The heat underneath the glistening wings of the bird Inculuculo was becoming African in intensity. What was Beatrice saying? Kessler? And: Count? “Open, Unkulunkulu!” But the god wouldn’t move. “Get a move on! But is somebody else here?” I yanked the curtain strings and said, more for myself than for Beatrice, “Hmm…, Kessler and Count—that’s something you can only find on Mallorca. A ‘Kessler’ is either a professional tinker, a ‘kettle man,’ or he’s a Protestant reformer. If it’s the latter, then he’s a religious gangster, and we’d better be on our guard. And a ‘Count’? That’s the least that anybody can be on this island, and nobody will doubt you. But what about me, chérie? Look out, I am Unkulunkulu, and it’s only the Kaffirs who believe in me! Watch, just one bang on my drum here, and you’ll see! Damn it all, the spring is stuck, the curtain won’t go up! I swear on your millipede-in-amber that it was working just a minute ago. If you had arrived one second sooner, porra! It would have gone without a hitch!”
Profound silence. Was Beatrice still in the room? Was I hallucinating? Was I, without my knowing it, a Vatzua, under the spell of the bird Culuculo that personified the forest divinity? We didn’t have any pots and pans for some tinker to work on; we did our cooking in tin cans, and… Damn you, Unkulunkulu, if you refuse to go up now…
I couldn’t budge the spring. “Beatrice, be patient for just a minute, and it will work like a top hat—assuming that I owned one… And now…”
I pulled up the curtain from below. “Beatrice, uh…” And I was thunderstruck. Next to Beatrice stood a gentleman—tall, slim, somewhat bent over, with blond hair mixed with grey, faint blue veins in his sagging cheeks, and holding a cardboard folder and a panama hat— but wait, what I’ve just written is pure fiction. All I could see was the outlines of a human figure, one that was standing petrified and staring at the naked white deity who suddenly appeared below the curtain, and who just as suddenly went back out of sight behind the rapidly descending cloth. I wrapped the stupid Unkulunkulu around me like a toga and staggered away, like some rainmaker taken unawares by a cloudburst. Was that laughter that I heard behind me? I threw Unkulunkulu on our bed, and there he lay, one piece of junk on top of another, an object now denuded of its grandeur and practicality, having once again become a god of the jungle whose worship nobody can witness. As for myself, the blaspheming skeptic, I quickly got dressed. My skull was about to burst. Kessler? This can’t be Nietzsche’s friend from Weimar! That’s ridiculous! The founder of the distinguished Cranach Press in Weimar? Nonsense! Germany’s last patron of the arts? And wasn’t there a book by him on Walther Rathenau? Concealing the naked savage beneath my Mallorquin denim suit, I emerged into our bible-paper room and stood across from a fellow in—a simple middle-class Mallorquin denim suit. Was this the democratic camouflage of a man who was once close to the powers-that-be in the German Reich?
“This is Count Kessler from Weimar,” said Beatrice. “He would like to have something translated into Spanish.”
“I beg a thousand pardons,” our visitor said, “for bursting in on you like this, Herr Thälmann! Your wife has explained everything. Do you think it might be possible? I’m rather in a hurry.”
Thälmann? What’s this all about? Just who am I, anyway? For years I’ve been Vigoleis, Don Vigo. As “Thelen” I appear only in the thermal bath of my dreams, and just a minute ago I was some degenerate oaf with the pale skin of occidental technology, metamorphosed beneath our Unkulunku into the supreme divinity of the Kaffirs. And now I’ve been transmogrified or bewitched into Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party, Hitler’s number-one enemy? I bowed, and gave the gentleman my real name. But of course, he said, that was of course my name, a thousand pardons, that’s the name here on this piece of paper, how embarrassing.
Beatrice, misinterpreting my own embarrassment, went on by way of explanation: “You know, the Josephslegende ballet with Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, and…”
“Oh, yes,” I interrupted her bibliographical prompting. “And the Notes on Mexico that you’ve had for years on your list of books to buy.” Turning to Kessler, I said, “Second edition sold out, right? You see, your reputation has preceded you into this scrubbiest of domiciles. But at the moment all we’re reading is Iberian mystics and detective novels.”
“This tells me that you have a remarkable gift for adaptation, and I’m envious. Especially in this day and age, when all of us are being forced to adapt.”
Not one word about Unkulunkulu, the kettle-maker’s profession, the gangster/ church reformer, or nudism! The person standing here in our presence wearing cheap homespun represented the grand monde; he was a grandseigneur who harbored within his person the cultures of three fatherlands, nurturing them to sophisticated perfection in a manner that is rare in German climes. His garb was, to be sure, somewhat soiled and worn—it was obvious that he had been unable to bring his valet along with him into exile—but it was distinctive nonetheless. True Mallorquins used their picturesque sashes as trouser belts. But like a bullfighter, Count Kessler had pulled up a pair of cotton underpants that reached above his belly button, and folded them into a roll. At first I thought this might be a nautical life preserver—not a bad invention for a diplomat fleeing his country. The Count’s hands were particularly attractive, the kind of hands that even good writers often refer to as “spiritual.” It was inevitable that they should look this way, for who if not the fastidious intellectual Count Kessler could ever have such beautiful hands? At any rate, Count Hermann Keyserling’s hands were very different, which is why Goebbels had such huge respect for them.
This first encounter with Count Harry Kessler was so bizarre that while committing my Vigoleisian jottings to paper, more than once I’ve asked Beatrice whether my dream life hasn’t been playing odd tricks with reality, causing me to produce here what sensitive readers would call “sheer fiction.” Not a bit of it. She’s sorry, but when she introduced me to Kessler I was actually standing under Unkulunkulu. But she then adds that the contents of the amber handle was a common, ordinary insect. My “millipede” was make-believe.
“Maybe so, but it’s one I don’t want to give up. I need it for that Child of the Eocene, and I need the child in order to prove that prehistoric man was governed by bestial instincts, and that therefore the ovens of Auschwitz, concentration camps, and atom bombs aren’t to be understood, as they sometimes are, as monstrous products of our Christian civilization.”
Count Kessler presented his request. As we were perhaps aware, he had fled from Germany, going first to his sister in Paris, a place where he had been a regular visitor, working in well-known circles as an advocate for international understanding. Then he decided on Mallorca as the place to settle in exile; Catalan friends, or perhaps it was Keyserling, had made this recommendation. Later we made the acquaintance of Kessler’s sister, a plain woman whom I at first took for the Count’s messenger or domestic help. My intercourse with Spaniards, and in particular my friendship with the noble Sureda family, had once and for all made me ignore any and all barriers between classes of people. I regarded any shoe-shine boy as a king, and any king as a beggar. In school I had never grasped the simple rule whereby two quantities can equal a third quantity, even when equal to themselves. This I didn’t begin to understand until I was confronted by Spanish quantities. All beings born upon this earth, I thought, are situated on the same level of humanity, a level that, as I learned in the meantime, is not so very lofty after all. That is how I avoided committing a faux pas with Kessler’s sister, the Marquise de Brion, who idolized her brother and who, with all the sacrifices that she made for him, cannot be ignored in any consideration of Kessler’s life’s work. Now he was a guest on this island, one emigré among so many. He explained that he was living in a house in Bonanova, just outside Palma on the road leading to Génova.
I told the Count that I was not an emigré in the strictly political sense of the word, since I had left the fatherland well before the official de
-braining of the country. But I explained further that you would never find me inside the Führer’s deep-sea diving bell. Kessler looked over at Beatrice and murmured something like “naturellement.” I said to myself, hmm… This experienced diplomat may be thinking that Beatrice is Jewish, and that this might be the reason why we didn’t want the rest of the Jews to perish. So we had to clarify matters, which we quickly did by citing a few facts concerning Beatrice’s Swiss ‘ck-ck-dt’ family history, as well as the fossil Inca prince who played Indian tricks with Beatrice’s bloodline. Whereupon we learned to our surprise that Kessler considered it possible that back in Berlin he had once met Beatrice’s father, the patristic scholar who, to the consternation of the Basel ck-dt’s, had been a pupil of Professor Harnack. “Adolf von Harnack and Kaiser Wilhelm—naturellement,” said Count Kessler. I remained silent because I wasn’t sure what was so “natural” about this pairing of names. Later, Beatrice cleared things up for me: “Gott mit uns!”
The old diplomat and utopian man of international peace expressed admiration for my equations: Heil Hitler! = May Judah Perish, May Judah Perish = Crime, ergo whoever says “Heil Hitler!” is a criminal. He said that if all Germans could see things so clearly, Hitler would long since be in an asylum. “Exactly,” I replied, “but now it’s us who are in the asylum.” What I meant by this was the island of Mallorca, but I kept an embarrassed silence under the gaze of this guest of ours, who hardly five minutes before had found me standing in embarrassing circumstances under the Unkulunkulu.
The Nazis had charged Count Kessler with tax evasion. Since they were no longer in a position to hang him, they at least wanted to grab his fortune using legal means. He was accused of selling a painting from his collection—was it a Renoir? I can no longer remember—for a million, and reporting the sale for a much smaller sum. His German lawyer had asked him to make out a sworn statement in the presence of a Spanish notary, but this wasn’t possible given the linguistic deficiencies on both sides. Kessler spoke just a few words of Spanish, and the notary understood nothing but Spanish, not even Latin. The Count had obtained my address from Zwingli; Keyserling had recommended the Hotel Príncipe to him. I bowed and said that he had come to just the right man, but would he kindly call me Thelen and not Thälmann. And I explained that Beatrice was Zwingli’s a.k.a. Don Helvecio’s sister.
Count Kessler looked a bit startled, but he took the documents out of his folder for us to translate on the spot into Spanish. It was the first time I had ever observed a diplomat at work. In this case, the work was admittedly in his own personal interest, but with a man like Kessler there will not have been much difference between a formal state conference in tie and tails and an attempt to prevent extortion while wearing a Mallorquin canvas suit.
He asked how much he owed us. I mentioned a price reserved for needy emigrés, but he would hear nothing of that. All of us were poor, he said, and he went on to say that I was no doubt poorer than he was, since he was still receiving a monthly check. I replied that he was probably right, but that as soon as my Unkulunkulu went on the market, I would be a rich man, and then it would be an honor for me to take him in under my umbrella. At this the Count laughed out loud. His final thoughts must have concerned the strange detours one is forced to take when in exile.
Scarcely had our door closed behind Kessler when I said to Beatrice, “See? Unkulunkulu performed his black magic. Just when I wanted to raise up the curtain, he tangled up the strings. But now the Count will be thinking that he’s come out of the frying pan into the fire. Was he standing in our doorway? I was so excited that I overheard the bell ringing. And now the whole contraption is lying off in that corner over there!”
Beatrice had met this gentleman on the Apuntadores, just as she was emerging from Angelita’s store. In broken Spanish he told her he was looking for General Barceló Street, and Beatrice, replying in French, said that she was headed that way, just a few steps. What number was he looking for? 23? “Mais, comme c’est drôle,” said Beatrice, adding that they could walk there together. Arriving at the house, they discovered that they both were headed for the second floor, but Beatrice told him that he wouldn’t find up there the man named Thälmann he was looking for, but rather me. One glance at his notes gave him the assurance that I was exactly the person he had been told to consult. In his confusion he began to speak with a mild stutter. Then came the weird scene with the umbrella. Beatrice had almost fainted with embarrassment: there I stood, buck naked underneath that stupid contraption. The gentleman had seen it all, and he would surely have run away if he could have. He just stood there like some primitive idol—an image that amused me no end: a god and an idol together in our miserable hovel, staring bug-eyed at each other. I asked Beatrice if she had recognized him right away. Yes, she said, but meeting him on the street was a mere coincidence. On her way home she had learned at the German Shop that Count Harry Kessler had been living on the island for quite a while. So the man she met could only be him.
Beatrice, who has made a hobby of politics, had read Kessler’s biography of Rathenau. And since, for her, music was an even more impassioned hobby, she was also familiar with the Strauss-Kessler ballet Die Josephslegende. All I knew about the man was his reputation for versatility. I hadn’t read a word of his writings, and now I would probably never see him again, never again touch the hand that closed Nietzsche’s eyelids. But hold on!—I didn’t know this at the time. Kessler told us about it much later.
On this historic day I did no more work on my Unkulunkulu invention. The grandest product of my creative ambitions now lay in a corner of our sala immaculata, tangled up and shorn of all its glory. Had Vigoleis too, its last worshiping Kaffir, lost his faith? Not quite. It was my firm intention to start fiddling with it again the very next day. But the very next day, Count Harry Kessler returned with a thousand apologies and asked me if I would be willing to be his amanuensis.
Whenever Beatrice left the house on errands, she never took with her our large-sized apartment key. We arranged a bell-ringing signal, and I would open our door in whatever get-up I happened to be wearing—which very frequently was my Adamic costume. When the temperature reached 100 degrees that was invariably the case.
I heard the agreed-upon signal, ran to the door, opened it, and had to acknowledge two things at once: that I was as naked as a jaybird, and that I was not a born nudist. The old Berlin rooftop-nudologist Richard Ungewitter, the author of several treatises on the unclothed human body, would have stood right there at our entrance in all his bearded dignity and with the folds of skin that enveloped his torso like a toga, and received Count Kessler like any person in full formal attire. But I, with my Adamic inhibitions, took a powder and hid behind the door.
“A thousand pardons!” said Count Kessler, “Once again I’ve arrived at the wrong time. But please don’t be embarrassed, it doesn’t bother me a bit.”
“But it bothers me!” I took my raincoat from the hook and wrapped it around my nakedness. Unkulunkulu would have been a better camouflage. I was more than ashamed. But now our visitor, seeing me for a second time in all my earthbound divinity, immediately helped me overcome this moment of mortification. He pointed out the window to our sweltering back yard, where one of the pretty girls’ pet armadillos was lazily ambling along. I heard him say that he was enchanted with the way we lived here. From the outside one would never believe that in this house, on this street, there was a rear view of Paradise itself. “If it’s Paradise,” I cried out, “then my state of undress is excusable.”
The Third Reich, Count Kessler began, would last a very long time. Distinguished emigrés, among them Georg Bernhard, Leopold Schwarzschild, and whoever else, were underestimating Hitler and, even more so, the German people. Things would go on like this for years. Then would come a war, and finally a horrible end to it all. He explained that he was a pessimist, but amid his pessimism he had become an optimist, for he had started writing his memoirs. That is to say, he had begun sketching them out
a good deal earlier, but here on the island he intended to work on them full-time, no matter what was happening in his beloved Germany. With his life’s forward path now barred to him, he would start living backwards. And he hardly dared to inquire whether I would type out his manuscripts for him. Typing was, he knew, something frightful, a form of penal servitude. But—
I reassured him. Once again, I said, he had come to just the right man. I was now hardened by experience, since a few other writers had kept me at the machine for months. It had even been a pleasurable, exciting task to type out manuscripts for Robert Graves, although Laura Riding’s were generally boring. With Laura, you always knew what was coming next.
I began by copying out the first volume of Kessler’s memoirs. I suggested to him the same fee arrangement that I had made with Graves. He agreed, although the Englishman probably had an easier time coming up with money, since Harry Kessler—yes, Count Harry Kessler, this fascinating literary stylist, this master of the German language—had fastidious taste when it came to paper and to his personal scribe. He used small-format linen stock with a bluish tint, which he no doubt ordered through his sister in Paris, for no such luxury item was available in Palma, not even in the elegant Casa Mir. For his manuscripts he used German script, but preferred roman cursive for his correspondence. This was symbolic of the impressive artistic and intellectual division within his personality. In his letters he was a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan by reason of his lineage, his exquisite international education, his gift for learning and his wide-ranging travels, his career as a diplomat, his way of dealing with people who lend the world their special stamp, questionable as that may be, and through his relationship with the world of Antiquity (he read Latin and Greek authors in the original, better than others are able to read in their own tongue). He was a man who stood above other men and above any and all fatherlands.
The Island of Second Sight Page 94
