The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Don Matías was overcome with sadness when I told him that this was the very last loaf of bread from Jaume’s oven we would be consuming here, on our last day on the street named after the General we had come to love and admire. Oh my good friend, he said, let’s not lose sight of each other! Why were we moving to a new apartment when important things were about to happen in Honduras? The new flag was ready. The Honduran nation was ready. Don Patuco had packed his military knapsack, and the only thing left was the official pronunciamiento. “When are you moving out?” I told him that we expected the moving van to arrive at dawn. Our furniture would be placed in storage for a while, and we would then be on our way to Génova and the house owned by Princess Inés, whose behavior on the island was so democratic in nature that she was known as Citizen Agnes.

  Mamú, too, chided us. Our decision to move was too hasty. Why change our address, when her millions would become liquid in just a few weeks, and all of us could establish princely new lodgings in Miramar? I told her that it was just one step from the Archduke’s Street to his regal palace. As soon as the first promising droplets of financial rain started falling upon us, we would gladly make the additional move. “Don’t you trust me?” That’s not what it’s about, I said. It was just that with Mamú, things seemed to be proceeding at an un-American pace, although this was not her own fault. It was the fault of the lawyers on both sides of her case, whose work she, as a devout Christian Scientist, was apparently unwilling to disturb. “Live and let live”—wasn’t that the motto of her late husband?

  No matter where Vigo and Beatrice met friends during this period, they both had to explain the reasons behind their good fortune. An apartment with bath and roof garden, one whole duro cheaper than their previous one. A vacation at the Casa Inés, a rosy future in the palace of the Archiduque. All that remained for us to wish for was the success of the published German version of the Lusitanian mystic Pascoaes, my “Hun-less Tombs of the Huns,” and one or another of my inventions. This would take us both out of all our trouble. We had withstood a great deal of starving and unhappiness. Our final gesture in the direction of triumph for us little people was the acquisition of a bullet-proof vest, which we wore by turns. Not long ago in our vicinity, the Nazis had dispatched an enemy of the German nation with a shot from a revolver.

  Our move took place without incident. The men arrived shortly after noon, early enough to establish ourselves in our new digs in Génova on the same day. We left all our other things in disarray in our old apartment.

  Our main concern now was to take a rest—one week, perhaps two weeks. Let’s do nothing at all. Give me a few days to finish the final chapter of my “Huns,” and then I would send the completed manuscript to the publisher Querido in Amsterdam.

  I had installed a second security lock in the door of our old apartment. If someone wanted to break into our piso, he would have to break down the wall. We closed off everything with four twists of the locks, and an hour later we opened the door to the Casa Inés by means of a prehistoric bone. This door, painted green, featured the coat of arms of the Swedish royal dynasty—a token emblem placed there in understandable family pride by the painter who later saved our lives and the lives of dozens of other people.

  We had four months ahead of us, and to us they seemed more endless than the shimmering blue ocean we now had at our feet, quivering beneath the cloudless skies we had enjoyed for all the past months. But how much water was left in the local wells? A neighbor of ours guessed that we had two or three more weeks’ worth if we were willing to conserve—which most foreigners weren’t willing to do. Rain? Hardly a chance. I resolved to forego bathing until the next rainfall.

  The painter who owned the place had laid out a rock garden, whose un-Spanish cuteness was in stark contrast to the luxuriant abundance of indigenous plants, agaves and yard-tall stands of cactus that formed a border between the terraced house plot and a steep hill in the back.

  Our aristocratic gardener had not been able to improve on the background of this vista: the Cala Mayor inlet, opening into the Bay of Palma. As we looked out, tiny lights began to sparkle on the water, fishermen with their fire baskets, setting out for the catch. Standing watch over all this was the constellation of Orion.

  Our day was at an end.

  Our day was at an end, and it also was supposed to mark the end of the first volume of these applied recollections of mine. That would have been a happy ending for a book that begins unhappily. We would find Vigoleis and Beatrice sleeping in the heavenly bed of a real princess, their shimmering linen sheet strewn with Keating’s Gold Insecticide Powder, hummed into slumber beneath a gossamer net by mosquitoes, and left unplagued by bad dreams during this night under Orion, who outshone the threefold constellation of my would-be assassins. Outside, the fireflies sparkled and the crickets fiddled furiously in anticipation of the big rains to come—to our dreamy ears it sounded like Bach fugues played on the organ that Mamú was going to have installed in Miramar—she had already received a cost estimate from an organ builder in San Sebastián. Somewhere on the island, my personal burro was rearing up on his bed of fermenting straw, waiting to be pushed into his stall at the Archduke’s fly-free stables.

  This is where my book should stop, with Orion holding his glistening pilgrim staff over our heroes’ slumber. Peace all across the island, peace in our hearts, peace in each and every cricket’s burrow. You, dear reader, already know from my countless hints that much blood has yet to be shed, especially the blood of Vigoleis, who after precisely five nights was slated to be one of the bullet-riddled corpses. By replying to the German Consul’s hesitant query, “What? You haven’t been shot?” with the touchingly foolish counter-query, “Am I supposed to be?” he has earned the right to postpone his Finis operis by the length of one more Book, although it’s going to be a Book with only one chapter—meaning, of course, with no chapter at all. A book of extended leave-taking. I myself am no longer frightened. I was supposed to be bumped off, and yet I was still standing. Any reader can shoot me now by slamming the book shut. If he does so, he will be spared the sight of other people’s fright—Angelita’s, for example, who didn’t believe her eyes when she saw us still alive. Every one of our not yet gunned down, drowned, hanged, or crucified friends got the cold shivers when we knocked at their sealed front doors to say goodbye. Some of them slammed their doors shut in a faint. In most cases, I was able to shove one foot inside and, using the password, let them see my true face. These people let us in and bolted the lock behind us, whereupon we, the Resurrected Ones, started giving report after report.

  For a certain length of time back then on the island, anyone who hadn’t been killed was considered to have risen from the dead. I’ll be brief about this, although I could fill chapter after chapter with descriptions of encounters during the first, second, and third months of the insurrection: my encounter with the limping Don Matías, with Don Gracias a Dios, who was now redeeming himself by composing patriotic verse hailing the Spanish pronunciamiento—like so many other foreign conspirators.

  In Jaume’s bakery, the Hondurans had already held a little memorial ceremony for the murdered Don Vigoleis. But now here he was, out on the street, stretching out a hand that at first no one dared to touch. The amazing thing in those days was that nobody had the courage to say to us, “How did you escape getting killed? You’re both supposed to have been shot!” In Don Matías I still saw the old Krausite and Decipherer of the World, my flour-sack buddy. But now this pseudo-Honduran was holding back his feelings. He had become as stiff as the little vest he was again wearing. I inquired as to the welfare of the one-armed general Don Patuco, explaining that I was being guided by this man’s inspired warnings against priests with forked tongues and generals with two arms. I was on my guard, since General Franco still had both of his arms. Don Matías suddenly went pale. “Be quiet,” he whispered. “If anybody hears you, you’ll be shot. They’ll think we’re in a conspiracy.” As for himself, he was now for Fran
co, and his daughter Encarnación was for Franco. After all, a man could have two arms and still be a swell guy and a successful revolutionary… “What about Ulua the cobbler?” He got thrown down a well. They put a stone on top. His wife was thrown down another well. Stone on top. Their son got away with false papers to Uruguay.

  In this way, I could fill many pages of this final, chapter-less Book. By doing so, I could easily lose sight of the two of us—not a bad ending, perhaps, for a pair of heroes who entered my story namelessly, plagued by fleas and bad dreams on board a ship taking them to the island—just two out of hundreds of people. That was years ago.

  They left the island as two out of thousands, unmolested by dreams, since they were kept wide awake by the reality around them. But they weren’t able to sleep, either—certainly not the kind of peaceful slumber enjoyed by Vigoleis and Beatrice in the celestial bed owned by Doña Inés, who like a girl in a fairy tale could call a king “Uncle,” and who greeted her polyglot house tenants with a strip of embroidery on our pillow saying Godnatt!

  Vigoleis turned the pillow over; he didn’t want any pearly greeting pressing into his cheek. Besides, the same idea sounds better in Mallorquin: Bona-nit! Bona-nit contains everything: the mouse rustling around in the palms, the bat’s shadow on the window pane, the octopus’ play of shadow beneath the seaside cliffs, the sea itself, the moon in the sea, the millions of stars, the Queen of the Night opening her chalice, and the red star at Orion’s shoulder, Bed-el-shauza, who with his very name proclaims the glory of the night.

  Bona-nit!

  EPILOGUE

  The world is simply the sedan chair

  that carries us from heaven to hell.

  The carriers are God and the Devil;

  the Devil is out in front.

  Johann Wilhelm Ritter

  Over and over again while setting down these island recollections of mine, whose origins were anything but arbitrary but whose future is anything but secure, I have noticed that the overture to any given chapter has determined that chapter’s structure and length. Since it has taken me so long to realize that mysterious tectonic forces are at work here—as in writing poetry—I might do well to exploit this insight into my work habits when shaping my Epilogue, the only section of my memoir that I am writing with an eye toward its length and toward the way it will come to an end—as both I and my reader so eagerly anticipate.

  If, for example, I were to begin with a factual account of how Beatrice, performing her first domestic chores in the Casa Inés, prepared the small guest room for Frederico García Lorca, then I would have to get lost in all the details of Lorca’s planned trip to Mallorca, and how his failure to make it became so fateful for him—and right there I would have transgressed the limits of space. It would be even more dangerous, albeit more tempting, to begin in this fashion: “Beatrice, look over there, to the right. Yes, directly above the seventh cactus from the left, that’s it, down below Son Maroix, that white speck. That’s the terrace at the house I was going to rent, the one I should have rented, for Henny Marsman.” The result would be more than a single chapter, it would be an entire book about my friendship with Marsman, Holland’s great poet and the editor for my Dutch editions of Pascoaes. I would relate our picaresque encounter on Mallorca and our re-encounter in Basel; the way-stations Dornach, Arlesheim, Locarno, and Auressio; the haunted Casa Peverada; Schulenburg’s “Monda”; our weeks together in the ski lodge in Bogève in the Haute Savoie; our flight to Portugal, where Marsman intended to rejoin us and where, at Pascoaes’ country estate, the mystic’s aged little mother prepared the royal guest room for Holland’s King of Poetry with the same loving care as Beatrice gave to the room for Lorca at the Casa Inés. Neither poet ever reached his destination. Lorca was executed on the Spanish mainland. Marsman drowned in the Channel as he fled to Portugal, his ship torpedoed.

  On the other hand, what if I were to start out by telling about the last snail we wanted to cook for ourselves, but which escaped us—or rather, which escaped none other than our clever friend Bobby, the young fellow who could surmount any problem the island posed to its foreign guests, excepting of course his own personal problems and those of the private physician’s gynecology? Just imagine—a single vineyard snail got away from him! But I’d better begin at the beginning. Period.

  I shall never comprehend why people like us Vigotrices, for whom destiny has reserved no firm place of residence on the globe, have not sung the praises of the sardine, the kind you can get in cans either in olive oil or en escabeche for two reales a can. Consume them with a piece of bread, and you have stilled your hunger for the next ten minutes, or however long it takes until you can get the next can. Doña Inés had piled up many such latas, and she invited us to eat our way through the entire pile, at cost. This was how she re-provisioned her household on an annual basis. Crisp, succulent lettuce grew in her herbal garden, there were jugs of wine and oil, and an old sailor next door brought us our bread. I’m mentioning all this in order to explain that during our first days, without ever leaving the house, we did not suffer hunger. Intellectual nourishment was also to be found on Doña Inés’ shelves, preserved like the sardines: St. Augustine, Cervantes, Pascoaes, Novalis. That’s all that I took with us into our place of solitude, but naming those names here might seem erudite indeed. Reading the urbane, devout Thagastian bishop’s works under the sign of Orion was an experience I shall never forget.

  Suddenly there is a gunshot; I look up from my book and gaze in the direction where the explosion is still echoing. A large, many-colored bird drops from the blazing sky to the dark-green foliage of the orange orchard. I catch myself recalling certain verses by Goethe and, turning back to Augustine, I say, “Damn it all, Beatrice, those bratty kids have just shot down another hoopoe! By the time Bobby arrives they’ll be extinct!”

  Otherwise, nothing at all disturbed the peace on our island. Just once I saw an eagle. It was flying so low that I could follow precisely its broad sweeping shadow across the red earth.

  Sunday began as bright as never before. During the night we had heard more gunfire. “What are they hunting for in the nighttime?” Beatrice asked. “Bats,” I said. “Great substitute for clay pigeons, and cheaper.” The ocean lay calm and contented in the Bay. Not a single sail, not a single wake from a ship already beyond the horizon. Not a single breeze to create on the sea’s surface the familiar shimmering moiré effect. The sky, too, was leaden.

  At around noontime some airplanes arrived. They circled Palma and the harbor of Porto-Pí. Oh look! Now they’re diving. And way up, that little dot must be a skywriter. Pretty soon we’ll see his ad, Mallorca clima ideal, and right behind it the word Persil, which will of course earn him more money.

  Now and then we heard more shots. Hoopoes, I thought. Maybe ravens, or quail. Sunday hunters? Do they exist in Spain, too?

  Several days passed. Beatrice took a short walk into the village, if that is what you could call the dozen houses in Génova, and reported casually that Doña Inés apparently owed some money at the store. The people there ogled her strangely, and hardly even greeted her. Crabby people, Beatrice said; she wasn’t going back. They were probably afraid that we, too, would ask for credit and then disappear from sight. Such behavior was now rather common in the island. That’s how many emigrés kept themselves above water.

  A few days later Pedro Sureda arrived—in uniform! And unshaven, and minus his usual loquacity. No jokes, no dance steps, no clapping on shoulders. Pedro, too, just stared at us, as if we were deep in debt, and apparently we actually were in some kind of trouble without realizing it. We owed our lives to a few people who were now beginning to demand the settling of old scores. Someone had told Pedro that we had been shot on orders from on high, and he had come by to see for himself. The fact was that our good friend Pedro simply couldn’t imagine Vigoleis, the fellow with the pronounced death wish, as a corpse. Seeing that we were still alive, he was relieved for the moment. But this is not something that he
told us on that day of our resurrection. He, too, remained silent. Why? It wasn’t until the eve of our escape, in a café at a corner of the Apuntadores that was swarming with uniforms of all conceivable political persuasions—some real generals were among them—that Pedro broke his silence. Back then, he said, he had wanted to make sure that I was dead.

  He gave us the following report: Pronunciamiento! Our buddy General Franco had mounted a sudden attack in Morocco, and the conflagration spread to the mainland. During the very first night our island had fallen to the insurrection. So it wasn’t clay pigeons after all? People make for better target practice. It was war, but it was a Holy War, one being fought for the greater glory of God and His generals.

  The background of the insurrection is obscure, and to this very hour no historian has been able to explain it thoroughly. In all our years on the island I was never able to get a clear picture of Spanish politics. For one thing, I have no sense at all of such developments. Worse still, I just don’t care who wants to exert control over me. As an honorary guest of the island, as an exterritorial and thus exempt from paying taxes, my interest in Spanish politics was all the more feeble. Yet of one thing I was sure: what was happening in Germany, the herding of an entire nation under the leadership of a single bleating sheep, could never happen in Spain. As I had got to know them, the Spaniards seemed much too self-centered for such foolishness, too convinced of their own importance. They were very much their own persons, and would never fall victim to massification. All the rest of Spanish politics, insofar as a foreigner could take notice of it, seemed simply ludicrous.