The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Now I was supposed to let the Savior melt on my swollen tongue—not to chew Him! The Host was not a lollipop. And whosoever eateth of this bread hath eternal life. On my way back home from this rehearsal where I had once again displayed my doltish, unheroic behavior, I dropped my cap in the mud, thus furnishing myself an explanation for shedding tears. My nice colored cap! My mother consoled me by letting me know that she had already bought me a new one, a silk sixth-form cap with a stiff wire in it. I told no one about getting whacked on the tongue. It was my secret. I was hoping that Sunday would make everything all right again. I would received Our Savior, and God wouldn’t let Himself be diverted from His Divine Purpose by some backwoods priest with stains on his cassock and dirty fingernails.

  Whitsunday arrived. I knelt down. My cousin Karl poked me just as I was about to stick out my tongue. Lots of incense, a crowd of people in their Sunday best, the First Communion roasts were already simmering in a hundred casseroles, the organ roared forth, a girl recited some prayers, ushers shepherded the little chosen ones on this, their Wondrous Day. All of a sudden I felt the cool presence of Our Savior on my tongue. Did I tremble? No doubt about it. Was my mouth dry? Of course. And I of course had difficulty swallowing the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. The sins of this young initiate were now erased, but I sensed no overwhelming illumination. Except for a bland taste of something like cardboard, I felt, to quote Martersteig, not the gratings of a green cheese. I had been deceived. Ex-communicated.

  When Heaven fails, Earth can often provide abundant recompense. The giraffe has a long neck in order to pluck leaves from trees. Nature thinks of everything. My Divine Feast was a failure, but my Mom’s First Communion meal was of regal proportions. Providence had bestowed upon my father a certain relative, Aunt Hanna, a spinster renowned far beyond our town limits. She was famous as a gossip, one who could take minuscule domestic events and inflate them into epic sagas. Whenever she opened up what she called her “Berlin basket,” my ears rose stiff with lust. And she was a great cook. There was never a baptism without her baking something fine, never a wedding without her Sevastopol pudding. Her true specialty: First Communions! This muse of the spinning-wheel had long since got the hang of what God meant by venial sins. She knew what kind of reward was due on these special days, and in my case she provided it in the form of savory dishes, which to this day I can name but no longer afford. Life has gone on, I have had to take many more whacks on the tongue, but there has never again been a tired but happy Hanna Hemmersbach to take her seat at table and accept praise from the assembled guests. And I have never again received rewards for any of my defeats.

  The Wondrous Day was also a day for getting presents. My relatives had arrived bearing gifts. My godfather, with his reddish chin-whiskers, his dress-coat, and his self-framed picture of the Sacred Heart (oval, red velvet, the rays in gold leaf), was already drunk by mid-afternoon when I was sent to attend the Service of Thanksgiving. If I had had a choice, I wouldn’t have gone. I owed no thanks to a duly ordained Friend of the Children like that old geezer.

  It was Sunday. And I didn’t have to go to church. The forest is my cathedral, pantheists of all shades are wont to say. We, too, lay beneath a starry dome. Most of the faithful were still asleep. Their snoring chanted harshly throughout the Manse.

  Beatrice asked me what I was thinking. I told her the story of the priest who was supposed to prepare my way on the Lord’s path, but who instead unloaded rubbish on it that I have never been able to push aside. I have often dreamed of this man, and now, in the Clock Tower, he appeared to me as a monster, half satyr and half shepherd of souls, dressed in a chasuble and chasing a virgin, wielding a huge key with slavering lust. I heard him shouting “Farther out! More!—Más!” with a drawn-out Spanish aaa. Spain is the land of devout eroticism. Nowadays I tend to doubt whether I would ever have come to an understanding of the great Iberian mystics if I had not undergone my novitiate in the Tower of Tarts.

  The main house and all the outbuildings were silent when, after dozing off again briefly, we squinted in the sunlight. Was everybody gone? Was time standing still? Had the tower clock struck its final hour? We got up.

  The old crone was all alone, asleep on a chair in the archway. Bullfight day is a holiday for young and old. At this hour in the Palma bull arena, Ortega, Lalanda, and Barrera were confronting the horns of the massive animals bred by the famous Miura. The champions who had exhibited their mettle on Adeleide’s mattresses were at this very moment displaying their courage and their más at the corrida, each according to his assigned role in the complex sport. Each of them could end up biting the dust, despite the candles burning in the little chapel on the Plaza de Toros, where the gladiators kneel before the Mother of God prior to entering the ring to the sound of trumpets and kettledrums. It was these three bullfighting stars that Zwingli was thinking of when he invited us to attend the national spectacle under the expert guidance of his friend Don Darío. Zwingli and his buddy were no doubt sitting right now amid the cheering hordes in the arena bleachers, cheering along with all the rest. Having snagged expensive seats on the shady side, they would be caught up in the frenzy of the bloody moment of truth that arrives in a whirlwind of silk. Hovering above it all, in merciless detachment, there would be the celestial vault and its sun, scorching the less affluent mob in the opposite semicircle of the stadium.

  Our own Sunday passed by without incident. Whatever passions were unleashed during the following night in our warehouse of wantonness had no effect on us, and thus are lost to posterity. Our slumber was hermetic. Our keyhole, through which it might have been possible to watch and hear us dreaming, was stuffed with paper. And behold another newborn, chrysalid day, a day for emerging out of hairy, hungry ugliness with sprouting, shimmering wings to enter a new life—lasting a single day. On the third day we felt nimble again, and went to the city. The world had not changed. There was an odor coming from the matadero and clouds of dust in the air. We aimed our sharp prow toward the telegram from Mr. Victor Emmanuel van Vriesland. It hadn’t arrived. Emmerich got his money back, and then we went to visit Antonio at the gentleman’s club “La Veda,” which means something like “closed season,” and the gentlemen there were decidedly closed-off types.

  Antonio advised Beatrice to place an ad for language instruction in the Ultima Hora. Sensing that things were urgent, he composed the irresistible text himself. Replies should best be sent poste restante; nobody should find out where we had our lodgings. Arsenio and Adeleide were fine people, and the police wouldn’t bother us any more; he had told the commander of the carabineros the story of our disaster with the minx Pilar. The police would have to check out the Clock Tower every now and then, but no one would pester us again.

  Another day, and no dispatch from Amsterdam. Instead, word from Danzas that our large luggage, especially crates of books, was now ready for passing customs in Palma de Mallorca. They found this out in Basel before the fellows at the Palma customs office got word of it. Fee: 1000 pesetas. Books are contraband in a country where literature is assessed by the kilogram—which, when you come to think of it, is not at all such an unartistic idea. I blessed myself: good heavens, will there never be an end to the fees and charges? Did we stay alive only to be plagued by life’s miserable appendage, financial worries? But Antonio knew just what to do. He had our luggage shifted temporarily to the duty-free warehouse.

  We received more mail; the world hadn’t forgotten us. A letter from my father, a delight for the eyes in his meticulous handwriting. How I would love to have penmanship like his—I could use it to earn my bread. What he wrote was just as candid as his calligraphy: It wasn’t clear to him what I was doing with my life down here. My reports were ambiguous; between the lines they showed an image of me that he wasn’t familiar with. How were things going in Spain? Mother was getting worried. And then a final line bringing the letter to its climax. As with any good writer, the sentence stood there on the page and suddenly ope
ned up vistas across the passage of time, causing the reader to place his hand on his heart. The weather was getting cool, and they had just mailed me a duck, the best of this year’s backyard brood, and Guten Appetit! I looked at the date on the letter. My shock of pleasure was followed immediately by the discomfort known to any skeptic familiar with the decompositional tendencies of all organic matter.

  More mail arrived on this day. But first I must dispose of this duck, and that will mean setting the clock ahead. Two weeks later I received from customs a notice that a package had arrived from Germany, import duty due. To be opened in the presence of a customs official. It was the duck.

  There was a certain odor, said the official, polite as the Spaniards always are when things truly begin to stink. Yes, it was the pestilence itself that I now proceeded to open up in the presence of authority. The packaging was first-rate: impregnated paper. I had to unwrap several layers until the backyard bird began to seep. The official nodded, and I replaced the wrappings over what was to have whetted our appetite. The fee was waived. Outside the city gates I heaved the roast into a field. Why didn’t I drown it right away in the harbor? My relatives had meant well, but as unclear as their notions about my welfare were, their ideas about the Spanish climate were completely false. Beatrice calculated that the bird would have got us past starvation, but would duck and Emmentaler go well together? Things would have gone much better if we had left Zwingli’s bills unpaid. My father was right: never get mixed up in strangers’ business. One’s own business is strange enough.

  The second letter was from a writer, and presented us with another canard. Vic had written it, Mijnheer van Vriesland, author of a novel about departure from the world in three days. My father’s bird had a greenish tint, but the bird Vic sent me was decidedly blue. The Berlin film company was broke, the glamorous star had completely disappeared, and he was unable to send an advance on the contract since he was himself depending on an advance from his publisher. But my letter! He found it delightful. It was worth more than a whole movie, this story about the trollop Pilar, I should try to market it. In any case, he had made copies of my epistle, and it was now circulating among the literati (the litter-rats?), some of whom had asked him for my address. Thus I shouldn’t be surprised if I got asked to produce sequels.

  And so my picaresque plea for help had not yielded us any cold cash from the writer van Vriesland, who today, as president of the Dutch and vice-president of the International PEN Club, has achieved the world fame that our abortive movie never gave him. Nevertheless, it was on the basis of my Pilariade, composed on a rusty bidet, that I did obtain something of no little importance: my friendship with the poet Marsman, whose verse I knew and carried around with me together with my volume of Trakl.

  The third letter we received on this day likewise had to do with ducks, or rather with a duckling: The proprietress of a small hotel in the center of Palma asked Beatrice to come for a visit. She had a young daughter who must be taught to chatter in English.

  Our suicide lay behind us, as if it had never taken place. The 4000 Dutch guilders for our departure from the world were sequestered in Berlin by dint of legal injunction, nor were we in a financial position to depart from the island to begin a new life in Toledo, where both of us wanted to go. We would have to wait things out on Mallorca and, worse, in the Clock Tower. So now, Vigoleis, get to work! Develop a new style! Combine the spatial visions of a van de Velde and a Gropius, with the Old Testament insight that life can be tolerable among depraved nomads, provided one has a tent to sleep in. Make a virtue out of necessity! Make a comfy home out of a flophouse!

  Vigo took all this to heart. He began to get ideas, and the chips began to fly.

  Beatrice got to work, too. That is to say, she got dressed up and went begging to the hotel where the duckling lived. The world was truly upside-down. The duckling’s mother, a very prim lady, was named Doña María.

  The girl’s name was María de las Niëves, Mary of the Snows. And it was she who brought about the miracle that early Christian legend associates with this cognomen: it snowed in mid-summer, or, translated into our insular situation of the moment, money fell into our heroes’ laps. Beatrice went to the hotel three times a week to hammer English vocables into this pleasant, but not very talented, daughter of a rich widow. The lessons took place in combination with a merienda, a snack—a matter of course, since the teacher lived far out of town, and a hotel kitchen never shuts down. This meant that Beatrice could regularly deliver sample delicacies in a can to her Vigoleis out at the cloister, where the shameless pauper gobbled up the crumbs from the tables of the rich like a flesh-and-blood vegetarian sneaking his Sunday chicken dinner behind closed doors. Once, while engaged in this work of marital mercy, Beatrice got caught with spoon in hand. Her boss confronted her (“What, secrets?”). Did she have a dog? There was enough garbage in the kitchen. All she had to do was notify the sous-chef. As we know Beatrice, she did not reply directly, “Begging your pardon, Madam, my dog’s name is Vigoleis.” Instead, blushing for mendacious shame right down to her liver, she employed circumlocution: the food was for her husband; we were living outside of town in a rooming house, but “full pension” did not describe the actual state of affairs. The landlady had fallen ill—that’s a detail I would have added. Doña María didn’t understand completely, but she understood enough to start railing about Mallorquins and their shameless exploitation of foreigners. From now on, at each English lesson Doña Beatriz would be given a picnic basket for her spouse, whom she should ask to come along sometime soon. With thanks for this generosity, Beatrice promised to put me on display.

  It is not my intention to accompany this language teacher on her forays to the hotel, much less to guide my reader along into the little room where Mary Snow struggled with a new tongue that she had to learn for her future career as owner of the present hotel, and of a brand new mammoth hotel already under construction. She had a hard time learning, and thus there would be no end of our hiking back and forth again and again, three times a week, from our suburban villa into the city. The Civil War would have already lit its fuses and sent its thugs after us. Any progress we made would reveal the hollowness at its core, and Mary Snow would still be agonizing over the irregular verbs. We actually did make some progress. We buckled down. With blind obsessiveness, we eked our way out of the Stone Age and entered an era that brought us custom-fit shoes and a tailor-cut suit, a thousand books on our shelves, and this and that other item that one wishes for when one is beyond wishing.

  During all this time, Vigoleis rigged up our homequarters. Rusty nails, stolen boards, a discarded wheel spoke, our ropes, a hunk of corrugated metal—with millions, anybody can build anything; God created the world out of nothing. Here, everything underwent an organic evolution, following the miraculous purposefulness of Nature—here and there a dead end that Beatrice would point to and ask, “What’s that for?” It was like a good book, about which critics might say: not one superfluous word.

  Our chair, which was superfluous whenever both of us were in the room, had its firm place up against the wall, where it looked like a hanging epitaph, a Baroque extrusion good for placing objects on. Most often, it was decorated with a tin can containing fresh flowers, and this became a problem when one of us wanted to sit down. I transformed our trunks into chests. Our bidetto is already familiar in its new function, but we of course also cooked on it—“brewed” would be the more fitting word, to take cognizance of its dual role. I stretched our ropes across the area where the architect had left a gaping hole, in the manner of clotheslines, but not for drying clothes. Instead, I hung our library on it, plus items we used during the course of the day. All kinds of things bounced above our heads: shoes, stockings, Georg Trakl, brushes, spoons, Nietzsche, Saint Augustine, dustcloths, suspenders, Novalis, detective novels, brassières, Teresa de Avila, St. John of the Cross—our books astride the ropes à la amazona. Using special wire clips, I took rejected manuscripts and pages fresh fr
om the typewriter and fastened them to the lines, where, like our victuals, they would be more or less safe from the rats. In old-time printshops, as you can see in early woodcuts, they hung the galleys up on ropes in a similar fashion to dry. If you’re willing to blank out such diverse items as sausages, loaves of bread, bags of flour or sugar, a sprig of vanilla, garlic cloves, and bay leaves, you’d think the Clock Tower might be the Venetian printing office of Aldus Manutius.

  So now, in place of a missing ceiling, we had an elaborate latticework of lines set out with remarkable skill, one that still allowed us a view of higher things. What writer can boast of a similar working space, where he can receive creative inspiration from above and below at the same time?

  Things didn’t go very well for us during these first weeks after the collapse of all the hopes we had set on the bottom of the ocean, and on Victor van Vriesland’s skills as a womanizer. Whoever puts his faith in hoping ought to consider making a careful selection, and eliminate from the start certain questionable aims. But we didn’t complain. We set to hard work—Beatrice with her usual compulsiveness that tastes like “victory,” compared to which I feel like a dullard, even when I’m putting my shoulder to the wheel next to her. Like the ants, grain by single grain we built our abode here in the Tower of Iniquity, surrounded by whores and rats, house searches and braying donkeys, candlelight and pious concupiscence, sharing a glass of wine with Arsenio or gabbing with the old crone. Somehow I even found time to play with the kids and sit on the lookout for the rat-king.