We concluded that higher forces must be at work here, occult powers that Don Juan held in command by keeping them in chains. It was likely that this poltrona had once borne the weight of the Mallorquin mystic Raimundus Lullius, the originator of the Great Art. Pedro did not dispute this assumption, for the sage Raimundus had in fact frequented the palace and conjured up spirits for the ancestral grandees. Unfortunately, our house did not contain a bell-jar large enough to cover the carbonized skeleton. Otherwise we would have conserved it for posterity. Smaller glass covers called redomas were plentiful in the entrada, containing under their mildewed domes such things as sprigs of myrtle and bridal wreaths, little collections of shells and coral, miniature Stations of the Cross replete with colorful penitent folk, and even more numerous insects, all of them on their way to this Calvary and unable to escape. Death, a common theme in this kind of popular art, had come to these household pests unexpectedly, and now they lay there as if the pious artist had intended all along to include them in his kitschy tragic tableau. Pedro said that the palace servants were very fond of these scenes, and that was why, when Don Juan enjoined everybody to rescue the most important contents of the palace, they had removed them to safety. And anyway, why should a painting by Velázquez have greater value than an insectarium, at a moment when a palace is collapsing? Incidentally—this occurs to me as I write these words—the fall of the House of Sureda coincided with the dethronement of the Bourbon Dynasty. All this feudal magnificence then dried up under a redoma, augmented by the vermin that always find their way to the scene of decay.
We prepared our meals in long-handled pans. Using a copper kettle that hung on a hook over the hearth, we boiled water against typhus and the plague.
We lived this way for three weeks, yanking many a chair out from under the spectral buttocks of some celebrity or other, but we never again got to see one of them in the little blue flames.
On the first evening, when Beatrice was about to wash our dishes, Pedro told her not to bother. We were not on General Barceló Street, he said, but on the Street of Bitterness. He went to the WC, which was separated from the kitchen only by a curtain, opened a little window and tossed the entire set of dishes into the cloaca located far below the house, which was built on a cliff. “We’ve got plenty of dishes. There are more than ten crates full of them in the attic. Papá thought of everything. Let’s not pretend that we’re poor. Take an example from Vigoleis.”
I had tossed a fresh chair onto the embers to warm up a bowl of water for shaving. I wanted to confront the private physician of Ludwig Salvator with a clean-shaven face. Should I bend over and poke through the ashes? I had spent enough of my lifetime in the bent-over position. Now I intended to enjoy life to the full. I had discovered a silver bowl from which, according to the inscription, no less a spirit than Don Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos had drunk the bitter gall of exile. This statesman, politician, and writer, Mallorca’s greatest exile next to Kessler, had spent part of his incarceration in our cloister. I used the bowl for my shaving water.
“Let’s go!” said Pedro. “Don José is waiting. He knows that I’ll be bringing you along.”
I picked up a knobby rosewood cane with an ivory handle and a whole bunch of tags hanging from it like multicolored ribbons on a guitar. “We’re off!”
“What are you doing with that horrible stick? You’re always making fun of people who use canes, and now you’re going out with one yourself?”
“Beatrice, what you see is no longer a cane. Like everything else here it has long since lost its original function. It is my fly swatter, and it will come in very handy. Here, I’ve found something for you, too.”
I handed her a yellowed pair of unmentionables that, if the labels hadn’t got switched around at the “Pressa” in Cologne, had once enclosed the aristocratic corpulence of Spain’s greatest woman writer, Doña Emilias de Pardo Bazán. “You can use this as a fan when the hot wind blows in from the Teix. Shall we go?”
Don José, private medical consultant to His Royal Highness Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria, was also in fact a doctor. He was also an impassioned collector, though he never let his avocation get the best of him. He collected postage stamps, examples of human behavior, and human embryos in the phase of development when they are no longer fetuses. He preferred the embryos of twins and triplets, although he confined himself to these specialties on the basis of availability rather than scientific speculation. Multiple births are rare, and rarer still is the opportunity to put one up in a jar. Don José never got beyond triplet specimens. He was familiar with the Hameln Septuplets, so famous and notorious in the Middle Ages and featured on a fearful broadsheet that we exhibited at the Cologne “Pressa.” But he himself could never dream of obtaining such an impressive rarity to put on his shelf. Nowadays this forward-looking physician would have his little moon-calves encased in plastic. At the time, he was limited to the use of pickle jars from his kitchen, which he sealed with the skin of pigs or fishes. Like the Rhine Maidens, these wee people floated in their bath of alcohol, and it was possible to put the specimens to a test of the principle known as the Carthusian Diver. Anyone wandering into this copa had to be in a good mood, with nerves strengthened to avoid spoiling the appetite. The copa is a pantry adjoining the kitchen, which also serves as the area for preparing meals. Standing next to home-made pickles and delicate aspics, the embryos led their melancholy existence beyond the reaches of space and time, weightless, free of sin, and blissful in their cradling, paradisiac, briny bath. People came and went around them all the time. No sooner had one made the acquaintance of an onion, a truite or a langouste en aspic, when Doña Clara appeared to fetch its neighbor and place on the pantry counter some new, no less succulently prepared dish, which likewise eventually went the way of all earthly things. All that was left over was us.
On certain occasions these Rhine Maidens—the very personification of humility and watery contentment—became a nuisance. There was, for example, a woman from England, one of the thousand old and decrepit ladies who came across the Mediterranean to Mallorca every winter with the regularity of migrating birds. This one had been coming to Valldemosa for many years for recuperation in Don José’s abode. Doña Clara, the physician’s niece and caretaker, had converted the property into a pensión, a kind of private sanatorium named “Hospedage del Artista,” which she presided over. Not everyone was permitted to enter a name in the guest book; you had to be an artist, or an invalid, or mentally ill. Once these conditions were fulfilled, you could enjoy a heavenly stay with Don José and Doña Clara. This British hybrid lady too, partly splenetic and partly diabetic, referred to the amazing couple’s hospedage as her second home. But she had never been inside the copa. As a proper lady she refrained from such forms of domestic intimacy. Then one day she had a moment of weakness and entered the pantry to sneak a bite to eat—Don José was keeping her on a strict diet—and what did she see? Her gaze suddenly perceived a preliminary phase of human existence, slowly revolving twofold upon itself in a shimmering greenish medium inside a glass jar, as in a dream. Was this salmon in vinegar and oil? Curried lobster in jelly?
The lady screams and faints away. Tumbling to the floor she knocks over a pot of marinated olives, and then she herself metamorphoses into a ghostly Rhine Maiden. The house personnel rush to her aid. Don José, who cannot bear the sight of a corpse, is staggering. Paquito and Manolo, Doña Clara’s very grown-up sons, give their attention to the doctor. Clarita, as her friends call Doña Clara, bends over the lady who is presumed dead.
Bobby, a German friend of the family, a poor emigré artist with Valldemosan experience who, to the delight of the establishment, was a walking expert in first aid—Bobby soon revived the lady on the floor. She immediately called for a taxi to Palma, and on the very same evening she boarded ship for the mainland. Mandrakes with bulbous heads do not belong inside pickle jars, much less in the copa of a convalescent home.
“That’s how it goes,” said Don Jo
sé, “when patients don’t follow my instructions. Now she’ll never come back, and I could have made her healthy.”
No patient had ever died under the hands of this physician. How many doctors can say that of themselves? Does this suggest that Don José was a miracle worker, or rather a fake and a quacksalver perhaps in league with Mamú’s Christian Science ladies? Or was his success due to the fact that he had no patients except for His Highness, who had long since laid himself down to die at Brandeis Castle? Don José had more patients than was beneficial for his hobbies, and in a larger area of the island than his mule could reach: in the Valley, across the mountains, in Sóller, in Deyá, even in Palma. His name was in excellent repute everywhere. And yet he hated the sight of blood, and looking at a dead body was the living end for him. A person, he said, should die alone; dying was a completely personal matter. Like the animals, no one should make a fuss about it. He was a great friend to mankind, and all the more so in order to speak and act as he did.
Whenever he was summoned to the bedside of a patient whose hours were numbered, whose fate was already in the hands of Almighty God and who had begun the death struggle, our doctor always fainted. On such occasions the peasants or fishermen had a hard time lifting this portly gentleman, and in the process forgot about their own dying relative. It is well known how dependent poor folk are on the local doctor, pastor, and schoolteacher, especially in countries where these are the only people who can read and write, and sometimes not even that. They would feel relieved if Don José came to with the aid of age-old nostrums and magic amulets and, strengthened with a gulp from the porrón, could finally be heaved up onto his mule. “Hurrah, saved again!” How awful it would be if the doctor had croaked under our noses! Croaking, in the meantime, had been taken care of in selfless fashion by the patient, thereby fulfilling the will of the Almighty, who disdains the ministrations of even the most expert of medicine men. This, by the way, was also Don Juan’s opinion as a strict Catholic, and it was a view shared by our own private physician in Palma, the equally congenial Dr. Solivellas, who never concealed from his patients that he was first and foremost a Catholic, and then a doctor.
Don José collected stamps the normal way, with the aid of a scalpel that feared the sight of blood. And he collected specimens of human nature with the aid of a wax nose. He practiced applied psychology, but without succumbing to the ridiculous ambition of competing with his bottom-feeding colleagues in a search for the primordial origins of human consciousness. He was at a far cry from such presumptuousness. He did not plumb the depths; he avoided the abysses where physician and patient become indistinguishable, and out of which they emerge with transposed heads, requiring both of them to undertake an even more dangerous descent into the inferno. Don José put all such experiments behind him. He had studied it all in Barcelona, where he was respected for his scholarly publications and deemed worthy of an academic career. The great histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal had just taken notice of him when the calamity occurred. Don José fell in love; he looked deeply into the eyes of his novia, and even more deeply into her soul, but failed to observe that at the surface his girlfriend was attached to another guy. This discovery broke his heart and shattered his trust in the science of the human soul. Henri-Frédéric Amiel went through similar crushing experiences, but his natural cynicism provided him with a diving suit resistant to the pressures of the depths. Don José was no cynic. He remained outwardly calm, made no further mistakes, left the mainland, became a country doctor in Valldemosa—and took care of the rest with his wax nose.
We are seated at table, delighting in the exquisite tiny morsels Doña Clara is serving up at a meal with at least 24 courses. Her cooking is famous on the whole island. The diners are chattering and arguing, there is excellent wine and carefully prepared dietary dishes for the clinical guests. Suddenly Don José arises and leaves this table d’hôte that he insists upon for the main meals in his establishment. We all assume that he has gone out to saddle his mule and ride off to visit a patient somewhere beyond the hills. But he returns after only a few minutes, and resumes his seat at table. But look—what has happened? Don José’s features have changed. Is he the victim of a spontaneous hypertrophy of the bodily extremities? Doctors speak of “acromegaly” when certain parts of the body suddenly become enlarged as a result of a disease of the pituitary gland. This is a mysterious organic process, as yet little understood by the medical profession. Don José’s nose is swollen, reddened by a network of capillaries, and now three or even four times as long as before. Don José performs his transformation into a carnivalesque pathological specimen, but not by means of a clever tweaking of his hypophysis—that would mean plunging into the inscrutable depths. No, for this purpose José installs a prosthesis, in common parlance a wax nose, and one might say that there is no more superficial solution to the problem. Don José is interested in the reactions of ordinary people who visit his house, most of whom are his patients, to this miraculous change in his appearance. He then draws his conclusions, which can be called infallible. He is particularly pleased by reactions of acute fright. He told us of one instance—thereby violating medical secrecy out of sheer professional egotism, a trait that he normally lacked—when the sight of a new nose emerging from behind his handkerchief suddenly caused a lady of high noble standing suddenly to pass a tapeworm. Which is to say, the nose had an anthelmintic effect, whereas traditional applications of anesthetics had been unable to dislodge the parasite from its aristocratic hostess. On another occasion, Don José forgot to remove his waxen proboscis when, while sipping his café negro, he was suddenly summoned to attend to a patient. The patient took such a fright at his appearance that it was no longer necessary to apply the leeches he had brought with him. The blood clot broke up by itself, and the patient recovered then and there.
During the years when Don José worked as a physician and inspector of public hygiene in Valldemosa, the mortality rate declined by half. In addition, like any good country doctor, Don José knew a thing or two about agriculture and animal husbandry.
Since he disliked death, he was always reluctant to fill out death certificates. So it was lucky for him that as a result of the declining death rate, this mournful obligation was also curtailed by half. But then came the Civil War. People died in the thousands—of heart attack, it was said, right here in Valldemosa, and Don José was forced to certify this epidemic cause of death for the authorities and for the historical record. This is a customary procedure in all civilized countries, no matter how bestially the populace might start massacring one another. Whatever is dead must be confirmed as dead in black and white by an expert, and once it is confirmed it stays confirmed. The young epileptic in Palma had six weeks of experience of this phenomenon. And incidentally, Don José claimed that he could have revived the fellow from his pseudo-exitus by means of his wax-nose shock therapy—and I believe he could have.
And so Don José wrote out death certificates in mass-production. There was no end to it, for the war was not just a one-time pronunciamiento. It attached itself to the population like a parasite, and murder was a natural component of its metabolism. Until one day when this physician refused to fill out any more such certificates, and started swearing as only he knew how to swear. On top of everything else, he said, he was a Catholic Christian. The others were Catholic Christians, too, and because they were in the majority they murdered Don José for refusing to be their brother. If only this wonderful man had heeded the maxim of Don Patuco, many of whose exploits I recounted to him: “Don’t count the corpses, my friend! What’s the use? Nature doesn’t count your individual life!”
Delivering babies was likewise not a forte of this physician. He held the sane opinion that Nature was much better at this procedure if left to itself. One could perhaps assist with a few chores, such as heating some water and keeping towels and a sponge ready, and soon the new citizen of the world would emerge on its own and start crowing plaintively. My grandmother would have been a
n ideal midwife for Don José, for she liked this job and did it all by and for herself, with increasing skill from newborn to newborn. After her final self-delivery, as she showed the little heap of human misery to her amazed husband, she said, “Wöllem, count ’em up. Is this number twenty?” My grandfather reached for the bottle and drank himself, uncounted, under the table of his own tavern.
Thus it is quite understandable that one day Don José said to his German emigré assistant, “Bobby, I’m going to train you as a midwife. In six month’s time you’ll be initiated in the secrets of human birth, so you can accompany me when I go out on deliveries. I’ll wait outside until you’re finished. Or better yet, I’ll send you out all by yourself right from the start. That way we’ll need one less mule.”
Bobby, who was born in Essen, grew up in the shadow of the Ruhr factory chimneys. At the age of twenty he was already the youngest, most talented, and most promising teacher at the Folkwang School. His specialties were photography and calligraphy. For purely aesthetic reasons he wrote everything in small-case letters, with no concern for the philological problems that this usage might give rise to. His penmanship caused the Nazis to suspect him from the start, for their own custom was to write everything as big as possible, if necessary with blood. Bobby stuck by his habit of writing in minuscules and with home-made ink. This got him branded as a cultural Bolshevist. “Concentration camp! Shoot him!”
The Island of Second Sight Page 77
