The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  In numerical terms I can report that on the basis of my agreement with the postal clerk, seldom more than 36% of our mail got lost in the shuffle.

  It was Menno ter Braak who drew my attention to the writer Slauerhoff. I came upon Albert Helman by myself, whose stories impressed me greatly. His pseudonym concealed a Surinamese writer about whom it was rumored that at age seventeen he was still climbing trees in the jungle—no doubt an exaggeration, but he couldn’t yet be badly spoiled by our civilization. I wanted to reach him concerning the German copyright to his jungle novel The Quiet Plantation, and one day in the university library in Amsterdam I took a seat next to a young man who was obviously translating something in a book. It was The Quiet Plantation. At the time, I was struggling with Menno ter Braak, the West Indian’s recalcitrant, trouble-making antipode, and his Bourgeois Carnival. My new library acquaintance and I got talking. He was a brand-new German Ph.D., and he was in fact translating Helman’s book into German. Probably, he said, we would be at loggerheads about my own intellectual barbarian ter Braak. This Dr. NN was a reticent, well-read philologist, the recipient of a Catholic stipend that allowed him to purchase books and sufficient amounts of food—an ideal situation for a literary person, whereas I was living on garbage like a stray dog. But this I must now explain. I worked a lot, but got almost no pay. Moreover, I am a voracious carnivore, one whom the vicissitudes of life have often coerced into becoming an abject omnivore. I refuse to let this get me down, but I am filled with remorse by my awareness that Nature can turn certain creatures into bad dogs. To be sure, the Miracle of Creation exhibits worse cases of corruption than a meat-craving Vigoleis with his seven meatless days each week. I found out that a butcher in my neighborhood sold scraps for dogs at ten cents an ounce. I became a daily customer of his. It’s for my Doberman, I told him, a smart, sweet, huggable animal if there ever was one, trained to the nines, a good watchdog, virtually quivering with pedigree. The butcher and his regular customers couldn’t wait to see this canine miracle. It was not readily noticeable that I myself was the dog in question, for I performed my metamorphosis inside my rented room, where I prepared these somewhat questionable delicacies using rare Indian spices that cost much more than I could afford. The other little doggie had none. But in his state of non-existence, he was actually better off than his master.

  Every day at the butcher shop I reported the newest training triumph of my pet pinscher, and I reached the point of having him begin to talk—at the time there was only one other talking dog in Amsterdam—when a stupid grocery clerk entered the discussion and killed my dog Mickey dead right in the middle of the shop. This guy was eating all the scraps himself, she shouted, the stakkerd!

  She had the laughing crowd of customers on her side. Stakkerd means imp, bum, loafer, tramp, and moocher. But before I could investigate mentally the word’s etymology backwards from the Old Norse and then up through the centuries to Vigoleis, on through the incarnate essence of all of the term’s nuances and into the very blush of my cheeks, I found myself standing out on the street with my ounce of flesh, betrayed by a maiden—just as, months later, Beatrice was caught holding a spoon by Doña María. Her dog was also named Vigoleis, which is further proof of his unique brand of double identity. I pulled the brim of my floppy hat far down over my brow, hunched up the collar of my loden coat, and snuck away like a culprit. That was the end of my peppered adventures with the frying pan. In total humiliation I reached for the potato, and came to despise it even more ardently. I avoided the scene of my abasement, although by rights I ought to have avoided my own self. I kept a discreet distance from the butcher shop. I behaved like Zwingli, or rather—keeping things as close as possible to the first person—I conducted myself as the Vigoleis of my own self will have to behave in the following chapter. Everything has already existed, says Uriel da Costa.

  The Ph.D. wanted to obtain a fellowship for me from the same Catholic organization that was financing his existence, but I would have to declare adherence to the Creed. As tempting as his offer was, I preferred to remain faithful to my pinscher: for every Sunday Mass, days and days of living it up.

  I also maintained my fidelity to Dutch literature, whose rich corpus of verse makes up for its almost total dearth of “great” prose. I discovered Henny Marsman, bought his books of verse and poems by other writers—you can buy little books by scrimping on food, one of the fine advantages of poetry. This entire harvest was now hanging on the ropes in our cloister cell, although at the time I had no idea that our adventures in the Clock Tower would one day be the very thing that started my friendship with Marsman, the great carnivore who loved solitude, but only if there was a butcher shop nearby. In my biography of Marsman I intend to relate how, in a restaurant located in the shadow of the Goetheanum in Dornach, and featuring a life-size photographic likeness of Rudolf Steiner with his theosophic gaze, the entire clientele of anthroposophers turned to stone as Marsman, speaking through Beatrice as interpreter, asked the waitress to bring him a bloody rib roast. Pace Uriel da Costa, such a thing had never existed before. We had to leave the premises, and in Arlesheim “At the Sign of the Ox” we finally were served what we were dying for. No one there raised an eyebrow, no one raised a scolding finger, no one pointed to a likeness of Steiner, and no one declared with the voice of an avenging bouncer/angel, “Rudolf Steiner says…”

  With all due respect to anthroposophy, its Founder never listened with sufficient intensity to emerge from the Seven Regions of his spiritual realm to pass into the Eighth Region: our “Clock Tower,” where I can survive on little nourishment, just as I did on Nicolas Beets Straat in Amsterdam, and where I make literature and then destroy whatever the Tooth of God has not already destroyed. Slauerhoff’s novel The Forbidden Empire made such a strong impression on me that I inquired about the copyright, and began translating it during the hours that Beatrice spent in the city giving language lessons. Of course I never succeeded in finding a publisher for this novel on the life of Camões, although I spent a pretty penny on postage for this manuscript. In addition, there were my intermittent poetic blood-lettings, my satirical stanzas, my dark-hued ballads: all of these got hung on the ropes, where they could dry out like slabs of Swiss smoked ham. The rats sniffed at them, but not because of the poetry they contained—I can’t boast of any such success. Scraps of food and edible provisions also hung alongside them on our lines, which I stretched loosely enough to prevent the beasts from dancing along them. I placed insurmountable obstacles, made from tin cans, at strategic points where the ropes crossed each other. This infuriated the pestilential horde, but they devised a way to get around it. They chose a subterfuge that must have involved insight and ratiocination: standing on top of the partitions, they gnawed the ropes. One night whole portions of the contraption collapsed. We two slumbering human beings were victims of the disaster, and everything in the cell went higgledy-piggledy. It was like a replay of the scene at Pilar’s on the night of our eviction. Not a single rope that held only literature had been touched! Since I still considered myself more intelligent than the most brazen smarty-ass among the rats at Arsenio’s whorehouse, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. Putting index finger to temple, I thought, “Wire!” On my tramp-like wanderings I never found pieces of wire long enough to create a network entirely of metal. So I made do with lengths of wire as end-pieces for attaching the ropes, and slipped the necks of bottles over them. Now show me a rat that will dare to step out on this tightrope! Beaming with pride I displayed my new brainstorm to Beatrice. A gnaw-proof hanging library! But I was jolted back to sober reality when my woman remarked laconically that, while she never wished to interfere with my technical experiments, she had never quite understood why I hadn’t thought of using wire in the first place. My hopes that one day during my lifetime an English lord would offer to purchase one of my teeth to fashion a ring from it—a story they tell about Isaac Newton—were immediately dashed. Worse yet, it would be like pulling every last one of my own teeth
to become master of this murky, misty realm of the shades. I had no profit from Beatrice’s retroactively obvious solutions.

  Our heroic couple was not lacking in diligence and ambition. Beatrice gave language lessons inside and outside of the notorious Manse, while Vigoleis led his less lucrative, sedentary literary life in our thinking room. Occasionally, the kids peeked through the partition to observe his production of world literature, and the big kids often arrived with their even bigger playmates to engage in their bumping, groaning business next door. This was just as much a part of the daily routine as the braying of the donkeys or a courtyard conversation with Arsenio. Every once in a while the Maiden from the Lower Rhine sounded forth with her silvery peals of joy. One day, when I perceived these blissful yelps issuing forth from the neighboring box and felt a waning of the literary inspiration descending upon me through the webwork above—our bidetto wasn’t yielding anything more than hollow, tinny trotting sounds anyway—I decided to step up on our chair and take a peek into the next-door cubicle. What met my eyes was a vision of the purest splendor; reaching my glance from the bedstead in all its glowing, shimmering clarity, the sight penetrated all the gloomy regions of my heart. Yet moments of mystical vision are like all moments: they don’t last. This one was over in a trice: all at once a shoe came whizzing at me, and I had to crawl back into my private underworld. The almocrebe who was her companion of the moment had aimed poorly. His missile struck the barn wall, loosening a centuries-old film of dust, caromed off, and did considerable damage inside my sty, though not the kind of damage that this off-duty teamster had in mind: he had aimed at my head. My airy archive was set in motion. Ropes snapped, and it was hours before I could re-arrange everything in its proper order. During this repair job, I of course had to keep my skull below partition level, for otherwise it would have been sudden death. Next door, Katie had a giggling fit, thus deriving a bonus of pleasure from the situation. What was I thinking of, violating the unwritten regulations of a whorehouse? The Spaniards are the most chaste people I know. A professional Spanish prostitute—perhaps I have said this already, but in any case I’ll mention it soon again—feels mortally insulted if a painter asks her to pose as his model.

  Our respective jobs didn’t bring us much money, but whenever we scraped up the real and fake duros that came our starving way, they were sufficient to meet our current expenses of sending out manuscripts into the world and heating our stew over our little camp stove. Meat? Not even on Sundays, the day when even the poorest of the poor can find traces of fat in their soup. We could smell meat, but only as its fragrance wafted toward our cell from the abattoir, from the neighboring cells, or from the old crone’s barbecue spit. We were invited once a week to visit our friend, the Royal and Imperial Court Actress, to partake of a meal and reminiscences of Old Vienna. This was always a feast day for us; there was wine, good talk, Inca squawks, monkey business, and lots of handshaking and shoulder-clapping with friends and strangers. And one day—lo and behold! It wasn’t Schiller’s famous Cranes of Ibykus. It was Katie, the coal tycoon’s spouse from Essen! The rocking chairs wouldn’t stop rocking. There were shouts and laughter. “Yes, indeed, my friends! Beatrice, Vigoleis, finally I’ve got you together with a few of Vigo’s compatriots. I’ve already told them about you. Please, Friedel, you do the introductions.”

  All of a sudden the big, wide world became a mere nutshell, a tiny thimble. This beautiful and imposing lady, her Rubensesque bosom covered by an expensive embroidered Mallorquin blouse, came up short when she stood facing Beatrice. And Beatrice, too, mentally shielded her eyes. Now where had the two of them met before? In Berlin, of course! No, beg your pardon, it was in Düsseldorf at the Becker Steel stockholders’ meeting. “Friedrich Wilhelm, isn’t this amazing? We meet again here on Mallorca!” Her spouse, the Herr Doktor, the steel magnate, was not sharing the thrill of this re-encounter, and so the lady felt it necessary to apologize for her slight breach of etiquette, based as it was on a total memory blackout. Her husband’s eyesight, she explained, had deteriorated since that time—when was it? Of course, 1928, when the serial murderer Kürten was loose in Graf Adolf Park—the mention of this notorious fellow with the bloodstained jacket helped to patch over an embarrassing moment. “He’s overworked,” the lady added, and La Gerstenberg, once again rocking in her chair, whispered to Vigo as he bent down to listen, “Nervous breakdown”—a diagnosis that I discreetly passed on to Beatrice. Whereupon all of us assumed a mien of great seriousness, as is appropriate in the presence of a fellow human being gone to rack and ruin. Only the Inca cockatoo refused to respect this minute of silence; he squawked forth his unchaste battle cry, and in so doing was, of course, very close to the truth at hand. Mr. Heavy Metal took off his thick spectacles and wiped them ceremoniously on his jacket lining, although when he put them back on, he couldn’t see any better. He had aristocratic hands, probably as a result of his ailments. He was also markedly taciturn, and to cap his misery, he seemed to have picked up a flea somewhere, for every once in a while he secretly scratched himself under his belt, the place to where the little animals love to migrate; they feel sheltered in the warm space between clothing and skin.

  We took our seats around the self-portrait of the illustrious Sureda father-in-law. The robust Rhine maiden sat opposite me, and her silken blouse caused me to become just as tongue-tied as the gentleman from Essen. My inner world, too, had now increasingly shrunk—not to a nutshell, but to right-hand Cell No. 2 in the Clock Tower, and I was straining to accustom myself to the sight of the fully dressed woman. So that’s what you look like, you steamy nympho, when you’ve had your fill and then stride forth out of the sin bin to return to the myopic glances of your mucked-up Freddy Boy and give him some line about “going shopping,” while your almocrebe once more licks his chops at the thought of the beauty spot so magically located on your left breast. Has your honorable husband ever noticed it? I’ll bet it’s not listed in your passport under “identifying marks.”

  “Vigoleis, you’re so quiet today. Is anything wrong? Poems? Creative block?” inquired Madame Gerstenberg, for whom my silence was particularly odd, since I was the one who usually was expected to take center stage with my story-telling.

  “No, neither the one nor the other, and most certainly not the third thing, either. I’m still enough of a mime to be able to conceal such afflictions from other people. Otherwise I could never step out in public.”

  “Was there another flood out there where you live?” asked Friedrich. I replied that maritime conditions at the Torre del Reloj were still favorable—sometimes low tide, sometimes…

  “The Clock Tower!” shouted the magnate’s wife, and turned as white as her now-clothed body. Her features collapsed and her eyes turned hollow, but she quickly regained control and continued in a joking vein, “Oh, ‘Torre del Reloj’! Back home we call it a church steeple, and that’s probably what it is. But now, speaking of clocks, a glance at my watch (a costly object set with diamonds, which she never wore in bed—her johns would have a taste for such items, too) tells me that we’re going to have to leave. My husband is expecting a call from Germany. Darling?”

  “Well,” said the tragedian as heavy industry made its hasty departure. “What would Herr Doktor do without the ministrations of his little lady?”

  “And what would Frau Doktor do without Spanish subsidies in the Clock Tower,” added—not Vigoleis, who could have verified this brown-on-white, but Friedrich Ginsterberg, La Gerstenberg’s sassy, savvy son.

  “Now Friedel! Do you have to spill the beans all the time? Besides, speaking in asides isn’t the fashion any more, except perhaps in cheap melodrama.”

  “It’s just possible, Mama, that this is a cheap melodrama,” replied her son, who knew the score. With that he had the last word. Bowing in all directions, he went his own way, a way that was to lead him without delay or hesitation to many similar towers, and before very long to the Alicante cemetery.

  The telephone mess
age from the homeland, the one the Frau Doktor remembered so suddenly on the basis of my prompting, appeared to have thrown her ailing spouse completely for a loop. The industrial couple sent a note to La Gerstenberg, saying that an urgent family matter required that they return for a time to Germany, and then they boarded the next steamer for Málaga. The mild climate and the famous medicinal wines will have put Friedrich Wilhelm back on his feet, and Katie no doubt also found in Málaga what she was in need of.

  I wonder whether they are still living—he with countless professional entries and titles in “Who’s Who?” and she, nameless and identifiable only by a beauty mark on her left breast? We shall meet up with her again, once again denuded, but not in her own nakedness.

  The tycoon couple ought to have stayed on to hear Adele Gerstenberg read from her play, but as the insatiably curious Friedel had found out, they were already floating somewhere on the Mediterranean. Thus the audience was confined to the persons originally selected: Baron von Martersteig, Beatrice, Vigoleis, Mr. Emmerich, the optician, and Friedel, his mommy’s son.

  The author read aloud for two whole hours, with a brief intermission for seltzer water between Acts Two and Three. We had been told that she intended to read only a few scenes; no one was prepared to hear the entire drama. The historical model is a familiar one: the chaste Queen Elizabeth, a miracle of moral righteousness in her own time, managed a “Clock Tower” outside the city gates, where almocrebes and bullfighters likewise derived their entertainment. To be sure, this cost Essex his head. I can’t recall whether La Gerstenberg lent this hackneyed material a specifically Spanish flavor; I am myself too poorly schooled in history to tell, and even less curious about necrophilia. In any case, the effect of her reading was overwhelming. But to say this, is not to apply a value judgment to the literary qualities of her play. A talented elocutionist can transform the kitschiest doggerel into veritable pearls of poetry, and send immortal literature into the trash bin.