The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  I made the acquaintance of Barth’s book when I was studying in Münster. The work caused quite a stir. Divinity students were discussing it heatedly, either in the university corridors or over plates of fried potatoes and pancakes in the dining hall. This was the period when Professor Magon was giving his famous lectures on Kierkegaard, who was not yet fashionable but who drew crowds into a large lecture hall. Kierkegaard was “in the air” at the time, along with Johann Georg Hamann, the “Wizard of the Northland,” with his Diary of a Christian. Hitler, too, was “in the air” with his Mein Kampf, considered by some as a work of divine revelation, by others as a brick to toss at Jewish store windows. Dr. Robert Ley’s mouse-catchers were already at work. They entered Jewish restaurants, ordered potato salad, took a dissected mouse out of a matchbox and stuck it in the salad, started complaining loudly, and then smashed the windows. That was the year 1927. Professor Wätjen was still teaching during this incipient German riffraff rebellion, delivering his fawning lectures on the history of the Hanseatic League before select audiences. His talks were social occasions. Amidst a clanking of spurs, generals with glistening monocles kissed the hands of beautiful ladies. The ladies played the coquettes with their fur boas and wrote down a few of Wätjen’s elegant formulations with gold-plated pens in gold-embossed notebooks. When some insignificant general of the accursed Reichswehr kicked the bucket, the entire lecture-hall audience emptied out to follow the cortege to his grave.

  René van Sint-Jan rubbed his carefully groomed Flemish beard, submitting Vigoleis, student of Netherlandic philology, to a test to see whether he qualified for admission to his advanced seminar. If so, he would have two pupils instead of just one. For almae matres as for flesh-and-blood mothers, the only-child system is not to be recommended. He handed his seminar candidate a poem by Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft and said, “Here, interpret this.” Vigoleis read through the work slowly. It was one of those charming, playful verses dedicated to a schoon nymfelyn named Meisken Ina Quekel, who is courted successively under the names Diana, Iphigenia, Dia, or Amaryllis. Amaryl de deken zacht / Van de nacht…

  I stumbled over the very first word, as if I had never been confronted with pastoral poetry before. There was no need in the world for me to know that certain tuberous plants go by the name Amaryllidae, but I happened to know it. The blood that had leaped to my head flowed calmly back down into my circulatory system. Taking botany as my point of departure, I focused on what I took to be the verb amarylleren. I cleared my throat and began to translate: “Let us, gently like the flowers, smooth out our nocturnal berth…” Today I would call that thing a pilarière. The professor smoothed out his beard, and kept smoothing it ever so pensively as I waxed more and more audacious in my exegesis of the poem, fully conscious of the academic failure facing a low-semester student who at the same was supposed to offer proof of his talent and overall intelligence. But this student didn’t fail either test. Mijnheer van Sint-Jan told me that he actually ought to flunk me, but that he would desist for two reasons: first, his other candidate would be staying on only for a half-semester longer, after which he would be getting his doctorate, leaving the professor with no more students at all and forcing him to shut down his seminar. Second, he was interested in my “case”: a gift for thought-associations that was as amazing as it was academically dangerous, but all in all a knack that, if nurtured in the proper pedagogical manner, could bear interesting fruit. Besides, the two of us would soon be entre nous. He welcomed me, and said that he would support me in his department. And he had a dissertation topic that would suit me perfectly.

  My uncle Jean on Münster’s Cathedral Square had also welcomed me. He also considered me dangerous because of my hopping from subject to subject, and for that very reason preferred that he and I meet alone—which was just fine with me. Over dinner he sent away his servant, and we got along famously.

  Professor Günther Wohlers taught an academic course in journalism before a no less select audience: Vigoleis and the overbred son of an aristocratic line. This fellow made his doctorate under Wätjen with a thesis on Lord Grey, but his dissipating womanizing kept him short of the coveted summa cum laude. His breakfasts consisted of a banana and strawberry-flavored sparkling wine, whereas Professor Wohlers, with our permission, always brought along to the seminar a stein of beer. As for myself, I practiced abstinence, out of continued abhorrence of the ur-German custom of alcohol-laced Frühschoppen, particularly when pursued in a university classroom.

  On Sundays after the last Mass in the cathedral, where Donders’ sermons attracted even godless listeners, the fraternity students, those with and those without their special “colors,” marched around Cathedral Square—an al fresco ballet that never ceased to strike me as a gigantic prison courtyard where the inmates are allowed a few minutes of exercise.

  Old Professor Mausbach, a sly little peasant type, taught us his notions of morality and cultural politics.

  That was my little world at the time, the world that coursed around me and gave me direction. It was largely by accident that my closest friends were students of Protestant theology. It was stimulating for me to get to know the hearts and souls of these young people who, a few years later, would don their robes and bands, ascend the pulpit, and declaim the Word of God with the same lips as would sing the German National Anthem as the times required. They were firmly set on rendering to God that which was God’s, and to the devil (Caesar) that which was the devil’s (Caesar’s), even if the latter, such as for example Adolf Hitler, lacked the proper imperial format. “Our Father” and “God Save the King”—for me, that just didn’t rhyme. I was of course familiar with Catholic attitudes. Oddly enough, the Protestant fellows were intensely interested in my opinions. They knew that I was a sometime “writer,” and the fact that I did my writing for a posthumous readership was in their eyes just as impressive as the fact that I was a propinquus of Auxiliary Bishop Dr. Johannes Seifes, highly regarded in Protestant circles for his tolerant ideas.

  Incidentally, it was these same students of divinity who hung on me the nickname Vigoleis. In a seminar on the origins of the novel, taught by the highly dramatic Papa Schwering, I discovered in the chapbook narrative Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberg a few picaresque motifs that a hundred years or more of literary scholarship hadn’t brought to light. I was pioneering in philological terra incognita, and even Schwering could easily have rewarded me for this with a formal doctorate. If I’m not mistaken—and here I’m truly not—the divinity students, by nature lacking in imagination, thought that my discoveries were ingenious, and they baptized me “Wigalois,” the Knight of the Wheel, by which they meant the emblem on the writer’s illustrated armor helmet. By my own interpretation, the emblem stood for the little wheel spinning inside Wirnt’s head, and I was proud of this. But I revised the name Wig-alois, “because of Alois,” to Vigoleis, a variant form also to be found in the documents, thereby alluding instinctively to the Iberian regions where Wirnt’s story takes place. By doing so, I turned the tables on my fellow students: what they had meant as a tease now became for me a knightly honorific. What I didn’t realize at the time was that by bestowing upon myself such an exalted sobriquet I was entering the company of Jacopone da Todi, the Umbrian poet of the Laude, who likewise endorsed his own nickname. I was even less aware that ten years later, on the island of Mallorca, this echt-Münster type of anabaptism would save my life.

  The divinity students gave me a copy of Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans, asking me to read it and then make an oracular pronouncement on whether the author believed in God or not. My soothsaying decision: if God was a writer, as we often were told He was, then Barth believed in Him in the same way that Bohr believed in his model of the atom, Planck in his quanta, and Professor Többen in his convicts. Life would be so nice if the academic departments of theology and law no longer had to be subsidized. It would be Paradise. No bird would gobble up a mosquito, and yet it would go on living. No wolf would kill a sheep, and ye
t it would go on living. No Adam…

  … and there I was, standing in front of the bookstore on the Plaza Cort and feeling the necessity to suppress my recollections of student days. Or was it that I just didn’t want to sacrifice our last duro for a St. Paul?

  The lady at the store said she had never heard of a book on San Pablo, and certainly not one by a Portuguese writer. By a Portuguese! She laughed, just as everyone in Spain laughs at Portugal. And she asked me whether I knew the couplet, Los portugueses pocos y estos pocos locos. From my geography lessons I knew that Portugal had a small population, and that it was a little Iberian offshoot next to the Atlantic. But that the few Portuguese citizens were also crazy—could such a thing be possible? Once you’ve been to Spain and met Don Juan, Don José, Don Matías, and Don Pedro, is there a surpassing degree of locura? A Seventh Heaven of screwiness, so to speak?

  I was on the right track. Beatrice would never see this duro again. I remained undeterred. I asked if I might be permitted to look on the shelves by myself. Yes, was the reply. In fact I would have to go take a look for myself, since she didn’t want to be bothered, and certainly not with questions about books. Imagine what things would be like if just anyone could come in off the street and ask for a San Pablo—written by a Portuguese! Because in my own personal library the books are arranged neither by language, author, nor subject, it took me only minutes to find what I was looking for: a volume printed in Barcelona by Editorial Apolo—Verdaguer’s publisher, and as such a recommendation in and of itself. The cover showed an Iberian portrait of Saint Paul. Title: San Pablo; author: Teixeira de Pascoaes; foreword: Miguel de Unamuno. This four-leaf clover could not have been more impressive. Three copies still stood on the shelf. I stuck one under my arm and asked the price. The lady didn’t move, but instead sent a hostile glance at my book. I felt embarrassed, as always in the presence of an illiterate. All of a sudden I was ashamed of knowing the alphabet by heart. It was not until we reached Portugal and the mountainous region of Travanca, where the wolves circled our house at night and only one person was barely able to read and write, that I learned to my amazement that one must approach this problem from a completely different angle.

  In any case, I was making no headway with the bookstore clerk. But fortunately, at this moment a gentleman entered the store from a back room, and I immediately turned to him, suspecting that he was the bookseller himself, which he was. “How much?” I showed him the book, a gesture that caused the man to go into a mild fit. Speaking Mallorquin, a dialect I had little comprehension of, he hissed at his wife and then, politely switching to Castilian, he explained that this spouse of his was constantly committing stupidities such as, for example, thinking that a bookstore was like a bakery, where you kept giving away the merchandise until nothing was left on the shelves. So it was hardly to be expected that the poor woman knew anything at all about literature. Was it my wish to abscond with San Pablo? He was glad to have arrived on the scene when he did, for otherwise this copy of the book would also have disappeared, never to be seen again! Such things just didn’t happen in his store. He urged me to consider that there were only three copies left—three! A week ago there had been two dozen, and before that about fifty. The book was selling like hotcakes, and it was Miguel’s fault. Although I appeared to be a foreigner, surely I was aware that the man he meant was Unamuno. “So please, Sir, hand me the book. It belongs up there on the shelf. This is a bookstore, not a bakery.”

  The bookseller replaced my copy next to the other dead stock on the shelf. Stunned, I remained silent. Don Joaquín Verdaguer had once recounted for me a similar story, and I thought it was just an example of his clever broma, one of his Lichtenbergian vignettes.

  “How much does a book like that cost,” I finally dared to inquire. “Maybe I can’t even afford it.”

  “Perhaps. It’s difficult to judge the purchasing power of book buyers. But a book from Editorial Apolo—8 pesetas.”

  “I’m happy to hear that. All I have is one duro.”

  “Fine. You’re a customer after my own heart. You keep your duro, and I’ll keep my book.”

  “Could I just write down the author’s name?”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’ll give you the publisher’s brochure, and you can try at the new store on San Miguel, just opened up. New-fangled place, you know. They’ll sell anything—anything, I tell you.” As I left his establishment he shouted after me that nowadays literature was going to the dogs—illiterates were buying up every last thing. Did he mean me, or his wife? Probably both of us.

  Mulet didn’t have the book, but he knew of this Portuguese writer, and offered to have a copy of San Pablo sent over from Barcelona. It would be there in a few days, maybe the day after tomorrow—no, not “maybe” but definitely. This meant that I had a few weeks time, and that I would have to do some fancy work with the duro we obtained through our friendship with the Mengelbergs. I was obliged to enter into negotiations with the beggar on the cathedral steps. After submitting to his usual reprimands, I pretended that I was simply a passer-by who would gladly give him something, but that I had just discovered that my last duro was a genuine sevillano, and thus I would have to walk all the way home to Génova. The beggar suggested fifty-fifty. I gave him the 5 pesetas, and in return I received 2.50 and blessings from all the saints, plus 100 days indulgence. I was still lacking two reales, but surely Mulet would offer me that much credit. After all, I wasn’t his only intelectual con su carcoma, to quote the title of a novel by Mario Verdaguer.

  São Paulo by Teixeira de Pascoaes turned out to be the great adventure of my life. Don Juan Sureda Bimet: your Catholic German thanks you and your golden veins, along with Pascoaes and his Iberian St. Paul, for having transported him to the Heaven of the godless.

  I had come upon a religious genius.

  Almost twenty years have passed since I first read a line of Pascoaes. From the first page onward I knew that I was being touched by a genius who would command my total loyalty. On the final pages I pondered with the Lusitanian seer where on this earth the apostle’s poor, emaciated body might have been returned to the soil, this body so worn down by inexpressible anguish. “Was it in Spain? In Rome? In Asia? In Macedonia? Did Lydia and Timothy close his eyelids and bury him amid showers of tears?” At that time, archeological excavations in Catalonia made it seem certain that the apostle had indeed made his questionable Iberian journey. In Unamuno’s eyes, this caused the Pascoalinian St. Paul to become doubly Iberian. Upon reading Pascoaes’ book Unamuno issued the summons, “San Pablo, open up Spain!” I knew right away that I would be this writer’s translator. And that is just what I am. But what is more, I became his private humanist, as Menno ter Braak has called me. God willing—that is, the “godless God” of Pascoaes—I will also be his biographer.

  I read the work in a single sitting, a feat that I rarely accomplish with a book, especially when the topic is religion. It discussed problems that had plagued me for years. The author dealt with questions that lay beyond the ultimate questions in a fascinating, often obscure, often spare style of writing: the sins of God, the restoration of the world, the unity of crime and redemption, mankind not as sinner but as sin itself and, as a logical extension of this idea that was so familiar to me, theologians as God’s gravediggers, reality as the forecourt of the magical temple of illusion, and the mysterium tremendum in the company of the tremenda… Dear reader, do go out and purchase and read St. Paul for yourself and you will learn all that I owed to Don Juan’s golden veins, and just what a treasure I had obtained for one genuine duro, a second phony one, and a little bit of credit from my friend Mulet. Take this book and read, at the risk of seeing your own personal Pixedes head for the hills. It is your problem whether you have to pay for the volume with your last penny. Your bookseller will at all events greet you with open arms, for in the meantime Pascoaes has become a writer for the “happy few”—which is to say, he is now a white elephant.

  As I read on, I caught m
yself mentally translating whole passages, assuring myself that I was going to transfer São Paolo into my own language. It occurred to me that the Spanish version could not be “correct” in all respects, that the translator hadn’t achieved his aims, unless my own premonitions about the work were themselves incorrect or overshot the mark. Later, when I compared the Spanish with the original, I found that I had been right all along. My instincts had not atrophied, Spain had not yet worn me down to the point where I would put off until tomorrow what I ought to start doing today: learn Portuguese in order to comprehend more of this extraordinary writer. Portuguese had the reputation of being a more difficult language than Spanish. To be equal to the task I would have to feed my brain with more phosphorus. I wrote to the author and asked him for the rights to a German edition of his São Paulo. Pascoaes, the Squire of Pascoaes, replied by return mail—a gesture of special distinction, as I later learned. It meant a great deal to him to be translated into German, a language with which he was not familiar. Germany was for him more the land of the nebulous philosopher of Königsberg than that of the Olympian Poet of Weimar. We began a correspondence that, with the exception of the seven years when we lived at his estate Pascoaes, lasted until just a few weeks before his death.