The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Pedro: “Maybe Mamá is too weak to give a signal. What’ll it be like if something happens to her while the nun just stepped out to the john?”

  Juanito: “God forbid! But I don’t believe in such diabolical coincidences. But how about this: why doesn’t Pazzis just let her out?”

  Pedro: “Pazzis is at the Carnival Ball. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday.”

  Juanito: “Tomorrow? It’s already past midnight, and the big fasting has begun. The time for repentance has commenced. So come, dear brother, let us both arise and together release the nun from her penitential plight, so that in the fullness of time we may be forgiven our sins.”

  “Amen, you Jesuit,” Pedro might have said if he didn’t actually say it. In any case, the lazy brothers got up and marched in their pajamas to the bathroom. Juanito addressed the sister: “Sor Amalberga, listen carefully. We want to help you. Put your right finger at the left under the latch, down where it’s broken off, but not all the way in the slot. With your left finger give the spring on the clamp a little push upwards, but don’t press too hard. It’ll be easier if you use a match. At the same time, press against the door with your foot, let go of the latch, and the lock will click open. We should have shown you this before, but you can do it.”

  The nun had no match, no technical dexterity, and no memory for verbal instructions. So she couldn’t do it. Moreover, she was ashamed to ask the señoritos for more precise directions. So instead of making any reply, she prayed.

  The brothers consulted with each other, faced now with this cloistered stubbornness. Pedro offered to climb through the bathroom transom, which was missing its pane of glass anyway. Or rather, he offered to climb up, hang down through the transom, and with half of his body show the imprisoned lady how to work the latch. But the nun rejected this idea. “Señorito, in Heaven’s name do not come at me through that little window! I prefer to wait here and pray until morning dawns and I can obtain help from someone else. God does not abandon those who are close to Him in prayer.” But Juanito, for his part, could not agree with this plan, for he said, “Sister, please consider that Mamá could be in need of your help. If you will just step up on the toilet and stretch your arms through the transom, we’ll be able to pull you out. Bind up your skirts, and we’ll have a table ready for you to land on.”

  Sor Amalberga regarded this suggestion as even more impertinent. She would rather die than be pulled out of a bathroom by two young gentlemen. I can see her blessing herself at the very idea of such a maneuver. So the brothers had to consult again while the nun, resigned to her fate, prayed on.

  Suddenly Pazzis burst into the house, in the merriest of moods after dancing through the night, covered with spangles and with confetti in her hair—the same artist who with her gouges carved marvelously sensual Madonnas out of olive wood, and who turned my head with her beauty and an intensity of Weltschmerz that was eventually her fatal undoing.

  Pazzis was never at a loss for advice for anyone or anything except for herself, and that is what made us so similar. After just one glance she diagnosed the situation, laughed at her incompetent brothers, and spoke a consoling word to the nun through the peephole. Then she said, “That big log in the fireplace in the sala!” “Ram it in!” she added when her brothers still couldn’t grasp what kind of strategy she had in mind. “Let’s break down the door!”

  This log had its own special history. It was indeed inside the fireplace, but woe to whoever would think of burning it up! A note attached to it announced that it was the last remaining piece of the tree under which their grandmother had given herself to their grandfather—if only in the form of her verbal consent to marriage.

  Sor Amalberga received new instructions, this time of the sort that would be neither difficult nor sinful to obey. She was to stand up on the toilet bowl and press her body firmly against the back wall, with her back to the door so that she wouldn’t get hurt when the door burst in. The nun did as she was told, relieved to hear a helpful female voice. All right, now she was on top of the bowl and facing the other way. She kept on praying. The brothers grabbed the log and swung it back and forth, at first to get the heft of it. Then Pazzis counted one—two—three, and on three there was a loud bang. Not only the tricky lock but the entire door split apart, and they barely missed sending the pious lady off into the Great Beyond. Her natural padding withstood the onslaught, and she didn’t even scream.

  At this point I must confess to delaying a dramatic stylistic coup in my account. Following the bashing of the bathroom door, instead of lingering with the pious lady I should have gone on this way: there was a frightful crash, and as the door was smashed apart, another door opened, the one to Don Juan’s room. Dressed in a shirt that reached to his feet and pale with fear, the grandee dashed out into the hallway swinging his trumpet and calling out with a croaking voice, “Revolution! Revolution! Every man for himself!”

  Before his children could inform him that no new tyranny had broken out, but only that a small palace revolt had been successfully quelled by his daughter’s intervention, the old gentleman was already on the stairs. And he ran through the night-time streets of the city announcing the bloodbath: “Revolution! Revolution!”

  Pedro kicked in what remained of the bathroom door, and the nun was free. With pale dignity she stepped down from the toilet bowl, offered the siblings a grateful “Praised be Jesus Christ!” and returned to duty at the beside of the ailing princess.

  The foregoing account is a description, fashioned from a variety of perspectives, of the place that was to facilitate the Occidental mission of the mystical writings of Teixeira de Pascoaes, whom I was about to discover.

  V

  Have I mentioned that the mysterious Count, the proprietor of the “apple” in Book One, was Pedro’s uncle? Yes indeed, he was a tío on his mother’s side, from the house of Alba Real del Tajo. I can’t remember why he was going through life simply as “Conde” and not wearing a prince’s crown on his head, although Pedro once explained this to us. In Spain there is a great deal of commerce in noble titles; it’s possible to exchange them within families, and you can raise or lower your rank as your sense of snobbery dictates. From the standpoint of hereditary biology, this is a healthy form of simony, one that is also widely practiced in Portugal, but it hasn’t put a stop to the overall decline of the nobility. This whole subject has now re-entered my mind with the same casual spontaneity as my inclusion of Pedro’s uncle in my island adventures. Let me add that the bronze knocker on Zwingli’s front door was a copy of one of those high-nosed Carthaginian divinities that you can see so many examples of in the museum on Ibiza. Was it perhaps Tannit, the guardian of heavenly love, who was summoned to drive out the tenants from their pilarière?

  The knocker at the entrance to House No. 23 had no such art-historical value; the builder found somewhere an iron hand that corresponded to the tenants’ social class. The noise it made was, however, the same. Because we occupied the bel-étage, a single knock sufficed.

  Just one bang!—and it was for us. Seconds later the bell at our apartment door was given a twist. Who could that possibly be on a Sunday afternoon? Pedro used a special signal. I opened up.

  “Santa Barbara!” I cried like a devout Spanish lady in a thunderstorm. It felt as if lightning had struck me. Pilar was standing at our doorstep.

  María del Pilar, the woman who was Vigoleis’ libidinous undoing; the raging scourge of Zwingli’s bed; our collective misfortune. My brother-in-law’s degenerate concubine looked at me with eyes reddened from weeping, and said, “Come quickly, before it’s too late!” She handed me a note. In my brother-in-law’s no longer elegant handwriting I read the words, “Am dying. Zwingli.”’

  Oh sure, my dear fellow, we know what your dying is like! You have every good intention, but intending is as far as it ever goes. You can’t fool me this time. I handed this premature obituary back to Pilar and said something like this: give him our best wishes for a blessed death; perhaps some other tim
e. But the woman grew very angry and gave me a piercing look. She stamped her foot, which was shod in a shiny little golden slipper, and yelled, “Where is Beatrice? Your brother is dying! Follow me!”

  This was not an act; I went in and told Beatrice. She put on a mantilla, and we followed the bearer of tragic news.

  The novelistic tradition contains many examples of relatives hastening through night and wind, over hill and dale to the deathbed of a dear one, and usually they arrive just in time to look soulfully into the eyes of the dying one, grasp his quivering hand, or hear from his lips, “I did it, I buried the body, God be merciful to my sinful soul…” On such a journey the relatives have plenty of time to conjure up whole other novels: the dying man’s life passes in review before their mind’s eye. “Oh Lord, if Thou wilt but spare his life, we shall make peace with him. All shall be forgiven and forgotten!”

  We were not allowed time for such emotionalizing, for Pilar raced like a weasel with us in tow, down Barceló and then left into the Calle San Felio, second house on the right, next to our pharmacy—we were already at our destination. So this is where the loving couple lived, where in fact they had been living ever since they secretly left the Count’s apple, just a hundred paces from our own house, and yet we had never crossed paths! Let no one ever say that we were lacking a benevolent guardian angel when we moved to the General’s Street.

  Zwingli was lying on the pilarière with his head hidden in the folds of the pillow. I would have bet my own head that this time he was really dead. His beard was Christ-like, his cheeks more sunken than in real life, causing his cheekbones to appear more Indian than ever before. His white hands lay on the blanket. Oddly, all of his nails had grown out, exceeded in length only by the one on his pinky, which now was bent slightly upward, as if commanding one final measure of respect before getting placed under the earth along with the others. All the magic was gone.

  I have never witnessed a human being getting born or dying, and thus as a poet I couldn’t have much to add to what Rilke already said in the words of his Malte Laurids Brigge “One must also have seen dying…” Now I was at least in the presence of death itself.

  The room was darkened, and yet I could still make out our wooden wardrobe from the Street of Solitude. Aha! The death of my beloved maternal grandmother, who suddenly passed away at an old age on Christmas Eve during our notorious “turnip winter,” as presents were being exchanged under the tree, gave rise to an ugly dispute over her estate. The altercation actually started at her wake. I was still too young to grasp the value of her earthly belongings, but too old not to be deeply shaken by the rude estate-grabbing indulged in by a devout, doctrinaire uncle, one whom I often saw crawling in the dust before our family Bishop, kissing the ring of this blood-related eminence of ours. Yet Uncle Jean, that wonderful man and expert in human nature, never pushed him away with his other hand.

  Now, however, I myself began feeling a certain mercenary urge in the presence of my relative’s corpse. The slut hadn’t given us back our wardrobe, or our table, or our bed linen, which she could now use to wrap the cadaver. But just you wait! The Finger of God can reach farther than your whored-out Helvecio’s magic nail!

  Beatrice’s eyes, too, lit upon the wardrobe. But since they slowly filled with tears, she had only a blurred notion of the legal ramifications. Poor Zwingli, she not only thought it but said it, too—in French, which for me had the effect of increasing the misery she was feeling. We stood at the foot of the bed—as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation…

  The widow Pilar was weeping out loud, at times crying out in pain, “Ay Jesús, ay Jesús!” Then she threw herself down on the corpse, shook it, embraced it, squeezed it so hard that if her lover were not already dead, he would be completely out of breath. “Beatrice,” I whispered, “let’s leave her alone in her sorrow.” But Pilar was thinking the very same thing. She rose up and left us alone with our sorrow and with our relative. “If he had only called us sooner!” Beatrice groaned.

  Then the dead man opened his eyes, exhaled long and hard through his waxen mask, and, for once forgetting his international prestige, said in Swiss German,

  “Is she gone? It was getting to be too much for me with that fucking woman!”

  Won’t this man ever die? Does he just want to go on dying forever? Now that’s going simply too far! I felt like hitting him over the skull with the shoe tree that Pedro failed to hurl at his spoilsport of a father. Then we would have an end to these constant false death alarms.

  Beatrice, in attendance for the second time at her darling brother’s resurrection, went deathly pale. Even her lips were now white. She didn’t move, she didn’t cheer. She said nothing. There was no water handy to toss at this jackanapes, as if he were a cat or a whore. But as might be expected of her, Beatrice was in control of this kitschy situation.

  Pilar came back. Zwingli immediately closed his eyes, but rather than play dead he started breathing audibly. These were the “sporadic sounds” of the deathbed which, according to Rilke, a poet must harken to for the sake of a good line of verse. This part of the scene, at least, worked out to my benefit.

  Doubtless already accustomed to such spontaneous resurrections of her bedfellow, the woman didn’t collapse in a heap. “Water,” the dying man now wheezed. Pilar shot from the room.

  “I don’t want her here. I’ve got to talk with you two. Send her off to a drug store far away.”

  Beatrice wrote down a prescription, and sent Pilar to the Calle San Miguel to buy some homeopathic drops. Vigo would go get a doctor while she stayed on at the bedside.

  A Spanish woman’s tears can dry up faster than they can flow. Pilar set off on her mission. Besides buying the medicine, she would no doubt return with ingredients for the General’s Eggs.

  In addition to his considerable, very masculine amatory woes, Zwingli had contracted another serious ailment; in fact, he was in desperate shape, not far from giving up the ghost. “Down there,” he said, “everything’s on the fritz.” He would have to say goodbye to the island, and the best thing for him would be to give up on Spain completely and return to Switzerland to undergo a full cure. But he could do this only if he chose to escape. We were supposed to help him with this plan, and it would have to be done with the greatest of care. One false move, and all three of us would get a shiv in the ribs. Zwingli turned his miserable head to one side and pointed to the night table. There lay the Toledo blade, ready for wielding.

  “But there’s something even worse than the dagger and almost worse than my health. There’s a card stuck in the mirror over there. Read it and you’ll see why I have to get the hell out of here.”

  The card was alarming. It came from a small village in the hinterlands of Valencia, where Pilar’s parents and siblings lived. The note said that they had sold their property and were about to board ship for Mallorca, where they intended to spend their retirement at their daughter’s house! Pilar had at one time informed her family that she was married to a famous hotel manager and had a large piso—and her relatives were expected any day now. All of us cringed at this news. Forgotten were all the spats and conflicts, now it would have to be clan against clan. The two Swiss citizens renewed a historical oath: Ça? Jamais! Niëmols!

  My sense of family cohesion is poorly developed, and my patriotic consciousness is best described as atrophied. But to stand together like this at the hour of need—even I thought this was admirable. So as the third member of the cabal I swore an oath to lend a hand and deliver Zwingli from the whore and her hinterlands.

  “Once I’m on shipboard,” Zwingli said, “Knoll will help me get out of Barcelona. Then you can pick up your stuff here, and especially, Vigo, my library, my collections. All of it is in my office, part of it still packed in boxes. Nothing must remain here. The combined value is in the thousands. That bitch…!”

  But then the bitch herself returned, and Zwingli went back to dying. The pharmacy was of course closed,
but Beatrice, who saw through the bitch right away, offered to prepare some Künzli tea—this would work as a purgative and have a calming effect at the same time. In fact it was a miraculous brew, one that outdid the expectations of even old Pastor Künzli, the herb expert who invented it. It was agreed in guttural Alpine German that on the following day Zwingli would sneak over to our house for further discussion of our plans.

  Then we departed, leaving the moribund Swiss citizen in the clutches of the vampire. Yet now the spirit of the Rütli patriots hovered over the chamber of death.

  Back home we trickled out our pesetas; we would have just enough for a sail to Barcelona. Spain, said Beatrice, was Zwingli’s undoing. Now it was up to us to rescue him at any price. But then he must never return to Spain.

  Zwingli arrived stealthily at the appointed hour. Not with the springy gait of a conspirator, to be sure, but with the haggard limp of an emaciated Lothario who is already toying with the idea of entering a monastery. He was accompanied by a street urchin carrying a large but light suitcase. As usual Zwingli reached into his pocket, but all the bravado of that gesture was now a thing of the past. I bedded down our friend on our mattress since he couldn’t keep standing up. Bedridden for weeks, he had wanted to send for us, but the bitch would have nothing of it. When he learned that her relatives were going to move in, he staged the dying scene. A Spanish proverb has it that the greatest obstacle in life is the family. One can manage with putas all right, but not with their hangers-on…