The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  José, the Catalan cook, Monica, the part-time cook from Santa Catalina, and Celerine, the assistant cook, all performed their assigned duties as in the days prior to Mamú’s horrendous disease. Only Anna, the nanny from the Black Forest, crabby like all servants kept on beyond retirement age, wasn’t pleased with the new dispensation. She thought it was just fine that her mistress was still alive—that was the proper thing for a mistress to do. But that Mamú had found religion—this turn of events she liked less, and even less than that, the constant fuss about “The Science” and the hymn-singing ladies. Nowadays, she said, the house was chock full of Bibles, and the Lord’s word was getting bandied about here in all kinds of foreign languages, whereas she, Frau Anna, approved of it solely in Martin Luther’s version. But what she liked least of all was the presence of that man Vigoleis, who kept telling stories that in her opinion had precious little to do with Christianity. But on this point this simple, extraordinarily diligent old lady was quite mistaken. Francisco, the gardener who had already discussed with his mistress the details of landscaping her grave, tended the grounds, Mamú’s “park,” with the same adeptness as before. There is little to report about her other maids, a seamstress, and a young messenger, except that they were collectively louder than one might expect in a wealthy household. But Mamú was living in Spain. Miguel, the chauffeur, had his own opinion of the crones who lately had become his chief passengers.

  This was the start of a marvelous epoch. We spent every weekend with Mamú. Sometimes Miguel picked us up, but usually we walked the narrow boardwalk along the bay with its rippling waves of not quite pure sea water, a route that now has been transformed into the Paseo Marítimo. We had the key to a gate in her “park” wall.

  At the beginning of every week Mamú came to Barceló Street to discuss with me the menu for Sunday. With time I got more and more fastidious and adventuresome in gastronomic matters. My revulsion against bread and potatoes grew stronger, and this meant that we had to shop for ingredients from many different countries. The calmados in Palma didn’t sell such delicacies. Mamú had shopped at gourmet retailers all over Europe. She owned a huge library of cookbooks in a variety of languages. Now and then, after the spirit had brought her back to health, she regarded these extravagances as sinful. I soon recognized the danger that threatened this new domain of mine, and quickly talked her out of such silly notions. I had never eaten bear’s paws, and was curious to get a taste of them, or at least to find out whether it was only snobs who sang their praises.

  It was reasoning of this sort that led me to recommend to Mamú a kind of compromise: she should buy a set of Bibles in the languages represented in her gastronomic library. Mamú thought that was a fascinating suggestion, though hardly a Christian one. Right away she sent word to her book dealer in Vienna to take care of everything. Her Portuguese Bible served me well when I later studied the works of Pascoaes. This, too, was a manifestation of destiny, as Mamú wouldn’t deny. The youth with the twitching arm, the dog’s paws, the Portuguese Bible—everything on this island had a dual essence, a twofold incarnation. Still, one had to be careful with such things. Islands themselves have their own ways about them.

  Mamú’s bookcases contained not only cookbooks, and Frau Anna didn’t only trip over volumes of Holy Scripture. Mamú owned a first-rate collection of contemporary literature in many languages. She knew most of the writers personally. Take any book from her shelf: there was an autograph inscription. Or Mamú would say, “What’s that you have there? Oh, Blei!” And immediately she would tell a story about Franz Blei, one in which she herself was a star performer. “Fülöp-Miller?”—Mamú hadn’t exactly unraveled this writer’s bibliographic snags as he was working on his book on the Jesuits, but she had used her connections to help him out, connections that extended to some very obscure ecclesiastical archives. She had known the unpronounceable Stanislaus Przybyszevski, a writer I much admired, and she once had entertained him as a dinner guest. And of course our friend Madame Gerstenberg, but also the great Frenchmen Gide, Valéry, Romain Rolland, the great Englishmen, the great Americans. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Papini, and Pirandello, who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize—they all were alive in Mamú’s amazing memory and in her even more amazing library. In addition, a certain number of deceased authors, she claimed, had entered her abode. That didn’t bother me, though it did Beatrice, whose memory is as solid as it is merciless.

  All of these exalted personages had at one time been Mamú’s personal guests, either in her palazzino in Vienna, at the estate of her late husband somewhere in the Hungarian hinterlands, perhaps on one of her father’s farms in New York State, or in her Paris apartment on the Quai d’Orsay, designed by Henry van de Velde. It is not uncommon for an American heiress to marry a Hungarian prince. Yet with the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, this particular prince forfeited all his property. He was able to polish the tarnish off his title with dollar bills, and Mamú used hard cash to buy back his castle. In those years, the feudal Europe of yore was literally haunted by tradition-starved American heiresses of Mamú’s kind. It was even plausible that her Hungarian Count or Prince—her deceased spouse sometimes surfaced with the one lineage, sometimes with the other—had not been a wastrel, but an extremely gifted architect whose talents had bestowed upon the citizens of America the Metropolitan Opera, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and a few dozen skyscrapers of somewhat lesser distinction.

  When Mamú, in our presence, ascribed the Metropolitan Opera to her late husband, the man who had died such a beautiful death, Beatrice, who is a devotee of world history, started figuring out dates. Did she perhaps think that Mamú was faking? A millionaire heiress, I was convinced, had no need of such charades. Only poor people tell lies. For 25 pesetas you could buy a lie from any tourist guide.

  Mamú was a millionaire. How many times over? For someone like me, someone who is forced to stick with the second-grade multiplication table of daily existence, it is immaterial how many million times a million his friend owns. A single million can suffice to hone away the rough edges that so often plague a friendship. Be that as it may, Mamú was a thousand times a millionaire.

  Her father, a typical American, invented a baking powder. Twofold genius that he was, he gave his invention a majestic name: Royal Baking Powder. It was a success the world over, putting Dr. Oetker’s continental products to shame. In no time the inventor’s business flourished, and he became a billionaire. Mamú was an only child, and a veritable deluge of wealth cascaded upon her. She went to the very best schools, and spent her vacations on long cruises on her father’s yacht. In her own words she grew up in a timeless world, just like a millionaire’s daughter in a novel. As we all know, life begins to get interesting only when it touches on poetry.

  Her father, she told us, died during the First World War, when she was already living with her children in Vienna. Meanwhile she had married the Hungarian aristocrat and put him back on his feet. A building contract detained her Prince in Barcelona. Returning to New York in wartime was impossible, although neutral diplomats offered their services. For the entire duration of the war her husband was listed as missing. In fact, he had gone to Mallorca to wait out the end of the world conflagration at the estate of his friend, the Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria. But the Archduke had already left the island in a submarine. Either he was now residing at his royal-cum-imperial summer home, or he was dead.

  1918: Armistice. Mamú flies (in the sense of hastens) back to America, searches for her husband and finds him, searches for her multi-million inheritance and doesn’t find it. “Vigoleis, do believe me, that was quite a blow!”

  “I can’t think of a blow that hasn’t hit you!”

  “Oh, you’re just being nice. But listen…”

  Anything having to do with the Baking Powder millions, Mamú told and discussed only in English.

  Irregularities had occurred within the company. It all went into the very high numbers, and what those numbers meant w
as that she, the sole heir, had been bilked of her Baking Powder shares. There was talk of dastardly deeds; perhaps her father hadn’t died a natural death. A certain cousin of hers was thought to be behind it all, a fellow she had no hesitation in calling a gangster. Many years ago he had courted her and her millions. For doing battle with the company thieves, she had recourse to smaller sums that were invested elsewhere, a drop in the bucket when compared to the bakery hoard, but a cool million nevertheless.

  Her lawyers encouraged her to sue. Her son, at the time just beginning to grow whiskers, said, “Shoot ’em, Mamú!” One of her daughters urged settlement out of court. The other daughter, who had wedded her own millionaire, shrugged and told her to do whatever she wanted. Wisely enough, the Prince was not asked for his advice. Since she had the money for it, Mamú sued. She pressed her case with elegance, vigor, patience, and all the other necessary qualities for that sort of thing. What she lacked was a good lawyer, and of course she had totally mistaken notions about the type of justice that gets practiced and perverted in courts of law. True enough, she had read Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas; I spotted a copy on her bookshelf. But that was only literature, she said, and anyway, all Kohlhaas fought for was a few horses, whereas in her case it was a matter of millions of dollars. That was grotesque logic, but I accepted it. The company that was her antagonist in this affair was working against her with a frightful weapon, one whose natural and insidious deadliness Mamú never recognized as clearly as we did. Had the Royal Baking company bought her lawyer and the judges? It was as simple as that.

  Her children grew up, married, had children of their own, got divorced. While the suit was still in progress, her husband died in the aforementioned “beautiful” manner (in Mamú’s Viennese it was “ein scheener Tod”). Stones started forming in her kidneys; cancer made its appearance and ate at her innards. If it hadn’t been for Mevrouw van Beverwijn’s powers of persuasion, Mamú would have died with her million-dollar suit unsettled, and the Royal company would have gleefully won the case de jure factoque. The Dutch lady thought Mamú could go on for another twenty years, and thus it made sense to start working again in earnest with the legal documents. Mamú put herself to it with renewed energy and with the counsel of the Spanish prosecuting attorney who was courting Auma. This fellow knew a lot about law, but he had never seriously studied gangster methods—and anyway, his mind was more on the young woman from Finland. Still, he helped to fill reams of paper with figures—figures about interest and compound interest, dividends and margins, profit-sharing, and other fancy concepts that are beyond my understanding. Mamú had studied up on these things, and so the prosecutor was able to broaden his professional horizons at the same time that he could keep an eye on Auma. She was still maintaining her distance, however, and we wondered why. The two of them were in such a state about each other that it was painful for us bystanders to observe. As with Mamú’s court proceedings, love had come to a standstill. They talked and talked and got nowhere. Mamú’s monthly income was substantial, though by a multimillionaire’s standards it amounted to peanuts. The legal fracas was taking its toll. Other American millionaires on Mallorca behaved very differently. They arrived with sumptuous yachts, traveling private casinos, and stark-naked women, whereas Mamú had to get by with a rented automobile and well-dressed domestic servants.

  It wasn’t only the court battle with the Royal Baking Gang that was eating away at Mamú’s bank accounts. She was having a great deal of trouble with a brother of her late husband, an odd bird indeed, old, over eighty, he too a prince, and living in princely dissolution. He resided in Budapest, and each year was required to pay enormous sums in child support as a result of his habit of siring progeny all over the place—not only in Hungary, though that was his main hunting preserve. Mamú had sworn to her husband that she would pay debts, coûte que coûte, for his profligate brother Ferencz. And she kept her promise, despite the constant flurry of new paternity claims piling up on her lawyer’s desk in Vienna. “If only the old lecher would just go impotent!”—how often Mamú expressed this wish with a sigh when mail arrived from Vienna. I told her she should cut him off totally, but Mamú was not one for the scalpel. This meant that her financial condition was in flux and unpredictable. She had already rented out her palacete in Vienna and used the income to pay the smaller child-support claims.

  We ourselves would soon feel the effects of this ancient brother-in-law’s second adolescence. But first we must let Mamú’s husband die his “beautiful” death.

  Mamú and her prince had gone to a little town in the hills near Vienna—I don’t remember its name. They were on a walk, and stopped at a stone balustrade to gaze at the landscape below them. They noticed a little church with a cemetery next to it down in a valley, and in the cemetery a couple of men who, from this distance, looked like little ants working at the ground. From their motions, it was apparent that they were digging a grave. Mamú’s husband, who had built skyscrapers and opera houses, who as a dynast had the privilege of being interred in his forefathers’ mausoleum, who furthermore could afford the most expensive style of cremation in the States—this man now went weak, got tears in his eyes and said, “Ethel, down there, see that churchyard? That’s the kind of world-forsaken place where I would like to be buried. Will you promise me that, darling?”

  Mamú, deeply touched, made the promise, and they continued their walk. They had gone just a few paces when her husband suddenly felt ill. He grabbed at his chest, had trouble breathing. They spotted a bench. She led him to it. He slowly sat down, fell over, and was dead.

  Mamú bought the grave plot, which on the following day was to have received the remains of a well-to-do local citizen. She also paid a huge sum for maintenance of the gravesite for decades to come—I think it was for 50 years. She signed the proper papers, and later she stored them in a portable metal safe.

  What I have just recounted would have occupied many pages in a written version of Mamú’s story. For Mamú had a wonderful gift for storytelling, comparable only to one other person I have ever known, though not of quite the same caliber in matters of romantic impact: the mother of the writer Pascoaes, Doña Carlota, about whom there will be much to report in a later book. Mamú also wrote down a good deal. She told us that stacks of her diaries were in safe keeping in New York. But ever since that business with her kidneys, she tired easily, a behavior Mevrouw van Beverwijn hadn’t been able to pray out of her. And so one day Mamú asked me to enter her service as her chronicler. She would recite for me the novel of her life; I could freely rework everything, add excerpts from her own notations, and generally shape it as I saw fit. For this collaboration we would have to be together all the time.

  The idea arose, as do all great ideas, out of the void. It came to Mamú one day as she was carving a roast capercaillie. It was a daring idea, fully worthy of this grand woman. Beatrice, who thinks “the void” is a concept for cowards, later said that the idea certainly came more from Mamú’s heart than from the roast bird; the woman was obviously in love with me. In any case, from whichever source, heart or roast grouse, the idea had arrived.

  Near Valldemosa lies the large estate known as Miramar. Ludwig Salvator, Mamú’s late husband’s friend and Archduke of Austria, had purchased it along with other landholdings, then renovated and enlarged it. The legal circumstances were obscure. The Archduke had sown his wild oats on the island, there were paternity suits, and now no one knew exactly who owned the property that was once the archducal demesne. One of the country houses at Miramar, a small summer residence praised in Baedeker, was for rent or sale. Mamú decided she just had to have it; there the three of us would live. The roast game bird stuck in my mouth, something that doesn’t happen to me often.

  Auma’s prosecutor started negotiations with attorneys for the Archduke’s heirs, and we went out to examine the castle by the sea. The premises were ideal for our trio. I was familiar with the various portions of the estate from my days as a tourist guide, when I
had explained the sights in my own fashion.

  Beatrice would get her concert grand if she promised to play for Mamú every day. If everything went well across the ocean with the baking powder concern, she would install an organ, Beatrice’s second-fondest wish.

  “And my dear Vigolo, what would you like?”

  “A donkey, Mamú.”

  Did Vigoleis intend to become Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at one and the same time, here on his mirror isle of Barataria? Yes. Don Quixote because of the millions that now, with the aid of some majestic baking powder, beckoned like a mirage. And Sancho Panza on account of the wooden peg to which he would have to bind the Knight, for the latter was such a fool that he was constantly and literally fit to be tied. And furthermore, neither of these two fools had much over the other one.

  Mamú expected me to say that I wanted an automobile. She obviously didn’t know me well enough to realize that I wouldn’t bother mentioning something I took for granted.

  It wasn’t until the final months preceding the outbreak of the Civil War that Mamú’s marvelous plan developed to the point where we could prepare for the actual move to Miramar. Her finances permitted such a momentous change of abode. We were to commence with the writing of her life story before the grape harvest. I was determined to give it the title The Royal Baking Gang. But we ought to wait a bit on that, the multi-millionaire heiress said. For a title she would prefer something “beautiful.”

  Her daughter in Paris was against our plan, likewise the daughter in Budapest, likewise her son, likewise the bristly German nanny. Without exception they regarded poor Vigoleis, in whom Mamú was plainly infatuated, as a fortune hunter. Mevrouw van Beverwijn, who hated me because I refused to swallow her story of the Miracle of the Four Paws, went after Mamú with all the tricks of her pseudo-science. Mamú stood fast. Arguments from envy couldn’t touch her. The fact that all of us on our island were soon to become failures was a matter of separate destiny, one that bore the unique and unmistakable features of a two-armed general.