Pedro from the House of Verdugo is tall, a born dancer. He has beautiful hands that move in enchanting ways. He has a pleasant singing voice, and prefers the old songs of his island. His lungs are messed up, his stomach likewise, and his heart is enlarged. He is an accomplished actor—not on the stage, where he would no doubt be a failure, but in real life, where this art earns more, especially in Spain, where the theaters are bad because they pretend to be good. At the time when we made Pedro’s acquaintance, he had not yet made a final decision about his career, and no one was pressuring him about this. He had certain ambitions as a writer, but even stronger inclinations to become an artist with pencil and brush. But first he had to do his military service. I have never been a soldier, but I know that an army recruit is worth less than a head of cattle. Beastliness has stuck to mankind ever since we emerged from the primeval slime, and that’s why nearly all of us go right along whenever we get the call to don a snappy uniform. Anyone who refuses is put up against the wall. As soon as someone puts on a uniform, he ceases to be what he is. Pedro from the House of Verdugo—let this be said to his credit—tried to preserve his human dignity even as a soldier, and at the time in question this was still more or less feasible. He accomplished this when it came time to get dressed. Arriving at the quartermaster’s store, he fished out a jacket with the arms too long and the collar too wide, a pair of trousers whose hindpart reached to the back of his knees, a belt that he had to wind twice around his waist before he could find the proper hole. His headgear would have been too large even for his heraldic progenitor.
Beatrice met him when he was garbed in this fashion, and she claimed that he was daffy. I got to know him in the same Landsknecht outfit, and as soon as I grasped his hand, I knew: this is a man after my own heart. As a citizen of Switzerland, Beatrice had no idea what it meant to be a soldier. The handful of guys who, to the annoyance of their neighbors, pop off musket shots every Sunday in their cantons while smoking their stogies or between hands of cards, and who in a war emergency can plant a land mine or do some border patrol while remaining free citizens of the Swiss Federation—these types have no say in the matter, although they would like to think they do. Whenever they get tired of the charade, they toss their gear at the feet of the Division Commander, and are never put in front of a firing squad. Pedro himself could have a say in the matter, whereas in Germany—and I believe Captain von Martersteig’s every word—such behavior would land a soldier in front of a military tribunal for sabotage of patriotic duty. “What a disgusting sight, these monkeys in the Spanish Army!” Pedro was not the only one who kept his dignity by flouting regulations. Martersteig: “For each missing button, solitary! For pants that slip down, the brig! How can they ever expect to advance in formation toward the enemy when they have to hold their pants up? And what can be done with an army where the generals put up umbrellas as soon as it starts to drizzle?” Napoleon, I replied, did this, too, and still he won battles. At Waterloo he just didn’t have a parapluie close to hand, and things went badly for him. I have seen many Spanish generals, but I’ve never seen one with an open umbrella. If I had, I would have embraced him. I felt vindicated when I once ran across an illustrated article in a Portuguese newspaper: a review of the national troops in pouring rain. The entire General Staff was sitting on kitchen chairs under open umbrellas. And these officers didn’t even have their batmen hold their umbrellas for them; no, the latter were back home taking care of the kids. My heart is touched at the sight of so much humanity in an inhumane profession. The Negus of Abyssinia carries his umbrella with imperial majesty. But maybe that thing is considered part of the royal insignia.
Just a brief moment more concerning the defense of the badly shrunken Spanish Empire: Pedro’s grandfather, Don Jaime Montaner y Vega Verdugo etc, was an admiral who earned his stripes in the otherwise rather ignominious Cochin China campaign. When still in the bloom of his youth, he was in the thick of things when the Spaniards tried to wrest Ceuta from the Riff pirates. From then on, he added one piping after another to his uniform; one gilded star tinkled next the other, so that the sea-warrior’s aged breast was overflowing at the gunwales when I finally met him in person in his palace. I was awestruck by this Balearic Nelson; his jacket fairly glistened with molded hardware. And such a confession is no doubt surprising coming from me, since I am much more often prone to ridiculing any and all manifestations of secular and ecclesiastical masquerade. Shall I give you an example that speaks volumes? Here it is:
I was to make a formal visit to my episcopal uncle in Münster, whom I had never met. I only knew his aged servant, a fellow named Jean, just like his employer. The two of them were bosom friends, since the elder Jean had once served as a coachman for the bishop’s father. For this reason, the servant felt completely free to drag the high priest down from the pulpit if, upon checking his pocket watch, he determined that the boy’s sermon was lasting too long, and that he would have to reheat the coffee in the sacristy. This impressed me: my uncle paled in significance when compared with his loyal menial. It is true that Uncle Jean’s prestige rose mightily in our family after he was named to the office of diocesan shepherd. Up to then, the issues of the “Steyl Missionary Messenger” and the “City of God” had displayed to one and all my parental household’s piety and modest literary taste. But now such things became of secondary importance. The Titular Bishop of Cestrus overwhelmed the popular Catholic press with his staff and his miter.
I was a non-believer in the sense of Berdiaev’s “non-tragic theology,” which rejects all forms of supplication. It was thus my intention to appear before my uncle as an “enlightened” citizen, as a person in my own right, as a young relative of his from the provinces, presenting myself to him as a fellow human being, as someone who recognized his own servant as a person to whom he was in the habit of bowing down. I knew that you were supposed to kiss a bishop’s ring—Mother really didn’t need to insist that I follow this custom. Yet I also knew that I didn’t care the gratings of a (to me, as yet unfamiliar) green cheese about such medieval malarkey—although I kept this knowledge from Mother. Thus fortified, I entered No. 30 Cathedral Square in Münster with my head full of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and similar weaponry, expecting to press the flesh with my relative: “Hello, Uncle. Here I am, Johanna’s son from Süchteln. How are you? Greetings from Dad and Mom. If you’d like to come visit us, you can say Mass in the hospital across the street, if Jean will let you. After Mass the nuns will give you some coffee in the rector’s office…” But at the door of No. 30 the lady told me, “His Excellency is not in. Come back tomorrow around eleven, that’ll be fine. And who should I say has come calling?”
Punctually at the appointed hour I betook myself to the small palace. A large crowd had gathered at the entrance—but surely not because of me? Or was Uncle Jean, following instructions from my Mother, going to perform a public conversion, with a procession and a Te Deum to follow? Unfazed, I strode through the waiting crowd and the portal into the palace garden. As I entered the vestibule I was intercepted by a young curate, who said that no matter who I was, I had arrived at the wrong time. His Excellency was about to say his first Mass in the Cathedral—would I be so kind as to… And then I heard voices and footsteps and the swishing of vestments. His Excellency the Auxiliary Bishop was descending the broad staircase in full panoply, surrounded by hands busy with adjusting this and that detail in his raiment and ornaments. The garments of Church dignitaries are just as seductive as those of a femme du monde. The unexpected sight of this pageantry caused me, in spite of the safety pins being attached to him as he strode forth in all his dignity, to lose my composure to the extent that I no longer saw in front of me my Uncle Jean but a Prince of the Church. On a sudden impulse, I stepped up to him. No sooner had he reached the bottom step when I cast myself down on my knees before him, grasped his hand and attempted to kiss his fisherman’s ring. The Bishop remained my Uncle. My gesture hadn’t surprised him in the least. He covered the ring wi
th his other hand, drew me out from the circle of his vassals, and said, “That’s what Johanna told you to do. But with me you don’t have to. We’ll do it all differently. Come around tonight at seven. You see that I’m in a hurry. Look, they’re still trying to get me dressed on the stairway.” “Propinquus meus,” he said to a foreign-looking monk. It sounded like an apology. And then my theatrical relative disappeared.
I’ve never forgotten that gesture with the ring. Needless to say, by making it, the bishop had won the heart and the trust of an infidel, although he had not won a disciple.
Uniforms and vestments are as dangerous as the war paint on primitive tribesmen. One must be very strong to resist them. Have I been any more successful at this than the missionary who, at the sight of a gang of painted Africans, was overcome with doubt concerning his sacred assignment? Like this man, I soon regained my confidence. Neither of us got eaten up, but we both had succumbed in our own fashion. Full-dress uniform is part of everyday business, even pious business. The Protestant Church is losing its hold on the faithful. I can’t help thinking that if the big-time non-Catholic professors and spokesmen of God’s Word were to put on a little warpaint, if they would don some colorful garb, swing a censer now and then, and talk in a foreign language, their cause would soon reap its proper benefits. They wouldn’t have to carry things so far as to fear being mistaken for dolled-up matrons, as once happened to the Patriarch of Lisbon on the island of Madeira. But a little more color wouldn’t do any harm. What I mean is that it wouldn’t harm their church, because for a long time none of this has had anything to do with God. God is under church arrest, and to the Protestant theologians He has no greater significance than what Nietzsche said books meant to most people: mere literature. And that is as it should be. In the Catholic Church, on the other hand, the same primeval myth is still as alive as the one that prompted the first African to put a ring in his nose. In our own day and age, as we witness the beginnings of an “a-perspective” era, such things can still produce daily miracles. But my friend Don Juan Gebser, the inventor of the era I am speaking about, knows much more about these things than Vigoleis.
So now I have introduced Pedro Sureda to my reader, establishing connections that stretch across the centuries. Heads had to roll, veils had to get lifted, a king’s name had to be conjured up to facilitate the description of a face, an admiral had to be resurrected from the dead and asked to jangle his decorations, and a heretic had to grovel in the dust before an elaborately caparisoned Servant of God. If I had depicted these things strictly according to nature, we would now be further on—that is to say, I would have used fewer words. But I deliberately dispense with such methods, for I lack command of the writing art. It is difficult to paint the portrait of a person in words in such a way that, if an artist were to illustrate the work, the original character would remain genuine. I once amused myself by comparing the illustrations in the earliest editions of Don Quixote, created before the visual appearance of the Knight of the Mournful Countenance as we know it had developed. Even today, it costs me some effort to imagine the features of my Don Quixote while only reading the text. The later goateed depictions of Cervantes’ protagonist repeatedly get in my way. It’s the same thing with Christ. It’s well-nigh impossible to extricate the genuine article from behind the fossilized Beautiful Man with the Jesus Beard.
As you can see, Vigoleis has no lack of connections on the island. Battle commanders on land and sea have handed him their letters of credential; he is recognized and registered in the best whorehouses in the city; a Catholic bishop’s official letter has recommended this young man’s scholarly ambitions to a bosom friend of Pedro’s Papá, the Archepiscopal Bishop of Mallorca, and the latter has applied his official seal and signed it in his fine, somewhat trembling hand: Joseph, Archiepiscopus, Episcopus Maioricensis. And by an odd coincidence, it turns out that the exhibitionistic young ladies on our patio are related to Pedro.
“You know these señoritas?”
“On this island everybody knows everybody, although sometimes it’s best to pretend that you don’t. What’s more, we are all related. But between me and the Aguados there’s a double remove.”
And yet it remains a lamentable fact that Vigoleis has been unable to transform all these high-sounding, anointed, palace- and bordello-born connections into cold cash. Not from connections that point to Heaven, not from connections that point to Hell. Even the connections that point nowhere at all haven’t yielded up a single peseta. If you want to find ore, you have to dig shafts in the earth. Vigoleis’ shafts are leading nowhere, just as always.
“Don’t you have any furniture at all?” asked Pedro, who as a pupil of Beatrice’s had arrived for his maiden lesson, and finally to get a look at the man who couldn’t afford the chair that his nature dictated he should be squatting on.
Beatrice had told him about our fateful odyssey. If two people sit opposite each other three times a week for an hour at a time, teaching and getting taught, then certain things will emerge in conversation that can allow an alert learner to reconstruct and ponder pretty nearly the whole saga: the whorish comedy with Pilar, the feral Julietta, the ingenious Zwingli, the “Clock Tower,” the army of monkeys and the poison chest, the twofold refusal of a wardrobe. And the pupil, with his artist’s eyes, will of course gaze at Vigoleis and, if he has a promising visage, will take up his pencil and sketch the schlemiel with a few deft strokes.
Our first conversations took place in a mishmash of Spanish, English, and French. The formal and familiar forms of address were glossed over, or got so mixed up that we chose to use the more intimate pronoun henceforth. The British are so lucky. From cradle to grave they use “you,” and the hapless translators into “du” languages are forced to intuit the moment when things get cozier between the interlocutors.
I don’t know which is worse: not to have a shadow, or not to have a face. Nobody can steal my shadow. I cast it ahead of me as I move along, I cast it behind me, and most often it swallows me up. It is always there. But my face? On a certain occasion the ownership of it was challenged. By Pedro, of course, who walked around with the face of his deposed King. The artist in him gave rise to the confusion.
Unlike Madame Perronet and her lady friend in Amsterdam, Pedro didn’t dress me up in a Dutch naval officer’s uniform and picture me as I set my deceitful course through the Straits of Macassar. Instead, the artist Pedro, the son of a king, detected noble blood in my veins, despite the fact that my nose is not at all aristocratic. So he focused on my chin—poor Vigoleis, will there never be an end to this? Who besides Beatrice had ever reached out for my chin? And he said,
“Your nose is not of the worthy type (castizo). But your chin, and your marvelously curved lips! Welcome to our island, you Bamberg Knight of ancient German lineage!”
I was a marked man. Pedro held the stirrup for me, I leapt into the saddle and sat there, a hero rattling my saber, gazing off to distant horizons. Vigoleis Imperator. Vigoleis Magnus Dux. Vigoleis Dominus et Rex. But Vigoleis still didn’t own a chair, not to mention a loyal vassal who could assist him in toppling Pilar from the pillar of her innocence and snatching a wardrobe and bedclothes from her apartment.
“So you don’t have any furniture? Not even a couple of chairs? Hold it there, Vigo, just a second, don’t move, your head is just right…”
Pedro went on sketching. Presumably he had now espied a facet of my Bamberg countenance that revealed a soupçon of Hohenstaufen arrogance, rather than some bastardized distortion that would ruin this whole artistic enterprise.
“We don’t have many chairs in our house, either. One chair for the three of us. That’s why we’re all so much on the move. But in Valldemosa, in our feudo, Papá has hundreds of chairs. Valldemosa is a village up in the mountains, and that’s where our castle is, the one we had to vacate—debts, lousy management, women. Papá, you have to know, is hornier than a billygoat in springtime when the leaves start sprouting. I can’t wait to introduce yo
u.”
“A hundred chairs? Just like that?”
“Yes. Papá saved them when the Sureda fortune crashed. There isn’t one of them that hasn’t been sat on by some famous personage or other. There are tags on all of them, with names and dates. Miguel de Unamuno, Rubén Dario, Alphonse XIII El Rey, Chopin, Luis Salvador, the Duke of Austria, George Sand. Ever read any of her books?”
“Not one line. I only know that Nietzsche called her a horrible scribbling cow, and that she wrote a book on Mallorca that everybody here seems to be reading. In the German bookshop she represents world literature.”
Pedro went on sketching. We chatted on, but then I had to shut my mouth because the contour of my Bambergian upper lip, shaped after Cupid’s bow, was giving the artist some difficulty as it kept moving up and down. Beatrice went back to reading her detective novel, unperturbed by our conversation and my Habsburg bloodline, which years later in Portugal was to blossom forth in unexpected glory.
Pedro tore the sheet from his drawing pad and stuck it on our cactus plant. In Poetry and Truth Goethe relates that owing to a midwife’s blunder he was considered stillborn, and that it was only as a result of strenuous efforts that he actually saw the light of the world. What got reborn here on Pedro’s sheet of paper—as dubious as a Doppelgänger, a hybrid of Goya’s ghost and some medieval German masterpiece—was simply not viable.
The constellation was not propitious. Beatrice turned away in disgust and left the delivery room. Woe to him who portrays her Vigoleis as uglier still than Mother Nature saw fit to create him! The artist, offended, asks me for my opinion. I have often sat for artists. It is always a difficult moment when they ask this question, or when they glance back and forth between the canvas and the model. I gave Pedro my honest opinion, right to his Bourbon face. If, I said, I wrote as badly as he sketched, I would throw myself down in front of a trolley car. Pedro turned sour. He was proud of his Bamberg Knight, and as an excuse he said that he was only just a beginner. His brother Jacobo was making much better progress, and his mother, the amateur princess…
The Island of Second Sight Page 50