Madame Enderun, now surrounded by a little band of steadfast admirers, finally noticed that something unpleasant was going on. The Ponta de la Foradada was no longer an attraction. At this moment the Center of Creation was the irate Teuton, all in a froth. Another gentleman in the group had listened to his tirade, and felt that this was the moment to do something about it. This was a quite ordinary guy in his sixties, with a battered Panama hat, a starched collar, and a flat-black necktie. From his vest, on a heavy silver chain, hung a medallion that no doubt bore his family crest. His shoes were of crude leather, his hiking stick had wrought-iron inserts, and his speech was replete with gutterals. Woe to whoever maligns a citizen of Switzerland!
The German guy, the chaibe Schwob, was now summarily upbraided in the mode of Schwyzerdütsch that gets spoken in Basel and environs. He was given a thorough dressing-down. But did he understand a word of it? If so, he learned that a specific aristocratic family had been living in Basel since the 11th century, and that this lady, hei jo—the hiking stick was pointed toward Beatrice—was part of the very same family with all its ck’s and ck-dt’s in spite of her Spanish skin color. And he was told, in addition, just what a Löli was, how he should be ashamed of himself and that—here the hiking stick was again pointed, but now directly at the Schwob, who stepped back a pace—goddamned Prussian that he was, he should immediately get out of sight, or else…
William Tell had shot his arrow!
Several other Swiss tourists stepped forward from guarding Beatrice and assumed a threatening stance, which announced that they wouldn’t abide a fellow citizen being defamed, thus forcing the defamer to face a small crowd. The Swiss hiker warned the German that he was obviously outnumbered. I told my fuming compatriot that it would be best if he just gave up, and added that the man from Basel bore the renowned name of Strub.
Condemnation of the German’s behavior resounded from a dozen throats. But he kept standing there, like an owl at midday being attacked by flocks of angry birds. He was speechless, since he was unaware whether his true Führer was alive or dead. Just one push of a Basel hiking stick, and this racist crackpot would have plunged into the arms of the octopus down below, his ghostly shade wafting down over a Mallorcan cliff.
Back at my official Führer car, the tourists were waiting impatiently. What was that scene all about at the Foradada, they asked. Did it have to do with the lady guide? Was somebody mad at her? She was probably a Jewess, as you might expect in this day and age. But then again, in a foreign country one shouldn’t be quite so picky, should one? It’s too bad about the beautiful landscape, though, and with the ocean so very, very blue, and that green octopus down there! Politics should be left back home, or maybe some people shouldn’t even leave home if they’re political. But then again, that fellow probably was right to protest. The trip was happening with German money, and people had a right to demand German treatment.
I gave my charges the long and involved personal history of Madame Enderun, the daughter of the Persian Consul General in Madrid, who owned a finca on the island of Mallorca. I told them I would show them his estate, with its subtropical garden and all. The German protester, I said, had been thinking that she was just another Jewish sow, which caused the Swiss delegation to man the ramparts, since Madame Enderun had attended Basel University, and besides many other languages spoke Swiss German. As that German fellow must have known, dialects are a binding force.
If she was Persian—and that man actually took her for a Jewess—then she was not only Aryan but hyper-Aryan. And her father, the Consul General—“What a delightful posting,” interjected a German lady. “My husband hasn’t got quite that far yet!” “You’re absolutely right about postings like that one,” I replied. “It’s my lifelong dream to become a Chief Executive Officer or a Consul General, but…”
My interlocutor suggested that I ought to try out some courtship with the woman in question—try making the right kind of connection. Hadn’t he already seen me in Valldemosa and Sóller in her company, more than once? If I did things right, maybe I wouldn’t end up as a Consul General, but maybe as a special son-in-law with—how had I put it?—a finca. That was it, a finca!
“Over there!” I cried out. “That’s the Enderun estate!” I was pointing toward a finca that we were passing by on the dusty road at the moment.
That day, the Monte Rosa left the Palma harbor rather late. People said that the delayed departure had to do with events taking place in Germany. This left the tourists with a few hours to kill in Palma.
Beatrice and I, as completely dead as we wished the German Führer to be, sat on the Plaza Atarazanas drinking the dust out of our throats. Suddenly we were joined by the ladies and gentlemen from my tour group, who sat down a few tables away from us. The man who had quizzed me raised a teasing finger, as did the lady with him. “Aha!” they called across the café aisle. “Everything going on schedule?”
“Perfectly,” I called back. “We’ve just got engaged!”
A roll-call aboard the Monte Rosa showed that about a hundred of the German citizens were missing. News reports from the native soil were such that they preferred not to return home. One can get hanged anywhere in the world, so who needs a fatherland?
The next day I went to the travel agency and received the 50 pesetas wage for myself and my Persian bride. The agency manager, none other than the German Consul himself, was once again in full control, just like his main Führer, if not like his best one. The Röhm Revolt had been suppressed. Some heads were still rolling, and Herr von Papen’s son-in-law, whom I met on the streets of the city, had left his legs unpowdered. That was his ceremonial form of mourning.
XXIII
We buried a great painter, Jacobo Sureda. Elly Sackett, an American banker’s daughter, had given support to Jacobo the man, while Mother Ey in Düsseldorf championed the artist. He was the best painter on Mallorca, which is saying a great deal, since the island was teeming with painters. Pedro had but one desire, and that was to achieve as much with brush and palette as his brother. So he painted more and more intensely, while Jacobo painted less and less. Jacobo’s lung ailment got worse from year to year. When we got to know him during our first island winter, the season that stood completely under the sign of the hellcat Pilar, his health was comparatively good. He was able to afford an annual visit to the St. Blasien spa in the Black Forest. He loved Germany, a country where he was no longer a stranger. Mother Ey had discovered him. She was in rapture over the young consumptive nobleman, who began as a poet and who personally set the type and printed his own first small volume of verse using the press owned by his friend Josef Weisemberger. The title was El prestidigitador de los cinco sentidos, and the poems did justice to the title: magically expressionistic, and deploying all of the five senses. When Jacobo died, his best paintings were hanging in Mother Ey’s gallery—or rather, they were in Mother Ey’s hands, since the Nazis had liquidated her gallery, accusing her of sponsoring “degenerate art.” It is probable that Don Jacobo’s pictures were likewise annihilated as “degenerate art.” They have never been found.
I never knew Mother Ey in person. Our only halfway intimate contact occurred when I slept on a historic mattress she had once reclined upon. Judging from the stories I heard from Pedro and Don Juan Sureda, from Jacobo himself and from our Folkwang School teacher, I understood perfectly why it was that Don Juan paid equally intense reverence to the mattress and bed linens used by Señora Huevo, as the Sureda children called her, just as to the beds once occupied through sleepless nights by His Catholic Majesty and his rival Don Miguel de Unamuno. The castellan protected Josef Weisemberger’s mattress, too, from profanation, and he no doubt had his special reasons. Was it because this German was a friend of his most talented child? Perhaps. I am unfamiliar with this man’s contributions to the world of art; I only know that in the House of Sureda his name will outlast the mattress he slept on. Josef Weisemberger was the first person to walk the streets of Mallorca in wintertime with
out a hat. Baedeker fans, those who are sworn to historical accuracy, should make note of the fact that this particular honor does not belong to Chopin.
Jacobo died of a pulmonary hemorrhage in his attractive artist’s home Ca’s Potecari in Génova, cradled in Pedro’s arms. In Barcelona he had undergone a difficult operation performed by a Catalan surgeon, a pupil of Sauerbruch’s, who did his work so badly that the operation was a success, but the patient succumbed. We had argued that he should go to Germany to be operated on by Sauerbruch himself. Elly Sackett would have financed this. But Don Jacobo didn’t want to go to Germany, because it was no longer his Germany. Should we summon Sauerbruch to Spain? Count Kessler, who took an interest in the Sureda case, told me that Sauerbruch would come immediately by plane with an assistant surgeon and a nurse, and the result would be one cured patient and one devastated bank account. Kessler himself had once been duped by the same “pork butcher” (the term was not Kessler’s) many years before, when he lay sick in London. A rather hesitant diagnosis by his English physician upset Kessler’s sister. She kept telling him he should ask Sauerbruch to come to England; after all, the two men knew each other. Sauerbruch flew over, tapped the Count’s chest, auscultated, reassured the patient, wrote out prescriptions, and casually inquired whether the Count would mind if he, Sauerbruch, stayed on a day longer to dine with the King’s personal physician. Kessler had no objections, and in fact he arranged the dinner. The surgeon’s bill for medical treatment and time spent in London was in the thousands, an amount that caused even a Count Kessler to blanch. He was about to sue the “blackguard” (Kessler’s term), but his sister took over the entire expense to spare her beloved brother all the anguish of a lawsuit. I had already heard a similar account of Sauerbruch’s padded bills from my uncle, Bishop Jean in Münster. A scion of the Westphalian Droste clan had an only son who was deathly ill. The professors at the university clinic all said: call in Sauerbruch. He came, he carved, he sewed, and left the patient out of danger. His rich, generous, happy Papa wrote out a check for the doctor on the very same day, for the fat sum of, let’s say, 50,000 marks. The surgeon telegraphed back: “50,000 is what one offers a clinical assistant, not a Sauerbruch. Signed: Sauerbruch”.
What an amazing message! It is a mark of true greatness if at the proper moment you can formulate words that can become proverbial. That is how I ought to have come back at Adelfried Silberstern on the subject of my consultation fee. “Zero point zero pesetas is what one offers one’s lawyer brother, not a legal and sexual consultant named Vigoleis. Signed: Vigoleis.”
I would give anything for a painting by Jacobo Sureda, especially for one created during the period of his physical decline—his Almocrebe, for instance, which presents Spain’s pride, misery, poverty, and steadfastness, depicted in the figures of a jackass, its master, and the shadows they cast across the baking soil. The picture wasn’t large; it would fit nicely in the place where I have hung a map of Mallorca, a sight that fills me with longing for my Island of Second Sight, now extinct. That is to say, I am overcome by saudade, as the Portuguese call it, and as Pascoaes—my Pascoaes!—uniquely delineates it in book after book. Or rather, as he once delineated it, for now he is dead. Just now, before I start explaining how I first encountered his work, I have received the news of his heroic, tragic demise, the death of the last Portuguese mystic, the man who intoned the swan song of Iberian mysticism.
In the senior apartments at the Suredas’ house things were constantly topsy-turvy. But one day Pedro told me that the place was now a madhouse. Papá, Mámá, and everybody else had gone completely off their rockers, and now they were obliged to use the WC at their next-door neighbor’s. Papá was locking himself in the toilet for hours at a time and reciting out loud. Pixedes, a housemaid who had stayed on longer than most because Papá went through a quiet phase, had now run away also. Pedro brought with him blankets and sleepwear, since nights at home were unbearable. Had more “golden veins” made their appearance? And which language had Don Juan opted for now?
“He’s not cramming any new ones. At first we thought it was Arabic, which he’s always been interested in. And it was our idea that while learning it, he forgot the trick with the door latch and couldn’t let himself out, just like that nun. What surprised us was when we first heard him yelling, ‘Paul, Paul, open up Spain!’ Pixedes packed her bundle and fled the house. Pazzis is desperate, because it’s not golden knots any more, it’s religious fanaticism that’s broken out in our house.”
“Religious fanaticism? Not bad for Spain. Great tradition! How can you tell?”
“He starts shouting, ‘Woe is me, woe is me if I do not preach the Gospel!’ Or ‘When will I be free of this mortal body?’”
There was no contradicting Pedro; this was clearly a case of religious hallucinations. If I had been the maid Pixedes, I too would have flown the coop. As Vigoleis, however, I kept listening. It’s one thing to use a bathroom for meditation, learning grammar, or doing a crossword puzzle. But for preaching? I pictured the Sureda family gathered together and flinching at each new outburst of their patriarch’s heretical phantasms, a form of blasphemy that no amount of patient reasoning could ever suppress. I saw them sticking the man’s trumpet in his ear and shouting, “Cease and desist! For thou knowest that thou art cursing the Lord!”
But from inside the room in question the tirade continued: “Christianity is the religion of the evening, which veils all things in its twilight. But then the heavens, which during the day are kept from sight by the azure air, open up a thousand tiny, gleaming windows. Christianity is the religion of the final hour, the time when our only salvation is to be found in hope, the somewhat desperate hope of St. Paul. Let us seek our salvation in hope!”
“Papá, come out of there! Papááááá, come out!”
“God perceived the imperfect nature of his Creation, and He was unable to undo it. But then Noah entered the Ark. Now Creation could only be modified, and the crime only eventually atoned for. That is the profound meaning of Golgotha. Jesus, the Son, is God’s bad conscience.”
The family left their pontificating father to his own fate. Pedro fled to General Barceló Street. Juanito took succor in devotional exercises; together with his pious sisters he prayed for Papá, though he didn’t overdo it. He was the only one in the family who eschewed exaggeration, for he was lazy and always tired, though not as a result of general dynastic torpor. Only Doña Pilar, the princess, stood firmly rooted in reality. Her Juan had not gone crazy, and he hadn’t turned more Quixotesque than otherwise. He had simply found a certain book—where? At a literary tertulia, of course. It was a book that had inwardly captivated him and was now keeping him outwardly captive at the odd location that could no longer be kept secret. She didn’t scold him, since from long years of marriage she knew that he would eventually come forth. The Suredas always came forth. The family coat of arms features a ferret. When he finally came forth, she would simply take the book out of his hands, and peace and tranquility would return to their home.
“Does anybody know which book it is that’s causing Don Juan such ecstasies? What kind of new gospel is he reading?”
“It’s a book about St. Paul, written by some Portuguese writer. That’s all we know.”
Doña Pilar actually succeeded in wrenching the book from her mystically transported husband, the book from which he continued to recite passages out loud at night, in bed, albeit only certain passages that received his imprimatur. During the daylight hours, pursuing his career as a Spanish grandee on the Promenade, at the cafés, in the clubs, or in the palacios of other grandees who were not yet financially ruined, he hid the book from sight. It was, after all, heretical in the highest degree, a threat to the salvation of his family’s souls, especially his daughters’, and it belonged on the Index. Doña Pilar, less concerned about saving souls than about the stability of her household, sneaked a peek at her husband and, when he left the house, took the book out of its hiding place. Don Juan, finding t
he place empty, went into a fit of rant: “Stolen!” He suspected one of his friends, a doctor whom he considered not only capable of robbing a tabernacle but also worthy of such an act. In the middle of the night he drummed the man out of bed. “You have stolen my Paul! Woe is me if I don’t preach the Gospel!”
Unlike many doctors who are enraged when somebody gets them out of bed for some petty ailment, this one kept calm. Since he hadn’t stolen the book, he wrote Don Juan a prescription for a purge, the Spanish panacea, and dismissed the despondent hidalgo.
But I still didn’t know which book Don Juan had found, and my curiosity increased. A book that could aggravate that man’s inborn nuttiness must indeed be one of the world’s greatest works of literature. I pocketed a duro, apparently our very last.
“That’s our last duro!” Beatrice cried out after me.
“I know! But we’re always living down to our last everything. Ciao!”
At the time, there was one bordello for every 1000 inhabitants of Palma. Which is to say, the statistics were even more favorable if one added the casas that were not officially sanctioned. More significant still were the figures for intellectual activity: one bookstore per 40,000 citizens. Not counting Mulet’s lending library, where it was sometimes possible to obtain certain volumes under the counter, Palma had two such stores. My search for St. Paul, the disturber of Don Juan’s peace and his family’s sanity, led me to Palma’s premier bookstore, the one on the Plaza Cort.
A book about St. Paul. What did I know about St. Paul? Precious little. I knew that Nietzsche called him the “dysangelist” and saw in him a hate-filled rabble-rouser, the incarnate loathing of the Roman Empire as of the world itself, the Eternal Jew, and what not else? Unamuno dealt with him in his Agony of Christianity, which he regarded as deriving from Paul’s personal agony. Cervantes calls him the Knight Errant of Life, the patron saint of death who arrived at ultimate serenity. The Nazis, too, were busying themselves with this personage; for them he was the Jewish sub-human, and they placed him on their index together with his Master and all the disciples. I also knew Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, a cold, arrogant piece of writing. I hadn’t read Schweitzer’s The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul.
The Island of Second Sight Page 108
