No less sour, I replied that I, too, was just a beginner, and was beginning to fear that there would never be an end to beginning. And then we gave each other a hug. Would I care to exchange my pen for his pencil? Tomorrow he would bring me a pad full of jottings, aphorisms mostly. Would I be willing to read them through and tell him if he should switch from drawing to writing? But those damned army barracks! An hour ago he was scheduled to stand watch in some filthy guardhouse. He was late for duty, and didn’t have a cigarette to bribe the officer in charge to look the other way. “What would insubordination like that cost you up there in Prussia? A whole pack of cigarettes, I’ll bet you!”
I gave Pedro a bribing cigarette from Beatrice’s stash. “It would cost me my head, my friend. And it would cost my family everlasting shame unto the seventh generation.”
“A great people, the Germans! Papá admires them, especially if they’re Catholic. He’s against Luther, and he knows German, too. He learned it in the john.”
“In the…? How do you…?”
My philological curiosity was awakened. I was familiar with several methods of language learning, and a few chapters later I will invent a new one myself. But I had never heard of the one that Pedro just mentioned. Beatrice, a certified foreign-language teacher, had surely never heard of it, either. Unfortunately, Pedro could not be persuaded to stay on. That would have cost Beatrice two cigarettes. He had no money, he said. And we didn’t have any, either. And so he left to loaf through his guard duty. We parted as friends for life.
Only after the door closed behind him did it occur to me that he had not once spit on our floor. As I have already indicated, this is precisely the way I wanted to present him here—with his superior Spanish manners. In this sense, he left nothing behind. But his sketch of me still hung on our cactus plant, and that was just as bad. I took down the sheet and placed it in a folder. But maybe I should have left it in place and invoked Goethe: “Oh, Beatrice, if you were a German instead of this Swiss hodgepodge of ck, ck-dt, and Indian squaw, I would quote the Sage of Weimar, who once told his friend Eckermann that the Germans didn’t know how to respond to strange occurrences, and thus they often missed out on higher things in life without even noticing. Goethe went on, and I quote verbatim: ‘Any fact in our lives is not of value because it is true, but because it is significant.’ Pedro’s sketch and my ugliness, which can never be disguised as some Bamberg Knight, are facts, but they have no significance whatsoever.”
I spoke these sublime words to the wind, for Beatrice entered the room, scrutinized the floor, disappeared again and came back with the pair of pants we used as a cleaning rag. Frowning tightly, she began wiping the floor.
“Now you see how these people can mess up your whole house. There’s no end to cleaning up after them.”
Whenever female intellectuals go on a cleaning rampage, it’s a signal to take off. And if they don’t, then you just have to go to the dogs in your own filth.
But then she, too, noticed that Pedro hadn’t spit on our floor, and her mood changed.
“He must have had a good upbringing. As crazy as they are, those Suredas are first-class people.”
“It’s all a matter, my dear, of his royal blood. Kings spit on their subjects, but never on the floor!”
II
Beatrice, Pedro has an idea how we could earn some money.” “You’ve had certain ideas, too. But all right. I’m curious. Tell me what he has in mind.”
“Prostitution!”
“Oh, thanks a lot! I rather thought it might be that. You’re impossible, the two of you. Just like smutty-minded little boys. So you want to send me out on the street?”
“Right! Out on the street, but together with me. The two of us, get it? We’re going to pull the big trick. We’re going to be Führers.”
Back then the word Führer was already somewhat in bad odor, but only mildly so—like the place on a pork chop near the bone, where the smell begins. Führer: the term evoked ridiculous images such as a silly toothbrush moustache and a faggish lock of hair, a madman’s eyes, and all of this stuck in a uniform to bring out the comedy and raise it to tragic German heights. This man was an easy mark for the international humor magazines, though considering that thousands of murders had already been committed in his name, he ought to have been looked into by criminal psychologists such as the famous Dr. Orthmann, director of the insane asylum in my home town of Süchteln. But in so-called heroic times, blood must flow in torrents before anyone realizes that it is blood. Germany itself had to become an insane asylum, in order that the prophecy might be fulfilled: that guy was going to end up in a padded cell.
And thus Beatrice and I became Tour Guides, meaning that we were now “Führers” minus the quotation marks.
Pedro introduced us to the manager of a travel agency, a German-Spanish enterprise called Baquera Kusche y Martins. The boss was a German with strong left-wing ideas and much bitterness in his heart. Apart from this, he seemed to be a kindly sort. His birthplace was Hamburg or some other north German town where they sssspeak with sssstrong ssssibilants, and he enjoyed teasing me about my sing-song Rhenish cadences. We got along very well, and we signed a work contract. His company organized group excursions with Woermann Travel, and led tours in Palma and to other points on the island. Each “Führer” was given a number to be displayed in a conspicuous place, and a company armband, and each evening, after the tourist hordes had jostled and questioned him half to death, a wage of 25 pesetas. To us that was a lot of money.
Some people enter this life as Guides and Leaders, able to lift the world right out of its hinges. But it also is possible to learn to be a Leader of the masses. A Leader, a Führer who learns on the job, goes through life with an aura of amateurishness, as with any occupation that one prepares for by sheer drudgery. He goes through the motions, satisfies his customers and earns his wage, and that’s about it. How different it is with the blessed ones who are born to lead others. Everything they do comes naturally, and if their chosen profession brings them into direct contact with people—if, for example, they are murderers, or officials who serve the public from behind post-office counters—then their work is simply a form of play. When human lives are part of the job, they play with those too, just as if they were engaged in some shrewd card game or other.
Accepted for service as Leaders, we took the oath of fealty with a handshake. We had certain definite qualifications for this line of work: our ability with languages (especially Beatrice’s ability) and our educational backgrounds. Our boss even complimented us for being “cultured individuals.” Our outward appearance: satisfactory. He gave us a tour schedule which we were to study carefully. In case we hadn’t already done so, we were to familiarize ourselves with the points of interest on the island—though as the manager said, we surely had lived here long enough for that. He could also provide us with descriptive literature. There was a “sssstrict” rule to be followed. A Tour Leader must never leave unanswered a question from one of those he was leading! “Der Führer knows everything! Just remember that, and you will be excellent Leaders!”
I already knew that a Führer not only was supposed to know everything, but that he actually knew it. To come up with proof of that insight, I didn’t have to reach very far back into my Vigoleisian past. Let’s go just four short years back to 1928. We’re in Cologne on Germany’s Great River Rhine (but, unfortunately for some, not Germany’s Great Western Border), in a former army barracks. There I find Vigoleis as a scholarly tour guide in the Hall of Cultural History at Cologne’s renowned and fiscally ruinous “Pressa,” the enormous exhibition devoted to the public media. For months he had worked on the staff assembled by the academic historians Karl d’Ester, Günther Wohlers, and Albert Bruckner, and had helped them put together their portion of the exhibit. Vigoleis knew exactly what lay or stood in every single glass case, and consequently he knew that everything in them lay or stood wrong. “Let’s not lose time with trivial details,” said a relaxed Pr
ofessor Günther Wohlers, the greatest and most amiable beer-guzzler ever to grace a German university faculty. “After the opening,” he declared, a full liter mug standing within easy reach on his seminar desk, “we’ll change everything around. The politicians won’t notice a thing. Not a single one of those bigwigs will notice anything while they’re getting pushed through the halls on opening day.”
Even after opening day, things stayed just as they were; Professor d’Ester was muzzled by his garrulous colleague. Thus our exhibit displayed the false cheek-by-jowl with the genuine, as is fitting for scholarship in general and for the discipline of history in particular. Then I made the discovery that a guide, i.e., a Führer, is an authority and has immense power. I invented explanations out of whole cloth, and soon I was the most sought-after tour guide—and the most knowledgeable. When famous visitors came, or especially learned or picky experts, the call went out for Vigoleis. Now there was a fellow who knew so much about all branches of literary and press history that he never was at a loss for an answer. That made him the ideal candidate for doctoral oral exams, and that was the very reason he never took them. Superannuated Cologne pols, Mayor Konrad Adenauer himself, and scholars from the world over, all shook his hand at the end of the tour. Dreyer of Dreyer Films wanted to hire him on the spot as a writer and narrator for his educational movies. Bodo Ebhardt wanted him as a scholarly assistant for his ritzy tours of castles and his phenomenal library at Castle Marksburg. The cruise-ship mogul Krone thought he could do wonders for his world-wide advertising. A laundry-soap company wanted to engage him as a factory tour guide for visiting housewives. An ordinary Cologne housewife asked me to visit her evenings after her husband had left for the night shift…
All this expertise began to give me the shivers, and eventually I quit. But not before the crown of scholarship had been placed on my head by the Berlin Institute for the History of the Press. The director of this illustrious enterprise came to Cologne one day with his students and joined in on my tour—incognito. At the end he presented me his business card. I knew his name, of course, from the scholarly journals. He asked me to take his place for a session of his Berlin seminar with a talk on a particularly knotty problem I had alluded to in the Broadsheet Room—a place where my imagination had an inordinate tendency to run riot. I stammered a few words in reply and was about to explain that not everything in the glass cases was entirely correct, when it occurred to me that this fellow hadn’t noticed anything wrong at all. So I said nothing, and that evening I consulted with Dr. Wohlers, whose star pupil at Münster University I was at the time. Wohlers said, “Go to it, show them just what a Führer can really do. When this farce is all over with, you can get your degree with me with a thesis on ‘Historical Hoaxes.’” I passed my Leader’s exam at the exalted seminar in Berlin, and later received handwritten certification—from Prof. Dovifat or Prof. Heide, I no longer remember which.
“See?” said Günther Wohlers when I showed him my letter from the Berlin Institute. “That’s how things are in this racket—just like a traveling circus. You just can’t let up with the whip, that’s all. You can always put things over on the biggies. It’s the little two-bit know-it-alls we have to watch out for.”
It was just such a half-pint smarty-pants, a high-school teacher from the Rhineland backwoods, who was almost my undoing. He arrived with pince-nez, salami sandwich, knapsack, puttees, and his eleventh-grade class. He tripped me up in the Napoleon Room. A Napoleon expert on the side, he was specializing in the Wartburg Festival and the book-burnings that had taken place there. A dangerous amateur historian.
In our exhibit on “Napoleon and the Rise of German National Pride,” we had done more violence to historical authenticity than had already been committed in reality. During my spiel the teacher kept frowning and rubbing his sandwich paper against a glass case that was bursting with historical fakery. Then he started objecting: “Enough of this violation of German liberty!” The eleventh-graders, up to then more interested in a class of girls nearby than in my soporific lecture, suddenly were all ears. The teacher took the floor, pushing me against a wall that likewise bristled with distortions of history. The kids all grinned. The reputation of the exhibit was at stake, and along with that of the entire scholarly field of press history. More than that, my de jure employer, Mayor Adenauer of Cologne, would stand or fall with the fortunes of his brainchild, the “Pressa” exhibition. This mutiny, incited by a mere corporal in the ranks of public education, had to be nipped in the bud.
In front of his class I asked this puny know-it-all to take over the tour in my place. It was obvious, I said, that he knew much more about this stuff than Professor d’Ester, the doyen of our fledgling discipline. “Please, sir, go ahead and explain this document to your young gentlemen. It is the most important piece in the entire exhibit, but historically, also the most difficult to interpret.” I led him to a case containing a single and very significant-looking document. It was significant, too, not because it was in the Italian language, but because it belonged in a completely different room. The caption was also totally wrong, though beautifully calligraphed on a gold card in Ehmcke Gothic, inscribed by one of Ehmcke’s glamorous pupils. His artists had painstakingly lettered these gold cards by the thousands. Our archive contained stacks of them, but nobody knew where they all belonged. Not one of the professors could unravel the mess. Karl d’Ester, arriving one morning with egg on his face from a hurried breakfast, wrung his hands. Economists with doctor’s degrees came by and weren’t any help either. Finally Wohlers came to the rescue: “Put out cards in all the cases. If some are left over, get rid of them. Wrong cards can get changed around later.” König, the archive messenger, brought in a bottle of beer, and all was hunky-dory.
But now it was the high-school teacher’s turn to get egg on his face. To be brief about it: no matter how close he stuck his pince-nez to the glass, he couldn’t make head or tail out of what he saw, and no doubt he couldn’t read Italian anyway. He was just about to apologize in front of his whole class when another bevy of schoolgirls, led by a decorous nun, noisily entered this hall of dubious science. The eleventh-graders switched battlefields. One single zealot, a pimply kid with spectacles, stayed with us, making careful notes for his history essay. In the next room, another guide had started his lecture. Back in those days nobody felt obliged to shout “Achtung! The Führer is about to speak!”
Having once again demonstrated my prowess as a Leader in the field of applied science, how could I possibly fail here on the island? Beatrice studied hard. She devoured books, copied out excerpts, memorized dates. Then, like a good student, she scouted the city, visiting all the main attractions. As for me, I read nothing and visited nothing, for I have no memory at all and don’t believe in marble tombs. The day before any tour, I could orient myself just a bit so the customers wouldn’t end up at all the wrong places.
A few days later we received our marching orders. A Woermann ship was arriving. About twenty guides were signed on. At seven in the morning the rented cars stood in long rows at the pier. The tour director distributed lists, armbands, and written instructions. Each of us was assigned to a group of 20-25 people and told which car to use. Among the guides were some professional interpreters who had hold of the basic 1000 words in each language, and a few could actually speak them. For years they had been dragging foreigners, people whom as native islanders they despised, across the insular landscape—and holding out their palms at the end of each excursion.
Like all slogans, the one propagated by the Spanish Tourist Board, “Mallorca clima ideal,” is a fraud—or shall we say, is based on a faulty conception of nature’s meteorological vagaries. In any case, thousands of tourists have spent their time on the island in a driving rain. Let us concede, however, that on the day of our maiden tour, a hot sun and hot dust descended on all and sundry. The steamer dropped anchor in the bay, the harbor police climbed aboard, and longboats, sloops, and dinghies headed out to take on the passengers.
Then the first batches came on land and fanned out. Each excursion participant had been assigned to a particular automobile. All they had to do was find the right number, or call it out as they came on land.
The Germans are great organizers, though they have never trusted their own organizations. A mad dash commenced. People bared their teeth, yelled, bumped up against each other. Each one wanted to be the first, wanted the best car and the best seat in the car. Fathers pushed mothers aside; daughters forgot their deportment-class manners; sons with facial scars, imagining that they were back in the Heidelberg dueling lists, flailed about trying to snag the snazziest car for their elders—why else travel First Class? In a shipwreck, scenes like this one are kept under control with a pistol. We weren’t allowed to carry any, and so we had all we could do to deal with these high-paying German gentry. “Your number, please? Oh, I’m sorry. Yours is the next car, there, see the number on it?”—“What, that old jalopy? We’re not getting into that thing, no sirree! That Schulz family over there, they got that big Mercedes. Are they any better than us? Do you know what kind of people the Schulzes are? Where can I register a complaint?”—“With your Guide, or with the company president in Hamburg. It’ll go faster with the Guide.”—“All right, then where’s the Guide, otherwise they’ll drive away right under our noses. We’re First Class, in case you didn’t know. Where’s our Führer?”
“At your service, sir, and I’m happy to inform you that the car we have selected for you is an unusual one, with a very special feature.”—“Liesl, come over here, the Guide here says that our car has some kind of special feature. Let’s hear about it. The hell with the Schulzes.” Liesl comes over, also two daughters and a son. I explain: “This old jalopy was formerly a luxury limousine, as you can see for yourself. It once belonged to no less a personage than the banker Juan March—you know, sure, that’s the one. The special feature is the motor, 200 horsepower. The old rascal had it custom-installed for his drug-trafficking. Just between you and me, it’s seen its share of cadavers. Later on I’ll show you some bullet holes. A historic automobile, believe you me–if that sort of thing interests you.” The family hesitates, but finally is cultured enough to enter the historic gangster vehicle.—“The one occupied by the family you have jokingly referred to as ‘Schulz’ may look better, but the motor’s all shot. I know that car from a hundred tours and more. Breaks down every fifty miles.”
The Island of Second Sight Page 51
