A few days later he was just where the Nazis wanted him. “Suicide,” the police declared. But they weren’t really convinced of this, and began snooping around, since not only the foreigner’s life, but also his money was missing. It wasn’t long before they detected in this affair the heady fragrance of Eva’s sweat. They decided to conduct a fully-clothed investigation of this naked item of Teutonic public relations, and they soon discovered that a woman can conceal an abundance of charms within her own wardrobe. Having duly inspected and disinfected her green puff, the bailiffs said, “All right, get dressed, we’re taking you downtown!” Dressed or not, she was surrounded. The officers of the famous Spanish Civil Guard never cracked a smile, not even when they took her on board ship. Two more officers appeared at the quay in Barcelona. Again there were no smiles, and this is how it went through the various stages of the journey. Up in France, Eva again got the chance to display her puff on behalf of the Führer. The Spaniards were delighted to be rid of a spy and poisoner.
“Eva” was her nom d’artiste, her Second Aspect. Her green powder puff was an ineffectual disguise for her primary occupation, which consisted in ecstatic moaning and groaning underneath the almocrebes and picadores at the “Clock Tower.” “My goodness, these guys are good!” she used to say. “If my husband ever found me here…!”
In keeping with her policy of patriotic lubricity, her husband never got to see her practicing the horizontal profession at the Clock Tower or at the tasco cantante. Her husband stayed on in Essen. Over time, his nervous breakdowns gave way to a total recovery of sheer nerve, which he placed in the service of the fatherland. His personal motto: Guns, not butter.
Oh, my beloved Kathrinchen! How I would love to have shared just once the secret confines of your pilarière, just once touched your green spot!
“You mean her brown spot, don’t you?” Mamú said. “But you never would have done it.”
Mamú was right. This Frau Doktor worked shamelessly for the Führer.
The very first time Don Matías attended one of Eva’s nude dances, his heart was sold. Likewise Don Thank God, for whom the green puff became a blind spot in his character, which tended toward enthusiasm to the point of patriotic enfeeblement. Fate, once again in the shape of an Eve in full heat, had seized hold of these two fellows, so much so that they put their own fiancées out of heart and mind. For them, the world revolved around the first female homo sapiens. Don Matías was her chosen partner. His lame leg gave him certain advantages behind the curtain. “Thank God” would stoop down in front of this curtain and start suffering. In his mind’s eye, he saw his friend Don Matías just as I myself see him, with bloodshot eyes and with his bum leg drawn up part-way onto the pilarière where she is lying. His brows are aflame, his hands are steamy and moist, the better to leaf through Eva’s poetry manuscripts, the very texts that Don Matías was intending to translate and publish.
Would Vigoleis have reclined differently next to this verdant meadow? Would his temples have pulsed less feverishly? Would his hands have been less moist as he turned the pages of her scrapbook? His eyes, too, would have leapt from their sockets, and he too would not have noticed that he was being spied upon. Like Don Matías, he would have unpacked in every detail his dealings with the traitor Don Vigo from the General’s Street, the guy who just happened to be Count Harry Kessler’s secretary. Nobody who sees red when he sees green would have been aware that this lady in the shimmering white skin was entering all this information in a separate scrapbook. Like Don Matías, I would have been thinking: my God, during intermission she writes poetry! She’s a naked, unblemished instrument of Eternity!
When I again met up with the two thwarted suitors on the Plaza Atarazanas, they were purging their sorrow with milk of magnesia. On the previous evening, Eva had been deported to Barcelona. When Don Matías limped behind the Spanish screen, her pilarière was empty. The blind bard was strumming his lyre, the deaf tenor was singing his gargled flamenco. There was no audience at all, for nothing was left on the stage to focus on. Thus the musicians had plenty of time to rehearse; surely it would now be possible to harmonize the lyrics with the strumming of the guitar.
Don Matías gradually recuperated in the bakery from the damage to his heart perpetrated by the Führer’s blonde beast. Once again he returned to philosophy, insofar as it was obtainable on paper, to Honduran political topics, and to his Honduran fiancée. This woman, who did not possess any visible green powder puffs, was still busy embroidering the banner for the pronunciamiento. I eventually learned that Eva had quizzed her adoring acquaintance about my humble person. With a gesture of desperation he beat his brow, and said he had been a traitor. I salved his conscience by asserting that Kessler was fully able to take care of himself, and that as far as my own welfare was concerned, surely he was aware that I had no intention of keeping the sensational secret with which Eva surrounded herself. He must not forget, I told him, that I regarded Hitler as a gangster from the very first day of his regime, and that I had always acted accordingly. Furthermore, he mustn’t forget that as a student I had given a whole lot of attention to criminal psychology, next to theology the field that was my world and my underworld. It was only natural for the Nazis to think that someone who curses the Führer so openly must have some organization behind him. Who is he spying for? Goering? Goebbels? Hess? Any of the above, each of whom would love to see the others hanging on the gallows?
Intellectual feats of this kind, rather amazing for Vigoleis, actually saved our lives. On separate occasions I was able to play one criminal against another, in Spain, in Switzerland, and especially later in Portugal. That’s why the stupid Huns in my home town haven’t been able to bury me in one of their Stone Age sepulchers.
Don Matías was grateful. He shook my hand, and we looked each other squarely in the eye. His own eyes were aflame with memories of the Honduran savannahs, yet at times obscured by the insect swarms that the winds brought to the Mosquito Coast. But what was Don Matías seeing as he peered into my eyes, and through them into the bottom of my soul? Following one of our conversations about Germany’s decline, he told me that inside my pupils he could see the gigantic menhirs of the distant Nordic past—tombs of the Huns. I stopped him short: “Please, Don Matías, if you value our friendship—no Huns! No Huns, because the time when the cemeteries will be full to bursting with cadavers, as in your Espronceda, is already on the march. I can already hear the tramping of the rosy feet of the twilight of the idols.”
One week after Eva’s deportation from our island paradise, someone broke into our apartment.
XX
If the captain of the Ciudad de Palma wasn’t still swinging in his hammock pilarière below the bridge with his lover, a personage who without fail had an astatic effect on the compass needle (as was carefully explained to me by my battiest pupils, William and Charles Batty, compass adjusters for the British Fleet during the Wilhelminian War), then the ship would be tying up at seven o’clock at the Palma wharf. By eight o’clock, our apartment bell would let us know who had come across the Mediterranean, and for what purpose.
On the stroke of eight the bell rang. Was it our milkman? A telegram from Herr Silberstern asking to be rescued from an erotic cul-de-sac? Nina trying to escape from Silberstern’s sexual advances? Count Kessler fleeing from my double Thälmann? An emigré? The Dutch writer Marsman, who was expected any day now?
It was Zwingli, our absconded Melanchthon (“black-earth man”) and Oekolampadius (“house illuminator,” also baptized as “Martinus”), alias Don Helvecio.
Yet it wasn’t he who was standing at our door—not yet, anyway. It was only his shadow, which he had sent ahead in the shape of a muscular guy, who now asked me if I was Don Vigo. When I said yes, he pointed to the dark stairwell and said that all the stuff belonged in our apartment, plus everything that was down below. Before I could ask him who sent the stuff, I was pushed aside. “Sent?” Our Don Helvecio of the Príncipe was back again, he said, and ordered
me to lend a hand. “There, that box. It’s got books in it. He’s starting up a university.”
No sooner had I uttered the word “Jeez!” when Beatrice came and said, “Jeez! It’s not Zwingli, is it?”
“Who else? Heaven is once again being merciful, sending our prodigal brother back into our arms. Open up the box.”
“But I don’t understand this at all. Why has Zwingli come back to Spain, and why us?”
“Probably to make sure that the coast is clear, as you told him in your telegram.”
“Well, he’s my brother, after all.”
“And that makes him my brother-in-law—maybe not officially, but in a definite moral sense. He takes lots of stuff with him when he travels—it’s probably an Inca family trait. You know, whole caravans of buffalo. Your forebears weren’t cheapskates. I’ll bet you that he’s also got some woman camp follower along with him, a suitcase full of homeopathic antidotes, and a valise full of Künzli tea for bathing in. His new amante is probably downstairs right now, putting on some rouge, and if we’re in for a really bad break, she’s putting some on her behind.”
But Zwingli had arrived unaccompanied. His pockets jangled with cash, and his get-up was pure haute couture, custom-fit by Barcelona’s leading haberdasher. His pinky nail was clean and polished to an impressive shine. It was Don Helvecio in person. For the trip from Barcelona he had reserved a first-class cabin for himself, but on the way over, out of sheer love of neighbor, he had shared it with a female French painter.
“Olá, Beatrice, Bice, Bé! Olá, mon Vigo, Vigoleis, Vigolo!”
So here he was, now with an even more probing nose, with shinier black hair, with the familiar fiery look in his eyes, and once again with a sack full of moola. In his current condition he could easily convert his guttologist grandfather’s staunchest opponents to the homeopathic faith. Professor Scheidegger had given back to our island a detoxified Zwingli. Such de-pilarization is surely one of the most impressive feats of this medical discipline—on a par, as far as I can judge, with Beatrice’s rescue from the bubonic plague.
Brother and sister, both of them living witnesses to the efficacy of a much-maligned science, now embraced each other and shared a microbe-free kiss. The Old Testament and its legendary scourges were a thing of the past. I was deeply moved by the scene—I, who grew up in a little house where we had the mumps or chicken pox and could never afford the services of a university professor. We had to make do with the ministrations of a pious local medical flunky, a fellow who in some cases actually achieved success, but whose allopathic itemized bills did their best to wipe out our recovered sense of well-being. Incidentally, this sawbones was the first extortionist whose connivances I was able to study from early childhood on. As I got older, he liked to converse with me in Latin—to the horror of my father, who, lacking formal education, realized right away that this technique of healing by means of academic discourse would cost him a pretty penny. And indeed it did.
Zwingli inquired about my literary activity and Beatrice’s music—how were things going? “Badly? And you don’t have a telephone yet? Well, it’s good that I’m back. All that will change now. But tell me, Bé, have you got anything to eat?”
The two of them had switched roles. Beatrice had asked her brother the very same question on that morning of our arrival on the Island of the Great Puta.
Besides a wad of money, Zwingli brought with him a whole set of new plans. Naive as I am, and easily hoodwinked by the mysterious ways people attain the ownership of hard cash, I asked him to open his wallet. It was chock full of Swiss francs!
“What’s happened? Did you submit your godmother to another blood-letting?”
Zwingli’s godmother had the reputation of being Basel’s highest taxpayer, a desirable acquaintance in a city of more than 400 multimillionaires, no matter what they looked like underneath their gilded apparel. I never knew her, but I was told that she was not only rich but attractive, though not without a proclivity for shady dealings of the sort that can never be proved when multimillionaires are concerned. This aunt of his had financed his de-pilarization, thus offering her services to science and bringing off another of the philanthropic achievements for which she was well known. We need only mention the pesticide DDT. But now, Zwingli said, it was all over with, and he screwed up his conquistador nose in fretful wrinkles. There wasn’t one Fränkli more to be had from that source, not even one Räppli! Fini! When a millionaire snaps her purse shut, there’s no way in the world to get her to open it again except—money.
I always admired Zwingli. He was a genius. But he never really understood millionaires. I’m not so sure that my own understanding of them is the correct one, and I’m willing to wait until I can test it out on myself. But I had one advantage over Zwingli: I didn’t know a single millionaire. Count Kessler had at one time been one, and Mamú would, we were hoping, be one once again. So we can ignore these two personages. Hence I had an untrammeled perspective on such individuals who, if I understood correctly a lecture I heard in Cologne by the economic historian Professor von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau, were to be regarded as having the mental capacities of boyish pranksters. Later I would have the opportunity to show Zwingli that my economic theory, scraped up during my exposure to three different academic departments, was right on the mark.
Zwingli had earned all his dough in Cologne, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris, all of it en passant. The bulk of it came from an American art collector. Zwingli had given this man a few tips and taken him from one art dealer to another, and in Brussels was able at the last minute to dissuade him from taking a phony Cranach back across the Atlantic. When this Yankee boarded ship at Le Havre, he simply left his little Opel standing at the wharf. “Take it!” he shouted down to his Swiss interpreter, who acted without hesitation and later sold the vehicle in Barcelona using the same underhanded tactics as when he smuggled it across the border. I, who lack the courage—or am simply too proud—to sneak a pack of cigarettes across any border—I admired Zwingli.
He unpacked his gifts. Books, more books, and sheet music, still more books, and still more sheet music. Knowing my predilection for the enfants terribles of Church history, he presented me with an exquisite anthology of the Spanish mystics: Santa Teresa in an old, unannotated edition, causing me to give forth a full-throated “Porra!” Beatrice’s only comment was, “Buschibuëb!” And that was saying a lot.
Zwingli inspected our apartment and decided he wanted the two rooms looking out on the street. “Bei Chrut und Uchrut,” he swore, this place was just what he needed.
“For what? Are you going to stay on the island?”
“On the island, in Palma, and here with you. It’s not the snazziest address, this pirate’s street of yours, but enfin, it’ll do just fine as the germinal cell of the General Secretariat of my International Academy of Art History. Later we’ll move somewhere else.”
“Not a bordello? Professor Scheidegger has fixed you up so well for new mattress escapades that your General Secretariat will turn out to be the waiting room for what’s more like you: a School of Lust.”
No, said Zwingli. He would never touch a woman again. But he had something special for stick-in-the-mud Vigo. He showed me a briefcase, causing me to emit gurgles of pleasure. “Guanaco leather? Genuine? My guess is it cost 5000 pesetas.”
“300 francs. Llama, Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse. Since you’re a connoisseur, you can keep it. But it’s not the briefcase—it’s the contents that are important.”
This was the Zwingli of olden times talking, when he regarded women as sexless entities, apparatuses to be manipulated, objects to be placed on the shelf according to their beauty and practicality. He was charming, clever, generous. If necessary he’d give you the shirt off his back. But if the shirt turned Isabella-brown, it was all over with him.
This briefcase contained packets of herbal tea, blends for every age and sex, all bearing the Künzli trademark, and in addition the bearded pastor Künzli’s magnum opus Chru
t und Unchrut. Zwingli was now frequenting all possible paths of rejuvenation. He no longer smoked. I’m always amazed when someone says, “No thanks, I don’t smoke.” He still had his expensive Chinese cigarette case, and as he passed it to us I was forced to say, “No thanks, unfortunately I’m still a non-smoker.” (But because my metabolism doesn’t absorb enough nicotine in our food, every once in a while I get an injection of nicotine. That explains the word “unfortunately”). Beatrice was allowed to keep the cigarette case.
Now reconciled in the most heartwarming fashion, brother and sister together drank some brew from their mountainous homeland. I stayed with wine, but at the risk of offending Zwingli I offered a toast to the famous philanthropic Swiss herbophile Künzli. Not that I meant any offense to that pious fellow, either. On the contrary, I have a high regard for the man as a man.. it’s just that I don’t like his tea. If all the theologians had given their attention to the flowers and the grasses instead of God, Christianity would never have gone to the dogs. To be a specialist in herbs, one must harbor an abundance of love for nature and its Creator; one must possess an uncomplicated mind, a willingness to serve one’s fellow man, a generosity of spirit, and humility. Humility above all, which can merge into genuine modesty. Perhaps one in a million clergymen goes off into the forest to collect herbs; the others prefer to stay in church. To this very day, I prefer wine to herbal tea, although I am willing to concede that when administered correctly, herbal tea can make just about anything disappear, beginning with gallstones and extending to evil thoughts. The mystic Albert Talhoff has very good reasons for lacing his tobacco with a pinch of Künzli tea. But he keeps his posological secrets to himself.
The Island of Second Sight Page 98
