Beatrice did some mental addition. Like a good Hausfrau she conjured up in her mind’s eye our provisions hanging on the ropes in our cell, and then pronounced the result: In three weeks we could save up enough for the fare. Her tone of voice revealed to me that she had actually squirreled away more than that, and sure enough, she was including a glass of lemonade for each of us at the railroad station restaurant.
Beatrice had no intention of slapping a donkey’s behind at the Manse to make him extrude pieces of gold. For purely aesthetic reasons, she would never stoop to such a thing. She was thinking exclusively in terms of frugality. For each and every cubic centimeter of that commode, we would have to go without certain items of nourishment, pull our belts one hole tighter—to the very last hole of all. Then, and only then, would we get to see the ancestral chest face to face. For the moment, we could have the pleasure of living in hopeful expectation. We had, of course, already divided up the bearskin before Bruin was slain: Beatrice would get all the drawers for her underclothes—this I generously allowed her, while claiming for myself only the secret drawer. “You are aware, chérie, how urgently I am in need of a tabernacle for my poems. It’s so painful for me to see my most sacred feelings hanging there on the clothesline like a shirt. And anyway, with underthings one usually expects a certain amount of decorum—just think of brassieres and other suspensory articles that any lady, who is truly a lady, hangs up only in a darkened chamber. I suppose I could write my reflective verses with some kind of invisible ink, but that Martersteigian heirloom seems just the right thing for my purposes. First-hand inspection will reveal whether it will be necessary to bore a few air holes in the drawer to prevent moisture and mold from accumulating during storage. We can ask Adeleide whether she’ll let us stand the piece out in the corridor. But what it all boils down to is this: this bartering deal is going to force us to look for some other living quarters. If we could only open up our folding cot somewhere else, we could consider this chest of drawers as an example of divine intervention.”
Emmerich had already got wind of our proposed junket to Deyá for chest-inspection. Deyá, he told us, was a damp, highly romantic burg, three stars in Baedeker and special praise for the cemetery. We mustn’t forget to look up a famous Japanese painter named “Three Little Clouds” who was a friend of Martersteig’s. Sóller: marvelous, glorious! The superlatives in the tourist guidebooks, Emmerich told us, couldn’t begin to describe the valley and its tiny harbor, an exquisite study in white, blue, and olive-green. And anyway, we had now lived on the island long enough to start exploring its inland attractions. We should be quick to load the armoire on the return bus; at the last minute our pilot could be overcome with regret about parting with it, obsessed as he was with keeping personal junk, such as his Pour le Mérite, his Iron Cross First Class, and similar crash-landing decorations. Every time he came to the bookshop, he blabbered on about Germany, the German forest, the German spirit, and German furniture. This from a Cologne native who couldn’t survive without potato pancakes.
Just two weeks later Beatrice had saved up the money for our trip. Martersteig planned to keep us in Deyá for four days; thus, we could avoid expenses for food for an entire week by fasting totally one day before and one day after the journey. He explained to us that he lived very simply, but that we wouldn’t starve in his little mill tower. Well, we weren’t starving in our own Tower refuge, either, but in fact—no offense to the military man intended—we were looking forward to putting on a little flesh during our stay in Deyá.
We took an early train. Our leader, stiff in the joints as usual, was abnormally quiet. He dusted Beatrice’s seat with insect repellent, thereby exposing himself and me to attacks of vermin. Then he dozed off grumpily, cradled and shaken by the 3rd class coupé. By unhappy coincidence we found ourselves sitting directly above an axle. The Captain’s air cushion provided only a little comfort, and when it burst a few minutes later—it was not made for the tropics and had dried out—his mood turned sour. The thought of going home seemed to depress him. Who knows what tricks and shenanigans his enemy would have thought up in the meantime? We left Martersteig to his morose cogitations, his aching back, his increasingly ominous premonitions, and an army of fleas that went on the attack in our compartment. Beatrice was the only one who didn’t get bitten.
The trip was worth the money that we had scraped together by going hungry. We rode through several tunnels, an experience that can make any landscape, no matter how intrinsically dreary, become a series of pleasant vistas. This landscape, in its fabled luxuriance, could boast of being the most beautiful and fertile region on the whole island. Olive orchards followed upon groves of almonds, palms jutted out from orange plantations, and yet the effect was not of the tropical sort in this southern clime. Everywhere you looked you could see merry black wallowing Mallorquin pigs, exemplars of a world-famous culture of gastronomic swine-breeding, based on a diet of apricots. More than the palm trees, the Aleppo firs, the araucarias, the carobs, and the tangerines, these animals gave me a sense of being very remote from my homeland and its pale prize-winning German hogs.
Sóller is a lovely town—if you are willing to accord any meaning to the word “lovely” under the hot Spanish sun—situated at the bottom of a colorful valley. A visitor wouldn’t mind settling there in one of the white-walled cottages amid cats, orange groves, and in the little front yard mothers suckling their young with their gleaming golden breasts. The morning we arrived we didn’t get to see much of this orange-producing town, whose product can be found in gift baskets of fruit anywhere in the world. The Captain was in a rush to get home, and that meant that we had to step on it, too. He wouldn’t even let us saunter through the streets, take a peek at the Franciscan monastery, visit the market square, seek out a wayside shrine—none of all this. We had to speed home—I almost wrote “home to the Motherland”—and so we trudged along donkey paths across rocky ground, past boulders and over mounds of talus, up into the range of hills that led from Sóller to Deyá.
I am incapable of describing landscape, for the simple reason that landscape doesn’t speak to me—or to put this more modestly, it doesn’t say very much to me. For this reason I could now make good use of the pen of the Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria, who lived on this island for decades. He is the author of the definitive work on the Balearic Islands; he knew how to capture the archipelago in word and image. Copy his text? Oh, if only I could locate one or two pages of his to plagiarize so that my reader might receive at least a remote impression of how magnificent our hike was, far above the pulsating flanks of the ocean, parallel to a shoreline incised with fiords and inlets that beckoned to the blue swells of seawater. Anton Emmerich would of course immediately say, “Copied out!” And Lord knows I wouldn’t deny it, although I would never even dream of stealing from Emmerich’s own “Guide to Mallorca.” If you wish to deck yourself with borrowed plumes, you won’t wait around until a moulting sparrow sends you one of its tail feathers. With all due respect to that Colognian’s business acumen, his “Guide” was a mess. So a few dabs of color from my own personal palette should do a better job.
The Captain’s feet were shod in a pair of sealskin moccasins, prescribed for his journey to Spain by an orthopedist in Germany. In the Count’s rooming house he always wore slippers made of cat or rabbit fur, which were no doubt beneficial for his gouty extremities, but were anything but moth-proof. Up here on the donkey path he shuffled along, every once in a while emitting a groan that signaled a pause to rest on a knobby pine branch. This we did gladly, for we heroes were also tuckered out from hiking, especially me with my congenital aversion to long foot marches. It wasn’t our footgear or our feet themselves that limited our endurance up here in the hills. As a Swiss citizen Beatrice is quite used to taking miles and miles at a stretch, and with her Indian heritage she could have snuck her way all along the trail. Moreover, the balancing mechanism inside our ears remained undisturbed, unlike the aviator, whom we had to lash to
a rope whenever we had to eke our way past a precipice. “It’s a case of acrophobia, Madam, and it becomes acute on donkey trails like this one. Terrible. But neither of you has ever crash-landed from 9000 feet. Down there…”
Martersteig almost audibly clapped his hand to his eyes, for “down there” was a yawning gap of about a hundred meters. To crash land down there without eligibility for a government pension? The worst way for a famous fighter pilot to get shot down, I thought, was if he did the shooting himself. But by then, we had successfully roped the airforce retiree past another steep cliff. Loose rocks tumbled down the incline into the abyss below. Our ailing, stiff-backed leader, who at any moment could plunge to the depths, thanked us with a glassy stare. “Your fatherland’s gratitude is certain”—isn’t that what the poets of his homeland were so fond of singing?
The sun, too, offered no mercy. It glared down upon us with ferocious strength in spite of the lateness of the season. Apart from a couple of brief drizzles that passed over the island, it hadn’t rained at all. The Captain, like all sufferers from gout a walking weather prognosticator, said that we could expect real rain very soon; he could feel it in his sealskin footwear. And then we would get to see what it was like when an entire island is inundated; we would learn what rainstorms can do in Spain.
After many hours of forced marching, slipping, sliding, and stumbling, we finally reached the village of Deyá, located on a mountainside in the midst of an orange grove, just as picturesque as Baedeker said it was. Martersteig came back to life. Stealthily, like a hunted game animal, he took Beatrice’s arm and whispered, “It’s down there, no, a little farther on, more to the right—no, farther still. Do you see that spruce tree standing alone? That’s it, right there. And who do you suppose lives there?”
Beatrice made no reply. Peering along a raised index finger with its bitten nail, she could focus her glance only on the landscape as a whole, not on some single house or free-standing spruce tree within it. I raised my own well-kempt index finger and said quickly, “Your enemy, Herr von Martersteig, our literary colleague Sir Robert von Ranke Graves.”
“Let’s move on, just a half hour more, and then we’ll take a rest beneath my spruce tree.”
This remark was controlled, to-the-point, and strategically significant. That’s how I imagine a ground observer communicating with his pilot: one kill. Next enemy, please.
His calculations worked out to the minute. After the announced interval, we were sitting, bathed in sweat, on the wall that surrounded the old house where the Captain had set up his command post. This is where he conjured up his imaginary army of Barbary apes, where he entertained his imaginary ephebes, his imaginary enemies, and his imaginary hatred of Germany, capable all the while of mustering as weapons for the great battle only his damaged spine, his knotty gout, and his worries about his pension. But we mustn’t forget that his arsenal also included his wooden ancestral shrine, which had gone before us like the Star of Bethlehem during our entire miserable cross-country trek, and which each of us imagined as sharing in equal parts: Beatrice for her underclothes, Vigoleis for his sacred cache of poetry. He imagined the key to the secret compartment as made of pure gold—the Nürnberg master surely would not have been content with anything less.
“Welcome, my dear guests,” said the Captain, as he opened the tower door with a creaky key.
The entrada was cool—more than that, it was ice cold. Whitewashed like all of the rooms in the house, it was completely bare except for a small jewel box set in a wall niche. A large spider with its notorious hairy legs (its bite can be fatal to man or horse, the encyclopedia says) was crawling back into its lair between wall and ceiling beams. Our host flipped a wall switch. No electricity.
The heart of a pessimist really starts pumping when everything goes wrong, especially in the presence of witnesses. “Madam, Don Vigo, you can see for yourself. Try the switch. No light! Do you need any more naked proof of my enemy’s wickedness? Robert von Ranke Graves wishes us to sit here in darkness! His spies will have reported our arrival to him. He wants to humiliate me in front of you, but—I have some candles!” This sounded triumphant. O death, where is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory now? Robert von Ranke, where is thy poetic imagination? Joachim has some candle stubs! In a soldier’s musette bag such things can be more important than a field marshal’s mace.
While we recovered from the agonies of our journey—our host opened up chaises longues in the shade of his spruce, or was it a palm tree?—Martersteig busied himself in his kitchen. On the way to his house he had purchased three good-sized sardines, and now he was roasting them on the grill. The smell penetrated everything around us, including ourselves—right down to the marrow. Nothing stinks worse than sardines as they slowly roast to a crisp; it is a fiery purgatory for all the slime of the primeval world. Science is still trying to figure out why the sardine, next to the earthworm the cleanest animal in existence, stinks so much, whereas a pig that has wallowed in mud all its life has such a sweet fragrance on the spit. “He should put his kitchen on the roof,” said Beatrice, and then she was silent. She had turned green, and I wasn’t feeling any better. But the snack did us good, and then we fell into a deep sleep. Afterwards, we went into the village. It was late in the afternoon when the shadows were getting long.
To cite Baedeker further, since I’m unable to do any better, Deyá is simply a fantastic place, unique, highly attractive and truly rewarding. I can’t quote any more, because I have just found out to my amazement that my 1929 Baedeker covers the village with exactly three-quarters of a line! Be that as it may, later guidebooks put the artistic activity in Deyá in the same category as Worpswede and Ascona. I don’t know Worpswede, but Ascona offers more naked flesh, more bedroom scandals, and less artistic activity than Deyá had at the time, when some world-famous painters were still living there. It also sheltered a few writers of note, a few philosophers, the odd vegetarian, a Rumanian soothsayer, and an Italian coloratura soprano whose ornamentations had long since broken off, so that she now exercised her God-given talent only on bright moonlit nights while sitting alone on a stone near her house; a dozen sculptors, a portrait photographer much in demand, a Russian. Graves lived at one end of the village, Martersteig at the other end. In between were the domiciles of international artists, some living there with their fame, others with their failures, their envy, their hatred, and their gossip. And then, of course, there were the indigenous citizens of Deyá, who for a long time now hadn’t been able to figure out just what they were still doing there on their mountainside strewn with orange trees. Many of them readily posed for painters—qué remedio? What else is there to do?
But now, did a famous writer like Graves truly feel the need to torture an un-famous writer like Martersteig? Lay traps for him? Drive him out of house and village?
Robert Graves was already famous by this time. His Goodbye to All That had a reputation as one the best British war books. It had appeared in German with the title Strich drunter (“That’s it, period!”). Like Joachim von Martersteig, Graves was an officer in the Wilhelminian War and served in France, the country that Martersteig still hated more than any other. But one day each of them said, “That’s it, period!”
Their soldiering days were over, their colorful uniforms in tatters, and depression overcame both the victor and the vanquished. Omne animal post coitum triste, praeter gallum qui cantat, says Aristotle: after the sexual act every animal is sad, except for the rooster, which crows. Or perhaps it sings, like our two writers from hostile camps. They devoted themselves to literature, Graves in a fashion that you can read about in any history of literature, Martersteig in a manner that the world has yet to discover. His image as a fighter pilot was already yellowing in the pages of the illustrated magazines. To display the new Martersteig to the world, the Clausewitzian Martersteig, it would be necessary for the canny Vigoleis to type clear copy from his “Monkey Army” manuscript. Each of these literary competitors could boast of a
German particle of nobility in his name, and both had selected Deyá as the scene of their pacifistic post-partum labor. And now comes the almost incomprehensible state of affairs: despite the similarity of their background, neither of them would have anything to do with the other. They avoided each other. Graves gave the crippled Prussian veteran the complete silent treatment, as if he didn’t even exist. On one occasion the Englishman apparently tried to walk right through the man from Germany, just as you read about in the Bible and in ghost stories. Yet since the Captain, in spite of his spiritualized old-Prussian sense of duty, was not made of pure spirit, it came to bumpings and shovings on the public street of the village, and it’s irrelevant which of them won the skirmish. Anyone who knows Graves or has given a cursory look at his picture in Penguin Books, can confirm what I know first-hand: the poet-officer beat up the officer-poet mercilessly. He knocked him out. He roasted him like a young herring and then, once again, as in the title of his book: “Goodbye to All That!”
Martersteig gave us a melancholy report of this affront, this provocation, this insult that he fell victim to. But judging from what I heard, it seemed to me that the Martersteigs had fallen victim to a great deal more than this. “He’s making things up,” said Beatrice, who came to dislike him more and more. I, too, had my doubts about the public scrimmage. Certain events may have taken place solely within our friend’s concussed cranium; later conversations with Graves confirmed these doubts, although the British all-around man never came forth with the whole truth. For Martersteig, Graves was apparently what horny dream images were for the pious hermits in the Desert of Chalcis. If a naked woman appeared in a dream to a stylite when he dozed off after his meal of locusts, we can have no religio-historical doubt at all that 99% of the saints tumbled off their pillars in a fit of repressed sexuality. Saint Jerome experienced things like that, and reported them convincingly. And he never even climbed up a pillar. Herr von Martersteig, predestined to crash-land, fell to earth with every step he took.
The Island of Second Sight Page 43