The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  The Counts de la Torre had a friend who likewise belonged to the military caste, and about whom they liked to tell stories. As a strapping young officer he had participated in the Moroccan Campaign, after which he was immediately appointed commander of the military academy in Zaragossa. As ambitious as the famous Corsican, he strove for higher and higher ranks, and his model was Il Duce.

  Like so much else, I knew the Italian dictator only from the newspapers. What he was aiming for was unclear to me, but how he was going about it couldn’t have been more obvious. Since everything was happening in uniform, his movement was distasteful for me from the start. Beatrice didn’t like Il Duce either, although her antipathy was based on personal experience. She had lived for a long time in Italy and witnessed Fascist acts of terrorism at close range. Her years in Florence were particularly clear in her memory, when she and her paleographic brother belonged to the intimate circle of the historian Guglielmo Ferrero and Dina Ferrero, the daughter of Cesare Lombroso. Ferrero was on the Duce’s blacklist, and thus exposed to harassment that also extended to members of his family and their friends. Beatrice couldn’t take a step without being followed by one of the sbirri. She was taken into custody several times and interrogated, then released as a Swiss citizen and threatened with deportation. But before she could be accused of subversive activities and driven out of the country or dumped into the Arno, she had accepted a position as companion to a German millionaire’s wife who, it must be recorded, poured arsenic in her breakfast coffee—which was surely just as bad as getting pushed around by the Fascists. That is why she responded to the Spanish count who was pounding Il Duce’s drum, “No Duce for me, thanks!”

  One day the Formigueras sent us an invitation to a party in honor of their friend, the aspiring Duce Don Francisco Franco y Bahámonde, who was vacationing with his wife in their house on the island. They explained that it would be necessary to hold a conference to practice the protocol for the event. We were both expected to attend, especially Don Vigo as representative of a nation that was responding so positively to the Italian Duce.

  Don Francisco Franco, General of the Infantry, had been sent in 1931 from Azaña to the Balearics as Military Governor, but he soon returned to Morocco. In the Formiguera household he was referred to as the Cabdillo or Caudillo, which means “chieftain”or “gang leader”: Il Duce.

  The word “practice” gives me a bad taste, no matter whether it is applied to the times-table, a machine gun, or the Communion altar rail. It conjures up visions of my Vigoleis’ predecessor, and how an aged priest wielding the Key of Saint Peter whacked his tongue for not sticking it out far enough, with the result that he never again joined in the singing of Aquinas’ wonderful hymn of praise, Pange lingua gloriosum… And now I was expected to show up to practice lifting my right arm and shouting “Ave Caesar!” to a general. But let’s go anyway. It won’t hurt to take a look at this nonsense.

  Young people were gathered in the halls of the residence. There was dancing and flirting, people made grandiose declamations into the void, and then the guests practiced saluting a make-believe general. All it took was one go-through, for after all, inside every human being there sits a monkey.

  It’s strange, but even in jest I couldn’t be persuaded to step up to the straw man, lift my arm, and say “Viva Franco! Arriba España!” Sometime later—not in this book—I’ll relate how I did this very thing years later at a Spanish border station, dressed up as a general. We let it be known that we would not be attending the party. We didn’t want to be spoilsports, especially since it now seemed to us that for all these people, playing at Fascism was a bloody serious affair.

  “Just as you wish,” said the grandee from the House of Formiguera, who earned his bread as a subaltern in a bank. “But later you will regret having failed to make the acquaintance of a future man of prominence. Hitler or Franco—we’ll see which of them hits the top first!”

  The general appeared, and the party was a huge success. For days afterward, the daughters kept telling Beatrice how much we had missed by being so strangely reluctant to attend. What the señoritas had in mind was not so much the political aspects of our refusal to come to the reception. They were thinking mostly about the glamour, the show of wealth, the erotic game-playing with mantillas and clattering fans. Despite their fascistoid parade of the capes (suerte de capa), how could these girls or anyone at all know that four years later this glory-seeking general would bear the superlative title of El Generalissimo?

  Vigoleis, the champion of missed opportunities, with books as with second-hand women, with his choice of a century to live in, and with the narrative of his second sight—the later world-famous Caudillo is not in bad company with this tissue of failures. But Vigoleis has never shed a single tear over this particular fiasco.

  Who has never heard a washerwoman boast that she works only in the finest houses? Seamstresses, midwives, and hired butchers all have their pride of place. Beatrice makes no special claims for her professional standing, in fact she would rather get paid one duro less for working in a faded palace, than be given wads of money by some belching nouveau riche. Common folk, who were intelligent and eager to learn, left their cottages to come to our apartment on Barceló, bearing with them even less than a duro, but gifted with the bright alertness and appealing decency that you can still find in the lower segments of society. All of them, with or without money and with or without brains, dirtied up Beatrice’s living quarters, but that had nothing to do with education. It had to do with the doormat that still was nowhere to be found at the entrance to our apartment. Books were more important.

  The houses that I frequented were not rich, and certainly not elegant. I was often drawn to the charcoal bin and cobbler’s shop occupied by “Siete Reales” for a bit of conversation, centering on the inner world experienced by this sooty man, who enunciated his sentences word for careful word, and who could well be regarded as your “man on the street” for the simple reason that he had no door to separate him from it.

  And then there was the bakery! The panadería was an even greater attraction for me, but before this could happen, the baker’s wife had to die in childbirth and leave her five famous little worms and her little pink infant motherless in a cruel world. This is an old story, and I wouldn’t be able to give it a new twist even if I tried. Life goes on via the back stairway of death. God wished it so, and Jaume the baker yielded to the will of the Creator, in Whom he believed less and less. But he had no time to give serious thought to his fate. For whereas God reigns unapproachable in eternity, and whereas to Him one day is like an hour or an eon, these kids kept screaming their heads off, the dough had to be kneaded, the apprentice had to be slapped around, and loaf after loaf had to be put in the oven. And there were always these customers! Women from the neighborhood took care of the kiddies; if one of them had just given birth herself, she would put the strange infant to her breast. Poor people aren’t finicky about such things. Where one baby is slaking its thirst, there’s room for a second. See for yourself: a contented lower-class mother will open her dress, proudly lift a heavy sphere out of its covering, and with practiced hand squirt a stream of milk against the wall. That’s persuasive. As prudish as Spanish women can be, as soon as they become mothers they lose all traces of modesty. Breasts are an ornament that they display like a farmer showing off a particularly luscious turnip. In Spain, mothers often nurse their kids for three or four years. This can result in amusing scenes, as when a thirsty tyke takes things in its own hands, pulls forth the spigot, and starts sucking away amid curses and screams like those of the Inca cockatoo. It’s an undying privilege of babies to press their demand for the nipple. It took me a long time to get used to this everyday manifestation of maternal happiness. With these Madonnas, the miracle of the female breast, which invites conception and then sustains what was conceived, lost its mystery and became nothing more than an udder.

  In this fashion, Jaume’s youngest little worm was nurtured alon
g with other infants. He lacked for nothing; he screamed along with his siblings and joined in their chorus of giggles. He was bent on enjoying life as long as it lasted. In these countries it is always doubtful how long that will be. There are deaths in many families where a dozen children is the norm; God giveth and taketh away, in His inscrutable fashion. Whatever remains will eventually engender another dozen. But for Jaume the real problem was the customers who came to his shop. They were more important to him than his God-given family nest. Matías took care of them for him.

  Matías was the brother of the baker’s deceased spouse. His left leg was shorter than his right one. He had entered the world with this deformity, and so he became a teacher. As a teacher he had claim to the title “Don.” I made Don Matías’ acquaintance at his sister’s funeral. He was dressed all in black. If I had got to know him a year sooner, he would likewise have been dressed in black, and a year earlier than that: also in black, although the shine on his suit would have been less scuffed. His appearance of perpetual mourning stayed the same.

  Pedro once explained to us that the average Spaniard never emerges from luto, and thus never really doffs his black suit unless he deliberately scoffs at the idea of mourning and an age-old tradition that dictates just how many years, months, and days must pass between “heavy” and “light” mourning, calibrated according to the degree of relationship with the deceased. Sometimes a person who has walked around for 20 or 30 years buried in black will tell himself that the time is up. Just 23 more days, and finally he’ll be able to put on a bright new suit. He goes to the tailor, gets measured up, chooses the fabric, and senses that this time it’s going to work, unless he himself dies and ends up all in white in a box. And then an obituary notice arrives in the mail—caramba, a long forgotten uncle seven times removed, related to the cousin-in-law of a long since deceased great aunt—this will cost him three weeks! The tailor undoes the stitches and sends the fabric back to the dye works.

  With his pedagogically trained eyes, Don Matías noticed right away that I was a foreigner and the only “intellectual” among those attending the funeral. He was limping along beside me; I shook his hand, and he learned that I was Vigoleis, Don Vigo, a practitioner of the writing trade from the nation that cradled poets and thinkers. For him this meant consolation on the day when he was burying not only his sister, but also to his hopes of wearing a white suit again anytime soon.

  From among my poets he was familiar with Goethe and, from among my thinkers, with Krausse. “What was that name again?” “Carlos Cristiano Frederico Krausse.”

  Aha, Krause. I had never read a line of his writings, and had never “had” him at the university, unless I was absent the day he was mentioned. Krause? When I get back home I’ll have to look him up right away, no doubt he’s in Sternbeck. But because it is a cardinal principle of philosophy to tell the truth, or at least to aim in that direction, before the corpse was placed in the earth I confessed to her mourning brother that I was basically unfamiliar with this fellow “Krausse.” Don Matías immediately stood still in this crowd of gabbing, smoking, joking funeral guests and, supported by his cane, looked at me as if yet another of his hopes had been dashed to the ground. “What? You don’t know him? Is it possible that a German doesn’t know his own Krausse?” I maintained my philosophical composure and replied with the bitter truth, “Sorry, no!”

  Don Matías approached his school authorities and was granted a period of so-called hardship leave, which would permit him to help keep his brother-in-law’s shop going until a permanent replacement could be found for the deceased woman. It was good for me to know this, for it meant that I would be seeing Don Matías every day and would have to be on my guard. To soften the blow to my intellectual pride, I could have blathered something about “Krausianism” to a German professor of philosophy. But I had to be careful in the presence of a Spanish aficionado, an amateur who devoted himself with passion to philosophy. Just think: a Krausista, a Neo-Krausian! It was stupid of me to spill the beans, telling this fellow right away that I was a writer and that I didn’t know Krause. I am normally so wary about associating myself with a profession that, in my hands, amounts to nothing. My indiscretion resulted in our eating bread from another bakery for three days—three days of boning up on Krause. Beatrice never saw me studying so hard! But now I could calmly approach Don Matías and orate to my heart’s content about Krause’s primeval being, his primeval inwardness, and his pantheism, without fear of a failing grade. And in the process I could buy a loaf of bread from him.

  “But Don Vigo, you told me that you didn’t know Krausse.”

  “You Spaniards say ‘Krausse,’ whereas we Germans say ‘Krause.’ It’s a pardonable mistake, considering that we were in the middle of a funeral procession.”

  Don Matías had already considered the possibility of mistaken identity; for him it was axiomatic that any German would know his Krausse—no other thought was possible. From my reference books I learned that Krausian philosophy had achieved a particularly strong following in Spain. At Madrid University there was even a professorial chair of Krausism, which was the springboard for an indigenous political-ideological movement. Its adherents were called Krausistas, they counted in the thousands, and Don Matías was one of them.

  Nonetheless, our second encounter did not take place under the aegis of German philosophy. Had I tortured myself in vain for three whole days with that Masonic pantheist? Don Matías took only superficial notice of my re-Krausification, and immediately began declaiming an ecstatic lecture on Spain’s greatest lyric poet of the previous century, José de Espronceda, who considered himself the Spanish Byron: a seducer of women, hero of the barricades, political conspirator, and pioneer of Weltschmerz. “A model to be emulated, Don Vigo!”

  Sitting on a sack of flour behind the shop counter, Don Matías delivered an emotional recitation of this poet’s controversial stanza about a cemetery that he claims to envision, one filled with corpses: de muertos bien relleno, manando sangre y cieno, que impida el respirar. There are stronger passages in Espronceda, and the scholars aren’t sure whether the one I have quoted is original or spurious. But coming from Jaume’s flour sack, it became moving poetry. It was incisive, no matter how many corpses it contained. One mark of great poetry is that it holds nothing back. Only Jaume himself and the ladies and girls in the shop thought that his Dance of Death was out of place, especially in a house in mourning. The Week’s Mind Mass had not yet been celebrated. Some of the women blessed themselves, saying “But Don Matías!” From below, too, came the admonitory cry of “Matías!” From below—that doesn’t mean from the Nether World, but from the oven room situated adjacent to the spacious retail shop, but lower by about a man’s height and separated from the shop by a metal grill. This was the realm of Jaume the widower, who from morning to midnight and often beyond, in the broiling heat amidst his vats and pans, earned his bread by baking it himself while watching his brother-in-law and that foreign intelectual sitting up above on his flour sacks, gabbing away about matters that transcended by far the subject of one’s daily bread. He didn’t like this one bit, but he kept his peace; his house was still in mourning. His brother-in-law, on hardship leave to keep the shop going, was taking great pains to solve the world’s mysteries along with one of their most insignificant customers: half a loaf of bread a day. The creator of biscuits and rolls had figured out that this was what the two of us were in fact up to, though he was oblivious to the wonderful, if only temporary, solutions we arrived at. Needless to say, as solvers of the world’s problems we made the flour in the sacks musty. We were all for sacrificing the Good in favor of the Better.

  During these first days—more precisely, prior to the Week’s Mind Mass—Don Matías sat on his sack in his close-fitting black suit, serving the customers with the politeness proper to a teacher on leave from the classroom. Later he neglected to brush himself off—what for, anyway? Flecked in white, he delivered his orations or listened to my disquisitions
, selling baked goods in between. Then the heat in the shop got to him. First he shed his collar and black tie, with the result that he lost none of his imposing, magisterial mien. As a symbol of eternal mourning, he kept two black buttons on his white piqué shirt, which he seldom had to change because at his new job it remained snow-white. Things went this way for a while, until one day I came upon him without his jacket on, and in place of his shirt he had on a wide-mesh wrestler’s jersey. He wore a scapular around his neck, but the one sported by this Krausist did not contain a picture of the Mother of God. Inside the little golden capsule was a photograph of his fiancée, the fabled Doña Encarnación—Carnita, “Little Flesh”—about whom more later.

  Like any Spaniard who can read and write, and who thus stands above the masses and is devoted to things of the mind, Don Matías also wrote poetry and short prose works. He collected these products of his ecstatic moments together with certain sarcastic analyses and pantheistic effusions in an oilcloth folder. By the time I got to know him, he had filled several dozen paper pads with his writings. He told me that they were stored in his library in the pueblo, the village where he worked as a teacher, and where he figured he would resume working once Jaume had found someone to replace not his wife, but him, Matías.