The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, Mamú fled the island under the efficiently organized protection of the American Consulate. But she still was in panic at the lethal threat posed to any Jew by the zealots of the Rome-Berlin-Burgos axis. Her fears were well founded. Several of the Christian Science dames had pinned to their blouses the emblem of the Holy War, the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, next to the swastika. This made them into the hyenas of a movement that would seek to annihilate their own organization. We said, “Mamú, find yourself a ship, the very next ship. Tomorrow might be too late. Jewish, and a millionaire…” She was even afraid of her German nanny, who had turned into a Nazi.

  But she had to listen to my Old-Testament stories with all of their chapters and verses, insofar as Silberstern made manifest their eternally human significance. I held back nothing. Because Mamú’s monthly checks were still arriving, she rewarded my palate for the things she was hearing from my loose tongue. We had the time of our lives together. She had praise for my triumph over the Third Reich, yet not enough praise to nab me a position as legal counsel in her very private suit against the Royal Powder Bakers. Her attorney in New York, she said, was doing excellent work. He had already made great strides and had the whole case under his expert care. She read me long letters from this lawyer who talked of “extreme importance”—so extreme that I prophesied that she would soon be a thousand times richer than all Silver Stars put together.

  I earned a dish of kangaroo meat by recounting for her a chronique scandaleuse from the international world of music, one that our walking Who’s Sleeping With Whom? expert revealed to Carel and Rahel Mengelberg as soon as they first entered our bible-paper room where, as fate would have it, I was taking dictation.

  Carel Mengelberg, no prudish milquetoast but a world-class musician who knows that where you sing best is where you will settle down, since that’s where your voice will be all the fuller and purer—Carel was astounded at all the goings-on inside his own artistic guild. “What? She with him, and he with her…?!” “You can take my word for it,” said Silberstern, taking conceited pleasure in divulging some improbable or even impossible mingling of personalities, replete with when and where and with what consequences. “But now listen to this, ladies and gentlemen. What might have happened—I say might have happened—if this or that personality, or that time instead of some other time, or at that place rather than some other place…” He presented us with a string of Waterloo hypotheticals, the kind of “what if” questions that are considered moot only by people who don’t realize that history actually consists of what doesn’t really happen. In brief, without sins committed against the Sixth Commandment there would be no philharmonic enchantment for the masses. And when Carel swore to my pot-bellied client with a handshake that he was an authentic Mengelberg, no doubt about it, a Mengelberg from the Mengelberg family, nephew of de groote Willem, Silberstern said, “Excellent! I can get you an angashement at the Trocadero. First harp: Madame Rahel. The best of the best!”

  Poor Mengelberg, genuine or not. He had arrived with only a dilapidated rucksack, intending to take a few hikes with his Rahel on the Golden Island, but now—conductor at the Trocadero! A lifetime position! Success and glory! Envious colleagues, an envious Uncle Willem! And he came without a suit of tails, with no money except one silver duro. Herr Silberstern promised to betake himself immediately to the nightclub to make the contractual arrangements.

  When he actually left after three hours, the Mengelbergs straightaway sank down on Nina’s bed, exhausted. Was it conceivable that ordinary people imagined such hanky-panky going on behind the musical scenes, inside the prompters’ boxes and in the orchestra pits? They had remotely heard of such things—but were they really true? Was Willem Mengelberg in actuality a musically camouflaged “Wilhelm”? Was Abendroth a Schnabel, and was Schnabel an Edwin Fischer? I felt it necessary to interrupt such musings by announcing that they must send a registered letter to Carel’s sister in San Cugat del Vallés, asking her to send him his tails by express, for our unlucky Star was at this very hour wending his way up the incline towards El Terreno, where the all-powerful owner of the Trocadero lived.

  Carel’s tails arrived in a mangled package. His sister Leentje—she, too, a genuine Mengelberg, unless we can get confused by Mr. Silberstern’s behind-the-scenes magic—hadn’t been living long enough in Spain to know how to send a suit of tails from Barcelona to Palma in such a way as to prevent it from running away by itself, resulting in a fall, or at least in a late delivery. And to prevent the little black armband from getting lost in transit. Happily, Don Matías, still observing his year of mourning, felt honored to lend the famous Dutch maestro his own black band for the occasion. As always several steps ahead of current events, I interpreted this gesture as a preliminary form of political collaboration: Why shouldn’t Carel Mengelberg create a musical setting of “Thank God’s Hymn to Freedom”? And Rahel, as swarthy as Rabindranath—why shouldn’t she pluck her lyre in the wake of the Freedom March? And then: Carel as Director of the Tegucigalpa State Opera!

  “Easy, there!” said Mengelberg’s new impresario Silberstern. First we would have to make sure that the angkashemang at the bar was in perfect order, with 500 pesetas as a beginning wage for the conductor—harp included. With that they could get by quite well on Mallorca, he said, even as an “authenticious” Mengelberg. Beatrice, quizzed by four eyes at once, confirmed this.

  So now Silberstern was the impresario for the composer and conductor Mengelberg, who just recently had made his mark leading the 110-man-strong Banda Municipal de Barcelona with the world premiere of his musical sketch “Catalunya Renaixent” in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The Mallorcan debut was an event that I described in detail to Mamú, with the appropriate enumeration of orchestra personnel, instrumental desk arrangement, and who slept with whom. I portrayed for her the puffed-up impresario’s darting about with flying coattails (I’m exaggerating, of course—coattails don’t exist any more. Besides, to scrimp on the cost of fabric Silberstein kept his jackets tailless), and his dialogues with the boss of the Trocadero, who naturally had never heard the name of Mengelberg. According to the nightclub manager, if this Don Carlos was such a celebrity in the world of nightclub combos, and if Doña Raquel could slam the kettledrums, then let them come, by all means, and try things out with his ensemble.

  We soon found out that Leentje needn’t have sent her brother’s formal suit. In the boss’s honky-tonk, Carel could have mounted the stage in shorts, and Rahel could have plucked a few strings sporting only a bra and the Cassandra glances that were normal for her. “And do you know, Mamú, the end result of Silberstern’s stupid puffery is simply that the event didn’t meet the Mengelbergs’ fond expectations, which were of a kind that not even a Mevrouw Beverwijn could fulfill. They’ll get over it as soon as they start hiking. Valldemosa, Deyá—they’re going to all those places on foot. No, Mamú, the real tragedy of the situation is something completely different, something awful. With all of their traveling back and forth between Palma and the Terreno, Carel discovered that the one duro they had in their possession, besides some small change, was phony. If you dropped it on a marble tabletop it wouldn’t bounce back, but just lie there. It was a lead slug. The sound it would make is plump, a word that derives from the Latin plumbum, and not one Spaniard in the whole country would ever accept it. No, slugs like that one find their way into the pockets of foreigners. So now Carel was carrying this millstone around with him. Rahel didn’t say anything, because unlike Carel she lives her life in regions other than the Aeolian clouds. To demonstrate the counterfeit, she pitched the duro onto the floor. All of us heard the etymological sound, and were filled with the “inner glow of poverty” that Rilke has made famous. The only one who could, would, and did master the situation was Silberstern. He asked for the duro so he could place a bet on a greyhound at the automatic machine. That, he explained, and the alms boxes in churches is where you can get rid of even the clumsiest coun
terfeit money. But his betting star was unlucky; he got caught trying to use the slug. The next day he came back and returned it, bowing and scraping to the original owners.

  “But he’s a millionaire, Vigo! He should be ashamed! He could simply have said, ‘It made that sound. Here, Maestro, is a genuine duro in recompense.’”

  Carel is myopic, and that has made his sense of hearing all the sharper. He can’t tell by looking whether something is genuine or not. Aesthete that he is, and connoisseur of women that he is, he often took some female passer-by for Spain’s most beautiful specimen of femininity. He would follow her, hoping to keep her before his eyes as if he were holding a tuning fork to his ear. He would simply run after her. Rahel, concerned for his welfare and bent on helping her creative partner avoid disappointment—although disappointment can also be inspiring—sounded a warning: that lady wasn’t worth his trouble; Spain’s beautiful women existed only on posters. But Carel, with his special intuition, disappeared from view. And when he returned to us breathless, he would always offer the same laconic report: “Niet de moeite waard.” As a bona fide Mengelberg of the musical guild his sense of hearing hadn’t deceived him. But he didn’t yet dare just to grab his “beautiful” prey and toss her to the ground like a duro to test her authenticity.

  As far as duros were concerned, I myself had already made great strides. Sometimes I heard it make atonal sounds—an inexhaustible topic for a Mengelberg. To make a coin sound just right, it was often only a matter of how you tossed it to the ground. I took our own real, genuine duro—it was also our very last—and made a few prestidigitory gestures unnoticed by the others (the Mengelbergs were too preoccupied with their own misery). I threw it down, and—it rang! Silver! You couldn’t even hear the metallurgic deception perpetrated by the recently abdicated Spanish National Mint with the national currency. And anyway, why should we, the common people, worry about such things? Carel and Rahel, suddenly revived by the music of authenticity, now gave the subject their full attention. Rahel began an incredibly quick-paced lecture. Each of us felt that she was addressing us directly, whereas in reality she was talking to all of us together or to nobody in particular. Her subject was the duro. Never before, she said, had a revaluation of the sevillano achieved so much in such a short time. Rahel sketched out a plan. She conjured up worlds of possibilities for which our arch-miser Silberstern, so thoroughly versed in scrounging pennies, would readily have parted with at least three duros.

  During my student days at Cologne, the economic philosophers claimed that money was a fiction. I had my reservations, which were supported by other academic departments, especially the Department of Theology. And now a genuine duro had certified for us the falsity of the economists’ claim. Whereupon we all embraced, and left for Coll de Rebassa to go swimming. Carel paid the trolley fare—a Mengelberg, after all, doesn’t act shabbily. It was warm in the sun, and plenty of beautiful women crossed Carel’s path. Rahel was constantly amazed—how scarce beautiful women were in Spain!

  Interested in matters of currency as in so many other subjects, Mamú wanted to know what happened with the bogus duro. She motioned to her servant to refill my glass.

  “The next morning I pressed it into our milkman’s hand. He was short-sighted, too, and since we had never cheated him, he didn’t toss the sevillano on the floor, but innocently handed over our change. I breathlessly went back to our shredded-newspaper bed and reported to Beatrice that we were finally rid of the fake sevillano. It was the first time in my life that I had cheated someone, but I explained that the authentic Mengelbergs were worth such a prank. Suddenly our doorbell rang. It was the milkman. He said that lead-slug duros were making the rounds on the island, and often it was foreigners who were the first to get pulled in. All I could say was: right you are, and if it was OK with him we’d pay up at the end of the week”.

  “And then…?” Mamú never stopped halfway, which is why she kept going with her gigantic lawsuit.

  “I put the sevillano in a metal box where Beatrice keeps souvenirs that we’re both attached to. It’s still in there, a reminder of the Mengelbergs, to whom we never confessed and never will confess that it was for their sake that I became a common extortionist. The left hand must never know what the right hand is doing—isn’t that what your Science ladies are always saying?”

  “So it’s a talisman of friendship? How touching. That reminds me of my late Prince, who would have acted just as you did. I like your idea of friendship. And it is friendship, isn’t it, that you have felt for the Mengelbergs?” She motioned, and her servant refilled again. It was an undiluted Valdepeñas.

  “It was friendship at first glance, Mamú. And nothing would have changed, even if Stern had used his Who’s Sleeping With Whom? to show that the Mengelbergs were fake Mengelbergs. We liked them in spite of Carel’s rucksack, which in my opinion just doesn’t become him.”

  What did Beatrice think about friendship, Mamú inquired. The same as Vigo. In many respects Beatrice and I were contrary natures, but when it came to basic matters of life our ideas and feelings were at the same level. Friendship was one example. Stefan George was not.

  Mamú’s servant—for some time now it was none other than Jaime, the skirt-chasing fellow Silberstern had tossed out of his house—whom she was training to become her butler, once again responded to a gesture and rushed to fill our glasses. For Beatrice it was a Manzanilla.

  At Mamú’s everyone was treated fairly, as long as we did the same for her. She would of course have preferred that we squirted the wine in a beautiful arc down our throats, directly from a porrón. But her vintages were much too precious to be imbibed only for their value as nourishment, as the Southern Europeans are wont to do. You just can’t squirt and taste at the same time. Admittedly it is impressive to watch a leather bag getting passed around a formal dinner table, especially if it involves expert porronistas. Not one drop on anybody’s white shirt!

  “And is your friend Silberstern now compiling his Roster of Musicians? If so, I’ll send in my subscription right away!”

  “If Hitler hadn’t seized power over the German sleepyheads, the first volume, A - Adelfried, would already have been published. But now the editor is no longer au courant, Mamú. As it is, the emigrés are sleeping wherever and with whomever they can. And back in the Reich, this sort of thing is now regulated by the Reich Chamber of Intercourse, which issues its own pedigree lists.”

  At this moment Calpurnia rushed hurriedly into the room with a telegram. The maid hadn’t become accustomed to the fact that messages are always urgent, even in the home of a millionaire, but that as soon as the messenger hands them over, these bits of news metamorphose into solemn communiqués concerning either access to new millions or harbingers of utter financial collapse. “Don’t hurry,” Mamú scolded her, but then she herself opened the telegram with alacrity—and Calpurnia lifted her swooning employer from the floor.

  Vigoleis remained the single calm element in the tumult that arose over the unconscious woman. He preserved the dignity of big capital. At a wave of his hand, Jaime refilled his glass. It was a 1923 vintage.

  As he was leaving the dining room he spied the telegram on the floor, picked it up and, contrary to his habits but in keeping with the spirit of the house, read the return address. “The Prince,” he murmured. “This is going to get very interesting.”

  Some weeks later, or perhaps it was only days later, Mamú rode to the General’s Street and wheezed her way up the stairs to our apartment. It goes without saying that she was beside herself, that her cheeks were quivering, and that first of all she had to sit down. She had received a letter from Budapest, her old bad-weather headquarters. But before she set out to explain matters, she inquired whether our notions about friendship, which we had explained to her earlier in connection with the Mengelbergs’ duro, were just meaningless dinnertime chatter, or our true opinion.

  I said to her: Mamú, true friendship can be tested only by money. If a friendship comes
to an end because of money, then it never was a true friendship, never a so-called friendship based on virtue, never a Pythagorean friendship in the full sense of the term. Even a friendship between God and human beings can be destroyed by money… but at the moment, Mamú didn’t want to hear this. She had come, she said, not as the head of her Mother Church but as a soul in distress, on a matter that the old hags must never learn about. This information calmed me somewhat. It couldn’t be an insurmountable problem.

  She wanted to know whether Beatrice still kept an account at her bank in Basel. Yes, a small amount for emergencies. Then came the fateful question: would Beatrice be willing to lend her this small amount, which could mean salvation for her at a time of her direst need?

  With no further ado, Beatrice agreed. If Mamú was approaching us poor folk with such a request, her reasons must be so serious that she was side-stepping an appeal to the Scientist ladies, most of whom were as rich as Croesus.

  Mamú, with tears in her eyes that gave heartwarming testimony to the caliber of our friendship, showed us the letter she had received from the Hungarian Pusta. “The Prince,” I thought. Surely it was her Prince who was the cause of her reaching out to us.