending to their Dad’s affairs. One was in the army, where he was learning to handle powder and lead. But he wasn’t in training for the defense of his country; the “Tower” maintained a third enterprise, for which the other two served as a front.

  I borrowed a hammer and a pair of pliers, and installed my harvest of rusty objects in our cell. In just one hour every single nail and every last hank of wire was in place and doing its appointed task. Beatrice lay down on the bed and, unaccustomed to meditating or staring into empty space (“empty” is meant here in the non-allegorical sense, although there was more allegory here for her, too, than at any other stage of her life), picked up a book and disappeared from my consciousness. That was fine with me, because I needed privacy for designing our habitat. This was especially necessary since I’m terrible at arithmetic, and our living quarters had to be planned out not with a simple ruler but with a micrometer. Precision work, in a word, requiring tight-fitting joinery. Go at it, Vigoleis! Show us what you can do in a field where nobody thought you were worth anything!

  I don’t like to be disturbed when I am puttering. I’m ashamed of all the sweating and swearing I do as I fit one thing to another, then take it apart again with more sweating and swearing, and so forth, until finally, based on no particular initial plan, a finished product emerges that is perfect, or in any case better than anything I might have thought through carefully before starting. Such remarks as “What is that supposed to be?” or “You’ll never get it done,” or “That doesn’t look like anything at all”—and the whole thing is over with. I putter in the same way that I write poems. I take the first word that sings to me, often enough some rusty old word or other, and never know at the beginning how it will fit the next one. Somehow I join one thing to another with rhyme and rhythm, and suddenly it’s done, there it is. Then it’s your business to decide whether it’s good or bad. But no matter what, I’m the one who has made it.

  When Beatrice awoke from her literary sedation and closed her book because it was finished, my do-it-yourself poem wasn’t complete. But at least I had come up with an opening stanza, which normally gives the direction for the further course and pattern of a literary work of art. I used my practiced fingers, which were unhindered by any Zwinglian cuttlebone, Arsenio’s crude set of household tools, my scavenger’s booty, and the ropes sent by Providence. The combined application of my resources permitted me to elevate these discrete elements into a spiritual dimension, as it were, by imparting to each one a new and higher function, albeit a subservient one. I installed the materials up against the wooden partition in such a way as to yield a practical writing surface—a tiny one, to be sure, but one that was attractive enough in overall aesthetic and pragmatic effect, somewhere between full-fledged Empire and its sober and tasteless German variant, Biedermeier. All that was missing was an inkpot, a goose quill, and a container of sand, and the Right Honorable Vigoleis could have started writing—perhaps an Ode to the Clock Tower, or a Sicilian canzona on the thirty cells of love ’neath monk and nun. But at this unlyrical moment in his life he had neither the heart, nor the sensory alertness, nor the soul for rhyming words together. So he confined himself to showing Beatrice their new brothel board, but then he added a solemn pronouncement in Italian: “Ecco, la mia bella, il bidetto anche per scrivere!” But Beatrice, too, was in no mood for intellectual feats commensurate with my cultural achievement. She refrained from using the newly created libertine surface to compose a lapidary statement in Latin, in hoc equidem equuleo… She didn’t even have any florid complimentary words for my skill in cabinetry. She was simply hungry, and she told me so.

  Ecco, I’ll set our new table for a topping-out ceremony. We brewed up some Spanish national chocolate, which comes mixed with sugar, cinnamon, and other seasonings. Beatrice took the first taste, and thus it was she who, with a grandly vulgar gesture, spat out the stringy mess on the floor. It was a horrid brew. I was forewarned, and so I didn’t have to spit. Using a well-known hydraulic technique practiced by infants, I made the substance flow back into the bowl, went outside, and heaved the Spanish national drink into a ditch with a splash. Immediately the chickens came running and clucking, hoping for something to peck. Go ahead and peck, but you’ll be better off with a worm. I closed the package and placed it in the single pigeon-hole of our new secretary. Then I boiled some water and we finally enjoyed a hot drink—insipid, but germ-free. Typhus! That was all we needed. Beatrice had terrifying things to say on this subject, and I was familiar with the story she now saw fit to recount once more. Her father had died of the disease in Argentina at a time when she herself had contracted the bubonic plague, the wicked scourge of the Old Testament, the Lord’s Avenging Angel, the Black Death. Her mother defeated it by dosing her with homeopathic miracle drops. The local physician, not to mention the populace far and wide, was astounded at this development; he was getting ready to give her the usual lethal injection. Thousands had already succumbed to the epidemic. Not one infected person had survived; they all turned black, began talking gibberish, and that was the end.

  No indeed, we were not about to take risks here at the very borderline of perdition, sitting right next to a ditch full of rats. Having barely escaped syphilis as a result of my stringent self-discipline and my rationalized cowardice, we ought not to let ourselves be ambushed by the miasmatic fever in a simple sip of water. As Nietzsche says, “With various little medications you can turn a coward into a hero—but the reverse is also true.”

  Our grape cure had made us weak, but it had also cleansed our blood so that we were immune from hypochondria—one less affliction. The world around us was hostile; we had to be ready for anything, and that meant we had to think through every next step. By purchasing that chocolate soup we had put our exchequer under unnecessary strain. One more mistake like that, and we would find ourselves at the very rim of the volcano that was already spitting at us. This hackneyed phrase about the yawning abyss is what the rhetoricians call a t
rope: the transformation of an abstract concept into a graphic image. I am employing such a figure of speech here not just to enrich my prose, but mindful of a very specific hole in the ground that threatened to become an abyss for us, and which to our consternation was actually enticing us. Every agricultural enterprise has a manure pile, and since there were large animals and much human traffic here at the Clock Tower, the installation for excretory waste was correspondingly capacious. Architecturally speaking, it fit in nicely with the monastic ambience, although I would not have placed it quite so close to the open-air staircase. It was longer than it was wide, and its masonry extended about a foot above ground, in keeping with traditional dimensions. What surprised us was that this oblong structure also served as the place of retreat for human beings. Visiting it entailed walking out on a plank laid across the pit, which dipped down precariously under its own weight and as a result of its frequent use. The place was partially concealed by dangling vines—a gift of Nature that was particularly appreciated by the female population.

  During the night the plank was a shadowy rendezvous for the rats. They were reluctant to depart when, in your state of secret need, you walked the plank and sent it dipping up and down with your steps. Month after month I conducted nocturnal observations of rattish behavior, and often regretted my lack of talent for sketching. Yet out of respect for the aesthetic sensibilities we are so often reminded of, I shall refrain from further depiction of the goings-on at the edge of this crater. I shall only add that my regular nocturnal vigils were finally rewarded by the sight of a snarl of living matter, a shadowy black mass of tails and legs and snouts that could be nothing else than the fabled rat-king. Overcome with zoological excitement, I nearly fell into the marl-pit. After this fright, instead of continuing my intense observations and perhaps experiencing the approach of this swarm of creatures towards me on the plank, I confess that I behaved unprofessionally: I leaped up, ran off to Beatrice in our cell, and reported to her that there was something good to be said, after all, about the place that she preferred to avoid for a thousand reasons. “A rat cluster!” I stammered. “Come quick, or it’ll be gone! There must be thirty of them, all knotted up together!” Beatrice turned pale and waxen with disgust. A single rat was enough for her. “Not even old man Brehm ever saw such a tight-knit family with his own eyes! Just think what he might have given to hunker down there with me on the plank for an hour or so.” Beatrice said something about the bubonic plague that gets passed on by rats, and that there were still cases of it in Spain, especially in Barcelona. I slunk back out to the diving board, but there was no repeat of the miracle. I squatted there with stiff knee joints for quite a while, until someone came and chased me away.