I had previously bought newspapers in Emmerich’s store, but we had never touched on personal matters. Now, however, he just opened up wide:
“As far as your wife is concerned, permit me, speaking as something like the dean of foreigners here on the island, to offer some friendly advice. I don’t know what your plans are. Are you going to be staying here very long? Helvecio told me the other day that you are a writer and a professor of literature, and he’s going to hire you for his future art academy. As a bookseller, I’ve never come across your name before, not even in the newspapers. Maybe you use a pseudonym, like so many others. But be that as it may, here on Mallorca every one of us is a doctor, a conde, or a príncipe, each according to his taste and the extent of his failures in life. But no matter who or what you are, if you’re planning on staying much longer in Palma, do have a care for your wife’s reputation. People are already talking, I’ll have you know.”
I asked Mr. Emmerich to be more explicit. He couldn’t, he didn’t have the time right now, a tour ship was in port, the shop would soon be full of customers. Perhaps I could return in the evening around seven, and I could bring my wife along if she had strong nerves.
“Beatrice, do you have strong nerves?”
“News from Basel? That last letter has me worried. Speak up! You know I’m prepared for the worst.”
“No telegram. And what you’re supposed to get prepared for I don’t even know myself. Tonight the man from Cologne at Ye Wee Booke Shoppe wants to give us a few tips on how to behave on the island if we’re planning to stay for a while. He’s written a tour guide to Mallorca. As a long-standing foreigner he knows his stuff, but I get the impression that he really wants to talk about personal matters. And what he’ll be telling us for your benefit will apparently require tough nerves. That’s why I asked you that strange question.”
Beatrice’s nerves are like iron. They are constantly in vibration, and emit tones that are sometimes high-pitched, sometimes muted. But as we crossed the palm-lined square at midnight, heading for home, the music had ceased altogether. Mr. Emmerich had treated us to jokes from his beloved home town of Cologne, which oddly enough he never left as a younger man, and to which he was just as attached as he was to the indigenous potato pancakes and sweet rice with wurst. But he had also revealed certain details from the previous life of the amazingly bed-bound Pilar.
Holy Pantaleon! Holy Kunibert! Holy St. Mary in the Capitol! Santa Catalina de Tomás! San Antonio de Viana! All ye saints of the God-fearing communities of Cologne and Palma, whose cathedrals are among the most famous in the world! Come to the aid of our two heroes, whose bodies and souls are skidding rapidly toward perdition!
But the spirits we invoked wouldn’t listen to us pagans. The one spirit that did lend an ear was that of my good mother. I felt her wan, troubled, loyal, and warning glance directed toward me across the ocean, as I strolled beside Beatrice beneath the palm trees. A mother’s eyes can penetrate any darkness. They can follow a prodigal son up hill and down dale. They can adjust to the most fearsome foreign climes better than the prodigal himself, who, though he may keep his eyes open and a firm grip on his staff, is bound to stumble. On that Mediterranean summer evening my mother’s eyes looked straight at me; I became conscious of them as in second sight. Like the legendary Atlantis, the island sank beneath the waves. I felt myself floating on a raft, drifting on the sea of my memory.
Emmerich’s narrative, delivered with a Cologne accent and laced with the argot of Cologne’s side streets, took me back several years—which was the opposite of what Emmerich intended. I saw my mother standing before me with tears in her eyes. Why are you crying, Mother? Is it because I, your son, am lost, the black sheep of the family, dyed in the wool? I wish now to relate this experience that drove tears to the eyes of my beloved parent and gripped me again on that sultry evening on the island. It will take us from Emmerich’s scabrous report back to his beloved city of Cologne. It will become apparent soon enough why this flashback was necessary in order to gauge the ugly, hateful misfortune that ruined this southern sojourn for Vigoleis and Beatrice.
Anno domini… But the exact year doesn’t matter. Germany, with blind trust in the Gott mit uns slogan embossed on its army’s belt buckles, had lost its first world war and was struggling to recuperate. Art, literature, and higher learning were thriving as in a dream-world. Trusting in nothing at all, I had just lost another of my little private wars and was getting ready to begin my first semester at Cologne University, where scholars like Bertram, Scheler, and Nicolai Hartmann would, I imagined, take me by my pale, bookwormish hand. From one day to the next, my parents had decided to accompany me on this maiden voyage to the land of certified higher academics. My good-hearted mother was concerned mostly with my choice of lodging in the big city: no bedbugs, decent bed linen, and the like. She intended to have a serious word with the landlady about my somewhat questionable health (including my physical health), and to offer her some suggestions of a sort that I needn’t enumerate here. Everyone who has a mother knows that there is no end of worries when a child enters the wide, wide world.
My old man also tagged along. A markedly unemotional type, for him the trip meant mainly the chance for a tour of the big-city bars, starting with frankfurters and a full liter mug at the Early Bird on Cathedral Square, and ending at Müller’s All-Saints Pub with long-necked wine bottles. Cologne never meant anything else to him.
I had clipped some room-for-rent ads from the Kölner Stadtanzeiger, and so mother and son set off on the look-see. Together we located the first address in a narrow alley off the Haymarket, in an ancient building with warped stairs and labyrinthine corridors, everything bathed in a twilit gloom that our eyes first had to get used to. Mother said that this was no place for me. We should try elsewhere, surely we could find a more decent house, maybe a bit more expensive, but that was unavoidable. I appeased her by remarking that unsightly portals often conceal palatial chambers, adding that I thought these surroundings were romantic (I hadn’t yet emerged from my infatuation with Romanticism). So I gave a vigorous knock on the first door, hoping to find out which was the landlady’s flat.
A half-naked girl with frizzy hair and voluptuous bosom stepped sleepily into the corridor, gave her visitors a look of amazement, and said, “Hi there, little guy! So early? And you’ve brought your mommy with you? OK, we’ll give her a rosary and she can sit on the stairs, my room is a little cramped.” Then she shouted some names down the hallway in her raucous voice, and added some remarks about this kid who was just weaned and wanted to lie at her breast, wasn’t that a riot? And how much did they think she could expect from lambikin here? All at once several doors opened, and the hall filled with loose-limbed womenfolk who greeted mother and son in the most cheerfully salacious way imaginable. A torrent of obscenities assailed our ears, as we ran the gauntlet on our dash to the exit.
My mother screamed; there were tears in her eyes. Was she at all aware that there existed such a thing as professional immorality? Probably not; she came from a happy family. I pity the people who frequent such establishments, or who depend on them for their living. But I regard them as much less despicable than professional mass murder, which involves not only mass graves but also ribbons and medals and heaps of money, and which also has to do with love—the pathological form of love that is called “patriotism.”
Once we reached the street, we didn’t dare to look at each other. It is embarrassing to be taken for a fool with your mother in a brothel; I have never forgotten the incident. I led my mortified parent to a nearby church, leaving her in more comforting surroundings while I continued my search for a room. I found one in a house where I wasn’t assaulted by naked women; instead, I was greeted there by a pious old lady who attended Mass every morning, and who took cash from my pocket using rather different methods.
Provincialism will always be provincialism, no matter if it is accompanied by a boxful of highbrow culture. And provincialism will be all the
more provincial if this box, before it arrives at its big-city destination, is already falling apart. For I mustn’t forget to mention that this journey to my urban alma mater had an ill-starred beginning. Two accidents occurred at my hometown train depot. First, while being loaded in the freight car, the crate containing my books burst its seams. And then, just as I was about to join my parents in their passenger compartment, two gentlemen appeared for a last-minute inspection: our town pastor, and his shadow and evil spirit, a prominent local gossip and threadbare dignitary, a man who survives in my memory solely in a symbolic role: he was the Hagen of the Nibelungenlied, but in petty-bourgeois, small-town recrudescence, an elemental German type that has periodically abetted Germany’s downfall. These two worthies caught up with me and made a final attempt to dissuade me from my academic apostasy; the salvation of my soul, they insisted, was at stake. They had seen my crate full of books get broken, and perhaps there was still time to reconsider the whole trip… But in an instant the locomotive engineer took pity on me and drove steam into the cylinders. I had escaped the henchmen of the Inquisition. Beatrice would have tossed a bucket of water at these village Torquemadas, as she will do in a later chapter when she sees her Vigoleis in a similarly stressful situation. But I didn’t even know her at the time, and thus I had to defend myself alone against the evil eye. In any case, after arriving in Cologne my troubles only began.
That night in Palma, Emmerich’s account of Pilar’s early career conjured the image of my mother, and I saw her praying for me. Prayer is a form of grace and a source of consolation, but you have to know how to do it. I have mastered it only in rhymed form, in poems, which are of course monologues, expressions of Self distinct from any Thou—which isn’t what prayer is supposed to be about. Thus I saw my mother, that good soul, rushing to my aid here on the island; she accompanied us across the square to the woman’s abode, where (heaven forfend!) those Cologne chippies would have been made flesh in even more perilous fashion. The words of Scripture fit this Spanish lush like a glove: “For the lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death.”
In place of the word “sword” I would prefer to say “dagger”; and as for her feet—well, we already know that they walk in little golden slippers.
María del Pilar was the daughter of a poor family from the hinterlands of Valencia. As she grew up, her doll-like beauty proved to be more than just a temporary adornment of her childhood. She turned out to be a beautiful girl, conspicuous for her visible charms in a country where, as in all countries, beautiful females are a rarity. While still very young she was raped by her father, and she ran away. A fisherman had pity on her, and took her aboard his boat. Later she worked on Menorca as dishwasher in a tavern. There she was discovered by Don Julio, our General of eggs-and-sausage fame. He found her a job in the officers’ mess; then he became jealous of his comrades, and arranged for Cinderella to join his spouse in their own kitchen. Following the adventures related before, she landed on Mallorca, and soon got tired of playing party girl for raunchy sailors in the quayside bars. She was even more disenchanted as an employee in respectable households, where for no extra pay she was continually pursued by turned-on señoritos.
A woman as beautiful as Pilar can always use the witches’ cauldron of her sexiness to achieve higher pay, though hardly ever without concessions in the form of overt love-making. And without love-making, nothing, it seems, is possible; for otherwise the world would become extinct. Anyway, the Creator didn’t fail to include Pilar in His Eternal Plan, for our Valencian beauty soon found herself in the employ of several well-heeled men in succession. A highly-placed prelate of the Church was among those who feasted on this latter-day Shulamite, and it was this Monseñor, by the way, who financed Julietta’s education at one of the island’s convent schools. When his mistress learned that he had disinherited some extra-ecclesiastical children of his own, she threw him out of the red-silk-lined domicile he had set up for her in a Palma townhouse. Shortly thereafter, she was, in turn, set out on the street by the landlord. The nuns wanted to keep Julietta in their school at no charge, but her mother refused: no Peter’s Pence for her! Then she found a position in a bordello, where she no longer had to go out looking for paying employers.
Pilar’s entry into the Casa Marguerita (I am still following the chronique scandaleuse as recited by our friend from Cologne) was an event widely discussed in every Palma club and society. At the time, this was the best cathouse in town; the patrona always had first-class ladies for hire, including some from foreign lands. None of the girls was permitted a tenure of more than six years. “A swell establishment,” was the opinion of our bookselling informant, who obviously had not passed up the opportunity to check out the mother superior’s entrepreneurial success. It was there that Don Helvecio, in his capacity as director, manager, or whatever he was at the Príncipe, made the acquaintance of Pilar while on an inspection tour of the city’s sporting houses. In Spain, Mr. Emmerich explained, the assignment of showing male guests through the local love centers was customarily carried out by hotel personnel, from the bellboy to the managing director. One evening Helvecio entered the Casa Marguerita to give some elderly British lords the chance to lavish their wealth in a fashion suitable to their caste. The patrona took him aside and whispered, “Something very fine, for very rich clientele, just arrived, and beautiful, bee-yootiful, Don Helvecio! Just one taste, and they’ll be back for more! Her name is María del Pilar.”
Don Helvecio, mindful of the good name of his hotel, explained to the Englishmen that he had something very fine for them, something exclusively for guests of some means, just arrived, and bee-yootiful! They would, he vowed, not believe their own eyes. “Just one taste, mylords, and you won’t want to leave this island for the rest of the season!” But since the gentlemen would need special arrangements in view of their somewhat advanced years, he would first have to make certain preparations personally. In the meantime, would my lords please be so kind as to repair to the reception room, where they might read newspapers or play dominoes. Coffee was also served there, and every now and then a girl would pass through, so they wouldn’t have the impression that they were sitting in a railway station restaurant.
Zwingli was in every respect a master organizer. In all my life I have never again run across the likes of him. The girls in the brothels all loved him. Several of them received gifts of money from him, meant to lift them out of their misery and return them to a decent life. He was familiar with their troubles, large and small, but also with their aptitudes in bed. Seldom, he once told me, had he ever sent the wrong man to the wrong woman. Because of his skill in these matters, he stood in high regard in the hotel business. Zwingli’s expertise and fetching ways paid off in this activity, as in so many others. He administered tests in person, and then oversaw further arrangements. This new girl from Valencia was “quality product,” to judge by the praise heaped on her by the proprietress, who was not accustomed to exaggerate when describing her girls’ selling points to the hotel escorts.
Zwingli gave his new female colleague the highest honors possible in his school of sexual studies: his exam went on endlessly. In this particular discipline, as we all know, high marks in the prelims do not automatically qualify for a waiver of the orals. Zwingli’s test lasted so long that the lords got impatient; they knocked on the door through which the hotel manager had disappeared. I never learned whether they spent time later with other girls. Probably the hotel limousine returned them in immaculate condition to the Príncipe, together with the flasks of mercuric chloride that you can always see peeking out of Englishmen’s pockets when they go cruising.
Late in the afternoon of the following day, Zwingli finally resurfaced at his hotel. “You have to stand up like a man,” quipped his bosom buddy, the hotel’s co-manager and co-owner (no one really knew exactly who owned or managed how much of the establishme
nt). “Hay que ser hombre, Don Helvecio! But this time you come straggling back like a battle casualty, for Pete’s sake! Hey, waiters! Get him some eggs, quick! Ham, bananas, champagne! Let’s get this man back on his feet! Tomorrow, Conde de Keyserling’s coming with his School of Wisdom, and the place will be packed!”
Don Darío knew what a man needs when he has stood up like a man.
During the following night, Zwingli absconded again. When early the next morning the famous philosopher arrived in port to have his even more famous bearlike hand shaken by the hotel manager, Zwingli was nowhere in sight. Don Darío, the short fellow with the limp, did the honors.
It was the same story night after night, and finally Zwingli stayed away from the hotel altogether.
María del Pilar fell in love with Helvecio. She gave herself to him completely, the first time in her life that she had done this with any man. Her much-touted talents were only for show; up to the moment when this fellow from Switzerland entered her life, she had remained untouched. This is how Zwingli himself explained it, and who was I to doubt his word, considering how much Tolstoy and Dostoevsky he had read. You only learn what you truly are when others confirm it for you. Besides, there are more hookers lying in legally sanctified nuptial beds than on the jerry-rigged cots in joy houses—which, incidentally, owe their popular name to a basic misconception.
Zwingli was fascinated; he felt like Tolstoy redivivus. He sensed an important new mission in his life, and ventured forth on the task of salvation and renewal. This girl must be lifted out of the morass, the same swamp where he had been spending all this time with her over the past few weeks, happy as a pig. This mud-bath of love would have to be moved elsewhere, for (and this was a somewhat less Christian notion) he wanted this beautiful sinner all to himself. It was a case of Resurrection with interchangeable roles. This too I can understand.
The Island of Second Sight Page 13