The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  The Consul still couldn’t comprehend the situation. So I stood up, turned to Beatrice and asked her if she would allow me (ladies first!), lifted the receiver and was about to push it into the Consul’s hand. “Tell the Falange what’s going on here. We are under martial law. Do your duty!”

  The Consul slammed the receiver down. I sat down again next to my German wife from the house of ck-dt and with Indian blood in her veins. She had replaced the powder box in her purse. There would be no need for pepper. The Consul was giving up the fight.

  Today neither Beatrice nor I can recall how long it took for the Consul to go back into an official rage at us. He gave us a thorough dressing down. His recital of our political transgressions was lengthy, and is already familiar to my reader. But my reader is not yet familiar with the way the Consul sought to conceal his cowardice. He was, he told us, a student of human nature; he knew very well what kind of characters we were, and he could easily explain to the Führer why he wasn’t handing us over to the Blue House for execution. I was a confused individual, caught up in philosophical fantasies—a rough exterior, but a solid core. My heart was in the right place, and one fine day it would beat mightily for Nation and Führer. It was his conviction that I could yet turn into a valuable member of the new folk community that was persuading him to save my life. And now, what had I actually come for?

  I told him, and he burst out laughing. Escape on an English ship? Completely out of the question! We were still Germans, and so: back to the homeland on S.M.S. Deutschland, the pocket battleship currently cruising Spanish waters. We would be allowed to take with us all our belongings; suitcases, boxes, items of furniture, books (we had starved our way to amassing a sizeable library)—none of this would have to remain behind. And upon arrival back home, we would be placed in a re-education camp. My wife, in particular, would have to learn how to be a real German woman.

  I suddenly took fright; Beatrice was opening her pocketbook and taking out her cosmetics. It seemed the worst psychological moment to blow pepper into the Consul’s eyes. But before I could give Beatrice a warning with my foot, she had already begun to put on her makeup, all the while smiling at the Führer’s representative. Why, of course! She was now sitting there as a German woman, and German women no longer wore makeup. That’s exactly why she was applying makeup.

  I told the man that we weren’t interested in returning to the homeland. I would go back to the River Niers only after the whole mob of Nazis and their Führer had gone to the devil. We wanted to go to Switzerland. “That’s absurd! How in heaven’s name…?” He refused to stamp our passports. “What? Insult the Führer and then demand a passport stamp? Not on your life!” He asked us if we didn’t feel ashamed, if we didn’t know how to behave in his presence and under his protection. If we had disagreements with the New Order, he said, we should keep those to ourselves, seeing as we were German citizens and thus wards of the glorious Führer. This was strong language. The two of us, wards of a criminal, a Professor Többen-type murderer? I stood up, grabbed our passports, pointed to the larger-than-life photo of the Führer and asked Beatrice if she wished to continue living under the protection of that man. Neither of us wanted that, and so I slapped both of the brown documents on the Consul’s desk, and we abruptly left. I had just canceled our citizenship. We were free again.

  We were still rushing through the front yard of the villa when we heard footsteps behind us. The Consul grabbed my shoulder and stuttered, “This is madness! Don’t you realize that if you are caught without papers you will be immediately shot?” He stuffed our passports into my inside coat pocket. I calmly replied that since we already knew that we were to be liquidated, it didn’t matter much where and how that was going to happen.—

  “Well then just go away! Heil Hitler!”

  It was of course our fervent desire to leave this inhospitable place, but—had our kind friend put his stamp in our passports? I thumbed through them—nothing! The Consul went back into his house, and we followed him. Without the stamps, our journey to Canossa would have been senseless. Upstairs again: he’s back behind his desk, we’re sitting on the chairs. Another tirade. Pepper at the ready, a life-and-death tug-of-war. New accusations. An amplified list of our transgressions, followed by further threats. I: “And the stamps?” He: was it true that I had a caricature of the Führer hanging on the wall of my study, a horrible misrepresentation of the features of the heaven-sent Redeemer of the Nation, a thing that I put up there to show my Spanish friends and make insulting comments on? I denied this. I said it was a lie that there was any such caricature hanging on the wall of my study. The Consul: such insolence! I was a liar on top of everything else. He had evidence and witnesses. He named some names.

  The Consul was purple with rage. I quieted him down by saying that what he was taking as a political matter was for me purely a question of philology, since by training I was in fact a philologist, albeit a failed one. The incident under discussion revolved around the difference between “have” and “had”—that is, around the verb “to have” and its conjugation. I unfortunately no longer owned the caricature, I told him. It was stuck to the wall, and when we moved it got torn. Egg-white is a strong kind of glue. Thus I once “had” the drawing, but I no longer “have” it. I begged his pardon for my linguistic fastidiousness. With a smile, I handed him our passports. Still in a rage, he banged down his stamp in both of them and told us to beware: the Deutschland would let us take all our possessions with us, whereas the British would allow us only to take hand-baggage on board—small suitcases, a box… He added that if the police stopped us and identified us as the two Barceló Street residents on the liquidation list, we were to appeal to the German Consulate. For a period of 24 hours he would guarantee our lives in the name of the magnanimous Führer, whose loyal servant I would no doubt become in due time. Not a hair on our heads would be harmed; the Führer was in need of heads. Considering the circumstances, this was a fine compliment—the finest that a clairvoyant Consul could offer to two documented heads that had not yet rolled in the name of the Führer, and that would not roll in the Führer’s name for the next twenty-four hours. We could only hope that no one noticed that our heads were steaming with anger. Our knees felt like jelly as we walked through the consulate yard for the fourth time.

  We were now officially stamped for our escape. This was bureaucratic lunacy. The English, such a great power on the high seas, were miserable pencil-pushers on dry land.

  We could stay alive for 24 hours, but by the end of that grace period we would be safely aboard ship. What lay behind us were three months of shuttling between Génova and Palma visiting friends and then going to the harbor. We had smuggled eyewitness reports and letters without realizing that we were ourselves scheduled to be shot.

  Pause for a council of war. I recovered my composure and tossed Beatrice’s peppered powder box into a ditch. Beatrice was shivering so violently that I feared she might misuse the box and blind herself. But what now? We should go separately, one of us to Génova to pack our little bundles, the other to our apartment in the city to do what was necessary, especially to pick up my Tombs of the Huns manuscript. Beatrice volunteered for the latter chore. If she was stopped by the gendarmes, as a woman she would be a more effective protection against our premature death than I would be with my episcopal letter of recommendation. But first we had to go to the English Consulate.

  There they put our names on the international list of refugees. Then we learned that the destroyer due to arrive at Mallorca that very evening had changed its course. There would be another ship. “When?” They couldn’t tell us exactly—maybe tomorrow, but it could be several days. We were asked to stay in contact with the consulate—call them three times a day or come in person. We turned numb. We were living outside the city in Génova without a telephone, we had no more money, and they were after us. Had the German Consul paid us the prescribed 200 marks refugee allowance? “No.” “Sorry.” This meant that for the British o
ur case was closed.

  But it was only logical: whoever rejects the Führer’s bribe for returning to the homeland mustn’t expect him to offer some grudge money.

  We had to change our plans. We must stay together. Taking all possible measures for our security, we went to our city apartment. The concierges told us that someone had repeatedly come asking for me. Apparently I was on some search list. Well, I said, I was busy both day and night—interpreting for the Falange.

  The clumps of wax at our apartment door were undisturbed. We locked ourselves in and, in a fit of panic that I have never been able to understand, I took the manuscript of my brainless Huns and began thinking how to give it an anti-heroic burial. This book, which depicted the outbreak of mass insanity in my home town, was about to fall victim to another form of insanity. Certain that we would be staying on the island for some time yet, we figured that if I were caught with the manuscript I would surely be shot.

  Our apartment had no stove. Should we start a fire on the terrace? The smoke would alarm the Blue House. That left only the toilet. I tore the pages to shreds, tore the shreds to smaller shreds, and sent my creation chapter by chapter to the same destination that no doubt some of my readers would have chosen for it. I tore up the pages and pulled the chain, tore again and pulled again, with ever greater intervals in between tearing and pulling, since the cistern on our roof was almost empty, and the bowl was filling up more and more slowly. Desperate as I was, this afforded me a certain pleasure at my own downfall. In between page-tearings and chain-pullings I read through a few passages, made some editing and deleting, and then once more pulled the chain. This game of cowardly egotism lasted a full three hours. If my opus was to go the way of all sewage, it at least ought to go in print-ready condition.

  What a memorable auto-da-fé! I, who already had annihilated so many of my artistic creations, discovered at this moment that I was a born writer. Not one word of mine was to leave the house without my own imprimatur. After drowning all my Huns, whom I had got to like while writing about them, in place of the still unwritten final chapter I flushed down a bunch of suspect letters into the cloaca maxima Maioricensis. Then I asked Beatrice, who was standing guard like a dame de pissoir, for some paper for myself.

  We spent the night at the Casa Inés. There, too, we arranged our belongings provisionally and left instructions as to what to do with them. Early the next day we walked to Palma, each of us carrying a small bundle in each hand, just as the Consul had told us. At the English Consulate we learned to our horror that no ship had arrived and that none was expected soon.

  What now? No money, and no house. That meant hiking back and forth to Génova in the blazing sun. And we hadn’t eaten a thing in two days.

  Our grace period was over. We were doomed.

  “It is folly to try curing the incurable” Thus spake Zarathustra. So let them perish!

  “But it takes more courage to make an end of things than to create a new verse—all physicians and poets know this.” Thus, too, spake Zarathustra, or thus speaks life itself—which amounts to the same thing.

  Where could we go? On the steps of the English Consulate, our bundles at our feet, we told each other that if the anarchist Count’s and the anarchist Countess’ offer—“Our home is your home”—was not just a local figure of speech but a sign of genuinely anarchistic generosity, then we could make our way to the Pensión del Conde—if in fact the Conde was still alive.

  Old, familiar paths, familiar faces, but no olás and olés. Hadn’t Josefa, the maid with the smoking bosom, made the sign of the cross? Doña Inés opened the gate a crack, made the little shriek appropriate to the occasion, and let us inside. “You? You’re alive?” It was still the same vestibule, the same paintings, the same rocking chairs. But the Countess looked different: tinier, paler, thinner. We knew several languages? That was important now, she said. She went to fetch Alonso.

  Don Alonso welcomed us in a whisper. A place to sleep? Fine, as long as the rebels didn’t blow up his house, which could happen any day now, at any hour. It was, he said, a miracle of his anarchist Madonna that the house was still standing. House searches once every week—fine, although he had declared himself pro forma in favor of the Holy War in order to keep his conspirators in hiding. He could have used us during the first days, he said, but on Barceló Street he was told we had been eliminated—despachados was the term used. The Count gave a soft whistle. Doors opened, and conspirators appeared from all corners of the house, men and women by the dozens, most of them intellectuals, to judge by the way they looked. I got the cold shivers. We had escaped the neighborhood of the Blue House only to find ourselves now in the Citadel of Anarchism. It was only the drawing-room anarchists who had left the scene; these were people who were ready for anything.

  We, too, were ready for anything. After a snack—something I had been dying for—we were mobilized for the cause. Upstairs under the red-hot roof was an attic alcove, formerly a dovecote. There they had put together the parts of a radio transmitter in such a way that it could be disassembled on a moment’s notice. Everyone in the house knew exactly where to betake himself in case of a house search. Don Alonso, the ingenious tinkerer, had planned everything. A number of anarchist priests, amazing people, were serving as fronts to the world outside. But house-raiding squads sometimes came down from the roof. To warn against them, guards were posted, including dogs. The radio was turned on, and we took up our listening post. The skylights and walls were made soundproof with blankets, and as a further precaution they threw a flea-ridden manta over our heads. We heard radio static. It was our job to monitor foreign broadcasts and to translate. They wanted to know what the outside world was thinking and saying about the Holy War. Beatrice listened to a few sentences, and then she translated while I listened on and translated in turn. It worked like a charm. In this fashion, we two candidates for execution didn’t lose any time at all. We earned our keep by sweating and getting bitten by fleas. I would like to have put on a bathing suit for these listening sessions, but Spaniards observe etiquette in all situations.

  We waited ten days for the English ship, days during which more than one tragedy occurred inside our fortress. One of the priests fell in love with a school teacher. But he wanted to keep on saying Mass until the war was over, when he would finally hang up his cassock and begin a new life with his novia somewhere on the mainland. A Communist sailor, a fellow who wanted nothing to do with anarchism, became rebellious and had to be bound and gagged. A citizen of Manacor hanged himself from a rafter when he learned that his entire family had been killed in a raid in his home town. Don Alonso cut the rope; groaning, the man came to. It’s not easy to break your own neck. In this house there was always something going on, and always in whispers. Vigoleis held forth on the subjects of human dignity, free will, peoples and fatherlands—sublime topics all, while the murderous rampages continued on the island outside our doors.

  We maintained contact with the English Consulate. One of us went there every morning, every noontime, and every evening.

  Bobby offered to take all of our belongings from our risky apartment to Valldemosa, where they would be in safe keeping. Doña Clara insisted that we stay during the winter in her hospedage, but we declined. We didn’t want to put anyone’s life in danger. We were marked people.

  Don Joaquín Verdaguer, the author of a serio-comic catechism for pipe smokers, had run out of shag. Deprived of his customary puffing, his pipe couldn’t fall out of his mouth when he opened his door in response to our knocking. He turned white as a sheet when we announced that we had come to say goodbye.

  Don Joaquín is the one who told us all about the plans for our execution.

  Our names were on a list drawn up by the Germans. The Spaniards weren’t particularly interested in liquidating us, but considering that an overall cleansing operation was to take place, they didn’t shirk from eliminating us along with all the others. One favor deserves another. Verdaguer’s account tallied on many poi
nts with the one given us by the German Consul. After three weeks of fruitless searching, the leader of the Spanish death squad had had enough; he wanted to let us get away. But then someone told him that these two Germans were good friends of his, Don Joaquín Verdaguer’s, so maybe he could provide further information. Verdaguer was grilled. He told them everything he knew about me: I was a member of the literary tertulia run by the man Mulet, but besides that, nothing suspicious. “Involvement in Spanish politics?” No such thing that he knew of, and highly improbable besides. But the best source of information was the owner of the lending library, Señor Don Jaime Escát, who would doubtless also give them a positive report.

  The executioner’s deputy looked up Don Jaime. He found him in the back room of his library, where he and I had so often talked politics and philosophy, and where Don Jaime had been almost drunk with joy at the news of a Red Azaña victory in the elections. It was there that he had asked Vigoleis to drink a toast to the Red Flag. “Oh you Spaniards and your politics!” Vigoleis had said. He, Vigoleis, would turn old and grey before he could comprehend one iota of Spanish politics, and besides, it didn’t interest him in the least. And besides that, he as a foreign guest in the country had no business getting mixed up in internal Spanish affairs. As for Hitler, however, he was a prime authority.

  Don Jaime, Verdaguer continued, asked the executioner just why he was looking for this damnable German Catholic. Of course he knew me, he told the man; he knew me all too well. The squad leader pulled out his execution orders: husband and wife, up against the wall, both of them! Whereupon Don Jaime leaped up and cried, “Ha! Give me that! That’s my affair! I’ll get them both, and I’ll take care of them myself, those traitors! I’ll shoot ’em myself!” Whereupon Don Jaime lifted his lapel and identified himself as the boss of the island’s Secret Police. The squad leader handed over his written orders, was given a receipt for the prospective liquidation of Vigoleis and Beatrice, and with that he was rid of his burdensome chore. No doubt he thought to himself that if the boss himself wanted to take on the job, those two must be truly dangerous criminals. Great! Let him do what he wants! But no sooner had the guy left the library when Don Jaime burned the execution orders and told a petrified Mulet how fortunate it was that this Catholic German never bothered himself with Spanish politics, for otherwise he would have searched him out and had him shot. But the Nazis, he said, ought to get rid of their opponents on their own time. For him, Don Jaime, the case was closed.