So let us stay with the truth, and that means with poverty, hunger, and the Mallorcan underworld. Our heroes arrived on this island and found a roof over their heads. It wasn’t a roof of the kind they expected, and yet it covered their existence quite satisfactorily. Heaven soon began to treat them ill. Things had gone badly with the trollop, and they lost the roof over their heads. But soon enough, by dint of a Cologne fellow’s presence of mind, they could once again reside under sheltering tiles. Troubles began anew, leading eventually to a day of forced marching, this time behind asses and an almocrebe. It should be noted that our two friends could easily have camped out for a while, for ever since they trod the landing plank at Palma’s harbor, not one drop of rain has fallen. Nor does it look as if any kind of showers from the heavens are about to enrich their lives. At any rate we should be happy that Antonio, with modest means that can excuse much else, has once again erected a roof over their heads. One doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, at least not so long as the benefactor is standing nearby. Once the benefactor has left—ours is already at the club catering to the rich old farts—it’s probably all right to take a closer look at things.
So let me put this question of propriety my reader: are you willing to be present as I take aside this gift horse at the Giant’s Manse and yank open its maw so that everyone, horse-trader or layman, can see plainly what quality of animal we are dealing with? You’re not afraid? No moral compunctions? No fear of germs? Excellent! I approve of such companions. Would you even be willing to stay on with us here under our new roof? Señora Adeleide will be happy to show you to your room—a single word and she will open it for you! Your revolver? No, you won’t be needing that here. Oh, I see, because we were talking a while ago about thieves? It’s actually not as bad as that, and anyway, Arsenio has a weapon more deadly than your little pea-shooter. Besides, our heroes are unarmed—we could even call them defenseless in their naiveté. That is what makes them heroes of the praiseworthy Robinsonian kind, those who repeatedly stand their ground in the face of the unknown.
But now you, my dear female reader back home in Germany: I’m not sure I would encourage you to pass your time at a place where the game of shepherd’s idyll gets played in earnest. On the other hand, if you do rent a small room, you might be surprised to find friends of yours here. We could produce for you at least one of your dear acquaintances from back home—assuming that you already know Kathrinchen, that charming lady whose husband is an Essen steel magnate with doctor’s degree, beer-glass spectacles, and a neurasthenic constitution. Such a reunion is entirely possible here. The world gets smaller and smaller the farther away from home one travels. For example, Beatrice had once met this popular society dame at the home of another Rhenish industrialist. To be sure, on that occasion Frau Doktor was very fashionably dressed, whereas here, though still the same merry and lusty Kathrinchen, she spends a good deal of her time in a convincing state of undress. It goes without saying that Beatrice wouldn’t think of revealing this socialite’s erotic secrets. And I am obliged to implore my reader to maintain the same discretion that an author of recollections must observe whenever he describes persons who have crossed his path, but who are still happily alive even as he strives to commemorate their deeds for posterity. Count Kessler, when writing his own memoirs, had enormous difficulties with long-lived characters of this kind. In particular, a certain famous princess refused to die, and thus cheated him—cheating, it seems, was her specialty—of some salient passages. He couldn’t just put her in his book as “Madame X,” Kessler told me, because every knowledgeable reader would immediately realize what species of beast was implied.
Because my characters present themselves in dual cognizance of their identity—for which I wish to express my thanks at this point—my task is rather different, though with some of them it isn’t easy to have faith in the ameliorative effects of a memorialist’s cleaver. Anyone who has observed the aforementioned Kathrinchen, grunting with pleasure on the butcher-block of her own flesh, will not have received the impression of a split personality.
With the traditional seal of confidentiality now on our lips, permit me to invite my reader to follow me into Book Three—no, not up the wide stone steps, not through that door. Nor are we in league with the limping devil of the poet Don Luiz Velez de Guevara—surely you know the story (Goethe mentions it in a sentence in his autobiography): one night, as a favor to a friend, the devil lifts off all the roofs of the city of Madrid. Even without having signed any diabolical pact, it will still be easy for us, right here and now, to get a bird’s-eye view of our heroic duo. For you see, their room at the Manse had no ceiling.
BOOK THREE
I wish purely and simply to be
the animal that, before God and man,
performs the tragicomedy called spirit.
Pascoaes
“Despabiladera” means “candle snuffer” in Spanish.
You’d think it was, at the very least, the word for
Imperial Lieutenant General Field Marshal
Lichtenberg
I
The black-and-blue welt on the back of Vigoleis’ head does not play a significant role in his recollections. Yet because these are recollections of the applied variety, or rather since Vigoleis himself intends them that way, it will be appropriate to include here all manner of experiences and insights, byproducts of his pure, undivided ego, that can be grafted organically or wilfully onto this account of his life. He trusts that these words will suffice to justify a few empirical lines concerning a goose-egg that made him into a bright and clever fellow.
The hummock on my noggin—how did it get there? What I mean is this: from what contact with what object in the space that confined and imprisoned us two mortals, the space that might well be called our death cell? My question is not a frivolous one. It would be if I had simply bumped my head on the floor, a surface made of the traditional local clay tiles. But no, I fell against an object made of metal, one that was located at the head of our bed within reaching distance, like a night table, though it served other purposes—hygienic ones, to be precise. In a room where there was virtually no room at all, this seemed to me to be an impudent luxury—and not just because I came into painful contact with it. Today, of course, I know that this pesky apparatus with its hip-shaped metal basin was just as integral a part of the room as the women who habitually made use of it—astradddle, as prescribed by the Italian term from which its name derives. A bidetto is a little horse, a pony so small that when you ride it your feet touch the ground—an extremely apt etymology. On the very first morning of our island sojourn, we (I include my reader, who by now is part of our family, and in whose presence we can discuss the most intimate matters)—we made the acquaintance of Pilar’s love-vessel. And now here, at first blush of a new dawning in our existence, we confront a similar object, one that is even less modest, and doubtless rather more expensive, than its counterpart on the Street of Solitude. I gave it a swift kick, sending it clanging against the door. Then I rubbed my bruise and looked around for something cold to place on it. My mother’s bread knife came to mind. She used to treat our bumps and bruises by pressing the blade lightly against the affected spot. It eased the pain and helped the blood circulation. We didn’t have a knife among our possessions, but why not use the basin itself to cool my skull? As I stood there with my head crowned, steer-horn-like, by this curved feminine utensil, I must have looked like some ancient Egyptian deity. But it worked. The throbbing stopped.
“Just where are we?” Beatrice asked. She had not yet fully awakened to life in our new Paradise. “And why are you wearing that stupid bucket on your head? Cold compresses! Isn’t there any water around here? And anyway, what a place! To me it looks like a youth hostel, or some kind of stopover for itinerant craftsmen.”
Voilà, there she is again, my Beatrice with her faulty imagination when it comes to the grittier aspects of life. On a purely cerebral level she could have made significant contributi
ons in the field of comparative linguistics. Her extraordinary ability with languages, a twofold inheritance from father and mother, would suggest this kind of career as the most fitting one for her. She can grasp the most remote etymological nuances at a single glance. But we cannot expect her to look at an egg and deduce from it the hen that laid it, or to think back from some chewed-over carrion to the vulture that spat it out, or from Vigoleis to Don Quixote.
“Beatrice,” I therefore said in the spirit of the Encyclopedists, who crusaded against chimeras and rank superstition, “la mia Beatrice, you can chalk it up to my cranial hematome if I venture to enlighten you while holding this peculiar object to the back of my head. It just seems to me that your choice of words is erroneous, because once again you haven’t figured out the connections properly. You speak of ‘itinerant craftsmen,’ whereas I would suggest itinerant craftsladies. And if you’ll permit one further correction, instead of ‘itinerant’ I would select some term or other that implies a static condition. All this may sound rather pedantic, especially so early in the morning. But don’t you agree with me that the solution to this puzzle is more likely to be found among the horizontal señoritas—assuming that it is any of our business at all to figure out the social significance of this embarrassing bathing stool? Let’s just be happy that we have a roof over our heads.”
In reconstructing this conversation with Beatrice I have just employed an obvious figure of speech, one that was not entirely applicable under the conditions prevailing at the time. If our heroes will only look upward, they will find out what we already know: that in that direction, too, not all is as it should be.
Neither of us had yet dared to glance ceilingward. The previous evening, in the murky light, I had the sensation that the space above our heads had a certain infinitude about it. My eyes could not discern any horizontal structural element. Everything here seemed to point upwards, towards the heavens. The entrance to this edifice was markedly unconventional; the corridor led to nameless depths, thus suggesting a cloister-like purpose for the building, a presumption supported by the size of our room with its dimensions of a monastic cell. It seemed only logical, then, that the building’s topmost structure should likewise lead one’s glance toward the celestial regions.
And it was just so. Our room had no ceiling. The perceiving eye searched long and hard until finally getting lost somewhere up in a jumble of roof beams. The roof itself was outfitted with curved ceramic tiles, in antique Spanish style. And because the roof lining was missing, one could see above the rafters the naked tiles, installed according to the system that the master builders of yore dubbed “nuns and monks”: one “nun” underneath, one “monk” on top, and so forth, all for the greater glory of God and to keep mortals from having their pious daily chores rained upon. Many of the tiles were broken, and several had slipped out of their overlapping fit, with the result that narrow beams of daylight penetrated through the open spaces. This lent our cubicle an ambience like that in a cathedral, a play of light refracting into a colored spectrum as it passed through broad areas of cobwebs gently undulating in the drafts of air. On clear moonlit nights the pitched roof resembled a star-studded tent. Little points of light lay scattered out above us, reminiscent of a passage in Immanuel Kant, a statement so cogent as to make one almost forget his reputation as a creative destroyer: “Two things fill my mind with repeated and increasing amazement and awe the more often and intensely I reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
But what if it rains? We haven’t reached that point yet and probably never will, for the Mallorcan Tourist Office’s statistics on annual precipitation would make it totally absurd for any moisture to find its way down through our damaged roof. Moreover, the rainy season wouldn’t start until the late fall; until then we surely could make an escape, perhaps even an escape devised in the spirit of Pure Reason—although we can doubtless rely on our friend Vigoleis, the Man of Unreason, who likes to boast of his talent for improvisation. He just won’t let rain interfere with the lugubrious workings of his mind, much less with his everyday business.
The walls of our cell were as high as I can reach with my arm extended, which is to say 7 feet 7 inches. The walls themselves were made of boards that partitioned off the whole building into little chambers. The windows were set so high that I couldn’t have cleaned them even with the aid of a stepladder. One of these sources of light in the masonry wall, an opening that tapered to smaller size on the outside, was located right above our room. Later, with the aid of an orchard ladder, I transformed this into a storage area for our laundry, not without encountering difficulty with the sharply angled sill. It was a daredevil kind of a job, and it had an effect on my health that ought not to be underestimated.
Our furniture consisted of the barest necessities: a bed wide enough for the shoulders of a strong Mallorcan male, but decidedly lacking his length; a primitive chair of the kind used by the old matron as seat and crutch; the aforementioned bathing stool; and a three-legged metal toilet stand painted in white enamel, whose aperture was no larger than a soup bowl. Beneath it was a pan containing a generous variety of insects, an indication that our cell had remained unoccupied for a long time—or, on the other hand, that the previous occupants were not the bath-taking type. The bait for this swarm of bugs, a repulsive substance of inorganic nature, was stuck to the bottom of the pan. Luckily Beatrice hadn’t noticed it.
I climbed on the chair to survey the remainder of the abbey-like quarters we had been assigned to, and counted fifteen gaping tops of cubicles. That meant fifteen compartments, ×2 = 30, and when multiplied according to the dictum that two shall always be of one flesh, the result was a good sixty people, i.e., threescore or about half a gross, that this barracks of love could entertain in one shift. The chamber sharing a partition with our own was furnished in just the same way, and all the others presumably likewise. It was a uniform setup, completely standardized, a clever way to rehabilitate an old unusable barn and turn a profit from it. That is exactly what had taken place here; without any doubt it was a brothel. But why hadn’t Arsenio gone ahead and added a few more floors? All at once I saw exciting possibilities that this edifice offered if extended upwards—possibilities for the cheapest and saddest way of fulfilling the command “Go forth and do not multiply.” Illumination would be a problem, but for such activity light is not a true necessity; a single bulb, as in our own space, would suffice. Air could be let in through specially installed ducts—but if you ask me, that too wouldn’t be a matter of high priority. An entryway built in the style of…
“What do you see up there that’s so interesting?” Beatrice said, interrupting my architectural reveries. “Is the box next to ours occupied too? People who come here to live must be very poor.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I had seen, and what I now knew incontrovertibly on the basis of all I had observed, including that pan underneath the toilet stand: that we had landed in an establishment of the lowest conceivable price range. Twenty-five pesetas per month is what Antonio paid for this flophouse, which included a towel and probably also the entertainment tax. 25 pesetas for a month of joyless shelter was one huge rip-off.
“I can’t see anything at all, chérie. So what you say is probably right. We’re in a youth hostel, and in summer business is slow. Who would want to go hiking in this heat? In winter it’s different, I can imagine that Adeleide always has a full house then. She’s probably got just what it takes, a hostel mother with a warm heart and a firm hand.”
“Maybe. But that would be the first time I’ve ever heard of Spaniards who go hiking. The place is probably exclusively for foreigners, and they really don’t start coming until winter. What I’d really like to know is, what you think we should do from here on. We have five pesetas left. I won’t be able to stand it here very long. It’s so awful. I could just strangle that Pilar woman! Go ahead and laugh. I don’t see anything funny about this situation of ours. What do I sm
ell? It’s probably coming from the toilet!”
There ensued a lengthy tirade in French, one that was not very flattering to me, and in spots even hurtful. To understand all is to forgive all, I thought to myself as I continued my elevated reconnaissance of our quarters. And besides, I thought this thought in French, which reminded me of my grade-school teacher, the one all of us kids were in love with and who spoke these words of wisdom every time my classroom performance left something to be desired. At the time, she wasn’t thinking of love but of my stupidity, but now I am constrained to think of Zwingli, who was actually the one who plunged us into this doubly distasteful whorish adventure. Instead of strangling Pilar, it would be more reasonable of Beatrice to consider fratricide. But who can expect logic from a woman early in the morning, still in bed, with no makeup on, no roof over her head, with a well-trampled mattress beneath her, and next to her a man who wouldn’t even have been able to come up with installments for the chair he was standing on?
The Island of Second Sight Page 27