The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  One by one, the days leading up to the hotel opening fell from the calendar. We had not yet seen the new building, but a day before the celebration Don Felipe took us along to El Terreno to show us the palatial edifice; on this occasion he would give us our rooming assignment. We agreed to wait until after the ceremonies before moving in.

  I can leave out the details of our tour through the enormous building. It still smelled of workmen, but in the prevailing heat it wasn’t necessary to provide for temporary rent-free tenants to help dry the masonry. Here and there workmen were busy sawing holes in the sandstone walls for windows—easily done to correct minor mistakes made by the architect. The rest was all finished, and we could stage the grand opening with a clear conscience. Whoever thinks that any opening ceremony is a fraud, has no proper sense of dynamics. Bunting, a bevy of costumed girls, top hats, a little verse intoned by an innocent child, a fluttering parade of dignitaries, and the laying of the keystone, the launching of the new ship, can take its impressive course. There will be speeches and toasts and choral singing, and afterwards the hammering and riveting and plastering will continue. Back in 1928 I had the opportunity, as a humble research scholar, to march behind Mayor Konrad Adenauer and other notables and attend the opening of the “Pressa” Exhibition in Cologne (30 million deficit). The event was still vividly present in my memory. I can testify that twenty-four hours before the sluice gates were opened, our hotel on Mallorca was farther along than the Cologne affair had been, even if you consider that Doña María’s shekels were by no means squandered as freely as those of the Rhenish Cathedral City’s fatcats.

  We had little time to look around our room, which was commodious and bright. Beatrice wanted to press a few keys at the concert grand, but Don Felipe was nowhere in sight. It wasn’t until we were on our way back home that the light finally dawned. Beatrice suddenly stood still, as if struck by a beam from above that couldn’t be caught hold of while continuing in forward motion. In a frightened tone she asked me, “Did you get a good look at our room?”

  “I just glanced in. A pretty nice room, not some garret like the one at Pilar’s, not to mention our dismal pigsty in the Tower. We’ve come a long way.”

  “A long way? Did you notice any wardrobe?”

  I conjured up my image of the room, measured it inch by inch, let my memory touch it up and down, and finally I had it all together: it did not contain a wardrobe, but something like a metal chest with little curtains in front. Surely the wardrobe was of the built-in type—just press a button and the clothes racks would come bouncing out. Drawers would pop out by themselves, and every time you opened or closed them you’d see the dust from little dead moths—in the Tower it was the bats who kept those little butterflies away from the love boxes…

  “Don’t kid around! You’ll see, those people won’t give us a wardrobe!”

  “Those people,” indeed. It wasn’t nice of Beatrice to talk this way. She was being very pessimistic. Why on earth should “those people” withhold a wardrobe from us, when they were investing millions in this enterprise? Millionaires, it is true, march over corpses—but over wardrobes…? This was my argument on behalf of grand-style capitalism.

  “It’s precisely because they’ve put millions into the building that they are cheapskates when it comes to adding a box for clothes. You can’t teach me anything about millionaires!”

  That was far from my intention. On the contrary, my intention was to plumb the depths of their psyche, or better yet, the depths of their cash register. A clothes chest as an instrument of power in the hands of a millionaire—Beatrice could recount certain experiences of her own in this regard. Inside the home of one of these types, she once was poisoned and, comically enough, a clothes closet played a major role in the adventure. That is where a strange man hid himself when not in the company of the lady of the house, the mistress who had hired Beatrice. So now, under the circumstances, I said that it was best to make inquiries, under the assumption that Beatrice was unwilling to play the role of hotel hostess without a wardrobe in our room, and I told her that I had given up the idea of being an erudite hotel flunky in a monkey suit. “When you come to think of it, chérie, we don’t need anything of the kind.”

  “That’s what you’re saying now, but as soon as we get there and start negotiating with them, you’ll chicken out, leaving me in the soup all by myself. You’ll start feeling sorry for those poor folks, or else you’ll get all mystical, and I don’t know which is worse.”

  Sorry? Well, anyone who feels sorry for himself can feel it for others, too. But “mysticism”? That hurt, and all I was able to say was, “Come on! We’re going to that hotel to have it all out with Don Felipe. If you prefer, you can wait outside. Don’t you worry, I am not going to go transcendental on account of a wooden box. You know what they can do with…?”

  But before I could specify a destination for the wardrobe, we had already reached the Calle San Nicolás and stood at the door. Just a few seconds later, we were in the little man’s little office. During those few seconds I gave myself an inward yank. My spinal column was stiff, but not inelastic. I was prepared to enter single combat against a million pesetas.

  Beatrice’s suspicions were confirmed in full. There was no wardrobe in the room, neither in the form of a piece of furniture nor in the form of a wall closet. Would we eventually get one? No, not in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, surely we could use the metal chest. Wood was expensive on the island…

  Beatrice shot flames at me with her Indian eyes, and this spurred me on immensely. I most decidedly did not chicken out; the two of us, certain of victory, started tugging hard—but at the wrong end of the rope. My mysticism remained earthbound in an Iberian way, whereas Don Felipe’s heart remained as stony as that of the king in the famous ballad.

  Then the little guy started getting edgy. Was he perhaps interpreting our behavior as an attempt at extortion? He got mean. The tiny golden pencil that up to now had tapped out the Morse code of his impatience on the desktop suddenly disappeared inside his fist, and his fist hammered down on the blotter. Caramba!—this was the Devil himself who now was reading me the text. Then he arose, but since he was unable to stretch up to his full height, he looked rather comical as he approached me with his shoulders hunched forward and his head drawn down. What kind of a game was this? What was this insolence of ours supposed to mean, a veiled threat? On the eve of opening day? “Do you want money from me? Are you both crooks (gentuza)?”

  All indications were that Vigoleis was about to get his face punched in. Beatrice took the necessary emergency measures. She was familiar with Don Felipe’s irascible temperament; in addition, he represented his patroness’ millions, and so he was doubly dangerous. But there was no violence. The Spaniard discharged his fury by thundering, “Me cago en Dios!” In the presence of a woman this utterance was in fact worse than the act itself. He was wishing me dead.

  Thus Vigoleis passed his first important test in the struggle for a human being’s right to a dust-free wardrobe, an object to which we can, without exaggeration, ascribe a symbolic value. He didn’t get a punch in the nose, nor did he get the wardrobe. Using his hors-d’oeuvre Spanish, and eschewing blasphemous actions like the one with which he had just been regaled, he let it be known to this Philip fellow that, under the prevailing circumstances, he must decline to place himself at the service of the hotel, and furthermore, even if Don Felipe were to reconsider, acknowledge his error, and come forth with the item of furniture in question, even then, there could be no question of cooperation in the enterprise. The conversation had opened up a gap; now there was an abyss between us, an unbridgeable one. What was more, Vigoleis knew he had the complete agreement of his Beatrice.

  Doña María, alerted by the noisy argument and informed in a few words as to its nature, immediately offered to have her own wardrobe transferred to our room. But her suggestion came too late; I had peered too far down into the cesspool of a capitalist soul, and it made my
flesh creep. If ever I were to fulfill my life’s dream, would I act in similar fashion, haggling over a few pieces of wood? Doña María had no recourse but her own nerves, which now conveniently collapsed. Her cicisbeo caught her as she fell, and hotel personnel rushed in from their listening post behind the door. Smelling salts, emetics, expert hands helped loosen the stays over her bosom. We departed. In this place there was nothing left for us to do.

  Upstairs in her little room, Mary Snow snapped shut her English textbooks. She liked Beatrice as Doña Beatriz, but not as profesora. But was the profesora now satisfied with her Don Vigoleis? The way he gave it to “those people”? Not yielding an inch in their categorical demand?

  We were on our way back home, out in an open field but surrounded by the stench of the slaughterhouse, a reminder that all is transitory, animal life as well as wooden clothes chests. Suddenly Beatrice acted up like a little puppy. She embraced and kissed Vigoleis, her armorless knight. He had really stuck it to those people!

  What else did you expect? What do you suppose those people thought about where we were coming from? Foreign trash—or doesn’t the word gentuza mean the common mob? They have only themselves to blame for this fiasco. There will be no opening-day tomorrow. “The damage will be in the thousands, and what does a wardrobe like that cost?” Although they were still the disgraced lodgers at a whorehouse, Vigoleis and Beatrice were finally on top of things again.

  Mary Snow was a cute child, but not a dancing dervish like Julietta, who in a similar situation would have dashed off to the cathedral to force the Virgin into approving of her nifty new dress. Niëves had as yet no such compensatory concerns.

  The hotel was not consecrated. As a result of unforeseen technical difficulties, the inaugural ceremonies were postponed indefinitely. Vigoleis needs only to brandish his lance, and already his enemies’ weapons split apart.

  We had to pay for this paupers’ pride of ours, but never for one second did we regret our stupid little prank. We are idealists. If amid the perfidious vicissitudes of fate suddenly a wooden cabinet is transformed into a divinity, we shall worship it to the point of utter renunciation. The first result of our fearless stand was three days of total fasting.

  Herr Emmerich congratulated us. He had heard rumors that we had landed splendid jobs. The charm of any rumor consists in the fact that everything about it can be either true or false; there is always “something” in it that corresponds to reality. When I reported to him that we had told those people to go stuff their jobs, he wondered whether we had received the money from Berlin and were about to go waltzing through Spain on donkeyback. The titillating news of Vigoleis’ latest quixotic caper spread like wildfire. There was a shaking of heads, viz.: the heads of Gerstenberg and Ginsterberg, Antonio, the noble anarchists, Captain von Martersteig, and the gangboss Arsenio, who renewed his prowling around with silver duro in hand. We were considered heroes.

  I have never owned a wardrobe. That’s because, since the mystical moment in question, I have always refused to forfeit any portion of myself for the sake of four boards, be they for holding clothing or for housing my eternally unclothed person.

  At this point I must not conceal the fact that a few months later Doña María begged us to excuse the boorish behavior of her business manager Don Felipe, and that she asked whether Doña Beatriz would be willing to resume lessons in her home. In the meantime Mary Snow had gone through two other English teachers, and she wanted Beatrice back.

  Beatrice agreed. My dress suit was put back in mothballs, and we continued our daily grind at the Clock Tower.

  One day was like any other, and what reason was there to expect that tomorrow would be any different? Every day was a day in a cramped cloister, with cramped food in a cramped room on a cramped bed, constantly gazing up at eternal goals, at the musty rafters and the beams of starlight that seeped through the spaces between nuns and monks above the motley wreck of earthly love.

  We had strapped ourselves early onto our cot, and were harkening to the waves of lust that reached our ears from the neighboring cells, the ebb and flow of human passion, the now familiar play of the nearby surf.

  Untrained though I was in things musical, my ear perceived what sounded to me like a wave of atonal sonority coming from two, or at most three, pigsties down the hall from us. She must be lying there now in her shimmering white Rubensesque plumpness, the mannish Kathrinchen, giving her groaning self to some dark-skinned bull—how fortunate for her that her lawyer husband’s nerves were still in a shambles! As long as that’s the case, she can get off on her own and live it up royally. There’s no lethargic Freddy around to tell her, “Not tonight, honey,” because tomorrow there’s this all-important conference, and after tomorrow’s conference, he’s so used up that it’s still no use. You’ve found just the place here at the Clock Tower. There are no conferences here except those that take place at night à deux in narrow cubicles, and the conference partners are of the prize-stallion kind. They may arrive with the faintly acidulous smell of a cow-barn, but you are long since sick and tired of your Friedrich Wilhelm’s fragrance of baby soap. To be sure, you must take precautions that your conference partners don’t present you with a certain kind of gift; the Essen coal-and-steel community would notice right away that your kid came not from your own local master-miner, but from a Spanish sapper.

  Just as I was mentally sneaking over into the white-hot next-door cell and was about to suggest that the blond child of the Lower Rhine ask the Tower madam for some stain remover, there was a knocking at our wall. Adeleide had a message for Beatrice: there were two gentlemen waiting in the tavern who wanted to speak with her on an urgent matter. “At this time of night?” Were they out of their minds? No, one of them was a soldier, a buddy of her son’s. The other one, in civilian clothes, she didn’t know.

  What do they want with me, asked Beatrice as she donned her albornoz. When I replied that it was obvious what they wanted, she said that, first of all, I should be ashamed of myself, and, secondly, they wouldn’t arrive as a pair, and, thirdly, one of them was a comrade of her English pupil.

  Arriving in a brothel as a pair—back in Cologne I had done just that on my mother’s arm. And as far as shame was concerned, here in this accursed red-light joint, there wasn’t a single corner free for the satisfaction of such moral exigencies. But Beatrice didn’t listen to my compunctions. She walked the length of the corridor down to the eternal altar to the month of May, and located the secret door that led directly into the fonda. At night it was impossible to get her to go out alone to the rat nests.

  From the cell where the Valkyrie was being anointed by some Iberian sailor or almocrebe, there again arose the familiar voice: “You over there, are you arguing again? Do you ever do anything else? You don’t have to come to the Tower for that. You can do that back home!”

  Before I could launch a reply over the partition, I was interrupted by a muffled scream of pleasure. In Spain, the jus primae noctis is a plural concept. In this case, a certain kind of erotic stopper was preventing our Menapic Katharina from giving full effervescent cry to her ecstasy. I am already calling her “our” Katharina, long before we have made her vertical, fully dressed acquaintance at the side of her burned-out spouse. Needless to say, we shall refrain from revealing to the latter person what we know all too well about the former. We will wink at each other now and then, and here in the Clock Tower winking will convey a message something like this: what we see there curving up under a hand-knit blouse from Casa Bonet for 100 pesetas is something that we have already viewed in its pristine, divine, paradisiacal, untouched state, gleaming with dewy freshness. That is, we could say we have viewed it in this state if we make the effort to erase from our thoughts an insatiable Spanish pig and his grubby hands—which we truly must do if we wish the word “untouched” to have any but second-hand connotations.

  In the following chapter I hope that we will progress far enough to get to see Kathrinchen without climbing up on a chair. Wh
en the time comes, she will no longer be a juicy piece of wild game, but rather a tame gentlelady. But now, Beatrice was staying away a long time.

  I had the pilarière all to myself.

  Lying on my back, I gazed through our latticework ceiling into the heavens above the barn. In the next cell a sailor, one who apparently hadn’t put into port for quite some time, was exerting himself strenuously. The partition shuddered, and the ropes and everything hanging on them were making obedient bows. My manuscripts rustled softly, and my shoes dangled up and down on their laces. The longer the swab next door blabbered on in a language unknown to me, seeking compensation (perhaps even more) with his saved-up pesetas for many a lonely night on the high seas, the more macabre seemed to me the ebbing and swelling of the baroque rigging above me. Moonlight seeped down through the perforated cupola and combined with the glow of the corridor shrine to form a melancholy twilight, glistening dimly in the oscillating ropework.

  It is at such moments that I have made poems, the best and most beautiful ones of my lifetime, which reveal the locale of their origins only insofar as I step forth in them more naked than the divine Rhenish child three boxes away from me. These stanzas of mine mark significant beginnings, they allow certain chords to resound that might almost have given meaning to my life. But these products, too, I committed to the flames with a firm hand when it seemed to me that their time had come.