The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Incidentally, I solved Beatrice’s double phobia against pits in a way that once again did credit to my talent for invention. It was a carpenter’s stratagem that not even the ingenious architects of the Middle Ages had thought of. After we finally departed this cloister of lust, my contraption was dismantled, and no chronicle, least of all the sketchy present one, will ever again relate the details of my cunning technical-hygienic installation. To this day Beatrice often thinks back to that period of horror and its dark menace, but she is touched to recall with gratitude that Vigoleis never got so cross with her as to chase her out on the plank. No, that he never did. This woman was chased enough to begin with. Love, in combination with inventive skill and a bad conscience, is what led to an appropriately sanitary solution.

  Our first day at the cloister ended with us having arranged our moveable goods as sensibly as possible within the immoveable cell space provided. To achieve this I had to nail the chair to a wall in such a position that it could be reached when we wished to place it at the desk—entirely in keeping with the philosophy of Either/Or, which under the circumstances must be judged not as a purely intellectual insight, but as an element in the art of living. I hoisted our two large trunks on top of the partition at the places where it formed a T with the neighboring box, thus giving us something like a homey ceiling and made the room feel more like a room. We just had to trust that this invasion of the next-door space—it was a matter of a few inches at most—would not elicit objections. If it did, I would have to screw down those big pieces of luggage, but where would I find screws? Simple: I just removed a few from all over the room. No one ever bawled me out on account of this annexation; there could be no question of a violation of law in the vertical direction, since all I did was take up some free space. Our trunks now towered above us, but we had to tie them in place with the ropes, for otherwise I might have to spend time in jail for manslaughter.

  After two hours of moving things around, which meant creating order at one end of the space by causing disorder in the other, we were exhausted. Each of us took a swallow of germ-free water, a ration of biscuit carefully apportioned by Beatrice, and gave each other a germ-free kiss. Then we embraced tightly and fell asleep. The day had been a busy one, and not without its blessings, considering that neither of us considered murdering the other in order to usurp space. We shared it like two people who have not yet arrived at the knowledge of good and evil.

  Nothing disturbed our peace. No noise from above descended on our pallet. The encampment was utterly silent. Beatrice was right: the youth of Spain does not go hiking. All the more restless, however, were the rats. Yet their hustlings and jostlings, their scatterings and bumpings were no match for the deafness of our slumber, even though there must have been quite a hubbub when the swarm took possession of our cell. There wasn’t much to be had, but enough to keep the indefatigable tooth of a rat quite busy. The sleeping couple did not awaken even when the grisly gnawing horde attacked their stock of provender. Was the mangy old lady-rat among them? I rather doubt it, for she would have to have been tugged up over the walls by the her younger cohorts, as I once observed a suckling mother rat do with her entire brood. The invaders will have been amazed to find suddenly, in this one compartment, more to gnaw on than was to be located anywhere else in the cells. There, they would be happy to come across a banana skin, a piece of chocolate, or a crust of bread. The truly lucky one would hit upon a cardboard packet containing a dose of Vaseline—that oily stuff was yummy, something to bare your teeth and hiss about. Since tubes have come into use, hardly any forager can sniff out this greasy delicacy any more.

  The animals paraded in a row along the vertiginous top edge of our partition, their tails hanging down like a single broad band across the upper edge of the wall—could we have watched it move? They sniffed at everything; not a suitcase, not a package, not a book escaped their attention. This cell, and these inhabitants of it, are from now on to be kept under close surveillance. Of particular interest was this small box, shaped like a suitcase. It didn’t look easy to gnaw through; one’s teeth just slipped across its hard surfaces. But wait—there emanated from inside it such a tempting fragrance that one ought to have a go at the corners. This was the container, at one time used by a Dutch traveling salesman to carry around his samples, where Vigoleis now kept his manuscripts, especially poems, which in spite of his advancing years he still wrote, but which in a spirit of unhealthy modesty he concealed from everybody. Not even Beatrice was allowed access to this little hoard of work in progress. Vigoleis kept alive her interest in his poetic idiosyncrasies by showing her works that had already been stored long enough to mature, or by telling her Herostratic stories about verse manuscripts long since immolated. These were conversations in the realm of the dead, like those famous ones that were popular when Frederick the Great was king.

  The morning of the second day found our two anachorites up early. Their bodies were numb from sleep; here and there they had sleep-marks on their skin, and it took a while before they could distinguish which limb was whose. The plunge that then occurred was an intentional one, and it didn’t hurt Vigoleis at all. There was no kissing—that would have been a mockery, a virtual desecration of the original cultic motive for such gestures: the transference of energy from one person to another. Not to mention the connotations… But enough, the reason they refrained from kissing was their immediate notice of the havoc visited upon their room during the night. As if with a single breath they both exclaimed, “Now we have nothing to eat!”

  Our national chocolate was done for: it was simply inedible, and would be so even if we had put it somewhere less accessible. We wished we could have hurled it at the rats. We were rigid with despair.

  Whispering to each other, we pondered what to do. One of us should set off alone for the post office, because we now had to conserve bodily energy. I went and returned with one empty hand, and no trace of the bundle of bank-notes we were expecting. In my other hand I held a bunch of grapes I had stolen. I saw them hanging down in front of me as I walked, and so I took them along. Perhaps they were public property, but in any case my conscience was unburdened. The grapes were for Beatrice. For myself, I also brought along some rusty hooks and a tiny horseshoe. These were for my next handicraft project: a rat trap.

  Beatrice was lying on the bed, smoking. She wasn’t reading. She wasn’t doing anything at all. She was on strike.

  The rats, she said, had come back. In broad daylight, or at least during the daytime hours in this shadowy cell. She had tossed books at them. Disgusting beasts. She just couldn’t stand this much longer. “Did you get the money transfer?”

  Here I stand, displaying for her my grapes and my rusty metal, and she is asking me about money?

  “Beatrice, you have less imagination than Adam and Eve before the Fall. I pick up a money transfer, and then walk all the way back home carrying this junk?” I placed everything carefully on the bidetto. “I would have raced back to you in a Hispano-Suiza, I would have honked the horn, tossed roses to you and abducted you. Maybe tomorrow. But no, tomorrow you want to leave.”

  “Forgive me. I’m so stupid and tired. Be so good as to pick up all the books I threw at the beasts. They’re in the rooms next door.”

  I clambered through the neighboring cells until I had gathered up our personal library, and then I took the chair down from its nail, stepped up on it, and began a careful repositioning of the trunks. I would rather have read some poems. I imagined myself as Sir Wigalois, standing watch over his fair damsel, doing battle with rats instead of dragons.

  Today I wish I could retrieve my actual frame of mind at that moment. My book collection contained the first complete edition of poems by Georg Trakl. For the edification of Beatrice from the homeopathic family, simila similibus curantur, I could have read her his poem about rats, one that was surely inspired by a “Clock Tower” experience. It’s almost all the same: the whistling noise, the empty silence at the windows, the shadows un
der the eaves, the horrible stink coming from the toilet. Still the “winds that groan in the dark” were not “icy” here; at nighttime they reached temperatures that would have sent us kids in Germany home from school because of the heat. The moon is everywhere white and ghostly, in every poem and in every evening, except when it’s a question of making love under a lilac bush. The vision of death that Trakl, with Hölderlinian grandeur and accuracy, conjures up amidst decay, repulsiveness and decomposition, could have given us strength back then when the vermin were plotting our downfall. Beatrice, too, cannot now recall which author she chose do help her do battle with the evil forces in that loathsome house of joy. Perhaps, she says, it was Angel Ganivet’s Idearium Español. She was smitten by this Andalusian writer and diplomat who, while still young, took his own life in Riga as the result of a love affair. I myself was later much taken by the mystical-religious attitude that led Ganivet to reject Catholicism, while Beatrice’s sober, more foresighted mind was captivated by the racial-political reflections that inform that writer’s Idearium.

  We read. But even the most severely addicted reader will drop his book if the flesh is weak. Reading requires a certain minimum of flesh on the bones.

  The third day: as far as our practical routine is concerned, it was just like the day before, except that it was Beatrice who made the pilgrimage into town and came back “without nothing.” And because she is neither a thief nor a scavenger, her hands were completely empty. There was hot water, each of us picked up our favorite writer, and then we drowsed off into a state resembling sleep, in which clear thoughts played the role of dreams. When we awoke we exchanged our thoughts about these thoughts; Beatrice spoke of “lucid stupefaction,” while I preferred to call it “mystical catatonia.” It thus appears that starvation was good for something, after all. Then Beatrice suddenly said that she wanted to end her life. I was constantly talking about suicide, she added; she was actually going to do it. I was crushed, for wasn’t it Beatrice herself who, just a short time ago, had given me Nietzsche’s works as a gift intended to bring a little light into my sullen existence?

  Beatrice never gambles. This means that Schiller, in his missionary role as educator of the human race, would deny her a place among humankind, since only that person is human who has a sense of play. And because she shuns any and all gaming tables, she certainly had never gambled with life, much less with any thoughts of ending a life. I mean, of course, her own life, not someone else’s, since other people’s lives are meaningful only in a collective sense. Which is to say they have no meaning at all, as our wars and the current rapid transition in the Western world from humanism to hominism so amply displays. The fact that Beatrice desired to wring the hooker Pilar’s neck is sufficient proof that she has not yet fully abandoned the realm of common humanity or become a sociopath—or should I put all this in the past tense? No, today she remains grounded in the Old Testament, despite the crisis in the Clock Tower and despite all the other crises she has endured through war and escape from war, renewed hunger, and her chronically senile Vigoleis. Her list of potential victims still contains a half dozen names of persons who ought to be eliminated illegally from this world, insofar as this world impinges on her private world. The number remains magically constant, while the names change over time. Some depart from the scene, new ones appear and get on her nerves, and thus there is a quite natural, seasonal continuity to her roster of contemptibles.

  I myself do not disapprove of suicide, which Creation itself has demonstrated for us in impressive examples. In fact, I consider the concept of suicide as more sublime than that of a death than can strike us in the form of a flower pot plummeting from the sixth floor and hitting our skull—with God’s prior knowledge, to be sure, since He has even included the lone sparrow dropping from the sky in His Master Plan for the Universe. Every human being has the right to do with his own life whatever he pleases; if it pleases him to end it, that is his own business. And yet it is someone else’s business whether fellow humans approve of his deed. Most people regard the act as a violation of nature—“What if everybody…?” And there’s the rub. It is pure egotism that makes a person who feels superfluous want others to go on living, or to die by their neighbor’s hand. “The ethics of any pessimistic religion,” Nietzsche says, “consists in excuses not to commit suicide.” Even a person who believes in God and attributes solely to the Almighty the right to bring a life to an “unnatural” end before its “natural”one, might be persuaded to see in suicide the Will of God, of a God who in such cases, using a finely calculated and masterly plan, chooses a technique other than a bubonic plague, a Pilarian bacillus, a flower pot, or a Massacre of the Innocents to gather human souls into His presence. In the words of my poet Pascoaes, whose brother was hounded to death as a student in Coimbra by a professor who was his intellectual inferior, “He chose to decrease the distance between himself as a creature and his Creator.”

  I, too, consider suicide to be a religious variant of the Big Gamble in Paradise. I don’t mean the kind that happens when life threatens to choke you, when you leave fingerprints on the cash register, when there’s a bank failure, when your wife is sleeping with the chimney sweep (which leaves other kinds of prints), when you just can’t stand it any more and reach for the noose. All that has nothing at all to do with suicide, at least not with the dignified, metaphysical type of suicide I have in mind. Those are simply petty bourgeois traffic accidents of a sort that just don’t happen in the primeval forest. I’m fully aware that my position on this matter resembles that of a black native who feels superior to the whites, or of one of the “happy few,” one who feels more at home in the realm of metaphysics than in the range of experience open to everyone under the moon; who senses the redemptive emptiness that lies beyond this world and desires a foretaste of it, who immerses himself in it and, especially if he has fled from some Pilar, feels the need to stretch out his antennae toward some new form of Eternity; who can hold out for a day and a night, and again for another day and another night, in the awareness that there will once be an end to all this nonsense, with no promise whatsoever of a rebirth or continuation of existence, either in this world or the next. Someone who, by clinging to this metaphysics of nada, is just as unoriginal as the antipodes who fall to their knees with utter faith and confidence in the opposite persuasion—those heroes of the battlefield who trumpet forth fortissimo their own homeward march, if they haven’t died already. And they will have monuments erected to them. None of that is original. But what, after all, does “original” mean? Not even God was “original” when, after the Creation, he delivered up the whole thing to mankind, like some earthly artist in search of bread.

  All this is an amplification of the philosophy of the sin of the Creation as developed by my mystical friend Pascoaes, whom at the time I—a novice and myself a flesh-and-blood candidate for suicide in the Clock Tower—had not yet discovered, despite my search through Iberian literature for new ideas, inducements, and stimuli for my notion of nada. But this is an exaggeration, for I actually left it to chance to meet up with the proper adversary. I came close; my Portuguese sage was already on the horizon, and it is one of the rewarding aspects of my Mediterranean guest appearance that I finally did encounter this Lusitanian poet who, without fear, lays siege to the ramparts of his God. The pathway into his presence would take us first to a place that we sorely missed in our Tower. Patience!

  I do not disapprove of suicide, because its roots can be located in the big mistake of Creation itself. But was Beatrice thinking of this kind of metaphysically grounded death now, on the our third day of starvation? Did she wish to return to her Maker and then call back to me, “Ciao, Vigo! There’s hot water everywhere here, and you can have a roof over your head!”—which I have my doubts about with regard to the Great Beyond. Be that as it may, what did she want? The word “annihilation” had been uttered. Our values were about to undergo a total revaluation—I was expecting something very final. To be sure, here in
the cloister of the horizontal brothers, different standards prevailed. Our cell was proof in and of itself that nothing at all could be depended upon in these surroundings, least of all in the matter of nutrition. How gladly we would have crawled on our stomachs the entire length of the corridor if, at the other end, we had espied a slice of bread, preferably garnished with sobrasada or even a stone-hard butifarra. We were now ascetics, wetting our lips with stagnant water. No locusts fell to us from heaven, not to mention manna or wild honey (Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision hadn’t been written yet). If I were to succumb now, if the strength of my mind were to sink beneath that of my body, then we would have to do ourselves in, hand in hand. And we could arrange that in a romantic way. I had imagination; I enjoyed, albeit within a small circle of acquaintances, a certain reputation as an inventor, and moreover, we were avid readers—Beatrice had in fact read a great deal. Literature could offer us examples of how two people who are tired of living can take leave of this world—Romeo and Juliet come to mind. We know of their fate in the form of Luigi Da Porto’s novel, Shakespeare’s stagecraft, and Gottfried Keller’s dreamy, romantic version.