The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  As for the blackout: at that time the village Deyá had a small unit for producing electrical current, a primitive affair that was in private hands. There was a little generator in a little shed, attached to a tiny two-stroke motor. Day and night it rattled away, and day and night there were breakdowns. But since the current was stored in batteries, there was no interruption of service. I can’t recall whether Graves had a financial interest in the power company, or whether he was just friends with the guy in charge. In any case, whenever Graves got angry at Martersteig, then out of sympathy with the Englishman the Spaniard cut off the German’s electric lights. And the darker things got in the Captain’s house, the angrier he became. It was the same technique as in the bull ring: before the fight the bull is harassed in the darkened toril. And it was like old family feuds, in which no one remembers who started it all and what the original reason for the dispute was; everybody just spits at everybody else. Martersteig was in command of whole regiments of gossiping monkeys, and they impugned the honor of Mr. Graves as often as they could—stories about women, mostly. And Graves countered by cutting off the electricity. But the Germans are not only the inventors of gunpowder and the printing press, but also of a light source made of wax. Martersteig had candles.

  That evening, in the light of just one of these German inventions, we sat in the hexagonal study of the creator of the new German army. This room deserves a careful description. The walls of this turret-like space were whitewashed; the beamed ceiling was low, the stone floor covered with the customary palm-leaf mat. In the middle stood a large round table made of darkly stained wood, split on the diagonal. Into the split the owner had stuffed some envelopes and a wire fly swatter. Three high-backed chairs were placed around the table, and on the table’s surface there was a metal holder containing the single wax candle. In one of the walls there was a small hole, and the plaster was peeling around it. Somebody, the Captain explained, as if making an excuse, had tried to drive a nail into the wall, but without success. The walls themselves showed neither bloodstains nor squashed mosquitoes. How did he do it? He killed the mosquitoes on the fly. But of course, the Richthofen Squadron! The Vigoleis Squadron kills mosquitoes using a soft clothes brush instead of his slipper, and that, too, leaves no traces of murder. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling on an electric wire.

  This spartan cell is where the general of the monkeys developed his strategy. This is where the Macaque Army was engendered, where Clausewitz hatched out his plans for cutting and slashing and emasculating the enemy. And this is where we now sat stiffly on chairs after a second starvation ration, listening to a man’s life story that bordered on the uncanny. It was enough to give us the shivers. The Captain drummed on for hour after hour, sitting somewhat bent forward to alleviate the pain. He stood up just once, to take a new candle from a drawer; he lit it and set it on top of the still burning stump. My legs had long since gone to sleep, and I was unable to move. But I wouldn’t have dared to in any case.

  Martersteig’s father was a tyrant, an iron Prussian pedagogue who would have admired a teacher at my own imperial educational barracks, who, to teach us a lesson in endurance, marched us into a growth of nettles and commanded us, “Up! Down! Up! Down!” And woe to whoever started whining and pulling his sleeves over his hands like mittens. That kid was given some whacks and ordered to stay after school—down among the nettles. In the Martersteig family, too, there could be no thought of complaining. Germany needed heroes, and heroes grew up only under the parental rod. Daddy had many titles and many obligations. He was a Privy Councillor, possessed a high rank in the military, and wore a slew of decorations that jingled tunes about service to the People and the Fatherland; he may have even been a general. His civilian profession was the law. He held two doctorates and was a State’s Attorney, Superior State’s Attorney, perhaps a District Commmissioner? This, too, I have forgotten. Let us just assume that this father was something very big, very imposing, very fear-inspiring, for his business concerned nothing less than so-called Final Authority. Whoever didn’t pass muster with Old Man Martersteig could just string himself up on the doorpost, or somebody else could string him up. In either case his life was over. Everyone in his house knew that the decisions he made were of the life-or-death variety.

  A late marriage to a Swiss woman beneath his social rank gave rise to tensions in the family tree and in the family’s fortune, but happily for the future, the marriage seemed to remain childless. Scandal causes deafness. Or perhaps the Privy Attorney was so busy with his court cases that he forgot to sleep with his bride from the Alpine meadows. The latter is my own theory, but the son of this father expressed it differently: his progenitor didn’t know the word “love”; such a thing didn’t exist for him, neither in spirit nor in the flesh. Nevertheless, late in the marriage, and in a moment of weakness, this stern husband spilled the seed that became Joachim.

  Joachim attended a humanistic high school and had what the Dutch call a studiekop, that is, a head for book learning. Translated into the ridiculous, it means that he was purely and simply a brain.

  When his father ended 25 years of service to the Empire, he was showered with honors, new decorations, an ornate chair in his office and banquet in the Martersteig villa with servants and printed menu, with braided uniforms, cutaways, naked shoulders, Martersteig diamonds, a Swiss Alpine necklace, a Hungarian fiddler, some dull-witted convent canonesses, and monocles. Someone taps on a glass; all rise and gaze into the silvery eyes of the celebratee. “A toast to many more years!” The band plays a fanfare, outside the rockets soar into the sky, 25 of them, and then the worthy judge raises his glass to his lips and expresses his thanks to one and all. He takes one sip. He staggers. A servant catches him up. There is a hubbub in the room, someone shouts, the ladies grasp at their diamonds. But no assassin or thief has entered the premises. The celebratee had only taken poison, and the curtain came down.

  His posthumous papers contained a few words to his family: after twenty-five years, a German judge who has done his duty before God and the Fatherland has but two options: either resign from office or take poison. He preferred the latter choice as the more decent, courageous, Prussian solution, so help him God.

  God helped him very effectively. The dosage was exactly proper for the Judge’s constitution, and so he immediately collapsed as if struck by a bolt of lightning. The proper Prussian military method would have been to use a bullet, but the old gentleman was also an aesthete; he didn’t like the idea of blood on his white vest, and perhaps he thought that the explosion of a pistol would be drawing too much attention to himself. I don’t know whether at that time suicide was regarded as a crime in Germany; in any case a civil servant was constrained to follow definite regulations concerning the cause of death: he had to kill himself in keeping with his status in society, for otherwise his widow would forfeit his pension. At the very moment when his father toppled over and there was panic in the hall, a deaf-and-blind Countess von Martersteig and the goldfish in the festively illuminated aquarium were the only ones to maintain their composure. Someone cried out, “Poor Joachim! Now he can’t go to the university!” In fact, Joachim’s mother received no pension at all.

  Certain aunts of his pooled their resources, and he was sent to a Royal-Imperial military academy—a “brain crusher,” as the Captain described it, using a term that was flattering for such an institution since it assumed that there was such a thing as a brain. What he probably meant, was that when the cadets were grown up and entered “real life,” they had no brain left in them. I can no longer recall whether it was the academy in Berlin-Lichterfelde. While describing life at this place, Herr von Martersteig started shivering, insofar as his bones permitted such motion. If anyone wishes further detail concerning such educational penitentiaries, he should consult Count Dr. Dr. Werner von der Schulenburg, who likewise spent several years in one without getting squeezed flat by the brutal guards. But these are amazing exceptions. Christianity, which developed so
gloriously and so naturally out of the starvation edema of humankind, has degenerated at the hands of its own unnatural, self-satisfied, conceited scholarly theology. In similar fashion, Germany has gone to the dogs as the result, speaking with Nietzsche, of its unnatural methods of education. Instead of learning the Greek and Latin classics, philosophy, and psychology, which his talents directed him to do, Martersteig studied generalship.

  Then came a war, and the young cadet rose in the ranks—never becoming a true officer, for he made it only to a captaincy, whereas in a war everybody else is named at least a sub-general. No, Herr von Martersteig was attached to the fighter squadron of his colleague Manfred von Richthofen. As an observer he got to see a lot—enemy territory mostly, a bird’s eye view of hell. Not many people had such a chance. That is why, afterwards, he was able to peer into Josefa the cook’s bosom and identify her little asbestos bag as a fireproof receptacle for pipe ashes—without, incidentally, being in any way aroused by what he was looking at; he loved only boys. Then he was brought down out of the skies. One shot sufficed to verify his status as a hero—it is like the shooting gallery at the county fair, where for a dime you can aim at a clay pipe and, bang! the whole array of stuff starts dancing and prancing, things start leaping and twisting and doing somersaults, it’s a high time all over, your audience is amazed. You leave the scene feeling like a hero with your head held high, and you enter a booth and treat yourself to a pickled herring and a mug of beer. It would be a macabre joke of history if the Tommy Robert Graves (minus the “von Ranke”; à bas les boches was still the byword) was the one who shot down this particular enemy, for Martersteig crash-landed behind enemy lines near a unit of French forces where Graves was posted at the time. And he actually landed, that is, he didn’t penetrate the French soil like an artillery shell. He had this lark-like hovering descent to thank for coming out of it with his life, his dislocated spine, his fantasies, his Hindenburg pension, his love-hate of his homeland, his “Farewell my dear homeland,” and the inspiration for his army of monkeys.

  The full moon had risen. It was long past midnight, and the stump of the last candle had long since died out in a pool of wax. Our story-teller rose achingly to his feet and paced back and forth noiselessly in his slippers, talking all the time. He did this for a while, then took his seat again. His story was apparently at an end; there seemed nothing more to tell. His pause for thought was, so we thought, the end of his song.

  Before we went to bed, Joachim, overcome by his own personal account, one that he often recited silently in his mind but seldom with audible voice—Joachim told us, begging our pardon, that he had decided not to leave the island after all. He would stay in his atalaya in spite of his arch-enemy, the humidity in the valley, the spiders and scorpions, and—he now felt that he could not part with the piece of family furniture; someone had found his father’s final poison inside it. Would we be angry at him? Now that we had seen the commode for ourselves, surely we could understand his misgivings about letting go of it.

  “Seen for ourselves?” asked Beatrice. “But we haven’t seen your chest yet, Herr von Martersteig. We haven’t been in all your rooms.” It certainly wasn’t in our bedroom.

  “Oh Madame, you are too kind. ‘How nice’—isn’t that what you said when you saw the niche in the entryway, just as we came in? The secret compartment is where my father kept my destiny, the powder he used to bring his brilliant career to an end and to force me into mine. No, I cannot part with that piece as long as my work remains unfinished.”

  We left the house early the next morning. A few meters above Martersteig’s little castle, the road made a dangerous curve where drivers sometimes lost control and ended up in the Captain’s front yard. This, too, he seemed prepared to live with for the foreseeable future. Our host stood at the top of the curve like a traffic cop and waved down a truck that was on its way to Palma via Valldemosa.

  Our leave-taking was polite. In a single night we had come so close that each party now felt the need to say goodbye as quickly as possible. As we entered the dangerous curve in the road, we saw the castellan’s monocle drop to his anemic hand, and then we could see only dust, chickens, jars of oil. We closed our eyes.

  The Captain stayed behind. Now he was 1000 meters back, 1001, 1002, it went quickly. The distance grew between us and the chest with its secret drawer that was to contain my meditative poems. The commode had such small dimensions that not even the art of perspective could make it appear any smaller. As far as my own valuables were concerned, a single poem, folded like the little packet containing a dose of poison, might fit inside the secret cubbyhole. Beatrice might have found room in it for a silk kerchief, a single gossamer item of underwear, her good-luck sturgeon scales, a few trinkets. One of the Captain’s polar-bear slippers was larger than the inlaid drawer with the lock forged by the Nürnberg master Hans Ehemann.

  The day before, during our walk through the town of Deyá, we paid a visit to the Japanese painter Three Little Clouds. I chatted with him about the qualities of light on the island (not those in Deyá), admired his delicate, elfin French girlfriend as much as his diaphanous drawings, and poked around a bit in his studio, very much under the impression of his and his artist companion’s similar coiffure: they both wore their hair in bangs, as if they were made for each other. Three Clouds wanted to sketch Beatrice’s portrait, and Aimée asked if she could paint my likeness on ivory on the following day. But then came the night with its cup of poison, and so we departed in an ancient Ford, bouncing and shaking amid poultry, rabbits, black piglets and tomatoes. The only work of art we took with us was our lilliput dream commode, en pensée.

  We didn’t see the Captain for years afterward. That is to say, if we met on the street or at the anarchist’s rooming house, we looked right through each other. When the wound caused by the monkey business with the armoire finally healed, and we could have made friends again—although we never really became enemies, our neo-Clausewitz experienced a new shock. Robert Graves had learned of our visit for chest inspection, and thus he found out something that was not to be found in Baedeker: that a man named Vigoleis did typing work for pay. So instead of The Monkey Army by Joachim von Martersteig, I made a clear typescript, from squiggly handwriting, of I, Claudius—a work of the enemy.

  Thus we gradually lost sight of our crash-landed friend. But as soon as Germany awoke to the first state-sponsored scansion of the refrain “Germany awake, Judah perish!” and things became very serious for Judah, our Joachim reappeared, and we shook hands in the face of a more powerful enemy, one that was flexing its sinews to leap at us here in our island redoubt. All three of us now castigated the Reich, lamenting how this frightful disgrace was sweeping over everything we held dear—for otherwise, why didn’t the spectacle just leave us cold like some massacre among the Botokudes? We felt we must completely swear off this dishonored fatherland, not only with our hearts, but in our deeds. Beatrice and I kept to this oath, right down to the last Brown Shirt menace. After just a few weeks the Captain was tripped up by a mug of German beer and two German sausages. But the details of this baronial Martersteigian monkey-business will have to wait for a later chapter. Let us close the current one with Vigoleis and Beatrice, who are now lying next to each other on their mattress at the Clock Tower. Their eyes are directed upward to the webbing containing their bodily and spiritual bric-a-brac. But their minds are still mired at rock-bottom, near the keel of their ship of life, where the bilgewater collects. Only rats can live there; never, or almost never, a human being.

  VI

  It never rains but it pours. On the night when the Captain conjured up his father’s chalice of poison; when an item of ancestral Martersteig furniture shrank from a respectable hardwood commode to the miniature dimensions of a jewel box, the kind that gets placed on top of a respectable commode; when we slept in a genuine bed for the first time in ages, but without ever getting to sleep—on that night, all the stars rose in the heavens and the moon did its utmost
to save the lord of the atalaya the price of a candle.

  On the following night we exercised our settlers’ rights at the whorehouse, and in the adjoining booths certain fellows feathered their own nests with exemplary gusto.

  Around noontime the sky became overcast. The old crone predicted rain, and you didn’t need a century’s worth of meteorological experience to agree with her. But as evening arrived, the wind from the Teix blew apart the clusters of clouds, and since we had no crops of any kind to harvest anyway, we ignored whatever the heavens had in mind, went to bed, and slept.

  One second later—one hour later?—we were awakened by a cannon shot. Great Scott, has Arsenio now decided to roll out Big Bertha? Isn’t he satisfied with his U-boat? The report echoed loud and long. A storm hovered over the city. Bolts of lightning illuminated the cathedral vaults, our walls started shaking under some higher power, and all of the stuff above our heads began to oscillate. Now whistling, now with a hollow roar, the storm sped through our books and writings—how we wished we owned a wooden chest for preserving them smooth and clean! As puny and miserable as a human being may feel when the elements decide to break into an uproar, one of those oaken commodes that my grandmother had back at the Scheifes homestead could have given us significant moral support during this riot of inorganic and organic nature. From all of the occupied cells we heard not the great kettledrum of lust, no raunchy Kate groaning for “more!” No almocrebe clicking his tongue. Instead, there were entreaties to the Mother of God, begging her to lend succor against lightning and conflagration. Yet the name most often invoked was that of Saint Barbara, that glorious lady who is listed among the Fourteen Intercessors ever since she performed a miracle ages ago to save the life of a certain Hendrikus Stock in the town of Gorkum in Holland. This is something the local hookers were of course not aware of, but I was informed in no uncertain terms that their Saint Barbara could do more to ward off lightning and fire than the Mother of God Herself.