The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  “Duck-duck-duck, duck-duck-duck,” said the bird in oddly onomatopoetic fashion, as I ducked down to enter the basement store. Even so, I hit my head against a crocodile that was fastened above the door. I took this as a good omen, and clapped my hands.

  An old lady weaving straw in the doorway told me that if I was looking for Doña Carmen, I would find her down in the gallery. I should go right in, she said, but warned me that the monster over the door, though quite dead, could still be dangerous.

  So even before descending to the depths, I knew the identity of the person who would sell me my junk. When dealing with a bureaucracy, it’s best to know beforehand the name of some clerk to look for. Yet on this occasion I placed greater trust in the song of the quail than in the revelation of the name Carmen.

  I clapped my hands, and was already inside the store. It was suddenly darker in front of me, and it took me a while to adjust my eyes to the twilight. It was only after my third palmada that I heard a female voice in the background asking who I was and what I had come for. “Vigoleis,” I announced. “I’ve come to see Carmen.” I was told to wait patiently for just a moment.

  The sum at my disposal was 12.50 pesetas; I wanted to buy a table and two chairs. I wasn’t prepared to haggle—I’m too proud and too stupid for such things, just as the old German proverb says: pride and stupidity were cast in the same mold. The objects I could make out in the darkness all looked more expensive than 12.50. A mahogany armoire, for example, was a cabinet-maker’s masterpiece, and must have belonged to a Sureda. It couldn’t have crossed the threshold for less than 1000 pesetas.

  Doña Carmen had a large selection of all kinds of goods. There were cheap reproductions hanging on the wall next to genuine oil paintings that were, in turn, obvious forgeries. Potted palms rose up in royal splendor toward the ceiling, one of them set at an angle because it was obviously meant for higher surroundings. Old porcelain, clasps and brooches from the Bronze Age, green glass beakers, revolving coat racks, doorway transoms with cute painted Rococo scenes, stuffed armadillos—still plentiful on the island—votive altar pieces, gaming tables covered in green felt, walrus teeth with scrimshaw carvings, mirrors, the first typewriter ever manufactured, more mirrors, clocks, suits of armor, buckets, easy chairs, chests and pilarières, candelabras, porcelain cherubs, bird cages, eyeglasses, gems, a stork’s nest, an electric generator, and a prayer book. Absolutely everything under the sun was here, including its opposite, its supplement, its pendant, the reverse of itself. Certain items were available only in partial form; it was as if each part, once separated from its former whole, was yearning for a new completeness. What is the opposite of a sewing machine? I don’t know, but Doña Carmen would not only know, she’d actually have it in stock—perhaps not a vista, but she would drag it out from under an upside-down tin bathtub or a top-hat box. And she had a thousand other useful items—rats, for example. Three of them, if I counted correctly in the dark.

  And besides, she had herself, the Queen of her own realm.

  The fact that her name was Carmen is not particularly significant. Most Spanish women go by the name of Carmen, unless they were lifted out of the baptismal font as Dolores, María de los Dolores (“Mary of the Sorrows”), or Pilar—Our Lady of the Pillar. These are extremely popular names, though not as common as one finds in books about Spain whose authors, engaging in excusable exaggeration, attempt to be more precisely Spanish than the Spaniards themselves.

  Doña Carmen was a voluptuous woman whose appearance could still knock a man’s socks off. I say “still,” because she was majestically approaching sixty. Zounds! Just imagine yourself thirty years earlier descending into this catacomb to meet her, to the accompaniment of that quail’s song: Oh my Carmen, my Carmencita, Carmencitiña, Carmencitilla, Carmencitititilla! I would have diminutized you down to everlasting sin on that Louis Seize canapé beneath that balding stuffed sloth! But this giant doll of a woman just stood there with her pompous dangling bosom and did nothing to conceal her age. As far as I could tell in the dim light of her shop, she hadn’t even made up her classic Carmen countenance. She didn’t need to, for she was a personality who spent her life amid the changeless conditions of life. On her brow, however, she wore the familiar curl, the upside-down question mark that is still used in Spanish typography and that facilitates the comprehension of complex sentences. When you see it at the beginning of a statement you know that the whole thing will be called into question. Was this the case with Doña Carmen, too? She wore a black silk albornoz with roses pinned on it, an adornment so attractive you felt like stealing it, or at least buying it outright—a practice that is by no means unusual in businesses like hers. The customer comes first—and in this case thirty years too late! But still early enough for a table and a couple of chairs. At this time of day, maybe even a bit too early.

  I stepped forward out of the sunlit doorway and headed through the piles of assorted stuff to approach the shopkeeper. I made a bow, told her that I was pleased to make her acquaintance, and that her bazaar had been warmly recommended to me.

  In reply to her query, “by whom,” accompanied by a gesture of invitation, I could have reported truthfully: by my friend Don Pedro Sureda, el de los Verdugos y Alba Real del Tajo, thereby making an aristocratic impression right from the start, though perhaps not an impression of wealth. My pauper’s instinct urged me to say quickly, “by Don José,” and I probably meant the most recent of the Don Josés to course through my thoughts, the private physician of Ludwig Salvator of Austria.

  “Don José?” Another hand gesture, this time not indicating welcome, but pleasant surprise.

  Every Spanish man is named José, unless he is a Pedro or a Pablo. Hence every Spanish woman knows at least one José. Doña Carmen knew one, too. We would soon find out whether we were talking about the same one.

  “Don José? You don’t say, sir…”

  Instead of replying, “Yes indeed, the very same, Don José Giménez de Oliveros,” as if stung by the tax man’s flea I chose a name at random and said: Don José Montodo y Lopez Grau, or Don José Nicolao Campaña Campins, or Don José Portella de Marmolejo. I made up some beautiful-sounding name for this beautiful woman—any name at all. Perhaps it was that of my friend the art historian at Salamanca University, the one that Professor Brinckmann had recommended me to: Don José Aranda y Bustamante—which would have sounded convincing enough.

  Whoever this Don José was, Doña Carmen knew him. Her eyes took on a shimmer of emotion, and in the conversation that followed it turned out that my Don José knew Doña Carmen very well indeed, and Doña Carmen—Oh good Lord, she said, how time does pass by! What woman who is not a true character will make a point of the transitoriness of time? It was, she went on, as if it were only yesterday that Don José entered her late father’s store… ah, those were the days… and the excavations he was interested in seeing, and that he visited with shovel in hand! He dug around Ibiza and Formentera searching for remains of Punic culture (Who did the digging, Don José or her father?)—“oh, and now he has sent you to me.” So my Don José was an archeologist. “How wonderful that he still remembers me!”

  “Who, my dear Doña Carmen,” I said with no need to prevaricate, “would not remember you? Don José sang your praises—you should have heard him!” Doña Carmen closed her eyes, made a half turn of her head, and paused for a long moment in the melancholic pose of self-mystification.

  I was a Mallorquinist, I told her, with a wide-ranging field of professional interest, though not a specialist, and most definitely not the kind of specialist who picks up a pot, and while gazing at the pot focuses on a shard, and while gazing at the shard focuses on a tiny scratch that simply must be there if… I was writing a book, I explained, and Don José had suggested looking up his friend Doña Carmen. At her shop I was sure to find material for my research, and of course I would also find Doña Carmen herself.

  Doña Carmen reopened her eyes. Unfortunately, at the moment she didn’t have an
ything Punic or Carthaginian in stock. Don José must have been exaggerating. She had already sold all that—the foreigners were especially interested in antiques of that kind. But faience, majolica, things made on Mallorca—she waved a hand around her shop—such items she had in abundance. Vases and plates with Moorish motifs, granite vessels with leafy ornaments, fragments of mosaics—I looked to where she was pointing, but couldn’t locate what I had come here for and what my 12.50 pesetas could pay for. But I hadn’t even begun with my own type of excavation. All I had done so far was to make a few digs with the spade and push aside a bit of dirt. The hard work still lay ahead.

  The things Doña Carmen was showing me weren’t useful for my research. I of course found words of praise for each single item, examined everything with the expert eye of a connoisseur, ventured certain doubts concerning authenticity, and offered certain suggestions concerning provenance. In this fashion we edged our way through her inventory, engaged all the while in animated scientific shop talk. Now I felt obliged to praise a washtub, now a rare Catalan votive picture depicting The Virgin Mary Offering Her Singlet. I clambered over cushions and rolled-up carpets, let out a connoisseur’s whistle at the sight of a little votive altar replete with burning wick floating in rancid oil in a silver-plated lamp—a priceless item—: “Spoils from the Burgundian Wars?” I stumbled over a child’s coffin that was propped up on a bidet stool. It fell to the floor with a bang. I kept on digging, and we kept on talking.

  We eventually reached Doña Carmen’s living quarters. A Spanish screen served as an implied rather than an actual separation between her bedroom and the less intimate area full of bric-a-brac. Inside, she explained, I wouldn’t find anything more that was pertinent to my field of research—just ordinary, everyday objects such as a bed, a table, a few chairs…

  “We mustn’t look down on everyday objects! A table, a chair, a bed—these comprise the foundations of human social interaction. If we were to remove them from our lives it would mean an end to all moral behavior. We would sink back to the level of the Neanderthals.” Besides, I went on, just look what can happen. At home we had this maid, a real peasant type, a mindless workhorse, a born-in-the-flesh milkmaid, and illiterate—which wasn’t the worst of it. Her muscles, Doña Carmen! You should see what those muscles of hers are capable of! They can destroy anything in the house that isn’t fastened down. Dinner plates? We’re down to using exclusively enamel. Doña Carmen opined that I didn’t have to tell her the rest; it was the old song about an age-old grievance. We agreed that we were dealing with a cosmic outrage of culture, or a cultural outrage of cosmic proportions. But we would never make any headway, I said, by giving this nuisance a name. My wife was getting blue in the face with her daily complaints of Na’ Maguelida this, Na’ Maguelida that, and by now our apartment furniture was in danger. The maid was dusting them to pieces. Wanton destruction of a magnitude no less severe, at times more so, than my loss of self-control, and now—I hefted a bronze wash basin in the shape of a griffin—“Doubtless Islamic influence, Ibizencan?” I asked casually, seeking to conceal my irritation. For at this moment I had finally spotted what my scavenging eyes were looking for, the very reason for this excursion: a small but very sturdy table! The Germans are fond of the saying “kill two birds with one stone,” and sometimes they even act on it. Now, intent upon applying this idea contrary to Spanish custom, I pointed into the private quarters of Doña Carmen’s bric-à-braquière. The table wasn’t large; the top measured at most two feet by three, but it had a drawer and strong legs that were roughly carved to resemble Gothic pillars. I could already see myself writing on it, eating from it, using it as a workbench, receiving guests and offering them meals at it, and killing a thousand flies on it with a single swat. And so I said to Doña Carmen: that rugged table over there is just what we need for our maid. Would she permit me…?

  I moved ahead in the direction of the table, but the lady immediately blocked my path, partly with her bosom and partly with an outstretched foot: stop where you are! “Oh, I beg your pardon,” we both said to each other, Doña Carmen adding that the miserable table was not what I was looking for. She had a round one made of macacaoba with a ritual tripod base, just the thing…

  “Doña Carmen, I’ll take that rustic one or none at all!” I summoned up my courage and took another step forward. Doña Carmen’s bosom retreated, taking all of Doña Carmen with it. She spread out all her fingers as if defending herself against an angry mob, and repeated, “Please, no farther!” Undaunted and intent on examining the table, I took an even more daring step in the direction of the antiquarian lady. She’s behaving quite oddly, I thought, as Doña Carmen emitted a tiny scream in inverse proportion to her corpulence, just as she might have done 40 years previous as Carmencita, fending off another kind of attack. Now, however, it was only mice that could elicit such a strange reaction—or was she convinced, once I had identified myself as a German, that I was about to violate her? Did she read books? Was she familiar with the crimes of Haarmann, Grossmann, Kürten? Hitler’s bloody ethnic mysticism? Medieval vendettas and the national uprising? That table had a spacious drawer, room enough for manuscripts, tools, bread…

  My third forward step, and this time she screamed out loud. Doña Carmen threw her hands forward and covered her face while calling upon her Savior, “Ay, Jesús, have mercy on my soul!”

  Women are unpredictable in their chronic climacteric nature. It often happens on trains that the emergency brake gets pulled and a lady tells the conductor that some man was about to rape her. A great to-do ensues, involving written reports and schedule delays, and later the aggressive gentleman is either missing his billfold or he has to pay up some other way, since his alibi is the lady herself even though he had no interest at all in doing her any favors. What would happen if Doña Carmen were now to pull the emergency brake—a specimen of which she no doubt had in her junk collection—and run out on the Rambla yelling bloody murder? It would be curtains for Vigoleis. The situation was critical. Doña Carmen reached for an area of her bosom that was the true or implied location of her heart, and begged the importunate Mallorquinist one last time, “Señor!” I, too, had taken hold of myself, but instead of reaching for my heart, I took the final step that separated me from the coveted table, and grabbed the knob of the drawer. “Ha! A compartment!”

  Doña Carmen screamed so loud that it echoed throughout her cavern as though she were the Witch of Endor. She collapsed on some antique or other, and it broke under her weight. I had pulled out the drawer. It was a deep drawer, not one of those skimpy things that are impossible to close after you put in one tablecloth and two napkins.

  Inside the drawer was a chamber pot. I felt a frisson of joy as I examined the darkened inside of this vessel: I had finally found one of the celebrated pots that have an eye painted on the bottom, a motif called “The Eye of God,” and beneath it the stenciled legend, “Yo te veo,” or “Yo te veo bribón”—I see you, you rascal, I see you! For a long time I had been looking for just such a mystical receptacle, and now Lady Luck was kind to me! Yet at the same moment when I felt sure that I was seeing the divine symbol, my nose told me that I was on the wrong track. I quickly shoved the drawer back into the table and suddenly felt pity for the Eye of God, which is forced to let itself be sullied in order to fathom the mysteries of its own Creation.

  Professor Stuhlfauth interprets the “Eye of God” as symbolizing God the Father, insofar as it occurs in the typical form of a human eye inside a triangle. Although the origins of this emblem are unclear, you can find it on altars, pulpit screens, shields, and gravestones, on the title pages of books, and in Spain even in chamber pots. The Hispanic variant presumably has something to do with sorcery, a bizarre manner of warding off the evil eye, since the iettatore or the iettatrice remains seated above the eye until the latter is darkened over and no longer capable of seeing clearly. A renowned Spanish ethnologist, Professor Ismael del Pan, once had the kindness to inform me that he regard
ed the “Eye of Providence” located inside this domestic utensil as an element of exorcism traceable to Judaic and Moroccan religious roots. The progressive hygienization of private bedrooms has caused these vessels to lose their practical value while preserving their magical qualities. Even today a bridegroom will present one, wrapped in cellophane and trimmed with pink ribbons, as an engagement gift to his bride…

  When I first entered her shop, Doña Carmen had been exercising her rights, as a dealer in antiques, to the private use of her wares. She was enthroned on one of them when I first clapped my hands to announce my presence. At my second clap she had extended her owner’s rights to the table drawer, quickly pushing the chamber pot inside it so that, when I clapped my hands for the third time, she was able to come forward with a smile and accept Don Vigo’s greetings from Don José Saavedra de Casas Novas. Whereupon destiny, which can be called blind by whomever it pleases, took its course, step by forward step, with a most evil eye directed toward the Eye of the One and Only, which to my misfortune turned out not to be God’s Eye after all.