Pepe and I were the only ones who were slaking our boundless curiosity by observing this unmistakably dandyish personality. Both of us were loiterers with higher aims in life. Pepito’s ambitions were confined, enviably, to doing nothing at all, whereas I, a wretched practitioner of German thoroughness, was still aiming to achieve nothingness by means of action. Our friendship can be explained on the basis of this concept of nada, and our camaraderie lasted until Pepe’s death when the Civil War demanded its hecatombs.
The finery worn by this foreigner, who wasn’t Helman, was just as poorly adapted to the climate as the pith helmet sported by the German who descended the gangplank right behind him. But in contrast to such headgear, he at least didn’t seem ridiculous. This fellow in the greatcoat had style; he exuded the special charm you can encounter in the works of the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz. In his free hand he carried an open wallet out of which, with magical motions of his fingers, he was compensating for whatever he lacked in familiarity with 1000 Words of Spanish. He evidently lacked a great deal, to judge from the number of coins he dropped into the palms of the fellows who always stand in wait at landing piers. He was distributing pesetas in a way that I have always imagined stock dividends getting distributed. To this very day I regret that my personal destiny has been that of a floundering loiterer among mankind rather than a prosperous stockholder or pension swindler.
There I stood, agape. There Pepe stood, agape. Another Spaniard came down the gangplank, holding his pavo so tightly under his arm that the wart-covered bird was pale with near-asphyxiation. Then came a spindly English lady, carefully tapping her way down the plank with her umbrella. Next, a few porters, a pile of baggage, and suddenly the Ciudad de Palma was empty. No sign of Albert Helman. On the way back home I couldn’t help thinking of that young fellow in the fox-trimmed overcoat who had set foot on our island bearing a quite amazing suitcase.
A few days later I received another note in Helman’s handwriting. This time it was a letter with a musical emblem printed at the top that made me think of boy-scouting, a mode of existence that is completely lacking in Helman, either genonymously or pseudonymously. Indeed, in spite of his extensive travels and his cosmopolitan ways he is anything but a guitar-strumming hiker in this world. The letter bore the cancellation: Valldemosa. The writer expressed his regrets at not having met me at the pier, and since the only address he had for me was that of my post-office box, he was unable to look me up. Now he would be expecting me at such-and-such a time at the Café Alhambra. I would recognize him by the means he had previously indicated, except that this time the albatross would be lying open on the marble table at which I would easily find him, although I might mistake him for a Spaniard.
The albatross on the table?! Open?! Had he slaughtered the bird? His jungle instincts had obviously won out, finally smothering his sense of Western high culture. But before I collapsed from fright at the thought, before I could envision a writer tearing the heart out of his Muse in the cruel Mayan cult of his race, the scales suddenly fell from my eyes: Helman’s albatross was a book. It had to be a book! And with the jubilation of a triumphant explorer I cried out to Beatrice, “Beatrice, Helman’s albatross is a book! The writer is traveling with a book!”
“Of course it’s a book. An Albatross Edition. What did you think it was?”
Of course it’s a book. A writer travels with a book, not with a puta or with an animal under his arm. I was the incorrigible ignoramus, a guy eternally slow on the uptake and with frightful gaps in his education that were embarrassing even amid an ambience of palm trees. This was the year1933, I was already thirty years of age, and I still hadn’t realized that books got printed in editions other than the old Tauchnitz series. As yet I knew nothing of the growing menagerie of animals in the publishing world: the Penguins, Zebras, Albatrosses, Salamanders, Kangaroos, Bantam hens, and Owls. What is more, if I may be permitted this damning admission, I was fully conscious of my ignorance. Such willful stupidity is bound to backfire sooner or later. It can get you into unpleasant situations, and is easily misunderstood. There is always somebody ready to raise a finger and single you out as woefully uninformed. For Vigoleis the only remaining pious consolation lies in occasionally being ahead of the others on the basis of his second, prophetic sight, not the sight that peers through the eye-slits of a mask. For instance, at this very moment I have a feeling that somewhere in the world a publisher, bankrupt from trying to sell volumes by precocious young poets, is preparing a series called “Mole Editions,” with which he will blindly attempt to tunnel through the steadily increasing mounds of masterpieces of world literature, in the process throwing up mounds of his own that will indicate exactly where the digging is good, with the result that literary merchants from all continents will follow him with their shovels at the ready. Poor Vigoleis! You can have such vague dreams, but your mediocre education has blinded you to what any educated man should know.
Having now mentioned this gap in my education, I sense that the moment has once again arrived for my reader—whom I continue to address, although he ought not to concern me personally at all, in a style that was common and pleasing in a past century—to confront me with the vexing question of just what an unfortunate gap in my education and my relations with the writer Helman—whom I met at the appointed hour at the Café Alhambra, seated with the mien of an intellectual and with Spanish nonchalance at a marble table, a modern-day Ancient Mariner casting his roving eye past his Albatross toward any stunning female who might enter the premises—it’s again time for my reader to inquire just what these topics might have to do with the young man and his Saratoga bag. Come to think of it, what does anything in this life of ours have to do with anything else? What has the snorkel got to do with Helman? Or Helman with the young man? Or again, the young man with Vigoleis? If all of this were not connected somehow to the idea of education, I could easily separate concept from content. But I prefer to approach the heart of the matter using the same method that I apply in all my attempts at gaining knowledge as well as in the process of forgetting what I know. We must all have patience. As so often, the detour will prove to be the quickest way. Our present detour can lead us directly back to our domestic quarters on the General’s Street. My reader has nothing to fear. No more gobbling turkeys will cut the thread of my narrative, although there are plenty of them tied to the balconies around us, fattening up for the Holy Night of their sacrificial death.
This was a time when we had not yet obtained new furniture. Our apartment was as virginal as on the day we first moved in. Wooden crates were the best we could do to simulate bourgeois respectability. Only the Lladó with its beauteous sounds hove up like a bowsprit above the swells of the void. The little Swabian and the two tall North Germans, who collectively called themselves “Hasenbank, Schmidt & Kleinschmidt, German Booksellers” with limited liability and unlimited trustworthiness, provided us with scrap paper for a few centimos per kilo, most of it unsaleable newspapers from the Third Reich. Scrunched up in a pile of clothes, this made for a quite comfortable bed, one that we could easily fluff up with just a few kicks, although the arrangement had no further advantages at all. My reader can no doubt imagine what it means to go on living after you have lost practically everything. Today, when the world around us is a heap of rubble and people are living in caves, this may not seem like such a dreadful set of circumstances. But at the time we had no psychological recourse to “normalcy,” such as is felt by someone whose house has been bombed to the ground. Thus we lived on in the metaphysical space that is situated somewhere above the worldly struggle for existence, the place that Nietzsche, that bourgeois anti-bourgeois, calls the only proper setting for obtaining an education. In this sense, Vigoleis can be said to be a truly educated man. But rather than being a consistent disciple of the great iconoclast Nietzsche, he was a fellow equipped with a talent for clever mimicry, and as such a faithful pupil of the philosopher Max Scheler.
But let us pass over these hy
brid intellects. They could once again retard our current chapter, and perhaps I can give them their due in a later section. It is high time that I introduced Mister Hutchinson. As an island customer with an open wallet, he deserves certain privileges. Besides, by letting him finally take the stage I shall be fulfilling my duty of politeness towards my reader. The American, on his part, fulfilled his own polite duty by announcing his name “Hutchinson,” as if responding to a stage cue. I myself—dramatist, actor, and prompter all in one person—had no need for a special cue. I bowed slightly and said, “Vigoleis.” Both of us were very pleased to meet each other.
“Very pleased”? Why am I trying to conceal my true feelings by the use of a phrase that gets tossed off thoughtlessly every day on streets and thresholds all over the world? “Pleased”? Yes, I was pleased, but it’s better not to inquire how utterly overwhelmed I was. To be truthful about it, I was so shocked that I fell against the wall. I just couldn’t believe my eyes. Standing before me there in the dim light of our apartment entrada was that same young man from the ship, my substitute Helman sans albatross, and now sans Saratoga bag but still dressed in the fur coat that thousands of moths were just waiting to gobble up. The seconds that followed were like a confused dream. This stranger was appearing before me as part Helman, part Saratoga youth, and it is certain that he gave me a winning smile, for that was his customary way. I just stood there with mouth agape. Heaven, in its infinite wisdom, can arrange everything so that even inside a pauper’s cottage, when an event takes place that exceeds in shock value all that is imaginable, it will still provide a door that can be opened. And thus our visitor stepped into one of the seven empty apartment rooms adjoining our entrada.
As on the day we moved in, we had distributed boxes and suitcases around the rooms where “we’re expecting the paperhangers tomorrow.” A Spanish family, for whom the piso was originally built, would have achieved the same effect with children. But since we had no children to offer, we at least gave each of the rooms a nice name. Names can imply value judgments. Any mystic knows this, while philosophy hasn’t quite sensed it. I knew a man in Amarante by the name of Homem Cristo, “man-Christ” or “Christ-man.” He owned a tavern, and he himself was his best customer. Things were always busy there. Whores and pimps held their rendezvous within its walls, and it was moving to hear people call out the name of the proprietor. There is a millionaire who lives in Lisbon and whose bank bears his name: Banco Espírito Santo e Commercial. The man’s name is Espírito Santo, Holy Spirit, and in free translation the name of the bank is Holy Spirit and Commerce Bank, a title that does full justice to the spirit of such establishments: Bank of the Holy Spirit of Commerce. I like very much to maintain contact with higher powers in this way. By giving our rooms suggestive names I rid them of their yawning emptiness. I turned suitcases and book crates into godparents. One room was christened after the luggage company Mädler, another was called “Bible Paper” after our multi-volume edition of German philosophy. We had a “Sala de Africa,” named for a the popular soft drink, and a “Cabin Room” that we nicknamed “ck-dt” because it contained one of our overseas trunks labeled “ck-dt.” For our bedroom, which for reasons mentioned above we heretofore had simply called our dormitorio, we invented the name “The Newsroom.”
Feigning self-control, I led the stranger into the space that we simply called The Room, since it contained the only piece of furniture that could have made it into a true bel-étage: an authentic Mallorquin chair, the product of a local craftsman, painted red and blue on a simulated gold ground, on loan from one of our palaces, but later the legal property of Vigoleis. I beckoned the young man to have a seat, and asked him what had brought him to us.
Well, he said, he was coming directly from the German Bookshop on the Borne. My name had been mentioned there as a teacher of German. He was intending to stay on the island for a half-year or longer because of his lungs, which could benefit from the Mediterranean climate. Then he would move on to Heidelberg to continue his study of philosophy. He had a degree from Princeton and a certain familiarity with the works of Kant, but was having difficulty reading him in the original. And so the gentlemen at the Librería—if I might have the time and interest—philosophy being my field…
Yes, I had the time, I was interested, and philosophy was, cum grano salis, indeed my field. We agreed on a wage and a schedule. He would come three times a week for an hour each. We could start the very next day—preferably in the evening because of the heat. Hutchinson thanked me for this consideration, which he interpreted as being offered because of his lung condition, which was in such contrast with his fur coat. In Spain, even if you don’t have TB you prefer to conduct all your business in the natural shade; it’s only a bullfight that is in need of direct sunlight above the zenith. Our newcomer of course didn’t realize this. What he took for a gesture of solicitude and concern for his damaged pulmonary passages was merely an appeal to local custom and my own personal comfort.
Now German is a language I think I know a little about, although for years now our private language has been Portuguese, and Portuguese is the language I think and curse in. German is and will remain my mother tongue. Besides, I have had a very active intellectual relationship with it. I can read Goethe without scholarly annotations, Stefan George without getting a stiff neck, and Kant without recourse to a medical or liturgical miserere. On the other hand, I am no good at offering anybody linguistic instruction. To do that, you have to have a completely different attitude toward language, and under no circumstances the meditative approach that is my own. Still, what this eager student of philosophy wanted was so-called “conversation,” which was fine with me since it is just what, from the very beginning, so many people have found me good at. For the most part I just blabber away as if my conversational partner were either myself or Don Matías or, to name a very special case, my mystical friend Pascoaes. Chats with him reach for the stars… but now I was being offered cold cash for this virtue of mine. And why not? I was, after all, a Führer. Moreover, this conversation business struck me as having a less than rigorous aspect. It was not bound up with any pedagogical method, much less with any school furniture. Free association inside a free space—that was something I could venture upon using the only chair we owned. “Then we’ll see each other again tomorrow, right? Fine, at six. Goodbye.”
Following this visit Beatrice and I had a conversation that was strategic in nature. Its focus was our sole existing chair. At the dialectical periphery stood a second chair that we would have to purchase, and somewhere else, in realms beyond the breathable atmosphere, there hovered a table—would it ever descend to us? It dissolved in mist when I explained that my pedagogical talent was so untrustworthy that I deemed it advisable to wait before making any more purchases—perhaps a month. If my pupil was then still willing to risk his lung and my tongue on the island, we could go ahead.
And how, pray tell, did I intend to teach a pupil with only one chair? Just how did I imagine doing such a thing?
At such moments of hesitancy and cowardice I am in the habit of playing certain pious trump cards, although they seldom faze this prodigal daughter of a theologian, while to me, the heretical nephew of a bishop, they come automatically: “We are in the hands of God, chérie. What harm can mere mortals do to us?”
We shall soon see what mere mortals can do to us if we neglect to take preventive action. Let us now re-enter the room where the pupil is waiting for his teacher, so that our plot can continue.
During our first lessons we engaged in little skirmishes of politeness. The youth, from a good family and thus possessed of fine manners, refused to take a seat while his teacher stood. But the latter coerced him, with a smiling word or a philosophical maxim, into utilizing the single sitting surface in the apartment, which was crafted at the precise anatomical height that has been standard in all of human history. He sat, but in a pose as if ready to leap up again at any moment. I noticed this.
One day—we had mea
nwhile sounded each other out discreetly, and certain personal matters had entered both sides of our conversations—the young fellow hazarded the cardinal question: what was the deeper meaning of this confusing arrangement of our apartment? He apologized profusely for asking. He was quite embarrassed, and added, “It causes me increasing discomfort to be seated, that I must be seated, while my tutor remains standing.”
So there it was. It had to happen sooner or later. Now it was up to me to remain, or rather to become, master of the situation. Beatrice had predicted this moment—naturally, for she is also a teacher—and had pleaded with me to invent some excuse in order to avoid a surprise attack. But instead, I trusted my lucky stars and my instincts as a Führer, and made no preparations. Now, however, I would have to set sail and head out into the unknown.
The Island of Second Sight Page 73