The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Thus our good friend, the ever-alert Mevrouw van Beverwijn, had Mamú’s kidneys as her chief concern. While her own husband’s analogous organs degenerated beyond recall, she devoted her magical talents to those of the American heiress. And lo and behold, Mamú got better! We can’t say that she got all better—she was too old for that, and she had lived too extravagantly for a total and permanent cure. But her health returned to the extent that she was again able to eat and drink whatever she wanted, or almost. She could again enjoy the company of us younger folk, and she avoided older people more and more. I can attest to this transformation, just as I can confirm a “miracle” of Our Lady of Fatima, one that I witnessed later in Lisbon. Certainly the testimony of a non-believer is worth a great deal in cases that involve miracles.

  It is beyond doubt that Mamú got better. Were the doctors wrong with their diagnosis? Were the people who lived with Mamú mistaken all along? Mamú herself told it this way: she had faith, and therefore nothing stood in the way of her being healed by the spirit. There was no earthly way of explaining it. Come to think of it, it’s also not possible to explain a poem: one has faith in it, unless it is simply too awful a poem. But what did Mamú, the atheist, have faith in? In the World Spirit? In Don Matías’ pantheism? In the ogress Mevrouw van Beverwijn? No, her faith was in a potent tale told by this Dutch busybody, a hair-raising verhaal of the sort one used to find in old household devotional handbooks, but which actually took place on the plantation owned by the van Beverwijns in the Dutch East Indies. Mamú once told us the story, but I also heard it from the mouth of Mevrouw van Bewerwijn herself. The two versions differed in certain details. Mamú’s version was benign, and not designed to convince anyone. Mevrouw’s variant, on the other hand, coming from a fanatical and evil-minded priestess of the cult, had the ring of Eternal Verity about it: woe to those who will not believe!

  On the day before our visit, Mevrouw had arranged a conversation with Mamú, who told her that she was going to die within days. In fluent English, Mevrouw preached Christian Science to Mamú, concealing all the while her own husband’s kidney problem and tossing in, as an example of the healing power of the spirit, a story about a dog.

  These Dutch planters had a dog that always went along when they visited neighboring farms. During one of these visits, contrary to their own custom, they tied the dog to the back of their car. On leaving for home they forgot to take the dog back with them into the car. At the time, she wasn’t at all sure how such ghastly negligence was possible, but later she understood it as a form of Divine Intervention. The poor beast was dragged behind their vehicle for many miles, which is to say that the dog suffered horribly in tongue and lung for the entire length of the involuntary sleigh ride. Once arrived at their plantation, the couple discovered the whimpering animal behind their car, half dead, covered with blood, a total mess. His fur had been scoured away over large parts of his body. But the worst damage was to his paws. They had disappeared. Only bloody stumps were left. Native servants nursed the animal, but no one thought he would survive. And yet he didn’t die. He recovered, but as a pathetic cripple.

  A nearby planter, who practiced Christian Science and proselytized for the creed, offered his services as a faith-healer for their dog. There were skeptical smiles. The paws had gone, they would not grow back— after all, a dog is not a salamander. But why not let this man of religion do what he wants, they thought. There’s nothing to lose. With his prayers, the healer re-created the dog’s paws and claws. According to Mamú, the healing process lasted but an instant; Mevrouw van Beverwijn herself, on the other hand, said that the Spirit took a month to regenerate the tissues. The photographs that Mevrouw presented as proof of the miracle didn’t show how long it took for the cells to develop into skin and fur and claws. Mijnheer van Beverwijn couldn’t remember at all how long it had taken, although he did remark—albeit not in so many words—that their dog had better luck than his own kidneys. As usual he deferred to his wife. Like a dog.

  At the time of the Byzantine Iconoclasm, the Caliph of Damascus ordered that the Church Father Chrysorras have one of his hands cut off for alleged high treason. The worthy Father asked for the return of his severed hand (oh, Don Patuco, it has all happened before!). He then pleaded with the Virgin Mary to aid him in his struggle against the iconoclasts, and to let his hand grow back again as the only means of proving his innocence. The hand grew back. Or so the legend has it. With the Lord nothing is impossible. And a dog, Mevrouw van Beverwijn said, is neither closer to nor farther from His omnipotence than a human creature, be he a sinner or a paragon of piety and virtue.

  The dog got well. I have seen photographs of the four paws. Mamú got well, because she believed in the restored four canine paws. How to explain this, the devil only knows.

  In those days, when Mevrouw van Beverwijn had joined with God or the gods in the struggle for Mamú’s kidneys, a wave of faith in miracles swept over Mallorca. A mother’s son—I’m telling this in biblical style, which is how it came to pass—had died, and he was taken out to the cemetery to be buried. In southern countries, because of the heat, dead persons are often buried on the very day of demise, or at least they are brought to a mortuary. This youth was therefore taken to the morgue on the graveyard premises and had to wait while the earth was opened. His mother was an extremely poor woman who had lived on her son’s earnings. Now she was penniless. Should she go begging at the cathedral? She prayed to the Lord, Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, and the Heavenly Hosts, that her son might be returned unto her. And Heaven heard her plea. When the men came and lifted up the casket to place it in the earth, the miracle had already taken place. From inside the coffin the pallbearers heard a knocking sound. And they were sore afraid, though they were rough men used to handling dead bodies as if they were inanimate objects—which of course they are. One cannot expect a gravedigger to have respect for the dead. The men were, I say, sore afraid; they dropped the box and fled. As it hit the ground, the box burst open and the dead youth fell out. His mother, who had gone to her son’s burial with trust in the Lord’s great power, was not surprised when she heard the knocking, for it was as if she were just waiting for the moment when the casket would open. She picked up the boy in her arms and carried him back to the ossuary. There she laid him down with maternal care on a wooden scaffold. The youth raised his arm, as if to strike or caress his mother. She, whose faith in the Lord had moved Him to make manifest His omnipotence, prayed in a loud voice, sang hymns of praise, and thanked the Almighty. The future would take care of the rest. The main thing was that her kid was alive.

  News of the miracle spread throughout the city like wildfire. Great throngs of people streamed out to the cemetery, some discussing the marvelous event among themselves, others singing hymns of praise. A number of ecstatics beat their breasts and openly confessed their sins. An unsolved case of robbery that had taken place years before found its solution here: the thief chastised himself in public. At length the authorities saw the need to intervene. Physicians were alerted, in particular the one who had made out the death certificate, and whose career was therefore in jeopardy. No one wants to be buried alive, but doctors ought not to be blamed for every little mishap. The doctor in question pronounced the boy dead a second time. “But how dead is he?” the Palmesans inquired. Surely not as dead as Dickens’ old man Marley, who was as dead as a doornail. “As dead as a coffin nail!” said the doctor. He stood by his diagnosis, and as far as he was concerned, the case was closed.

  But not as far as the boy was concerned. Every once in a while he raised his arm—one could never quite determine whether this signified a blessing or a threat. At other times he even sat up. His mother never left his side. Because she was poor, she was unable to persuade the authorities to have the boy taken to her home. The death certificate had been issued, so the boy was supposed to be dead. Just who did this young fellow think he was? Who was he protesting against? Why, he wasn’t even eating anything.

  The
professor of medicine from Germany, the one who made such a grievous error with Mamú’s kidneys, learned of the case and examined the young man. This time he made no mistake. The boy was alive, he declared, but he would soon die unless taken immediately to a hospital, or if necessary to his own, the doctor’s, residence. Clinically dead? No, very much alive, but totally gone to the dogs. He offered to treat the patient for no fee. Once again the authorities intervened. This German professor did not have a license to practice medicine in Spain. He had a reputation as a quack, but they let him continue examining the boy anyway. Colleagues had arrived from the mainland. They percussed and stethoscoped the patient all over. Their victim remained motionless throughout, except for an occasional arm-raising and now and then a twitch that went through his whole body. The diagnostic literature on “twitching” could have been amplified significantly there at the cemetery in Palma, for the dead youth kept on living and twitching for a full six weeks more. Then a sudden, universal twitch shook his entire body. He was now so very dead that Professor Hufeland himself, Germany’s famed specialist in clinical death, would have attested to this agonizing exitus in writing and without the faintest scruples.

  The pilgrimages to the cemetery were taking on dubious forms. At the gate, religious hawkers were selling chewing gum, holy pictures, turrón, roasted chestnuts, white mice, lemonade, holy water, and rosaries. My grandfather would certainly have nailed up his coffee sign. The excitement in the city grew. Holy Mother Church remained silent, awaiting further developments. As much as She welcomes any and all true miracles, She is strict about such things and refuses to be misled by a simple case of clinical death. With this in mind, I discussed the case with one of our neighborhood patres, and I quickly let go with the assertion that when it came to clinically dead people, the Church—how could it be otherwise?—was cruel and lacked imagination.

  Proof? Years ago I had heard a bell tolling, but I no longer remembered precisely where it hung. The good Father kept prying, and so I gave him the story of a canonization that failed. In the heat of our theological disputation, and urged on by subconscious feelings of regional chauvinism, I decided to have things center on a certain Electoral Bishop of Cologne. This servant of the Lord had accomplished more than the required number of miracles for canonization. His name was firmly anchored in the minds of the faithful. The advocatus diaboli had raised no objections. A papal bull recounted the life and deeds of the candidate for sainthood. Everything was shipshape—no doubt even more so than I reported in my story.

  Only one act remained, and that was to exhume the bishop’s mortal remains in preparation for his “translation” into a special vault. But when the stone tomb was chiseled open, the priests and prelates were seized with horror: the candidate was lying on his stomach! That is, the skeleton showed unmistakably that the corpse had been set in its final resting-place in prone position. Was that a proper way to bury a Christian? Clerical minds started working feverishly: what had actually happened? Holy Mother Church came up with a clever way to wriggle out of the embarrassing predicament these prone bones had put Her in. The bishop, She declared, had been mistakenly buried alive. Waking from his rigid state, he had been stricken with fright and started blaspheming. He ought, of course, to have yielded to the will of the Almighty and awaited the hour when it would please the Lord to lead His servant out of apparent death into the arms of genuine death. Yet instead, the bishop tossed and turned in his tomb until, lying on his belly—an outrage to all sainthood, a slap in God’s Eternal Countenance—he breathed his unworthy last. It would be unthinkable to canonize such a sinner! God forbid! And so they plugged the almost-saint back into his stone box.

  Now wasn’t that a case of hard-heartedness and failure of imagination? How did I think things had really happened, my priestly interlocutor wanted to know. This way: when the man awoke from his rigor mortis and was about to rub his eyes—“Where am I?”—his hands hit the coffin lid. Buried alive! Having survived this moment of mortal terror, the saint thanked his Creator for granting him this final trial, one which he, in his steadfast faith, was to endure before he should meet his Heavenly Father face to face. Bedded softly on luxurious ecclesiastical textiles, with head raised, as comfortable as one can be inside a granite container, he lay there and started thinking. Not frantically, for he knew what was proper for a future saint. It was his desire to die humbly, as he had lived. With one final effort, he twisted around to the lowly belly-down position, one that is indeed dishonorable for a bishop, and gave up the ghost. The Lord took him unto Himself. Holy Mother Church anathematized him.

  The priest listened to my legendary version of the legend, shaking his head all the while. Then he said gently that I had things quite wrong—not about the Church, but about the saint in question. That man was, he said, the author of The Imitation of Christ.—“What? My fellow Lower Rhinelander Hämerken?” —“Hämerken?”—“Yes, Thomas à Kempis?”—“The very same!”

  I was astounded. My fatherland had manufactured a stab-in-the-back legend about its war heroes, and now I stood at the cradle of a belly-down legend about a Christian saint! Not just any saint, but my mystic friend whose Imitatio hung in the handiest position on the line back at our Tower of Meditation…

  The Palma cemetery administration, yielding to pressure from the populace, permitted the mother to set up home next to the youth’s body. There she sat, waking and praying. God, who had given her son back to her, would surely be willing to pester some official into declaring the death certificate null and void. That is what the mother, not a very intelligent woman, was hoping for. The Lord had done what He could, the rest was up to human beings. But humans, especially if they are officials, seldom cross the narrow borders of their own stupidity. A certificate is a certificate. Doesn’t God know that? Well then, we now have before us the age-old question of Job, which my mentor Pascoaes answers so beautifully.

  No one wanted to bury anyone any more. Many people didn’t dare to lie down to sleep, for fear of waking up in a coffin. Some of Beatrice’s pupils called off their lessons, refusing to learn anything more until the miraculous youth was either truly dead or truly alive. In the midst of this mania there arose anguished notions of self-chastisement, fear of the Lord, the devil’s touch. Mamú’s household also had come profoundly under the influence of the chiliastic movement spurred on by the boy caught between death and life. Mevrouw van Beverwijn came along with her legend of God’s mercy to canines, and threw it into the heady brew of pious hopes. Not all threats of death bring death itself! Behold the youth at the Palma graveyard! Her story of her dog and his four paws fell on well-tilled soil. Mamú announced that she was willing to have her kidneys prayed for.

  Afterward she confessed to us that without the twitching youth she never would have fallen for the Christian Science rigmarole. The boy had dropped out of his box just in time. No hay mal que por bien no venga—this saying was getting truer and truer on our island.

  Mamú thus became a devotee of Christian Science—not what one would call an impassioned believer, but a very active and hard-working member. For the Mallorcan chapter of Scientism her house became what the cottage of Lydia the dye-seller at Thyatira had been for the early Christian movement of the Apostle to the Gentiles: a church.

  Our second visit to El Terreno took place at a time when Mamú, in the opinion of all her doctors, ought to have been dead or at least in an ambiguous condition somewhere between extremes, perhaps lying next to the youth at the Palma cemetery. But she was alive and chipper. Her features, formerly distorted by the imminence of death, now had a kind of sallow plumpness that was to stay with her to the very end. Her abdominal cramps had ceased, she had no more hemorrhages, her entire arsenal of medicines went into the garbage can, and her live-in nurses had been dismissed—with a generous bonus, of course. Such was the scene when we revisited Mamú. We celebrated privately her resurrection. Her cocktail-mixing daughter had left, and telegrams had been sent to her other children: “Alarm over.
Mamú prayed to health. Death nowhere near. Live Mamú welcomes visitors.” They never showed up.

  Mevrouw van Beverwijn told her that spiritual healing was not connected with diet. Intercession with divine forces had nothing to do with recipes, so long as no one ever laced meals with poison. This was an important matter for Mamú, for she very much liked to eat good food. At one time she had enjoyed the same close relationship with Madame Sacher in Vienna as her late princely spouse had enjoyed with Franz Joseph, the Austrian Kaiser. Despite the fact that I have never been at all close to such prominent individuals—which I did not hesitate to confess to her— I, too, am dreadfully fond of excellent cuisine, and thus our ancient heiress was all the warmer in her feelings toward me. In the course of time Mamú discovered further amiable qualities in her friend Vigolo. For example, that he had had some intriguing experiences during his brief life span, and that he was capable of recounting them with spicy affability. That there had been adventures, for example, regarding a genuine Spanish puta. That in my student days, arm in arm with my mother, I had visited the mothers of the City of Cologne. Or again, that the “Torre del Reloj,” a Mallorcan cathouse, had sheltered us for months beneath its extremely porous roof. Mamú beamed. I was the “nice man” who would have been welcome at her interment. But she liked me better at her table and in relaxed conversation.