The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Our living room, pantry, kitchen, and bedroom were situated one adjoining the other, and as I have explained, the windows and the large French door of the sala looked out upon the yard. Nobody could peer into our kitchen or bedroom, and there we had wooden shutters for blocking out a blinding sun or curious onlookers. Things were worse, though, in our living room, which was at the same level as an outside patio. We couldn’t reach the patio from our floor, since it was separated from us by a light-shaft that was like a castle moat. And besides, the patio was not included in the rent. In addition, we were separated from the world of the proprietary class by an iron fence. Our view was usually blocked by laundry hanging on a line. In the South one does the laundry every day, with cold water and on a stone. So there was a constant fluttering in the breeze, large bedsheets and the little things that lie closest to the body. I was soon able to assess the cup sizes of Mother and her daughters, and also of the maids, besides which I learned the schedule of their lunar phases and eclipses. It was embarrassing when we invited company and saw these pages from the domestic calendar hanging on the line outside. At first, Beatrice was upset at this spectacle. I didn’t mind it so much. I didn’t exactly think it was beautiful, but was my clothesline-full of poems back at the bordello any more stylish?

  What was truly disturbing was the source of this open-air exhibition, the daughters of the house who emerged onto the patio several times a day. Without fail, they sent their curious glances into our room, and were always amazed to see nothing but boxes of books and our Christmas cactus, which, by the way, was starting to sprout. What—hadn’t “they” moved in yet? Have “they” just thrown down their stuff here while they live somewhere else? Foreigners act strangely on Mallorca—everybody knew that, and everybody disapproved. One day one of the señoritas screwed up her courage, spied me out, and asked me straightaway, “Are you here yet?” I was standing at the fence, gazing at the exotic display. In the bourgeois way that I have with little matters that are of no concern to Vigoleis, I began to fib, thereby committing the sour sin of cowardice: I fed her the same story that I had already handed out to Arsenio, about our furniture that was waiting to be processed at the customs office. To be on the safe side, I transplanted the whole saga of forms, declarations, value estimates, oath-takings, and deposits to the city of Barcelona, for it was possible that this little lady’s Papá knew the Customs Director very well. One false word, and all our stuff would be out on the General’s Street before sundown. When chance and coincidence have repeatedly tripped you up in your lifetime and caused your prospects to shrivel away, you get over-cautious—and end up in the soup worse than ever. “Barcelona?” our neighbor’s daughter asked. “Papá knows the director of the Main Customs Office. You should talk with Papá, all he’d have to do is say the word, and all your stuff would get sent over on the next ship. It must be terrible to live without any furniture! I mean, you can’t even…”

  Which saint should I have implored for aid against this kind of proffered assistance? I wasn’t aware of a single one that specialized in such complex matters. And Beatrice, who invoked Saint Anthony for any and all problems, wasn’t within earshot. So I kept on lying. I thanked the girl for her kind offer, and told her that our most recent communication from Customs gave promise of the release of our belongings in short order. It was only our Bechstein piano that would be kept under bond, since we owed 3000 pesetas in duty.

  “3000 pesetas?”

  “3000, as I say. And at the moment we haven’t got that much.”

  After this conversation took place, we bought some drapes as a protection against the prying glances of the considerate daughters. I hate drapes. They remind me constantly of how cramped this world of ours is, and that I am too poor to keep it at a distance. I would give anything to have a private study on the top floor of a skyscraper. And please: no drapes at the windows—get away from me with your gypsy-wagon puffery! My life is one uninterrupted battle against the potato and bolts of chiffon, both of them symbols of an Icarus who can’t even fly high enough for the wax on his wings to melt.

  In the Count’s pensión, Madame Gerstenberg hosted a farewell dinner. She could no longer endure life on the island. She was suffering from insular anxiety, an affliction that had escalated into insular rage, a dreadful illness that later would befall Beatrice, too. There are only two types of cure: leave the island, precipitously if need be, or bang your head against a wall. Our dowager tragedian chose the deck planks of the Ciudad de Alicante, and departed with her son to Alicante, from whence they had once arrived. It had simply become unbearable to her to be separated from the world by an ocean. She felt as if she had been locked in a pillory. I tried to reassure her with the sophistical remark that one can never be quite sure at what point a continent begins, geographically speaking, to get demoted to an island; science just hadn’t progressed far enough to set standards on this subject. And then I unloaded on her my monetary theory: an island was actually no more unbearable than any arbitrary point on so-called terra firma. All that was necessary was sufficient wealth to afford a motorboat or an airplane, like the banker Don Juan March. Why, that man could enjoy a more serene existence on some coral reef than Adele Gerstenberg could experience in Alicante.

  Instead of replying, Madame Gerstenberg just gave me a look with her yellowish face, causing me to fall mute and feel like a simpleton. Captain von Martersteig, the only true Icarus in our local flying circus, had not come to the festivities, although he was still in town. Doubled up with gout and heroism, he sat alone in a bedbug-infested apartment, and to make matters worse, agonized over an open letter of ultimatum to President Hindenburg: either the calcified old Field Marshal must raise his pension as a war invalid, or—but no one ever found out what dire consequences lay in store for the Reich President if he should refrain from appending his martial signature to an edict of augmentation. The reason is that Adolf Hitler made short work of this particular little paper tiger. He bought our old air warrior’s loyalty for the price of a glass of beer, two Frankfurt sausages, and a dollop of mustard.

  I exchanged a few letters with Madame Gerstenberg, but then the intervals increased to the point where both of us stopped writing to each other. Friedrich died of tuberculosis, and half a year later his mother followed him to the Realm of the Shades. Terra firma, it turns out, was even more confining than the island. Both of them lie buried in the Alicante Cemetery. The Captain, on his part, will inter himself for a few more years in his ghostly palace in Deyá. There he will live on as if in a cremated state, nursing his pique in a dank and barren cell. Not even his arch-enemy von Ranke Graves will be able to scare him away. His pension will once again be reduced by a few marks—and that says everything. But now let’s leave him alone to gather mold; soon enough the Führer will appear on the scene and yell out to the whole world, “Germany, awake!” This clarion call will in fact awaken our Captain, and he will reappear in these pages with his monocle, his fur-lined Turkish slippers, his Pour le Mérite, his bottles of poison, and his winged words about the gratings of a green cheese.

  Anton Emmerich will now gradually disappear from our view. He has big plans, and hankers to get out into the world. He is not suffering from insulitis, but he simply has had enough of this grubby island Paradise. He offers us his shop for a song—Zwingli’s debts to him came to a much larger sum. But since we couldn’t even cough up a song, since in fact we were poorer than the people in the folk ditty, “Please give us a penny—Sorry, haven’t any!”… In brief, this crafty potato-pancake German patriot departed from the island after selling his business to a new arrival from the homeland. This gentleman came from the banking business, had a few shekels, and was remarkably short in stature. Behind the counter he looked as if he were standing in a trap door. And a trap door was to be his insular destiny.

  Now that we’ve swept away our friend from Cologne, I have room for more characters.

  If my extrapolations are correct, I have already used up more than half of
this book to depict the consequences of our shipwreck—which, strictly speaking, was not a shipwreck at all, since we lost our footing as soon as we stepped on the island. Our existence became grounded only after we moved into No. 23 on the Street of the Hero Against Piracy, which then led to a fierce struggle for our daily bread. This struggle lasted years, and ended with complete victory: we finally bought a bathtub. This was possible only on the basis of several uneaten meals and several unpurchased books. For me, the bathtub meant much more than a vessel for cleansing the body. Seated within its walls, I experience the Archimedian Principle in its spiritual manifestation. Beatrice, as jaundiced as our friend the dowager tragedian, has cursed the island more than a thousand times, and more than a thousand times I have implored her: “Do not curse the island, curse me, your Vigoleis; curse Vigoleis, who is not just an avatar of myself, but rather my self’s court jester, even if I’m not wearing a fool’s collar and a cockscomb. Take him as the symbol of an attitude that is sufficient unto itself, and therefore sufficient for self-induced implosion. Sure enough, I probably continued, the Spaniards have a lot to learn. They aren’t housebroken. If you don’t have a spittoon handy, they spit on the floor, and they mess up your apartment with cigarette ashes. A house and a public street are all the same to them. But is it all that bad? I clean up after them every time. Like the circus clown who runs behind the elephants with dust pan and broom, I follow our Spanish house guests around all the time. And frankly, I get a fright every time the doorbell rings and you open up to welcome not some dear friend of either sex, but a company of spitters, ash-droppers and butt-tossers. Why, to look at you at such moments, you’d think that these guests of ours were about to lift their legs and have a go at our deluxe Bible-paper edition of The Great Philosophers.”

  “Oh, this accursed island of Balearic polluters!” you once said, my dear Beatrice. And I could only repeat: “Oh, this polluting scoundrel of a Vigoleis! Why doesn’t he finally write a poem that will buy us a doormat, a spittoon, and an ashtray? Just you wait, ma chérie, you’ll see how life can get transformed when a guest of ours gets up out of his chair, walks over to the corner, and with an audible splash and visible gratification spits his load into a gracefully tapered vessel. Sometimes he might aim wrong and return to his seat with a shrug of his shoulders. In such cases I will get out the broom, and we should be grateful if about 30% of all shots hit the bullseye. Day and night, my dear, I wrack my brain to figure out how to invent something truly great that will earn us 1000 pesetas—in writing: One Thousand! Just imagine if I ever succeed in working out the formula for my fluorescent printer’s ink. Henceforth, mankind would be able to read in the dark. It would mean an end to bedtime squabbles when one of the partners wants to read and the other wants to go to sleep. But nobody is willing to recognize my genius, not even you—and that is a bitter pill to swallow.”

  Let the reader be aware that I have just recorded thought-patterns and snatches of conversation that move far ahead of actual events. For up to the present moment, no Spaniard has ever had an opportunity to spit on the ladrillos on our apartment floor that we polished so assiduously with our shirts and pants. Besides, entre nous (although I could announce this in public, since Beatrice has known all about it for a quarter of a century): what I wouldn’t give to have been born with such intrinsic greatness as to permit me to spit on anybody else’s apartment floor, to eat with my knife even when nobody is looking, and to walk into my house without scraping the mud from my soles! Why hasn’t Vigoleis achieved anything in life? Because he doesn’t spit, that’s why. Because he behaves himself. Because he insists on wearing buckled slippers even in his miserable garret at 3E Helmersstraat, Amsterdam. I am singing the praises of public spitting, and I am fortunate enough to have found a publisher for these jottings who is a full-throated master of this art. It’s hard to say what the result will be. After all, it’s a little late. And a little early for an unknown writer to come forth all of a sudden with a heap of jottings.

  Well, here’s Nietzsche on this subject: anyone has a right to produce an autobiography after his fortieth year, because even the least among us can have had close-up experience of something that is of rewarding interest to a thinker. During the period in question, I experienced my Vigoleis in extreme close-up. And if you, dear reader, are the thinking type, then we are on just the right path and I can continue my wandering. Therefore, let us consider it a compliment if I allow Pedro Sureda the privilege of being the first Spanish hidalgo to spit in our piso. This is, as Beatrice has just remarked as she spies over my shoulder at my manuscript, not historically accurate, because Pedro himself came from an un-Spanish household. I think it would be a shame if Pedro were not a born spitter, and so I’ll make him into one right here. History, let me repeat, is not a waxworks museum where every birthmark gets pasted on where it belongs. Herodotus is guilty of much worse historical transgressions. And just think of all the things the authors of the Old Testament make Yahweh do, not to mention Christian Morgenstern with his Palmström! What, my friend Sureda was never a spitter? Why shouldn’t the world that matters to us be a fictional one? Doesn’t your friend Nietzsche say so?

  If you have ever seen portraits of Alphonse XIII, the last King of Spain, then I needn’t go into specifics about Pedro’s appearance. He was the (forgive me!) spitting image of the great Bourbon. His mien was more intelligent, and he lacked the effeminate arching of the brow. His glance was livelier than that of his King, and his nose was pinched slightly to one side. But otherwise he was the very likeness, the mildly distorted mirror image, of the monarch. This often led to misidentifications that Pedro handled with regal aplomb, and the resemblance led also to gossip. For how can somebody have a king’s face, when he ain’t no king? It would be nice for the island of my second sight if Pedro stood in the same relationship to the King of Spain as Julietta did to the General from Fort Mahón. From a sociological perspective, this would expand considerably the circle of my intimate relationships, and today I could only regret the fact that I never embraced the coalman Siete Reales simply for lack of a romantic opportunity—Vigoleis enjoying converse with charcoal merchants and royal offspring in the lofty regions of the island. It just wasn’t to be. Not with the man in black, because of the dust, and not with Pedro—no disrespect for the King intended—because as we know, kings aiming to freshen up their bloodline are wont to use the servants’ stairway, whereas Pedro’s mother was in her own right the progeny of ducal nobility. “But that’s no argument!” say the genealogists, people who are habituated to grafting branches onto family trees at will. True enough, but this particular Spanish princess is still among us, living out her waning years on her island.

  On his mother’s side, Pedro hails from ancient Iberian nobility. His family flourished on the banks of the Tajo under Carlos V, and later under Philip II, the one with the name that is so abhorrent to the Dutch. Even if we discount such questionable royal connections, Pedro’s lineage on the paternal side points back to the Spanish mainland. The ancestors of the Suredas arrived on the island with James the Conqueror in the year 1229, the year that is sacred to all Mallorquins. After a long siege, on the 31st of December of that same year, the Christian king delivered Palma from the hands of the Moorish dogs. Pedro’s ur-grandfather was on hand for this. Clothed in a coat of mail he raged furiously among the heathen hordes, for he had a specific grudge against the moros: to this day the family bears the name “Verdugo,” which means executioner, hangman, or beheader—to memorialize the bloody deed that kept the clan in fealty to the Spanish Crown.

  I’ll relate the story in a variant that comes closest to satisfying my penchant for gothic sagas. In Don Paco Quintana’s version, fewer heads roll, but otherwise every detail is exactly the same. It’s the thirteenth century. The castle of the Suredas is undergoing siege, and we hear the battle cry, “Death to the Castilians!” Battering rams wham up against doors, gates split apart, black devils clamber up the ramparts, a massacre commences. The lord of
the castle falls under the swipe of a scimitar. The noble lady and her children, the sole survivors of the blood bath, are brought before the Sheik. The latter pronounces his decision: “Death to the Castilian infidels!” —But with this proviso: if the mother will behead her children with her own hands, one hijo varón will have his life spared. The lady agrees, but it is not she who decides which of the children is to survive the infanticide. She places her children around her in a circle, lets herself be blindfolded, picks up a sword, and whirls around several times, swinging the weapon like the hand on a clock. When she stops twirling, the blade points to a varón, a boy, the one selected to continue the noble line. She kills all the rest, and then herself.

  I have often recounted this ancestral saga, and have yet to meet a mother who says that under similar circumstances she would act the same. To kill for love—is that so difficult? Or does a mother’s love not extend beyond the grave? Death is a good thing only when the masses say it is.