The mention of the name “Newt” made me a bit worried. I had circulated a series of rhymed satires, among them “Party Comrade Newt” with swastika, honorary dagger, and “bloody claims / to achieve the Führer’s aims,” who behaves like a wild man and, in the final stanza, “joins up with the vultures / to honor Western culture.” Damn it all, they must have found this out! And I will be really in the soup if these guys know that I am the writer of a parody of the Horst Wessel Song.
I was poor, the Reich Commissioner continued, as the result of matters beyond my control. My wife, or the lady I was living with, was, to be sure, not Spanish, but she held Swiss citizenship, came from a well-known dynasty of scholars, and was of partly Indian ancestry…
“And if the Incas, Herr Doktor, were not of Aryan stock? That would be the end of the whole matter!”
“It is not as you might think. You would of course have to marry, not on our account, but because of the Spaniards, their society, and the Church. The Inca question will be decided by the appropriate government commission. You needn’t have any concern on that score. Who is and is not an Aryan—that is determined by the Führer.”
We agreed upon the following: I would take the position in Madrid with a starting salary of 1000 pesetas per month, free rent with furnishings of my own choosing, an advance of so-and-so-many times 1000 pesetas, all expenses to be borne by the Reich. Once a year I would be expected to travel to Hamburg to deliver a personal report, rail first-class, all expenses paid, two months vacation per year, free travel on all lines of the German National Railway, and on non-German lines 60% discount in the form of travel vouchers. Moving expenses? They would be reimbursed, of course. We both smiled. We quickly understood where both of us stood.
“Do you have any further questions? Anything else you would like to add?”
I stood up and said very calmly, “I have only one further question. Just what gives you the nerve to come here and throw me this line of hogwash? Please leave our house at once!”
Vigoleis was courageous. How did this come about? Had he been drinking cascarilla? Was Don Patuco exerting heroic remote control on him? This was the same Vigoleis who took it on the lam when he saw Pilar’s dagger, who ate a sumptuous final meal instead of jumping in the ocean, who handed over all his property to a half-demented auctioneer, who suffers hunger and goes on a grape diet, who doesn’t own a bed, who hasn’t finished typing out Claudius, Emperor and God, and how can he go on typing without a table to type on? And now comes the Third Reich in the shape of a man with titles, decorations, legal prerogatives, and money—heaps of money—and says to him, Vigoleis, we don’t care what you think of our Führer. It’s what you can make others think of him—that’s what we’re willing to pay you for, because we have a billion times billions. If he just would say the word, Vigoleis could name Beatrice as his secretary, his own private secretary, the kind that people have who have something to hide, and the 500 pesetas per month could easily be arranged. And this is the same Vigolo who now stands up, calmly makes a pile of the papers on the floor with his foot, and says, “Get the hell out of here!” Has he gone mad? Was he already a victim of the insular malady?
The man from the Reich remained seated, lit a cigarette, and leaned comfortably against the wall. “You have courage, too. That’s important. I shall give the Führer a personal report on our conversation. He is…”
Screaming now, I told this guy that if he didn’t leave at once I would throw him out. And then the happy phrase suddenly occurred to me like a cue from out of my subconscious, where it had lain dormant for years. “Get a move on!”
During this historical, courageous moment in my life, my vision suddenly blurred. I saw before me the image of three clenched fists: the double fist of the Honduran general, and the no less frighteningly cramped fist of my brother Jupp—Oh childhood, oh disappearing world of charm! The Nazi recruiter must have also seen this last magical fist getting clenched, for before I could shout my thundering threat for the third time, this time in a powerful baritone, as if I myself were the master and he the muzhik, the slave, the ox under the yoke, the man had already tossed all the documents into his briefcase and snatched up his hat. At first trying the wrong door, since our place was uniformly empty, he finally hurried away muttering dismal threats. I shall refrain from recording those threats here, for we shall later have the opportunity to recount how they were put into practice.
The Reich Commissioner left his cigarette case—it was made of pure gold—on our book crate. Without claiming a reward, I returned it the next day to the consulate. But the gentleman had not forgotten to take his precipitous leave with a ringing “Heil Hitler!”
Beatrice came home earlier than usual, so I didn’t have time to polish the floor. With her strange notions of floors and how to walk on them, she immediately reached for the waxing mop. I gave her the latest news, explaining that once again I had just tossed out the window a completely furnished apartment, 1000 pesetas a month, and a genuine Reich Commissioner.
Beatrice sniffed, catching the aroma of the expensive cigarette.
“Bullet-proof vests—that’s the first thing we have to go out and buy. Right now that’s more important than a bed.”
I begged to differ. Bullet-proof vests? Nonsense. On this island the Nazis are using poison.
My prediction that in the long run events here would not at all turn out to be terrifying appears to be incorrect, for long before the Civil War broke out, we arrived in very dire straits. Have I consciously misled my reader in order to keep up his interest? And what’s with that boastful business in my Prologue about “my having a say in the matter”?
That’s not working very well. For one thing, I have overestimated my powers of memory, and for another, I have underestimated the Nazis. Yet in order to detoxify the atmosphere I shall now introduce a harmless youth who also smokes expensive cheroots from a golden quiver. He will get a chapter all his own, and even his own chair to sit on.
X
The youth’s name is Hutchinson, George Brewis Hutchinson. “George” is common enough, there’s nothing special about it. But “Brewis” was a Christian name I had never heard of. I learned that it meant “brew,” as in soup—a kind of bouillon from meat extract. And this was the name he went by.
He’s an American, he’s consumptive, he is in possession of a college degree from Princeton University, as well as of a head of fiery-red hair that would be the envy of any woman who sought salvation in cosmetic rinses. But perhaps it is best if I put all of this in the past tense, for he died long ago. His tuberculosis was not of the benign sort, and he was given to profligate habits beyond those of the intellectual kind. It even seems likely that it was his organic degeneration that drove him into an adventurous life with women, with a knowledge of eternal, transcendent matters, and, for that matter, with the likes of Vigoleis. Yet we shall not allow suppositions concerning his later destiny to prompt our memorializing of the man by name. The split within his personality was at the time so marked that it could have given rise to all kinds of misdeeds. Besides, in these recollections every person makes his appearance with the features that he himself presented to me.
No, I have nothing scandalous to report about this young man, no incidents that would prompt the future student at a German university to cross swords with me or, since he was a Catholic, to engage me in fisticuffs. Quite the contrary: I owe to him the idea for one of my inventions. My inventions! They would deserve an entire chapter of my recollections, but here I shall mention them only in passing. Vigoleisian inventions have not taken human progress a single step further, but only because they have never been put to practical use as I conceived them. In cases where they have benefited civilization anyway, such as gunpowder, they were invented by someone else. Nevertheless, I have repeatedly experienced the elation of creative moments, and that is what is most important to me.
While I’m at it, I should add that right at the beginning of Hitler’s war I got a whiff of
the whole tragedy of Vigoleis’ career as a failed inventor. The two of us, every day becoming more and more stateless as victims of the brown behemoth, anxiously followed the reports of the increasing threat posed by German U-boats. In those days we were living with tacit political reservations, but with personal security, in Portugal at the viticultural and poetic Pascoaes Castle, a name that has already made fleeting appearances in these pages. The master’s aged mother—she was approaching one hundred—liked to gather numerous important people at her hospitable table—to the consternation of her son, who constantly tried to avoid such invasions, many of which occurred with the purpose of seeing him up close, the great mystic, and listening to his prophetic pronouncements.
At one of these magnificently improvised meals, arranged by the fascinatingly ugly, perky, and almost dwarf-sized Doña Carlota, the widow of the last peer of the last King of Portugal, I had the opportunity to expound, to an audience of several dozen attentive listeners, my theory of underwater breathing mechanisms in diving vessels. My ideas arose during the act of speaking, from sheer ad-hoc inspiration. It was a display of technology tinged with mysticism, abetted by my consumption of exquisite food and drink—or did I not owe my eloquence, rather, to Justina, the head cook, who may have been in league with the Devil and his Black Art of culinary wiles? My solution to the problem was as follows: build anti-submarines with a long hose attached to a buoy floating on the surface. The hose would serve as an extended air passage for renewing the oxygen supply, obviating the need for the vessel to surface. I vividly recall that I got this idea from seeing Doña Carlota’s garden hose, several hundred meters long, lying totally useless in her yard summer and winter with a thousand punctures and leaks, stretching from her fonte dos golfinhos to her beds of roses and groves of fig trees, an element of Nature like a root or a vine. My lecture, which I illustrated with clever waving of my table napkin, made sense to many of my listeners. A navy lieutenant in particular, who was famous for having suppressed an uprising on the island of Madeira within firing range of his pocket destroyer, nodded in assent. Dependent as I am on an echo for igniting the spark of my inspiration, I got more and more excited. After just one or two more gulps of wine my invention was complete. It was up to the admiralty to put the thing into practice.
Accordingly, I expressed the desire to rush immediately to Lisbon, about 500 kilometers from the scene of my hydrostatic “Eureka!” using the senhora’s automobile—with her kind permission, of course. I would go to the capital and visit the British Embassy, where I would offer His Majesty’s Navy my invention, still warm from the incubator and as belated thanks for my evacuation from the Island of Second Sight. That trip would mean the triumph of my idea. But this request of mine had a sobering effect on the assembled dinner guests. As raptly attentive as they had been during my presentation, now they began to think I was crazy. They whispered to each other that I was a jokester, a comical fellow who had gone through all kinds of madcap experiences on the island and who was obviously capable of creating such antics right here and now. At this moment the little dinner waiter Victorino was serving the guests backwards with his right hand, because with his left hand he was trying to cover a hole in his trousers, although his white glove was just as conspicuous as the shirt flap it was meant to conceal. The guests urged him to refill my glass. No one was willing to court embarrassment among the higher authorities on my account. All of a sudden the Pascoaes Castle, normally the scene of all kinds of excess, became a bastion of prudence. This turn of events quickly sobered me up, too. And as always when I have plunged from the heights of creativity, I considered both myself and my brainchild completely bonkers. I mumbled something about the ratonera speculum of the poet Pio Baroja (a mousetrap invented by the poet, designed to make the animal fall on its mirror image), and reached for consolation to the source of my inspiration, the dinner oporto, the wine from the sands of Collares that we already knew from Mamú’s table, and the heady, fruity Vinho Verde from Pascoaes’ own castle vineyard, a label already familiar to us from feasts at Mamú’s. Pascoaes, an Icarus-type himself, reassured me by referring to that misunderstood mythical genius, and by holding forth on the dubiousness and futility of all technological activity, a subject that looms large in his works. Be that as it may, he writes these works not by candlelight or in the glassy twilight of the tear-shaped lamps he praises so often, but beneath a naked 100-watt Philips bulb.
Everyone knows that the “snorkel” was invented and deployed a few years later by the German Navy. There can be no question of a theft of intellectual property—or was my idea somehow leaked from the dining hall of the Casa de Pascoaes to the Führer’s main headquarters? Besides, the British naval attaché would hardly have considered me a “man of the moment.” Enfin, you are a clever inventor, Vigoleis, but what has all this got to do with the youth who was supposed to be the subject of this chapter? Well, not much, I’ll admit. This youth was the point of departure for another kind of snorkeling expedition, one that can once again reveal the melancholy misapprehension of intellectual endeavor. And the fellow who came away from it in sobered condition couldn’t even seek solace in a wine glass.
I think it was a morning in November. At any rate I am certain that the first year of the Third Reich was not yet behind us, and I was standing on the jetty that stretched far out into the Bay of Palma, watching intently the difficult docking maneuver of the Ciudad de Palma, which ferried passengers to and from the mainland. I was expecting a guest I had been corresponding with on literary matters, but whom I had never met in person. The person in question was the writer Albert Helman, whom I have mentioned before. His pseudonym was by this time as transparent as the secrets it was meant to conceal. Disgusted with the culture of Holland—he was a native of Surinam—he was living in voluntary exile, perhaps the bitterest form of banishment, on a hilltop near Barcelona, out in the uplands of San Cugar del Vallés. A few days earlier I had received a postcard in his minuscule hand, announcing his arrival. He would be sailing with the Ciudad de Palma, and I would recognize him by means of an albatross. I found this odd—not because of the animal qua animal, but because of this particular animal. We can never visualize Saint Jerome without his lion from the Desert of Chalcis. The writer of the Apocalypse is often depicted with an eagle hovering above his head. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson has entered literary history with his cockatoos and his araras, which were most definitely not his inspiring muses, as one envious rival once claimed. Minnesingers look out at us from the illuminated manuscripts carrying sparrow-hawks on their outstretched fingers—so why not Helman with an animal, too? But an albatross? He would be carrying the bird under his arm, if I had understood his postcard correctly. I knew the West Indian stories by this exotic fellow, Het euvel gods, and above all his masterpiece, the dramatic short novel Mijn aap schreit. Thinking analogically, I expected that if the writer were indeed accompanied by an animal, it would be with his pitiful monkey on one shoulder. Yet ever in search of variety—this was his lot in life—he had no doubt traded in his humanoid pet for the bird that traverses the world’s oceans. The very idea of domesticating such an animal was enough to command deep respect. Be that as it may, monkey or albatross, it would be well-nigh impossible to mistake him as he stepped out on the gangplank.
Meantime the docking process finished. Many people streamed forth on land, especially foreigners, for Mallorca was getting more and more popular. The international travel agencies were touting the Balearics as a rendezvous for their customers. Only a few proud Spaniards could be sighted among the passengers, and most of these were carrying turkeys under their arms, culinary delicacies that they snapped up more cheaply on the mainland than on the island. I have already mentioned that the pavo is the Spanish equivalent of the Northern European holiday goose. Tied by foot to an apartment balcony, the incessantly gobbling turkey cocks are force-fed in the open air. You need only to have spent the season of Advent in the old section of a Spanish city, gobbled at from every level of houses
whose balconies feature cacophonous turkey debates from early morning to sundown, to prefer the Feast of the Resurrection of the Lord and its festive bullfights to the miracle of the Savior’s Birth. For long before the wattled bird has been shoved into the baker’s oven, you have become so heartily angry at the beasts that you lose all the joy of the meal.
In any case, if Helman had chosen a turkey instead of an albatross as a poetic travel companion, I would have had a very hard time picking him out in the crowd. Assisted by my buddy Pepe, a harbor rat from Barceló Street, I kept a strict lookout for the fowler from the West Indian jungle, but we espied not a single poetic personage with an albatross under his arm. But wait! Maybe he had the bird attached to a string like a kid’s balloon, so it could circle around in the air above everybody on the dock! If we followed the string down to the man’s finger, it would be a simple matter to single out our exotic traveler from amongst the surging masses at dockside. Pepe must have been thinking the same thing, for we both looked upwards to the shimmering white sky, where the only circling fauna were the squawking seagulls, none of them connected by a string to anyone’s finger. I was about to turn on my heel and leave the scene when Pepe tugged my sleeve and pointed to a distinguished-looking gentleman, and I mean a truly elegant fellow. Like all street loiterers, Pepe had a weakness for distinguished-looking persons. Was this the guest I was expecting? The young gentleman strode down the gangplank, but minus any pet animal. We kept him in sight.
He was wearing a light-grey felt hat, the hairy kind preferred by the British, on a full head of fiery-red hair, shiny black shoes with white spats and, apparently in studied color combination, a leather greatcoat with a fox-pelt collar the same color as his hair. This coat would be the envy of any East-Elbian landowner, even down here at 40º latitude, if it were not for the fact that wolf-skin had meantime become the swashbuckling fashion in such circles. In his left hand our man was carrying a suitcase. And what did I see? It was unquestionably a Saratoga bag, all the more certainly since a colorful serape, looped casually through the handle, was hanging down almost to the ground. I must confess with shame that up to that moment I had known such items of baggage only from novels and from a crazy journey once undertaken by Don Juan Sureda. Today I myself own a Saratoga travel bag, and while it may be an exaggerated sense of possessiveness on my part, and although it is long since cracked in several places, I would not give it away for anything. This unique object came to me from the Brazilian estate of Count Werner von der Schulenburg, who at the time was still among the living. He was a member of the Protestant branch of the family, and upon another occasion I shall tell the story of how I inherited his possessions ante mortem.
The Island of Second Sight Page 72
