The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Pilar threw herself down on the floor and beseeched me with choking voice not to believe that she ever laid a hand on Helvecio. Helvecio, the only man she ever loved! The scene was frightful in its phony melodrama. The woman literally coiled up on our floor. I thought it best to go into the kitchen and heat up the stove. Beatrice got up, and I noticed that she pulled a dust pan from under the covers—she probably meant to use it either as a shield against the dagger or to smash the fury’s nose in. Now she calmly replaced it on its hook, but not before sweeping up demonstratively a few bits of dust. María del Pilar took no notice of this; she was busy with her own misery. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph came to her aid, and she was soon over the worst.

  Had the police been there, she asked? Yes, but not on her account; they came in connection with the murder a few doors down the street. But where was Helvecio? She had just visited the steamship office and asked to see the passenger list. He wasn’t on it, not even under the name Zwingli. What could she do? Would we help her relocate her man? All these questions were interrupted by sudden bursts of tears, moans, imprecations, vague gesticulations. She powdered her nose, applied rouge, made hesitant suggestions. I advised her to flee before the authorities started a serious search for the missing Swiss citizen. Go in hiding? But where? In Barcelona, of course, where no one would find her, but where she might find her Helvecio. She liked this idea. She would dissolve her household immediately, sell everything, throw it away for cash to the highest bidder. Would we…? Why not? We would like to get our few pieces of furniture back—our wardrobe, especially our table, and our bed linen—you remember, don’t you, little Pilar, back then—? Renewed sobbing, “Ays!”—invocations of the divine intercessors. What was I thinking, now, at this moment of her great sorrow, her desperate situation, her unbearable solitude—to have the nerve to bring up long-forgotten stories! Pah! She was right. It was cruel of me to come at her with the apple of discord. Things would go better if I paid mind to the old saw about building golden bridges behind the fleeing enemy. This harlot has fire in her eyes, Vigo. You won’t be safe from her until the Mediterranean Sea lies between you.

  “Fine, Pilar. We’ll buy a few of our… er, pardon, a few things from you. If you have, let’s say, a wardrobe and a serviceable table, one that I could do my writing on, and some bed linen—how would that be?”

  We agreed on a price between friends, plus a small amount in consideration of her emergency situation, inclusive of moving costs.

  Our leave-taking was memorable. The two women embraced and kissed each other on the cheeks, their eyes partly tear-filled, partly glazed over. It wouldn’t have surprised me if one of them fell over dead with a knitting needle in the aorta. Vigoleis stood by and wondered whether “that woman” was going to throw herself around his neck, too. But this horny pontifex had no need to build such a golden bridge as this one; he gave her one final handclasp and a glance that takes us back to Book One and the Street of Solitude, when the insatiable doxy tried to lure the stranger to her poisonous bed.

  Before my eyes could focus again properly, she was out the door.

  “Oh ye olde whorish glory, whither hast thou gone?” I whistled. Then the doorbell rang. I opened up. Porra! Pilar!

  María del Pilar was smiling. My resistance crumbled. Now or never—but not here! On your pilarière, Pilar, just around the corner, I’m coming… Then she asked me for her knife. She had forgotten it in all the excitement.

  Beatrice fetched it from the rubbish can.

  Cleaned out of house and home, Pilar left the island. Our furniture deal went through before she departed; the Swabian book man lent us the money. Zwingli’s archive had disappeared. We never found out who the bitch might have sold it to.

  We received a postcard from Zwingli in Switzerland. This time he was not on his deathbed but on clean sheets in Scheidegger’s homeopathic clinic in Basel. Old Grandpa’s drops and his millionaire godmother’s francs would, he wrote, soon have him back fit as a fiddle.

  Now we had the island all to ourselves.

  VI

  Render unto the Kaiser the things which are the Kaiser’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. No believing soul would ever have difficulty rendering unto God what belongs to Him. But to render unto the Kaiser the taxes he demands: who hasn’t spent sleepless nights over this problem? To this day my head spins whenever I fill out a tax form. I have had to do this in many different countries and languages, and each time I have been confronted with the same riddle: why all this gibberish that a normal human being cannot understand without crib notes? Nowadays the latest literary fad is “hermetic” poetry. Isn’t all poetry “hermetic”? But for me, plumbing the depths of a poem is child’s play compared to puzzling out a tax form. I filled out my first Spanish form to the best of my knowledge and with the worst conscience imaginable.

  The tax agency chose to ignore my poverty status and demanded that I pay hundreds of pesetas, or else… The letter ended with a threat signed by some bureaucrat. I was stunned. This was just like Germany.

  We hadn’t regained our composure when Pedro came by and asked us if we had been visited by some new misfortune. Pilar was gone, Helvecio was gone, and we had the whole game to ourselves. But then he spied the tax man’s letter. Aha, he said, that’s a bit of a problem. We would have to figure out some way. Foreigners on the island could expect harsh treatment. There were too many suspicious cases among them; so many of them came here under questionable pretenses.

  Pedro took out his pad and began sketching Vigoleis as a victim of abrogated civil liberties. Then he drew Beatrice with shorn locks, incarcerated in a Tower. Finally he told me to meet him at the Palma City Hall—he knew a few important people there.

  The most important person’s office was a reflection of his rank: large and empty. Or almost empty, for it contained a diplomat’s desk and along the walls, in keeping with Mallorquin custom, a few dozen handsome, uncomfortable, upright chairs that had leather seats and leather backs with embossed coats-of-arms that pressed into the flesh of anyone sitting on them. The walls featured impressive paintings that fascinated me as a tour guide, but happily I was not obliged to offer any explanations of them. If I had, I would have listed them among the greatest Spanish masters. The gentleman seated on the heraldic throne behind the desk had the appearance of an old El Greco. And it seemed to me that he knew this, or rather that he knew he looked like the real thing.

  On the surface of his desk were to be seen a gold cigarette case, a little silver bell, a book with gilded margins and bright-colored bookmarks, and the important person’s right hand, pale and tired from signing so many documents.

  Pedro had not briefed me concerning what he, I, and the important person were to talk about. I had to rely on my instincts as a tour guide, but I soon realized that the owner of the pale right hand was likewise a born Führer.

  Don Francisco was enormously pleased to make the acquaintance, finally, of Don Vigo. He had of course heard a great deal about him—wait, what had been the occasion? Had he read him? No, in all honesty not one line; even educated Spaniards had no knowledge of German, Spain was oriented more toward France. A zoologist, of course! Don Vigoleis was a scientist of animal life. Don Francisco nodded appreciatively at Pedro’s explanations; he seemed captivated by the whole story. I was no less intrigued by these revelations about my own career, and Pedro was doing quite a fine job of making it all up. I have always had a weakness for animals; as a kid I kept quite a few of the smaller varieties. I trained jackdaws and starlings, I bred budgerigars and meal-worms, kept canaries, moles, frogs, salamanders and pet fishes, rabbits, hamsters, squirrels—a stinking, squeaking, copulating, expensive, noisy and silent menagerie. I could well have turned out to be some kind of expert in zoology–why not? And now that’s just what I was. My hobby, Pedro explained, was the flea. “Go ahead, Vigo, tell Don Francisco something about your latest scientific findings in this field that concerns us all!”

  Don Francisco made a welcoming
gesture and offered us cigarettes. “Fleas?” He was very interested, if only from a scientific standpoint. These tiny animals were what had brought me to Spain? Remarkable, very remarkable.

  The flea, I began, was an anabiotic incarnation—I ought to have said “as we all know,” in order to lend credence to my thesis, but my Spanish wasn’t yet good enough for that. But I got by with some famous names: Haeckel, Darwin, Bölsche, Aristotle. I spoke of occasionalism and prestabilism, Mendelism and pseudo-ovulation, fabricating the evolutionary story as far as the kangaroo, the focal point of my research: the flea as a degenerative mutation of the marsupialia. My investigations would lend support to the theory of degeneration, according to which the entire world of fauna originated through the progressive deterioration of the most highly evolved creature, Homo sapiens. For purely economic reasons I was conducting my research with the flea, a more accessible animal than the kangaroo. It had become apparent that the Iberian flea, and its subspecies the Spanish, Balearic, and specifically the Mallorquin flea, Pulex irritans maioricensis, were best suited as guinea pigs. My research station was located on Barceló Street, and my research assistant was the daughter of a Swiss scientist who had made his name in a different, albeit no less flagellating, field of inquiry. I was preparing a lengthy study on my topic, under sponsorship of the Union Internationale des Recherches Zoologiques in Geneva, at whose most recent congress I had delivered a paper on the pouched flea. The press had printed detailed reports of my discoveries. Don Francisco recalled seeing my name in the papers.

  I need not emphasize that during this disquisition I felt as if ants were crawling over my entire body. From my very first day on Spanish soil I was plagued by fleas. Not a single page of these jottings of mine, at least in their Iberian aspects, was lived through without flea bites, although Beatrice somehow was spared this pestilence. The bubonic plague made her immune to many things, but also allergic to a host of other threats. Keating Powder was actually beyond our means; we went through a whole can of the stuff in a single day. And Zwingli’s godmother hadn’t yet financed the invention of DDT.

  Don Francisco listened politely and, feigning real interest, asked me a few questions. He expressed his hopes that my research could proceed undisturbed, if not un-bitten. The island, he explained, offered not only the necessary fleas, but also the appropriate degree of tranquility. This was the moment when Pedro chimed in and pointed out that certain untowardnesses had already occurred. Don Vigo was involved in an unpleasant matter concerning taxes, one that made doubtful his permission to remain in Palma. He was being asked to remit horrendous sums to Internal Revenue; weren’t scientific stipends regarded as tax-free? “Vigoleis, do you happen to have the documents with you?”

  He had them indeed. Don Francisco’s expression turned mournful. After a moment’s thought he ventured the idea that the flea professor had no doubt, out of absent-mindedness and modesty, neglected to introduce himself to the island’s Governor. It was important, he said, to know how to deal with official agencies as well as with fleas. He might be able to do something about the present case. He rang his silver bell, a functionary entered, and the two of them whispered something to each other in Mallorquin dialect. My documents then disappeared with the functionary. Our conversation continued. Clima ideal, bullfights—my flea circus was at an end. The functionary returned with a file folder. Don Francisco glanced through it to see if it was the right one. Then he dismissed the functionary, stood up, and said approximately as follows: “Don Vigoleis, you may rest assured that we Spaniards are proud to have such an eminent pulelogist in our midst. Our country has a glorious history; it has enjoyed world-wide prestige under a monarch on whose empire the sun never set. Today we are perhaps not at the height of our power in the political sense. But in matters intellectual and scientific we outclass the rest of the world. La Cierva, Marañón, Unamuno—you surely know the names. As far as your personal research is concerned, you shall not be further harassed by the tax authorities as long as you are our guest.”

  With these words Don Francisco tore up the file and threw it in the wastebasket that—I forgot to mention this—was also in his office. We were dismissed. You could tell from Don Francisco’s behavior that he didn’t want to waste any more of his time with us. And for our part, we were eager to leave this citadel of bureaucracy. Down in the hallway, Pedro danced the bolero and sang a picaresque ditty. I maintained my professorial decorum until we arrived at the Plaza Cort, when I, too, finally let loose. Beatrice, far from embracing us in our triumph, said that she didn’t believe a word of our flea story. Be that as it may, in all our later years on the island no one ever again sent us a tax form, much less a process server.

  I was deeply impressed by the sophisticated manner in which a Spanish civil servant had fallen for some hare-brained nonsense. This was Spain in its quixotic unpredictability, one of those mild attacks best described as half insanity and half clownishness, although there is really nothing ludicrous about them. Don Quixote’s foolish mistakes can appear ridiculous only to someone who thinks he knows the limits of being serious. I loved that Spain, and still love it for its mystics, its ecstatic poets, its morbidly erotic priests, for its Pedros, and for Pedro’s philologically tortured father, for its God-fearing whores of the streets, and for the cheap hotels that light a candle to the same Virgin to whom the torero dedicates his life before he walks out to face the bull’s horns. I love the stubborn pride it displays in the face of the ridiculous, and the absurdity with which it confronts the obtuseness of the world. I love it for its “mañana, mañana,” for the simple reason that every Tomorrow will without fail turn into a Today. How would a German tax administrator have reacted to getting an erudite flea planted in his ear at Pedro’s instigation? He, too, would have tapped his little silver bell. But instead of some office minion, two guys would have appeared, strapping fellows both of them, pointing to Vigoleis and saying, “This the one?” And they would have taken him away in a paddy wagon. And amid shouts of Heil dem Führer!” he might have been released as “cured” sometime in the year 1933.

  Shouts of “Hail to the Führer” had been resounding in my fatherland for years, but the new Savior was not yet officially recognized. Up to now, the only one who had resurrected and commercially patented the historic Roman Greeting was Mussolini, who had acolytes in Spain and on the island of Mallorca. They were few in number, only a tiny coterie gathered around the fasces. And oddly enough, unlike in Germany, it wasn’t representatives of the underworld who sided with the insurrectionist leader. The first followers were from the aristocracy who were betting on the future. I say “oddly enough,” but why, exactly? The nobility’s purses were empty, too.

  Beatrice’s fame as a language teacher was rising, like my own star as a flea scientist. So for a while we both shone brightly in the firmament. She drummed respectable languages into Mallorquin brains manifesting varying degrees of density. Meanwhile, she also began teaching at a lycée, since she had excellent recommendations, plus an even more valuable Swiss diploma. This school admitted only daughters of the richest, most prestigious families. Founded by Germans, it was still called Colegio Alemán, although its ownership and direction had long since passed over into Spanish hands, those of an intelligent and pedagogically talented woman, Doña María, who had many names, many children, and many grandchildren. One of whom, a wild mestiza of enchanting beauty, presented her with vexing problems. Doña María was urbane, much-traveled, and married to an ailing husband who, nevertheless, was a wine connoisseur, fond of offering copious quaffs to guests at his table. Doña María had discovered this new teacher, Beatrice, and hired her on the spot. She dismissed in silence rumors that her new profesora had once been of the ilk of the Pilars.

  Pedro had opened up for Beatrice the palaces of the impoverished nobility. Each one was occupied by uncles, aunts, and cousins whose consanguinity was even more tenuous than the ancient, traditional labels named after parts of the body. From the head to the tip of the
middle finger, there was at one time such a thing as a “fingernail cousin.” Beatrice gave lessons in all of these domiciles, showing the señoras how to decline and conjugate. Some got left by the wayside, others took their place, and Pedro told all of them that Doña Beatriz had a husband who was worth looking into: a little crazy, a little shy, very learned, and not very handsome—which a man doesn’t really have to be. There was a statue of him in a German cathedral. This aroused the young ladies’ curiosity. They urged their parents to send Don Vigo an invitation. It happened, and he accepted. He found the girls charming, and not at all so abysmally stupid as Beatrice had described them. He engaged in polite conversation, blushed readily for no discernable lubricious reason—an annoying legacy of Original Sin—and at times caused the young ladies to blush. Those were very pleasant moments in the palacios listed in every Baedeker, homes that we now could enter for reasons rather different from what Zwingli originally had in mind for us and his concubine.

  One of these citadels of pedagogy was the palacio of the Count de la Torre, situated on Portella, the “Casa Formiguera,” which was connected by an archway above the street with the Casa Marqués de la Torre. During my first visit, walking through abandoned rooms we spied priceless treasures dating from a time when the island was owned by a half-dozen of these grandees. We also met a genuine matriarch, whose age I estimated at a few hundred years. She seemed so very authentic in these authentic surroundings that I could have converted then and there to a classicistic theory of history, until the Count told me that this was his own mother. Had she been artificially fossilized? Her son was scarcely older than I was. He had many children, very many, perhaps in deference to the name of his dynasty, Formiguera, which means “ant hill.” The girls were learning French and English. One of the older daughters, perhaps the oldest, was married to a captain who, although a soldier, was not the worst specimen of his kind. His private cook was particularly good. Soon we were clapping each other’s shoulders in friendship. I told him how I had restored honor to a Spanish general, while not concealing that I didn’t think much of the military. Whereupon this officer invited us to his fortress, and ordered the casement cannons to be winched up to their threatening positions above the ramparts. These were his pride and joy. Just a few more stars, and he could have been Julietta’s father. Later his cook/aide-de-camp sprang into action. In peacetime, the trench surrounding the fort served for the most part as a rabbit trap. We ate râble de lièvre au Madère. My compliments, Captain!