The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  The thieving couple at the Tower was saddened to learn that we were going to leave our cell the very next day. This calls for a celebration, said Arsenio, and asked us to attend a party to which Antonio would also be invited.

  We had leg of lamb à la mode bisaïuele, plus two dozen other dishes, including donkey cheese for Beatrice. There were toasts to our prosperity on the Street of the General, as well as to the well-being of the Tower and all it stood for. After midnight we were joined by the sea captain, who had a drink with us and then quickly disappeared. Whenever this underwater smuggler was at the Manse you could be certain that some important job or other was being pulled. But this time his haste was due to the babe who was waiting for him on the bed of luxury. He was getting signals to dive.

  No sooner had he left when Arsenio came forth with a question that had been on the tip of his tongue for a long while. I was finally to come clean, no more secrets, no further need to hide anything from each other. I knew very well what he was up to, and why the carabineros always kept an eye on him. But, by all the Saints, he hadn’t any idea what my game was. What Antonio had told him about Pilar—whom he knew, by the way—could well be true, but he thought that this story was a feeble kind of make-believe. “So now, out with it, Don Vigo! Who are you, and what kind of a double life are you leading at my place, in the city, on the island?”

  I told him the truth. But that isn’t what he wanted to hear. Anybody, he said, can make up nice stories. He was hurt; it was a matter of confidence for confidence. “Go on now, don’t leave me hanging. Or do you want me to tell you who you are and what you are up to here on my family estate?”

  “By all means, go ahead and tell me.”

  The Giant sipped his piping-hot coffee and enlightened me concerning my Balearic mission.

  Unlike his boss, he was not illiterate, although he had not read a book in his entire life. But he knew that there were such things as books, and such things as people who wrote them. His security department had investigated my case, and here was the result: I was a writer, I had never denied it, and one look inside our cell was enough to confirm the nature of my profession—by reading the clothes hanging on the line, as it were. There were well-known cases of people who wrote books and who took jobs as waiters or cabin-boys, as grape-pickers, or in the Foreign Legion, or anywhere at all, and then acted as buddies just so they could collect material for their work. It was no doubt my intention to write a Spanish novel of manners, and that’s why I decided to move in at his place of business. A Spanish writer would do the same thing in Germany, but with this difference: he would leave his wife back home. He laughed, we laughed too, and then he continued: now I was finished collecting material, tomorrow I would load all our stuff on a wagon, his wagon—“No, no, that’s fine with me, it’s a question of honor”—and then I would start writing my novel in our new lodgings. “But please, caballero, not one line about me as long as I am still alive!”

  We toasted Vigoleis’ novel, the Clock Tower Cadaver Murders, a few soggy, rain-smeared chapters of which hung on the line as we spoke. Before I sent them off to the publishers, I would have to squeeze them through the wringer. Prost!

  By naming Arsenio’s name in these pages twenty years later, I am not breaking my promise to him, for the robber chieftain was eliminated in the first few days of the Civil War. His death must have been dreadful; I have heard several versions of how it happened. He was not even given time to escape in his U-boat. Which is to say, his ship-captain friend decided to return to snorkeling for Germany.

  We allowed ourselves a few hours sleep, and then we began dismantling our hovel. I untied the ropes and carefully pulled each nail out of the wall, placing all of them, straight or crooked, in my pocket. I also took along the boards and fence pickets that I had found on the grounds of the Manse. I regarded them as my own property on the basis of the right of salvage, whereas previously they only fell under beachcomber’s rights, unqualified by any whore’s notions of private ownership. I was touched with melancholy as I took apart our universal bidet. Where would my inspiration come from in the future? While packing our books, I started leafing through familiar works that were always the source of new discoveries. But Beatrice, who can spend whole days packing books, urged me to make it a rush job—no time for that now, on Barceló there would be so much to set up. “And besides, tonight is Christmas Eve!”

  Christmas Eve—and the trees are in blossom.

  A hired hand loaded the wagon. We took leave of one and all, large and small. The crone wiped a tear as she turned a fish on the spit in the acrid smoke; she was the only one who probably never had a single thought as to what we might be doing there at the Manse. For her we were just there, friendly foreigners who never got in the way, never betrayed her boss to the police, never tried to blackmail him. Like the rats and the hookers, indeed like herself, we were simply part of the household, with no apparent purpose except to turn the spit. Why does any given tree stand in the landscape here rather than over there? One just accepts it like Nature herself; one doesn’t puzzle over it. Whoever tries to will go insane, and most people would rather not. Only when the tree is cut down do we notice that it is missing, and often not even then. The cloven carob tree—to which, incidentally, my Notice to the Reader at the beginning of this book does not refer—was soon dug up by Arsenio, and no one seemed to mind. The bandit had designed another kind of tree for the guys who manned his catapults.

  Adeleide returned a few pesetas to us as overpaid rental—a little gift that made us beam with pleasure. The boss hitched his shaggy draft horse to the wagon. We took our seats in the quaint coach, and Tschüss and Ciao, Palace of the Whores! People waved and shouted, dogs barked, maids came by and bared their teeth in merriment, children turned somersaults. The century-old matron picked up her chair and limped out to the highway to see us off. A brood of black piglets scurried off across the field with people chasing after them. Dust, and more dust, behind which the “Clock Tower” then disappeared.

  Now cross your heart, Beatrice: you were ready to blow up the whole Tower any day when the rain came down on our cot through the canvas and your Unkulunkulu, when the moisture gave us bone cramps, when mold started growing between the typewriter keys, and when your Parisian hat started growing a beard where the fashion designer never would have put one. And when the big bat got caught in our hanging library, to your great shock, and contrary to all the textbooks of zoology that say that a bat is incapable of making such a mistake, you were ready to jump out of your own skin—but you stayed in it. Admit it: it was nice there after all, and we led a peaceful domestic life there beneath the nuns and the monks.

  How quickly all the misery can disappear, how easily an ordeal can peel away when you have a goal in sight and a work horse in harness in front of you. Arsenio clicked his tongue louder than a whip. The hooves sped on; sparks flew.

  Our arrival on the General’s street caused no little commotion. Word had got around that a foreign couple was moving into the empty apartment. If the street hadn’t been so narrow, the neighbors would have lined up on both sides to greet us. So they stood in a cluster of curiosity on the convent patio across the street and observed each piece of the action with such attention that we felt quite flattered. This time we drove up to an apartment without a palefrenier in tow, but Arsenio made an even bigger impression. Turkeys were gobbling away on all the balconies, as if to celebrate our arrival.

  But hold on, cher Vigoleis, we are not interested in how, step by step and hoist by hoist, your belongings got lifted off your prairie wagon and taken inside your new piso. Or how an old granny came up to you and told you that you would find a bed in the entryway that was meant for the new tenants since she didn’t know what to do with it otherwise. Some other time you can tell us how the old lady’s husband introduced himself as fellow tenant and professional custodian; he claimed to be well over ninety but still on the job as gatekeeper over at the convent. Who would have thought this of the wizened ol
d gent? At twelve, as the little bell sounded at the convent, the street suddenly emptied. Not one soul was interested any longer in the German writer who was arriving with a cart full of stuff and a brain full of ideas, waiting for the time when he could sit down at his typewriter and set to work creating his pilariario íntimo. But now, you clever scoundrel, perhaps you could at least tell us what you said in reply to Arsenio’s question, “What about your furniture?” “Our furniture, Señor Arsenio, is at the customs warehouse. I hope that we can fit it all in, because the rooms are smaller than they looked when I first inspected them. It’s Swiss furniture, by the way, a small fortune in freight, insurance, packing, and customs! If we had got to know you sooner, we could have brought it all on land the back way. Your ship captain could have torpedoed our furniture piece by piece onto the beach into specially constructed padded docks.”

  For days and weeks prior to the birth of the Redeemer, households are oddly busy preparing elaborate celebrations of this feast of the poorest of the poor. We had to compress all this work into just a few hours, for that’s all the time we had between arrival in our new digs and the moment when the little bell under the Christmas tree would signal the sharing of presents. A pair of pants, a shirt, and some underthings were deployed as dustcloths and scrubbing rags. I skated across the black-and-white square floor tiles and gave them such a glossy sheen that the Christ Child Himself, if He had dropped down from Heaven again, could have seen his mirror image in them. But since He had his own experiences in a stable with oxen and donkeys and a crib of straw, He studiously avoids the hovels of the destitute and prefers houses that have Persian carpets on the floor. Beatrice cleaned the kitchen, which was redolent of the previous tenants’ cooking habits. We didn’t have any incense, but used orange peels for the same purpose. I roasted them over a manuscript that was ripe for immolation. Then I arranged things in our bedroom. A couple of hoists and snatches, and the job was done. Two more heaves in the roomy sala with its view of the idyllic yard outside, and our miracle of the boxes and suitcases was complete. In order to vanquish emptiness you need a special sense of space; it helps to be familiar with the secrets of Gothic structures. I put the rest of our stuff in one of the windowless alcoves. Then I made myself scarce. Beatrice, too, had errands to do.

  I knew a spot near the harbor where there was a stand of cactus, the common opuntia, a giant variant growing on a dangerously steep incline. Twice I came roaring to the bottom with landslides, but on my third attempt I got a firm foothold and, not without loss of blood, came away with a large central trunk with two offshoots that looked like ears. I filled a bucket with soil and returned home, grubby but happy. Our Christmas cactus stood one meter tall. I melted down two candles left over from our rage at the Madonna for sending rain to the Tower, twisted a few wicks, and shaped some pencil-thin tapers that I stuck on the cactus needles. If in all your misery you are still clever and buddy-buddy with the Muses, you will take Rilke’s New Poems, Part Two, thin-paper edition, out of a box, tear out the already foxed blank flyleaf, and write on it your own poem “For Beatrice,” a work that bears (or rather bore since it no longer exists) the same relationship to Christmas Eve as a Spanish fig-cactus does to the German Christmas spruce. Just don’t start wallowing in potato-pancake nostalgia! Just don’t remind yourself that somewhere on the Lower Rhine a home-grown goose is getting roasted to burnished yellow-brown crispness, yet not too soon for the ceremony of gift-giving.

  Employing my South European palette, I composed a thoughtful letter entitled “Christmas in Spain,” with the intention of diverting my parents’ and my brothers’ attention from the domestic goose. Instead of singing Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht with half-crocked solemnity, I meant them to break out in a fit of envy: how they would yearn to be down here with me, ambulating under the palms, standing at the blue seashore, letting the sun beat down on their skin, while up there—damn it all, somebody go check!—it’s about five below zero, and what’ll it be like when the privy freezes up? They don’t have to know that down here in the Southland, their Prodigal Son’s pipes froze at well over 100° above, that the two of us were skating on a different kind of thin ice, or that before we could exchange Christmas presents, we had to hang a shirt over our window so that the young ladies in our back yard couldn’t peek inside to watch our private celebration. Or that when our candles have gone out, we’ll be sitting in the dark since we have no money for a light bulb—but would they actually believe all of this? It’s possible to boast romantically of even the direst poverty. Successful writers are fond of depicting their youth spent in misery: lousy grades in school, quitting school at thirteen, paper boy, scrounging for food, time in prison (the latter is particularly popular nowadays; no writer can be taken seriously who hasn’t spent time in the pen). I can just hear someone urging me to add this question to my seasonal letter: “And do you, too, have roast turkey in your casserole?” This “someone” will know that for Spaniards the Christmas goose is invariably a pavo. And which vintage had we chosen? A Malvasian from Bañalbufar?

  Suddenly there are footsteps in the corridor—porra!—it’s Beatrice. “Stop, don’t come in! I’m busy! What are you thinking—that this place is like some poor people’s house where the Christ Child is lying on his tummy with the whooping cough? Just hand me one of your slips. I have to cover up something. Fine, now you can come in…”

  Then it was my turn to be invisible; the gift Beatrice was bearing for the Feast of Lights also looked imposing. I went into one of the front rooms and peeked through the blinds to the street outside, where padres were coursing back and forth in their picturesque cassocks. On Christmas Eve these gentlemen have more on their minds than just some pagan tree symbol.

  Beatrice arranged a dining space on top of our book crate. In conjugal harmony we sat on the edge of our bed and consumed our Christmas Eve repast. Like laborers at a construction site, we ate off paper. This comparison with professional carpenters is not at all far-fetched, for the two of us were, after all, construction workers: we were building our home and our future on the island.

  When it got dark, I lit the candles, not without some difficulty keeping them upright. Then we exchanged presents.

  I had fastened my stanza to a spine on our brightly lit cactus. Thus illuminated, the single sheet of bible paper looked elegant indeed; but did it also have a solemn inner glow? I could only hope so.

  My present lay underneath Beatrice’s slip: a book, one that has passed through how many hands? The paper was yellowed and dog-eared, but from every last page there came forth an intense light: Las Moradas, The Interior Castle, of Santa Teresa.

  When our candles burned down to the last stump, we went to the cathedral to attend the “Missa del gallo.” According to ancient custom, so we were told, at the Christmas Mass a Moorish boy would intone Moorish chants. It was an experience. The brightly lit cathedral, the little black boy warbling his sing-song from up in the pulpit, the ladies with elegant mantillas on top of towering combs, and right in front of us a man stretched out on the pew, snoring away the Holy Night. I had to think of Felix Timmermans and a louse-ridden tramp from my childhood, the one we called King of the Bees because of the insects that inhabited him. He spent his nights inside a small forest shrine, and in my childish ignorance I considered that the profanation of a sacred site. The local police smoked out this bum, but not for reasons of sacrilege. The snoozer in front of us took up the space of five seats during his silent, holy night, and nobody bothered him. Everyone celebrates the advent of the Redeemer in his own fashion, and this fashion apparently struck everyone as not the worst way to celebrate. For who knows? Perhaps this tired fellow, already beyond his last crust of bread, was in his dreams a shepherd keeping watch over his flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and the glory of the Lord shone round about him, and he was sore afraid. And in his slumber he heard the sound of wings, and an angel descended and said unto him—but you can read the sequel in the Gospels, unless you
know it already by heart. This particular angel will have spoken to our local deadbeat in Spanish, or even more likely in the Mallorquin dialect. All of a sudden the whiskered snoring came to a halt; the star stood still above the stable, and our dozer caught sight of Mary, Joseph, and the Child lying in the crib, and he emerged unblushing through the strait gate to Heaven. And the other shepherds returned to their flocks, fanning the flames and glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them. Then our man turned over on his other side and resumed his snoring for the length of three whole Masses.

  The streets and alleyways were alive with people. In Spain Christmas Eve, the Night of the Rooster, is not a time for quiet contemplation or for decorous quaffing of spirits at home in the family circle. Not after the Christ Child has been placed back in His manger with fresh diapers.

  Taking a long detour, we too returned to our domestic hearthside. We now knew just where we belonged, and that we were all by ourselves as soon as we closed our door. No rats, no riotous shouts from 2 x 29 throats, and not only a ceiling but also a blanket over our heads. No donkey to wake us with the gentle wafting of its biblical exhalations, rather than with bone-shattering screeches.

  Vigoleis had saved one more candle. He stuck it on the topmost spine of their opuntia natalis and lit it. He hoped that its little flame would send some light out into the empty night. He dotes on this tragic mood of hopelessness. Once in a while he likes to turn over his egg timer and watch the grains of sand trickle down for no reason at all, just as the days of his life trickle away, grain by grain, for nothing and for no reason at all. Just as the stars twinkle in the firmament, eternally and without any meaning.

  On this night, too, the heavens were dotted with little lights. Since it was a remarkable night in his lifetime, he looked up and lost himself in the sight of eternity, a spectacle that never fails to convince him to the point of physical pain that there cannot be a benevolent Father up there. One star might contain God, but millions and millions of them…? On a Night of the Redeemer like this one, you’ve got to be wearing a golden tiara as a protective helmet if you don’t want to feel like reaching for the bottle…