The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  “House search,” said Beatrice as I squeezed my way into her boudoir. “You had just left when I woke up to the sound of a shot. That’s when I noticed that I’d fallen asleep and you weren’t here. And then you should have seen the spectacle, the uproar—I was crying, shouting, swearing, much worse than that business back then with Béla Kun. I thought that…”

  “… that Vigo had gone and shot himself. Cross your heart, who else around here would be interested in shooting off guns?”

  “I know you’re afraid of guns. I didn’t have time to think anything. There was your note, and all of a sudden they started banging on the wall, and I thought all the trunks would come crashing down. Adeleide ran in crying and said nothing was going to happen to us, we should just stay inside, and if I understood her correctly, they were looking for smugglers, and her husband was under suspicion, but he was innocent. That’s all she said, because then a carabinero took her out and asked me for a chair. That’s all I know. But Vigo, I beg you. I can’t stay here any longer. We’ve got to leave. I’d rather die in the gutter!”

  That’s easier said than done in a country where the gutters are filled with contented bums. I don’t even think that there is a single country where you can die in a gutter. That’s just a figure of speech.

  That night we didn’t get any sleep. Instead, we felt a marvelous lightness. We seemed to have sprouted wings, and our ears resounded with shivering, rushing tones. If you need a musical comparison for this, Beatrice would be the one to consult. But that’s not really necessary, because these organ-like sonorities came to us not from the upper vaults of our basilica but from our own abdomens. To put it more delicately: the singing arose from the hunger in our blood.

  As the meager dawn approached, we dozed off into a semi-slumber that lasted perhaps a second or two, perhaps an hour. But then we heard a noise at the walls of our cell. The rats!

  But it wasn’t the rats, nor was it an armed battalion. First we saw a little hand reach over the partition, shadowless, like the hand of a dead child. We had no time to cower in fright, though, because the fingers of this hand clearly bent over the top of the wall to get a purchase on it. And then a second hand appeared, grabbing the partition. And finally a little curly head. Only one creature in the Tower had such a head of curls, and that was little Rosario. She peered into our cell.

  What she saw appeared not to satisfy her. Far back in her little throat she made a sound like the bleating of a new-born lamb. The others in this soprano choir were apparently standing downstairs in the corridor. The one peeking in on us said, “They’re still not doing it!” The little rubberneck slid down from her perch and the mob of kids dispersed giggling.

  Oh, my dear children, how I would like to have done you the favor of doing what we weren’t doing! For doing it would have meant living not only in a different skin, but in an entirely different flesh, not the martyred flesh we could barely sustain with a few drops of water, dragging ourselves past the stations of the cross muttering “Lord, have mercy on us” and fingering the beads of our agonizing rosary. No one was having mercy on our heroes. But what do you kids know about what’s really going on in your father’s house? What’s really going on, 30 times from door to door—kids, go play somewhere else.

  Beatrice glanced squarely at me. “C’est ça?”

  “What else?”

  II

  Except for the usual wailing of the wind and the everyday hubbub on the premises—the barking dogs, the squealing piglets, the braying donkeys, the clucking poultry—all was quiet at the Tower. I stepped outside our door.

  Arsenio was strutting around prouder than usual, issuing orders. When he saw me he gave me a conspiratorial wink and called out a few words, as if in rapid summation of the previous night’s adventures. Those cops had better go back into training if they think they can catch him—if indeed there was anything to catch here in his personal domain.

  At noontime we lay down again, Beatrice on the bed, I on the floor, each of us in the drowsy shadows of our hunger. Then I suddenly heard voices. There was commotion. More and more people had arrived at our cloister, door after door was being opened, the partitions shook. I heard Adeleide’s voice. Children were screaming like crazy.

  Adeleide was scurrying around in the corridor. At the far end on a small wall pedestal was a statue of the Madonna, the altar in this House of Love, with candles that, when lit, surrounded Our Gracious Lady with a halo of natural light. I peeked through the door. The hostelry matron was arranging flowers and greenery in gilded vases. A palm frond, beautifully woven in on itself, rose up behind Our Lady to the heights, which in this place were, of course, eternity itself. Was it Corpus Christi? I remembered this feast day very well. On the street in front of our house we put up an altar. We kids had to collect rushes and swamp grass to strew on the path of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Corpus Christi: a moveable feast—but this late in the year? The Catholic Church seemed to follow a different sequence of events in Spain; the faith was different here, the relationship of believers to the Almighty was different. But this was mid-September.

  “Friday,” said Beatrice, “the day the Lord died. You remember it only as the meatless day of the week. In Spain it means a lot more. In some southern countries they still ring the bells of dread the evening before. In Fiesole I was always touched by that custom.”

  “Bells of dread? Up in Süchteln we had no such thing, and”—I spoke in an aside—“no mantraps with perpetual May altars, either.”

  On this day we finessed our walk to the post office. The word “suicide” didn’t enter our whispered conversations, although we both kept it in mind and sensed it in each other even as we insisted on boiling our daily ration of water. Then we both retired to our separate pallets. We couldn’t share the cot any more, since the straps no longer held. Stretched out on my back, protected against the hard floor by cushions made of pieces of clothing, I began dreaming. But of what? I simply can’t remember. But we both recall, with the absolute certainty that comes of preserving “vaguely” in one’s memory an agony survived in the past, that we felt as if we had temporarily yielded up all of our earthly weight. To be sure, we were unable to fly, but could probably do so soon if we didn’t lose our patience and kept on fasting diligently. If Rilke, who loved to reside in palaces and perambulate arm in arm with white princesses, could say that poverty is a great inner glow, then perhaps he was thinking of the starvation that goes along with poverty, which can in fact become an inner source of light. As with the birds of the air, your bones get hollow and turn into fluorescent tubes. As we know, asceticism is partly based on the desire to release man’s higher nature by means of self-denial and abstinence. Stripping ourselves in this fashion at the Giant Arsenio’s cloister, we never reached the point where we felt so far elevated above the needs of the day as to require his services no longer. Nor was our condition of drowsy bliss so enticing that we ever wished to repeat the experience at a later time by voluntary exercises in fasting.

  “More! More!”—but in Spanish, with its long vowel aaa: “Más! Más!”—that’s how the word hammered rhythmically into my semi-slumber. I saw hands reaching toward me, all the cathedral beggars were crowding in on me, an army officer joined in the mob, half of me was myself, the other half Don Vigoleis, the Catholic German. But then I underwent a further cleavage, and I became the adulterous captain of the East Indian freighter. I saw long rows of animals passing by, large jungle ants being led to the slaughterhouse carrying burning candles, it was like a religious procession, and it smelled of flesh and incense. It smelled of women. I heard piercing shouts, a tongue of flame shot up, I was surrounded by monks’ cloaks, there was no lack of people wearing sanbenitos, a naked female was there (ascetics are famous for their wild dreams) I was being crowded and pushed, in one hand a dagger, in the other a gleaming receptacle. I felt a painful sweetness on my tongue, then I was split from head to toe. My tongue broke apart, I heard the tinkling of a key ring, and again and again: m�
�s and más and más… I tried to rise. Then I screamed and woke up.

  “You were shouting so loud,” said Beatrice as she bent down over me from the bed to wipe the sweat from my face. “What kind of a disgusting dream was that? I woke you up. I should have just tickled you behind the ear so I wouldn’t scare you. I’ve been wide awake for a long time. I know where we are. Can you hear me? I need some cotton to stuff in my ears, otherwise I’ll go crazy. This is Inferno itself!”

  The space above me seemed to be staggering in faint illumination. Beams of light were drifting off into the infinity of the sky. The bats, whose nocturnal dogfights had kept the fluttering insects at bay, threw ghostly shadows, like monstrous little dragons. And now there began a hullabaloo of bumping and humping, moaning and groaning, cursing and slamming from twenty-nine cells along the corridor. Women screamed as if they were being roasted alive, and the words they stammered forth in their transports of lust only barely exceeded the illiterate minimum of their devout carnality: Ay Jesús, ay Jesús, Santa María, ay Jesús, María, José, followed by a seething machine-gun rat-a-tat of lust from 29 different locations at once: “Más! Más! Más!”

  C’était ça, évidemment!

  Our booth shook. They had finally arrived—the much maligned journeymen—but instead of bringing their Wanderlust with them, they brought only their lust, and each one a woman. The debauchery screamed to the high heavens as in the days of Sodom and Gomorra, but no Hand of God appeared to smite the sinful multitude. The ridgepole bearing the brunt of these waves of depravity sat firmly on the walls of the Manse. How that Inca bird would have swung around on his trapeze and shouted his porra and puta! Every once in a while one of the cells ceased to oscillate, only to have another one redouble its rate of vibration. A third cell began to sound like the drawn-out moan of a conch-shell horn. Then came something like a fanfare, then somebody whacked a bass drum, and somewhere underneath all this, you could discern a vox humana. Was someone getting beaten up?

  The bats were already hanging in the feeble light of the roofbeams when this orchestral performance came to an end. The cacophony of creation gradually gave way to sounds from outdoors, one instrument after another went silent. Here and there one more note, a straggler from the sea of salaciousness, proof that some guy had finished playing a march for his chosen Madonna. Out on the courtyard a jackass was braying loudly.

  And yet silence did not reign among the nuns and the monks. Some dreadful snoring had started up, an ear-splitting form of snoring interrupted occasionally by a curse or the sound of a kick.

  Beatrice sat on the bed like a corpse—cold, pale, bolt upright, with wads of cotton protruding from both ears. Her whole body was trembling. I rose up from the uncomfortable position I had spent hours in, stretched out my legs, took the chair down from the wall and stepped up on it. I wanted to survey the scene, take in the view across the partitions into the temple to make sure it had survived this primeval night. At the end of a thunderstorm or a flood, people like to set out and view the damage, the news of which, depending on its severity, will get passed from mouth to mouth for generations to come. I am unable to enter into this chronicle what I saw in the neighboring cells; at best I might describe it in a privately-printed pamphlet that in any case would be immediately confiscated by the censors. I was touched—nay, I was deeply moved—by what I espied at the far end of the corridor. The little shrine to Our Lady was smothered in garlands of flowers, waxen votive offerings hung down on strings from the narrow pedestal, dozens of votive candles had burned all the way down into their glass holders, leaving only a single tiny flame, flickering ever so dimly in the upward breeze, as a devotional gesture to the Mother of God. Here in this devout Tower of the Hours, the breezes always went upwards. The wick floated in a little golden puddle of oil in a many-colored glass receptacle, casting prismatic daubs of colored light on the doll-like figure of María of the Pillar, Our Blessed Lady of Love, who had survived the entire past night of libidinous activity. She knew that the candles were not lit to banish the darkness, but to express joy and gratitude for Her humane regard for the lot of humankind, as well as to invoke Her blessing on what many consider to be a sin. She is familiar with any bearing of any cross, with any human destiny, any transgression. You can approach Her with any concern, even with the concerns of the Clock Tower. In Spain, the saints are not just static images of grace; in this country God has not been disqualified and made to follow the whims of theologians; no professor raps His knuckles in objection to philologically questionable passages in his posthumous writings. No one trains Him like a canary. He moves about freely, and is as well off as God in France—the One I know too little about. The fact that His Mother was given such a place of honor in this stable of lust displayed the Spanish national soul more clearly to me than any profound treatise ever could. I had, to be sure, read widely in the writings of Santa Teresa, and that ought to have sufficed to justify the Blessed Virgin’s presence in Arsenio’s scurrilous cloister.

  Around noontime Beatrice said softly but firmly, “Come on, get ready. We’re going to the water.”

  That’s what she said: “to the water.” Not…to the movies, or to the Café Alhambra, or to the Cathedral. But she also said that I was to get ready—and that meant, no doubt, get ready for the worst. And so I finally started shaving.

  The past night was simply too much for her. This much I could understand, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, with over-meticulous care I set to removing my stubble. This has nothing to do with class-conscious suicidal customs as practiced by dueling fraternity students, or army officers who dress up for the event in a dark suit and top hat. I was cleaning my face because I hadn’t done it in two whole days. I have never been free of vanity as far as my outward appearance is concerned. I’m not the roguish type who always checks himself in the mirror, not by a long shot. But I like my shoes polished, and the creases of my trousers mustn’t be allowed to flatten out. If I were a smoker, Beatrice’s suggestion would have prompted me to light up a cigarette.

  This particular day remains branded in our memory as an unusually hot one, a true dog day, even though the eponymous star no longer prevailed in the sky. Thus my depiction of our passage to the place of self-destruction cannot do without copious drops of sweat and thick clouds of dust. Did we take a final look at our possessions—adieu, my little bidetto, my faithful little typewriter, my poetic oeuvre; farewell, slipper and collar button, badger-hair brush and brassière, Indian dress and Unkulunkulu (this was Beatrice’s umbrella, about which more later), so long to all of you; shall we never see you again? I locked our cell door with the key, something we never did before. But when you intend to stay away forever, you take certain precautions.

  The Clock Tower cook, a girl of a certain age named Bet-María, with iron bones and a bosom that extended under both arms, greeted us effusively, pointing upwards where a shimmering haze concealed the azure sky, and intoned words that I shall never forget: “What a glorious day! May the Lord bestow upon us just as much sunlight tomorrow, and may the Purest, the Most Blessed, the Immaculately Conceived Mother of God grant us her gracious intercession”—and she pointed to the citadel of lust from which we were about to depart forever.

  Slowly and with dignified pace, like the mourners at our own burial, we entered the city, passed through its streets and headed for the harbor with the intention of leaping into the sea from the farthest end of the pier, where the lighthouse stands surrounded by a raised promenade. First I would help Beatrice, who isn’t good at climbing and doesn’t much like heights, to clamber over the iron railing, and then I would follow. I, too, am not very good at gymnastics, but a railing like this one wouldn’t be any problem. This was, incidentally, a wordless agreement between us, as we figured out in retrospect—one of the many that can illustrate how two people who are devoted to each other in body and soul can, at just the right moment, do just the wrong thing.

  As we arrived at the first boat dock, we noticed something tha
t forced us to change our plan. Amid orange peels and sardine cans, bunches of straw, street refuse, and a pool of oil glistening in all the colors of the rainbow, we saw the swollen cadaver of a cat jutting out of the water, and sitting on top of this, a rat eating a hole in its improvised raft. I pointed at this symbol of transience, and was about to start quoting Trakl when Beatrice pulled me away from this view of a form of putrefaction that, to one kind of tooth at least, offered delicate morsels. “…in sweet, stale, rotten flesh / their snouts toil in silence.” She was thinking: That’s just what would have happened with us—or rather, pardon, that’s just what is going to happen with us. So we’d better find a rat-free shoreline. “Come on, let’s go out to Porto Pí!”

  Porto Pí? But of course. That’s where a cliff juts out over the sea. We once stood there just like the tourists we decidedly no longer were. The Golden Isle had since become a Devil’s Isle, and now it was to become for us the Isle of the Dead. Onward, to Porto Pí.

  Did I remember Porto Pí, Beatrice asked. You bet Vigoleis remembered that cliff above the sea! He had stood up there in the days before Pilar turned into a raging bedstead fury. She had stood next to him, the intoxicating one next to the intoxicated, and she touched his arm and pointed to something in the distance, causing Vigoleis to think impulsively of Life and the Ocean and Swimming and all such things that leap to mind when things have come along so far that the two of you can stand and stare together at some distant point. He, of course, did not recognize this spot as suicidal topography, ideal or otherwise. But if Beatrice now wanted to go out there, the overhanging cliff could very well serve as a diving board, though not a very springy one. Still, once in a lifetime one can manage even that. I followed her.