Fortunately, Beatrice wasn’t. I myself got the name confused with that of an obscure philosopher, von Tschirnhausen, and this earned me a pitying glance from the Captain. But then we were served black coffee, and so this gap in my education was passed over. We sipped our coffee on an open loggia, where we were further able to determine that a certain Viennese dignitary named Martersteig, whose guest lectures I had listened to at the Cologne Institute for Theater History, was unrelated to our new acquaintance, although quite well known to La Gerstenberg.
Friedrich had another dramatic scene with his theatrical mother, and it was interpreted for us by the Captain. Friedrich, he explained, was still tied to the apron strings, but only during the daytime. At night he was in the habit of leaving his own mother aside and harking back to the Primeval Mother, whom he located with Emmerich’s help in certain houses frequented by our bookseller. First there would be a game of chess at the “Alhambra,” an activity that was in no way deleterious to Friedel’s health. But from there he would proceed to an end game with some queen or other, and this was young Ginsterberg’s undoing. Then the Captain made a discreet reference to Don Helvecio, alias Zwingli—surely we were following his drift? The Viennese Court Actress was a stunned woman when Friedrich finally picked up his briefcase, and, saying “Good night all,” left the scene. Martersteig, too, excused himself to continue writing his Army of the Monkeys. He had just arrived at the passage where the German High Command was conducting maneuvers with the freshly drilled simian recruits—in the Teutoburg Forest, no less. “Kiss your hand” to the ladies, “My good neighbor” to Don Vigoleis, a stiff bow of the kind that was costing General von Hindenburg twenty pesetas a day, and then Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s comrade of the clouds shuffled off to do his patriotic duty.
“I don’t know which of those two young men is to be pitied more,” said La Gerstenberg after a pause. We led her to her favorite place in the shadow of the painted castellan. There, without rocking, she tried to digest what she had heard and what she had eaten. The latter task she could accomplish only with the aid of a medication that Doña Inés had already given her.
“I’m not sure which of them I should feel sorrier for, my Friedrich or Martersteig. They are both at death’s door. With his Prussian discipline the Captain will no doubt outlive my son. Friedel is dying of women. Back in Germany it was bad enough, but now Spain is giving him the final thrust. My ex-husband is insisting that he return home, but we don’t want him to. In Germany the mob is rising up, and Chancellor Brüning is trying to keep them down by making them wear white shirts instead of brown ones. I’m scared, my dears. I fear for us all.”
Our conversation got entangled in politics. I have already mentioned that the old lady had been a success on those other boards that represent the world. Great statesmen and diplomats had paid homage to her. Poets and musicians had frequented her Vienna residence, among them some of the most prominent names of their time: Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Harry Kessler—anyone could add to the list without fear of committing a mistake. She was familiar with our escapades in the Street of Solitude, but it had not yet come to her attention that the Don Helvecio of the Príncipe was one and the same as our Zwingli. She had lived for several months in his hotel, before the manager abducted his slut. She compared Zwingli’s current situation with that of her son, who likewise no longer took regular baths.
At midnight we retired to our room, which was situated next to the Captain’s. He was still performing military drill, earsplittingly, on his Orga-Privat typewriter. Friedrich claimed that Martersteig depended on the noise of his machine to drown out the howling of his monkeys—a redoubled clamor of battle, as it were. When the pendulum clock in the corridor struck twelve, his typing ceased. At the final gong, Martersteig picked up the black oilcloth and covered his monkey factory. He was of the opinion that here in Spain the prohibition of nocturnal disturbance of the peace took effect at precisely this hour, and so he now gave his troops the horn signal “Disperse!” and his macaques scrambled out of file. The Captain himself lay his stiff limbs on his bed and dreamt of the attractive boys he could no longer afford on his skimpy war-invalid’s pension. His epoch of glory lay far in the past. Only once in a lifetime can one be a corporal in the military academy and the commandant’s favorite. Baron Joachim von Martersteig, German Airforce Captain Ret., who had left Baron von Richthofen’s fighter squadron at 15,000 feet and fluttered down into enemy lines, was homosexual, just like the long-tailed comrades of his imaginary army. It was a venerable Prussian tradition, but one that, as Don Joaquín, he had to forswear here in Spain. Once again it was the fault of Paul von Hindenburg, German Army General Ret., who as President of the Reich proved to be just as wooden as the gigantic idolatrous statue of him into which we wartime German kids had the privilege of pounding symbolic nails in the war bond effort. Like a beast entering the slaughterhouse, this martial colossus was marked off in zones bearing various prices. Since my father couldn’t afford a golden nail, I was assigned an inferior portion of the General’s anatomy to drive my threepenny spike into. I was mortified. The biblical Golden Calf was more to my liking.
In Martersteig’s universal conscription for his pan-German monkey army, Beppo had as yet been spared. Thus it came to pass that this immoral Javanese simian once again started shaking his ritual clapper, this time at the crack of dawn, which in Spain is the veritable witching hour. He held on by all fours to the window latticework and drummed us out of our sleep. When I opened the shutter, the little devil lurched up to his lair with a hoarse bark, this time spraying down a foul-smelling liquid that I was barely able to dodge away from. Instead, I got hit on the shoulder by a pebble. I decided to close the shutters again.
“Throw some water at him!” Beatrice called from the bed, “They don’t like that!” She had taken note of the new offensive tactics practiced by the Count’s favorite pet, this plague upon his boarding-house guests, and she now believed that her cure-all against whores and cats would be equally effective in the battle against monkeys. But Beppo belonged to a race of Javanese simians that is not at all hydrophobic, and thus aren’t fazed by a few spurts of water. Perhaps we could get some advice from Martersteig, who was so far along in sounding the psyche of his substitute draftees that he was threatening to turn into one of the four-footed mercenaries of his own all-German horde of the future. It wouldn’t be the first time that an author identified with his protagonists right down to the bone. When we broached the subject at breakfast, our master tactician told us that there was only one reliable weapon against Beppo’s shameless insults and exhibitionistic pranks: poison! As long as that monkey kept up his gymnastic tricks, we would be on the defensive. This was the very reason why he, Martersteig, Airforce Captain Ret., had the intention of submitting to the Reich heads of state his plan, in the form of a novel, to muster an army of monkeys. If his idea could be accepted, then there would never again be a Marne disgrace, never again a Compiègne, never again a deserting Kaiser. Unfortunately, General Schleicher had not yet given him the opportunity to present his scheme for reform of the military…
But all this, he said, was causing him to digress from our urgent problem. He advised us that since poison might also harm Beppo’s master and benefactor, we should move to one of the windowless rooms on the building’s courtyard side, perhaps switching lodgings with Fräulein Höchst, the bovine Valkyrie who occupied one of these. Such quarters were, he admitted, unhealthy. But they were conducive to meditation, and thus more beneficial for mental hygiene. He, too, was living here in a form of retreat from the world; for him, never again a room with a window, and most definitely not one with a window on the street, which after dark turns into a staging area for the lowest classes, who arrive on hot nights with mattresses and marital squabbles coram publico.
Don Alonso was convinced that in just a short time we would get used to Beppo’s style of blowing reveille. Just pay no attention to the little chap, he said, and he would l
eave us alone and pick out some other targets. In fact, the animal did just that: he targeted an irritable old couple, a Spaniard and his French wife, who lived in constant warfare with each other, and now were joined by Beppo as a crafty co-belligerent. No one could tell why the monkey sometimes went to the aid of Madame and at other times gave Monsieur his support. The gymnast from Dresden couldn’t afford the higher rent, and so we exchanged rooms with this disputatious couple, who in the process of moving were able to keep the peace for a full twenty-four hours. Then their skirmishing started anew. As much as I despise marital strife, I’ll have to admit that this pair raised spatting to new levels of sophistication. Beppo now indulged in a period of egregious misbehavior, shaming himself as well as all of us boarders. The Inca bird, too, had a field day. And so did we, for our new mystical chamber was about half the price of our previous larger quarters with the musical shutters.
Half the price: “Beatrice, this will make a difference in our finances. We’re not yet exactly in abject penury, but if we start imagining abject penury in real terms, for example, as a gutter, then I have no doubt that we’ll be lying in it before long. Our pesetas are shrinking, my manuscripts are getting sent back to me, and we haven’t heard a word from the movie people in Berlin.”
No, the lords of the silver screen weren’t interested in me. Why was this so? The originator of this promising venture, a resident of Amsterdam, the novelist, poet, essayist and playwright Victor Emmanuel van Vriesland, wasn’t writing to me either. He had published an important novel that the folks in Berlin wanted to turn into a film. They had a nose for money and fame, and both were to be had with Vriesland’s book. Vigoleis had translated it, and my German version was to serve as the basis for a screenplay. The title was Goodbye to the World in Three Days, but it turned out to be farewell forever. A film star had told the writer that it would make a sensational movie. This middleman was actually a very beautiful woman; it was she who drew up the contract. Beauty and the cinema: the most natural match in the world. My manuscript had wandered off to Berlin, where it lay dormant. Where the beautiful woman now lay, I had no idea, but I supposed it was in Amsterdam—a good reason for the creator of the Urtext to cloak himself in silence. Recumbent women require loving care—who would ever take umbrage at such a thing? Or take notice of Vigoleis?
The world had forgotten him, just as he might have forgotten the girl Pilar and her eponymous erotic bedstead, if the loose-talking cockatoo didn’t remind him of her daily with a word of two syllables. Meanwhile, Beppo had been deprived of his freedom by being put on the chain. He could still shake things, but his pilfering days were over. The English matron had a new wig, and with gentle colors and lines she resumed painting the courtyard fountain, which, at least on canvas, did not dry up. The art-supply salesman and his woman left the scene. Fräulein Höchst gave indications that she had the same thing in mind, but then, because of an injured foot she had to stay on a week longer. Pepe was kicked out amid circumstances that I have already sketched out. Friedrich remained his mother’s daily and nightly concern, the increasingly enfeebled pageboy to a flighty queen introduced to him by Mr. Emmerich. Captain von Martersteig was back in Deyá, where his enemy was apparently willing to temper justice with mercy. His room was now occupied by a Catholic priest in civilian garb who was busy negotiating a very complicated probate matter for a mainland religious order. His interest in the female sex was considerable, as was his thirst for wine and free-thinking philosophy. I enjoyed chatting with this erudite man of God. La Gerstenberg became more and more friendly toward Beatrice and me, and in turn, we became more and more fond of her. The half-blind Count went on peeling potatoes, Josefa puffed away at her shag and let the smoke waft merrily from her bosom, evoking our veneration like an ambulatory liturgical thurifer.
And thus things went on, day by day. I read a good deal of Spanish, especially the Old Testament, because that is a book I love and because one can learn to read a foreign language most conveniently with a familiar text. We heard and saw nothing of Zwingli. As if by special agreement, the twin stars Gerstenberg-Ginsterberg never mentioned his name again, and of course our arch-coquette was likewise forgotten completely. Once in a while Julietta crossed our path when we went to the post office or to Emmerich’s to buy newspapers and thumb through books by the two writers who represented German literature on the island. Every now and then the bookseller asked me hesitantly when my own name would start drawing customers to his shop. “May I help you?” “Oh yes, do you have the latest by Vigoleis? Simply fantastic! He’s all anyone is talking about. What? Are you living on the moon? What else in God’s name is a German supposed to read on this island?”
To me it is an exciting idea to be a writer whose works get read, particularly when you hear racy things about yourself when eavesdropping in houses or when, in a bookstore, you observe how your books get snapped up like hotcakes. Back in Cologne I often visited a tiny shop where Max Scheler liked to browse. The famed philosopher was the main attraction in this establishment, making his appearance sewn and bound on the shelves, and, very much unbound, standing at the counter with his round metaphysical head lifted from the pages of a book and gazing off with almost animal-like despair, into the void. Otto Dix has captured much of this posture in his frightening portrait of the man, and that is how Scheler lives on in my memory. At his lectures I was so disenchanted with his bald pate, plus the incomprehensibility of his explanations, that I soon joined those who helped to thin out the student ranks. By skipping what he said and sticking to what he wrote, I got what I wanted.
At any rate, in this bookshop nobody was asking for Vigoleis’ latest, for the simple reason that his latest hadn’t yet been authored. It was yet to be born, and in order to be born it would have to gestate a while, and in order to gestate, it had to be conceived. The author had come to the island with this purpose in mind. There he wandered about in double role beneath the glowing sun, no longer the target of a floozy’s anger, no longer Zwingli’s object of pitying indifference, no longer Julietta’s steamy predator.
No, no one inquired as to Vigoleis’ newest book, just as no one ever inquires about the heroic feats of a child unborn. Let us, then, begin a new chapter, one that will give us some glimpses of new light. Frankly, we had expected more at the anarchist Count’s boarding house: at the very least a palace rebellion, with a broken window pane and a hysterical English matron, deciding she would rather live on her own home island with no sun, no oranges to be savored fresh from the tree, and no daily anxiety about the ups and downs of the exchange rate of the peseta.
III
Small causes can often have large effects. Smaller causes can have even bigger effects, and the very biggest effects frequently have no cause at all. Witness, for example, the world. It was created out of nothing, and that has made it the worst calamity the world has ever seen.
Nothing was happening. And because nothing was happening, Vigoleis’ and Beatrice’s frequent personal financial audits caused us to scowl with increasing concern. Our worry reached a climax the day we were notified of an empty bank account. When such things happen to a business firm, the distinguished gentlemen rub their hands and begin calculating with rapid pen strokes how much the swindle has netted them. A field general spits on his saber, oblivious to how many corpses his day of defeat has cost him. A stoic, assuming that such persons can ever go broke, continues twiddling his thumbs. Because we belonged to none of the above-mentioned types, we would be forced to find another solution to our life-threatening predicament.
Beatrice found it. We decided to keep our room for the time being, just as a roof over our heads, but to renounce all in-house meals except breakfast, which, here too, consisted of café au lait with ensaimadas. By means of this drastic cutback, we could go on for a time, but then…? Then the island would sink into the sea.
Out of a false sense of shame, a vestige of our bourgeois mentality, we refrained from informing our fellow boarders about our straitened circum
stances. It left us cold to know that people were pointing their fingers at us on account of a doxy’s wrath, but we were genuinely ashamed of not being able to pay our bills. We were shameful paupers. If one last, urgent telegram to the movie people met with no success, perhaps we would hang ourselves. Did I just say “perhaps”? Always a Johnny-on-the-spot when it came to quick decisions, it was I who suggested this solution. But Beatrice considered suicide ridiculous and cowardly, and besides, hanging was un-aesthetic; she would leave that to Teamster Henschel in Gerhart Hauptmann’s play and similar literary proletarians. If she were ever to do away with herself, she would emulate Sappho, who, still strumming her lute, dove from the Leucadian Cliff into the sea. To this I readily replied that to maintain such artistic standards, we would have to rent a larger wheelbarrow, or better yet a donkey cart, to carry our musical instrument (so thoughtfully disassembled by Pilar) out to one of the promontories to be found everywhere on the island—out at Ca’s Català or Porto Pí for example—any travel agency would gladly provide directions. For my part, I would take along my little typewriter, or perhaps my somewhat more portable Parker Duofold pen, which could symbolize my muse with no difficulty at all. And anyway, the ocean probably didn’t give one damn what I took along with me to its depths.
By the time Vigoleis had this vigorous discussion with Beatrice, he had long since given up on Schopenhauer. He accused him of betraying his own great creation, a philosophy that in its negativity far outstripped Christianity, by lapsing in his later years into pseudo-mysticism and a stuffy, academic doctrine of individual salvation. At the moment, he was in search of a substitute for this German apostate, and had reason to believe he had found one in a dyed-in-the-wool Spanish mystic. He was resolved literally to delve into this new friend, sound out his meaning, and with every deciphered line to cover up the lie he was himself living, to wit: that he lacked the courage to do damage to his pitiful carcass by his own hand, and was thus under sentence of looking forward to a normal demise somewhere on a bed of straw. What he overlooked, however, was the fact that in the proverbial light of eternity he had much too high a regard for his own taedium vitae—for which, incidentally, he had adopted forms of play-acting that were so amusing to others that they refused to take his despair at all seriously. Such a reaction is doubly painful until one learns to ignore it. Vigoleis ought to have offered proof of his chronic melancholy by putting a noose around his neck, a bullet through his head, or a stiletto into his aorta—to name just a few of the proven household methods. Besides, he possessed dexterity and practical inventiveness far beyond his domestic needs. Placed in the service of self-annihilation, these talents could promptly relieve him of the shock he experienced, morning after morning, at his continued existence among the living, together with his first personality, and in addition to his second.
The Island of Second Sight Page 23