The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Vigoleis closed the window. The night’s breath was cool. He turned around to his Beatrice, but she was gone. She was lying on the bed, and he was just about to check under her pillow to see if she had placed his stanza there when he remembered that the accursed Pilar hadn’t forked over their pillows. Doctors will tell you that it’s healthy to sleep without a pillow, and these are the same doctors who say that the vegetarian regimen is better for you than meat-eating. On this particular night, what would Vigoleis have sacrificed for a crisp roasted goose, the fragrance of which reached his nose in rather un-Christian fashion several pages ago? Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle, perhaps? Perhaps. Or his last shirt.

  He covered Beatrice with the cloak of Bethlehemite charity and lay down next to her fully dressed. And there was peace on earth at this spot, where two persons of good will were one: on the Street of General Barceló, in house No. 23, second floor, in the room at the end of the corridor, where I had to close the window to keep out the chilly air from the palm-adorned night.

  Let’s hope that we don’t catch cold!

  A special star, dear reader, shone over the night with which I am bringing this Book to its close. So let’s have a little asterisk stand here * as a typographic symbol for its ending. It is the same star that legend tells us led the Magi from the East to the stable of the Redeemer; it’s also the star that pricked the conscience of a young man from the Swiss cantons, urged him to rise up from his pilarière, put on his pants, and head for the Street of the General. His footsteps did not echo through the house, for he was shod with alpargatas. He knew that two people were abed in a piso at this location, and thus that they had found a place to lay their heads, but that’s all they had found. The young man regretted this very much, for he considered himself responsible for the fate of this couple. He didn’t plant a candle-lit Christmas tree in front of their apartment door—that will be taken care of in a later chapter by an American millionairess, or rather by her servant. This Swiss fellow, not a millionaire, but just a few zeroes away from it as long as he lived, slid an envelope under their door. Inside were a few hundred pesetas and a note with the words,

  Merry Christmas! You’ll hear from me

  as soon as the bitch lets me go! Zwingli.

  Our heroes discovered this belated Christmas present the next morning as they padded through the empty house. It was a long time before they heard from Santa Claus again. When he finally surfaced, it was already high time for our heroes to intervene: Caesarian section! They performed this operation with great care after disinfecting the area completely, and although Vigoleis was confronted by Pilar’s drawn dagger, he did not run for it. He did not flinch. All of this will be put on paper in good time. At this moment we are taking a breather. There’s no reason to rush things, for our couple spent nearly five years under the same roof.

  You, perdurable reader, may continue to follow their footsteps, or you may choose to go your own way on the path of other characters by other writers, just as you like. If you knock, it shall be opened unto you. On the other hand, you might find the door already unlocked. The key is of the old-fashioned kind. It’s huge and unwieldy, not a work of art like the ones produced by the Nürnberg master Hans Ehemann. This key is one that you’d rather not take with you when you go to the store run by the pretty Angelita or to Don Matías the baker, who is in reality not a baker at all but a great philosophizer. You’re probably thinking: aren’t there burglars on your island? No, the Barceló is one of those streets where, at its far end, people live who would sooner hack off their own fingers than stick them in other people’s pockets. Later, around about the end of 1933, things will get different; spies will make their appearance everywhere, political flunkies doing their job at the behest of a man they worship as their glorious Leader, checking things out in the so-called German Colony in the Balearics, a community to which our Vigoleis also belongs on the basis of his German birth. To them he looks suspicious. So they’ll break down his door with a crowbar and sniff around inside: what’s this guy writing about, anyway? Stuff against our Führer? A Führer is not some god you can believe in or not as you choose. So behave yourself, little man, or we’ll take care of you! —“A Yale lock,” said Beatrice, “and always hook the chain.”

  But that came sometime later. I’ll give you due warning when the Führer’s local henchman rises to power, so that you’ll know that he’s after you, too. And a few years after that, when the Caudillo starts shooting and once again you start getting hot feet, you’ll want to be right there along with the rest of us. You won’t be able to breathe free again until we are all on board a British destroyer that will take us away from an island that has become Hell on earth.

  Steamy adventures, loose women, candles for María del Pilar: is this the end of it? Yes and no—I’m not making any promises.

  Let us not profane Christmas Eve with jarring previews of later chapters. We must allow the angels to sing their eternal hymn of glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to men of a kind of good will that, unfortunately, nobody believes in any more.

  BOOK FOUR

  Ecce homo—ecce demens

  after Unamuno

  Homo homini homo

  after Vigoleis

  I

  If the world contained nothing but famous people, it would long since have dribbled away like dishwater and left nothing behind but slops in the cloacas of the Last Judgment. God the Inscrutable has seen to it that His creation has not attained the supreme heights, and that the supermen have not sprouted forth in such abundance as to grind lowly humans down completely as they goose-step onwards into eternity. History tells us that humanity is stronger than its yea-saying and nay-saying geniuses, its saints and heroes. Both types are freak occurrences that either threaten us or beguile us. It seems as if the nameless drift of society can at times suddenly bring forth a profusion of great individuals whose names are destined for immortality. When this occurs, rational people take fright, wring their hands, and ask, “Will this never end?” For the most part, such fears are baseless. How many truly great Popes have there been? None of them has been able to topple the Church from its rocky heights. Not even an Adolf Hitler has succeeded in driving Germany into a cesspool from which it can never arise again. True greatness is to be found in true anonymity, in the mode of existence of the vermin of this world. The Spanish all-around genius Gregorio Marañón has written some very readable ideas on this problem in his book on that Great Nameless One, the Man on the Street, Henri-Frédéric Amiel.

  I am writing these thoughts on greatness and fame in the city of Amsterdam, in a house situated on a street named after a famous writer: Jan Frederik Helmers. I’ll have to confess that I have never read a single line of Helmers, and in my circle of literary friends I have yet to meet anyone who knows who Helmers was, much less has read him. And yet this bard is so famous that the Amsterdam city fathers have named not one but three streets after him. This is more than a writer has a right to expect after his death, especially one who then goes completely out of everybody’s sight. My friend Pascoaes, the mystic and vintner whose works and wines I continue to advertise shamelessly, was overcome with dread when he learned that potentates in his home town of Amarante wanted to name a street after him. “Don’t they want to read me any more? If my work is not of a kind that is cherished by posterity on its own merits, then let it perish. I do not wish to be buried alive as a street.”

  The fame enjoyed by the Dutch writer Helmers on the city map of Amsterdam far exceeds that of the Spanish General Barceló in the eyes of the Mallorquins, for only a single street bears his name. It is a thoroughfare that would hardly deserve the designation “street” if it didn’t widen out slightly at its upper end. At the point where it merges into Calle San Felio, it is inhabited only by the better sort of people, such as the wealthy Dr. Villalonga in his old palace and, kitty-corner across the street, by Mosén (Monsignor) Juan María Tomás, a heaven-inspired musician and one of the finest characters we got t
o know on the island. At its bottom end, the street becomes narrow and snakes off into sheer poverty, presenting nothing at all worth commenting on. Little people live there, the kind who see to it that the island doesn’t become extinct. Two cloisters are located there, showing the street their gloomy facades and their consecrated portals, the one opposite our house for male inmates, and the other, farther up the street and with better exposure to sunlight, for the female variety. I am unable to verify whether the two pious establishments are connected by an underground passageway. This is, however, the case with most Spanish or Portuguese cloisters.

  I once entered such a subterranean tunnel in the former convent of the Sisters of Santa Clara, the “Casa da Cérca em Cima” in Amarante, now the residence of my motherly friend Doña María da Gloria Teixeira de Vasconcellos Carvalhal, the sister of the writer Pascoaes. Standing there in the tunnel, I envisioned the pious parade passing back and forth, and it is no wonder that I came under the spell of the delightful lunar eroticism that I have otherwise experienced only in early Iberian mysticism. For the history of love-letter writing, it is fortunate that the Convent of Conceição in Beja, where Sor Maríanna Alcoforada served the Dear Lord, lacked such a corridor to the realm of the monks, for otherwise this Portuguese nun’s letters would never have been written—if indeed she wrote them herself, which I doubt.

  Presumably General Barceló was born on the street named after him. Or perhaps he died here, because I can’t imagine why the city didn’t pick a better spot to perpetuate his fame. He lived from 1717 to 1797, the great son of an island that has produced many great children. He cleansed the Mediterranean of the plague of piracy which, with billowing sails, infested the high seas at the time. Antonio Barceló succceded in sniffing even the most dastardly corsairs out of their coastal lairs, forcing them out on the main and blasting them to the salty depths. He was no less victorious on dry land. You can still hear today a popular quatrain composed during the hero’s lifetime: “If the King of Spain had four like Barceló, Gibraltar would belong to Spain and not to the English, No!”

  Don Francisco Franco, himself a general of the most superlative type, once a much-feared freebooter in Morocco and a man who now has the most elegant avenidas in the whole country renamed after him, has yet to grab Gibraltar from the British. Thus he actually pales in comparison with his historical comrade-in-arms, General Barceló. No one knows how many General Francos Spain might need in order once again to sing “Not to the English, No!” And if anybody did know, he would be shot anyway. Be that as it may, this is not of much importance for my story, whose course is just as void of great individuals as human history itself, within which it is a mere leaf drifting in the wind.

  In a dismal stable on our street there lived a shoe repairman, who kept himself alive with his awl and the sale of charcoal and olive-wood, the island’s fuel of preference. We soon started calling him “Siete Reales,” seven reales (one real = 25 centimos), because he always miscalculated prices to his own disadvantage—quite a feat when dealing with Vigoleis, who never got past the basic times-table. Siete Reales was illiterate, but he spoke a spotless mainland Spanish, and that is why I enjoyed chatting with him. I even profited from his philosophical insights, and this led to friendship—though we never went so far as to clap each other on the shoulder, for this would have raised too much charcoal dust. With the baker Matías—who wasn’t a baker at all, but a schoolteacher, and hence Don Matías—who ran his shop a few houses down the street in the shabbier direction, I regarded this indigenous gesture of eternal friendship as less unpleasant, although not entirely innocuous. At any rate, with him the dust clouds were not of the sooty type. I shall return to this flour-bedecked fellow, with whom I enjoyed a similarly philosophical commercial relationship, as soon as the Nazis emerge from their historical hinterlands and send one of their Mata Haris on a special Balearic mission to turn men’s heads before they get their necks wrung.

  On a nearby street, the Apuntadores, there stood a little shop owned by two elderly ladies, one of whom had two beautiful daughters—one of whom, in turn, waited on customers in the store. This was Angelita, whose eyes were larger than the most alluring night-time sky. Every time I stepped up to the counter, she fluttered those teasing eyelashes with their fly-leg adornments, and I immediately forgot what I was supposed to bring home. I heard a buzzing noise around me, as if the flies were still alive whose legs made this little she-devil so dangerous to someone like me—who grew up on the banks of the Niers and whose Mama once took him through bordellos looking for a suitable apartment. Under such glances, everything collapsed. By the way, Beatrice was of the opinion that Angelita’s lashes were natural—she didn’t have to hurt a single fly to turn into a she-demon. As for myself, I prefer her, even just the memory of her, with fly-leg eyelashes. And she didn’t have to go far at all to lay in a supply of such a cosmetic: right next door was a butcher shop presided over by a sour old hag, where we sometimes went to buy a cut of lamb. This butcher-lady was crabby, and barked at anyone who came to disturb the peace and quiet of her swarms of flies. One day she was found dead behind the counter, and now it was her turn to be covered with flies. This was in mid-summer. Such an edifying end for the proprietress of a butcher shop: to get buried by flies in her own store. The shop lacked a meat cooler; if it had one, she could have slumbered off flyless into the Great Beyond.

  I believe I have paid my proper and sufficient respects to our Street General, so that he need not feel outpointed by Julietta’s father. But the real reason why I spent so much time on the various streets of the town is that in our house there isn’t much to see. It is an empty house—that is to say, an empty apartment. The money that Santa Claus pushed under the door would have been enough to equip the rooms with the necessary furnishings. But we considered it more advisable to buy back our books from the customs office before they got eaten by rats. For 300 pesetas we were able to repossess our world of print. The remainder of our belongings wandered off into the same furniture warehouse where we went with the whore to buy our sofa bed. We purchased a rickety table and two old-granny style chairs, and this left us with a few measly coins for a postage stamp and a loaf of bread.

  Such was our modest debut: a table and two chairs in the kitchen. Krupp’s beginnings were more meager than that, and even Diogenes found shelter in a barrel. We were lacking many things, but in our condition of enforced asceticism we never went so far as to take pleasure in our lack of pleasures. On the contrary: we were jubilant whenever we undid the knot in our money stocking and poured out enough change, calderilla, to afford a cooking pot, or perhaps a knife. On such occasions we would look deeply into each other’s eyes, down to where you can espy a mysterious glimmer, and would say, “What do you think? We’ve got by for so long without a cooking pot. How would it be if we just waited a few more weeks? And do we really need a knife? Or a spittoon (an item that in Spain is almost more urgently necessary than cooking utensils)? What do you say we go out and buy a book?” A book! That’s it! And then we would fall into each other’s arms, which we kept clean despite our destitution, and would feel that we had hit the jackpot.

  The better I got to know our new language, the clearer it became to me that there were untold treasures to be unearthed here. I discovered writers whose very names were unknown up in the North. Spain? That meant Cervantes and the classical dramatists, and that was all. I was thrilled by the prospect of reading Saint Teresa, the Confessions of Juan de la Cruz, and Fray Luiz de León in the original. I didn’t dare to even think of reading Don Quixote, however; that seemed to me to be an assignment for a more mature spirit than my own, just as it is only now, at the threshold of my own half-century of life, that I am able to read Goethe with profit, if not yet in the classy Artemis Edition. I should probably wait until I am a hundred—but then again, I don’t think Goethe is worth that. We literally ate our way into Spanish literature, simply by eating less. Each of us had a special field. Beatrice delved into history, while I
, with my aversion to all forms of tradition conserved in books, plunged into the immutable imaginative world of rhymed and unrhymed poetry. I can be fascinated by historical writing if the historian has a one-sided view of things—if, that is, he writes with one eye to the ground, much as a chicken must look down in order to see the sky above—if, that is, the historian can elevate history into legend, thus redeeming it from so-called professional scientific accuracy, which in any case never can exceed astronomical approximations. Thousands of works have been written about Napoleon, and the literature on this rewarding subject keeps growing. But what do we know about him? Who was Napoleon? Every biography has to create him anew from the germ cell of a human existence, perhaps his own. According to the latest calculations, the world in which we bring up such questions can expect to last another 20 billion years. Or maybe it’s only 15 billion. And there’s the fly in the ointment: Napoleon was a savior, but it’s also possible that he was a criminal, or perhaps it’s the other way around. Whoever enters “history” has ceased to be himself.

  Chatting for hours in this fashion helped to slake our hunger for “real” food, the pangs of which were often painful. I was the advocate for poetry and legend, the champion of a form of truth that resides in the clouds. Beatrice clung with a physical and mental sobriety to historical reality; with her sharper intellect and with the help of her frightening, emasculating erudition, she defended what I, in my impotence, insisted (and still insist) on calling the Historical Lie. Will Vigoleis one day be her victim? It was hard to stand up against her—or rather to sit down against her, for I was sitting and Beatrice was sitting, too. During such disputations we both squatted in a mood of harmonious hostility on boxes of books, later on our rustic chairs, which after a time sported a coat of paint. Later still—indeed much, much later—we sat in real living-room chairs made of straw. Two years (the chronology is not very precise) had to pass before we could afford such lacy sitting-baskets. But no sooner were they broken in, when they collapsed, and we reverted to our primeval style of living as box-squatters. Our edifying literary discussions did not suffer from the change, but our ability to expand our library certainly did.