The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Our driver gets in, I sit next to him. In the back seat Daddy and Mom are all smiles. Son and daughters on the fold-out seats are all smiles. After all, they’ve done it once again! They’ve picked a true Leader!

  For a while now they can relax. Before we drive off, they’ll write a quick postcard to Aunt Amalia back in Germany: “Dear Auntie, guess where we are! We’re sitting in the Führer’s limousine, haha!”

  Now I have to leave the car again, down the way there’s another insurrection, they’re almost into fisticuffs. It’s Beatrice’s group! Beatrice is standing in the middle of a rude throng. In her excitement she’s talking French, and that works miracles. These are all people of culture, after all. They’ve studied foreign languages, so they become as gentle as lambs and summon forth their meager fragments of French. “Oh please, Madame, keep on speaking French, we all know it and it’s easier for you as a Spaniard, though I must say your German isn’t bad at all—a little bit of an accent, but it sounds delightful. In Valencia we had another guide who spoke French, maybe you know him, real swarthy type, you know, and he was wearing…”

  I am able to catch Beatrice just long enough to belch out a string of pithy Dutch expletives. These sons of bitches, let’s drown the lot of ’em, shoot ’em all, string ’em up in the baobab trees! But Beatrice, so very touchy about spittle and footprints on our polished apartment floor, acts here as if transformed. She is even able to calm me down, by pointing out that this crazed multitude is traveling First Class. Really decent passengers, Third Class, would be arriving soon enough, and they’d be easier to deal with. Then she was gone, chasing after a woman about to dispense blows with her purse in retaliation against a Spanish driver. No sooner had this luxury-class fury taken her seat next to him, she gasped, than he tried to pinch her in a certain place—jawohl, and she was not going to tolerate such behavior! Other ladies were furious because no one had tried to pinch them—why go to all this trouble and travel through Spain as an unattached female? Both factions were right, in my opinion. All of the ladies should have been spirited off to the Clock Tower and thrown to the bulls. But on their chartered tour they all eventually got what they paid for. Those Spanish drivers are fairly bursting with virility. And the way they drive is tantamount to seduction itself: one hand on the wheel, the other on the female client. Lots of squeals and shrieks, especially in the curves, where hip contact naturally gets closer. Oh, I wish them all a safe journey! Still, in all my years as a Führer I never once heard of an accident arising from customer service of the kind under discussion. Well, perhaps a scratched fender here, a torn undergarment there…

  A tourist disembarkation at the harbor in Palma takes the better part of an hour. Finally the masses have dispersed to the waiting automobiles. The tour director gives the high sign, and the first cars start out: Group 1, Guide 1, then five minutes later Group 2, Guide 2, and so forth, until the snake is winding its way across port city and island.

  First stop: La Lonja, the ancient trade center, an eloquent witness to the former wealth of the city. “As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, this is a large Gothic sandstone building with small minarets, 1st half of the 15th century, built by Guillermo Sagrera, richly ornamented with sculpture, four octagonal corner towers, connected by an ornate parapet with turrets. Inside—just follow me, please, but be careful, chips of stone have been known to drop down—here inside, the vast interior is divided by two ranges of three spiral columns. Especially notable is the collection of paintings from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. A spiral staircase—up there, you can see it from here—leads to the roof and from there to one of the corner towers, whence a fine view of the city, the harbor, and the bay is obtained. But we won’t be going up, much too dangerous. Not too long ago an elderly lady, handicapped, fell from the parapet down to the street. Too late to save her, unfortunately.”

  Dead bodies always make a big hit. The remainder of the above text can be found in Baedeker’s Spain, 1929 edition, pp. 124-25. Some guides, Beatrice without a doubt, passed on this information ipsis verbis. But I didn’t, for the simple reason that this sort of stuff bores me to tears. As a Führer my chief aim was to enter that building a few paces ahead of my charges, and with my panoramic Führer’s vision determine in an instant what things were all about. Then I collected my group and explained everything according to the dictates of my fancy. After a few introductory remarks, this fancy of mine transported me without ado back to the golden age of Mediterranean piracy. Inside this palace, I then elaborated, the pirates used to divide up their spoils. Abducted women were raped on the spot; the unattractive ones were sold as slaves. Up there in the corners were four small rooms for making gunpowder. And then I would introduce my favorite general: “He took care of the whole mess! Barceló cleaned up the entire mare nostrum! Those paintings over there were done in commemoration of that savage era. Take a look at them, but you won’t see much. Covered with age-old patina. All right, let’s move on!”

  The next guide is already coming near, and so I have to shield my own people from questionable elucidations. So far, so good. They liked my story. And that’s enough for me. The little gang of tourists got what they paid for. But wait—a little old lady with her nose in her Baedeker comes up and tells me that the book has it all different—isn’t this the “Lonja”? Another lady, this one even older (I had winked at her during my brief lecture) asks abruptly which of the two ought to know better, our Führer, a local resident after all, or that foreigner Baedeker? Hadn’t I been in this profession for quite some time? “Not only that, Madam. I have also been commissioned by a publishing house to edit a new guide to Mallorca containing hitherto unpublished material, most of which I have myself unearthed. And I intend to publish my findings despite a certain sensitiveness on the part of the island natives in historical matters.”

  “Daddy, did you hear that? Our guide is going to publish a brand new book all about historical sensitivity on Mallorca! He’s our Führer, so let’s buy it! OK, Dad?”

  “We certainly shall, Agnes. These people are pioneers of German culture abroad, and they are contributing to our nation’s prestige in foreign climes. After our tour we’ll ask him to join us in a toast to the fatherland. I’m sure he’d like that. But now pay attention, Agnes. This is not just a pleasure trip. We’re here as part of your education. Travel is more educational than home and school combined.”

  “Excuse me!” Somebody comes up to me, interrupting my victims’ discussion about culture and education. “That painting over there in the right-hand corner. Isn’t that late Van Dyck?”

  “That one? No, it’s early Hodler. But I’m grateful to you for asking such an intelligent question. Up to now no one has been able to establish just how that work of art ever got here to Mallorca. The Cantonal Museum in Bern is still investigating. Professor Iselin—surely you’ve heard of him—has come down here himself. He and I are working on it together.”

  “Many thanks, very interesting. I think I’ve read about that somewhere.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Without stepping on the Swiss art expert’s toes, I was unable to add a single thing more to this story about where the painting belonged. A very distinguished-looking gentleman from the group stepped forward and—I could see it in his eyes—was about to ask me a very tricky question. Before he came anywhere near, I was already sitting in the car, and we coursed through streets and alleys toward the Cathedral.

  I did know a thing or two about this building. I remembered a few architectural details from our mournful starvation walks in its vicinity. But—who was slumbering within the many sarcophagi; how wide, how long, how high; how many columns, when it was built, why it was built, with whose money, with whose sweat, who designed it, when the deterioration had set in, when it would be restored, how many people could fit inside it—Please, ladies and gentlemen, for God’s sake (that’s probably why it’s standing here) don’t ask, because I simply don’t know and I’d have to concoct stories to come u
p with answers. I’d rather you pray to your Führer. Churches are meant to be prayed in, not studied. Most people forget that.

  We have half an hour for the Cathedral. I ask my group first of all to let the colossal space take its effect, which they all do; they crane their necks like chickens being eyed by a hawk. “Simply colossal!” “You’re so right!” Then comes the first question: why are the columns that support the central nave angled slightly inward? Damn it all, I never noticed that. They really are bent inward. My brain comes up with the Leaning Tower of Pisa—can I use that here somehow? Call it a “partial inclination”? But first I throw in the jazz that never fails to do its stuff: “That’s an excellent question, one that shows unusual powers of observation. Are you perhaps an art historian, and a very original one at that?” The young man nods assent. I’ll have to be careful. Even on well-trodden paths there can be traps. Dad and Mom take one step forward and eye their son proudly for asking such a smart question. This evening the whole ship will know it: that young fellow will go far—he knows how to get at problems, and how to embarrass a tour guide. But wait just a minute. I make reference to one of the Pre-Socratics, who once said that the right question is half of its own answer. Still, I go on, in art history this maxim didn’t always hold, and most surely not in this particular cathedral. At this, the student’s parents’ eyes glaze over. The student himself says, “I beg your pardon?” and I can tell that with my remark I have threatened his pride as well as my own. But I continue: we could take two basic ideas as our point of departure: a religious idea and an architectural idea. To me it would seem more appropriate to combine the two, for as we know, the great cathedrals of the world were conceived as amalgams of religious-rhythmic contemplation and secular-technical visual acumen. For this very reason, our own centuries have no longer produced cathedrals. People in my group nod their heads. And they nod even more energetically once I start using motions of the hands to illustrate my assertions. Especially effective in this setting is what might be termed the “pumpkin outline,” employed as an indication of the cathedral’s limitless dimensions. It never fails.

  But this student just wouldn’t let go. He pestered me no end with his insistent prodding, and when several more tourists rejoined my group and started listening intently, I had no choice but to start talking in earnest. I abandoned all rationality, donned the mantle of smugness, and found the solution in a flash: mystical inclination. The columns inclined that way as an expression of a mystical tendency. This kind of statement must, of course, be delivered with loudly echoing chest tones. Then it does have its effect. “Inclinatio mystica, sir! Surely you are familiar with the concept. We have before us here the sole example of medieval mysticism translated directly into architectural space.”

  The young academician motions to the intent crowd that he is, in fact, familiar with the tendency in question. Ten minutes more of reverberating rhetoric, and I have explained how the medieval technicians were able to raise the columns without causing the collapse of the whole edifice. One of the tourists, probably an architect, pointed out that the damned columns were not only inclined inward, but that they were positioned asymmetrically to the central line of the nave. Vigoleis, once again into the breach! Hod carriers! Vigoleis mobilized thousands of hod carriers to fill the entire nave with sand, thus preventing the columns from falling. To me it seemed like a perfectly cogent explanation. But now there were audible skeptics. Even some of the uncultured faces started grinning. One gentleman pulled out a pocket slide rule and said, “Now wait, my good man, how much sand? I’ll have that figured out in a second.” My knees turned to rubber. Slide rules aren’t reliable beyond the decimal point, and even in front of it they leave much room for the imagination. But I was about to be exposed, and all I was doing was making up stories for 25 pesetas. Never let a question go unanswered! Der Führer knows everything!

  “Well now, my good friend, it figures after all. Congratulations! When the Suez Canal was built…”

  All ears were on the Suez expert. I took a deep breath. I was liberated. The crooked columns collapsed, the Cathedral of Palma sank into nothingness, and nobody noticed at all. For meanwhile, an argument had started among the gentlemen over whether Ferdinand “von” Lesseps, the architect of my savior the Canal, wasn’t himself a German, and whether an envious world wasn’t trying to rob Germany of his accomplishments, too. It was, somebody piped up, the same as with Johannes Gensfleisch, known to posterity as Gutenberg. Those goddam Dutchmen were always claiming that their man Coster…

  God was with me, and against my German clients. Who’s to say that He doesn’t abide in the houses named after Him?

  We continued our tour. I pointed to the rose window and explained that German stained-glass artists had had their hand in the brilliant result—a remark that didn’t fail to win approval. After that I again lapsed into fiction. Things got especially hairy when we came to the marble sarcophagi, whose separate contents I mixed up hopelessly. Not one carcass stayed in its proper holy place, and none got correctly ascribed to the person it had been in real life. No one noticed, for somebody in the group mentioned that German carcasses were much better anyway. Comments like this diverted attention.

  Things proceeded in this fashion, beyond our allotted time. I made springs gush forth where there were no springs, I pulled stars down from the sky, entombed living persons, all for 25 pesetas. But happily, people who travel First Class are so very cultured that they’ll swallow anything.

  Up comes a gentleman, introduces himself, we shake hands, he offers me his cigar case, genuine German Brasil, or would I prefer a throat lozenge? He compliments me on my absolutely superb explanations. Donnerwetter, he says, that’s the best thing he’s had on the whole trip. Surely I was aware of the ignorance that you meet up with nowadays in the field of tour guidance! Unbelievable! Then he takes me by the arm and gets confidential. I think to myself, now he wants to know the way to the nearest house of bawds—I’ll be happy to send him to the Clock Tower with my compliments. “But do you realize, Herr Führer, what kind of people you have as clients? I mean, have you noticed just who is here among us?”

  I confessed that I hadn’t noticed. I wasn’t about to tell him that I regarded the whole lot of them as idiots—I wouldn’t mention that until tonight at the pier, when we would be saying adios. All we were told was that this shipment contained nothing but academicians and high-class types, but that you could spot that right away by the way they disembarked. After all, the disciples at Emmaus also had an idea who was standing among them. The gentleman puts his mouth to my ear and hisses forth his secret: “Von Puttwitz!”

  “Von…?”

  “Exactly! The general! I’m afraid he’s in another group, but I’ll get him over here. I want him to meet you. You know, he’s the one with the…”

  “Oh, that one? With the two…?”

  “Two? What do you mean, there were three!”

  “Oh, of course, if you look at it that way.”

  “Nowadays that’s how you have to look at it. Otherwise the German nation is lost. We have very hard times ahead of us. But Puttwitz…”

  I knew less about any General von Puttwitz than I did about the builder of Palma Cathedral or the corpses that repose in its vaults. I had noticed a middle-aged man with dueling scars and a Vandyke, accompanied by two women. That one could very well be a general, and that is why I was about to ask whether it wasn’t the one with the two ladies that this guy was talking about. But in General von Puttwitz’ life the number three was apparently the magic digit. Maybe he had been divorced three times. Or jailed—for political reasons, of course. Or maybe he had made three attempts on the Führer’s life, or on Poincaré’s. At any rate, this conversational misunderstanding brought the two of us only closer together.

  “By heavens,” I said, “Ill have to report this to my friend Martersteig this very night!”

  “Martersteig?”

  “No less! Baron, or General von Martersteig. He holds cla
im to both titles.”

  “You don’t say! Wait a minute: Battle of the Marne…”

  “Sorry, von Richthofen Fighter Squadron.”

  “Oh, of course! That’s where he was. Great flyer. He’s living here? Recuperation?”

  A small group of tourists had come close by, so I put a finger to my mouth and whispered into the gentleman’s ear, “Secret mission!”

  “Aha! I understand. And you?” He winked at me. I winked back, and pointed meaningfully at my official Guide number. Our confidential bond was established—not, to be sure, at a table of regulars in some rustic German inn, but in patriotic surroundings at one of the frontier outposts in an anti-German world. My fellow conspirator bowed slightly; he would report to the General and bring him over to my group with a few other colleagues. “And then we’ll drink to our Führer!”

  I bowed. “Oh sir, you are too kind!”

  But this was yet another misunderstanding. For the Führer he was talking about was not Vigoleis, but that other Führer, the non-quixotic one. It was Adolf Hitler.

  My skull fumed, my stomach churned, my mouth filled with a bilious liquid. And this was only the beginning of the tour.