The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  As in an art gallery, I made the rounds of this exhibit, but without a printed catalogue and unhindered by a pressing crowd of visitors incapable of adapting to the tempo dictated by the works of art—or, to put it more accurately, the tempo that the art works would require if today the picture-postcard aspect of art had not become predominant. To appease this trend, all curators have installed postcard stands at the gallery exits. Don Fulgencio had a different idea. Scarcely had I studied the final line of text when she again appeared, my bosom friend from 1001 Nights, to guide me through a dark corridor and into a spacious room. An elderly gentleman stepped toward me.

  This was the master of the house. There was no need for the domestic servant to whisper it to me: this was the legendary Don Fulgencio.

  And what a Fulgencio he was! Such masculine effulgence! I estimated the age of this phenomenon, this flesh-and-blood personage out of the mythological mists, at about 80 years, although I must admit that I am seldom correct with guesses of this sort. If my own exact age down to the minute were not so fully documented by oral tradition and, even more reliably, by the official stamps so prevalent in our time, I would never come near to surmising it, whereas the age of my Vigoleis, whom I myself baptized, is beyond any calculation. When it comes to women, this matter can become acutely embarrassing. Not, of course, with women like Mamú, who at any age can contradict their own birth certificates, women who at 50 have no need for facial alteration or whose mouths at 80 still display their eternal youthful smile. No, the women I have in mind are those tragic, ghostly ones who, with valises full of cosmetic nostrums, approach the borderline where birthdays are no longer celebrated and where the tortoise veers between the purely vegetative and the purely animalic state. Once arrived at the 50-year checkpoint, they apply makeup in order to pass for thirty-something, with the result that they look like ladies in their seventies on Ash Wednesday.

  Much too little attention has been paid to this subject. It has given rise to murder and manslaughter; marriages have broken apart long before their time; the masculine world has been forced to stand witness as an entire generation has been passed over, just as certain kids skip a whole year in school. Ladies who, fretting over their crow’s feet, rush out to buy salves and ointments, will never reach their goal. Indian fakirs go about this with herbs manipulated beneath magical textiles; they, too, achieve amazing sudden shifts in age. I dare say that the renowned forger Van Meegeren, if he had ever set his sights on the cosmetic mystification of women’s faces in a beauty salon in Paris or Amsterdam, could have become a very rich man. It would have occurred to him to adorn the abandoned mistress of some Monte Carlo billionaire with a masterful Mona Lisa smile, so that whatever remained of her gilded undercoating would be revealed only within the confines of a chambre séparée. Instead, by deploying his divinely inspired artistic fakery, this man succeeded in confounding the academic expertise of art connoisseurs the world over, in the process nailing them—and himself—to the cross. And there they now hang, as tokens of ignorance and fanatical ambition. Meanwhile, stock in the fine arts keeps rising in value, in reverse proportion to the decline of artistic discrimination. For the genuine comprehension of art, it is necessary to approach it from inside, with the heart, and not with the aid of litmus paper and X-rays. Specialists in the epidermis of art who stumbled over The Apostles at Emmaus are the very same ones who now have discovered primitive man’s l’art pour l’art in the caves of Altamira, Valltorta, Covalanes, and elsewhere. They have yet to arrive at the caves of Mallorca, although there, too, the Van Meegerens of the Ice Age did their work… But enough on this subject for now. At the moment I am eye-to-eye with Don Fulgencio, and my digressions could make him disappear in a fog.

  Don Fulgencio was busy blowing his nose, but otherwise seemed to want to address me straightaway. I felt no need to snap out of my meditative mood for his sake, and yet I had no desire to fritter away the time. Besides, certain noises at the door indicated that the servant girl had taken up a post just outside, eager to learn what kind of business this strange mahatma intended to discuss with her boss. But before I allow these two dignitaries to enter conversation with each other, I wish to offer a description of the gentleman about whose existence Beatrice had serious doubts.

  The man’s overall bearing was stiff, although when walking he manifested a certain insecurity about setting down his left leg. I don’t mean that he dragged this leg behind him, only that the left didn’t seem to function as well as the right. A cane would have been of some help, but he would have rejected such a support on the basis of an old man’s vanity. Field Marshal Hindenburg was a shining, internationally acknowledged example of this kind of proud senility, an attitude that cost Germany dearly. Don Fulgencio’s hands were attractive but unkempt. I studied them carefully, purely on account of their shape. Very few people have beautiful hands, and there are even fewer artists who can paint a human hand. Don Fulgencio was annoyed by my constant gazing, which he misinterpreted. He quickly set about removing the grime from under his nails, employing other nails on each of his hands that served this specific purpose. This he accomplished skillfully, as if he had spent a lifetime in practice. Incidentally, this was not the first time that I, with my mania for observing hands, became the mute agent for an auto-manicure. If only people would realize that, far from wishing to cause embarrassment, my interest in dirty nails stems from a very personal envy of such persons. They embody an attitude toward life, a measure of pride and self-confidence that I have never achieved. They keep dirt for themselves, where it’s meant to be kept.

  Don Fulgencio offered me a chair, and again sat down behind his desk, which was covered with a large plate of glass. Underneath the glass were letters, picture postcards, newspaper clippings, a lock of hair, handwritten poems—a veritable herbarium of yellowing testimonials to his sentimentality. The walls of his office contained calendars with pull-off pages, showing a plethora of past and future appointments. Clearly there was a reason behind such a display in this decaying palace where nothing, not even my own self, seemed left to chance. Opposite me, above the old man’s head, was a richly carved Black Forest clock; as I watched, the cuckoo flew out of the little window and started squawking. It squawked four times, with a beating of wings.

  Immediately Don Fulgencio drew from a pocket in his embroidered vest a snap-top watch, and checked the time. “Accurate to the second, sir,” he said, and these were the first words he spoke. “Here, see for yourself.”

  He extended the golden timepiece in my direction, and I quickly affirmed his declaration. He was absolutely right, and because he was right, I suspected right away that something must be wrong. Black Forest cuckoo clocks are notorious for their inaccuracy. In my family household each member had his or her own cuckoo clock—hasty purchases made during the inflation, which entered its most murderous phase just as we were spending our vacation in Triberg. Each cuckoo had its own sense of time, which every day sent my meticulous father into a rage, while I thought it was romantic and natural. No two thermometers or hygrometers ever show the same degrees. At Fulgencio’s house, however, apparently a stray bird had flown in to show the Spaniards just what German punctuality is all about. In Spain, as is well known, it is only the bull fights that begin on the dot. Amazed at this attack against the Iberian sense of time, I asked the gentleman to explain the origins of his aberrant clock.

  “This masterpiece,” Don Fulgencio said as he replaced the watch in his vest pocket—making it necessary to pull in his belly just a bit—“This work of art is a gift from a happily married couple in Titisee. You know, in the Black Forest. Thirty-seven years ago I gave them a child with smooth black hair and a fiery temperament, who adapted well to the Teutonic bushlands. I should add that this was my sole export arrangement with Germany. The transalpine races seem to prefer Nordic suppliers. There was a good reason why I simply gave away this young orphan, but that is neither here nor there. When the girl was four years of age, her parents sent me this clock
. Ever since then it has never once stopped—to me, an excellent sign that she is getting along just fine. If it ever stopped running, it would mean that her life’s thread would have unraveled.”

  “But what if you forget to pull up the weights? If I understand you correctly, you have a human life in your hands.”

  “If someone might ever neglect to wind up the clock, it would imply a cause-and-effect relationship with the destiny of that child. In that case, forgetfulness would be tantamount to destiny.”

  I would like to have continued chatting with this Spaniard about accidence and providence, hoping to make some gains in personal awareness—all the more so, as neither of us was a professional philosopher with the typical penchant for disputations that are as interesting as they are futile. Such colloquies resemble a game played with several balls, many of which remain suspended in thin air. It is a matter of daily practice to see how many balls one can juggle at any given time. Born philosophers are rare. Most of them grow on trees, and that is why almost all of them need the greenhouse ambience of universities, “Schools of Wisdom,” or scholarly articles in print.

  But I remained silent. Don Fulgencio gave me time to digest what he had just said. The emptiness of his glance beneath his furry brows told me that he was mentally up there in Titisee. Was this pure superstition on my part? In my younger years I was quite snobbish toward superstitious persons. Back in those days, on the basis of my bible-paper philosophers I believed that certain effects result from certain causes. I regarded superstition as a pathological excrescence, as a kind of myoma that attached itself to true knowledge. Nowadays I am cured of such dreadful notions. Besides my reading in the Occidental mystics, above all Teresa de Ávila, my recovery owes much to my years-long sojourn in Catholic Iberia, where an apostolic-nihilistic inclination towards superstition is often mitigated by a very moving form of humaneness. It must be apparent from much of what I am recounting here, concerning my own or Vigoleis’ life experiences, that it is no accident that I have become the translator of a mystic, Pascoaes. For this I was predestined. This gift was placed with me in my cradle.

  Here in Fulgencio’s office it was as quiet as a monastery. The clock ticked softly with its little balance wheel. The cuckoo was perched expectantly behind its little window, and behind the office door crouched my host’s domestic servant. Don Fulgencio was still far away in the Black Forest. I waited until he could finally return to me from the thickets of Northern Europe. As one born to wait, I would make an ideal prisoner with a life sentence in solitary, an ideal obedient monk, or a constantly praying hermit. But in order to enter prison I would have to commit a crime against a fellow man. To enjoy cloistered solitude I would have to commit a crime against myself.

  All of a sudden Don Fulgencio was back with me, and so we proceeded to the business at hand—a business the nature of which was still unclear to me. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. My special mission had achieved fulfillment when I reached the top of those three flights of stairs. Beatrice’s incredulity was refuted by my sighting of the company’s sign at the door, and Pedro had been washed clean of any suspicion. I could have got up and left. I should have. I was in serious danger of having a child foisted on me by sheer garrulousness. Rabindranath is still a fresh memory for all of us. But I stayed on, and like the cuckoo, I became a cog in the snail-like motions of the cosmos.

  For Don Fulgencio, however, I was at this moment simply a potential client waiting for an attractive offer. To signal my inner relaxation, I sat with one leg crossed over the other, but in reality I remained the gullible simpleton, miles away from being the Padishah imagined by the servant girl who was still eavesdropping at the door and was now about to learn what was what.

  Don Fulgencio must have been a resourceful businessman, to judge by the furious efficiency with which he now set out to make our deal. A racing oarsman at a feria couldn’t have done it much better—which makes me think I should retract my analogy with Field Marshal Hindenburg. The boss succeeded in explaining what seemed to me an attractive offer. I found myself concocting arguments that I could later use against Beatrice, in case I once again returned home with an anthropomorphic raven. Incidentally, the abandoned child now under discussion was of the male sex—somewhat disappointing for me, since I would have preferred a little girl to play with. Pre-natal determination of sex is still an obscure area of science. But in the present instance, post-natal sexual identity was a bitter fait accompli that I had to accept.

  I allowed myself to be persuaded that the child should be set aside for me for a few days. In a short time I was to inform the broker whether we would take the boy. I forgot to ask the tradesman to show me the object of our negotiations, so overwhelmed was I by being outmaneuvered. How often I leave a store with a purchase I had no intention of making! I rose. Don Fulgencio stepped forth from behind his herbarium, and I heard the servant girl flit away from her listening post. Cats sped across the courtyard, and then I was standing out on the street blinking my eyes, as the day had lost none of its dazzling brilliance. I folded my beret to give it a visor, and made my way home.

  I chose a long detour as the shortest way, given that I had to ponder my strategy for any and all further negotiations arising from the promise I made to the broker. I did this more for my own sake than for Beatrice’s, who would be shocked. First a raven, now a kid.

  On the way I met a German war invalid, a fellow whose heroism (Iron Cross, Second Class) had now drifted over into the “Never-Again-War!” movement. He suffered from hay fever, or catharrus aestivus, as he himself preferred to name his affliction, but except for that he was living happily and contentedly with his Spanish wife, who ran a millinery store. Anyone who wanted to be seen on the streets of Palma bought her hats from this woman. The injured German veteran, whose father was a schoolteacher and a creator of (rhyming) word games, made his own purchases in Paris, and that was a huge mistake. His fear of aggravating his hay fever was so great that he avoided all contact with flowers, even artificial flowers, the idea being to preclude any thought whatsoever of blossoming meadows. His wife had to switch to selling brassieres, stockings, and the like, since no one wished any longer to wear her neurotic hats. Beatrice was her last victim.

  I completed the remainder of my homeward journey in my usual state of absent-mindedness, which turns me into a dangerous pedestrian. I probably wasn’t even thinking of the state of fatherhood that the gods of the island were plotting for me.

  I found Beatrice sitting on a box, absorbed not in some murder case, but in Padre Feijó, whom I had started translating in order to acclimate myself to the misty atmosphere that surrounds his world of thought. I was copying the technique used by underwater workers, who first enter a compressed-air chamber to exercise their breathing before descending in a diving bell. This is the only way I know of to adapt to a foreign mentality. I would like to have produced for a German readership this Benedictine monk’s great essay on the mischief committed by nationalist zealotry. Of course this would get nowhere in the Third Reich, but perhaps there was a market for it in a periodical run by emigrés? I corresponded on this subject with Klaus Mann, who, I assumed, would welcome with open arms for his journal Die Sammlung such a contribution on nationalistic superstition. But he, too, had no room for a three-hundred-year-old voice of the spirit against the anti-spiritual.

  “Well now, has Vigoleis made a successful business deal? And how did Pedro wiggle his way out of it?”

  “I’m not at all sure that what I have just accomplished can be called business. As far as Pedro is concerned, you can rest assured. I didn’t see Pedro, but instead went straightaway to Don Fulgencio. As you know, he lives on Morey, in a palacete that’s swarming with cats and domestic servants. That’s the street you’ve always shunned because of its questionable elements. That’s where he lives, and nailed to his door is the Sacred Heart and a palm branch. What did Angelita sell you?”

  “Some goat cheese from Menorca, some soaked garbanzos, a
nd a can of squid in their ink.”

  “I just… But guess who I met.”

  “Bobby, fleeing from Don José’s gynecological machinations? So then he’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll keep the chickpeas and my portion of the squid for him, as long as he spares me his abstract art.”

  “Our young friend from the Folkwang School can certainly get by for a week in Valldemosa without applying the forceps. No, I met Mr. Hay Fever!”

  “Oh my God, you just can’t escape bad luck! Did he bore you to tears?”

  “He complained bitterly about the failures of medical science. They can’t find anything to cure him of his malady—not even the Germans, and for him that’s the worst part of it. But since Hitler, he hasn’t been swearing so loudly that there’ll never again be a war using weapons filled with flower pollen. But at the moment the important thing, it seems to me, is that I made an agreement with Don Fulgencio. You can see in me the Angel of the Annunciation, you may speak your Ecco ancilla, and our plundered apartment will be our Bethlehem. I’m going to zip back to the adoption agency. But don’t we still have a drop of Felanitx around?”

  Beatrice handed me the bottle in silence. I placed it to my lips as she, standing at the hearth, stirred the calamari a few times in their ink. I was prepared for anything, for heavy artillery and for some French sniping to underscore the seriousness of the argument. Allons-y!

  “Well then, it seems that this time I’ve come out OK. To be honest, I was preparing for the worst, especially after you sent me Mr. Silberstern with his disgusting money and girl problems, a trampish pharmacist, Kitschoffer the exhibitionist (this was an unfortunate Spanish schoolboy whose Swiss forebears were named Kirchhofer), the unwashed Miss Joan, en chaleur perpétuelle, and instead of my longed-for grail with the Eye of God, a mangy raven. Now it’s just a kid? You’re running out of ideas. Are you sick? What are we going to do with the brat? I hope it’s already housebroken and won’t mess up my newspaper. We can find some milk, but I refuse to wash diapers.”