The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  But the “bitch”—my reader will again notice that information gathered later is playing a role in my narrative—this particular individual had transformed the above manager type, certified the world over, into something like a cartoon by Berlin’s low-life favorite Heinrich Zille. She added certain touches of Käthe Kollwitz and certain bitter contours of the Galician master Castelão. She had made of Zwingli, one might say, a fellow who refuses to hide his personal opinions beneath a starched linen straitjacket, whose heart, now covered by a torn and wrinkled chemise, no longer beats in anticipation of serving his genteel clients. It was indeed questionable whether his heart pulsed for his own sake. In a word, she had created for him a decidedly unstarched private life. Right now, riding in the Hispano-Suiza, we were about to learn details. Must I really add information about the spots on his suit, his scuffed and ragged shoes, the shirt cuffs that hung limply at his wrists and whose color differed only barely from that of his grease-stained jacket sleeves? I do believe that we have said enough; Beatrice was all the more to be pitied.

  Vicinity of the city. Gorgeous seaside location. Spacious park at south side. Five minutes to beach. Tram stop at entrance, etc. That’s what we read in the brochure describing the hotel where we soon could wash away, in our “double with bath,” the dirt of our voyage and perhaps also the moral contamination we underwent upon disembarking. Our personal fenders were damaged. Worse yet, we didn’t have any fenders. This matter would have urgent priority as soon as I found out where we were going and how things would turn out. When I have that comfy study to crawl into—how nice of Zwingli to think of me in that way. He’s actually a pretty swell guy—a little seedy, quite seedy in fact. Beatrice doesn’t like that. But she really ought to have been just a trace nicer to him, seeing that he wasn’t dead and all. That would have been a terrible turn of events indeed. Behind it all is a broad; I can’t wait to meet the “bitch.” Back in Cologne he had one like that. We students were goggle-eyed. After a while she went to bed with our friend the gravedigger. She was a necrophiliac, Zwingli told us laconically. She craved certain cadaverous attributes he wasn’t able to provide. Good riddance! If I were him, I would have got the terminal shivers. Not Zwingli. He packed his bags and headed for Brussels, where another affair started up. After that, he hightailed it to Rome, ostensibly to pursue archaeological interests. But his true interest was in digging up women, or at least it had been. Now he was here on this island, with a woman in quotation marks, and surely we weren’t prejudiced? The whole thing looked extremely risky.

  Suddenly I was very tired. Beatrice, sitting next to me, was also very tired, and Zwingli, facing us on a fold-out seat, seemed likewise very tired. Here, in back, no one said anything. We couldn’t hear the lively conversation going on between chauffeur and palefrenier up front. The automobile dated from the days of class warfare; a glass partition separated servants from those being served. There was a speaking slot, but it was stuffed with a purple velvet cushion, making the separation near-total—feudal, one might say. In half an hour, I said to myself, we’ll be there and things will get democratic again. A pity, though, for I have certain aristocratic proclivities. I admit that I enjoyed that inside window just a bit, smutty though it was. Was this, Vigoleis, the first rung on the chicken-ladder of your new life?

  It was eight o’clock, an hour when the sun has already spread its warm blanket over everything. Old Sol also poked his rays inside our automobile, which ought to have been inching along like the vehicle for the bereaved family in a funeral cortege. Our threefold mood was decidedly funereal: black window curtains and a bit of black crepe, and we would be participating in a first-class interment—except, of course, for the missing corpse. Our corpse was alive, and so the Hispano-Suiza could go full out without showing any disrespect. We were driving at hair-raising speed. We saw next to nothing of all the fascinating Spanish sights whizzing past us right and left. Too bad—I’d like to have made note of this and that for letters to our friends. After three minutes—it can’t possibly have been any longer—it suddenly turned dark in our car. On both sides of us, house walls edged in dangerously close to our fenders. I started worrying about scratches and scrapes when we jerked to a halt. Beatrice and I lurched forward. We would have gone head-first through the medieval partition if our chariot hadn’t been a deluxe model with ample room inside for passenger safety. At any rate, this method of stopping seemed anything but luxurious. Maybe the hotel lacked an auto ramp to its front entrance. We would soon find out.

  “Nous voilà!” said Zwingli as he rapped on the partition. He was probably stopping for an errand. Our door flew open.

  Beatrice didn’t move. Thinking that the siblings should be settling everything between themselves, I resolved to be even more hesitant to initiate action than I normally am. So I, too, remained silent, leaning back in a concave section of upholstery that innumerable well-heeled hotel guests had pre-shaped for my traveling comfort. I love broken-in furniture. It welcomes the sitter with deep-seated hospitality.

  Zwingli’s magic nail, brandished often as an open-sesame, wouldn’t work when it came to our hearts—as he himself realized. So to explain his “voilà” he added: “This is where she lives. We have a whole floor up there.” After a pause, he went on, “It’s just so goddam early! She’s still asleep,” and he scratched his head in confusion. This released a shower of dandruff. We could have covered an entire Christmas tree with the shiny flakes, and if we added a few candles, we might have had a pleasant family reunion after all. Ah, Beatrice, you poor sister of a brother you love so much!

  A bunch of ragged kids squeezed together to form an honor guard as the gentleman and his lady emerged from the limousine to follow their host through the entry. So narrow was the street that the open door of our automobile stuck halfway into this gateway. The perfect way to arrive in rainy weather!

  The vestibule, where our baggage was standing in a pile, was cleared of the gang of inquisitive twerps by a few kicks administered in decidedly unceremonious fashion by our host. Our motley porter sat next to the baggage pile rolling a cigarette with his left hand, an art Zwingli had also mastered: no more use of bodily appendages in the carrying on of life than is absolutely necessary. Now, however, neither this kind of dexterity nor his magic nail could lift him out of the funk that seemed to envelop him. He was no longer the sovereign Don Helvecio whose marvelous scepter made the Little Helpers dance down at the harbor. As we followed him up the stairs, he gradually got smaller and less imposing, until finally he disappeared altogether. He had simply taken a powder. To describe such events, the occult sciences speak of the phenomenon of dematerialization. It is reported to happen even less frequently than the appearance of ghosts. With the connivance of the appropriate visible agencies, you can conjure up invisible ones. But to make a man of flesh and blood simply vanish into thin air, a man I have been following up a flight of stairs, that is a very sublime form of sorcery, one that must involve the Devil himself. The Devil? Wasn’t it more reasonable to suspect the “bitch,” who, equipped with parapsychological powers, may have effected Zwingli’s abduction to Nada just as she had brought on his metamorphosis from elegant young swain to shabby, smelly harbor rat? And if this Zwingli was in actuality only Zwingli’s double, then we were dealing with a case of compound levitation—Something scientists like Driesch or Dessoir ought to look into.

  A few steps higher and Beatrice, together with her mediumistic faculties, also vanished. One more step and I saw no more of my own self! Only my heart, pounding wildly from the fright, assured me that I hadn’t vaporized or turned into one of Gustav Meyrink’s spooks. I didn’t have a mirror handy to see if I was already wearing the mask of death—the “Hippocratic aspect,” as the physicians so delightfully call it.

  This spectral intermezzo lasted but a few seconds. I then heard a noise, an everyday, earthbound sound, like a key being turned in a lock. A door was pushed open, and light entered the stairwell—faint, but sufficient to return us
all to the real world. I had overestimated the sleeping woman’s spell-weaving powers.

  The man with the many-colored cummerbund lugged our baggage once more. When everything was in the apartment, he stood waiting. Zwingli reached into his pants pocket—apparently a very deep one, bottomless even, for his hand got completely lost inside it, made a few twisting motions, and then failed to resurface. My own pocket was not so cavernous, but rather well stocked with pesetas. I gave our Little Helper a handful, and this gesture transposed him out of his fairy-tale existence into his native sphere of plodding corporeality. He took the money, grinned, and disappeared. I stepped into the room. There I was, where “she” lived, aground on the shoals of somebody else’s love affair.

  Beatrice sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette. Zwingli closed the door. I leaned against the wall. It was just like being back in Cologne-Poll, and yet very, very different.

  The street where our limousine let us out was called the Calle de la Soledad. Soledad means solitude, loneliness, or emptiness, but it can also signify longing, homesickness, mourning, or grief. It is an important concept in Iberian mysticism. On Vigoleis’ Spanish sojourn this street was his first anchorage. It wouldn’t remain so for long. The seabed wouldn’t hold. His ship of life was soon adrift again, and, unfamiliar with the depths in these strange waters, he soon got beached once again.

  III

  As the hoop fits the barrel-stave, as the gold band seals a marriage, in just the same way inbreeding relates to an island: in each instance something holds something else together. With animals, humans, and intellectual affairs, inbreeding can bring about superior achievements never approximated by a genetic mix. As examples, we might list the bloodlines of famous horses, the generations of Egyptian pharaohs, the writings of Christian mystics, or, since we are speaking of islands, the population of the Dutch island of Marken, which for decades has been on display in proud local costume to tourists and other visitors. The first time I spent a week among such isolated folk, all of whom are related only to each other, I felt very much like an outsider, which of course I was. During that entire visit I wandered about in shame of my mainland chromosomes. I had nothing whatsoever to offer the natives except my money. Deliberate inbreeding provides proof that chauvinism can go hand in hand with calculated cupidity.

  Because Mallorca is an island, we could observe the same phenomenon here, though as time went on I became more interested in its gradations of light than in its people. Its light? Perhaps my reader is taken aback by this remark, for one hardly ever hears about the inbreeding of light. What I mean to suggest is the peculiar phasing of illumination generated here by the varying degrees of shade. On this island there takes place a constant shifting and melding of types of shade: human shadows copulate, so to speak, with the shadows and penumbrae of man-made objects and clouds, to yield the ever-changing mystery of Mallorcan light. Hundreds of artists from the world over, on seeing this kaleidoscope for the first time, have not believed their eyes. Some very few have succeeded in fixing the experience on canvas. Prominent among these happy few is a Japanese painter who lived on the island for many years, and who refused to leave until the Civil War forced him off. His name in translation means “Three Little Clouds.” In person he was just as gossamer as his name implies, and his paintings breathed the transparent ether of the island itself. As he once told me, this atmospheric transparency was so unique that not even the luminary marvels of his own homeland could bring forth what I liked to call the inbreeding of light—a phrase that, incidentally, he found amusing.

  “Cloudless days: over 170 per year; rainy days: no more than 70; fog: 4 or 5 days.” That’s what the travel brochures say, and I have altered nothing from personal experience, which like all appearances can be deceptive. There, in raw numbers, is the set of climatological preconditions for the miraculous merger of sky and earth whose charm at any given moment overshadows—if I may be allowed such a jarring reversal of metaphor—attractions that Nature normally takes centuries to bring forth elsewhere.

  A trace of this magical illumination was also visible in the vestibule of the house occupied by the individual we were now visiting. I have chosen the word “individual” deliberately, with the pejorative connotations it carries with it. By calling her a “bitch,” Zwingli had already degraded—or perhaps upgraded—the character of his female companion to that of a mere “individual,” especially if we consider what he said about her bedtime talents. Presumably we would soon find out what kind of bitchery he actually was referring to. Was “bitch” a term of endearment? Or did it designate a common street sister? Did he mean to suggest a woman of slovenly habits? Should we already start turning up our noses?

  As I have mentioned, there was a handful of that magical light in her apartment vestibule, and at one and the same time it put me in a mood of both reverence and suspicion. Why were the occupants of this house so parsimonious with the celestial gift of light? Wallpaper, which might be subject to fading, was nowhere to be seen. Instead the walls were whitewashed, a type of finish I associated with root cellars and livestock barns. But my very brief sojourn on this island had already taught me that my personal yardstick was ripe for the kindling pile. I would have to acclimate myself to new standards in the same way as I would have to get used to this odd indoors apportionment of daylight.

  Was I bothered by the darkness, Zwingli inquired. Surely I wouldn’t want it any darker, he said, and if it got any brighter, we would truly be in for it. Had I never heard of flies? One inch more of sunlight and we could be eaten alive!

  Flies! So that was it! The perennial plague of the sunny climes, a foretaste of which we had experienced on shipboard! Flies abhor the very darkness that engenders them in swarms. More than most other species, they are lovers of light, the joy of the sunlit world, the very embodiment of the ecstasy of creatureliness. With their cosmopolitan inclinations and their trillions of progeny, they constitute a fine symbol for a faith in the future that puts to shame those of us humans who are inclined to piety. And yet humans don’t like them, particularly when they appear en masse. But humans in numbers raised to this power don’t appeal to their fellow humans either, to judge from the waves of genocide that we have been witness to. Give us a single human being, and things can work out just fine. Give us a million, and we make the sign of the cross and plot their annihilation. Give us a single buzzing fly on a melancholy summer afternoon, alone with a book of poetry in our private study—who would think of harming it as it flits around a central point not unlike our own spiritual core, the point we can only postulate and never locate with certainty? But let flies appear in multiples, and the swatter will swat and the blood will spurt. Man is to his fellow man a demon. To the fly he is a snapping dog.

  By banishing sunlight, the woman of this house had also banished insects. The window shutters with their fixed blinds, called persianas, let in only the tiniest sprinkles of daylight. Surely that had something to do also with love. As we all know, love shuns the light. Only red light matches its confused inner urges. It stimulates the biochemical processes required for it to find its way out of platonic abstraction back to passion—though little lamps are in reality rarely necessary. In this context I have always been puzzled by the fact that the lowest color on the solar spectrum was selected as the STOP signal in modern traffic. Otherwise, where red lights emit their alluring gleam, life goes on at its most hectic pace. But this matter is far more complex than simple optical semantics. It is an existential problem, one that Jean Paul Sartre might one day solve for us from the exalted precincts of Paris. Red can, of course, also signify “danger,” and thus I should be less eager to claim for the color an exclusively erotic meaning.

  My eyes soon adjusted to the soft twilight that filled the room like the glow from the clerestory in a basilica. In this room there was much for the twilight to fill, for it was as good as empty. Because it probably wasn’t intended as a room for sitting in, it contained just a very few items of furniture. I have me
ntioned that it was a “vestibule,” though one might even contest this designation. There was a bench whose seat and back were made of loosely woven wicker or straw, a few chairs, a table with sideboard that resembled not so much a bonafide table as a South Sea Island catamaran, and two oversized wooden pedestals supporting artificial palms. That was all. These imitation plants, it must be said, produced more subtropical ambience than the decidedly fake-looking real palms to be seen in the conservatory of Amsterdam’s Hotel Krasnopolsky. With phony decorations it always comes down to what purpose they are meant to serve. I know certain people who right now are living out their waxen character so determinedly that no waxworks would ever dare to display the originals on a pedestal. The walls of this room in Palma also had a few paintings, but they were less effective as imitations. Not only did their tropical fruit fail to invite the viewer to take a bite. Even a mind untutored in art history could spot their insipid colors as indicative of cheap commercial reproductions. Suspended from the ceiling was a candelabra that looked like a ham in a butcher shop, especially as it was covered with a cloth sack.

  One single fly buzzed around this mummified chandelier. It was evidently a degenerate specimen, for by rights it ought to have shunned the darkness, darted through a crack in the shutters, and joined the legions of its relatives that at this time of day were invading the meat stands over at the city market. Zwingli broke the silence by getting up and stretching. He gave a loud yawn, took off his jacket, and made himself comfortable. After all, he no longer had to treat us to the welcoming ceremonies at some princely hotel. And what about the ceremonies here in the Street of Solitude? To describe these I shall, for a moment, have to tell some history.