The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  One of the kids in the family, Pablo, was slated to learn English so that he could later play a role in his father’s business, whose true nature was getting gradually unveiled. Pablo was nineteen, narrow-minded, and wily; his hair was shaved down to his skull, and his breath smelled. He was in the military, but he was bought free to the extent that he could sleep at home rather than in a barracks. Three times a week he hunkered down in the Giant’s fonda as Beatrice funneled learning into him. For this activity she received 25 pesetas, meaning that we no longer had to pay rent for our cell. The young soldier, who at nighttime went on life-threatening smuggling duty, fell asleep without fail every time English sounds reached his ears. And since it is inadvisable to waken a sleeping soldier, Beatrice, too, regularly fell asleep during these sessions. It is only very great generals who can afford to snooze on the battlefield. The only one who stayed awake was the Giant. He slithered around our little classroom with something on his mind—but what? Every time Beatrice’s head fell on the tabletop, she woke up with a start and saw this gang leader motioning to her with a shiny duro—his Adeleide wouldn’t notice, and after all, he was the boss here at the Clock Tower. Beatrice could no longer see the forest for the trees, so I finally had to enlighten her as to what this guy really meant by flashing 5 pesetas at her. In my calmest tones I let her know that she had gone down in price since we started living right here at the source. Now that we were housed in a hookshop on the basis of a hotel waiter’s ministrations, it was all over with the prices once offered by the gentlemen sitting on the hotel terrace. Beatrice shook her head, and with this gesture she provided the most plausible confirmation of the effectiveness of my interior architecture: she had forgotten that the air surrounding us was unclean. Then it was Arsenio’s turn to shake his head. He added a second duro, he went as high as twenty, and then he gave up. We stayed the best of friends. He just couldn’t understand why people didn’t make use of their most natural gifts.

  Why would a woman ever choose to remain fallow?

  After a few months, he offered to advance me the amount due at customs for our books. We could bring all of them here, since books were all that we had on our minds. I thanked him with a deep bow, and was given wine. But we refused his tempting offer, for fear of the rats. We knew that there wasn’t any cheese in those boxes of books, but we didn’t trust for a moment the lemurs in this carnal zoo.

  We enjoyed the respect of the permanent Tower whores. They were poor creatures, not all of them beautiful. They were women who got badly mauled by the bullfighters when they wouldn’t perform as requested. Their behavior earned them slaps and blows as a bonus for the love-making. They knew that we could hear everything, and they agreed that the whole setup was like a pigsty. I told one señorita I had got to know, one who had certain intellectual ambitions, that you can get beaten up in any profession: a rejected manuscript is no caress, either. When I showed this girl our room, she broke out in tears. And then she asked if we had ever seen the Big One.

  The Big One in the Tower of Whores was the super-lady, the main attraction, a walking exemplar of eroticism, a living legend of lechery, a second Pilar, a scarlet sister of sainted reputation, Palmira by name, who demanded a cool thousand to stretch out on the mattress of her profession—if we can indeed call a “mattress” the venue where she pursued her business. Her johns, if they weren’t the famous espadas in person, arrived in limousines. For this queen of the coquettes, Adeleide had outfitted a luxury chamber in the main house. One day Palmira showed it to us, like a proud newlywed showing her relatives around the estate of her nouveau-riche husband. This suite had cost a pretty penny. The four-poster bed stood on a raised platform, the canopy borne by gilded columns. An elegant mantilla served as a bedspread. By means of a silken sash, the canopy could be opened, revealing a capacious mirror. Indirect illumination was installed all around, each lamp with its own silken pull. The walls were done in Genovese damask. In one corner stood a shrine with an antique Madonna on the crescent moon, a literally adorable figure. There was a censer hanging on a chain, a lamp for the eternal flame, and an ivory crucifix. A reproduction of Goya’s nude Maia, not one clipped from some art book, hung on the wall in an exquisite frame. Above the door you saw a shepherd lolling next to his shepherdess, playing her a tune on his shawm. The room smelled of very expensive lasciviousness. An upholstered door led to the bath, which was a masterpiece of the Palma firm of Casa Buades, Plaza Cort 32-35. Baths of such opulence as this one were to be found in only one other location on the island, the Palacio of the banker Juan March. Pilar’s murrhine receptacle was here made of red marble. It could not be held in the flat of your hand—the single blemish in this exemplary penthouse.

  The woman who lent this bed of honor the glory of her body, Palmira, whom some called Doña Palmira, arrived one day at the little room of Vigoleis, whom some called Don Vigo, and asked him straight from her tastefully concealed shoulder, without cooing or lovey-dovey preliminaries, if he would be interested in giving her some company in her boudoir. “I want to sleep with you, stranger man. Why won’t you come and visit me? You are certainly aware that people pay handsomely for a night with me, but you are not aware how much I would give for an hour or so with you, my foreign man. My dear little friend, you’ve come here from so far away. I could give you so much, so much…”—this was the approximate tenor of her invitation—“but of course you wouldn’t accept it, for you are as proud as your dear Doña Beatriz. I admire you both for remaining here in this pigsty, for living your own lives that are so much unlike ours, and not giving in to the misery that surrounds you. For you know, my sweet darling, I’ve heard your story, and I just had to see you up close. So now, come!” The only alluring aspect of her appearance was her eyes, which shimmered behind gilded lashes.

  Sweet, darling Vigoleis, her little love-cushion and lustful lollipop, gold medalist in the syphilis sprint and by this time fluent in Spanish, withdrew his desirable body from this dangerous tangle in approximately the following fashion: “Señorita, my dear friend, my big little sweetheart from the luxury apartment, pride of the Ivory Tower—you are lying. For if you truly knew of our adventures, you would realize and comprehend that I simply cannot come with you. And since you are bigger than Pilar, I wish that you wouldn’t threaten my life. I don’t exactly love it, this life of mine, but I am suddenly in need of it again in order to finish a story I’m writing, the story of a poetizing (I said poetisante) youth, whose posthumous works were eaten up by rats when they got wind that he was on his way out. But then he survived a leap into the void, and in his leather satchel there was no longer an oeuvre for him to destroy. Now he is making up for lost work. He is writing his fingers to the bone, just look…so let’s remain friends. As romantic as it would be to sneak around on the paths of illicit amorousness, it’s just as romantic to write about it. My next chapter will be an idyll about Palmira and this far-traveled stranger, and their encounter in the Clock Tower…” But then I noticed that the nymph standing opposite me hadn’t understood. She wasn’t interested in literature about love. She wanted love itself. She stamped her foot, shook my hand, and departed. No sooner was she gone when I felt the need to wash my hands. But I was ashamed of my twofold cowardice.

  Over time we got used to the sounds of nature at the Tower, just as the neighbors of a railroad station become inured to the noise of arriving and departing trains. You subconsciously memorize the schedule and watch the clock on your kitchen wall. As far as we were concerned, this whoretel functioned more like a registry. We got to know several regular customers, and they got to know us: “Odd birds, that foreign couple nesting out there in the ‘Torre’—they must be some kind of token respectability.” Aristocrats have a way of showing disdain for the mob, even after the mob has long since tossed them out of power.

  I think the time has finally arrived to say a word about the actual business conducted at the “Torre del Reloj.” Suburban hostelry, produce farm, vineyard, and trading post—all this
was, of course, a front. Arsenio stood at the center of an ingeniously contrived ring of opium smugglers, who chose a cleverly orchestrated dealership in contraband American cigarettes as a further element of camouflage. He wasn’t completely his own boss, although in the Balearics he was the top guy, crafty and cunning, gifted like no one else with the talents of a field marshal, and equipped with detailed knowledge of the local terrain. The true boss of the syndicate was the noted banker Juan March, nicknamed “Verga,” a term that means “rod” or “switch,” a cognomen held in honor by the family to commemorate the weapon they used in earlier times to discipline their hogs. March was the richest man in Spain and one of the richest in Europe. “Enrichi au su de toute l’Espagne par la fraude et la concussion,” as Bernanos exclaims in his book on the Spanish Civil War, a war that was to a large extent financed by Juan March himself. Today, according to reports from friends in Spain, he is richer than ever before. Someday I would like to write a biography of this American-style gangster, but no doubt a more worthy pen will be found for such a task. In the meantime, a great deal has already been published in newspapers and magazines about this upstart. Yet as far as I know, no one has yet produced the horror story appropriate to the subject, a tale entitled perhaps “From Hog-Tender to Billionaire,” which would also be awarded the ecclesiastical imprimatur. At this point I shall only mention the role played by this political dude during the Wilhelminian World War, which poured the first millions into his piggy bank: grain exports from Argentina to the belligerent countries, paid in advance using neutral bank accounts, protected by neutral insurance companies. The freight consisted exclusively of stones; the ships were sunk by a hired submarine. A brand new game! A brand new kind of luck!

  When we arrived on the island, this banker’s palace was already standing. But his father still tended the pigs in Santa Margarita, using a method that is just as amazing as the mathematical/philological talents of the famous Elberfeld horses: the swineherd opens a furrow in the field with his verga, and not a single pig dares to cross the line. That’s because thousands of years ago the pigs that strayed beyond the line got whacked on the snout, and their descendants still sense this. The younger Señor March, on the other hand, escaped the magic pale and pressed his snout far beyond the limits of the family farm. In fact, he marched over corpses, and that’s why he served time in prison when the Catholic monarchy collapsed. But he didn’t stay long behind bars. He bribed the prison personnel, from the warden on down to the most menial keeper of the keys, guaranteed a living for all of them in foreign climes, and arranged a clever escape for the whole caravan via La Linea across the border to a ship waiting at Gibraltar. This coup cost the banker several millions. The nascent Spanish Republic was already beginning to topple. Don Darío, who bore a personal grudge against Don Juan as the result of a murder case, suffered a nervous breakdown while the monarchists celebrated lavishly. During this time, Beatrice was giving French lessons to a certain señorita. On the day the escape was announced, she received champagne. Her pupil’s Papá was Don Juan March’s lawyer.

  Juan March came up with a brilliant idea for a wedding present for his own daughter: an airship. He commissioned Dr. Eckener to build a zeppelin for her honeymoon trip around the world. Unfortunately, the company in Friedrichshafen was unable to sign a contract, owing to lack of time until the desired date of delivery. In Palma, gossips passed the word that the bridegroom had already crossed the line; even solid German workmanship could not produce a dirigible airship in nine months’ time. Don Juan was content with a Super Whale from the aircraft firm of Dornier. For the position of on-board steward he selected a giant Watusi negro, who for weeks was a sensation on the streets of Palma. The smaller wedding gifts were publicly exhibited in a local hall; it was similar to a World’s Fair, and people came over from the mainland to take a look. Only Goering and Caligula ever put on such gaudy displays.

  There were innumerable stories circulating about the owner of the “Banca March.” But then things quieted down for a few years while the man lived in exile, until at the beginning of the Civil War his name started to be mentioned again. After our own escape from the island, when we were living in Basel at the end of 1936, in conversation one day with Dr. Hartmann, the foreign-news editor of the Baseler Nachrichten, I ventured the opinion that Franco would never win the war, not even with help from Hitler and Mussolini, because these two potentates had only their own interests in mind and would drop His Excellency the Caudillo just as soon as they had achieved their particular ends. Dr. Hartmann and I were having a meal at an Italian restaurant. He ordered more wine, we drank a lot, and he became more and more pensive. His ruddy face featured a pair of very intelligent eyes behind thick spectacles. These eyes of his sparkled, but otherwise he looked dead. I thought to myself, he’s drunk. But no, he was just sad. Like many bachelors, he was a good-hearted fellow, and loose talk just wasn’t his way. I continued gushing about the possibilities in Spain, but then he said it was already too late. Franco was going to win. His newspaper had just received a dispatch from Rome that Juan March had arrived at the Vatican to negotiate support for Franco with the Pope. Did that mean that gold would start flowing from the combined sources? “No doubt about it,” said Hartmann, taking another doleful swallow. Tipsy though he was, he saw all the connections, and soon things started working out precisely as he had prophesied. A few days later the Concordat was no longer kept secret; it was in all the newspapers. Any church with universal ambitions must be willing to walk over corpses if it wants to avoid having to dig its own grave. That is the bitter truth, but it’s also how progress works. It causes weeping only in those who get to feel it. We were weeping too.

  At around this time Don Pío Baroja, one of my favorite writers, found refuge in Basel, where he lived in the house, in the shirt, in the trousers, and in the slippers of the oddly totalizing writer Dominik Müller, and ate his heart out with homesickness for Spain. The only element of his clothing that didn’t originate in Müller’s costume shop was the beret on his head. Don Pío was a very special kind of anarchist, so special that he had enemies in all political camps in his fatherland, all of whom wanted to shoot him, even in the attics of the country’s two embassies in Paris. So he fled to Basel’s Water Tower area, where Dr. Müller did for this Spanish refugee what we refused to have the Führer do for us: he offered him a pair of pants. Pío Baroja accepted. Herr Müller published an interview with this, the greatest Spanish novelist of his time. People who read it and who knew Baroja said to themselves, “There goes another one—Baroja on Franco’s side!” It gave us a shock, too, and we sought out this Basque writer. He was, thank heavens, still the same. His Swiss host had played an evil game with the refugee’s world fame. I lacked the courage to alert Don Pío to the scam that was going on. He was himself unable to read the words his friend had put in his mouth. Baroja immediately confirmed Dr. Hartmann’s dark suspicions, and even without the aid of wine he added, more gloomily still, that he felt forced to surrender. He was old, sick, and exhausted, and without Spain he couldn’t go on living. This vagabond genius, this desperado and anarchizing romantic, whose life’s work already filled more than eighty volumes, was suffering from the same illness as had befallen his Basque compatriot Unamuno: Spain. Gallows-birds like Juan March, whose biography no one could have written better than Don Pío as part of his series of little-known adventure books, seem able to keep this disease under control. The finest products of the country are the ones who are repeatedly ruined by it—not only in Iberia, although that is where the affliction causes a dramatic level of desperation only possible in the somber shadow of the Man of La Mancha.

  Arsenio was not a murderer and not a millionaire, but he was what one might call well off. He could have bought up all the volumes of poetry in the world without becoming one penny poorer. Juan March was the crowned king of the island, Arsenio the uncrowned one. The gang used a submarine, a decommissioned craft of German manufacture, steered by a genuine German captai
n whom we once met in the Tower, where he always was given a princely welcome. If he happened to arrive without a sailor’s bride, Adeleide regularly lent him accommodations in the Big One’s commodious four-poster. This fleet lieutenant spoke fluent Spanish, but on one occasion, when something took him by surprise, he betrayed his Teutonic origins by exclaiming, “Au Backe!” I immediately replied with, “Mein Zahn!” and the introduction was complete. Whenever this dashing pirate turned up at the Tower, a certain excitement pervaded the premises. One week later Arsenio actually told us that we shouldn’t be scared if we started hearing guns going off at night. The carabineros had gone nuts and couldn’t be persuaded that he, Arsenio, didn’t have something to do with Juan March’s band of smugglers. “Opium?”—“White slavery?” The chieftain slapped his thighs and left me standing alone. In the following night we heard gunshots. There was a hellish to-do, a clattering of hooves, women screaming (but not in the boxes), dogs barking, and flares shooting up in the sky. Vigoleis and Beatrice were unharmed. Antonio’s connections with the police were reliable, and, in any case, we had such a reputation as bohemians that we could have walked the depths of Hell unscathed, like angels on a guided tour. Arsenio and his two older sons were taken into custody, and that evening the English lesson in the fonda was canceled. But the three rogues wandered home the very next day—lack of evidence. So Arsenio blew his loud horn: wine, octopus, pavo real, turrón, with the lady and gentleman from Box I as guests of honor. For once, Beatrice didn’t need to enter the little hotel with tin can in hand; this time her dog was given the juiciest morsels right from the spit. But we drew up short of drinking to companionship and brotherhood. We stuck with the formal titles Señor Arsenio, Señora Adeleide, Doña Beatriz, and Don Vigoleis. A toast to you and to us!