The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  “Take this,” Pedro said. He tore a page from his sketch pad and gave it to me. He had drawn our mysterious visitor on the scale of 1:10, paying more attention to his head than to its underpinning. Only after glancing at the portrait did I begin to notice certain contortions in the corners of the man’s mouth—facial gestures surrounded by stubble and reinforced by wrinkles in the neck. One look at the real-life model convinced me that the artist had seen things clearly, and that I—where had I seen such a visage before, so different from a genuinely human countenance? Why yes indeed, at the prison in Münster, where in a lecture room behind bars Professor Többen was exhibiting his “cases” to us students.

  The broker was conversing with his companion notary in Mallorquinian. The latter, getting impatient, stamped his foot hard enough to raise some dust, made a grotesque smile, and swore through his nose, an action that gave rise to a bubble that, no bigger than an egg, quickly burst into spray. I nearly collapsed. Were we going to have a unique, profoundly significant act certified by a notary-public who lived at the borderlines of imbecility? This could result in black-on-white disaster for all concerned! I glanced around the assembled company, looking for allies. Beatrice pulled a wooden box over to the Lladó, tipped it up, and opened the top of the piano. Was she going to start practicing? Now? Very well, I would do it all myself. Making a quick decision, I asked the broker to show me, finally, the child. But if the imbecile was not a coachman after all, there would be no coach down below, no servant girl, no hijo de algo…

  “Don Fulgencio,” I said, “let us proceed directly…” But I got no further. With a piercing screech the goitrous fellow leaped to embrace me. Did he take me for a king, the kind of shaman whose “royal touch” some old stories tell us can make a goiter disappear?

  This was a primal scream. All of us have used it at one time or another. Without it, the race of mankind would never have degenerated into human beings, but would still be squatting in trees or paddling along in the glassy primeval ooze. Mankind would be at an end, because billions of years ago it would never have got started. There would have been no need for a Jesus Christ to come and redeem us, for pessimists to rake us though the coals, or for non-poetic existentialists to bother themselves with our latter-day enlightenment. The notary cried out, “Papá!”

  Strictly speaking, dear reader, what transpired following this brutish shouting in our bible-paper living quarters, the place that was supposed to have been the scene of my most gratifying optation, belongs not in these applied recollections at all, but in a handbook of psychiatry. Here I shall append only the remarkable external events and explain how all of us became the victims of a feat of legerdemain, the consummation of which was abetted by Beatrice’s deep-rooted skepticism and lack of imagination, unmitigated in this case by any sight of reality, as well as by my own, perhaps misguided, ambition and my inborn playfulness, arising from natural melancholy. Not to mention my poetizing idealism, which comes dangerously close to being simiesque and can easily be stimulated by sheer curiosity.

  Don Fulgencio de la Fuente y Carbonell de Lladó was a common, ordinary employment agent. Housemaids, waiters, botones, kitchen help, wet nurses and the like were the raw material of his business, commodities that no doubt were not always easy to deal with. At the beginning of his career he developed his talents on the mainland, with headquarters in Barcelona. Later he settled on Mallorca, where he had grown up. He came from Son Ferragut, a village in the interior of the island. Once by accident he received an indirect commission, on behalf of a childless English couple who regularly spent the winter months in the Balearics, to locate an orphan, a hijo de algo of questionable origins, an expósito of the kind that still today are taken to convents to rescue them from even more fearful destinies. The foster parents’ gratitude knew no bounds, as the girl turned into the glory of their barren marriage and kept alive their bonds with the beloved Mediterranean, even when they lived on their estate in England or when traveling. Over the course of the years Don Fulgencio, despite his commercial shrewdness a man with a warm heart, arranged several further adoptions. Inclined to hyperbole, harmlessly whimsical like most of his fellow-countrymen, but probably also with the intention of lending his trade the aura of sanctity, he placed his business under the sponsorship of the Divine Friend to Children. Yielding in his later years to a progressive penchant for dissimulation—pseudologia phantastica in still scarcely studied manifestation—he forged for himself several resounding testimonials from personages of high standing. We have already seen and commented upon his royal missive, which managed to express with heavy-handed irony an anti-monarchist’s unrelenting anger after the collapse of the throne. Presumably it was only Vigoleis who took this bogus document at face value, just as he does his own self, day in and day out.

  It was known all around town and across the whole island that Don Fulgencio allowed himself certain irregularities, that he liked to step forth in borrowed plumes, that his ambitions exceeded what a business agency such as his could ever achieve, in spite of gold and silver medals. Yet the authorities never felt the need to go after this merchant in human lives. They turned a blind eye to him, winked at each other, and were no doubt happy that, so far, they had themselves been spared this variant of Mallorcan nuttiness.

  Our employment agent’s life was further complicated by the simple existence of a feebleminded younger brother, who was in his personal care following the early demise of both their parents. Fulgencio’s move back to Mallorca can probably also be explained by his new legal status as his brother’s keeper. This brother remained a child, one of the poor in spirit who were—and presumably still are—destined to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. He was Don Fulgencio’s albatross. I know of no other calamity as dreadful as being burdened with responsibility for someone who is mentally retarded. My whole being rebels against such an insane twist on the part of Mother Nature, who even under normal circumstances is insane enough. No one knows when Don Fulgencio first hatched the idea of selling off his brother, who in the meantime had reached full-grown adulthood. It is unclear whether the broker came up with this notion at a moment of profound depression and urged on by his superstitious visions, or whether he had abettors, evil acquaintances bent on making him a laughing stock. I have never been able to establish the truth of the matter. Was Pedro, after all, part of such a plot, in so far as he suggested me as the proper father for the man’s goitrous brother? Puzzle upon puzzle!

  On the eve of our departure from the island, at our last gathering at a café on the Borne—at the next table sat a genuine general with his Pilar—we were reviewing event by fascinating event, in joy and in sorrow, the story of our sojourn on Mallorca, the times of near-starvation as well as our days of plenitude at Mamú’s. I inquired, “Pedro, What about that business with the hijo de algo? Were you involved in that?” He did not reply, for at that moment the general pricked up his ears like a guard dog. Had the writers and philosophers of Mulet’s tertulia, loyal to us right up to the end, done anything to push this little scheme along? Verdaguer? Don Jaime Escat, the Villalonga brothers, or in particular the specialist in depth psychology who could have had a professional interest in the case? It is useless to try to find all this out at this late date. For in my memory the events of our island period, which one or another of my readers may find amusing, have taken on an aura and coloration of sorrow and melancholy that will forever remain constant from top to bottom, no matter how rationally I might try to link together all the strands of so-called cause and effect. I now believe less than ever in the psychology of the moraine and the mythologizing attempts to unravel human pre-history, both of which methods operate hand in hand in the frightful lower depths of existence. Perhaps Vigoleis can be forgiven if he has the conceited affrontery to say that he is too fervently devoted to poetry for such tactics. As I continue to observe him while writing, I discover that Vigoleis, as prone to shame and embarrassment as any fool, has up to this very moment never veered off—or, let us say, degen
erated—into abject despair. His merry Weltschmerz has made of him a plaything of destiny. If, like a football, he sometimes flies out of bounds, it cannot be said that he ever gave himself that extra kick. Though continually shoved around, he has never felt that he himself was doing the shoving. Those who wander at the periphery of existence, where no one believes that the instinct for self-propagation can bring about the fulfillment of what is unfulfillable, no matter how sacred that goal might be or how much inner commitment it might entail: such persons simply cannot accept the burden of fostering a child. This non-child’s name, by the way, was Olimpio.

  XV

  As the child-of-nobody hurled himself with a shriek to the bosom of his cuckoo of a father, his lips were bathed in foam. Beatrice withdrew in disgust. Her Lladó remained silent.

  We took the broker and his white elephant, now reduced in price, to the Plaza Atarazanas and loaded the two brothers onto a cart; Pedro insisted on doing the driving. As a businessman, Don Fulgencio was dead; he was a dead man. Olimpio was delivered to an institution, Fulgenico to his palace.

  I went back home. I was incapable of clear thoughts. I felt as if my mind were in a vise. All I could do was make a sudden decision: Matías! Go buy some bread from Don Matías! I sank down on the flour sack like… an empty sack of flour.

  “The Nazis?” the baccalaureus asked. “Have you locked horns with the Consul?” I told him I would explain things tomorrow. I bought a loaf of bread, and went back home where Conde de Kessler would be waiting for me. But what would Beatrice say?

  She greeted me with a look of such dark, smoldering despair as I hadn’t seen in her eyes since the ordeal with the whore Pilar. The sight of foam at the mouth of the goitrous cretin had stifled every last trace of maternal feeling before it could express itself. Besides, our corridor was now filthy, and our bible-paper apartment had saliva on the floor. But even so—all had ended peacefully. I gave her a questioning glance, and she replied with the oracular assertion, “So that’s what we get!”

  She had squeezed up the newspapers in our bedroom to make a place to sit down. And there she now sat, like a mother bird in the nest. “Never again will I let that guy in our house!” she continued. “You’ll just see what happens!”

  “Do you mean Kessler? Our schedule for today is pretty full. He and I have a whole lot of solecisms to weed out. Kessler will be punctual as usual, and after this deluge he’ll have mud on his shoes.”

  I could tell by her glancing at the ceiling that Beatrice meant neither Count Kessler nor Fulgencio’s boorish brother. Whenever she has fits of superstition, she is unbearable. On such occasions, I feel like grabbing her and dunking her in a cool bath of reasonableness. But—with what strength, and with what justification? So then I, too, lifted my eyes to the ceiling, only to notice that he was really gone. Empedocles! I, too, took fright, but was suddenly thrust back to reality by the ringing of our doorbell.

  Whenever I take up a new address, I conduct a test to see if it really works. I issue what I call my Spider Edict.

  At the post office I send myself two postcards, each with the notation “Return to Sender.” As the “sender” I put down my own name, one with my old address and one with the new. The second card gets sent a few days after the first. The mailman does the rest of the work. He observes that Vigoleis doesn’t live at the address indicated, and puts the card back in his bag—“return to sender.” On his next delivery round he goes to that address, with the same result. Thus card No. 1 becomes a dead letter. Card No. 2 has no stamp on it, requiring the postal service to make repeated attempts at delivery in order to cash in the postage due. In this manner, delivery eventually takes place, and after I arrive it works like a charm. I owe this clever method to Don Fernando, the General Secretary of the Palma Post Office. It has worked in several countries, even in the Canton Ticino.

  My “Spider Edict,” so named after the opening words of the text Sollicitudo omnium aranearum, has other aims as well. I have always been poor. Poverty breeds emergencies. Emergency is the mother of invention. When I move into a new apartment, I make sure that it isn’t swept too carefully, and immediately I pronounce the Spider Edict. I return all rights to spiders, just as Napoleon’s clerical adversary did with the Jesuits in 1814. The spiders must henceforth spin their webs and, on my behalf, catch flies and mosquitoes. I keep them—in southern climes, of course—just as the ancient Egyptians kept the sacred ichneumon as a mouse catcher. In particularly bothersome locations such as above our bed, at my desk, or in our reading space, where the incidence of biting and stinging is unusually high, I have them spin their webs. To this end I open the window, allowing free access to all the flies of the neighborhood. In places where I wish the spiders to settle, I spread honey on the wall or on little sticks that I deploy for just this purpose. The flies immediately form black swarms that serve as bait. Then I release the spiders, which I have captured and assorted according to type and size. One out of ten will begin attaching its web just where I want it. Sometimes it takes weeks for the spiders to take up ambush positions at all the important points.

  The first spider I trained in this fashion to keep watch over Beatrice’s reading site was baptized by her, a Bible expert, with the name Mephiboseth. When one day the spider disappeared without a trace, Beatrice said that this meant bad luck—and it did! From then on we christened our chief spider Empedocles, because it kept disappearing into thin air. Some women cannot bear to hire a maid, and Beatrice could not stand having spiders in our employ. That is why I later gave her a mosquito net as a present. It was less romantic, but more reliable. Still, if a mosquito ever finds its way inside the net, there’s hell to pay.

  Empedocles was at once poet and philosopher, a kind of wandering redeemer, physician, and multiplier of loaves. He read and ate with his hands, and if we can give credence to legend, one day he suddenly disappeared. Some say that he jumped into the crater of Mount Etna in order to enhance his reputation as a divine being—since gods also like to eliminate their tracks behind them. But the mountain seems to have played a trick on this super-guru—he flourished around 500 B.C.— for the story goes on to claim that the crater spewed out the miracle man’s slippers, just to show him who was who. And that is why we picked out this ancient Greek guy’s name for our head spider.

  Once when things were again going badly for Count Kessler—he had received a snide letter from Goebbels, threatening him in ways that could be fatal for our work on the memoirs— I told him about my Spider Edict. It cheered him up for a while. And because he was superstitious in a manner deriving from Classical Antiquity, he believed the story about the disappearance of Empedocles.

  Vigoleis, the enlightened pessimist, gave his own special spider the name Spinoza.

  XVI

  In place of the absconded Empedocles, another ominous “star” soon made its appearance over our heads. It was a gruesome animal—not one that captured insects, but nevertheless one that spent its entire life in cahoots with vermin. Its professional specialties were wine and women. It came from Würzburg. Its name was Adelfried Silberstern, and it was the legitimate brother of Privy Councillor Silberstern, whose first name was Brunfried.

  “Vigo, do me a favor and ask the milkman to give us a whole liter today, and not just half.”

  “He won’t know what’s come over us.”

  “Ciao!”

  “Ciao!”

  I had started a novel, a caricature of the Third Reich in my home town of Süchteln an der Niers. My working title was “Hun-less Tombs of the Huns.” On the basis of a draft chapter and through the good offices of Menno ter Braak, the Amsterdam publisher Querido had accepted it. I worked and worked on it during the hours when I wasn’t working and working for Count Kessler, and when I wasn’t composing letters to high mucky-mucks of the insane German Reich. I wrote and wrote like a man possessed, and worse yet, as a man who thought that he could swim against the tide. A human being is not a salmon; if he swims along with the crowd, he’ll alw
ays be going downstream.

  The doorbell! What did Beatrice tell me? Oh yes, no milk today. I’ll just finish writing this sentence… And then, the doorbell again. That guy is in a hurry—I guess he’s worried that his milk will go sour before he’s had a chance to deliver it. Just type out one more sentence… but then our impatient visitor rang for a third time. I leaped to the door and called out my message into the dark stairwell: “Two liters today, milkman! Just a minute, I’ll go get our can!”

  The milkman was hard of hearing and invisible. Was he already on the flight above us? But then a voice spoke to me in a south German accent, “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Silberstern from Würzburg, Adelfried Silberstern, wine and spirits, brother of Privy Commercial Councillor Brunfried Silberstern from Würzburg. We’re both from Würzburg.”

  My mind was still back in my home town, where on Sundays the pastor would announce the banns of marriage: “With the intention of Holy Matrimony, Peter Joseph… and Anna Maria…, both of Süchteln. Should anyone have reasons why this marriage should not occur, he is by conscience bound to come forth…” My novel had to do with a marriage taking place in the Third Reich, one that had reasons for not occurring, reasons that carried the death penalty. It’s no wonder that my thoughts continued in this direction as the milkman spoke. But surely my engaged couple wasn’t from Würzburg…

  It was only when our milkman stepped toward me—something he had never done before, preferring to keep a milk bucket’s distance between us—that I realized that I wasn’t in my home town with the heroes’ tombs, but on the Street of the General, House No. 23, an address that the man from Würzburg had picked up at the German Bookshop. Gradually he emerged out of the twilight of our corridor, with a torrent of words and displaying a fat belly, making me take a quick step backwards.