The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  A couple of tourists have now started a fight over a pair of bathing trunks. Two elderly ladies go off hunting their automobile; they wish to leave this very minute. But their driver can’t understand what they are saying, for one thing because he doesn’t speak German, for another because he’s fast asleep. Only von Kammerwitzputt’s General Staff, men who are, after all, inured to ambushes, melées, and naked violence, continue drinking beer and mixing the ingredients for their creation of the new German Reich. Lieutenant von der Hölle is on a one-man reconnaissance mission with binoculars. He has a fabulous broad in his crosshairs—marvelous superstructure. Back on board ship there might be a chance for some close combat.

  The owner of the shore restaurant reports the theft of napkins and tablecloths—purloined no doubt in the interest of chastity. The tour director makes note of every detail; the company will make full restitution.

  The two hours are up. Time to leave. No one pays a bit of attention. They’re too busy splashing around and getting sunburns. The car horns let out cacophonous blares, but to no effect. A Guide yells out oceanward: whoever is not in the car in five minutes will be left behind, and will have to arrange return transportation at the traveler’s own expense. That does the trick. People torpedo onto the shore, pull their togs over their wet bodies, leap into the nearest car, and off they go.

  Every single car has now left for Sóller except mine. The restaurant owner had let me take a nap in his kitchen. Our driver rushes in to tell me that one of the señoritas is missing and the parents are frantic. I dash out to find them on the beach, and they start beseeching me, “Where is our daughter?” I ask for Daddy’s binoculars, and start scanning the mirror-smooth ocean. Not one young lady to be seen. “Can she swim?” I ask. “Like a fish,” says Mom, but she didn’t have her bathing suit, and without one… No daughter of theirs would ever, not in a million years! The way people had behaved here, she adds, was absolutely atrocious! I wasn’t to imagine that these savages represented Germany.

  But I’m not imagining anything at all, just looking. Our driver is getting impatient. I give him one of my duros from the Shark Cafe. He goes back to sleep. Then a blood-curdling scream from Mom’s throat. She has found a pile of clothes—the shame of it! Trudi went swimming naked! And at that moment the prodigal daughter reappears from her fugitive swim and steps out on the sand. Mom, with her broad back, tries to shield from curious glances this Birth of Venus from the Mediterranean Foam. Luckily, Lieutenant von der Hölle has departed with the General Staff and at this moment is nearing the mountain summit. As a Führer I have not only obligations but also certain privileges, and so I make sure to observe the dressing procedure—from a discreet distance. What I see convinces me that unless Mom keeps her spunky daughter on close tether, some fellow might make a very fortunate catch. I certainly don’t wish it for the execrable Lieutenant.

  Daddy, who meanwhile has tipped the driver for waiting, tells me I won’t regret having neglected my duties to the other tourists for his daughter’s sake. I am unable to think of an appropriate Führer-like reply, so I stand smartly at the side of the car, open the rear door, make a formal bow, and as I motion Trudi to enter, she gives me a mischievous smile. Now I can understand her interest in black piglets. Mom spoils the situation by insisting that this is Trudi’s first and last trip abroad. Daddy vigorously agrees. Brother and sister, soured by the whole scene, say nothing. The mood in the car is awful.

  I leave the family to their own affairs. Thanks be to Trudi and her threadless enterprise, for now I can snooze in peace until we reach “Alfabia,” where we are going to look at subtropical gardens. Oh, I muse to myself, if only Trudi had shed her clothes as soon as we left Palma Harbor! In my thoughts she writes a long, long letter to her girlfriend back home, a letter in which “awesome” is every other word. And I am flattered that she mentions me: just imagine, he knows, like, everything! And he didn’t leave me behind! But is everything he tells us, like, true? Daddy says it has to be, cuz otherwise he couldn’t keep his job for one week. People would notice if he was making things up, and some of the tourists are real experts. What’s amazing is that he’s been doing this for, like, seven years! I’d go nuts…!

  You would go nuts? Trudi, between you and me, your Führer already is nuts, but go ahead and tell your girlfriend everything else about your trip as you see it. It’s true, and if you need more material for a gushy paragraph about the landscape, just keep your eyes open. The drive up to the summit is extraordinary, and not only in Baedeker. From the top you can see the plains and the ocean far down below. Tourists often get tears in their eyes, the view is supposed to be so splendid. Supposed to be? Exactly, for I’ll be seeing it myself for the first time today. It is my maiden voyage, too.

  We stop at the summit. But the ladies and gentlemen prefer to stay put in the car. “Let’s keep going.” And so we careen down to the depths around countless hairpin turns.

  Dozens of cars are still standing in front of the country estate “Alfabia,” and this tells us that we have made up our lost time. But the distraught family won’t get out here, either. Punishment for Trudi! What will become of her? She’ll end up in a brothel! Perhaps so, but then only in the “Torre del Reloj,” on the majestic mattress.

  So we zip past the Moorish gate to the gardens. I’ve taken off my number and Führer emblem. I’m on strike, and from now on traveling incognito.

  Our leave-taking at the pier was strictly pro forma. Mom avoided me altogether; brother and sister said hasty goodbyes; Daddy kept his word and pressed a 25-peseta note in my hand. That’s how much he was willing to pay for his daughter’s exposure. He did this, incidentally, with practiced sleight of hand; the driver, who had an eye out for his own gratuity, didn’t even see it.

  Trudi was the only one who gave me a warm farewell, and in doing so elicited a poisonous glance from Mom. I was about to wend my way homeward when the girl cried out, “Oh no, my bathing suit!” “But you didn’t have any!” “Yes I did, I always do. But I didn’t want to use it, so I hid it in the car.” “Then I would advise you to hide it even better right away, otherwise Mom is going to skin you alive!”

  Vigoleis was dismissed. He went home, pulled the shades in the bedroom, and threw himself down on the pilarière, sunburned, lacerated in body and spirit, tormented, filled with disgust at the behavior of the human herd. Heine, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer had each told bitter and biting truths about the Germans. How might they have let go with all barrels if they had ever played tour guide to Germans for an entire day around the island of Mallorca? Did I say played? And yet my first experience as a Führer was in fact child’s play compared to the tours with the packs who arrived later on Strength Through Joy ships and infested the island.

  Beatrice returned exhausted but not demoralized, much less in desperation. I’ll admit, she said, that these Germans were riffraff one and all. Crowds of them are repulsive, they have no idea how to behave in a foreign country, and that scene in Porto de Sóller! No other nationality in the world would behave that way.

  “Not even the Swiss? Or will they only start behaving that way when the franc takes a nosedive?”

  For a while longer we tore into our respective so-called fatherlands. That pulled me out of the slough of humiliation. Then out of a blue sky I asked, “Tips?” and proudly smoothed out before her my 25-peseta bill. Beatrice fished around in her purse and came up with 2 reales, which equals 50 centimos. A lady had pressed the coins in her hand, while the others had preferred not to tip.

  “A German lady, of course.”

  “I’m afraid not, she was Swiss. But,” she added as a mitigating point, “from Basel.”

  “ck….dt or photo-Phischer?”

  “More or less, and filthy rich.”

  “But in Valldemosa you said that your group was so charming!”

  “The charming people are neither Germans nor Swiss. The charming ones are always whatever you aren’t, Austrians for example. Didn’t you know that?”r />
  Over the years we led tours of this kind regularly, also for other agencies, and made good money at it. But I never got rid of the disgust. Starting with the third one I had to throw up even before I hit the streets, and this happened every time. Basically, this technique of preventive purgation worked out better; it was an expression of my cowardice, for anyone else who reacted as I did might have wanted to spit in the tourists’ faces or quit on the spot. Gradually I got to know the places we visited inside and out. I not only knew the names of the paintings, but also which ones were genuine and which were forgeries, just like a professional art historian. I knew who was buried in which tomb, whether he died of old age or had been poisoned or skewered with a blade. I knew why a certain church stood here and not on some other spot.

  I learned all these data with the aid of tradition and scholarship. But still I kept on fabulizing for my clients, and my reputation grew. On one occasion, angered by the behavior of the philistine mob, I gave forth the unadorned truth—and they grumbled at me. The masses have an unerring instinct for the tawdriness of real history. As in Cologne at the “Pressa,” here too I was asked to take over for VIP visitors. Among others, I guided (and misguided) abdicated kings, archbishops, chairmen of the board, generals, prominent whores, millionaires, and world-famous artists. I didn’t get rich doing it; I don’t even possess a single autograph. After that first tour nobody dared to offer me a tip, and that disturbed me. Guides who clung to the stupid truth pulled in huge harvests of tips—a psychological injustice if there ever was one.

  The 100-peseta note I once received from a business magnate was not meant as a tip, but as hush money. It was none other than the owner of the passenger line for which I was inventing all the pertinent history not to be found in Baedeker. He was traveling with his own wife, his own daughter, and his own ship. I was assigned to him as a personal guide—that’s just how important a man he was. He would be taking the same tour as everybody else, but our agency boss insisted that he was under no circumstances to be allowed near the common tourists. He hated that sort of thing. He wanted to be undisturbed, but I would have to explain things as usual.

  The Chief Executive Officer himself took me aside and told me emphatically, but amiably, to keep the camera-carrying hordes away from him and to spare him the long lectures; I wouldn’t regret it. Astute businessman that he was, he named the amount right there and then: that evening at the pier his secretary would hand me 100 pesetas for my trouble. Or rather, he could take care of that himself, right here and now. No sooner said than done. His wife and daughter went along with the scheme, only here and there they asked a timid question or two, which I then answered—truthfully, but also very briefly and in a conspiratorial whisper. The most exquisite automobile in running condition on the island was chartered for this tour designed to foster the Chief’s meditative experience. Somewhere at the shore we stopped for a picnic. I ate up heartily, the ladies decidedly less so, and the Chief didn’t touch a bite. He sat off to one side on a rock and contemplated the blue horizon. Possibly he was in love, or maybe his flotilla was foundering.

  In Sóller we did have a run-in with the madding crowd, but there were no serious consequences. The driver stepped on the gas, and we disappeared in a cloud of dust. We arrived on the dot at the Palma pier where the ship’s longboat was waiting. The Chief’s secretary came up to us with a mournful look to render a brief report on the day’s receipts, and a few items didn’t add up right. Pointing to me, the Chief said that his guide was to receive 100 pesetas. All day long I had been on my best behavior, but now at the final minute I made the stupid mistake of explaining that Mr. Chief Executive Officer himself had already taken care of this small matter, but now had obviously forgotten. What a fool I was! If only I had kept mum there, too—seeing as where I had been hired to play a mute! “Talk is silver, silence is golden” indeed.

  Walking homeward Vigoleis swore to himself that he would keep his mouth shut forevermore, for by doing so he might soon advance to Chairman of the Board himself. But this went the way of all good intentions. To this very hour he has advanced to nothing of importance, because he’s always opening his big trap at just the wrong time.

  III

  Pedro arrived in civvies; the time for wearing his humiliating carnival costume was over.

  We celebrated the Feast of the Miraculous Disrobing with sobrasada, wine, and bread, and we gave a toast to freedom. The food resembled the General’s Eggs, but it didn’t serve the same function. Pedro picked up his pad and began sketching: Vigoleis as Tourist Guide. A second sheet: Vigoleis as Padre with Cassock and Biretta. A third: Vigoleis as Spanish Army Recruit, Engaging in Mutiny. The fourth sketch showed him as a knight with hand to breast, ruff collar, and saber, freely after El Greco. This fellow was a talented artist, but he never succeeded in depicting Vigoleis as Vigoleis, despite hundreds of drafts and sketches for a grand portrait. Later, when he took lessons from the German refugee Segal and asked me to pose for him, a shadow of my second aspect gradually merged into my primary visage. But before the work could be completed, Segal packed up his utensils and left the island, and I fled soon after him.

  It wasn’t only Pedro Sureda who had returned to humanity. We, too, had reached a tolerably humane level of existence, thanks especially to Beatrice’s persistence in hammering several languages into some very resistant brains. She made a name for herself in Palma. Our house became a crowded place. In her field, she was just as much in demand as I was in my capacity as a cicerone. Prosperity lay just around the corner. In our kitchen there was a real saucepan on a hook, and each of us had our own pillow. We no longer had to roll up our clothes. We even had bedclothes, including a woolen blanket, an attractive second-hand peasant model that cost us more to de-flea and de-Pilarize than a new one would have. But easy come, easy go; our common oddball vice, books, was the reason why we still had no doormat. At the foot of the bed lay my old black loden greatcoat, as spooky to look at as some trophy from the hunting grounds in a world of ghosts. On our bookshelf one Rivadeneira classic stood next to another. We also spent quite a lot on clothes; in the South, more than in most other places in the world, clothes make the man.

  I began translating Spanish literature, first only for myself as an exercise in getting to know the texts, but then in order to create an audience for Iberian literary art in Germany—I should say more modestly, a larger audience. I translated works by Padre Feijó, Baltasar Gracián’s Criticón, novels by Pío Baroja, a few books by Mario and one, a gem of a book on the art of pipe-smoking, by Joaquín Verdaguer, the relative and literary confrère of the great national poet Jacinto Verdaguer. And some other things that I can’t recall. Pedro helped me tirelessly with linguistic difficulties; Beatrice, the walking dictionary, provided the solution in doubtful cases. I started up a busy correspondence with publishers. Our private exchequer shrank in direct proportion to the German publishers’ regrets that at the moment they daren’t get too close to Spanish material.

  Was this a reflection on the quality of my translations? Later on, Professor Karl Vossler had lavish praise for my ability to render the spirit of Iberia.

  I remained faithful to Dutch literature. At the beginning of an earlier chapter I mentioned the name Slauerhoff; it was ter Braak who brought him to my attention. But no sooner did I write down his name than I got sidetracked to my own literary dog food. That’s how it always goes in the life of Vigoleis, and thus that’s how it goes, necessarily, in these pages. But now I can report I completed a German version of Slauerhoff’s unique novel on the life of Camões, The Forbidden Realm. I expended a great deal of time and care attempting to emulate this writer’s famous chaotic style, and I was proud of my chaotic German version. The first publisher to hold my manuscript in his hands dropped it on the floor and lifted those selfsame hands to the heavens. Back to the sender. Other publishers rejected it on the grounds that nationalistic circles could take offense at the novel’s title; the “Third Realm” was about to come out
of the forge. The Great German Carnival was about to happen, and that is why a dozen publishing houses also gave political reasons for refusing Menno ter Braak’s Bourgeois Carnival. People were being careful. Even Verdaguer’s little book on the tobacco pipe, which finally came out in Germany around this time but not in my translation, caused one publisher to go into a world-historical fit. Even as a non-smoker I knew that you can burn your fingers on a pipe. But for political reasons? Simple: Hitler didn’t smoke.

  Vriesland’s Departure from the World in Three Days was taking an eternity to write. It was sent to me down on the island in separate waves. In the first line of the book a Jew makes an appearance—and on the horizon the Forbidden Reich was about to dawn forth.

  “If you keep putting your own stuff into the fire,” said Pedro, “why don’t you try translating cheap novels? For that kind of stuff we have our own Pedro Mata.”

  Pedro meant well, but I felt that I meant even better, so I persisted in translating for the highbrows: Eugenio d’Ors, Angel Ganivet, Miguel de Unamuno—all for naught. I didn’t even dare to produce an uncensored rendering of writings by my Santa Teresa de Ávila.

  Don Quixote had his windmills, and now Vigoleis had his publishers. A non-Iberian evolution.

  Beatrice’s consumption of literature is so huge that not even a rich man would find it easy to keep her book bin filled. She has a literary tapeworm, and occasionally I envy her for it. This is the reason why we scouted around for a lending library. Pedro recommended the “Casa del Libro” on the Borne. There I entered my name in the membership list; their catalogue seemed to justify such an adventure. The fee was manageable; we would just have to send off two fewer manuscripts per month. The library manager was a short, fat man with a mild speech defect. He had an inimitable bleating laugh that drove milky-white bubbles of saliva into the swarthy corners of his mouth. His name was Mulet. From the second day of our acquaintance I felt constrained to pay special attention to this man. In the forenoon he was smooth-shaven, but by five o’clock he had a stubbly beard. At ten in the morning I asked him for a certain book, and he said I could pick it up at five. At five, he couldn’t remember a single thing. One forenoon he accidentally twisted his hand so that it turned black and blue; by afternoon the injury was invisible. Once I saw him sitting in a café on the Borne; I waved and went on my way. When I arrived at his shop, there he was. For a long time I remained the butt of jokes, some of them quite clever, perpetrated by the identical twin brothers Mulet, much to the amusement of the tertulia that met at the “Casa del Libro” around the writer Verdaguer, the tobacco-pipe Verdaguer.