During the current emergency, and amid deafening salvos of thunder, I was glad to have a cookie from Cell No. 2 tell me just how the Celestial Fire Department worked: who manned the buckets, who stroked the pump, and who wielded the hose. This pious whore knew all about these matters; she didn’t hurl a shoe at me when in all the confusion I happened to gaze down on her across the partition. I had to rearrange our ropes, for otherwise the tempest would have scattered all of our carefully stowed possessions all over the cubicle. In a state of semi-undress, the girl was kneeling in prayer at her pilarière, her eyes raised to Heaven and thus to me, although I was in no position to perform miracles. Her bull lay asleep on the mattress. Only a direct lightning hit, or a renewed invitation to the dance, could have lifted him out of his snooze. She asked whether my girlfriend wasn’t afraid, too, that the world was coming to an end; she wasn’t screaming or praying, and we hadn’t lit a holy candle. No, I explained, my girlfriend had long since conquered fear. She wasn’t much for praying, and anyway, God didn’t care much for mockery. No sooner said, when a bolt of lightning hit the barn. I tumbled back off the chair on top of Beatrice, a loud peal of thunder rocked the Manse, the rafters shook, and piercing screams went up all around us: the Torre is on fire! The place smelled of sulfur and the cheap laundry bleach “Legia,” the scourge of all foreigners who cannot afford new clothes every six months. Underneath me Beatrice was trembling from head to toe, and I myself was trembling under the mess of our belongings that this celestial knockout punch had sent down on me with our network of ropes. For a split-second that seemed like an eternity, all was quiet. And then the clouds split apart. Rain splashed on the roof. Nuns and monks started dancing.
If this were a novel and I its author, I would now introduce the filles de joie one by one and have them tear each other’s hair out over the question of who was responsible for seizing that lightning bolt and, in the very last fraction of a micro-second, flinging it outside the barn at the carob tree—was it Saint Barbara or Our Lady of the Pillar? O Santo da porta não faz milagres, says a Portuguese proverb: the household patron saint doesn’t perform miracles. In this barracks of sin there was no shrine to Saint Barbara, and thus it was she who had prevented the disaster. The Tower was not consumed by flames, although the carob tree was now two carob trees.
Nevertheless, this meant an end to love-making. This, too, makes my jottings different from a novel, where the writer would show his little couple sauntering across some field or, in a higher-class plot, have them mounted on horseback, both of them filled with glowing ardor and quivering emotion. Then with a swift change of mood the author would make a storm appear. At the first big raindrops he would have the two of them head for the nearest haystack. The heavens would open and pour down oceans of water, a second Great Flood. But our two heroes would remain neither soaked nor satiated; they would make love endlessly, as if there were no such thing as hay since Adam and Eve… Unfortunately, I can’t depict such a scene for my own little couples, because there are too many of them, and I wouldn’t know where to put them. Outside it’s pouring cats and dogs, and inside the barn too. Even if the nuns and monks had allowed all the stars and planets to enter the Manse, they would have been powerless against the waters. The water level was rising in the cells. Sauve qui peut! Après nous le déluge!
The electric wires shorted out. I lit candles—not holy candles, but working candles. Man the pumps!
Deploying our raincoats and Beatrice’s miraculous Unkulunkulu, I was able to divert the torrents; at least we were now protected from the worst inundations. All around us was chaos. My poems, my great prose, my published renderings of other people’s writings, our sugar, our sprig of vanilla—all this had now turned into a soggy, dripping, watery mess. The sole survivor of this catastrophe was a little spray of domestic parsley that Beatrice hung on the ropes to ward off vermin; it devoured the moisture, turned greener than green, and emitted a delightful fragrance as in the month of March.
I spent the rest of the night squatting like a hen on my typewriter, trying to protect it from the liquid elements. Beatrice cowered under her exotic umbrella, fast asleep. The outcome of this cloudburst in our palace of God-fearing lechery was bound to be either renewed suicide or a double case of pneumonia.
As dawn arrived at our hovel, I made a firm decision: we must leave this churning water mill. Out of this pigsty! Away, as fast as possible!
My reader will be thinking: who is he to be making decisions? He’s quick to find words, but just where does he think they can go, Vigoleis and his girl, seeing that he doesn’t even have money enough to take a trolley to the terminus of his own life, not to mention the train fare to Deyá to negotiate for a commode? Another reader will recall his mother always telling him that moving three times is just as expensive as having your house burn to the ground. Yet another reader, a classically educated one, will start murmuring, “Oh,” or rather “Evoe! Plus salis quam sumptus habebat.” Be that as it may, my dear reader, we would simply have to leave this churning water mill.
“Beatrice, chérie, Bice, Bé,” I said, as it began raining underneath the Kaffir god, “my dear, unlike the feathered fauna, we lack a preen gland with which to oil our beaks and then smear each and every feather until we are as waterproof as a burkha. I’ve been thinking. While you were asleep I went deeply into my soul, and have returned with certain insights. During our very first night here, when the tempests of human lust raged all around us, we decided to go jump in the sea holding hands. But the ocean depths rejected us. Now that the waters are threatening us from above, don’t you agree that our neighbors’ libidinous yawpings are more endurable?? Or should we go kill ourselves again? The mysterious Heraclitus once said, panta rhei, everything is in flux, you can’t step twice into the same river. I invite you to join me in pondering this matter. Do you think that the Captain still has a tiny bit of his old man’s anniversary poison left over? Somebody ought to take that secret compartment and bang out all of its contents. Or wasn’t it perhaps an act of Divine Providence that we were cheated out of the chest? Under the present circumstances, a chameleon would start evolving gills. But unfortunately we’re not that kind of lizard. Nevertheless, I sense a miracle in the offing!”
Beatrice wasn’t interested in developing gills, or in putting a noose around her neck, or in poison. And unlike the flounder, she rejected the idea of a moveable eye in order to face misery from only one side of her head. In a word, she didn’t want to take her own life again, and this meant that I had to preserve mine to remain with her. This was Point Number One of our watery breakfast chat. Point Number Two emerged, and ended, in a single word. “Antonio!” we cried out as if with one voice. How could we have forgotten that good man for so long?
Antonio said that now that the rainy period has arrived, earlier than usual (honestly), we could no longer remain at the Torre. The barn would get cold and drafty, Arsenio wouldn’t have the roof repaired—“Tell us about it,” I thought to myself—and so it was time that we looked elsewhere for lodgings. So our camping days were over! Antonio advised us to rent a small unfurnished apartment. We could scour up some furniture somewhere, time would tell. In a country where time has no meaning, this was a somewhat risky proposition—but the water was rising. Don Vigo would have to go looking, upstreet and downstreet; vacant pisos were always indicated by a piece of white paper in the window or tied to the balcony. Then he would enter and start asking about how many rooms, whether there was running water—but we already knew about such things. It was no doubt the same in other countries. I assured Antonio that it was no different than in Holland—and started thinking about Madame Perronet, a long staircase, a ship captain in loden coat and floppy hat, a girl’s corpse…
The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Wilhelm Traugott Krug offers information about more things than a normal human being needs to know, in order, consonant with a very broadly conceived polypragmosyne (check it out in Krug), to reach the end of his days. Yet this superb reference w
ork contains no advice whatsoever concerning how one should conduct a search for a piso—either systematically or by violating all rules of civility. This is probably the case because both methods are subject to happenstance—not an appealing matter for Krug, who was a genuine philosopher. Nonetheless, following Beatrice’s suggestion I scoured the entire city of Palma, carrying a map and a street index, checking off each street, alley, bridge, square, and so-called island as I investigated it. There was no dearth of white paper in windows and on balconies. The city was undergoing a building boom. The island was flourishing. It was bustling with activity that was already beginning to concentrate in the capital, and it was expected that the island’s population would double in the next 30 years. Here as elsewhere, human reproduction was largely an arbitrary matter, but this technique can also fill the world systematically with new progenitors. Besides, the Spaniard loves to change his whitewashed walls frequently. Moving his household will give him, it is true, the same whitewashed walls as before, but in different dimensions and with new neighbors and new excitements. He loves the street, not cozy togetherness at home and hearth. He loves his club and the bordello. The women can be depended on to frequent the church.
My Spanish had improved to the point where I could haggle without difficulty. I climbed upstairs and downstairs from morning to night. Many apartments in many sections of the city stood empty; I stuck my nose into all of them and cringed at the prices, but without anyone noticing my horror. No, I said, this was too large—just the wife, no kids and only two maids, one of whom slept at home. How charming, I said, a poem, a little gingerbread house, but unfortunately too small—seven kids, the eighth on its way, three maids, a cook, and we were expecting the in-laws from Paris soon. My family situation became more and more complicated. During this search I got to know my Vigoleis truly well for the first time. My profession changed with the changing circumstances. And it occurred that by mistake I looked at the same apartment twice, telling the landlady a different story each time—“What? Last week I had three kids and now I have seven? Well, yes, four from my first marriage that I had asked to join us”—and I was gone. Once I was confronted by the house-owner himself and subjected to a cross-examination. He asked me one question after another, each one more compromising than the last, and finally I sensed that he actually knew us—which was true. He demanded the gospel truth, he was in the know, I was the pimp for some puta out there, what I wanted was to drag his house down in the dirt, he knew all of us including Don Helvecio of the Príncipe—but perhaps we could make a deal: 1250 pesetas a month, 3 months in advance, hay que ser hombre! If something is very expensive, the Spaniard says it will cost him el ojo de la cara—the eye in his head. For me at the time, the cheapest apartment was so pricey that I would have had to toss down both of my eyes.
Weeks later I finally located an apartment in the Old City. I encountered only cats and nuns. The apartment was just right for us, and not too expensive—I would have lost one eye and closed the other. The owner was a pleasant fellow, a book printer, and his workshop was in the same house. I figured that we might collaborate, since he always had proofreading to get done. I rented the flat with a handshake and sprinted out into the darkening street. The cats scurried away and the nuns blessed themselves. A thief? An adulterer? Before they could recover, I was back at the Clock Tower fetching our passports for the rental contract. When the printer saw our documents, he hesitated. Was the Madame my wife or my “relationship”? Since she was neither the one nor the other, and since I couldn’t conjure up the appropriate term in any language, I responded to the severe glance of the man’s pince-nez by saying that Doña Beatriz was my wife. “Legal?” “No.” “So?” “Yes.”
A man, he said, could have as many lovers or mistresses as he wanted. But a woman must be married. I could move in any time at all with my querida, but with a doubtful wife—he must have consideration for his own spouse, the neighbors, and his Catholic printing house.
So once again I missed the boat. It was too late to explain to this moralist that my wife was my querida, my doxy, my hooker, my concubine and my Pilar, tell him that we were coming straight from the Clock Tower slut hut, and ask him where I might continue my search. Too late; I was shown the door. The owner wanted things above-board.
Once again I ran myself and my heels ragged for weeks without finding anything acceptable. But then one morning Lady Luck smiled at me. I am not superstitious, but if at the crack of dawn a rat with a white tail runs over your body, it can only mean good luck. I found a piso that seemed just perfect for our morganatic bond. The landlady was friendly with me. I was friendly with her. The apartment was newly whitewashed, making it look like friendliness itself, so I said I would rent it then and there, but—I would quickly return with my wife to show it to her. As soon as the landlady saw Beatrice, she made the sign of the cross and slammed the door in our faces. A neighbor who had been watching came forward with the explanation: that lady in there was a beata, a bigoted witch who was always telling lies. To the landlady, my companion’s short hair was the Devil in person. The Church forbade mannish haircuts. Pious women had often blessed themselves when they saw in Beatrice an emissary from Hell. Everyone has his or her own ideas about the celestial and the infernal Beyond and its denizens. As for myself, I cannot claim to be able to distinguish an angel from a devil. That’s why I never slam doors in people’s faces. That is my undoing.
In the earliest movies, where it was always raining and the actors went through their mute and jerky paces as if in constant fear of themselves, the passage of non-filmworthy time was indicated by a placard saying, “Years later…” Heart-rending music underscored this rapid flow of time. One saw clouds drifting past, the snow melted off the garden gate, the trees came into blossom, a newborn lamb skipped into the world. And then, suddenly, the rejected lover made his reappearance. In the meantime he had bumped off his rival and made a bundle in the States, while his girl had gone off with somebody else. The dance could continue.
Our existence on the island, likewise eternally rained in, eventually reached a point where I could say, “Weeks later…” Three or more dots can indicate the occurrence of nothing much at all. Beatrice gave language lessons, and we made up with the hotel owner Doña María; the Captain’s armoire joined Don Antonio’s hotel-room wardrobe on the junk pile of furniture we got cheated out of—the Fates that rocked our cradles just didn’t include these items in their list of goods we would obtain on earth, and to this day we have got along without them. Over and over again I took my Sitzfleisch for long walks through the city, with casual stride but acutely observant like a policeman on his beat, constantly on the lookout for anything resembling a white piece of paper. Palma was abuzz with moving vans. I knocked on many doors. I learned a good deal about municipal architecture, and like the gas man, I poked my nose in countless households. And found nothing. Oh, Unkulunkulu, Thou god of the shiny-skinned Kaffirs, Thou shelterest my Beatrice from the rain, but when wilt Thou perform a miracle for me? I beseech Thee, lead me on the right path, one, two, three flights upstairs…!
During the hours when I squatted in our cell, I wrote reams of airy stuff, finding my subject-matter mostly somewhere beyond the clouds. But can a true poet ever let a cloud bank cheat him of his creativity? Too precious for putting on paper, too lousy to get published—“So he’ll be a cobbler,” my father used to say, and if I had taken his advice, I wouldn’t be sitting in a brothel. I would long since have sewn up enough shekels for an armoire and a wardrobe with built-in mirror. One publisher to whom I sent a set of stories wrote me a cordial, encouraging letter: not quite what he needed, but he would bear me in mind as I kept him informed concerning my “growth” as a writer. I did no such thing, of course, but I kept on applying fertilizer to my little plant. Lord knows my life provided me with plenty of manure.
Three times a week Beatrice went to the Suredas’ house, where she got to know the whole clan. Papá, she said, seemed to be even crazier than Pe
dro. It was now time that I, too, made their acquaintance. Yet as far as craziness was concerned, I had best put my own house in order, which I proceeded to do.
With a clear conscience I could pass through all of the streets of Palma with one exception, a place I just mustn’t dare to go. Every person has a dark spot in his past, and I was no different. My dark spot had the name Villalonga, and the street where the man lived, the one I had to avoid, was the Calle del General Barceló, just a few steps past the anarchist’s palace. Dr. Villalonga was one of those specialists for anatomical cavities who, if he’s treating you, can cause the cessation of hearing and sight. I owed him money. The dust on the island had stopped up my ears; I was deaf. Don Alonso recommended the doctor just around the corner. The treatment was exemplary. Back in Cologne not even the Professor of Otolaryngology had squished out my ears as elegantly as this fellow. His fee was a mere 10 pesetas. I intended to pay up without delay, but was asked to come for a follow-up in two weeks’ time. Dr. Villalonga had studied medicine in Germany; he was fond of digging up memories, and told me the names of his old professors. I still remember one unusual clinical case he mentioned: a soldier had been shot straight through the head, and the professor had patched him up successfully; whatever was said to that man afterwards went in one ear and out the other.
By the time my two weeks were up, Beatrice and I were on our grape diet, and I was unable to pay my bill. Like Zwingli, I now avoided the street where I had no business being anyway. Then came the period when I wandered the streets looking for white sheets of paper. I didn’t dare to enter General Barceló, for fear that I might meet up with the doctor. For me and my strategy, the city map of Palma was reduced in size by one street.
The Island of Second Sight Page 45
