The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Quite apart from the purely geographic separation between Pedro and me during puberty, I could never have had a real Jonah for an uncle. Pedro is the scion of a dynasty that helped to write world history, whereas Vigoleis comes from a family whose name is at best good enough for a modest role in a village chronicle. His was a dynasty that enjoyed a certain earthly stability, owing to the fecundity of his father’s mother, who planted a total of nineteen seedlings in the local soil. On his mother’s side, two bishops arranged for the necessary linkage to Heaven Above. These achievements can, to be sure, serve as cozy intrafamilial mementos, to be placed and admired in photo albums and on mantelpieces. But will they have any value as history without adding some fictional spice to make them seem important? Hardly. In one other respect, too, they seem to lack real significance: as documentary underpinning of these jottings of mine. Just imagine for a moment the nature of my situation as the authorized biographer of Vigoleis. I have let my brother Ludwig periodically check through the manuscript of this book. When he reached the part where I first mention our grandmother’s 19 children, he wrote in the margin, “Wrong! Only 9! Typo in the death notice! according to Uncle Joseph.”—each lapidary remark outfitted with an exclamation point as evidence of this reader’s glee at catching the author in a typographical mistake. It is only Uncle Joseph as the source of this corrective information who escaped Ludwig’s sardonic jibes, for he regards Uncle Joseph as beyond criticism—which he no doubt is, since this particular uncle of ours is a printer, and he is the one who probably used his father’s press to print the death notice.

  Well now, I thought, this is going too far, this is irresponsible pedantry. With a single stroke of the pen, ten children are eliminated from the list—this comes suspiciously close to a modern Massacre of the Innocents. Has King Herod returned to wield the Lord’s scourge once again? Ten too many children! And to think that Granny was hoping to make it to the round number of twenty, in order that she could get to see her Wöllem sporting on his overcoat lapel a decoration from the Kaiser for productivity! Granted that if it ever came to a vote, nine children would still be in the minority. But such an act of decimation is still much too harsh. I wrote to my brother, the decimator: what a fine family this is, where you can’t even depend on what’s said in the death notices! I refuse to liquidate a single one of the 19 children; I shall defy the printer’s devil and insist upon the existence of all of them. Have you, my Idumaean brother, considered that among the ten you have slaughtered we might have to count our own father? What, then, about us? Nineteen children—isn’t that more exciting than quintuplets? And just think: almost all of the great geniuses of history came from families with numerous children, usually more than 15. It’s all the more remarkable that no genius has yet come forth from our own family. Let’s assume for a moment that those ten don’t exist, and never did exist. As a long-time fan of circuses and county fairs, you must be fully aware of the attractiveness, for the minds of the common folks as for the great philosophers, of “what doesn’t exist.” Any carnival manager can vouch for this fact any night after the show is over, as he sits in his trailer sipping potato schnapps by the light of his kerosene lamp, counting the day’s box-office take.

  There were no further editorial objections. My brother kept his own counsel. Perhaps he was ashamed for being of little faith. Besides, he is not enough of a historian to insist on mobilizing a single dead typographical error against nineteen living persons.

  In spite of our numerous uncles—oddly, none of the girls ever reached the age sufficient to make them our aunts—not one of them had the right stuff to be swallowed by a fish, and not only because the little creek that for centuries has coursed through our historically somnolent home town has no pretensions to reach an ocean. Our single mentionable uncle is my godfather, who like all of his brothers was beholden to the bottle and was otherwise a bookbinder, but a man who hardly ever glanced at the contents of what he was binding. Which means that he was highly reliable in his profession, just as an illiterate typesetter can be depended upon to keep strictly to what is in a manuscript. This merry fellow represented me at my baptism and, in the process, lent me his Christian name. Albert—it means “of brilliant lineage.” Unfortunately, I have never detected any of this brilliance in him or in myself. The brilliance must have got diluted or vaporized by the baptismal waters. In any case, once Christ’s work of redeeming my soul was accomplished with my uncle Albert’s assistance and oath-taking, once all of my sins and my eternal punishment for them were washed away and I could partake of grace, illumination, and consecration in the Holy Spirit, thus becoming a child of God worthy of reward in Heaven—spiritual gifts that we no doubt deserve as we are placed into the vale of tears that is this life of ours, but for which I expressed my gratitude by bawling and wetting the ceremonial object I was lying on, a brocade baptismal cushion from my mother’s Scheifes cottage. In brief, as soon as I became a full-fledged Christian soul, the members of my baptismal party felt that they, too, had a right to partake of certain blessings. They betook themselves without delay to the nearest pub in the vicinity of the church, which was the one run by my grandfather. They placed the baptized infant on the counter and started drinking. After this interlude they visited one watering-hole after another. My godfather got more and more crocked, while the baptismal infant’s face became redder and redder, but there was no letup to their alcoholic ana-baptist ritual. My father, my other uncles, other so-called uncles and family friends had no objections, and they drank, too. Soon they drank themselves out beyond the town limits into the outskirts, in each of the taprooms placing the “bearer of brilliant lineage” on the bar, where he screamed for his mother’s breast, until at one of these establishments they finally just left him there. They completely overlooked the original sin that was the trigger for the Christian mystery that had just been accomplished with my person, and, wiping the beer foam from their Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches, reverted to pagan liturgy, victims of the concupiscence that Christian baptism fails to eliminate. They drank without me. And without me they all returned home. Where was their new little Christian child?

  Somebody sounded the alarm. They retraced their steps through the various bars, miscalculating now and then, but at none of the stations of their reverse journey declining the bottles that had to be drunk from once again. After hours of intense searching, a local constable succeeded in spying out the bar counter where this little heap of Christianity lay in his soggy, stinking swaddling clothes, abandoned by God and his godfather. I was returned to my mother for the price of a bottle of aged-in-the-cask brandy—but was I still the same person? Hadn’t my baptismal procession crossed another equally un-Christian baptismal cavalcade on its journey from bar to bar? Was I some stranger’s infant, one that, following the sacred ceremony, likewise got carried to the beer spigots? This question has worried me all my life long, and it is one of the reasons why I seek protection behind my Vigoleis—not to mention all the mythological implications!

  “So swiftly,” we are told in the first chapter of Pascoaes’ book on Napoleon, “did the birth proceed, that for lack of a cradle the newborn had to be wrapped in a tapestry woven with many-colored scenes of warfare. This account has the ring of both legend and truth. Truth is, after all, no different than legend. It is intriguing to speculate about the influence that these embroidered scenes, perhaps depicting events in the Iliad, might have exerted on our hero’s destiny. In contrast to many living things, dead things can have a vitalizing effect. The child’s very first glances took these images into the misty regions of his soul, where character and personhood were still slumbering, waiting for the first ray of light that would awaken them. This is the hour that gives shape to the Self, when form after form slowly accretes around a central point, giving rise gradually to a more or less definite whole.”

  When I translated this page years ago at the writer’s house, I was reminded of how my own baptismal tapestry, with its smell of overnight schnapps and beer,
tobacco and other incense, that penetrated to the misty regions of my developing personality. It was a dubious ray of light, but nonetheless a ray. Even someone who is averse to mythological trends of thought will readily interpret my aversion to beer and inferior forms of brandy as what it in fact is: an intellectual acknowledgment of the lessons derived from my experience of a profligate anabaptism. Of course this has no bearing on the identity of my personality with my Self. It serves only to confirm that, in keeping with the laws of entropy, I was handed over to destiny while lying on a counter in a bar.

  Among the books in my personal library there is one that I cherish very much, the illustrated Handbook of Geography by Professor Daniel, who was part theologian and part geographer. The fact that in Book One I was able to compare Pilar’s kitchen table to a catamaran is a detail that I owe to my godfather, who, no doubt guided by his innate sense of panta rhei, bound this book in such a way that his binder’s needle failed to penetrate fascicle 42. When he delivered the finished product and I happily began leafing it through, the native Carolina, Palau, and Sandwich Islanders immediately fell out. After that, every time I consulted the Book of Daniel I had to replace these sinister characters between the pages, with the result that their threatening visages remained indelibly imprinted on my mind.

  I gave Pedro accounts of this and similar details of my family dynasty, which was never menaced by the maws of a sea monster or by the drawn scimitar of an angry Moor. I told him about the petty citizens of a petty town, people who printed and bound books or, like my father, owned books but never read them: people who lived, made love, drank, and then drank some more, right out of the bottle or from expensive glasses; people who then died, every one of them with the conviction that this was the Will of the Almighty, every one of them a person whom nobody outside the town limits cared two hoots about.

  When we left the tiny hidden cove of Valldemosa and clambered back over loose gravel and breakneck goat paths to the fresh-air resort of the Kings of Aragón and Mallorca, we were lugging with us a huge, heavy object: a sea turtle, the largest specimen that had ever been caught at this coastline. It was of extreme old age and, as we learned from a fisherman who was not much younger, not indigenous to Mallorquin waters. It had probably migrated from the great ocean depths near Menorca which were still home to such giants. The one we caught had presumably fled the distressing site of the famous 1756 battle between French pirates and the English fleet under the tragic John Byng, and paddled across the ocean to spend its waning days in the Valldemosa inlet. We now presented this tortuga as a gift to Doña Clara. With the aid of her cook Toninas, she made some delicate dishes from it, including a so-called turtle soup with little turtle sausages and turtle eggs in Madeira au four—a meal for gourmets whose taste hasn’t been ruined by the likes of Maggi. Doña Clara’s tortue au naturel will reap praise long after she has passed away, but with turtle it helps to be a connoisseur. To others I recommend the imitation item you’ll get out of a can. The one from the Valldemosa cala tasted like mammoth from the Arctic permafrost.

  We were still seated at our antediluvian meal when a telegram arrived for Beatrice. Was somebody dying again? Or was someone already dead? No, it was just a hasty sign of life, and it came from Paris. The text: “Coast clear? Zwingli.”

  De-Pilarized by potent ministrations of Professor Scheidegger’s homeopathic science, my brother-in-law was once again heading for the southern latitudes.

  Beatrice now decided that living in this house of art was no longer for us; the place to confront real danger was one’s own house and home. So we left Valldemosa and its heights of historical mattresses and sank back down on the nameless heap of our own poverty. Pedro wanted to give us chairs to take along, a bed, some crockery, a box full of alibis. That’s how a friend behaves when he is at the same time a Spanish grandee. But Beatrice and I, still two very un-Spanish little people, declined his offer as an offense to the Sureda dynasty. Immune to such bourgeois temptations, we were satisfied just to shake hands and clap a grateful drumbeat on shoulders all around. I took one last look at the sleepy pickled euphoria of my embryos: “Adios, my friends. Don’t worry, we’ll be back!”

  Six hours later, we were sitting on crates in our bible-paper room and chatting about how wonderful it all had been, about the immense fortune the Suredas had squandered, how everybody up there in the hills seemed crazy, crazier than here in the capital, and—“Now Beatrice, you’ll have to admit that genuine turtle soup is pretty terrible. Your Swiss friend Mr. Maggi found this out, and was smart enough to put his mock turtles on the market.” Then our conversation turned to the other citizen of the Swiss Confederation, the one who was inquiring whether the coast was clear.

  “What he means by a ‘clear coast’ is obviously Pilar, but he’s not asking whether Pilar herself has been de-Pilarized. What are you going to do? The telegram came with paid-up reply.”

  “I’m going to send a telegram.”

  “Fine, but what are you going to say? I’ll keep out of it. You must act according to your conscience. That’s what we always do, and that’s why we can rest so comfortably on our pile of newspapers. Think it over while I kick our bed around a bit. Tonight we’ll again be sleeping on our own empty life history.”

  “But after all, he’s my brother!”

  “That sounds like an accusation. That’s not how we want to play the game, and I’ve never been a spoilsport when it comes to other people.”

  Beatrice wired Zwingli that the coast was clear—which it in fact was, as far as the tootsie was concerned.

  Doña Clara had given us a basketful of food and a bucketful of turtle soup with huge gobs of turtle meat in it. This kept us in haute cuisine for two weeks. Two weeks of haute cuisine are the equivalent of the price of a table and, if you know how to haggle, two chairs. Let’s keep this in mind. We’ll endure the odor of a prehistoric mammoth by holding our noses—“Just a couple of weeks, Beatrice, and we’ll have finished consuming the entire beast…”

  XII

  During the starvation years of the Wilhelminian World War, when my father lost two-thirds of his body weight, when my grandmother sat down to die before losing all of her body weight, when the high nutritive value of the common turnip was discovered by the same caste of scientists who later declared the common Hitler Turnip as a vitamin-rich fodder for the people, I had already become so skeptical that I no longer believed in the miracle of the loaves, although I still thought that the God we called our own really ought to do something for His chosen people. Or did He perhaps intend, by distributing a few million breakfast rolls, to spare the experts at the Kaiser Wilhelm Science Institute from everlasting shame? This question concerns only bodily hunger, which has never made me into a true grouch. I have long since counted the miracle of the loaves among Creation’s lesser magic tricks. I didn’t even long for it to happen when we went starving for days in the Clock Tower. No, what I have in mind is “the sacred power of genuine, true hunger” that Wilhelm Raabe has his “Hunger Pastor” write about, and that makes me yearn again and again for a multiplication of bread loaves: if only a Savior could appear on the scene and increase my library, decimated by war and persecution, by a factor of a thousand! All the while, then as now, here on the street of the poet Helmers, as formerly on the street of General Barceló, in order to buy books I have had to stint on food. No miracles happen in the house of Vigoleis.

  In a word, from the tiny amount we saved by consuming the leftovers of saurian soup, we deducted a certain allotment for books. Language is feeble when it comes to expressing minuscule numbers; the diminutive of “an amount” is “a tiny amount,” and that’s the end of it. The Portuguese are better off in this respect. They can reduce a “tiny amount” ad infinitum, a skill that paradoxically can have a very grandiose effect. The formation of diminutives sheds a great deal of light on a language—a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked by the philologists. A Lusitanian citizen cannot buy a loaf of bread for 1000 reis, nor ca
n he buy a book for 20,000. Our own tiny amount was situated so far below the borderline of diminution that we would have to buy a table and a chair not just second-hand but fourth- or maybe even tenth-hand.

  Pedro knew of a rummage dealer on the Rambla, located below ground, a kind of catacomb of junk that, among other things, offered for sale vegetables and live poultry, rabbits, wine, crockery, and brushes.

  Every country has its own morality as regards taxation, an attitude that gives rise to tax laws that invite secret and open fraud. Just as government ministries commit fiscal mayhem by means of bills pushed through the legislature, the individual citizen sets traps for the internal revenue office. Every more or less civilized country is familiar with this type of guerilla warfare. In Spain, store owners had to pay a store owner’s tax, no matter what, how much, or how little they sold. For this reason, all store owners sold everything: the butcher sold vegetables and alpargatas; the greengrocer sold firewood, underwear, holy pictures, and bread; the coal dealer repaired shoes; the cobbler made bombs in his spare time; in the brothels, besides girls you could consult the latest newspapers. In Palma we bought the best nougat in a bookshop, where you could also lease a donkey. Besides tending to churches, the clergy was known for maintaining bordellos, bullfight arenas, and railroads. Thus it was no surprise to me when, arriving at this junk dealer’s premises, I saw fresh fruit, small animals, and brooms for sale. A quail was wildly whirling around in a small cage. Quail stands in high regard in Palma. Some say that it brings good luck; others tame the bird as a lure for catching other quails. Their meat is also prized. Mamú’s cook roasted them on a spit, and this was my favorite way of cooking them.