Thälmann hadn’t been around our house for quite a while. My first visage had completely repressed him, and Kessler had no idea at all about my second visage, or rather, he had only got a glimpse of it when it was overshadowed by Unkulunkulu. But now, all of a sudden, the notorious “red sub-human” Thälmann reappeared, and I was frightened. For as comfortably as I was wont to play my role as Vigoleis, what was I to do with the “arch-egalitarian” inside me? I would try my best to limit the spread of this Kesslerian rash to the less sensitive parts of my body.
Kessler’s Spanish housemaid came by at an unusually late hour, bearing a second letter. It was urgent, she said; the Señor Conde had returned home in great excitement, and she would wait for our reply. I broke open the envelope and, now addressed as “Dear friend,” I learned that the undersigned knew very well that I was not named “Thälmann” and that I wasn’t Thälmann himself, but that the undersigned could not remember my true name. All this, he went on, was extraordinarily embarrassing for him—begging a thousand pardons—and one day he would explain everything. His servante would wait to receive my kind reply.
By this time of day I knew that a protest demonstration had taken place in Palma. There had been some violence, and the rally had ended in the usual fashion with arrests. A handful of gunpowder-filled bones, Don Pablo Enorme told us, prepared for the occasion by Ulua, failed to go off because the bone-tossers were too involved in political discussions at some café or other.
I own, or I should say I once owned, several letters from Kessler in which I am called Thälmann, as well as several others in which he retracts my anarchistic anabaptism, substituting my true name, the one from which I had long since de-baptized myself, for the crossword puzzle that my person often presented to him. He never did offer the explanation promised in his night-time express letter. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the truth, this time from another Count whose acquaintance we made during our Swiss exile, in the town of Auressio that I have already mentioned in these jottings. It was Count Werner von der Schulenburg, who lived a few hundred meters above us and the rest of the world in his wonderful writer’s domicile named La Monda (later the hermitage of the Dutch poet Marsman). He was reduced to a refugee’s diet, sans German shepherd and sans direct outside contacts, but in the company of his wife Marianne from Düsseldorf who, while she was much too classy to do the proverbial city-street cartwheels, was likewise the object of my admiration. During the Röhm Purge of 1933 the Count was scheduled to be made a head shorter. But, old conspirator and condottiere that he was, a type that not even crafty Nazi huntsmen could drive out of the thicket of his political intrigues, he now sat up there on the hill in his overalls and was writing comedies for the stage. As good Germans we at first avoided each other, each suspecting the other as a spy carrying a concealed dagger and in league with the dreaded Consul in Lugano, Captain Rausch.
But then one Easter Sunday—the Risen Lord was making the rounds of the houses with a blessing for each and every one—we both realized how ridiculous this situation was. There were but seventy hearths in the village. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody knew whether anybody else had ever murdered someone (in the Onsernone Valley the traditional vendetta was still a local custom). Each evening Schulenburg and I stood together down at the roadway waiting for Mella, the postman, sexton, gravedigger, miner, and discreet purveyor of gossip in one and the same well-groomed person, to distribute the mail. Then, keeping a mistrustful distance, we would climb the stone steps that were carved out of the ledge and kept slippery by the local cattle, up to the village.
Things just can’t go on like this, I thought to myself. I sent the Squire of La Monda my just-published German translation of Pascoaes’ St. Paul. The delivery was put in the hands of Emma, the aristocratic couple’s maid, a calm and reliable child with the blank gaze of a grazing cow and a heart of gold that belied the character of her father, the most feared tyrant in the valley. An hour later His Royal-Imperial Excellency appeared in his heavy loden cape and hunting cap, every inch of him an indication that my T’uang theory was dubious, and that the Almanach de Gotha does contain a few pearls after all. To put it briefly, not even Martersteig’s snippety old maids, who grumbled so fiercely against the Tscharners, would have anything to criticize about our visitor, except perhaps his sparse growth of hair and his wife Marianne.
Marianne was an actress, and she was Catholic. She embodied the proverbial radiant glow in the lowly cottage. But how had she entered Count von der Schulenburg’s life? Quite simply: this Count, flexible as he was in all situations, had lowered himself to let her in. He now introduced himself with all his titles—academic, heraldic, genealogical, and literary: Schiller Prize, Goethe Medal, most frequently produced playwright, Senator of the Halcyon Academy. The best I could do to match these honorifics was to present myself just simply as Vigoleis with a V as in Vespucci but lacking the renown of that city, a name that Beatrice’s ck-dt relatives in Basel were reluctant to accept since it intruded on their prerogatives. In any case, Count von der Schulenburg instantly ignored me and turned his attention to Beatrice. He insisted on having met her before—but where? Two such well-traveled individuals might have crossed paths in many places in the world. “In South America, by any chance?” our blue-blood guest suggested. Yes, said Beatrice, that’s where she spent part of her childhood—but then she retreated into her Inca fortress. The Count went on guessing where the two of them could possibly have met, while I remained for him just so much air. It was established that they actually did know each other, but that the how, the where, and the when would only emerge with time. But wait, I thought: in cases of doubt, let truth be told, and so I had to take action. I went to our bookcase, took out our Jacob Burckhardt, and opened a volume containing a youthful photograph of Basel’s most famous sainted scholar. I showed the picture to His Royal-Imperial Excellency, about whom I knew that he had written a biography of the younger Jacob Burckhardt. “This is where you had your first mysterious encounter with Donna Beatrice from the House of ck-dt!” It is a fact that the young Burckhardt looks just like Beatrice.
A citizen of Basel would have countered my exclamation with “Däwäg!” Count Werner von der Schulenburg… but to continue would take us too far afield. By the time he left us after three hours, we realized not only that he had drunk the last of our wine, eaten the last of our salami, and destroyed all our hopes for a quick downfall of the Nazis, but also that our list of encounters with remarkable personalities had grown by two. There developed a see-saw traffic between the meager hut of the struggling writer and the lofty residence of the great one. In fact, many things developed. I told the Schulenburgs about my Spanish adventures, I unplugged the Count’s bathtub drain in La Monda, told tales of the priest in the neighboring village—which led me to add some whoremongering stories from Mallorca. “It’s amazing how you do that!” said the Count—and for displaying my talents I was rewarded with Valpolicella and roast goat or, most delectable of all, Onsernone fox. Since one cannot go on forever about porras and putas even when the subject is Spain, I told him that I had been Harry Kessler’s scribe and what one might call his last secretary, adding some highlights from Kessler’s workshop of world history. In the process I also regaled Schulenburg with the story of my third visage, the one that I had worn on the island, albeit only briefly: Thälmann.
Count von der Schulenburg’s gaze darkened, while retaining its aspect of firmness; it was a convincing and almost fear-inspiring glance of the kind that only an ages-old aristocratic family could bring forth. “What?!” he cried. “Do you mean to say that you did all of these things, and yet now that you’re almost starving you’ve never put them to your advantage, you’ve never written a book or even a brochure about the final years of the self-styled Count Harry Kessler from the house of…? You fool, you dimwit, you dunderhead, you!”
“Er—how’s that again? Did you say self-styled? And from the house of…?”
“From th
e Principality of Reuss! It’s an old story: illegitimate son. Not very complicated, either. Other people have had a harder time getting their noble titles.” I’m quoting exactly what Schulenburg told me, only he presented the story in wittier fashion and with greater precision, without mixing up the Reuss dynasty’s elder and cadet branches. I recalled having heard similar gossip on Mallorca concerning my employer’s sinister bastard blood, rumors that were outdone only by others having to do with his beloved sister, who was said to be the natural daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Kessler would never have written such a grass-roots correction of Gotha into his memoirs. But permit me to ask my curious reader: doesn’t a nightingale have the right to sing a song that the sparrows are already chirping from all the rooftops? Captain von Martersteig, for example, was just such a blatherskite. I believed his very word, all the more willingly, considering that I was myself switched as a baby and then taken for someone I wasn’t at all. Confusions of this kind can happen even in the loftiest regions of society, starting with the Imperial pilarière and extending to princely and ducal bedrooms or the estate stables. I myself, a person possessing no family tree but only a horoscope whose aberrations apply equally to someone else, have never taken such matters very seriously. Cadet Branch or Elder Branch—parthenogenesis happens with crabs and little worms, as well as in stories told by wet nurses.
But what Count von der Schulenburg, a man who sat firmly in the saddle of any and all genealogical discussions, went on to say about that other mystification, my friend Count Kessler’s fixation on Thälmann, knocked me for a loop, for his explanation entered the realm of psychoanalysis. Harry Graf Kessler, he said, had once stood on the barricades in Weimar in 1919, wearing a red shirt. And Schulenburg asked me to guess who had stood next to him defending the fatherland. I thought for a while; I was always lousy in history, and so I wasn’t able to get beyond Rosa Luxemburg. But Beatrice chimed in right away: “Thälmann!” It was him. The rest of the story played itself out according to the laws of subconscious repression. On Mallorca, the phonic similarity of the names Thälmann and Thelen had caused the red-shirted agitator to resurface—surely I understood, said Schulenburg. Hadn’t I studied psychology?
Indeed this was a persuasive explanation, even for someone who doesn’t believe in such eruptions of marsh gas from the depths of the human soul.
Kessler’s close friend, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, who played such a significant role during his Weimar years and whom I met during the writing of this book in connection with the disappearance of Kessler’s posthumous papers, was a modern Pantagruel,. ninety years of age, dressed in a cleverly designed zippered suit he had invented as a final transcendence of Jugendstil, he almost persuaded me to join him on the carousel at the church fair in Zug. Professor van de Velde, too, found the Thälmann story captivating, but he doubted that Harry had ever stood on a barricade anywhere. He couldn’t recall any such thing, and it was he who ought to know about such things. As for myself, I don’t consider it odd that a Red Count would lend a hand at a street blockade. A red shirt would have fit him just as nicely as those Mallorquin canvas duds. Professor van de Velde was gathering material for his own account of his friend’s final years, and when I told him that Kessler wrote parts of his memoirs in the Alhambra or any of the thousand other cafés in Palma, the old Kessler connoisseur said that it had never been Harry’s custom to hang around and write in cafés. If I hadn’t been working on a delicious rack of lamb at the moment, I would have replied that no matter how firmly rooted in his own personality a man might be, he could still be easily shaken into oddball behavior by two types of situations: marriage and exile.
Count Harry Kessler was a bachelor, but he didn’t escape the experience of exile.
But now Harry Kessler was said to be a gorgeous late blossom on the venerable Reuss family tree, blooming forth above peoples and fatherlands? And why not? Nothing is impossible in this world, and anthropology and genealogy have no doubt had to solve some even more vexing riddles involving love children. As long as human reproduction doesn’t take place in numbered copulation sacs as with the silkworm Bombyx mori, official family trees should be banished into the realm of superstition. Still, I would be the last to deny that a Mr. Jones Jr. is in most cases the bona fide offspring of a Mr. Jones Sr.
Harry Kessler was one of the most polite persons I have ever met. But was his politeness a consequence of his elite education? Was he a man of the world because he was a child of the aristocratic court? When he was about to take his shoes off so as not to dirty up our apartment—was he fulfilling Beatrice’s secret wishes because he knew that we couldn’t afford a housemaid? Or can this be explained, rather, as a manifestation of genetic impulses that formed his character? The science of eugenics is still in its cradle; in 1933 no less a personage than Eugen Fischer proved this to be the case. No one can have much confidence in its findings, perhaps none at all. Things have become a little clearer with the research of Szondi, the Hungarian scholar working in the field of human destiny, and his theory of unconscious drives that lurk within a family. Be that as it may, it makes me wonder when I read a certain passage in the memoirs of the church reformer Johannes Kessler, a passage that his dubious descendant Harry quotes in fragmentary fashion. It’s where the young theology student Johannes K. tells of entering the Black Bear Inn in Jena with his travel companion. Sitting there comfortably and eating a hearty meal next to them was none other than Martin Luther. The innkeeper, a jovial fellow, encouraged the young scholars—“Come right in, gentlemen!” But Johannes Kessler, a child of humble origins who had just recently abandoned an apprenticeship in saddlery for the study of theology, felt embarrassed because he was wearing muddy shoes. Whereupon he performed the same act for his new religious idol that, four centuries later, Harry, the child of ennobled parents, would repeat on General Barceló Street: he started taking off his footwear. “For our shoes were (Johannes K. continues), if the reader will permit me to say so, so shamefully covered with mud and dirt that we could not simply enter the establishment. Thus we crept behind a door and sat down on a little bench…”
Harry hadn’t crept over to a bench, for the simple reason that Vigoleis, the proprietor at the General Barceló Inn in Palma de Mallorca, didn’t own a bench for his entrada.
XIX
Reticence is a conspicuous and frequently humbling trait of Vigoleis—humbling for his own person, of course. A shy person is convinced by instinct and experience that humans are often all-too-human to other humans, and this insight has the effect of restricting his behavior in the presence of others. Having had his fingers and his tongue slapped as a little kid by godforsaken schoolmasters and by even more hopelessly godforsaken priests, just for having raised a few impertinent questions about basic matters, having been sent into the corner, into the darkness, where he learned to answer these questions by himself and achieve his own salvation in the process, he finds that he has the pusillanimity of his educators to thank for the smidgen of floating earth he now occupies in comfort and safe-keeping, though he remains constantly worried that his little island could someday simply melt away beneath the soles of his feet. This explains his penchant for metaphysics. “Oh,” Nietzsche says, “if only someone could narrate the history of that exquisite feeling called loneliness!” Right here, dear reader, an attempt is being made in just that direction: a lonely Vigoleis among his friends on Mallorca, where he practiced reticence in the company of those friends, but not with his enemies. But after all, the Nazis were not humans. They placed themselves above humanity, thereby becoming bestial. That’s what we had to watch out for.
Don Matías was my friend. We were one heart and one soul, and together we shared in divine concord the flour sacks at Jaume’s bakery, thus transforming them into much more than the background and basic ingredient for the daily bread and Sunday ensaimada of our ongoing Spanish tertulia. We shook hands warmly and clapped the flour dust from each other’s shoulders until no dust was left. But we nev
er kissed each other—that kind of activity we left to the ardent members of the famous 18th-century Göttingen Poets’ League back in Germany, whose antics were the subject of many of the stories I told Matías. We Brothers of the Flour Sacks loved freedom more than we loved each other. This was a satisfying type of bond, one that could hold its own against any other, and one whose third member was still Don Gracias a Dios, “Mr. Thank God,” who in increasingly fervent ballads, and with increasingly copious shedding of tears, kept on lauding the goal of freedom for his Honduran pampas.
All of this took place one bread-shopping day after another, over the course of many such visits to the bakery. Then one day I noticed how Don Matías, after glancing straight at me, suddenly looked right through my eyes and off into the void behind me. This was a kind of ominous ocular legerdemain I had experienced a few times before, in particular in the presence of poets who were entering a state of inspirational bliss. Don Matías was also a poet, one who at times dealt with the ineffable, but I had never seen him go into a trance. He was, after all, an Iberian, and as such predestined not only to have moments of mystical afflatus, but to write about them too, as if they were the most natural thing in the world—just like Santa Teresa. Was his brother-in-law involved in an affair? And if so, was the lady going to enter his orphaned conjugal bed and, by the same token, fill the vacancy behind the bakery counter? Would Don Matías have to start teaching class again?
The Island of Second Sight Page 96
