He told me that he would go out and get these folders, since he wanted to get my opinion. The drawer under the shop counter was also soon filled with home-baked literature, and on a shelf behind our flour sacks some metal cans got replaced by a small personal library. Thus whenever our conversation centered on a writer whose work Don Matías “had somewhere upstairs,” he didn’t have to limp up to his room; he just reached up behind him, and in a cloud of flour dust we both bent over the passage in question.
In this way, a small-time bakery in a poor section of Palma became an intellectual focal point of the highest significance.
I was able to draw Don Matías’ attention to a few aspects of the original Krause that he had overlooked. The bakery business suffered, but that was unavoidable. Hadn’t Catherine II once mocked the incurable world-improver Diderot, by saying that his grand ideas would yield fine books but a lousy economy? What hopes did we have, two unpublished writers, of exerting a meliorative influence on this woman-less bakeshop? One thing was in our favor—or rather in favor of intellectuals who chose to converse amidst sacks of flour: Pío Baroja, the great novelist, was in his younger years not only a physician but also a baker. In spite of his ck-dt pedigree, Jacob Burckhardt had engaged in some of his world-historical reflections while seated on a sack of flour in a house in the suburb of Sankt Alban where he rented a room. I was, by the way, delighted to introduce that cultural historian to Don Matías, explain Beatrice’s relationship to his clan, and point out this remarkable detail of his biography.
The relationship between the two brothers-in-law deteriorated as a result of the teacher’s ineptness as a shopkeeper. The clientele threatened to take their business elsewhere. Beatrice, too, took umbrage at the intellectual substitute baker. It piqued her that my shopping for half a loaf of bread kept me from doing other important things, and also that on the way home I so often made a detour to the Municipal Library to fill gaps in my education. For me nothing was more embarrassing than to step into Don Matías’ presence like a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework. At Mulet’s tertulia I was never grilled so thoroughly as when sitting on Jaume’s flour sack.
But now it was Beatrice who put new life in the bakery business, and she did it by becoming an inventor—which is supposed to be my own forte. Here’s how it came about: it was taking me too long to come home with our half a loaf, and Beatrice decided to go fetch it herself. She entered the bakery at a moment when Don Matías was reading aloud from one of his works. Besides myself the audience consisted of a bunch of women and kids from our neighborhood, who had come not for literature, but for bread. Instead of yanking me by the collar and dragging me home with the bread, as many a plebeian wife would have done, Beatrice reached out by herself for a half-loaf, her lower lip pushed forward menacingly. From my stories and my hunger for learning, she already knew of the local schoolmaster and his Iberian mission, and she didn’t want to interrupt his recitation. In this respect she was acting like the other women, who listened open-mouthed to the brother-in-law’s declaiming, while down below Jaume kneaded dough, weighed it hastily, and threw it with a loud and angry report onto the mixing table. Beatrice, not the least interested in the oeuvre of my praeceptor Iberiae, grabbed our bread from the shelf, paid at the counter, and disappeared. This was the signal for the other customers to follow her example, and it left no one but me to hearken to the rhapsodical verses of the Krausist in the wrestling shirt. There ensued a siege of the shelves. People took what they came for, one girl turned on a machine and pared off the thin slices she wanted for today’s sopas, and one by one they paid their money and left the shop. It was the world premiere of the self-service store, a triumph of remarkable female audacity—inspired, to be sure, by my own—that is, a born fabricator’s—absorption in abstract spirit. Today such stores can be found the world over. The Americans and the Swiss Migros boss Duttweiler are competing for ascendancy. The patent belongs to Beatrice.
Because this shop was patronized only by little people, there was practically no cheating and no checking up on the customers. Don Matías was grateful that everything around him went so smoothly, for this meant that he could devote himself all the more passionately to his philosophical and belletristic endeavors, and pursue his studies to his heart’s content. Sitting as a shop regular on my personal flour sack, I remained loyal to him. Then came the day when he began writing at the counter. Not ordinary literature, not l’art pour l’art, but love letters! He was not just a theoretical love poet, he was actually in love.
His girlfriend filled his entire being. He called her his own, although according to Spanish custom he would first have to conquer her. This task served as an impetus for his thirty years, his nimble pen, and his winged spirit. The girl’s name was Encarnación.
Can there be a more beautiful name for a beloved woman—Love made flesh and blood? Three times a week, Don Matías carefully shook the flour dust from his shirt, from the chest hair beneath it, and from his trousers, threw his black jacket, a so-called americana, over his shoulders, stuck his guitar under his arm, and waved Adios down to his brother-in-law in the oven room—he was off to the pueblo. There, where he taught school, is where she lived, and one day she was meant to fulfill the biblical injunction, implied by her name, that she and Don Matías should live as one flesh. But Jaume would bake many sacks of flour, and I would purchase many half-loaves of bread, before the amorous schoolteacher would let me peer into his heart. On one occasion, filled with ardor but free of any tinge of jealousy, he showed me the contents of his scapular medallion. People who are receptive to poetry, mysticism, and philosophical ruminations are often quite shy and reticent when it comes to interacting with their fellow men. But once the veils are lifted and the dams breached, there is no holding back the floods of emotion. What I am reporting here is the result of a long-term friendship and secret literary/philosophical conspiracy, kept alive by means of our daily bread. It could serve as a refutation of my own theory concerning bread as the most graphic symbol of poverty. Let us bear witness:
Encarnación was the daughter of a general—incidentally, the fourth man of this rank to make an appearance in these recollections. Heaven had bestowed upon her many charming features, but left one of her eyes out of alignment. Her mother died shortly after giving birth, and the baby was given over to the care of an Indian ama who carried her only on her left side. Her father, who thought of Carnita as the apple of his eye, likewise was in the habit of holding her only by his left arm. But while the nurse acted only from thoughtlessness or force of habit, for the general this was a matter of sheer necessity. His right arm was missing. So the infant would wander from the left arm of its nurse to the left arm of its father, until it finally reached the age when it no longer wanted to be carried. By this time, however, Carnita was seriously cross-eyed, and the general was told that there was nothing to be done about it, although the condition might correct itself as the years went by. In a civilized country, any number of techniques would have been applied to bring her eyes into line—special glasses, for instance, or Christian Science, or homeopathic henbane in the proper dosage. But little Encarnación was an exotic flower not only as a general’s daughter; she had entered the world inside an authentic buffalo-skin wigwam high up in the Honduran Cordilleras. This took place around the time when her father lost his arm; it was the price he paid for heroism. But he had not yet attained the rank of general.
Don Matías didn’t know whose praises he should sing more ardently, those of his true-love-become-flesh or those of his future father-in-law, Don Patuco, who was responsible for the miraculous Incarnation.
Don Patuco, the Honduran general, was tasting the bitter sopas of exile on the island of Mallorca. As a young soldier he made his name protecting the construction of the Inter-Oceanic Railroad against attacks by brigands, losing his right arm in a skirmish. He battled gangrene in stinking field hospitals, and finally won. Once the stump healed, he began his rapid rise through the ranks. His country�
�s supreme command sent him from one endangered borderland to the next; wherever the manco made his appearance, the one-armed warrior, the enemy retreated. He played a role in every insurrection and pronunciamiento, and it wasn’t long before his name came to stand for a free, united Honduras, under God and beholden to no other power. In the 1920s a carefully planned coup d’état failed as the result of the bribery of one of the conspirators. Don Patuco and a small band of followers were forced to leave the homeland soil that contained his arm and his wife. Deported by the neighboring countries, and after indescribably difficult wanderings, this stateless group of warriors eventually landed on Mallorca, in the same village where Don Matías was struggling to wrest the younger generation from the Spanish vice of illiteracy. I never learned the general’s real name, since he was living incognito. Don Matías would reveal only that the father of his future bride was a direct descendant of the Zambo general Guardiola, a famous personage in Honduran history.
Since time immemorial priests, generals, and whores have been the great sources of energy and progress in the Southern lands; their history can never be written without giving close attention to this Trinity. Don Matías and I did just that during our sessions on the flour sacks. We determined, for example, that two of the categories were subsumed and united under the third, whereas enmity could prevail between the servants of a militant Church and those of the state. This play of forces makes the South more attractive for me than the sun, but not more attractive than its wines.
Don Matías shared my antipathy to the clergy, although he was not as enraged as I was to see representatives of this caste pursuing women with flowing cassocks and fanatical leers, then seeking out the next best church, casting themselves down before a crucifix, and flagellating themselves. Matías had his own experiences with Men of God, and I had mine. “Be on your guard against generals with two arms and priests with forked tongues!” he said to me one day when waves of political excitement entered the bake shop and raised much dust—though not the peaceable white dust from which bread is made.
I knew several priests with forked tongue, but I couldn’t quite figure out what Don Matías meant by two-armed generals. He explained this eloquently, using as an example Don Patuco, who had passed on the maxim to him:
A general must display his courage in front of his troops; he must leap into the breach, race across the savannahs, and aim straight for the enemy’s heart. “None of your remote observation posts for field marshals, Don Vigoleis, none of your map-room strategy! Don Patuco won all his victories with his sword in his fist. It was only natural that certain limbs might remain behind on the battlefield. When the militiaman Don Patuco chased after the brigands to rescue the pouch containing funds of the Inter-Oceanic Railway, a bandit sliced off his right arm. The robbers were close to being victorious, but after the field surgeon bound off Don Patuco’s arm stump, our hero declared that he wanted to fight on, and someone handed him a sword. But then an amazing thing happened: Patuco refused to re-enter the battle without his own sword. So they looked around and found his blade still in the fist of his severed arm. In their haste they were unable to loosen the rigid fingers from the handle. Patuco, mindful of bloody old myths of the Mosquito Coast mestizos, took the other sword and with a single blow separated his former hand from his former arm, grasped his dead right hand with his fearless left one and, sensing now a double unity with himself and the spirits of his forebears, he cried out, ‘Follow me!’ Before sundown the railroad funds were again in the hands of the Trans-Oceanic Company. Patuco was promoted to sergeant.”
“What a glorious hero’s life! What grand material for a mythological-religious epic! Isn’t there any Honduran bard who can render this in rhyme and meter for posterity? The whole epic tradition pales in comparison, the Germanic and Greek heroic sagas and even the astral myth of Gilgamesh. You are the one, Don Matías. You must compose this song of the double-fisted sword. You owe it to the father of your Little Flesh!”
Don Matías gave me a pleasant smile. And then he picked up his cane and, as if it were a scimitar, slammed it down first on my flour sack, then on his own, raising such a cloud of dust that we disappeared for a few minutes from the censorious glances of the baker down in the underworld. When we finally surfaced from our mythological mist, white-in-white like the shades of another world but plagued by a very earthly attack of sneezing, he said to me in a conspiratorial tone, “Don Vigoleis, my Teutonic friend, before the flour in the sacks we are sitting on has been baked into bread, I shall introduce you to the poet of the Honduran national epic. All things take time. Poems that are meant to outlive the generations do not simply grow like the blossoms of a single summer!”
I wrapped up my bread, paid at the counter, and rushed home. At first Beatrice just shook her head, then she shook me. I had never before returned from the bakeshop so completely covered in white. “Did the bakerman finally chuck you out? If I were he I wouldn’t have just kept gaping s-o-o long at the two of you!”
Just shake me as much as you want, I thought to myself. You’ll be astounded as soon as I start telling you my Wild West story. “Don Patuco…” But my tale of derring-do made almost no impression on Beatrice; she would have preferred any dime-store detective novel. She already knew South America. As a child she herself had raced bareback across the savannahs and herded cattle with cowboys. Without doubt, she said, my “General” Patuco was known in his home country as a much-feared and much-sought-after cattle rustler, one of the big-time sort who ravaged entire ranches. And we were supposed to think that he was the savior of his country? All right, why not? Any dictator we could name was also a cattle rustler, and the South American variety had plenty of models to take after, most of them beasts of the pure-bred sort.
“But what about the Honduran national poet, the one who is writing the saga of Patuco? Aren’t you touched by that idea?”
That she would have to see with her own eyes, said the Swiss theologian’s daughter, all at once renouncing her own Indian heritage and her wild chases across the savannahs. That’s what makes her so complicated: her unexpected transitions, her wavering between Basel and the Inca lakes.
Was it two sacks of flour that got baked into bread, or was it more than two? Far be it from me to take literally Don Matías’ prediction, one that he uttered in a rush of enthusiasm for the Honduran national cause. But I actually got to meet the poet.
For me, meeting a poet is always a moving event. Poets embody all that transcends mere reality—as long as one doesn’t get too familiar with them. In my lifetime I have met several of them, great and not so great, published and unpublished. None of them has ever resembled the Honduran poet I met on my flour sack when on this particular day I entered the shop for my daily bread.
He was a pale, thirtyish fellow, dressed in black, with hollow cheeks that seemed cadaverous, but in his case were no doubt the mark of his Muse. His cheekbones projected sharply, his mouth was puffy, and a delicate mustachio followed the contour of his upper lip. It wasn’t his melancholy expression that made me realize who this new customer really was; rather, it was the significant look with which Don Matías greeted me on this occasion. What ensued was a rendezvous of the unpublished poets. Beatrice had sent me here for a half a loaf of bread and a pound of flour. But just how important are bread and flour when the inchoate murmurings of a national saga are sitting on a sack in front of you?
Don Matías rose up ceremoniously, took his cane, and limped from behind the counter to effect the introduction: “Don Gracias a Dios, poeta—Don Vigoleis, poeta.” We bowed to each other—I, for my part, with a deep bend of my torso, Don Gracias a Dios less deeply since, doubtless taxed by his patriotic visions, he chose to remain seated on his white throne. Today I am amused to recall this encounter, but at the time I was deeply affected by it. Here we were, all three of us prodigiously gifted poets, all three of us showing great promise, if not the greatest talent. Three poets, three destinies. When would the world sing our praises? Or ra
ther, when would we start singing to the world?
Unlike Vigoleis at various times, Don Gracias a Dios was not one to curry favor with book publishers or newspaper editors. He had a loftier mission; his recognition as a poet would not emerge from the waste-paper baskets of third parties. An entire nation was looking to him, and thus he could keep his mind focused inside himself—which he now did on his flour-sack perch.
“Books have their own destiny,” says a well-known maxim of a certain Terentianus Maurus. But aren’t the destinies of those books’ authors also worthy of a classical quotation? With Don Gracias a Dios this was surely the case, in spite of the fact that his work wasn’t published. For this reason I shall now tell his story, which Don Matías revealed to me on the occasion in question. With a wave of his hand he asked me to free up some space for him on a flour sack, and as the self-serving customers came and went I learned what the Norns are capable of spinning if they have some halfway decent thread on their spindle.
The poet Gracias a Dios was the child of a mother who with annual regularity gave birth to a stillborn baby. This had occurred six times, and her seventh was imminent when a miracle happened: she came to term and bore the child, and it lived. “Thanks be to God!” she rejoiced, “my prayers have been answered!” Hence the boy’s name: Gracias a Dios.
It soon became apparent that little God-be-Thanked was unlike other little children. As the first to emerge safe and sound from his mother’s womb, he was born for higher things; as a poet he was meant to join the ranks of the eternally rejected. He combined in himself the energy of all six of the babies who preceded him but never took a single breath, and the result was that he harbored a longing for all that is infinite and inexpressible. This became manifest when he entered puberty—pale, driving because he was himself driven, brooding with hot breath in the superheated air of his unhealthy homeland. Don Matías pointed to the counter drawer where he kept a notebook containing God-be-Thanked’s earliest responses to divine inspiration. Eventually, he said, they would be preserved in his country’s Pantheon. I remarked that they had a more tragic effect sitting inside a baker’s drawer, and both men agreed. With a dejected gesture of his pale hand Don Gracias a Dios wiped some flour dust from his mustache.
The Island of Second Sight Page 62