The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  For this reason, there can be no talk of “pure coincidence” concerning the living or dead persons in my book. Each and every character in it makes an appearance in the flesh, in his or her own shadowless image, although in certain cases where political entities or individual grudges might present a danger, my reader must be detoured away from precise identification. This was decidedly not the case with my Kathrinchen from the Rhineland, who appears in my memoirs as the complete nymphomaniac that she was in reality. The same is true for her male counterpart, the piggish lecher Silberstern, although I must admit that with this particular fellow, a man who was worth his weight in gold, I have altered his surname from “gold” to “silver.” This admission will no doubt be of help to his family. Here and there in my book I have changed certain phonemes within proper names, but the bearers of these names appear as they actually lived. I changed nothing at all that concerns my own person. As the author, and as a human being, I felt that I had no choice but to expose myself to any and all personal attacks.

  Many of my acquaintances had already passed on from this world before I decided in the year 1952 to set down my recollections, aided by nothing more than my magically comprehensive, logarithmic memory and that of my constantly courageous and loyal partner Beatrice. Other people gave me their blessing as I naively wrote out my memories, and even later when they appeared in print. Today, as I write this Afterword with the intention of canceling an erroneous inhumation, the number of departed souls from our Mallorcan world has already risen sharply, and I don’t even get to read all the obituaries. Zwingli, the real-life originator of my second-sighted island adventures, the man who, like his sister and me, was listed to be liquidated during the Spanish insurrection, was lowered into an early grave in Santa Fe de Bogotá. Mamú, our lady in charitable Christian memory; Don Juan Sureda; both of the Counts, Kessler and Keyserling; Villalonga; Mulet the Great—All of them are now no longer with us.

  Risen from the dead is solely Captain Heinz Kraschutzki, about whom I reported previously that he was executed, and about whom I report that he was involved in the 1918 naval mutiny at Kiel, and that he raised chickens on Mallorca. I wrote this in response to what I heard about him on our island at the time, an account of his life that none of my painstaking research in libraries in Amsterdam and The Hague has put into question. I am not one of those writers who invent things from whole cloth, nor could anything be further from my intentions than to besmirch any person’s reputation, either by detracting from his real life or by concocting a phony life for him.

  This particular hero of my applied recollections wrote to me in the spring of 1957, saying that everything I said about him in my book was wrong. But unlike what I might have expected of him in accordance with my further advisory to accept the characters “in dual cognizance of their identity,” he submitted his complaint in full cognizance of his own person, which he claimed was the victim of mistaken, though happily not willfully falsifying, assertions. First of all, he explained, he never took part in a mutiny in Kiel. At the time in question—I am keeping strictly to what he told me in his letter, which is no doubt of importance for the history of World War I—he was captain of the minesweeper M 100, whose home port was Bremerhaven, and he was on the high seas when the naval mutiny occurred. Upon returning to port, where the city had already fallen into the hands of a military soviet, his crew unanimously elected him as a delegate to the existing revolutionary council. Thus it was only after the uprising that he entered the Bremerhaven military regime. Hence, I read further in this admonitory letter from a sailor I thought was dead and who was claiming to have been mistreated by others as well, there was no mutiny on his ship. If the relationship between captain and crew had in all cases been like that on M 100, he went on, there would never have been any mutinies at all.

  Secondly, he wrote, he never engaged in chicken farming on Mallorca. In fact he had never in his life owned a single chicken. Thirdly, he was never executed there, although the radio and three newspapers of national renown had published obituaries (incidentally, they also published my own obituary). He cited the newspapers by name, and one of the obituaries was printed under my byline. When I wrote it, I had no idea at all that sometime later my pen would bring forth my insular recollections, including an account of the execution of Herr Heinz Kraschutzki. He was still very much alive, he wrote, despite the fact that in Spain he had been sentenced to “only” thirty years in prison, of which he served nine years, two months, and four days.

  In addition, this resurrected man complains in his letter that I had no right “an sich” to publish details of the life of living person that could potentially harm that person. But he was reluctant to make a direct accusation against me, since I had presumably been misled by the press accounts of his passing.

  I was not particularly moved by this message from what I had been thinking was a voice from the next world. My joy at a man’s resurrection, coupled with my shame at having offended the same man’s reputation—these things lay far behind me. For in the meantime I had learned from my friend, the writer Karl Otten, who like Kraschutzki and all the rest of us was a victim of Nazi persecution on the explosive island of Mallorca, that the information given to me by the German Consul, which was the basis for the account in my book, was erroneous. In a later letter, Herr Kraschutzki asked me what possible motivation the Hitlerian Consul might have had to list a person among the deceased, when he knew full well that this person was still living.

  In times when murder is rampant, puzzles will multiply. Even so, I hastened to reply to the ex-captain of the German Navy that in a subsequent edition of my book, in accordance with his wishes, I would duly absolve him of (1) mutiny and (2) chicken-farming, and I promised (3) that I would restore him to life in all its blissful abundance. I should add that I could not resist expressing my disappointment that he had never made personal acquaintance with a chicken, in the legal sense of “chicken ownership” (detentio gallinae). I informed him that I myself had never owned a single chicken, although for several years I had intercourse with chickens, with thousands of chickens to be exact, on my brother’s farm, where I also had found opportunity to observe their egg-laying secrets and repeatedly to be amazed by their proverbial stupidity. Yet I was also aware, I told Mr. Kraschutzki, of their obsession with any and all forms of chicken feed, as with their active herding instinct, which one might refer to as a biological extension of their hunger for corn kernels. Beyond this, I knew of the frustration experienced by chicken breeders in seasons when the eggs yield more roosters than hens—a state of affairs in the barnyard that could be called, if I remember correctly, a form of sexual mutiny.

  I am mentioning all this simply as a marginal comment on the recantation I sent to Herr Kraschutzki, although my reader will have noticed that here, too, one thing quickly leads to another. I wrote to the sailor further that I was sorry he hadn’t been a mutineer. I would have liked him better as a mutineer. In fact—and this has nothing more to do with the special case of a man who avoided getting murdered against all sense of law and liberty—in fact, I consider military revolts on land, on the sea, and in the air as a distinctly honorable method of atoning for the type of sins one has committed by putting on a killer’s uniform in the first place. As I see it, a rebellious soldier is more courageous than one who sticks to his post wearing a murderer’s decoration on his cowardly breast until he hears the trumpet calling him to his own demise.

  This completes my act of contrition with respect to Captain Heinz Kraschutzki. Let him now rejoin the living characters in my book—sans chickens, to be sure, and absolved of being a mutineer against God, King, and Fatherland, those three entities that have caused so much trouble for humankind in the upwards as well as the downwards direction, but especially downwards, where the soldier makes his appearance, standing rigidly at attention with his brain in his boots. Since the Stone Age we have never come to grips with spiritual ossification. Perhaps there are some who wish to believe that man is
a rational being who can get beyond acting with tooth and claw. But here, too, let truth be told.

  Ascona. Casa Rocca Vispa . July 8, 1960

  Additional Correction:

  I cite a character in my island memoirs, Bobby, as presenting his business card with the same typographic design as the printing of this book. This refers solely to the first edition, whose colophon reads as follows:

  “The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen was set in Poliphilus and printed in the autumn of 1953 by Drukkerij G. J. Thieme in Nijmegen, under commission from G. A. van Oorschot, publisher on the Herengracht, Amsterdam, and bound by Elias P. van Bommel in Amsterdam. The typographic design is by Helmut Salden, Wassenaar. The licensed German-language edition is published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Düsseldorf.”

  Blonay. La Colline en Malaterraz, September 7, 1970

  Further Correction:

  For years there have been reports that I was dead. Yet it is not the purpose of this supplement to my island recollections to contradict advisories concerning my interment. Recently the announcements about my biting the dust have become more numerous. There have even been some messages of condolence, which I have found just as touching as they are amusing, because when the fateful hour finally arrives I’ll be in no position to savor them, either in heaven or in hell. I will have disappeared into the void, dans le néant. And that’s just as it should be.

  But people whom I have myself caused to die with strokes of my pen, people who since then have proven to be very much alive—in my applied recollections I have restored such individuals to life, as in the case of Navy Captain Kraschutzki.

  In the book, I reproduced the death notice of an uncle of my mother’s, from the Scheifes farm in St. Hubert. I added an assertion that God had forgiven this murderer, but that he had not escaped the secular arm of the law. He was hanged, I wrote, basing my conclusion on oral reports from my grandmother and my mother. This family oral tradition is erroneous. I am seizing the opportunity presented by this new edition of my book to set things straight.

  Not long ago I received a copy of the local newsletter from the village of St. Hubert, the Hubertus Messenger, No. 98, dated October, 1974. Under the headline ‘St. Hubert Enters World Literature?’ the death certificate is quoted together with my explanation of the murderous deed. The author of this notice added the following commentary:

  “The death notice for Heinrich Hermann Scheifes, which A. V. Thelen incorporated into his novel, was quoted together with other information in Footnote 29 of the article ‘Diary of the Remarkable Events, Recorded by C. Pielen in St. Hubert’ in the Hubertus Messenger, No. 42. It should be noted that not only has God forgiven this unhappily culpable man, but the civil authorities were also merciful toward him. Following early release from prison, he lived for a long time in the vicinity of Stenden-Rahm, where he passed away. Given all that we know about the man, it is clear that he was not a murderer. Signed: Ma.”

  It was not wanton macabre fantasy that caused me to let this putative murderer hang from a tree. Rather, I was following carefully the legend about him that was current within my own family. This now takes me straightaway to the topic of the credibility of my Applied Recollections. What is a “legend”? Here in my Island, you can read Pascoaes’ opinion that legend corrects history, and in another passage, that truth is no different from legend. On the other hand, in Conde-Duque de Olivares by the eminent man of science Gregorio Marañón, we find the statement that “legend is a caricature of truth.” One step further on this controversial subject, and I have arrived at Ernst Bertram and his book on Nietzsche. An Attempt at a Mythology. Bertram’s Introduction is concerned specifically with the nature of legend, and it has often been contested: what remains of history, he says, is quite simply legend.

  I am therefore grateful to the Hubertus Messenger, which has herewith permitted me to return an executed but now half-cleansed man to his world and to my reader, by removing the noose from his neck.

  Further, there is need for supplementary information in reference to p. 462 above, where, in keeping with what Pedro reported to us at the time, I remark in passing that several children had died. This, too, is erroneous, for now it is necessary to add two more children. Permit me to explain this unfortunate omission:

  In the autumn of 1976, Vigoleis and Beatrice finally decided to make a return trip to Mallorca to enjoy a reunion with Pedro, and to make the acquaintance of his wife and their three children. Besides, Pedro had expressed his desire to create on canvas a portrait of myself in old age.

  After 40 years, during the exact week of our former departure and overcome with emotion, we fell into each others’ arms. And like 40 years previous, Beatrice received a kiss on her hand from this Spanish grandee—nothing had changed, except that we had grown old. During this visit we often retraced our own steps. But the island was no longer our island. It had turned into an encampment for international tourism. Where ships of the Woermann Line once discharged hordes of Strength Through Joy passengers, now each and every hour thundering jets spewed forth travelers onto the island.

  Our first destination was the Street of General Barceló, the Calle del General Barceló, House No. 23. The street itself had not much changed, although the house numbers had. But inside the front door we found our old address number. A little farther on, at the corner, we sought out Jaume’s and Don Matías’ bakery, but it was no longer there. Then we turned into the Calle de las Apuntadores, heading for the Count’s pensión and the little store run by pretty Angelita. But great heavens! Our little street was unrecognizable! It now was one single bazaar, with tavern after tavern, each one offering, on posted menus and in pub windows, selections to suit the taste of Teutonic customers: sauerkraut, fresh-ground coffee, and similar items of German gourmandise. What had once been the aunts’ shop was now a restaurante. And yet—may I continue serving as a Baedeker?—the little palace that had harbored the Pensión del Conde was still there, but in more decayed condition. The tree-shaking monkey Beppo’s coconut palm in the inner courtyard was withered. And upstairs, everything was transformed. The place was teeming with hippies, who had established here an international convention center. I felt very uncomfortable moving about in such company and stumbling over them. They were living in their own world, and the new proprietor of this rooming house, a bearded fellow, asked us with a scowl why we had entered the place. I explained the reason for our visit to the Conde’s Pensión, but he was unable to provide us with any information. He knew nothing about this Count. Besides, amid all the noise produced by the unruly crowd of kids, we were hardly able to make ourselves understood. Where at one time noble personages had found shelter, a brand new style of living held sway. So we left the premises, I with my head bowed.

  The Borne? Well, this once exclusive boulevard was now a platform for strip-teasing blonde Valkyries. Other ladies sat beneath café parasols quaffing their beer, their loins yearning for musclebound Spanish machismo. Their male partners, meanwhile, spent their time ogling the Spanish beauties passing by in blue jeans.

  In Valldemosa we visited Pedro’s little cottage studio. The new owner allowed us to examine, room by room, the palatial quarters that Don Juan Sureda had completely squandered.

  There was much that we had no desire to see again. Besides Pedro, the only other old friend we met with was his brother-in-law Don Eduardo, well above 80 years of age—an impressive character.

  Pedro’s true home is now his studio in an old mill, Es Molí in Sa Cabaneta, situated on untouched land a few kilometers north of Palma. It is a magical place. What you’ll find there is a well, some donkeys, a grove of cactus, a flock of pigeons. Just a year prior to our visit, our painter friend was able to afford the installation of electric lighting.

  To mention only one of our excursions, we drove out to Felanitx, where everything was just as we remembered it, and we had dinner in an old taberna. We chatted with the owner, who just then was celebrating the name-day of one of his childre
n with a grand meal, to which he immediately invited us. We had roast dove—not the kind from Brindisi but from Binisalem, and a Felanitx white. As a gesture of thanks to our host, I spoke a few words in honor of his son’s eponymous saint, invoking blessings upon all who were gathered here at the festive table. In return, we two old, odd strangers received copious heartfelt thanks in the Spanish tradition.

  Pedro’s inquisitive ways had also affected his wife Catalina and his disconcertingly beautiful grown-up daughters. These two were dying to meet Vigo and Beatrice. I had a great deal to tell them, since they wanted to hear all the stories of the House of Sureda that are recorded in this book, and with which they were of course already familiar directly from us, and in particular from me, the one who has made literature out of the chronicles of their distinguished heritage. I didn’t hesitate for very long. Once having started, I wove into my narration several other grotesque episodes from our personal experience. My Spanish tongue became quite fluent once again. But I asked Pedro and his family to speak in their local dialect, the language so dear to me even though I couldn’t grasp every word. When I was posing for Pedro, he always asked me to go on palavering. I soon discovered that my constant chatter was enlivening the painter’s creative spirit. In this way, the 40 years that separated us soon vanished, and the portrait turned out to be a masterpiece.

  We soon learned something about Pedro’s family history that he had never mentioned: during his parents’ artistic sojourn in England, in addition to his mother’s paintings and his father’s higgledy-piggledy collection of ticket stubs, brochures, museum catalogues, etc., two children made their appearance. So here and now, I am allowing these unborn creatures (which they had been for us all along) to join the ranks of humanity. I know nothing more about them. I forgot to ask Pedro about their fate, or even just about their lives. Perhaps they never crossed the Channel. When I experience something unusual in my life in this world, I never say to myself, “Aha! You can use that in your manuscript!”