The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  At the very same hour when I sat facing this aristocrat’s reverse loudspeaker, getting taken to the cleaners more pitilessly than any student at an oral exam, all over the world distinguished speakers were standing next to pitchers of water holding forth in honor of Goethe—all the Bertrams, the Heuslers, the Ortega y Gassets, the Gundolfs (if he lived long enough to take part in this celebration), the Gides, the Schweitzers. To be sure, a hundred years after the Olympian’s death, Goethe scholarship was still in its Wertherian phase, and none of the professors would have been able to blast forth any great wisdom into the Great Sureda’s trombone. So it’s no wonder that the likes of me had to take recourse in empty blather. I did so for a whole half-hour. Don Juan shook his brass instrument frequently, he repeatedly poked the earpiece into his hairy orifice in order not to miss a single word of my anniversary oration. He nodded in assent, as if to indicate that my jerry-built disquisition was taking the words right out of his own mouth. Deaf people are mistrustful, but if they are convinced that their amplification apparatus is working properly, they can become as gentle as the blind. I passed my orals with distinction. How amazed Don Juan would have been if I had already made the greatest contribution of the current century to Goethe scholarship, my discovery of Goethe’s conversations with Mrs. Eckermann, my surprise gift to the professorial guild on the occasion of the poet’s 200th birthday!

  When, at the end of my improvisatory rope, I brought my declamation to a close, I was hoarse. Don Juan set down his trumpet and thanked me. I looked over at the door with the intention of escaping, but the grandee held my arm, pulled a small poetry anthology from his pocket, and asked me to blow forth a few poems as the final gesture of our celebration. He checked off the poems he wanted to hear, and now he heard them: durch das Labyrinth der Brust – wandelt in der Nacht. Oh, thou eternal hour! When silence returned, Don Juan glanced at me and said with emotion, “Goethe is alive. You have brought him back to life! A great spirit!”

  Who, Goethe or Vigoleis?

  In the Book of Joshua it is reported that seven priests blew seven trumpets of rams’ horns, and the walls of Jericho fell down flat. That is amazing. But it is no less remarkable that my blowing into a deaf man’s horn reawakened the dead Goethe, and on the very same day when the scholars were pummeling him with all due solemnity.

  Don Juan was an erudite grandee, and travel had further educated him. I don’t know if Ernst Haeckel ever sat on one of his chairs, slept in one of his beds, or ate from one of his plates, but a copy of that writer’s Miracles of Life with a dedication from the author, written in large script across the whole flyleaf, was in the hidalgo’s library. Yet more important than the library was Don Juan’s collection of tickets from all the trains, trolleys, toll bridges, ships, theaters, museums, and the like that he started amassing at a certain point in his life. They filled dozens of boxes and gradually displaced some essential items of furniture.

  A brief word in this connection: during the last decade of the previous century, Don Juan made a trip to Germany. At the time, a criminal case was in all the newspapers. A certain man was accused of murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. He maintained his innocence, although he couldn’t prove it. He claimed that on the day in question he wasn’t in the city where the crime was committed, but in the distant town of X. Shortly before his execution, his defense lawyer, conducting another search through the man’s house, found one of his defendant’s old suits. In one of the pockets he came upon a ticket for a horse-drawn tram. He ascertained that it had been issued on the fateful day in the town of X. The man was acquitted.

  Don Juan, who followed this case with increasing dread, began imagining himself the potential victim of a miscarriage of justice. The Dreyfus Affair was also in the news at around this time. The public was getting nervous. It was felt that it was important to have an alibi at all times. Don Juan returned from this journey with a suitcase full of material that would save him from the gallows. He insisted that his relatives never take a single step that they couldn’t document years hence.

  His mania for collecting extended also to newspapers, and in this regard he doubtless exceeded my mentor Karl d’Ester, the professor of journalism whose students even had to protect their sandwich wrappings from his prying fingers. Don Juan had once read of a case in which an entire year’s worth of a particular weekly suddenly became critical evidence and was worth thousands. Ever since then, he kept all periodicals and subscribed to a host of obscure serials.

  His archive was stored in crates, suitcases, baskets, and cardboard boxes, in drawers, cabinets, under beds, and in corners of rooms where there was always space to spare. After a time it started competing for Lebensraum in the Suredas’ apartment, since Don Juan decided to bring to Palma the portions of his collection that had been stored in the wet nurse’s quarters in Valldemosa. He was planning to compile a general catalogue of his holdings, and asked my advice concerning the best system of classification. I recommended a pocket-sized microcard file; in two or three years the job would be finished, and then I could only hope that Don Juan would be accused of murder. That would be the most fitting way to put the catalogue to its proper use.

  Like the fiumare—those rivers that carry water only in the rainy period but then swell up to become dangerous torrents—Don Juan’s life saw the regular recurrence of hectic activity that destroyed much in its path but left behind, in the river bed of his mind, a fertile layer of mud. I am now about to relate the story of how the hidalgo learned German, an account that is as fundamentally important for these pages as it is indiscreet. Perhaps my reader will catch my drift if I say that I wish him to become privy to this story; once we can get past the “privy” part, it will be clear to my reader why it is that my ears pricked up when, for the first time, I heard the name of the Portuguese mystic Teixeira de Pascoaes, the man who has played a central role in my life ever since.

  Hemorrhoids are, apart from the discomfort they cause, an indecorous affliction. The euphemistic designation “golden veins” does nothing to remove the stigma. Don Juan suffered from this ailment to an extent that forced him at times to sit for hours on end in an unmentionable location in his house. Under such constraint the pious monk Caesarius of Heisterbach would have pondered the question of eternity. But Don Juan, citizen of a country of autodidacts, pondered his own education. During these hours of outer and inner coercion he drove himself to learn two languages: Greek and German. Since his ailment was chronic, he reached his goal. Still, everyone knows that it isn’t possible to learn a language silently; one must declaim everything to get used to the new sounds. That’s just what Don Juan did, and because he was hard of hearing, he did it very loudly, considering that he couldn’t shout the lessons into his own trumpet bell.

  If you will now picture the site where this self-teaching went on, and picture further a housemaid from the countryside, you can imagine that after a few days this maid will start getting the willies. He locks himself in and yells out gibberish—you, too, would pack your things and leave your new job before real insanity broke out. None of these hired criadas, Pedro told me, lasted more than a week, and so Doña Pilar was forced to abandon her easel again and again to do common housework. Her art suffered as a consequence, but Don Juan suffered even more, for over the years the rectal clusters multiplied. From a solely linguistic standpoint, the golden knots that disfigured Don Juan’s second visage were quite beneficial. Over time, the entire household became exclusively oriented toward the grandee’s philological vein.

  When we got to know him, Don Juan was already an advanced student. In German he was quite fluent. His affliction worsened, and his family feared that Papá might start teaching himself Chinese. His doctors weren’t much help. As with cases of the flu, they advised waiting until the illness cured itself.

  Whenever Don Juan finished a relieving session on his linguistic perch, he left the throne room with his textbooks stuck under his arm, holding his drooping trousers with one hand, while with
the other hand keeping his underwear from touching the sensitive spot, and shuffled across the hallway into his bedroom. The bedroom was small, and he had long legs, so he had to keep the door open with his legs projecting out into the hall like a roadblock. The family was by now accustomed to this new phase of his malady, and they hurdled over these paternal stilts as a matter of domestic routine. “Learn to suffer without complaint,” was the doomed German Kaiser’s motto, and our family doctor had it posted on his office wall for the edification of his patients. Don Juan suffered while learning.

  Once Pedro installed an eternal lamp in the hall, no one stumbled any more. A wealthy aunt donated the oil, but not out of Christian charity. No, this was a preventive measure to avoid hospital bills that might otherwise ensue. But the eternal flame was unable to prevent a worse calamity.

  A British lady commissioned Pedro to paint her portrait. Friends of hers had recommended the “famous Suredas,” and by mistake she approached the nameless Pedro rather than his brother Don Jacobo. Pedro was thrilled: Heaven had sent this errant non-beauty to him and his easel! Art history can point to several instances where such mistakes have given rise to immortal masterpieces. The rich lady from England was willing to pay the price that Don Jacobo would have asked—a few thousand pesetas. All of us shared in Pedro’s excitement: thousands of pesetas! The sittings were to take place in his parents’ flat, mornings at eleven in the little room where I had held forth on Goethe. Pedro outfitted the study as a studio, and at that hour of the day the light would be just right for the job.

  But this was the same hour when Don Juan conducted his one-man sit-down seminars. There was a way, they figured, to steer clear of disaster. Pedro’s mother and a number of siblings agreed to keep Papá in check and, if necessary, squelch his loud verb conjugations. I myself offered to stand guard, or to divert Don Juan from his sanguine preoccupation by conversing with him on his favorite topic, Original Sin. But Pedro, trusting in the resourcefulness of his own family, said that my services would not be required.

  On the evening of the first day of posing, Pedro visited us, and I could tell right away that something untoward had happened. Those thousands of pesetas had slipped through his fingers. As a proud Spaniard, the kind you read about in books including this one, he didn’t cry. But you could infer from his quivering lips that down deep in his gut he was plotting dastardly revenge. If only he had left this English dame to his brother and shared the loot with him afterward!

  “How come?”

  “Papá!”

  “Good gracious!” cried Beatrice with the emphasis of a dyed-in-the-wool Brit who has just had the death of her favorite cat predicted by a soothsayer. As in a movie, she immediately sensed what had gone wrong, while I was still groping in the dark.

  The dowager arrived at the appointed time. The princess welcomed her and took her to the studio where Pedro had hastily covered one wall with a bedsheet. This had the effect of dividing up the room and gave the illusion of space. One of Doña Pilar’s masterpieces, perhaps the best painting in the entire piso, was duly admired by the lady from England: a portrait in blue of an old friend of the family, Don Miguel de Unamuno. Then Doña Pilar left the room, and Pedro gave posing instructions to his very first paying victim. Using the few snatches of English that Beatrice had taught him, he started a conversation, but soon he went silent. He sketched out some contours, and perhaps even started applying some color—I don’t recall any details of his technique.

  Then: intermission for the model. Why of course, she could simply relax. Should he fetch her purse for her? Oh, she must have left it in the entrada—if she wished to get it herself, it was just across the hallway. The lady ambulated out of the studio. She was an elderly personage wearing the familiar English stockings. The ensuing scream was ear-splitting. There was a noise as if someone were stumbling over something, and then an urgent summons to “Dear God!” Pedro heard a shout of the English vocable umbrella, and then the front door slammed shut.

  Pedro, standing at his easel, turned into a pillar of salt. “Papá!” He didn’t even need to go out into the hall to be certain of what had happened. The grandee lay prone and bare-bottomed on his bed, his legs stretched out across the hall carpet, loudly conjugating verbs. Can there be a more dreadful, a more fear-inspiring sight for a lady who came to have her portrait painted? And apart from the sight, this incomprehensible yelling coming from the oblivious old man’s mouth—German, or perhaps Greek, Homer, Goethe, Hölderlin…? The domestic guards had let down their guard, leaving Papá alone to follow the nameless urgings of his philological passion.

  It speaks for Pedro’s virtues as a human being, and as the son of his father, that he refrained from whacking the old man over the head with his palette. Who, in a similar situation, would not have spit a wad, or at least tossed a shoe tree at the naked old gent lying there?

  We were shaken.

  “There’s nothing for it,” said Pedro, bringing his account to a close. “Vigoleis… What would you have done?”

  “I would have locked Papá inside and left the scene.”

  “Locked him in? You idiot, it’s obvious that you come from a country where not only philosophical systems, but also doors can be ‘locked.’ Did you ever run across a door in our piso that can be properly locked? The bathroom door, for example, can be locked only from the inside, and even for that you have to know just how to do it, or else you’ll never get out again. If it were any different, that thing never would have happened to Mamá’s nun.”

  I listened up. The princess has a nun? One to whom embarrassing things have happened? I have always been interested in nuns. Once, a nun was deeply in love with me and wanted to sleep with me. Another nun once stole a blackbird I had carefully tamed—she killed it, fried it, and ate it. Since then I have looked upon these black-veiled ladies as the archetypal manifestation of corporal and mental aggression. At my insistence Pedro told us a remarkable story, and in the telling he forgot his own frustrating escapade with the English lady. When he left after midnight he was his old self again.

  After escaping the fateful apartment, we later learned, this British portrait dame leaped into a taxi and asked to be driven to His Majesty’s Consul. There she filed a charge stating that under pretense of having her portrait painted she had been lured to a dark house on a dark street. There she was greeted by a short woman and led into an artist’s studio that, as she later realized, was not an artist’s studio at all.

  This short woman then showed her some blue man she claimed to have painted herself. And then the real painter came in, claiming to be the famous Jacobo Sureda. He stood behind an easel pretending to paint her portrait. Then this awful thing happened—we wondered just how she depicted it to the Consul.

  That same evening the British lady left the island, in flight from the tortured buttocks of a Spanish grandee. Incidentally, the grandee himself never learned the mischief he had caused with his philological blood. Deaf or partially deaf persons always have the last word—the only word they can be sure of. In the story of the nun, this word once again belongs to Don Juan Sureda, although it was Pedro’s sculptress sister Pazzis who rescued the cloistered lady in question.

  Having strewn about so many hints, I can no longer hold back from giving an account of this tragedy. Besides, I am of the opinion that by relating such quixotic adventures, I can offer my reader a clearer image of Don Juan Sureda, a man who gave my own existence such a significant new direction, than if I were to linger over a description of the double bags under his eyes, or over the fact that owing to my Habsburgian donkey’s chin I was often taken for the son of Papá Sureda himself, whereas his true son Pedro had to go on playing make-believe in the kindergarten of the Thirteenth Alphonse, the King of Spain, El Rey.

  The princess never kept a nun in her house in the same way a prince of the Church keeps a house chaplain. Doña Pilar was ill, and preferred to be under the care of a nun rather than any of the numerous members of her family. Nurses visit
many households, rich or poor, and they can adapt quickly to local conditions. They don’t ask many questions. In the Sureda home, Sister Amalberga was put on her mettle more severely than in most other houses. Soon she figured out which doors could be opened, and which it was best to leave closed. The problem was finding out how. She located the bathroom all by herself, but no one instructed her in the tricky matter of the inside lock.

  The mishap occurred during her first night in the apartment.

  Pedro shared a bedroom with his older brother Juanito, a student of jurisprudence. His academic specialty was Canon Law, but his chief field of interest was a form of pious idleness.

  It was perhaps around midnight when Pedro was awakened by a noise. He listened, and it sounded as though someone were knocking. Was it a nocturnal bird pecking against a shutter? All he could hear was his brother snoring. Pedro turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but now he heard this rapping noise more clearly. He listened again, and this time there was no mistake: someone was knocking! But who? He immediately thought it must be the nun, locked in the bathroom and unable to get out. Damn it all, nobody told her how to do it! What now? While he was no left-winger, Pedro was no particular friend of the Church either, and thus as far as he was concerned, Sister Amalberga was a subject of strictly clerical interest. So he shook his brother awake and said approximately as follows: “Juanito, stop that un-Christian snoring! There’s a cloistered woman in our house who right now is in cloistered distress. Listen!” The knocking was still audible; it was louder but still restrained. Juanito agreed at once with his heretical brother’s assessment of the situation: no doubt about it, Sor Amalberga was locked in the throne room!

  The brothers sat upright in bed and listened to the knocking, which could now be heard at regular intervals. After a while, Pedro said that it was Juanito’s job, as a Catholic, to liberate the nun. Juanito was not so firmly convinced of such a doctrinal obligation; he defended his position by alluding to both prevalent modes of jurisprudence, although Canon Law would have sufficed to justify his preference for malingering. Then Pedro had a brainstorm that once again showed him to be a faithful son, this time on his mother’s side. In the current situation, he said, it was probably not the nun who needed help, but their mother who needed help from the nun. But then it would be Mamá who was knocking, said the clever student of the law, and the scales of justice sank for a moment in his favor. Silence. The brothers tried to figure out whether the knocking was coming from their mother’s room. The ghost decided not to do them any such favor. There was more knocking, this time louder than before, and it was coming from the bathroom.