Our expedition took several hours. Time enough, I thought as we ascended the three portal steps, for the domestic storm and its meteorologists to have come to rest. On the stairway we heard piercing shouts. Julietta was yelling. Pilar was yelling. No question about it: mother, the mature plant, was lowering the boom on her daughter, the sprouting seedling. I darted upwards three stairs at a time, flung open the vestibule door, and sprang to the aid of my darling protégée. “Stop! Not one more slap!”
Pilar had already done some bloody work on her child. Julietta lay on the floor, doubled over in pain. Golden slippers can, as we see here, be used in special ways to soften up an adversary. Pilar was fuming. She was out of control. She called upon every last saint of the Church, the immaculately conceived Mother of God, in a word the entire Heavenly Host, to grant their blessing as she inflicted her punishment. Julietta, rather less pious on her part, replied in similarly pragmatic fashion. She took recourse to the proven argot of the gutter, lending her mother the sobriquet puta—an enormously significant concept in Spain, one that can facilitate a comprehension of the country in its entirety. In the same breath the child expressed a desire for her own death. “Go ahead and kick me, you horrible mother! Just see what will happen to you if I die!” I was familiar with this kind of suicidal incitement to murder. As a child I had reacted similarly, although the circumstances were never quite so dramatic in our house. There, the eternal mother-offspring hostility centered on a ghastly carrot casserole that I refused to eat, claiming that I would croak if she were to force this mess of pottage down my throat like a goose—and I hoped passionately that I would suffocate on this bowl of glop, just to punish my mother. But she knew just how far one could go when dealing with a squealing captive piglet. Pilar and Julietta were going too far. It tore my heart to see this brat so cruelly mauled. I was a very inexperienced Vigoleis. Amid the ear-splitting clamor of battle, I overheard Beatrice’s warning shout, “For God’s sake, Vigo, stay out of it!” Like a warrior unaware of his own cowardice, I lunged at the rabid mother.
The Beatrices among my readers, those who are familiar with the world and its noblest product, the human being, know very well what awaited Vigoleis as he set out to drive a wedge between the feelings of mother and child. But for the benefit of the Vigoleises, one or the other of whom may be among my readers, I shall now reveal what happened to our esteemed brother.
Hardly had he touched Pilar’s desirable body, and with cries of “Basta! basta!” pushed her up against the wall and away from her slavering daughter, when the child, whom an even less experienced referee would have considered down for the count, rose up and jumped me from behind. Whereupon the two of them joined forces and began beating me up: they scratched, kicked, shoved, and spat, and soon my hands and face were bloody. Pilar grabbed my shirt and ripped it in shreds down to my belt, and before I knew it Julietta had torn it completely off my body. I was already bleeding like a galley slave, when Beatrice came to my succor and intervened in this scene of violent retribution—but in her inscrutable fashion: she shouted a command to defend the redoubt just a while longer, for relief was on its way. So I held the fort with rapidly ebbing strength. One of my eyes was already blinded, while my other eye was seeing double. What it saw was that I would soon be a goner, unless…
Beatrice ran to the kitchen and filled a large bowl with water, egging on the faucet with shouts of “Faster!” and “Allons donc!” Though a very impulsive woman, when plotting revenge Beatrice takes her sweet time—a genetic legacy hailing from the days when the sun god banished her ancestors to an island on Lake Titicaca. “Get with it! Allons donc!”—but the water wouldn’t come any faster. I have mentioned that this was a hot day, and at this hour the rooftop reservoir was almost empty. Beatrice’s Indian imperturbability cost me a few more lumps and scratches, for compared to the ferocity of the women’s attack, I put up hardly any defense. But then the bowl, with its contents of smothering water, came flying at this brace of bawds.
Mother and child let go of their victim, spat as if on cue in the direction the decisive missile had come from, caressed each other with words of endearment, and disappeared into the General’s room. Pilar’s albornoz had once again been pushed aside, revealing large portions of her bosom. The sight had no effect on me, a creature of flesh. How strange are the workings of a man’s heart!
Pilar had now been dishonored a second time. Vigoleis, beware!
It was a long time before I was sufficiently mended to go out on the street for a breath of air. Meanwhile Beatrice hunted for Zwingli, and actually found him. He was lying on the bed in a state of double defeat: conquered on the one hand by the emanations of love, on the other by the scourge of hatred. As he explained in a barely audible whisper to his sister, Pilar had disarmed him when he ran to the girl’s rescue. “Get out of here!” he said. “If she finds you here, she’ll stab you to death! She’s out of her mind today, worse than any day when she’s come back from confession. Out, out! Use!”
Pilar went to confession often and with pleasure, but afterwards she was always disagreeable. For the truth is, her confessor was in the habit of tickling her too.
We brothers-in-law had not been heroes on this afternoon. One of us because he couldn’t, the other because he wouldn’t, and we shall leave open the question of whether this second one could have if he had wanted to. I have never “performed” this particular episode. I have concealed it; it is not in my repertoire of heroic ballads, and for a simple reason, too. My reader will recall that in the third chapter I blew my own horn with puffed cheeks, calling myself a raconteur with mimic talents that are a match for any occasion. Very well then, let’s put this storyteller to the test. Make him perform his own self right here and now, eye to eye and tooth to tooth with the hyenas. Have him act out a little bloodletting, let him display the stigmata of shame, the witch-inflicted wounds of whorish calamity. Ask him to show how, with his one good eye, he keeps a lookout for his Beatrice, who must soon arrive to splash him out of his misery. But speaking of eyes: maybe he could re-enact the good one convincingly enough. But not even a shot of the worst brand of garbageman’s schnapps could ever get him to portray the other one, the protuberating one, replete with the proper Picassoesque a-perspectivity rendered by a blow to his cheekbone at the hands of the woman of his sleepless nights. All that earlier talk of mimic talent was empty boasting, pure ostentation, and purposeful distraction. For this rascal knows full well that his art has definite limits. Incidentally, it ought to puzzle no one that these two ravishing Spaniards showed such vehemence in bringing down their island guests. It wasn’t the first time that Spain had emerged victorious over Inca blood, which in this case, in highly helveticized dilution, leaped into the breach or lay gasping on the pilarière. We can just ignore our dreamer from Germany; he can take care of his own disposition. That is, after all, the tragedy of his nation: it always hands itself the means to its own defeat.
“Just to muck our way through,” I said to Beatrice as we left the battle scene, where blood and water had streamed forth as at Waterloo, “is unaesthetic. And besides, it’s senseless. We must view everything from the lofty perspective of our minds.”
“What else? That’s why I decided to chuck water, darling. Water is the only thing. It always works with cats, and it worked with those two meows up there. One dousing, and it was all over for them!”
I remained silent in order not to clip my guardian angel’s wings in mid-flight. Who knows when I might need her again. To be sure, the water bath had done its duty with the she-goat and her kid. But it was also clear to me who had actually done a job on whom, up there in the apartment.
“Come on, let’s go to the cathedral and enjoy the ocean view. Tomorrow Zwingli will have gobbled enough at the trough so that we can make further plans in peace and quiet. We can’t stay in this omelet barracks. Go to bed with the swine, and you’ll stink all the time.”
It was touching to behold this unity of ours, in our desire to ab
andon the swinish domicile to which we had been lured by a telegram from an expiring man. My feelings for the bitch, a term that I place here sans quotation marks because not even a full dozen would do justice to the degree of her depravity—my feelings for this morsel of carrion had simply vanished. Mother and daughter had torn them from my breast together with my shirt. Or perhaps I should say that they had simply ripped them off my torso, for they had never been situated root and branch deep within my bosom. It was never more than a kind of band-aid eroticism: give it a yank, a few hairs will stick to the strip, and you won’t even say “Ouch!” And your skin will soon heal up.
Thus ended Vigoleis’ love for the first Spanish woman to cross his path, a dagger inside her garter. He had been found unworthy to die at her hand, this mournful hero.
The space in front of the cathedral was a campsite for the loitering army of beggars crippled and healthy, infirm and imbecilic, the gatekeepers of all of God’s houses in southern lands, people who are as picturesque as they are repulsive. No costume expert in the world could ever design a wardrobe of misery such as the one sported by these partners in penury. Spain is crawling with these characters; they constitute a special guild, or more precisely, a professional class of their own. They call down the blessings of heaven upon anyone who makes a donation, but whoever resists their threadbare entreaties with a regretful Perdone hermano, “Forgive me, brother,” is regaled with curses and revilement. But since heaven and hell are in criss-cross cahoots with these social barnacles, it makes no difference whether one makes a contribution or not—or at least one would think so. In reality most strangers fork over their copper obolus, not out of superstition, but merely to get rid of this plague as speedily as possible.
One member of this reeking league of cadgers had star status in Palma. It was almost as important to experience him as it was to view the cathedral itself, in whose eternal aura of light he collected his alms. He spoke “all languages,” which in Spain means German, English, and French, but he also knew Italian. In addition, local legend ascribed to him a command of the classical idioms and Hebrew. It later became apparent that legend had no need to improve on history, for in fact this hunchback could have invoked curses and blessings on his victims in these latter tongues as well. This hunchback: an enormous hump protruded from the tatters of his cloak, camouflaged with rags of various colors. To look at him evoked loathing and disgust. A greenish liquid oozed from his eyes, his hair and beard were lousy, and he stank from every pore in his body and his filthy raiment.
This whimpering king of the mendicants was squatting there as we climbed the steps of the Calle de la Seo to the square of the same name, from which the cathedral ascends in all its majesty. Porfirio—this was the misshapen fellow’s name—crawled his way over to us and intoned his little speech in German. I gave him a few coins and received his assurance that heaven would reward me—not up there (his eyes, veiled in green, pointed in the traditional direction), but here upon our earth, “Right now, Sir, today, before the arrival of the evening!”
The sea was as smooth as a mirror. Boats with drooping sails drifted in the void, waiting in vain for a breeze that would take them back into harbor. We found a bench and waited for the air to freshen up. Tomorrow was another day. Everything would work out all right if only we stuck together.
We had been sitting there for an hour gazing morosely out to sea, each occupied with the other’s thoughts, when we noticed two persons walking down the avenue of palms along the quay. They climbed the theatrical staircase that led to the cathedral—two tall women holding each other close, no doubt a mother with her daughter. I am not often subject to attacks of sentimentality, but following those inhumane scenes in the Street of Solitude, where a prehistoric world loudly demanded its rights with tooth and nail, this sight of pacific familial love touched my heart. Every now and then they stopped; the mother caressed the tall girl, the tall girl kissed her mother, and then they both looked out on the seascape and continued their walk up the steps. What an edifying sight, this exclusive affection of two people for each other, occurring here at such a romantic place, a spot that no one who has ever stood there is likely to forget: beneath the gothic arch showing the scene of the Last Supper, the Puerta del Mirador. Our two incarnate symbols of human concord directed their steps to this portal in order to enjoy even warmer waves of elation in the presence of these saintly images with their whitewash of pigeon droppings. And no wonder, for no one who lives in Palma lets a week go by without mounting these ramparts to gaze outward to the blue expanse from whence, centuries earlier, the conqueror approached under sail to deliver the island from the scimitar of the infidels.
As mother and child came closer, we recognized them as our mother and our child, the horny nag with her filly. And they recognized us as the infidels, the Saracens, the pirates, the incorrigibles, the grandparents of the devil—and who knows what all else. Pilar crossed herself, Julietta spat in our direction—two gestures corresponding to their respective ages and world experience. Then they passed on slowly, with the same dignified air as when they arrived. Soon they will be among the beggars, and before they enter the cathedral to genuflect before the image of the Holy Maid of the Pillar, they will already have bribed heaven itself—and with our money, too, because we had been keeping a common household budget, albeit a rather one-sided one. It remained to be conjectured just how much money they would toss to the mangy pimps of heaven and hell. Your fate depends on it, Vigoleis! For you must not forget that heaven hears the pleas of those who sin in its name, and who allow love to be made in its name, and for the greater glory of the Lord. And do not forget what you have already been told: that in Spanish bordellos there is a little shrine in a corner, where the ladies see to it that the eternal lamp never goes out. In her apartment boudoir Pilar, too, had a little silver vessel with just such a gentle flame floating in it, illuminating with its golden glow the many-colored garments of the Queen of Heaven. If the two of them agree to do business up there on the cathedral square, and if they contribute one single perro chico (five-centimos) less than you did, then just like Beatrice, who is superstitious, I will take it as a disastrous omen.
In Pilar’s quarters supper was at nine o’clock. We pondered whether we shouldn’t grab a bite somewhere else, and then rush to our room as soon as we got home. But that could surely be interpreted as desertion, a verdict that, oddly enough after our virtual defeat in battle, we wanted to avoid. Among humans, all friction is said to arise from misunderstandings—a theory I firmly believe in, because I regard the world itself as a misunderstanding. My biggest misunderstanding was without doubt to have interfered with mother and child at a moment when they were in the process of working out their own little misunderstanding.
When we entered the house entrance and stairwell for the second time on this day, something came whizzing down the dark passageway and landed loudly on the stone floor right in front of us. Another object arrived directly after this one, confirming the laws of free-fall velocity that had given me such torments back in my German schoolroom. Then it rained once again from above; this time something came bounding down the staircase, and then the upstairs door was slammed shut. The lighter elements of this precipitation hovered for a second in the air, then fell slowly downwards like the snowflakes in those magic glass spheres that fascinated me when I was a child. It was leaves—inscribed leaves, literature—that came flying toward us and landed on their originator. For a moment I felt like a tourist feeding the pigeons on the Piazza San Marco in Venice.
Beatrice’s and Vigoleis’ possessions were being evicted, and the two of them would surely have been tossed out as well if they hadn’t exalted themselves above all earthly concerns by tarrying for a half-hour inside the cathedral. What is more, blood would have flowed—not from scratches and lacerations, but from gaping flesh wounds inflicted by that Toledo blade. But as bad as this bouncing of their belongings was, heaven had prevented worse events. I would dearly love to know how much
the bitch placed in those gouty palms on the cathedral square. But heaven, at least in Spain, does not permit anyone to peek into its cards. The Civil War gave me the hugest problems in this regard.
A pile of plunder on the Feira de Ladra in Lisbon, on the Waterlooplein in Amsterdam, on the old Jewish market square in Warsaw—just to name a few famous collection points for abandoned household goods—this was the scene of our heaped-up caboodle in the entrada of the Count’s apartment complex in the Street of Solitude. The owners stood by speechless. But it was only this mute behavior of theirs that made them differ from the dealers at junk sales, whose job it is to fob off the stuff they’ve bought on even lower types than themselves.
It was nine o’clock, supper time chez Pilar. “Aha,” I was just thinking to myself, “there’ll be two less place-settings tonight.” But wait! What is that sound? It was a low tone, like a gong announcing “Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served”—and then there was a horrible crash.
The Island of Second Sight Page 18