The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Meanwhile several other customs employees had entered the office. Volumes and sliced-out pages from the collection were making their way from hand to hand amid chuckles, brief discussions, and appraisals, just as at the pre-sale confabs at an auction. They all agreed that this was filth, and they were appalled that it was made in Germany. I noticed that certain officers were stashing some smaller specimens in the pockets of their smocks. The Director then made up his mind: “Quemar!” I translated: “Burn it all!” My client blanched —but not on account of the threatened auto-da-fé. Dripping in sweat, he rummaged among his treasures, pulled forth a few books that had already passed through the officials’ hands, and began furiously thumbing through the pages. “Right here, Herr Doktor! Look here! That’s exactly where the very best of it was, and these gentleman have used their pen knives to cut them out. You must register a protest!” So I enunciated a formal protest: willful larceny of an entire corpus of intellectual property. The Director laughed and said, “Maybe some judge will fall for that one. We make autonomous decisions.” He went on to explain that he himself had cut out the most blasphemous examples, spending whole nights working through the collection. Remaining calm and matter-of-fact, relying on my experience as an assistant to German university scholars, I inquired of the Director just what, in light of a unified concept of erotic scholarly research (difficult to put into Spanish, but I managed), he meant by the word “blasphemous.” By employing this term, I added, he was giving the entire case a theological turn. Was he aware of the possible consequences?

  He had a ready answer. He reached into the breast pocket of his elegant jacket and produced a few pages that even a Professor Karl Kerényi would have a hard time interpreting in mythological terms. At the sight of this fraud, a quivering Mr. Silberstern stammered, “One thousand marks each! Tell him that we protest in the name of literature! I’ll sue him for damages!”

  The Customs Director simply snickered. “A thousand marks? In Paris you can get stuff like this much cheaper, en nature. We know all about it, we were over there once in our younger days. Nowadays, with a wife and kids…” He replaced the porno sheets inside his jacket pocket, and declared the meeting finished. His verdict was laconic: the entire lot was to be burned. I threatened to inform the Consul. Consuls and Customs Directors need each other. We were granted a delay of 24 hours.

  Don Joaquín Verdaguer was not only a professor, a writer, and an expert in tobacco pipes; he was also the Ecuadorian Consul. It was he, of course, and not the German Consul, that I had in mind. I explained the case to him, requesting his aid in the name of erotic science.

  At this, Don Joaquín turned morose. He showed me his official Consulate rubber stamps, now twisted and desiccated from disuse, including the dried-out stamp pads, the yellowed Consulate letterhead, and the empty Consulate cashbox. For years, he said, he had been the local representative of the glorious Republic of Ecuador, just waiting for someone to come along and request his protection. But now I had arrived, and I wasn’t even an Ecuadorian! I was to go visit his German colleague, who would treat it as the simple matter it was: a delay in the name of the German Reich, investigation by the proper legal authorities, and consultations with experts at the Biblioteca Nacional. That way, we could gain time. The German Consul would pursue the case with vigor and if necessary send a telegram, at my client’s expense, to the German Foreign Office. But—was this such a serious affair? The Spanish nation was accustomed to all kinds of questionable goings-on. The Barrio Chino in Barcelona was like no other place in the world, including Paris and Marseille. —“And blasphemous? The very worst kind of stuff? What can that possibly be, the ‘worst kind of stuff’?”

  I reached into the inside pocket of my decidedly un-elegant jacket and pulled out a page. “This is what the blasphemy in Mr. Silberstern’s collection looks like.” It was the most titillating specimen in all of Western art: the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile, seen from behind.

  Don Joaquín sucked on his pipe, and retracted all he had just said about vice in Barcelona. “Pilfered?”

  “No, not exactly, my friend. Using a stratagem of my new profession, I took possession of it as a form of official credentials. Now I can present myself anywhere as my Jewish client’s procurator and prolocutor.”

  “Did you say Jewish?”

  “I did indeed. And that’s precisely the fly in the ointment. Silberstern is non-Aryan, and the reason for his escape was profanation of the blood. So he can’t expect his own Consul to offer him protection.”

  The Ecuadorian Consul explained that if a Jew still had a valid passport, the Consul was obliged to assist him.

  With my credentials in my jacket pocket, I went to visit “our” Consul. I explained that if he did not handle this matter with dispatch, his official prestige was on the line; that I had discussed the case with my friend Verdaguer, the Consul of Ecuador, and that by tomorrow morning each and every accredited consular official in Palma would be aware that the German Consul didn’t know how to run his business.

  The Consul replied that he knew his business inside-out. A Jew was a Jew, but Justice was Justice. He was, he said, the representative of a nation based on laws. “So let’s get at it!”

  The warehouse Director stuck by his guns. To him, filth was filth. He took forth certain volumes, slapped page after page of unveiled hindquarters and forequarters, mixed-company frolics, and erotic trapeze exploits. But the most incriminating specimens had disappeared, for by now the duana officers of Palma were swimming in a sea of porn. Still, what the representative of the Third Reich got to see was enough to place him in a moral dilemma. “It’s horrendous!” he said. “For heaven’s sake, just take a look at that!” It was material for scientific research, I retorted, and the one thing was not mutually exclusive of the other, quite the contrary. Wasn’t he familiar with the classic dictum that we are all born twixt urine and feces? This, I elucidated further, was the tragedy of humankind, the source of all human error, the vital subject of artistic endeavor, and nowadays the reason why the waiting rooms at psychiatrists’ offices were filled to bursting. It was indeed difficult to overcome this natural heritage. In a small voice, the Consul said, “You know me well enough to realize that I’m not a scholar but a businessman. But if this stuff here is supposed to be scientific material, then I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Back home in Germany this is what we call sheer crap.”

  I responded that what he and I regarded as crap back in Germany might not be one and the same thing. I asked him to telegraph the German Embassy in Madrid, at my client’s expense, and request a delay against the private verdict of the Palma Director of Customs. I myself would send a registered letter to Miguel de Unamuno, informing him that now Spain, too, was starting to burn books just as in the Third Reich. Unamuno replied with a sarcastic postcard, saying that in Spain a much bigger fire was about to break out. There were arsonists at work all over the place, he wrote, and may God save his beloved homeland.

  The Director of Customs expressed his regrets to the Consul of the Third Reich; his Bull of Immolation was already formulated and signed. He showed us the document and then put it back in his pocket, covering with it the naked backside of some whorelet—a symbolic gesture if there ever was one. Case closed: on to the pyre for an auto-da-fé. At my insistence, the German Consul suggested that the crates be sent back to the return address in Germany. “Impossible!” said the Director. This filth would never leave the warehouse. I leaped into the breach with a request in my client’s name that the scientific material, the entire four boxes full to bursting, be sent to the National Library in Madrid as a donation from Señor Adelfredo Silberstern from Furzeburg.

  That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was stupid of me to make such a suggestion. The larceny of the skin pix would come to light, and the Director and his staff would be reprimanded for purloining piggish printed matter. The Custom’s Director’s scolding was anything but music to the ears of the Führer’s representative: how could he
, whom the Director had thus far considered to be a person of sterling qualities, stoop so low as to defend such trash?

  The Consul left the scene. He had suffered a defeat.

  I stayed on. I at least wanted to save the pigskin and calfskin bindings, as well as certain innocuous title pages. But I was shown the door. I left the scene. I had suffered a twofold defeat.

  My client wrung his hands when I reported the ineffectuality of my efforts on his behalf. I mentally estimated my legal fee at 100 pesetas, but Mr. Silberstern saw no reason to pay me. He never so much as asked what he might owe me for my consultative services.

  The auto-de-castidad took place in the Customs Office courtyard. Valuable first editions, a number of out-of-print volumes and pornographic rarities, but also such harmless books as Fuchs’ History of Morals and illustrated editions of Boccaccio—every last tome was put to the flames, including a monograph on the Oberammergau Passion Play, illustrated Bibles, plus a textbook of gynecology. My client observed the immolation of his hobby through a knothole in the fence. He figured his loss at 25,000 marks.

  My friend Mulet from the tertulia, who had a close acquaintance at the Customs warehouse, observed the execution of the books as a representative of the intellectual segment of Mallorquin society. He took a handful of the ashes home with him in a little cloth bag. One charred page still showed a fragment of naked flesh, but not even the horniest Spanish lecher could have established with certainty where, within the framework of the entire human anatomy, this particular view of unadorned epidermis had originally exerted its stimulating effect. But he consoled me with the revelation that not a single full- or half-page illustration had been lost. He himself had observed how, previous to the burnt offering, everything of value had been carefully removed from the volumes, so that the Customs Director was now without doubt the owner of the best collection of visual erotica in all of the Balearics. He was, after all, an old connoisseur… “And not only on paper!” came a shout from the back room, where the tertulia was in session.

  The most faithful customer at the German Bookshop had the alert, beady eyes of a dog in heat, and he had a long, black beard. His hairy garment was held together by a rough piece of rope. He was as poor as the mendicant order to which he had dedicated his life.

  This monk was a subscriber to certain Parisian journals which displayed a great deal of unclothed flesh. He arrived at the shop several times a week to inquire whether his orders had arrived. If they were on hand, hidden behind the counter, he snuck briefly into the backroom, the one we already know about as the venue for erotic adventures in natura. He always paid his bill promptly. Acting from pure Christian brotherly charity, little Mr. Hasenbank allowed him a discount for needy clergymen. But when the heavy-set and very wealthy co-owner of the shop offered this destitute man of the cloth a shiny duro and a particular street address, Pater Pachomio declined in the Name of the Lord. A bordello was a den of iniquity, he explained, and he wouldn’t think of entering one. But as for a cloistered brother taking occasional peeks into illustrated magazines, the Good Lord would not think it amiss. Besides, he regularly confessed to a confrater, a colleague who suffered from the same urges and who, incidentally, shared the price of their Parisian magazine subscription.

  I presented Mona Lisa’s second visage to this mendicant fellow, who was living under an eternal vow of chastity. He blessed me right in the middle of the shop, before the eyes of all three of the German booksellers. Of all the thousands of people who have tried to decipher La Gioconda’s smile, it is solely Pater Pachomio who will have figured it out in the privacy of his cell.

  XVII

  Heil Hitler!” “Good morning.”

  The German Consul had summoned me to ask a few questions.

  “You wish?”

  “Do you have certain enemies back in your home town?” The Consul had put on his official face, one that always failed to impress me. He shuffled papers in the officious manner, and this too left me cold. The time was past when I felt the urge to flee the presence of a bureaucratic jackass. “Yes,” I replied, “I’m surrounded by enemies.”

  “Can you name the persons who wish to do you harm, and their reasons? It’s important.”

  “You bet I can, Herr Konsul. But it will take time for me to list all of them. You can start taking notes: my enemies are the gravedigger and all his minions, each and every hick and bugger and whoremaster, all women typists, all clergymen of whatever shade of belief or disbelief, all greengrocers and all salesgirls, cobblers, tailors, sextons and pharmacists, the madam at an exclusive brothel and her staff, the mayor, the director of rubbish collection …”

  “Don’t joke around with me. What are you getting at? Answer my questions! I am asking you in my official capacity.”

  “But that’s it exactly! Let’s see, where was I? Ah yes, the garbage men, the town accountant, the dairymen and the alpine herdsmen, all tax assessors, tax collectors, and tax embezzlers, all children with the exception of…”

  The Consul objected angrily to my ridicule of the Reich. I was guilty, he now said, of slandering the Führer on German soil, since his office was sovereign territory. I knew this already. Then I was informed that my father had been detained by Party operatives for the purpose of quizzing him about his degenerate son. If I persisted in sending my relatives slanderous letters about the Führer, the Party would find it necessary to take retaliatory measures against the life and limb of my family. I was to consider myself forewarned.

  “Herr Konsul, are you telling me that as a result of my complaints, which I do not deny having made, my people will be put in harm’s way?”

  Apparently this was exactly the case. The Third Reich was a merciless place, and my name was on the list of persons harmful to the state. The authorities in my home town had already recommended my elimination. “Do you understand?”

  This Consul, prior to his swift decline an unassuming, polite, well-bred and friendly German on foreign soil, had by now turned into a true big-shot of the unfriendliest kind, every inch the uptight subaltern of the Nazi movement. As he rose from his chair, his scalp almost touched the frame of the Führer’s portrait behind his desk. I remained standing and said, “Herr Konsul, my family has flourished for centuries on the banks of the Niers. Our name Thelen can be traced back to earliest prehistoric times. In Middle High German our name was ‘Diuten,’ and among the Anglo-Saxons we were known as ‘Gédithan,’ ‘Thedoan,’ and ‘Thiudan,’ and some tribes called us by the name of ‘Thiudisk.’ In Old Norse we find an early branch of the family by the name of ‘Thiuda,’ which means ‘people,’ Old Irish ‘Tuat,’meaning ‘he who is at home on this land, who thrives on the land, who raises his family on the land, who owns the land.’ It also meant the same as ‘heathen.’ So at the beginning we were heathens, too, German heathens to boot, the kind that Nietzsche relates to the idea of täuschen: deceptive types, dissimulators, charlatans. What it comes down to is this, if you will permit me: ‘Thelen’ is a synonym for ‘German.’ To this day, as you know, the Italians still call us ‘tedeschi,’ which is to say, ‘Thelens.’ And here’s something you may not know: we have connections far over into Portugal, where the bloodthirsty Doña Leonor Telles murdered her way into the queenship”.

  “This brief plunge into the murky swamps of ancient history is simply meant to show you that I have a very long pedigree. Although I must admit that, with the exception of the questionable Gothic King Theudis, the tribe of the Thelens has not brought forth the kind of heroes that bards and minstrels keep singing about after all these centuries. But along comes Adolf Hitler, who is giving us benighted latecomers our great moment. My relatives love the Führer. They’ve written to me about this. They will be delighted if they can give their lives for him and his cause. They’ve written that, too. My mother includes the new Savior in her prayers. If there is anything I can do to see to it that my loved ones back home may fulfill their patriotic wish to become fertilizer for the soil of the fatherland—then, Her
r Konsul, I am not so perverse as to deny this to them! I am the black sheep of the family, and now, as I refuse with all my might to put on the color brown, for them I have become blacker still. The people in my home town are ashamed of me. You may report to the local authorities up there that I’m in agreement with their plan. Right away I shall send my father a letter with the same message. Would you like a copy for your files? So then—Guten Morgen!”

  “Heil Hitler!”

  As I exited, the Consul called after me, “The day after tomorrow the Monte Rosa is arriving with 2000 tourists. So I’ll need you again. You’re my best Führer!”

  “Thank you for the superlative compliment. I’ll be out there at the pier, right on time. And once again: Guten Morgen!”

  “Guten Morgen!”

  A few chapters back I startled Beatrice with Captain von Martersteig’s query as to whether she had heard the latest news. She hadn’t, and so I told her that Hitler’s Third Reich had just begun its thousand-year history, and that heads were rolling, just as the Führer had promised the German people. Beatrice, whose fascination with history extends even to the kind that gets written against the grain, asked me this rather startling question in return: “Well now, I’m curious as to how your folks are taking all this. Are they going along with it?”