While Vigoleis, released from all earthly bonds and with strange flesh heaving all around him, thus experienced his moment of transcendence, downstairs in the taberna the Fates were spinning new threads. That is to say, the yarn was already spun at the beginning of time, and all that was necessary was to mount warp and woof on the frame so that the shuttle could start on its zigzag journey.
The two men who had arrived at this hour, which was for us still the dead of night, were Pedro, a painter, and his brother-in-law and friend Fernando.
Pedro wore the uniform of the Spanish army. He was a common soldier, not one on bribed leave, serving his time in the army with a peevish and scoffing attitude. He was an intelligent young fellow whom the curse of civilization had not yet turned into a fool. Like all men of his rank, his head was shaven bald, for the military debasement of the soul is quickly given its outer mark of Cain. If you’re being trained to shoot at your fellow human beings, what right have you to walk around with a full head of hair exposed to the omnipresent lice? “Poor guys,” said Beatrice, who had never seen a prisoner in a German barracks brig. Arsenio passed around smuggled cigarettes and poured them a vintage from his cellar, otherwise served only to the gentlemen who arrived in Rolls Royces and U-boats. Don Fernando, Beatrice told me, actually looked nice. And it was no wonder, compared to the two other good-for-nothing ragamuffins.
Here is the story: back at the barracks, Beatrice’s somnolent pupil Pablo had sounded forth the praises of this private teacher who was coaching him in English, something he was decidedly less good at than he was with telling tales out of school. Everybody knew, of course, that the Clock Tower was a cheap doss house, and Don Fernando’s comrades-in-arms began wondering about this exotic coozy who was earning extra pesetas by selling another one of her natural talents. And from England, of all places. Or was she? No doubt a prostitute who was dishing out a story to Pablo that he wasn’t supposed to pass on, even after several months—but one mustn’t look for guilt inside a shaved head. A uniformed companion of his, Pedro, also bald but bright, had been looking for a teacher, one who was good but cheap—two qualities seldom combined by Mother Nature, who isn’t exactly generous in handing out her oddments. Out here at the Tower, Mother Nature relaxed her standards somewhat, so much was clear. But was Pablo’s teacher good? She surely must be cheap, and that’s what Pedro needed because he was very poor. He was nothing more than the son of an even poorer father from a highly aristocratic family, an impoverished island dynasty with historically significant lineage. Some of the ancestors are hanging in the Prado with pleated millstone collars, their hands on their swords or at their breast. Pedro’s brother Jacobo was rumored to have become a successful painter, married to a rich American woman. They had a house in Génova, C’an Boticari, that was frequented by the art-loving foreign colony that spoke only English, which is why Pedro wanted to learn the language. Pablo had been raving about his teacher, but surely he never said where or how he was sleeping with her, since his lessons always took place at a marble table in the Tower taberna, pitifully illuminated by a lamp thickly coated with fly droppings. Don Fernando, Beatrice reported, spoke fluent English and was a much-traveled man; I must know him: he was the thin, greying fellow at the post office whom we often overheard offering consolation to English ladies concerning lost correspondence. His title there was Secretary, next in the post office hierarchy after Director, a position that was unfilled. His wife Pazzis was a sculptor, one of Pedro’s apparently numerous sisters, and there were even more brothers. A flourishing family…
In two hours a lot can get said. Beatrice gave me a report down to the last detail. I listened to her like a child at the feet of a crone telling fairy tales while rain patters against the window panes. The men in the cells were doing another kind of pattering, but this didn’t make the scene any less magical and lulling. Every once in a while Kathrinchen added a Rhenish squeal of pleasure to the Spanish drumbeat. And Beatrice talked and talked…
Don Fernando and Pazzis, who was lust for life incarnate, became our friends. I recall Pazzis as a highly talented artist on the morbid side, with a face covered by freckles. Whenever I was in her presence I felt a lump in my throat. Often it was only a dumpling that prevented me from speaking, but Beatrice said that I was in love. I knew what it meant to be in love, when your throat and your mouth tighten up simultaneously. No, it was something else. Later, Pazzis took her own life. And then I realized that I had sensed her presence as a counterpart to myself.
Don Fernando had a high-pitched voice; his manners were quite un-Spanish in studied imitation of foreigners he had observed, and he had salt-and-pepper hair that must have given Beatrice pause for a second or so. Moreover, he had a sarcastic way with his sketching pencil, which he wielded at any and all society gatherings on the island. As a marvelous complement to his eccentric personality he owned a little Fiat in which everything was loose that was supposed to be tight, and everything that was supposed to move was stuck tight, so that the car had to be pushed. The more Don Fernando kicked and swore at this vehicle, the more immoveable it became. On the other hand, as a postal official he demonstrated a gift for cosmopolitan inventiveness. He distributed gratuities to the conductors on the Génova tram line, so every day at quitting time he hitched his Fiat to the last car. Out at the terminus he was greeted by his mongrel Perna, so named after the leg that it lifted on everything in sight, including its master’s own leg. Upon arrival he asked kids to push his Fiat up to his house, the residence of artists. Don Fernando liked to have himself chauffeured around like a satrap. The next morning the kids turned the car around and set it at the top of the street, and Fernando descended noiselessly through clouds of dust to his place of work. In El Terreno he had to put another gang of kids in harness to get him across a level stretch. There, too, Fernando exercised his regal prerogatives. He employed this commuting technique for years until Pazzis finally was able to show him down to the last penny that the bribes, gratuities, and motor vehicle repair costs—the only constant and reliable aspects of owning this vehicle—were costing him more than he would spend if he took a taxi every day. If five passengers got together for a taxi ride to Génova, each one would be paying the equivalent of a single fare on the tram. So Fernando gave up his car, but then fell into a fit of melancholy. People said that he even began neglecting his postal duties—that is, if a Spanish civil servant can ever be said to “neglect” his duty. At the time when Don Fernando came to look over the educated prostitute at the Clock Tower, he still was in possession of his Fiat, which meant that he was at the height of his potency. He was of course convinced that the teacher didn’t know a word of English, but he was genuinely curious as to how she went about practicing her other profession, her Tower trade, and he wanted to find out for himself. This he confessed to us later, but he need not have.
Don Fernando was such a sophisticated postman and civil servant that he survived the shock of learning that Pablo’s profesora was the sister-in-law of the doxy who lived in the apartment across the street from his office. Once this mutual acquaintance was established, the conversation took an easygoing, cosmopolitan course, partly in English, then in French, and again in Spanish. Don Fernando was familiar with the biography of Zwingli’s mistress. He knew Zwingli, too, but only as Don Helvecio, though he would never have guessed that the man behind the name was actually Swiss. “But listen,” said Beatrice, “this Tower here is even worse than we imagined. People get killed here!”
“People killed? What else is new? But of course, you’ve never climbed up on the chair and seen bodies lying flat in rows. That’s pretty old stuff that your two friends are dishing out.”
“No, Vigo, you don’t understand. I mean real murders! These guys aren’t at liberty to express themselves clearly. Arsenio kept pacing around the table. He didn’t trust these visitors. And the Chinaman who helps out in the kitchen isn’t just some shipboard coolie. Adeleide told me that he’s an important contact in the opium trade, and the
international police are looking for him!”
“Well, they’ll have a hard time finding him. The ‘Torre’ is the best alibi for respectable people. For example, who would ever guess that we live here? As for that stuff about real murders—wouldn’t that be a great plot for a trashy novel? The title, usually the hardest part of any book, would be the easiest thing to come up with: ‘The Clock Tower Cadaver Murders.’ How’s that?”
“Cadaver Murders?”
“Of course! I mean the corpses that get pre-slaughtered by the pious girls in their boxes with the aid of the Sixth Commandment. Then along comes a sadistic smuggler with a mask and completes the job. As for getting rid of the bodies, a piece of plotting that most writers of thrillers lose sleep over, I’ll leave that to the rats. Brehm reports about a case in which a gang of these rodents devoured alive three of young Hagenbeck’s circus elephants. When they all work at it together, they can take care of a stiff in the course of a single night. All that’s left over is a bunch of bones, and if necessary I’ll grind them up in Adeleide’s flour mill, in a chapter where the author steps forward to manipulate the plot so as to avoid the premature revelation of the culprit and to prevent the novel from ending too soon. Our horny friend Kate over there…”
“Shh! What if she’s listening?”
“She’s all finished, I made sure of that. Now she’s lying there like a pile of rotten wood on a sultry summer evening. So what do you think? Wouldn’t a great murder thriller like this one bring us some money?”
“I’m all for the theory, but the problem is how to put it into practice. What I mean is, that the rats would gobble up this manuscript, too, before the first murder takes place. But you know better than I do what purposes you have in mind for your writings.”
“Beatrice, chérie, I swear to you a sacred oath that this time…”
“No swearing! We have sworn to each other never to swear anything to each other. Have you had any sleep?”
“Did some reading.”
“Nietzsche?”
“More profound than that! The Book of Nature. It’s quite amazing when all the cells are cooperating in the work of Creation. Everything fits so nicely together, it’s enough to make a believer out of you. In any case, it’s given me a whole lot of inspiration. Two poems! A lullaby filled with sweetness, and a dirge filled with jarring hiatuses. They were all finished in my head. All I had to do was to reach for a pencil. But as you know, I never do that. The seismometer announced new temblors, even your Unkulunkulu started shaking, which it usually doesn’t do unless the boxes are filled up. Such things get dangerous if you’re on a bridge, and that’s why you should never go across in march step. And here? Wow! Blondie over there started yelling for her mother, so you can imagine what her mood is like. Now she’s quiet, but there are always aftershocks. Tell me more about those two guys downstairs.”
“Tomorrow. The painter strikes me as pretty far gone. By the way, he looks just like the ex-King of Spain. The very same face.”
“And the other guy, Don Fernando?”
“What about him?”
Hmm…, I thought. Instead of “What about him,” Beatrice could have gone on to say, “Oh, that one. Well, he’s elegant, a little crazy, in a raw-silk suit, steel-blue eyes, Basque blood, and hands like a vampire.”
Reclining now on our chaste pallet, we abandoned all further considerations to the care of the night. The moon had departed, the candles in the cells and on the pedestal of Our Lady had all gone out, and since the seismograph was inscribing its perceptions into thin air, there is nothing more to report concerning lingering tremors. If I were determined to record a single word, a single blissful moan uttered by my Kathrinchen, I would have to reach back for earlier statements or ejaculations of hers; what I would write may be true, but it wouldn’t be historical. She herself is historical. She has left traces in the Essen Registry of Vital Statistics, and she left impressions on her mattress in the Clock Tower that I shall never forget. Surely it does not behoove me to impugn her credibility in my jottings simply in order to lend contours to her figure by having her utter in a barely audible wheeze, “Man oh man, I’m all done in! Now I’ve had enough for three whole days!” (In chaste parentheses: the next day she was at it again.)
We don’t even know if the rats got what they were after, during that night when Don Pedro José María de Lourdes Juan Celerino Roman Miguel Bruno Ramón León Ignacio Luis Sureda de Montaner Bimet de Maturana y Vega Verdugo de Rousset y Lopez da Sousa y Villalonga de Alba Real del Tajo made his shaven-headed entrance into the Recollections of Vigoleis.
When Beatrice conceded her poverty award to Pedro, she was familiar with only three centimeters of his name, for otherwise she would have subtracted a few pesetas. For the longer the name of a Spanish grandee—some of them take up the entire page of a book, and I have rendered Pedro’s only in its minimal, albeit historically most significant, form—the poorer its bearer turns out to be. They seldom suffer from a dearth of ancestors. Pedro, with a lordly gesture, reduced everything to “Sureda” on his visiting card.
The English lessons took place at the home of Pedro’s parents. And it was there that Beatrice got to know the numerous clan members. “It’s a crazy place,” she said. “It would be impossible to make them all up.” Once again I was forced to restrain my novelistic curiosity. It was weeks before I was introduced to Pedro and his tribe, of which he represented a quixotic offshoot. With regard to the other members of the family, I am tempted to write that he was “the most quixotic,” but this superlative form of the adjective is not very elegant linguistically, and besides, it would imply value judgments that I prefer to avoid. In what ways, for example, was Pedro battier than his father? I shall stick with the simple term “quixotic,” which will allow me plenty of room for doing justice to this new character in his superlative deviancy as an artist and as a human being.
We frequently took advantage of La Gerstenberg’s invitation to join her for a snack in her room at the Pensión del Conde. This was, of course, the kind of “snack” offered by persons of means, and it far outpointed our usual main meal of the day in terms of nourishment.
We had to return her invitation, and thus there arrived the great day when Beatrice held her jour in the Clock Tower. Adele Gerstenberg was touched—“But children, no need for that! And for heaven’s sake, don’t go to great construction for an old lady like me.” She asked what our living quarters were like. She was curious about this ever since her Friedel told her that the estate out there was a highly romantic place, and Vigoleis himself had already planted hints in this direction. One day she almost hiked out there by herself to make a surprise visit, but her kind son was able to quash that idea. “But Friedel, why not?”
Her son kept the answer to himself. But now we had issued the invitation, and all that remained was for the scales to fall from her eyes.
We chose a day for our little dinner party when the mattress transactions would be at a minimum. There were in fact certain days when no one at all made use of the cells, allowing us exclusive enjoyment of the celestial premises together with the rats and the bats.
We arranged everything in the most attractive fashion. We unscrewed the chair from the wall, and our natural disorder was transformed into unnatural order. Beatrice was in charge of the change of sets. She had her own notions and experiences concerning a jour fixe. I had none. There was no such thing in my parents’ home; there, every single day was a fixed day, and that was that. In the first months of her marriage, my mother tried to arrange some such thing with the aid of her well-to-do farmer relatives, who planned to arrive at our house in their coaches drawn by heavy draft horses, dressed in stiff silks and furs and velvet. Among them was a filthy-rich hermaphroditic cousin, Aunt Molly, whose marriage turned into a tragedy—a novel in itself. But at the birthing hour, my father stuffed this tradition’s head back where it came from. If this nonsense came about, he would sue for divorce. This was a remarkable form of mutiny for a sma
ll-town couple who, on their wedding day, took a donkey ride up Dragon’s Crag on the Rhine. My father simply didn’t like any kind of “fancy stuff,” and thus he deprived me of jour experiences, leaving me to depend on my own imagination and on passages I read in books. I wondered how Madame de Staël or Bettina Brentano might arrange a reception if they lived like us in Robber Arsenio’s castle of whoredom. But Beatrice wasn’t to be deterred; she developed her own style of entertaining company. Her standard was not to be found in the palaces of the princes and captains of industry where she had been present for tricky conversation, delectable pastries, and poisoned tea.
Our sty looked less piggish once her aesthetic hand rearranged the stuff on our clotheslines in a more pleasing order, just as, when company is expected, you might place knickknacks on a highboy next to a silver swan with peacock feathers. The bidet was concealed with an Indian shawl, although it was my intention to reveal the whole truth to my fellow author La Gerstenberg, ever since we had our conversation about how, for a writer who plies his craft by hand and outside-in for hours at a time, writer’s cramp is best overcome without the aid of psychoanalysis.
We picked up our guest at her pensión and walked with her casually to our jour fixe. I carried her folding chair, which she made use of repeatedly during the journey. She didn’t like the heat; on a hot day she felt as if she had been strapped in a harness that impeded her freedom of movement. This was an oppressively hot day. The highway was veiled in clouds of dust, and the slaughterhouse was making propaganda for a vegetarian lifestyle. Adele, even more prone than Beatrice to feelings of disgust, started shivering. I told her that this was a stroke of bad luck; it didn’t smell like this all the time—the wind was blowing in from a certain range of hills and bringing certain things along with it. Surely she knew the poem “Harbingers of Spring” by her friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal, where the wind wafts through bare boulevards carrying strange things in its course. There was a similar stanza in Mörike: familiar fragrances glide ominously through the land, just as we were experiencing here. “Great poetry, chère Madame, can encompass the entire globe. No matter which poet pumps the bellows, his breath can grasp the heart of any receptive creature.”
The Island of Second Sight Page 38
