After some rummaging I found a letter from Stuttgart, from the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. This had to be the money transfer. “Well now, I see you’ve fished something out after all?” I showed him my passport. The man said “All very well,” and then he started beaming. Just a moment, he said. All the Saints, he went on, must have sent me to him, Would I be so kind as to take the trouble to examine another pile of mail, one that had been sitting there for years? No one knew quite what to do with it, perhaps…? “Perhaps,” I said and fingered through the mound of missives, picking out this and that addressed to us, old stuff, long-overdue correspondence. I took it.
The clerk was about to load more and more mail on me, including some packets under heavy seal, stuff that he wished to be rid of. But I refused to be bribed. “Some other time, perhaps. God willing.”
“God willing! But please, just one moment!” He pointed to his crossword. “Famous German writer, with double-V?”
“Wigoleis.”
“You? Well I’ll…!”
“Incognito. So many admirers, you understand.”
He didn’t really understand. With “Jacob Wassermann” he would have made better progress. He shook my hand warmly.
Beatrice sat beneath the palms of the Café Triangulum and listened to the saga of the wealth that had fallen into Vigoleis’ lap overnight. It was a check for a few hundred pesetas, the fruits of his somewhat less than Wassermannian success with the pen, his pygmy efforts at creative writing, the cold-cash proof of his existence as a writer. It had arrived a few weeks late by a quirk of devious fate, the same cabalistic powers that at the very last moment kept us from the final temptation of all, and issued a command to Zwingli to cross our path on the way to the cliff. All of this had taken place without the customary extra insurance premium, starting in the bordello with the Supreme Judicial Court assigned to our case, à chandelle éteinte, in a procedure that very closely resembled medieval legal protocol. And when the final candle went out, Beatrice broke down completely. Not a single star appeared in the heavens. In a purely external way, all of this can be explained differently, more simply, without any evocation of a Higher Purpose. The bifurcation of my private personality extends into the realm of bureaucratic documentation. At the time in question, my passport certified only the baptismal half of my existence. In its pages, no trace of Vigoleis was to be found. So it was no fault of the bureaucrats.
Herr Emmerich readily lent us fifty pesetas. I was about to show him the check when he laughed. With him we could charge anything; we looked more honest than most people who came to Mallorca. Why, he would be willing to lend us a hundred. Whoever was willing to go into debt to a free spirit like himself, he said, would never get into financial trouble.
We bought some easily digestible food, a simple soup, the kind quickly brought to heat for hospital patients. A candle, and a box of Oropax for Beatrice, to assure her peace and quiet during a night that we would soon be spending again in the confines of the “Tower,” and not in the arms of some undersea octopus. We strode—but no, I mustn’t go on talking about “striding”—we hailed a taxi. By coincidence it was the same one in which, in the previous chapter, Vigoleis began boasting to his Beatrice. “Where to?”
“‘Torre del Reloj’!” Now we’ll see whether the place is as notorious as Zwingli claims it to be.
“‘Torre del Reloj’? Good, very good! You have to stand up like a man!” And we arrived in the twinkling of an eye.
Things were hopping at our house of joy. A second-hand dealer had set up a booth for the candy and gift articles adored by girls who would never think of selling themselves for money. Arsenio had thought of everything; anyone who appreciates the human soul will want to take care of the human body as well. We, on our part, were happy to be back home. Unnoticed, we made our way up the open-air stairway into our cell, where we were greeted by a surprising new development. Our sleeping quarters was the scene of a furious paper-cutting fracas. Had we been invaded by vandals? Jagged scraps of paper lay all about the room; the floor, the bed, the trunks—everything in sight was covered with torn fragments of paper. The rats had been at work. My traveling salesman’s leather case, the one that I used as a purgatory for my sinful attempts at poetic utterance prior to consigning them to the fires of Hell, had been selected by the rodents as a prime target for their intercessive activity. With their special expertise, but oddly misled by their instincts to assume the actual expiration of the man who was now opening the cell door, they had attacked the posthumous literary works of Vigoleis. “If any man’s work shall be burned,” says the poet Paul of Tarsus, “he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” This obscure passage, often debated and still not translated into comprehensible language as it will have emerged from the mouth of the Apostle, occurred to me later when I was involved with Pascoaes’ God’s Poet, as pertaining to the condition I found myself in when my work was destroyed, but I myself was saved yet condemned to outlive my own work—the worst thing that can befall a writer. And to think that I was consigned to this destiny not by a jury of my peers, but by the denizens of a bordello.
“Our cheese! Our cheese!” Beatrice shouted, and all at once she was alive again. A light had dawned upon her; the theory of the subconscious triumphed for once over Vigoleis, who has a low opinion of such chimeras. Porto Pí and Port-Bou—what possible connection can exist between the two in the muddy regions of the human soul? With an archetypical cheese? “Cheese?”
“Yes, in Port-Bou! Don’t you remember, our Emmentaler?”
Of course. I had forgotten. As far as I was concerned, it had simply dropped out of sight, that wedge of cheese I stashed away at the Spanish border in order to mislead—though not, mind you, deceive—the Spanish customs officials by wrapping it in my poems and placing it underneath my prose, inside the traveling salesman’s satchel. But then came Zwingli limping out of his grave; Pilar pursued me with her wormy apple, all the joints of our existence came cracking apart, domestic scenes, eviction—let the reader count up all the events that might have caused us to forget, in the throes of starvation, that we had a sample of the most famous cheese in the world in our private luggage. It was an open-and-shut case of instinctive repression. A race that can commit such a lapse can never endure. “But Beatrice, chérie, I can see nothing in any way tragic in this event. There you are, looking as though you were going to tear your hair out. Leave your hair alone. Instead, consider the following: the Old Testament days are over and done with. Those good old times when God could have spoken to me in my sleep, ‘Vigoleis, arise, take up thy salesman’s valise, rip apart thy poetic oeuvre, bring forth the cheese, eat thereof and offer a morsel thereof to thy helpmate that she might eat thereof, and be of good cheer in this house of iniquity.’ God is not with us, Beatrice, in spite of the fact that as a German citizen I can lay a certain claim to the contrary.”
“You’re making fun of me. You’re mind is clouding over.”
“Not at all. I have never seen things as clearly as right at this moment. Just you wait, Heaven has certain things in mind for me. The rats took advantage of our godforsaken absence to murder me as a literary personality—that is significant, and cheese is inspirational not only for rats. At this very moment in Germany, people are assembling an entire philosophy based on cheesy ideas. Weissenberg…”
“Oh stop your quarreling, you over there! Life is so grand, and the Spaniards—do they ever know how to be alive! You have to get used to it, though, so quickly from one day to the next. If my husband knew that I am lying here, he’d have another breakdown. As far as he knows, I’m just on a trip. And do you know what? He’s right about that…”
We were dumbfounded. This voice, speaking with an unmistakable Lower-Rhenish accent and in drowsy, languid intonation, was coming from the cell next to ours, the one I had peeked into that very morning. It was the voice of the transparent, hyper-erotic subject of my secret, privately-printed essay, now lending expression to the afte
r-spasms in her loins, in the language of my homeland between the rivers Nette and Niers. I have never felt homesick; I am at home anywhere and everywhere, even in a house of joy whose joys I do not share. Such an attitude presumes a vigorous inner life and a large measure of disgust with the outside world; one must avoid perversion and cultivate introversion, but above all, one must not cling to one’s own shadow. Yet I’ll confess that I was not untouched by the thought that only a single leap over the partition separated me from my dear fatherland, although I could not have brought about this repatriation without a serving of the General’s Dish.
Beatrice and I continued our discussion in whispers. Using our camp stove, she cooked a stringy panade with ingredients supplied by her Swiss compatriot Maggi. Looking back, it seems to me a comical turn of events that both of us, having survived such a dire ordeal, got a whiff of our respective homelands while sitting at the very center of a hellish foreign world that had almost been our undoing. In silence we spooned the soup from our bowls. Then I took the candle and approached the shrine of Our Lady of the Pillar, where the eternal flame was still lit. In anticipation of the coming night, many fresh candles had been placed at the little altar—big ones and little ones, white, yellow, and many-colored ones, each according to special need and affordability.
I love candles. I always have several on my writing desk, and keep them lit even in daytime in order to relish the secrets of the flame. As to why on that particular occasion I made an offering of candlelight, I am no longer able to say. Perhaps I did it out of a superstitious belief that bad things could happen to us if we persisted in being the cause of no sound at all emerging from one of the cells, if our abstinence were to transform one of the boxes, the rest of which would soon be resounding like organ pipes up into the rafters, into the source of a mute pedal point—a kind of tuba mirum spargens sonum. By neglecting to join in the concert we would be depriving the music of the special sound that, according to our friend the organist Mosén Juan María Tomás, is the touchstone for all composers. In my home town, on the Feast of Corpus Christi a Jewish family we knew regularly assembled a votive window at their house using items borrowed from pious Catholic neighbors, in order to avoid a conspicuous gap in the row of festively decorated houses. This is exactly what we did in the Clock Tower, and it spoke for a sense of communal spirit in the midst of the diaspora.
With a tender, loving gesture Vigoleis placed his Beatrice on the cot. Then he took up a palm frond, swept up his posthumous papers into a pile, and lay down upon it.
“Oropax” lent Beatrice peace of mind, a peace that the Mediterranean had denied to these two pilgrims who were so thoroughly sick of the island. Peace for one night. But this one night lasted half an eternity.
III
It was Sunday. We lay there for quite a while with open eyes, gazing up at the vaults of our cathedral, each of us aware that the other was awake. But neither of us moved. It was Sunday.
As a child I suffered from a condition that someone once referred to as Sunday melancholy. Later this affliction extended to the remaining days of the week, and then it was no longer anything special, considering that I had been able to summon a certain amount of energy to counter it. I recall Sunday mornings when the sun shone through the slits in the venetian blind into my room, turning everything into a celebration. Every flower on the wallpaper looked different, even though the pattern replicated them a thousand times. I knew each and every exemplar by heart, and discovered more and more new transformations. On the street outside there was no rattle of trucks passing by: on Sundays commercial traffic was prohibited. Sunday! Gradually my not quite wide-awake brain registered the truth: no school, no humiliation, no teasing, no punishment, no homework, nothing—just Sunday, the most comforting day. But then I burst awake and remembered: You have to go to church! Gone was my summery meadow of a thousand blossoms. All the roses looked alike and crummy and cheap, fifty cents a yard and pasted up at all the wrong angles.
Going to church was a twofold coercion. My parents and my school insisted on it, and the school even took attendance at Mass. Young nitwit that I was, I couldn’t make this kind of weekend surveillance jibe with the omniscience attributed to the Good Lord. I also had trouble with the fact that one of our classmates was allowed to absent himself from all church services on the basis of a medical certification. This kid Wilhelm was as healthy as a lumberjack, but his father was the richest taxpayer in town, a millionaire who could afford his own concordat with the church. Our family used the same devout Catholic doctor, but we wouldn’t dream of requesting a similar dispensation. My father was not in a salary range that would have permitted him to enter negotiations with God’s representatives. When he finally worked his way up to the point where he could have greased the Lord’s palm, I had long since sprung free of the whole dishonest mess. It didn’t cost me a dime, but it cost me many a sleepless night and threw the course of my education out of balance. For years, Sundays remained poisoned days for me, and for years I nursed a strong mistrust of a Church that I was unable to square with the God who was said to reside within its walls. Then came the day of my First Communion, a climactic moment in the life of any Christian, the most wondrous day in his life.
I gazed up at the vaults of our Mallorcan church, saw the beams of sunlight streaming through the cracks in the roof, the prismatic light of my Sunday melancholy. “Most wondrous day,” indeed! I was nine years old and still believed in God, in the same way that I believed in fairy tales. But fairy tales don’t impose obligations on a believer. God, however, commanded us to “come forth” into His service with shouldered prayerbook. This most wondrous day: it was preceded then, and presumably still is, by a course of instruction that was supposed to initiate us into the mystery of “transubstantiation,” a concept more difficult to comprehend than it is to pronounce. I myself probably didn’t comprehend anything at all, but that didn’t make any difference. Our pastor gave me the necessary box on the ears, and others got it too. This baleful procedure took place two or three days before the Most Wondrous Day. We were required to stand in rank and file at the altar rail—our food dispensary, as it were— for a “rehearsal.” We had to memorize each and every step, each and every segment of the liturgy. The instruction placed particular stress on our behavior when receiving the Blessed Sacrament: bow your head in sincere humility, kneel down gingerly without banging the shins of the kid behind you, fold your hands under the linen cloth at the rail, and then stick out your tongue so as to swallow the Host while avoiding the slightest desecration, such as causing it to drop to the floor. Do not chew it! The Savior will melt on your tongue all by Himself. Our ancient pastor had trained generations before ours, every year the same maneuvers, and he had just as little patience as a humorless drill sergeant. I was guileless, and believed firmly in the miracle that was about to take place. My mother had given me fuller explanations than the pastor did. I would feel a shiver at the moment when I received Our Savior; I would undergo a metamorphosis, I would become a different child—a “better” one, she no doubt said—maybe even an angel.
I was quivering with expectation. All this seemed even more promising than Christmas Eve, which up to then was the Most Wondrous thing I knew. I pitied the poor negro kids in the “Steyl Missionary Messenger” who, instead of receiving the Savior, ate each other up. But if we saved up enough tinfoil and rolled it up in balls and delivered them to the pastor, the kids in Africa could receive Holy Communion too. I collected a lot. I felt truly sorry for the pagan children. Today I feel more truly sorry for Christianized children. In catechism instruction I didn’t do very well. God had not granted me enough intelligence to grasp the bounty of knowledge required to receive Him, and on rehearsal day it turned out that I was physically awkward besides. I was a pagan child black as the ace of spades, a kid that the white folks would have to collect truckloads of tinfoil for, before he could approach Our Lord’s table.
We approached the altar rail two abreast, as what was calle
d “Communion partners,” and knelt down. I folded my hands in the prescribed manner under the cloth, bowed my head, peeked to one side to see when it would be my turn, lifted it again, and extended my tongue. Not very far, it’s true, because the pastor might have got the wrong idea—some of the kids stuck out their tongues at him during the communion instruction, just for fun. My own Communion partner was one of the most active in this regard. I was amazed at this kid, my cousin Karl, who was now kneeling next to me and somehow still found the time to pinch me, whereas I was already sweating from anticipation.
The old man walked along the rail checking everyone’s posture, everyone’s tongue. When he came opposite me he began to fume. What, this rascal doesn’t even know how far to stick out his tongue? Farther out! Farther out! And when “farther out” was simply no longer possible—after all, a human being is not a woodpecker—he took his big key and whacked that part of me that was to receive the Savior on Whitsunday morning. My teeth crunched painfully into my lingual artery, and my mouth filled with blood. With the practiced gait that was meant to signify contemplation and inner bliss, I staggered back to the pew, next to me my Communion partner Karl. Karl had observed everything very carefully, and he hissed at me, “Man oh man, why didn’t you spit at him? Just let him try that with me. I’ll puke out all the blood on his pretty vestments. Just wait, that old bushman’s gonna pay for this…” Our pastor’s name was Busch.
My cousin Karl died while still young. When he was seven, he claimed to know where babies came from. Nobody believed him, but he didn’t care, and it turned out he was right. He never avenged me—how could he have? A kick in the shins? A spritzer of stink juice on the pastor’s cassock, the one he said every dog in town should piss on? Was it truly the old man’s fault? As one of the Good Lord’s legion of accomplices, our pastor was respected in the community, and when he died they put up a nice gravestone for him. He had grown old and grey in the service of God, and was no less brain-dead than a sexton who genuflects before the altar dozens of times every day while thinking of nothing at all. What he succeeded in doing was to single out one of the nameless victims of his pious drill methods during his final season in office, give that boy a well-aimed smack on the tongue with his house key, and with this single blow destroy the mystical edifice of a childlike faith.
The Island of Second Sight Page 33