The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Then came Patuco’s insurrection and defeat. God-be-Thanked’s father perished at the barricades, perforated by bullets of the government forces. Mindful of the miracle of the “living birth,” the general urged the boy to unite his destiny with that of the men who had now become stateless. Henceforth he was to be their guiding spirit, their migratory talisman. Filled with renewed inspiration, he agreed. Has a poet ever failed to comprehend special voices that speak to him from no matter where? Gracias a Dios said farewell to his bride, his lodging, the soil of his homeland, all that was near and dear to him. Sooner dead than slave! And with the others he went into exile, into a transcendent new realm where the destiny of his nation could—and would!—prevail in his verses. For was it not, Don Matías continued, a poet’s mission to seize meteors that plunge through the universe and restore them to the sacred cosmic order? They would return victorious, the band of men declared to a company of weeping women and girls as they secretly embarked at a coastland hideout. They would be back, it was only a matter of time. They would reappear suddenly, and the trumpets would blare for their arrival! They’re at the Mosquito Coast! Don Patuco, Manco, Maneta, the General, our Savior!

  Matías portrayed the scene in the most colorful language, surely not without unconscious allusions to the Napoleonic legend of the March to Paris after the hero’s resurrection from the Hundred Days of banishment. God-be-Thanked had reached this phase of the national saga in his notebook. To compose the final stanza he would have to await the fanfare of freedom.

  Down below, Jaume toiled by the sweat of his cheese-colored brow, struggling more with his repressed anger than with the viscous mass he was supposed to knead to provide food for the masses up above. He was lacking the proper insight, for surely it is the masses that poets sing and tell stories for, the masses that heroes die for, and the masses that call forth new heroes and new poets. All Jaume could see was the kneading board under him and the time-wasting blabbermouths above him. He sweated all the more, and Don Matías continued:

  After the band arrived on Mallorca the poet lived in the pueblo where Don Patuco bided his time and kept his blade sharp, while his daughter Encarnación created a flag for the pronunciamento. (This was the design: from out of an undulant Sea of Freedom a fist juts forth, holding another fist in its iron grasp; the second fist holds a battleaxe, and the scene is crowned by a rainbow in the Honduran national colors.) Then Don Gracias a Dios was ordered to Palma, where he could more readily scan the international press for news of Honduras and gauge public opinion concerning his fatherland. As minimal as this information was—the world hardly took notice of his puny country, no matter how explosive things were, God-be-Thanked’s poems gave reason to believe that the Great Day would soon arrive. The poet’s fingers were literally itching to write his final stanza. “As a fellow poet,” Don Matías added, “Vigoleis should know about such things.”

  And how I knew about such things! But I didn’t notice that Don Gracias a Dios had itchy fingers, unless his nail-biting—in which many poets engage—was to be taken as a harbinger of future glory.

  With his pallid complexion and his consumptive ardor, Don Gracias a Dios struck me as the affecting epitome of the patriotic young firebrand pining away for his humiliated homeland, awaiting the hour when his nation would rise up as one man, and on the wings of his own song would carry him home as the once-banished troubadour of his people. From my own experience I am unfamiliar with such homesick love for the fatherland, even though for several years I have eaten the so-called bread of exile, which for me has never tasted more bitter than wherever in the world the bread of poverty tastes sour. It’s possible to live it up even in exile. I know several such persons who back home never had it so good as in their stark new surroundings.

  But I am interrupting Don Matías’s account. I meant only to point out that in conversation with the bard of Honduran national shame and rebirth and his Spanish friend, the suitor of the cross-eyed embroiderer in the pueblo, I once again had occasion to point to the Western literary heritage. I could name any number of historical models. I could tell these men about German greatness and German love of Freedom, about the German night and German grave-digging, about emergence into the light of a New Day, about ethnic and patriotic poetry, about lyres and swords, about Körner, Schill, Arndt, and the latest German uniformed seer Ludendorff. That got their attention! It roused the youth on the flour sack from his lyrical reveries. His eyes took on a fiery cast, and he was about to rise from the sitting position. But apparently his legs had gone to sleep—like my own—and he dropped down again against the metal grill. For a while he was hidden by flour dust—one no longer saw him, but heard his voice intoning an original stanza out into the bakeshop, upwards and downwards. Just a single stanza—he had to conserve his energy. When he again became visible, his singing had already died away.

  Don Matías, moved by the puzzling outburst brought on by my German Sturm und Drang, now came into action in his steamy wrestler’s jersey. With one swoop he pulled open the counter drawer, fished around in it, but couldn’t find what he was looking for: his own contribution to this memorable moment. Probably he had left it in his classroom desk out at the pueblo.

  I leaped into the breach—which I was able to do since I happened to have with me the Insel edition of the collected works of Hölderlin. I had already told Don Matías about my thin-paper philosophy, and he declared that he also wished to possess a volume like this one on papel biblia. “Death for the Fatherland,” I began, “by Hölderlin.” This majestic, cynical stanza has probably never had such a rapt audience as these two men, Gracias a Dios and Matías, sitting there on Jaume’s moldy flour sacks. Speaking for the German Parnassus, I urged youths to descend in waves from on top of their hills to engage with the murderous enemy rising up from the valley below. I infused them with the soul of their own youth and enjoined them, like a band of magicians, to do battle in their just cause. And their patriotic songs—Gracias a Dios knew this just as keenly as Hölderlin, who was close to insanity—weakened the knees of the dishonorable foe, and finally victory was ours: “Live on, O fatherland, / and do not count the dead! For you, / beloved country, not one too many has fallen.” Not one – i.e., none!

  I recited these verses first in German. Not very well, not like Wüllner the professional elocutionist, although like him my hair was white. Then I translated word for word. I received sincere applause. Even Jaume down below was clapping, but not for me; he was slapping mounds of dough into a trough. I made my biggest impression on the two poets with the line about not counting the dead. How far would we get if people started counting them? Don Gracias a Dios explained that beginning with his very first pronunciamiento, Don Patuco had made it a sacred principle never to count those left behind; only in this manner would the battle for freedom be won. I agreed, although Hölderlin hardly needed my support. A soldier fallen on the field of battle is of course only a legend. He becomes real only on the pages of written history. If it were any different, how many youths would be willing to descend from the hills in waves? We should leave counting to the chroniclers who juggle and manipulate numbers according to the particular philosophy of history they serve. How many soldiers fell on the fields at Chalons, at Waterloo, at Stalingrad? Only a worrywart carves notches in his rifle-butt. Me gusta ver un cementerio de muertos bien relleno, Don Matías was now declaiming in the words of his pseudo-Espronceda, and it was just as convincing as my Hölderlin.

  The hoarse bakeshop doorbell jingled incessantly. The little people, the cannon fodder of our patriotic songs, came in for the bread they had been toiling for ever since that unholy story about a woman and a snake, one of which stepped on the other’s head while the other snapped at the first one’s heel—it has never been cleared up which was which. Their domestic labor was at least as strenuous as that of Jaume, who was now baking their bread while muttering curses.

  Don Matías later explained to me that the Honduran youth’s sallow complexion was not onl
y the result of patriotic fervor and homesickness. Gracias a Dios had an inamorata in the city of Palma, a girl he sang to while standing under her window, like the thousands of other mortals who night after night lift their gaze to their beloved until the girls, chased away from the window, move over to the next house so the serenade can continue. Gracias a Dios was used to this game; surely it helped him cope with his sorrow, and it kept the embers of poetry alive in him. All the situation needed was a puff of air, and the torch would again burn brightly—for Honduras!

  Well then, said Don Matías, now that we had talked over so many things and, as it were, given heaven and earth a good preliminary plowing to reveal what the noble bonds of humanity and friendship could achieve, he saw no reason to conceal from me the final truth, insofar as I, a poeta, had not intuited it already. Don Gracias a Dios also had a genuine, home-town girlfriend named Asunción (Ascension or Assumption), whom he intended to marry when he returned to Honduras with flying colors. He thought of her every single day—and this was weakening him.

  “Hay que ser hombre, Don Matías,” I said. “You should stand up like a man, even in exile!”

  Like bosom comrades we clapped the flour dust from each other’s shoulders. I strode homewards carrying my bread, while Matías remained seated on his sack behind the counter, still in trouble with his brother-in-law Jaume, who thought that things were getting more and more out of hand.

  For a few pages now I must leave Don Matías out of sight, but not the cause of Honduran independence, as I introduce my reader to another exiled combatant from the one-armed general’s platoon. His name, borrowed from the geography of their home country like those of all their fellow conspirators, will in my hazy memory always be associated with Reinhold Conrad Muschler’s novel Bianca Maria. This new fellow was the cobbler Ulua.

  Ulua not only had two names—that was normal for an insurrectionist—but two professions. Besides being a shoemaker he was a petardist, or perhaps I should say a petardero, since in Spain the word petardista is reserved for a crook or extortionist who secretly lights fuses and blows up whole houses with his home-made bombs, the petards. Ulua was no extortionist, though one might say that he was extorting himself, which is true of any good revolutionary or blind adherent of a militant political movement. There can be no victory without idealism. But we shall go no further into that.

  Ulua had fought at the side of Patuco; he had undermined many a stretch of railway and filled many a hollow bone with explosives. This was in fact his specialty: bombs made from bones. As soon as he was appointed chief fireworks expert of the Honduran national movement, Don Patuco’s fame rose as the most feared cattle rustler in Central America, a development that brought discredit to his pronunciamientos for quite a long time. Ulua needed cattle bones. He sneered at the paper bags that others, Don Alonso and his gang among them, were always glueing together. For him that was child’s play, whereas “we in the Cordilleras, we in the savannahs…”

  Ulua lived in Palma in one of the dilapidated houses lining the square near the dilapidated post office and bordering the more elevated portion of the city—the square where Julietta used to dance. It took courage to risk your life clambering up four floors on rotting stairways. His wife was the daughter of Mallorquin immigrants, and it was she who advised our freedom fighter to take residence on the Golden Isle to await the Great Day. Their marriage was blessed with a son named Sacramento. While still young he began to abjure the God to whom his pious mother had dedicated him at his baptism. His name, meaning “Holy of Holies,” no longer quite fit his nature, and so he latched on to “Pablo” as an innocuous substitute since no one associated it any longer with the Prince of Apostles. He had just turned twenty, but like all of these kids with mustaches, he looked older.

  Gracias a Dios took a room in Ulua’s house, thus closing the circle.

  My first meeting with Ulua’s son took place of course on Jaume’s flour sacks. Pablo himself initiated our second encounter by rapping the iron fist at our front door. “Welcome, Don Pablo! Beatrice, here comes a combatant from Don Patuco’s legion. Up to now he’s only been a punctuation mark in the epic poem of our mutual friend Gracias a Dios, but soon, who knows…?”

  “Enorme!” cried Don Pablo, “enorme, Don Vigoleis, a punctuation mark! And perhaps only a question mark! And that’s why I have come. Doña Beatriz, I would like to learn English, for quite frankly I don’t think much of this mania of our old guard for upsetting the world with hollow bones. Every month a revolution, and then once every year Holy Communion at Easter time—enorme, enorme, but that’s not getting us anywhere. I want to go to England, and then to the States.”

  This was Don Pablo the skeptic, the young man who doubted the revolutionary efficacy of hollow bones. From then on we called him Don Enorme, because this was his every second word, and that is what he was in every respect. He worked as a clerk in a shoe factory. In his free time, which in Spain means during working hours, he occupied himself with literature and philosophy. He had learned German by reading, and for this it wasn’t necessary for the god of language to enter his Golden Vein. He was of course a Krausist, he knew his Nietzsche inside out, and Stirner too, whose maxims he had taken to heart: “For me nothing is more important than myself.” He dismissed Ortega y Gasset, the darling of the philosophical set, with a few barbarisms, only to sing the praises of Count Keyserling’s Latin American confessions—“enorme, enorme!” Now that we had staked out the landscape a bit, he asked how much Don Vigo would charge for philosophical instruction twice a week. But please: I was to understand that what interested him most in German philosophy was whatever seemed most obscure to the teacher himself; the two of us could make an attempt to find our way together on the basis of our very different intellectual backgrounds and attitudes.

  Things became more enormous than ever when I suggested that we collaborate on an anthology of German octopus philosophy. We would work together on the Spanish translation, then translate from Spanish into English, from English into Italian, and through further antagonistic languages eventually back into the original German. The resulting work, a dilution and distortion containing many new gems of wisdom, I would then recommend to a publisher as a collection of aphorisms by a long-lost Sanskrit philosopher of personal redemption.

  We did not end up undertaking this philosophical chrestomathy, long a favorite project of mine. Rather than tempt the gods, we stayed with the tried and true. Until the outbreak of the Civil War Pablo remained my indefatigable disciple, and a dangerous one with an enormous brain that absorbed and assimilated everything with frictionless rapidity. On only one other occasion have I ever dealt with such a quick-witted, exotic thinking machine with interchangeable gears and dust-free lubrication vents: the aforementioned Surinam writer Albert Helman. I stand in amazement at these prodigious cerebrators, and not without trepidation at witnessing forces at work in them that the Western world has long since lost sight of.

  Now one might suspect that Ulua and Don Patuco would be proud of such a champion of their national uprising. But no. Don Gracias a Dios, pining away in pre-matrimonial love for the fatherland; Encarnación, sewing away at the national banner; and a certain Don Sulaco, a drug dealer with connections to the Clock Tower who provided the group with the necessary financing—all these received more attention from the crippled warrior than the philosophy student who could never wield a sword, much less hurl a petard stuffed by his father’s swarthy thumb, without blowing himself to smithereens in the process. His conflicts with the Old Guard were approaching a crisis, and the shoe factory paid a minimal wage.—“Doña Beatriz, a year from now I must know English perfectly!”

  Ulua was getting less and less pleasure from his Sacramento. The latter, not a stick-in-the-mud like his philosophical preceptor, who is more afraid of unexploded bombs than when they actually go off, was growing tired of the “old guys” constant nagging him about creating a revolution. He said that the next bomb to go off in Palma would get tossed by his
own hand, in front of pre-arranged witnesses. Would I care to be on hand?

  One day he came for a lesson and instead of taking a philosopher out of his briefcase he pulled out a bicycle-racing cap with blue and white stripes. Tomorrow he would be on the Plaza Cort at 12 noon wearing this cap as a signal to his cohorts, and would throw a powerfully loaded bone into the Ayuntamiento. “The Spanish revolutionaries can take care of the rest, I’ll have nothing more to do with it. Everything has been carefully set up. Later you’ll have to let Don Patuco know through a third party that Ulua’s son will stop at nothing.” He gave a thunderous laugh, and then we lost ourselves in a discussion of Cogito, ergo sum and its bearing on anarchism.

  Sacramento, Ulua’s son, threw his bomb at the stroke of noon. It did no more damage than the local petards from the workshop of the anarchist Count. The insurrection was put down with a few rubber truncheons. Sacramento escaped. He threw away his racer’s cap together with the explosive bone—an ingenious double stratagem by the philosophically trained terrorist. We harmless passers-by, surprised by this revolt on the streets, noticed a pickpocket lifting up the cap and heading off in the distance. But a policeman with lightning-fast reflexes immediately put bomb and cap together in his mind; since a bomb obeys laws that hardly concern a Spanish policeman, he chased after the thief, whose legs, unfortunately for him, were shorter. He was dragged over to the constabulary. It wasn’t until much later that the actual cause of the disturbance was ferreted out.