The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Julietta was gone. Following an almost fatal beating, she had left the island. Some “uncle” had offered to take in the saucy and promising young kitten. He was having her trained as a ballerina in Barcelona.

  As physically wretched as he was, Zwingli still commanded active mental powers. And since there was now no Pilar around to interrupt him, he started emoting about his plans for an academy. The initial concept was all worked out, and soon a lengthy memorandum would be sent to an American financier. In addition, he had in mind setting up a shoe factory and a horse-racing stable. We had the hardest time focusing his attention on the one immediate, central idea: his escape. He had forgotten all about it.

  Because there were no ships leaving for the mainland on Sunday, we settled on the following Saturday as our day of our departure; that way, Zwingli would be one day ahead of a possible pursuit by Pilar. He arranged the following: she would go to the movies with a girlfriend of hers, and after the show she would wait for him on the Plaza Santa Eulalia. The doctor would give him some injections to make him more or less fit for the trip. Pilar, a movie fanatic, wouldn’t have the slightest suspicion. As far as she was concerned, everything would be fine as soon as her Helvecio once again stood up like a man. She even went back on the street to raise money with her heaven-sent talent for the General’s Eggs.

  Zwingli thought it was too dangerous to enter his real name on the passenger list; he feared that Pilar would inquire right away at the shipping line. For this kind of camouflage he didn’t need to search very far. His father, schooled in Christian patristics, had let him be baptized with a plethora of first names including, among a few concessions to bourgeois normalcy, such echoes of Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation Era as Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Oekolampadius. The latter, a Basel reformer and one of the most feared religious gangsters of his fanatical time, carried the bourgeois surname “Hausschein,” and it was under the name of an obscure “Señor Hausschein” that Zwingli intended to make the trip to the mainland. It was his hope, of course, that such an erudite disguise would put Pilar and her confederates off the track. But on the day of our departure Zwingli sent me a note asking me to go right ahead and buy his ticket. I did so using my own name, Vigoleis—which amounted to a double deception, although at the last moment the game took on a certain legitimate aspect when I draped my loden coat over the escapee’s shoulders and propped my floppy hat on his brow.

  It was a favorable moment for an escape. Fog lay over the seascape, concealing the harbor and the low-lying section of the city where we lived. Beatrice said goodbye to her worrisome brother, who was now barely distinguishable from myself, either in clothing or in mood. Then, ciao! and “Don’t forget to write!”

  We walked separately. Ahead of me in the mist walked my loden coat under my symbolic floppy hat. But the Vigoleis who was propelling this getup along seemed to be either congenitally lame or plagued by the same affliction that caused Don Juan Sureda to speak in so many different tongues. If Beatrice had not found just the right word at just the right time back on the Street of Solitude when I was lusting after my brother-in-law’s wife, I myself would now be plodding along like a crippled capon behind my own double.

  I said goodbye to Zwingli before we reached the dock; I didn’t dare follow him to the brightly lit gangplank. Zwingli gave me some good advice: don’t be a stick-in-the-mud, take good care of Bé, and get his archive away from the bitch, even if it meant calling the police…

  “Should I go find a bullet-proof vest?”

  “One night with her and you’ll have everything!”

  “A knife in the ribs, or syphilis?”

  I received no reply to this superfluous question. My double had disappeared.

  As I turned the corner into Barceló, a foghorn started wailing. The Ciudad de Palma had weighed anchor and was steaming toward Barcelona.

  Now Zwingli could shake off Vigoleis and climb back into his old, tortured skin. I see him standing in front of me like a horse being brought to stable. He never learned how to sleep standing up, but he was certainly an expert in the horizontal position. We wondered whether he could truly get mended in Switzerland. His intention was to have himself de-pilarized in the clinic run by a well-known homeopathic specialist and friend of the family, old Dr. Scheidegger. His entire family was committed to homeopathy; one of the grandpas had achieved a certain notoriety in the field. His “Home Guide to Homeopathy” was a bedrock of the siblings’ private library, and they consulted it for any and all ailments. Beatrice owed her life to homeopathic drops. Surely this potent liquid, dribbled into a glass by an expert hand, could do the trick against the Pilarian toxin. Since the treatment is based on the principle of similarity, he would have to remain for a while yet under that woman’s scourge—but such a method could make the withdrawal cure all the more humane.

  After arriving home, I barricaded the door. We realized that Pilar would immediately suspect us of being accomplices to the escape, and that she was capable of asking pimps to help her force an entry. I knew that she still maintained cordial contacts with the Mallorquin underworld.

  That night, our lives weren’t worth a fig.

  A few days before, a bloody drama had occurred on our street. A man discovered his wife in bed with another guy. This is called adultery, and for people who haven’t thought much about the ways of the world, adultery is a rotten spot in Eve’s apple. Our neighbor murdered the violator of what he considered his personal integrity, dispatched his wife with a second blow of the axe, and with a third, the sister-in-law who lived with them. Blood flowed in torrents down the staircase, a crowd raced to the scene, a few butchers’ dogs had to be chased away, and kids were kept from viewing the carnage. As a relative of the murdered sisters, “Siete Reales” knew the details, and thus I got a full report from an unimpeachable source. Above and beyond the metaphysical blindness of the perpetrator, I took a special interest in this case as a study in ethnology. The police locked up the murderer, who hadn’t even tried to escape since, as the shoemaker explained to me, every Spanish married man has the right to kill his wife and her other bedfellow if he catches them in flagrante. A few days later the judge set the man free, and all his neighbors accompanied him in a triumphal parade to his house, which some helpful ladies had washed clean of any trace of the deed. Not long after that, this defender of his personal honor took another lover to his bed, someone else’s wife, a woman he had been “visiting” for quite a while previously—a likeable young lady, by the way, who whitewashed walls for us in our apartment. Nobody could whitewash like this adultress, who charged only two reales per hour.

  Blood—and this is all that I have meant to convey by telling the story of this petty bourgeois tragedy—had already flowed copiously on the Street of the General. Was our own blood now to be shed in all innocence? Was our blood to attract the frightful curs of Palma, the progeny of the hordes of canines that ravaged the city at the turn of the century? These hounds were housed in a kennel owned by Don Juan Sureda, who kept them as guard dogs for himself and his increasingly numerous relatives. At that time he still was living on Calle Zavellá, in the town palace named after his clan. Every evening the hungry pack was let loose, and instead of protecting life and limb of the nobility, they swarmed out across the city, raided private houses, and had a particular weakness for butcher shops that were kept open to take advantage of the cool night-time breezes. On these nightly self-service expeditions, the bloodhounds provided themselves with the food that their kennel master no longer could offer them, since by this time Don Juan was already among the aristocrats who could afford to make bets at his club like the following: “Do you want to bet that I can make an omelet that will cost X thousand pesetas?” Take a frying pan, an egg, a drop or two of olive oil, stir constantly over a low flame fueled with hundred-peseta bills. —Whenever the barking band of beasts descended on the city, there was general panic. For years afterward, the population had memories of the widespread outcry, “God help us, the
Suredas are on the loose!” On one occasion we ourselves were the cause for the general alarm getting spread almost daily on our street.

  I had agreed to type out some manuscripts and do some partial German translations for an English travel writer. Her husband was a war invalid, suffering from a strange form of the gout that could be cured, or at least made bearable, only by constant moisture, and for this reason the couple always sought living quarters in a humid environment. This didn’t help much. So the determined wife bought a tiny sailing sloop, stuck her gouty spouse in the little cabin, set sail, and in this way evolved into a popular author of travelogues. Hydrophilus was not seaworthy, the owners even less so, and this meant that on their voyages they had to stay close to the coastlines. But this, too, was dangerous, since the chubby lady didn’t know how to sail, and the crippled warrior was no help in any case. So the intrepid voyagers bought two Great Danes and trained them to leap to the other side of the boat to keep the balance every time she tacked.

  They had already explored all the French and German rivers, testing them for humidity, and now they arrived in the Mediterranean to check out its literary and hygroscopic possibilities. They made the passage over to Mallorca roped to a freighter, then they got towed around the whole island and finally threw anchor and moored their floating sanatorium at the Paseo Sagrera dock in Palma harbor. The lady’s stories were pure kitsch, miserable pulpy stuff, but since she always staged her plots on the ocean, they were grabbed up by the maritime-obsessed English public. In Emmerich’s shop her books went like hotcakes. No wonder this writer, whose name I have forgotten, was able to pay me well.

  The lady always arrived in the company of her Great Danes—that is to say, her dogs dragged her to our house and then proceeded to riot in front of our door, scratching the varnish and tearing apart the doormat we had purchased after so much physical and mental sacrifice. What is more, lacking any house to live in, they were not housebroken. Even before running amok on the landing in front of our apartment, they created havoc on the street outside. Like heralds of the court they swept a path for their mistress. Our peaceable neighbors, who loved to sit on low-slung chairs near their doorsteps and knit, mend fishing nets, or—their favorite activity—do nothing at all, gathered up their children and belongings at the first sound of barking and rushed into their houses. Chairs were scattered on the street; degenerate dogs that didn’t realize quickly enough what was in store for them, got bitten to death. Cats hissed and scrambled up the naked walls. Nuns blessed themselves and instinctively pressed their flat bosoms against the wall. And then the writer herself came on the scene, a pith helmet propped on her weathered coiffure and tied under her chin with a veil, carrying the large palm-frond basket that contained her manuscripts. She readily paid for minor property damage that neighbors complained to me about—such things, she said, were material for a good story. But once when a child got bowled over by the Danes and had to be taken to the hospital with internal injuries, this was a bit much for the lady from England. We made an agreement that henceforth I would fetch her manuscripts from on board their sloop and later return them there. From then on—and this is why I am telling this story—there were no more shouts of “God help us, the Suredas are on the loose!” on our quiet street. As in days of yore, the neighbors sat calmly on their chairs mending and knitting, cobbling, sewing mattresses, tying fishing nets and nursing their babies.

  Later the British lady geared up their sloop and set sail again with husband and canine herd. For a while longer her travelogues appeared in the magazines, but then her byline disappeared and their little boat was never sighted again. Presumably the Great Danes committed a nautical error during a difficult maneuver, consigning themselves and their masters to a glorious mariner’s death at sea.

  Blood, then—I am reaching back a few pages—blood that attracts dogs: would it start flowing again from House No. 23, this time from Vigoleis’and Beatrice’s veins? Will Heaven not grant surcease? I preferred not to trust to a Higher Power, but far and wide there was no sign of a whore coming to flash her blade. I could have spared myself the effort, but I quickly changed my mind when we entered the bookshop around noontime. “One minute sooner,” the proprietor told us, “and a crazed fury would have skewered you both!” Pilar had come by and made a search of the premises, thinking that Zwingli must be hiding somewhere in the ice-cream bar copa that they both knew so well.

  The man who reported this to us was no longer Emmerich from Cologne but his successor, a short, ash-blond, very friendly fellow from Swabia who learned only too late that he was not made for Spain. It cost him his nerves, his health, and his own and his wife’s savings. He was still quivering over his whole body, and I, two heads taller but no less fearful of raging whores, now likewise felt the touch of cold steel at my back. This time someone was bound to end up lying flat on the battlefield, rubbed out either by Pilar herself or one of her kind. Zwingli once told us that Pilar had stabbed more than one individual. Mortally? My gooseflesh told me: mortally. The new owner of the bookshop hadn’t yet learned a word of Spanish, so all he knew was that on this particular hunt, we were the prey. He was, of course, familiar with the details of our whorish adventures, right down to the matter of the rapidly abandoned deathbed. It didn’t cheer him up at all when Vigoleis was asked, “You’re still here? I could swear that I saw you just last night on board the steamer, wearing a loden coat and a floppy hat, when I was taking some last-minute mail down to the ship.”

  But then I told him our story. He and I were in great excitement, whereas Beatrice started calmly leafing through books on the shelves. Antonio came over from across the street, where Pilar had also made a visit, and warned us, “Watch out! That woman is unpredictable. At any minute the dagger can pounce from her stocking!”

  That evening I once again barred our door and installed a clever alarm contraption that would wake us up immediately if anybody started fiddling with the lock. But the contraption didn’t spring into action until next morning when the milkman arrived. No sign of María del Pilar.

  No hay mal que por bien no venga, goes a Spanish proverb: “misfortune can have its good points, too”. Beatrice wasn’t feeling well—nothing serious, but she decided to stay in bed.

  Her bed rest saved our lives, or at least one of our lives.

  The whore arrived at noontime. I immediately fainted, and was still shaking as she shouted to be let in. With the clear conscience enjoyed by all atheists, I rapidly set my affairs in order with the Powers Above. Just let her approach, dagger in hand! I could have wished a nobler form of widowhood for Beatrice, but such things lie beyond the control of man.

  “Do you want us to go back with you? Is your Helvecio dying again?”

  She had arrived, she declaimed, to settle matters, but now with both of us. No more fooling around. Where was Beatrice? These words spewed forth from her pretty little mouth, from beneath her quivering little nose. She had forgotten to powder it, which she suddenly realized when I focused my eyes sharply on it. Women don’t like that.

  My cosmetic ambush gave me an advantage.

  If she came to settle matters, I said, then she would have to betake herself into the back room to Beatrice’s bed. Beatrice was sick.

  Fearing the worst, Beatrice had been listening at the door and now dove back under the covers as we entered the bedroom. I let the vengeful woman go ahead of me. Our apartment was like a cave animal’s burrow, with the nest at the end of a set of tunnels: you couldn’t go astray. But this wasn’t just a casual hunting expedition.

  My own back was secure from the dagger’s thrust—but what about Beatrice’s breast?

  The woman stopped at the bedside and hurled her customary hate-filled glance at Beatrice—or was it a lethal glance? Hardly lethal, since she possessed other means for killing. Before we knew it, Pilar reached under her skirt and pulled out this dagger that by now is probably so familiar that it has lost its effect—stylistically, I mean. As a weapon it was still dangerous. />
  Beatrice remained motionless, lying in wait. Perhaps she had secreted some weapon of her own under the bedspread, ready to brandish it at the proper moment. Or perhaps she knew from reading detective stories that it’s difficult to stab somebody through bedclothes and pillows. Nonetheless, I grabbed a kitchen chair to smash the whore’s skull with. This chair, however, was badly carpentered; as I lifted it, a splinter went straight under the nail on my middle finger. I yelled “Ouch!” and dropped the whole chair. At the very same instant Pilar shouted at us that Helvecio was gone and she had come here to…

  “… to murder us, too,” Beatrice interjected coldly, as she rose up incautiously on the bed. “We know the whole story. The police have been here. They’re looking for you. Who else but you can have killed my brother, sale femme!”

  Who would have expected this of Beatrice? Instead of water, this time she was hurling an accusation! Pilar turned rigid; the dagger fell from her hand. She called out the names of her loyal Saints, then groaned “Ay Jesús!” and threw herself down on the bed. She started weeping so violently that it almost broke both of our hearts. The murderous crisis was over; the arrow had flown back to hit the archer.

  We let the poor wretch wail herself out. I offered to brew us some coffee. Beatrice asked for a cigarette.

  I gave Pilar a briefing: we knew that Helvecio was missing. According to rumors, he had been done in by a jealous concubine. The police were notified. When Beatrice heard the news, she lost consciousness. Bad heart attack. There she lies.