The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  This was, in the form of a politely delivered speech, a rebuff—a blow with the flat of the blade, to be sure, but a blow in any case. I parried with a gulp of Felanitx. For ulcers of the spirit, alcohol is still the most beneficial balm, and the brand I’m talking about had 16% of it.

  If what I am recounting here were pure narrative fiction, something made up, I would now let you hear a knock at our door and the special doorbell signal used by Pedro, who has a key when he comes down the corridor to our apartment. Or I’d have Mr. Silberstern (may Beatrice forgive me) demand immediate entry with four rapid knocks, to tell me of some new sexual quandary and ask me to help him out, or at least listen to the details. Beatrice would dash away, absolving me of all further explanations concerning the orphan. But unfortunately, these jottings are beholden to reality. Here I am endeavoring to depict everything that happened in those days, down to the last pictorial detail and the most insignificant area of shade, against the background of our furniture-free everyday existence. Beatrice is not some wispy phantasm. And provided that the phenomenon of existence can tolerate being set in the comparative, Don Fulgencio is even less so—although Beatrice would have liked nothing better than to wave him off into the realm of fable and Pedro’s masquerading intrigues. Least of all, myself—although I must confess that I have lived through moments when I felt like some monster’s sweaty dream. But who would ever want to have a fool like me in a dream? That, too, is something I must take care of on my own; I must be my own nightmare and torturer. There’s no one to blame except Creation itself. “Shame, shame—that is the history of mankind!” Thus spake Zarathustra.

  Beatrice’s unexpected agreement moved me deeply, but at the same time it forced me to make a difficult decision. I said, “Fine, then this evening I’ll go right to the agent and set the day when we can make formal acceptance of our hidalgo. In three days I’ll have put together a crib. Angelita will give me a few empty boxes, and will she ever make eyes!”

  Beatrice is not attached to kids. That is why for years she was a teacher who was deified by her charges. She knew how to treat them. She made her decisions with the secure firmness that over the long run can lead to friendship and love, a process that impresses me in certain stories in the Old Testament. At times, the Lord seemed to be speaking through her. Was that now the case, too?

  From out of the kitchen of the fisherman’s family living below us came the fishy essence of roasting sardines. The girls in our back yard were in a loud, screeching spat over some triviality. In the upper storey Pepa, seamstress to the upper crust, was leaning out the window discussing matters of high fashion with one of her customers across the yard—it was a familiar scene of rich and poor in their customary exchange of ideas. Nothing has changed. Tomorrow it will all be the same, and the day after, too. Only then will the world in our bel-étage cease to obey the Copernican laws of orbit and gravity. The lord of our universe will be our adopted kid. Will it succeed in curing me of my Weltschmerz? My hare-brained penchant for self-destruction? To wish one’s own perdition, says Kierkegaard, is too sublime for the likes of humans.

  It was late when Pedro arrived. The bottle was empty, the mollusks had been consumed together with their murky juice, the yard girls were long since lost in sweaty slumber, each one yearning for the embrace of her novio, even though she would have been content with a quickie with some guy from the “Tower” gang.

  Pedro sensed that something was afoot, but as usual he pulled out his sketching pad and started penciling our images. He casually inquired about Beatrice’s stubborn pupils, about my newest inventions, about Mamú, Rabindranath, and Bobby. I showed him the broker’s letter, telling him that Beatrice suspected Pedro himself of being its author. Our artist, crazy in love, galant, and as always in the pose of a bolero, expressed his heartfelt congratulations and, with just a few lines, made a sketch of this new son of ours who would soon enter our impoverished little world. The image was that of a little fat monstrosity of a child—which immediately soured Beatrice’s notions about Pedro once again, although she was on the point of forgiving him for having suspected him of perfidy.

  The sight of Pedro’s sketch made me suddenly aware that I had neglected to inquire about the age of our prospective new family member. After a long debate, we agreed on 13 months. I planned the dimensions of the cradle accordingly.

  Do I have to describe the days that followed? How they were filled with hectic preparations? Once again, Beatrice had more layaway cash on hand than I suspected. Pedro’s excitement was contagious; again and again he arrived at our apartment carrying useful items. First he brought a baptismal cushion bearing the Alba coat of arms, 300 years old. Another time, he unpacked a pair of underpants whose label revealed that they had been left behind in the charterhouse by Fortunato, a saintly monk, when the tonsured squad was expelled. More significant still was a bottle containing a half-inch of wine left undrunk, as Don Juan’s inscription informed us, by Rubén Darío, Antonio Gelabert, and Paco Quintana during a stay at the castle, anno 1913. This vintage had had twenty years to improve in the bottle—what cellar in the world could have offered a nobler baptismal quaff?

  Paco Quintana is familiar to many, and Rubén Darío is known the world over. But who was this other member of the triumvir, Antonio Gelabert?

  As a barber, Don Antonio had several generations of Suredas under his razor, but it was as an artist that he enjoyed the privilege of sharing a bottle with the above-named notables. Moreover, it was as an artist that he was close to the Suredas. Don Juan Sureda was his bosom friend. He began in ceramics, and as a painter he ended in obscurity like Van Gogh. Today his oils are demanding unheard-of prices. He lived in Valldemosa with a maid and a circle of reliable customers. Tired of wielding the scissors, he bought a little house in Deyá and lived there, an artist among other artists, devoted solely to his housemaid, whom he married; to painting, with which he lived on in even more serious libertinage; and to his own ugliness, which inspired him and which might even have captivated a Goya. Weary of all this, he took a rope and hanged himself in the stairwell. The rope was braided from his maid’s hair. Thus Don Antonio had returned to his original occupation.

  We were also touched by the solicitude of our neighbor Doña María de los Angeles, an old gout-twisted lady who lived in abject poverty since the alcoholic death of her husband in jail, where he squandered the remainder of their savings with some of the guards, and since the death at sea by drowning of her three sons, fishermen and drug smugglers in Arsenio’s gang. Someday I shall perhaps tell the life story of this once wealthy, once beautiful woman. She offered to take care of our child—a gesture of friendship in gratitude for the food we had long been sharing with her.

  For the adoption itself—or, more elegantly, for our “optation”—we agreed upon a Saturday at one hour before noon. The ceremony would be over with by the time Count Kessler arrived for our usual dictation session on his memoirs. He would be given a sip from the bottle, whereupon we could return it to Don Juan, its label adorned with yet another famous name.

  In the previous night there occurred a cloudburst such as Palma had not experienced in decades. Our General’s Street was thick with mud from the torrents that swept down from the higher districts all the way to the Plaza Atarazanas. After Beatrice swept the floors, I polished the tiles with a contraption invented by myself for just this purpose. Then Beatrice covered them with a runner made of old newspapers. This would no doubt give rise to comical scenes with Count Kessler, who would of course not comprehend such an improvised technique as the lesson in thoughtful hospitality that it might be for any Spanish guests. Nevertheless, he felt embarrassed to dirty up our apartment, knowing as he did that we had no money for domestic help. In this regard we shared the same degree of penury. Time and again I tried to dissuade him from taking off his shoes at our entrada. It was only later that we hit upon the idea of using felt slippers, the kind handed out to tourists at island castles, in place of doormats.

  O
n the day destined by the stars to bring us disaster, Pedro appeared bright and early with a steaming tray of ensaimadas. He helped us put newspapers on the floor, and then pinned a sign to our corridor door with the mysterious letters NHN, which I had often seen at other people’s entryways and which I had always misinterpreted. The letters do not stand for Nil homo nequit, “nothing that is humanly impossible,” but for no hay nadie, “Nobody home.” It was our desire to remain undisturbed for the solemn acceptance of our Vigoleisovitch.

  If today, twenty years after that crazy forenoon, I ask myself whether I was excited, I can aver without exaggeration that the hammer-blows of my heart did not cause me to collapse in a heap. Yet I must admit that on that morning I did not approach our door over pages of the Deutsche Allgemeine with the same habitual, casual stride I used whenever the milkman brought us our milk, which was always at the same point of turning sour. Beatrice was nervous—in fact, too nervous to start an argument with Pedro; she was in the pre-stage of fury that could turn her into a mute pillar. Pedro was simply Pedro, full of silliness even at this highly dubious moment.

  A loud knock at our door echoed up the stairway. And just as we might count the seconds between a flash of lightning and the thunderclap, each of us counted the tapping steps as they approached our landing. Now—now! Pedro lifted his hands as if starting a dance, spreading all his fingers. And then the doorbell rang, thrice.

  “Ave María purísima!” said Pedro. I responded like an altar boy, “Sin pecado concebida!” and I went to the door.

  If I were a novelist, at this juncture I would plant some doubt as to whether it was truly Don Fulgencio with our child who was asking for entry despite the letters NHN, thus granting Beatrice her little triumph: Aha, it’s all a swindle! It’s only the night watchman who’s come to pick up his weekly pay! Yet historical veracity demands that I open our door for the broker to enter. It’s odd, though, that he appears to be rather taller than I remember him from his palacete. Perhaps this is because the dimensions of our living quarters are giving rise to optical illusions. Everything looks big to little people.

  Don Fulgencio filled up our door frame completely. I even feared that he might hit his head against the upper molding. Would he allow me to precede him into our apartment? Then I espied a second figure—probably the chauffeur, while down below the carriage waited with our kid and the servant girl. This second visitor, smaller than his putative boss and rather less imposing in dress and manner, looked well into his sixties, although probably he was only fifty. He clicked his tongue, suggesting that I was correct in identifying him as the coachman. He made a bow—something a Spanish cochero never does, but—all right, let’s enter the room where Beatrice and Pedro await the visit with poorly feigned nonchalance. If I say “poorly feigned,” it is because no one ever approaches an encounter with another person without fearing a violation of one’s own selfhood. There were no mutual introductions. No one asked about the child. If Don Fulgencio had lit up a party cigar or if Beatrice had started yodeling—she never yodels—all of us would have welcomed this as a perfectly natural prelude to the festivities. Instead, Pedro began humming softly his favorite copla: “Ay si, ay no, ses at lo tes em dinen, que’l m’ham de teiar…” The coachman belched resoundingly and spat with grandezza behind our piano. I didn’t dare to look at Beatrice.

  We chatted about the weather, last night’s thunderstorm, the newly rinsed palm trees in the beautiful girls’ yard. Then someone piped up about political matters and that fellow Hitler who seemed to be sitting more squarely in his saddle and was now further than ever from getting tossed out, contrary to what Don García Díaz, the Berlin correspondent for the paper El Sol, kept prophesying to his readers every Sunday. Don Fulgencio’s opinions were more remarkable than I had recalled them from our exclusively personal conversation at his herbarium. They were decidedly not my opinions, but at least he seemed open to discussion. The nameless fellow whom I still took for the coachman—though now, standing in full illumination, he looked more like an accountant or a bailiff—didn’t open his mouth except to burp or spit, further proof that he represented some anonymous authority, perhaps a notary who had come along to make official the transfer of the child. His faulty upbringing was of course his own business.

  My immediate train of thought led me from coachman to dray horse to civil servant to red tape. Even in Spain, where people were not yet degraded to cannon fodder and the civil servants were still bribeable, you could still meet up with an aberrant representative of the official sphere who would insist on rubber stamps, illegible signatures, and above all on the proper document—what the Germans call a Schein. The meaning of this German word, which originally signified brightness, glory, and brilliance, mutated in the late Middle Ages into a designation for “written proof” or “documentation.” Spoken threateningly by a civil servant, it is among the most fearful words I know. “Do you have a Schein?” I have only the most dreadful memories of my school years and my teachers, with the exception of our principal, Father Kremers. I would prefer to end my days in a ditch rather than relive those years in the classroom and get harassed by slave-driving teachers. Even so, I am never tortured by nightmare memories of school. In their stead, what often awakens me in a cold sweat is being pursued by civil servants. I fear asphyxiation, and I cry out. Over the course of the years Beatrice has become used to these nocturnal attacks, whereas I myself am repeatedly the victim of such ambushes. You simply cannot become inured to bad dreams, no matter how often they occur. Those who explore the depths of the human soul might conclude that instead of “sharing my bed with my mother,” I had shared it with a civil servant. “Try to shuck off the burdens of the world, and you will have to bear them. Let someone else succumb.” The goblins won’t leave me in peace. That’s why St. Augustine’s City of God stands on feet of clay. This precursor of modern psychology refused to employ civil servants in his civitas, not even in subaltern positions. The civil servant is the very salt of the state, its very own salt-lick. My own personal Oedipus once confronted me in the following manner (I hope Don Fulgencio will forgive this digression back to Cologne, where this Oedipus of mine held sway behind a counter in the Municipal Post Office).

  I was a freshman at the university, and I was overwhelmed by new experiences. I wanted to purchase some stamps, but the counter window was lowered. I knocked ever so discreetly on the glass. It was 2:00 pm, the time when the public was permitted to do business. Behind the dull glass I saw a dark, roundish shape that could only be that of the clerk’s head, apparently awaiting the victims of his afternoon shift, his moistened pen already in hand. Suddenly the window opened with a bang. This servant of the Reich poked forth his skull, which was adorned with the same bellicose brush haircut as the portrait of Hindenburg on the stamps he had to sell, and he snarled at me, “What are you, illiterate? We are closed until two!” The window snapped shut with another bang, much like a guillotine. It failed to decapitate this particular post-office terrorist only because, with reflexes closely resembling those of an aged pensioner in a split-second I succeeded in retracting my head into my collar. In my fright I took a step backward, causing me to step on the foot of the customer behind me. This fellow, in turn, gave me a quick shove forwards, making me lurch into the counter. These post-office counters were built in such a way that the clerks lacked a completely clear line of fire. The principle of free-roaming, introduced decades previous in zoological gardens by Hagenbeck and Lutz Heck—the zoo visitor can stand eye-to-eye with the wildest of animals and not get eaten—had not yet found its adherents among the architects of public-service accommodations and their counters.

  Be that as it may, my would-be Hindenburg had now delivered a shot with his Prussian muzzle-loader, and now sat smoking behind his window, which still rattled from the preceding fracas. Suddenly the official clock, set just a few seconds behind my grandmother’s First Holy Communion watch, tolled twice. The counter window leaped upwards, and the selfsame Reich bloodhound w
ho had barked at me asked in the politest of tones, “May I help you?” In between the rifle shot from in front and the shove from behind I had forgotten what I wanted. I stammered something, heard the fellow behind me grumbling, and fled the scene. It took months for me to muster the courage to approach another post-office counter. A fellow student consoled me. He had just flunked his all-important state exam with the philosopher Scheler, who on his part had offered solace to his student with the phenomenological dictum that in order to understand him, Scheler, one must be literate. Was the post-office clerk aware that I, too, was a student of Scheler? And did he possibly think that I understood him?

  Without a doubt, this Oedipus at Cologne contributed toward my decision to escape into foreign lands before the counter windows closed on the Weimar Republic, long before Adolf Hitler, the Master Civil Servant of the Reich, stepped into office behind his frosty pane of glass, holding a watch that was a good deal slower than my own—slower by centuries.

  Satellite are often just as important as the planets toward which they always show the same face. Sancho Panza is an immortal example of this phenomenon. In this regard, let us examine more closely our coachman/civil servant before he signs on the dotted line and disappears into the anonymity of his ledger books—which can also serve as a hiding place.

  With such a patently earthbound character, let us begin at the bottom of his feet and proceed slowly upward along his rumpled trousers, across his woolen sash and up to his open shirt collar, from whence there protrudes an impressive goiter, above which, finally, we behold an unimpressive head. Let us begin, that is, at his soles and not at the crown of his scalp, considering that a pedestal is often worth more than the entire statue. Memorable quotations and a bas-relief frieze are meant to distract an observer from the depicted figure, who in bronze is more amazed at his own heroism than he ever was in real life. This coachman wore the hemp sandals of the little people, albeit with Catalan laces. This brand is somewhat more expensive, but for a man of his standing…?