The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  “Mamú, it’s pretty obvious that Vigoleis is a priest manqué. If you can locate the proper church for him, he’ll turn out to be an excellent confessor and proselytizer.”

  To accompany the erissó José offered a Portuguese vintage that grows in the sands near Collares. He always came out to serve special dishes himself. Mamú liked that.

  IX

  Beatrice kept slaving away in one of the palaces that stayed loyal to us, trying to teach a señorita whose kitty-cat memory couldn’t retain a single item of vocabulary. The work didn’t enlarge our income by much, since the girl’s noble parents were so impoverished that they had no fear of the specter of Communism, and since their palace had already reverted to bank ownership. I kept seated at my machine and wrote for eternity. Then the man arrived.

  Why deny your own name when standing in the doorway of your own apartment, if you aren’t a crook? Yes, I was Vigoleis. And the man said triumphantly, “Finally!”

  He was poorly dressed; short and skinny. He was draped in loose-fitting Mallorquin homespun. His cheeks were hollow, and he was unshaven. His hair was white, the skin of his hands sagged over the bones. He handed me a note, asking if I recognized and acknowledged the signature. I didn’t recognize it; it was dark here in our entrada, and as for “acknowledge”—this began to sound like Zwingli. A tardy creditor? I felt that I had to humor him. “Sir,” I said, “I’m glad you have come. I can inform you that Don Helvecio hasn’t lived on the island for quite some time now. You see, he was dying, and he had himself transported to Switzerland so he could be treated by Professor Scheidegger, the detoxification expert. He’s going to get well, and in his case that isn’t just some medical figure of speech: you see, homeopathy…”

  At this the man said, in a tone of indignation that I would never have expected from such a cockroach, “What are you talking about? Homeopathy? Don Helvecio?” That was none of his business, he had nothing to do with such stuff. Doña Beatriz had signed this piece of paper—was he at the correct address or wasn’t he?

  Beatrice, going into debt in my immaculate name? My heart stopped. This was serious. The daily rag in my home town used to publish humiliating notices sent in by respectable citizens, warning readers that they were not responsible for any transactions effected by their wives. How I empathized with the disgraced husbands, especially if I knew them personally! And now I was in the same kind of situation. Beatrice! I led the gentleman into our apartment.

  First of all, he spat a wad on our floor. If I hadn’t been so familiar with Spanish custom, I would have been doubly enraged by such contemptuous behavior. I’ll wipe it up, I said to myself, before Beatrice arrives. Just don’t let her arrive before I get to it, because no doubt she’ll make a big scene. “Please,” I said, “do have a seat. What can I do for you?”

  The man not only had bad manners, he also was cruel and calculating. His explanation was so overwhelming that I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling over. In brief, he was demanding 3000 pesetas for a demolished piano. O whore Pilar! Your urge for revenge extends all across the ocean!

  “Pay up!” the man said, “or else you’ll face a court-sponsored auction of your belongings!”

  I told him that I couldn’t pay, which meant that everything would go under the hammer. Now in control of the situation, I said “Do what you have to!” How could I have been so petty as to suspect Beatrice?

  The man stood up and said, “Momento”—a term readily understood by anyone. But what then happened was again incomprehensible. He went to the door and entered the corridor. Gone! I thought. I relaxed and wiped the floor. Now Beatrice could come back any time. But instead of Beatrice, it was the man himself who came back, with a bunch of other men in his train, strapping fellows, every inch of every one of them a Robert von Ranke Graves. I thought my final hour had arrived. But no matter how often and with what metaphysical yearning I might have longed for this moment, this wasn’t at all what I expected.

  The man said that he had given the matter further consideration. Court case? Enforced auction? Lawyers? All this was nonsense. We could earn the money for the piano ourselves. I immediately thought of Mamú’s agonizing baking-powder affair: no, let’s avoid a legal suit at all costs! The man nodded and made a sign to the others. They were well trained; muscle-bound though they were, they quickly assessed the situation in our apartment. Amid a banging of doors they carried what little we owned out of our piso. He was willing to leave us our bed, but wanted all our books. They weren’t really worth anything, he said, but—at a wave of his hand the thugs headed for our makeshift bookcase. I rushed over to stop them. “Don’t take those! I’ll hand over our bed and my black dress suit!”

  “As you wish. As it is, your junk will cover only one-sixth of what’s due. I’ll come back when you have settled in again.” He bent down and tossed our doormat to his gang. We had owned it for three whole days.

  Easy come, easy go. The expenses for lawyers and legal perquisites would have amounted to much more. That bloody whore!

  “Is that bloody slut back on the island?” I asked when the man was already on the stairs.

  “What do you mean, slut? There ain’t no slut. The law’s the law!”

  “If the law’s the law, how did you find out my address if Pilar didn’t give it to you?”

  “Make a note of this, Don Vigoleis. In Spain the worst evils are politics and the family! Adios!”

  “The Nazis!” I thought. This was the Führer’s first attack on our private property! But he didn’t get our books!

  The damage, though hard to estimate and in any case not covered by insurance, was extensive enough to make one wring one’s hands. I wrung mine all right, but not for long; this was a time for action. Beatrice must not get to see the filth all around our apartment. Like a licensed maintenance man I swept and wiped. The place was sparkling when Beatrice arrived, battered and mauled by her drudgery in the upper-crust palace, a line of work that she pursued with such energy that even her students took fright.

  Catching sight of our empty apartment, did she think that I was going to surprise her with a relocation to a more respectable part of town, as in the golden days of our move from the Clock Tower? She spoke French, and that means that she felt dark premonitions. We walked across the apartment over to the room that had been our dormitory.—“Well?”

  I let out a deep sigh and explained to my chérie that it would have been best if we had jumped into the sea from our Leucadian Cliff. That way, the long arm of the Führer never could have reached us.

  “The Führer?” Beatrice had tears in her eyes, and more tears were dripping down her cheeks; one of them fell on our spic-and-span ladrillo, and she wiped it up.

  “The Nazis, my dear. The Führer’s cossacks sent a piano man over here with a demand for 3000 pesetas for your wrecked piano. I took care of the matter and prevented a legal suit that would have cost us a whole lot of money and trouble. This encargado said that after we got settled back in he would come back, then four more times, and then the whole thing would be paid off. But by that time Hitler will have had us shot. What happened today is just a warning. You watch, this is only the beginning.”

  “That’s just about what I was thinking.”

  This was a stroke of luck in the midst of disaster. For whenever Beatrice “just about” anticipated some calamity, we were already on our way to preventing it from happening. What, she asked, was I suggesting that we do?

  “All I need to do is say the word, chérie, and the Consul will offer me a job in the party’s foreign service: Madrid, Barcelona. He has said so several times, and there’s no doubt about it. 1000 pesetas a month, minimum. We could leave this place. The piano man wouldn’t get a cent.”

  “Jamais!” Beatrice said.

  “Nunca jamás!”I replied, using the more emphatic Spanish expression of denial.

  That night we slept on a pile of clothes. We could have asked Mamú for help, but Mamú was having trouble enough of her
own. The split within the Mother Church was getting more serious. She had received upsetting news from her lawyer in New York. Her daughter in Budapest reported that her lecherous brother-in-law had booked some more children on Mamú’s family charity account. Her attorney in Vienna announced that the mortgage payments on her little palace would no longer cover the increasing expenses. Mamú was desperate. This time I told her that she should insist that the dirty old man in Hungary wear a permanent chastity apron, or she would cut off his funds. Mamú didn’t know what a chastity apron was. I gave her a historical explanation, adducing the Etruscans. She thought that the image, when applied to her brother-in-law, was quaint, and she perked up a bit. She hadn’t come to Barceló Street for several weeks—why discuss menus when there’s no money to pay for the ingredients? Pigeons from Brindisi, morays from Tartessos, cranes from Milo—all this was past history. Without compromising his art, José the cook was having to make do with the local fare. It was all right with us that Mamú didn’t visit us any more; we just couldn’t ask her to sit on a wooden box.

  Pedro was speechless at our naïveté—more specifically, at mine. That piano man would have been satisfied with a single chair, provided that I had promised him all the rest with the great eloquence I was surely in command of. What a failure! And I had been in the country for such a long time! Pedro shook me. “We’re going to go see that man. It’s not too late yet. I know the company. Lladó pianos are famous. It’s an old company, right nearby on Rambla, right-hand side.”

  Inside the spacious hall at street level there were many instruments in various stages of playability. A very old lady was sitting in a wing-back chair in the middle of this world of music. She was somehow disabled, and wore a straw-colored wig that made no pretensions to authenticity. Right away, like the monkey Beppo, I felt an urge to swipe it from her head. She was the piano company’s inheritor, and the piano man was only her factotum. He built, sold, and auctioned off the instruments. Evidently the company was not having the best of times. The lame old lady was very friendly. With the healthy half of her body she pointed out a few instruments that were already varnished. She thought we had come to buy or rent a piano. She pounded the floor with her cane, at which sign my piano man came shuffling over, the same encargado with whom I had concluded our friendly financial settlement. Pedro, the born haggler, took the man aside. He pointed over to me. The man scratched himself in several places, nodded his head wordlessly, and then came over and shook my hand. I was, he said begging my pardon, a big idiot. Why hadn’t I protested? Turning then to Pedro, he reported that I had said, “Do what you have to,” and so he brought in the movers. The lame lady nodded. She was very attentive, knew exactly what was going on, and agreed to everything. Several times she raised her good hand to an itchy spot in her wig—an odd, touching regression to the times when she still sported a full head of hair.

  Unfortunately the man had already sold the ruins of our piano for junk, making less profit on it than he had expected. He was disconsolate about this sad affair that involved, as usual, a whore and high-level politics, but what was he to do? Here, too, Pedro knew just what was to be done. Lladó & Co., Pianos Lladó, Palma de Mallorca, Baleares, gold and silver medals, etc., must place a Lladó at the disposal of the plaintiff Don Vigoleis on behalf of Doña Beatriz, pianist, pupil of Juliusz Wolfsohn. No rent would be charged during the first months—this would count as restitution for the hasty removal of private property. Doña Beatriz had come to select an instrument. The man agreed, and was greatly relieved. Full of bluster and self-assurance when he first arrived at our apartment, now he was suddenly pliant and deferential. His only aim, he said, was to serve art. The old lady nodded and scratched herself once again at the place where, a half-century before, she felt an itch. The smashed piano was now likewise a thing of the past.

  Stepping out onto the Paseo de la Rambla, I ventured the opinion that the piano man was crazy. “No,” said Pedro, “but he’s well on his way to getting there. All of us here on the island face that prospect. Whenever people get that far, there’s not much that can be done about it. The best time is the transitional phase. Papá has got worse over the last few years. You haven’t noticed because you didn’t know him in his great period.”

  As a matter of fact, the piano man later became a clinical case of insanity, as Joaquín Verdaguer told me when I asked. “Se volvió loco. La fábrica ya no existe”—gone mad, the company doesn’t exist any more. Period.

  A few weeks later some men came by and, using a huge belt, heaved a Lladó into our apartment. The emptiness there was extraordinarily beneficial for the acoustics. Day by day, Beatrice’s playing kept the name of Lladó alive and well. But first, another man arrived.

  This other man was a gentleman who did not spit and did not scratch himself anywhere. He was tall, well-fed, robust, nattily dressed in an expensive tropical suit, and carried a briefcase that was too large for a traveling salesman and too small for a captain of industry. What did he want of me? Was he an insurance man? Unlikely. Such companies employ agents who dress differently depending on the clientele they serve. This visitor didn’t seem to be observing any rules of social mimicry. Was he a writer hoping I would type a manuscript? That would be a blessing. The piano man hadn’t taken away my typewriter—I told him that it wasn’t my property, that I was paying off installments on it. Businesses are willing to respect such arrangements. No, this new gentleman was not a writer in my exalted sense of the term. He came from the Reich; the Consul had sent him to me with greetings and a cordial inquiry as to how things were going. As he spoke these words I led him into our bare living quarters, and he looked around with quizzical glances. I hastened to ask him to ignore the sparseness of our surroundings, adding that we were expecting painters to arrive tomorrow to do the whole flat. Tomorrow? Well, within the next few days; here in Spain one must learn to be patient.

  The gentleman from the Reich: “Our Consul has not misinformed me. Your situation is lousy, and you have a certain quick-wittedness about you. Painters or paper hangers tomorrow? Clever of you. That’s why I’m here.”

  I: “Begging your pardon, but a person is either quick-witted or he isn’t. By saying I have a ‘certain’ quick-wittedness you’re offering me the chance for a retort. Do have a seat.” I gestured toward a wooden box. The gentleman sat down.

  The gentleman: “Excellent. You’re my man. Permit me to explain what I have in mind and to show you some documents. May I spread them out here on the floor?”

  I: “By all means. Do what you can under the circumstances.”

  The gentleman from the Reich was a member of the Party, Old Guard, Honorary Dagger, Blood League, Street-Fighting Ribbon. He also held a doctorate that, while earned under the former regime, still came in handy. He held a high position, if not the very highest, in the Executive Commission of the Hamburg branch of the National Socialist Party Foreign Service. He presented his credentials, taking his long pencil and pointing to documents as he set them down on the stone floor tiles. I began to take a liking to this fellow; he had a sense of humor. He had arrived from the embassy in Madrid where, if memory serves me correctly, a certain Count Welsceck represented the interests of the swastika.

  “Well?”

  “You’ll see in just a moment. I’ll take things up one step at a time.”

  This he did with aplomb, displaying papers that gradually covered almost our whole living-room floor. They were looking for someone with attested verbal and written fluency, in particular someone with command of Spanish, preferably with a university education, well-mannered, confident, good conversationalist, imaginative, neat appearance, married—preferably to a Spanish woman, under no circumstances to a German. That’s the kind of person they were looking for.

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” I said. “It’s an enviable man who could meet all of your qualifications. What do you have in mind for such a person?”

  This person, the gentleman explained, would be put in charge of a German ne
wspaper in Madrid. In addition, he would be sent on lecture tours throughout Spain, speaking at the German enclaves and also to audiences of Spaniards. The Consul in Palma, who like all consuls was asked to provide information, had submitted my name along with certain personal data that had been supplemented by research at the office in Hamburg. The agent took some more documents from his briefcase and passed them to me. “Here, have a look.”

  I read the material slowly and with deliberate care. Apart from minor details, everything was accurate as concerned my several failed attempts at fashioning a career, although a few facts were jumbled up. It was true that I had taken theology courses in Münster, but theology was not my main field. “Good work,” I said as I placed the incriminating documents on the floor next to the other papers, “except for one thing: the Consul has neglected to inform you that I am an outspoken opponent of your Führer. I am unwilling to go along, and he knows that.”

  The gentleman reached once again into his briefcase and pulled out some papers that he kept in his hand. “I’m afraid you are mistaken. As a matter of fact the Consul did report this to us, and besides, we are in possession of a political assessment of your person, provided by the authorities in your home town. They are keeping an eye on you there, too, in connection with your correspondence. Your father has already been issued a warning.”

  “I’m aware of that. But that is his own business.”

  “That depends. We offer no quarter.” He had decided to come over from the mainland, he explained further, to speak with me in person, since of all the candidates recommended to him I seemed the most qualified. My uncle was a bishop. I was imaginative, no question about it. This he knew from confiscated personal letters as well as from satirical poems—here a quick glance at new documents—in the collection entitled “Party Comrade Newt.” These poems were evidence of genuine talent, although it was talent that had been expended in a void. At the word “void” he again looked around him in our empty apartment. This fellow also had talent, but perhaps he didn’t have an uncle who was a bishop.