The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  “She’s destroying my piano, that crazed slut!” Beatrice shouted in French. “Quick, quick, the key to the apartment!”

  Beatrice had allowed mother and daughter to commit reciprocal mayhem; she had rescued Vigoleis by applying her Indian stratagem of slow poison; but now that her beloved instrument was having its wiry heart violated, there was no more question of methodical calculation. I grabbed her skirt and held her back. What a superb climactic moment for a small-town, low-budget amateur theater! Minimal props: a few pieces of rickety furniture, some scraps of used paper. But now witness the great scene of our hero Vigoleis—or let’s call him Don Vigo for the sake of local color—which the author will now create with bated breath:

  Thou fool! Thou darest snatch the evil axe

  She holds aloft to split thy skull in two,

  That maddened maenad? Let her vent her bile

  On wood and wire! Desist, if thou hold’st sacred

  Thy brother’s life and limb!

  But Vigoleis wasn’t standing onstage at your local Thespian Club. Instead, calmly and in resigned tones, using the voice of his own small-scale personality, he stated, “Beatrice, just let that slattern up there chop up anything she likes. Nothing can hurt us any more. If you make a false step now, she’ll chuck out our dear Zwingli too, and then we will have come to this island for nothing at all. It would be better if he had just up and died, as he promised us in his telegram. But in this accursed country nobody ever seems to want to stick to agreements. Where is that study I was supposed to be occupying? Where is that concert grand for you? That piano was nothing but a miserable honky-tonk upright! As soon as the money comes from Berlin I’ll get you your Bechstein, you can depend on that as solidly as you do on your superstition. Let’s just take care of our own situation, which now looks pretty grim. We’ll have to…”

  Once again the second-storey door opened, and once again it rained cats and dogs down on us in the darkened stairwell. Pilar had transformed the piano into kindling ready for the stove, not including a few sturdy metal hinges and bolts—not a bad job of lumberjacking, considering the short time it took her. Only the bronze sounding board and the wire strings had resisted her efforts at demolition. Zwingli later had these carted away. In the aftermath he told us that he thought his final hour had arrived when the wrecking action started. If Beatrice had entered the apartment, he would, he averred, have breathed his last—a conviction that we share with him completely. Pilar had fumed about that wh… of a sister of his and her boche of a boyfriend. Not until she began taking out her rage at the musical commode had Zwingli begun to feel momentarily more secure in his own skin.

  And so Beatrice had saved her brother’s life after all. The power of music.

  Upstairs the music had come to an end. Peace again prevailed under the roof of the Conde’s “apple.” While I certainly would not like to be inside Zwingli’s skin, it would be useful to have that nail of his to get us out of this terrible mess. I decided to look up Mr. Emmerich, who had already had many experiences in Spain, and who could probably give us some advice in this perilous situation. With a few brief words I brought him up to date. The scars on my face left him no doubt that I had been waylaid, that the robbers had stripped me, beaten me sore, and left me for dead. Emmerich, a man of imposing words, was also a man of quick action. All our stuff went into the back room of his shop, not the first time that this space had to bear the consequences of Pilar’s rabid erotic behavior. Like an energetic ragpicker of my own existence, I schlepped our gear around the respectable street corner, and by eleven the job was done. My fellow-countryman, whose elbow-room was getting tighter all the time, told us about a pensión where he himself had lived for a few years. It was owned by an impecunious count from the mainland, who had married the even poorer daughter of a count and countess from the island. It was right nearby, just across the Borne in one of the little streets that lead to the harbor. Should he make a quick call, he asked. Single room, twin beds?

  In the Pensión del Conde there was a room for us, a single with twin beds, and we were lying in them by midnight.

  On the wall opposite the beds were two wooden panels with burned-in lettering, products from the hobby workshop of our half-Catholic, half-anarchist aristocratic landlord. “The Lord’s Ten Commandments” hung where one usually expects to be told to ring once for breakfast, twice for the maid, thrice to make a complaint. The Ten Commandments are no less famous, and so we know exactly what the hobbyist’s glowing stylus had inscribed in ninth position: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”!

  Vigoleis didn’t see the panels until the following morning. Yet even without an Old-Testament warning, during the preceding night he had not coveted his neighbor’s wife—indeed, if truth be told, not even his own. He slept, and Beatrice slept, too. Dreamlessly, both of them, for they had each taken a tablet to ward off evil spirits. We should let them have their rest. It had been, as we have noted, a very hot day.

  Three stars, my dear reader, separate us from our sleeping heroic couple, and that is a more respectable form of insulation than three layers of whitewash on an apartment wall. Thus we shall not need to whisper, as we stay together a while to take stock of what’s happened, and to make a tentative survey of what is to come.

  The first part of my jottings is finished. You have followed our heroes’ footsteps through thick and thin, though thickness has admittedly outweighed thinness in this report. You might have expected such a development, however, since the Spanish proverb you saw at the threshold of this work was meant as a clever warning: whoever would prefer not to mingle with such a dissolute brood ought to put the book down and say, “Please, not that kind of thing!” In any case, you are under no coercion to read me, considering that the publishing industry offers you hundreds of authors who outstrip me in every way. And yet you did not take fright at first sight; you joined in on our trip to accompany a relative of the author’s on his final journey. Then it turned out that this relative was only seemingly dead. In actuality, he never again became truly chipper. That is to say, in our Fourth Book he will lift himself out of an anabaptism with a grand gesture, and with unabashed audacity. But then we shall already be hearing the first explosions from Morocco, a sign that General Franco has completed his apprenticeship with Mussolini and Hitler, and is handing in his journeyman’s test piece. We shall lose sight of Zwingli, and almost of ourselves as well.

  This vital toughness of his, his cynical announcement of impending death, when death wasn’t close by at all, his appeal to our soft-heartedness and Christian altruism—such behavior has meant bad times for all of us. But for us heroes, things have been a good deal harder to withstand than for you, my reader, who have had the option from the beginning of shutting my book at any passage that strikes you as too extravagant, too shameless, too objectionable, too candid, or too sentimental. As the pacemakers for this story, we have had no such liberty. We were caught in the pincers; we had to stick to the text, which often enough turned out to be an Urtext of the most cryptic kind. But now tell us honestly: Haven’t we heroes of your book behaved quite courageously? Isn’t it true that we have neither kept anything under wraps nor added anything, so help us God? At the moment we are lying comfortably next to each other on our beds in a palace, on mattresses of kelp, the kind that needs no cooling layer of horsehair, and are enjoying a somewhat artificially induced slumber.

  Surely you have already noticed: once again they are under a count’s roof! Can that be just happenstance? You will recall that Vigoleis once accused himself of aristocratic tendencies, whereas Beatrice is regal by nature and by virtue of her double legacy, as a daughter of the Incas and as a child of the oldest monarchy in the world, whose throne is occupied by a sovereign who rules the world in more than a proverbial sense. Nonetheless, our heroic duo was not led to their new shelter by feudal considerations. They had no time at all to ponder any such subtleties as they departed from the Count’s “apple” amid scorn and contempt, unless yo
u imagine that Anton Emmerich, our Little Helper from Cologne, might have nudged their destiny somewhat in this direction. At this point we shall refrain from investigating the matter further. But count’s roof or no count’s roof, I can assure you of one thing: for quite a while you will see nothing more of the aforementioned brood. In the palacio owned by our anarchistic grandee, rabble of that sort are never spoken of—that is, not by human tongues. The fact that a parrot does so, is not without a certain annoyance, but we shall just have to look the other way. This feathered blabbermouth had a faulty upbringing, and now he thinks it is his duty to remind the residents of the rooming house that they are in Spain, in case they may have forgotten, in spite of the heat and the fleas—as is actually the case with Mr. Joachim von Martersteig, Army Cpt. Ret., in Room 13. But we shouldn’t reproach this roguish bird—I mean the one from the family of the psittaci—for following his nose and telling tales out of school.

  In Book Three it’ll all start up again. Our heroes will get sent up once more, while you, dear reader, will probably have pulled in your sails. No one will hinder you from casting off this burden. But wouldn’t it be better if you returned home right now, seeing that we can’t remain travel companions, not even to mention such a thing as friendship? My addressing you as “dear” reader would no longer be appropriate; I would have to ask you to look around for other literary adventures. Your local bookseller can advise you best in this matter.

  But—no offense! And farewell! Perhaps we shall meet again. It is such a small world. And what is more, our Vigoleis’ name is now linked with that of a Portuguese mystic. As above, your bookstore manager will be happy to provide you with details.

  But you others—you readers who are still “dear” to us—we must get on with it. Hundreds more pages lie ahead of us, leading us on countless highways and byways. So now, please, here by the rear stairway, let’s enter Book Two.

  BOOK TWO

  Fortunate is He who receives from Heaven

  a Morsel of Bread without having to thank

  Anyone for it but Heaven itself.

  Don Quixote de la Mancha

  Come, my sweetest darling fair,

  Join me on my pilarière!

  after Wilhelm Busch

  I

  When a publisher releases a book, he counts upon a certain number of readers whose interest and purchasing power will allow him to undertake such an adventure of the mind. This implies that it is conceivable to consider readers as the retroactive sponsors of a given work, and that is precisely how I think of them. I don’t mean this in the sense of those early-medieval artistic masters who gave their wealthy donors a tiny corner somewhere near the bottom edge of their paintings, showing them gazing devoutly upward at the Community of Saints. No, I’m thinking more of Renaissance artists who placed their benefactors on the same level as the saints and all saintly persons. For this reason, my charitable reader has the right to move about freely in my work. He may even situate himself several levels higher than certain individual characters, a privilege he will surely take pleasure in. It is only natural that I myself remain in control, although as I have said, anyone is free to seek salvation as he wishes. This is especially true here in our rooming house belonging to Count Number Two, a man who tends to attenuate or even abrogate the salvationist claims of his Church on the basis of his anarchistic sympathies.

  Beatrice and Vigoleis are asleep, and will remain so until well past noon, but not because they are particularly enamored of Spanish customs. No, they have each taken a double dose of sedative, so that they will remain undisturbed by any outside agency whatever, invited or uninvited. Following their expulsion from the Street of Solitude, they have fully deserved their profound slumber. Let us, then, use this interim to familiarize ourselves just a bit with their new surroundings: their abode, its owners, its paying guests, and its badly paid service personnel.

  Once when I was in conversation with the publisher of this book, I mentioned in passing that it would contain a half-anarchistic, semi-Catholic Count. My assertion met with a violent objection on the part of this publisher, the first and most generous benefactor of my jottings. Poking his cigar suddenly in my direction, he cried, “That’s impossible! Either someone is an anarchist or he’s a Catholic. But both at the same time? You must be dreaming!”

  “Mynheer van Oorschot,” I replied, “every publisher is at the mercy of the notorious dreams of his authors. And the crazier those fantasies are, the nuttier their ideas seem to be, it’s all the better for the resulting book! I assure you that my ‘impossible’ Count is a pure prodigy of Nature, which every now and then is capable of such marvels. As soon as you reach this spot in my manuscript I trust that you will be convinced.”

  We have now arrived at this Count, a person even more remarkable than my publisher imagined, as we shall see when we examine his “impossible” trinitarian makeup: a Count by virtue of his father’s name; an anarchist in his own right and in the name of the freedom that he loves above all else; and a Catholic in the name of his rather less than pious spirit—although piety and Catholicism are not necessarily complementary concepts, as we can learn from a glance at papal history. If, however, a Spanish grandee turns anarchist, this is a much more instructive kind of metamorphosis than the one involving our little Vigoleis, a.k.a Albert, in those faraway years of his childhood, when he sought to protect his cache of toys from his brothers’ tyranny by turning into a girl and playing with dolls. That’s why I have been able to move past “little Albert” with just a few words. I shall have to take more time with our Señor Conde, although it won’t be until we reach the Epilogue that I can do full justice to his true stature and his confusing tripartite nature.

  When a Count turns anarchist, he renounces his long aristocratic title. He takes an axe to his family tree. He hammers flat the ring that bears his dynasty’s coat of arms. He then calls his palace a “house”—a rather ineffective form of renaming, for under the same roof there is still room for kings and even for God Himself.

  Our Count thought otherwise, and in so thinking, he constituted a minority of one—which is of course just what he had in mind as an anarchist. The renowned Baedeker, for example, couldn’t be bothered about this hidalgo’s social transformation. The famous tourist guidebook portrayed his palacio for what it was, and referred to its owner as the scion of a titulado, who gets a few lines of his own. I, too, have no reason to call this venerable building a house or a cottage, just to suit a certain apostate’s whim. In architectural style it could belie neither its glorious past nor the fact that many blue-bloods entered and exited through its doors. They held on to money bags that got lighter and lighter over time, and in the end were powerless to retard the downfall of this particular “house.”

  “If what you want is loss, then become your own boss,” my grandfather used to say. Whereupon he bought his own tavern and hung a sign on the door saying “Make your own coffee!” This pioneer forebear of mine sold boiling water by the measured pint or quart to whole families, who in long processions made pilgrimages to his bar, asking to brew up their do-it-yourself java. But it wasn’t actually the hot water that attracted these families. My little home town was situated on the pilgrim road to Kevelaer.

  Our Count Number Two was likewise a loser. To be more exact, he was well on his way toward becoming one when I met him. He, too, nailed up a sign at his entrance to lure pilgrims from all over the world into his palace, but not to offer them hot water. He provided passable shelter for a modest price. My reader may expect his sign to have read “House of the People’s Friend” or “Fonda for Catholic Anarchists,” or maybe the other way around, “for Anarchist Catholics.” But no, in gold letters on a blue ground his sign bore the reactionary legend Pensión del Conde, “The Count’s Boarding House.” And behold, it was just as great a success as the hot-water hospice run by a certain Lower-Rhenish speculator in pilgrimages. Beneath the Count’s roof there was always a crowd of guests, people who had either seen, or ho
ped still to see, better days, just as my grandfather’s water customers were mostly driven by a promise that beckoned in their direction from the goal of their pilgrimage. The Count had made himself the object of his own disbelief. If anyone had pointed out an anomaly in his commercial house sign, he could well have replied that his abode indeed did not contain a genuine Count—but then again, who could expect to find a specific bird at the cash register of the “Golden Swan Hotel”? Or to be served at Sears, Roebuck by a stag?

  Don Alonso María Jesús de Villalpando, Marqués de Sietefillas y Conde de Peñalver y Tordesillas—this was part of the dynastically expansive and ramified title of our anarchizing hosteller and friend of the people. Here I shall call him simply Don Alonso, for the sake of brevity, and at the same time in keeping with his own sworn abhorrence of highfalutin’ traditions. Don Alonso married into the palace on the Calle de San Felio, and the price he paid for the holy sacrament was Doña Inés, the only daughter and last surviving offspring of a very old family with a probably even longer name. The roots of her family tree were located somewhere deep in ancient Castilian terrain, and the branch that she extended into the world with a certain pious resignation was just as desiccated and unyielding as the soil from which it sprang. One of her chain-mailed forebears had arrived on the island in 1229 with James I of Aragon, the Conqueror, and here the family flourished. But now it was in a state of acute degeneration. Doña Inés remained childless, in sharp contrast to the seven daughters that Don Alonso sported on his flattened-out coat of arms: Marqués de Sietefillas. Extramaritally, however, he exceeded this heraldic challenge. He sired several progeny, by lovers he obtained in order to sweeten a life spent at the side of the increasingly sour, tiny, almost dwarflike, and exceedingly ugly Doña Inés, whose physiognomy Velázquez was able to capture long before her dynasty’s final aberration first saw the light of the island near the turn of the century.