The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  The two animals made strange noises that none of us could interpret. Using her Viennese inner-city dialect, Mamú egged on her little darling. But it was no use. I was resolved to break my word of honor if nothing happened between the matrimonial couple. This was all so ridiculous! We felt like bailiffs at some court proceeding, using miniature models to demonstrate how a train wreck had occurred. Bobby stood his ground—which, after all, was his main job in this situation. But I was suddenly overcome with rage, and made a quick grab. “Oh, my poor little puppy!” Mamú cried, dropping her opera glass to the floor. “I saw a jiggle! Vigo, you can stay on Mallorca!”

  Mamú was a highly educated person, but any street urchin could have set her straight. I, too, knew a thing or two about such procedures. After all, I had raised rabbits, and never in a random way, but always according to the book, a certain volume of the Guild Masters’ Library. This, the most dog-eared volume in my teen-age collection, contained an unforgettable, lapidary sentence: “If the male then makes a leap, one can be sure of success.” But Belgian Giants are not Pekingese Dwarfs. Besides, Asiatics are inscrutable, and it was I myself who had caused the leap.

  Twice more I let T’uang experience his one second of bliss. Each time, Bobby caught the jolt with knitted brow. I knew that as an artist he was intolerant of mere scribbling, and what was going on here, although we were writing in minuscules, wasn’t a demonstration of elegant calligraphy. So let’s just get it done and strew some sand over it! It is a terrible thing to break one’s word as a German, just because of some tripe-eating animal.

  The nanny had already prepared a bath for T’uang. The wedding table was cleared, and then disinfected.

  “All right,” Mamú said to the Commissioner, who had spent tortuous minutes beneath the palm tree. She raised four fingers of her right hand. “Caramba!” was the overjoyed official’s reply. “Fine job!” I said, and congratulated him. He then told Madame that he was grateful, adding that if ever he could do her a return favor…

  Mamú was of the opinion that I ought to tell the man straight out exactly what he must do for me. Upon her life she would never be willing to submit her doggie to such swinishness a second time. But wasn’t it scheen after all? I took Don Fulano aside and explained to him the precarious situation that a friend of Mamú’s was in. “No problem at all, my friend. Here, give the gentleman my card, ask him to present it to our clerk, and the problem will be solved once and for all. Four times! Caramba! I would have been satisfied with just once!”

  The Immigration Police never bothered us again. We were now tax-exempt honorary citizens of Palma de Mallorca. I wish to add that Don Patuco’s spy reported to his general that the incriminating registration card was missing from the file. By means of an authentically Llullian feat of prestidigitation, we had been effectively dematerialized in the sense of legal accessibility. When the Civil War broke out, this would save General Franco two bullets.

  Now we had no aspect at all any more. And we had beaten the Führer at his own game of racial humbug.

  The state’s attorney later reported to us that the Commissioner’s dog had given birth to a litter bearing the unmistakable earmarks of T’uang’s Imperial lineage. The proud breeder had let it be known all over the island and beyond that his T’atsu had produced offspring of T’uang.

  Would Mevrouw van Beverwijn now…? Was this evidence for the validity of her Christian Science? If so, I would have to do a lot of apologizing.

  XIV

  I have a friend in Spain who is sad whenever he thinks of the hour of his death. Not that he is afraid of dying. A brave fellow and a swashbuckler, on research trips he has come to grips with Red Indians and predatory animals, and on one occasion, strapped to a martyr’s stake, he thought his final hour had arrived. He has two children whom he loves more than himself, although he remains the self-admiring type. He loves them more than his treasures and his real estate, which together amount to a sizeable fortune. When he dies, his children will be as poor as churchmice, for out of the thicket of anonymity there will emerge the more than thirty illegitimate children that this man, still leading a life of Old Testament fecundity, admits to having engendered in his home country alone, and they will all claim their share of his estate. He has taken no measures to prevent this from happening. The earlier count of thirty has in the meantime risen to fifty and more. His devout wife, who he believes is still ignorant of his profligate paternity, prays every day, beseeching God to take all these bastards unto Himself, begging Him to visit a plague upon them and annihilate them as products of her husband’s lascivious habits.

  When Vigoleis closes his eyes forever, no one will contest ownership of his repeatedly decimated personal library, so often replenished by means of starvation campaigns. It is the single item of value that he will bequeath to the world. With its dispersal, all of his forms of existence will come to their final end. Anyone who claims to descend from him will be a liar, and such a lie will not even be useful in the search for truth, as was the case with Dr. Herman Baruch.

  I have remained childless, by reason of having transcended on a metaphysical plane the cunicular Christian pattern of sublimation. But I love kids just the same. And in order to have one without committing a sin against my own convictions, I chose the route of adoption.

  Adoption, the scholars assert, is an imitation of nature, and hence a problematical matter if one is willing to admit, as any primitive human and any Naturalist writer can confirm, that nature is very difficult to imitate. That is why the Ancients decreed that no castrati could adopt children—a wise move if you bear in mind how an adolescent son’s voice will change in comparison with his father’s. Such considerations were irrelevant in Vigoleis’ case, although he was blacklisted by the Nazis on the basis of having committed racial contamination with Beatrice. One day he found a warning in his post-office box: the Reich Gelding Commission was keeping an eye on him. His Janus-faced character—a poetic aspect together with an innocent, boyish nature—would remain intact, and he could go on writing. What was alarming was the official stipulation that no poor citizen was permitted to claim a rich citizen as an adopted child. This legal detail set the stage for a thoroughgoing perversion of the natural course of events.

  Fantasies about synthetic paternity clotted my mind as Mamú’s lawyer investigated the matter of whether, how, when, and where I could be adopted by Mamú. If the case ever arrived at a favorable result, I would be an American citizen, and thus could marry Beatrice with no need for her to exchange her innocuous Swiss passport for one printed on criminal brown paper.

  My wild, feral marriage, which continued to gnaw at my mother’s heart, was in the eyes of the Children of the Mother Church in Boston more than just an annoyance. They regarded it as one more piece of evidence for our debauched nature and satanic wickedness, curable only in the fires of Hell. As soon as this bluestocking coterie heard about the adoption plan, as a result of Mamú’s and my own blabbermouth habits, their sense of outrage knew no bounds whatever. To them, this amounted to a bare-faced attack on the Royal Baking Powder millions, engineered by a couple of beggars who slept on torn-up newspapers. They would have liked to tar and feather me, or better yet, put me in a cage together with Rabindranath. Nevertheless, Mamú remained firm.

  What would these guardians of morality have said if they knew that Mamú’s prospective son was himself aiming to adopt someone?

  As the island’s most expert tourist Führer, I was of course aware that Mallorca was in the business of exporting children, in addition to its more famous products such as the delicious bacon derived from the Mallorquin sweet hog (Sus dulciculus maioricensis V.), prized since the days of the Roman consul Caecilius Metellus (nicknamed Balearicus), a delicacy that has placed the cuisine of the Adlon Hotel in Berlin far above the average for German hostelries—as Count Keyserling well knew.

  This particular feature of Balearic commerce is overlooked by all of the available travel guides—but then again, the shortcomin
gs of our Baedekers are all too familiar. The only person who could have written a truly comprehensive guide to the Island of Mallorca was my dear friend and journalism teacher Günther Wohlers, a scholar specializing in Joseph Görres and an expert on women and spiritual beverages. He died as a result of his own versatility, at about the time when a Baedeker discovered him. After his death, in my estimation it was only Don Vigoleis who could stand in as a worthy successor in matters of Mallorquin detail, albeit one who was at several removes from the original when it came to all-around vagabond tourism. In fact, Don Vigoleis had already taken up Wohlers’ scepter in the form of hundreds of letters to his friends, letters that were often copied out and sent to friends of these friends, with the result that he could lay claim to being the most widely read picaresque epistolographer of the entire Mediterranean world.

  Don Flugencio’s Children’s Aid Agency—Established 1876, Gold and Silver Medals, References Upon Request—was not among the attractions one must visit if one wished to have “done” the island.

  Pedro told us about a certain fellow on the island, drawing sketches of him in a variety of professional poses, who plied the trade of corredor de niños: Supplier of Children. In Mulet’s tertulia there had also been talk of some such business, but I hadn’t been able to form a very clear picture of its operations. In my mind’s eye, I saw a large knife with blood on its blade, the blood of a child. And weeping mothers surrounded by innocent kids at play, kids who were destined to fall victim to the well-honed blade. Was my thought process too German, too sadistic? But if so, then the tertulia attendants were equally guilty, because they always “ventilated” such matters in such a way that the wheat got thrown out with the chaff, leaving no useful grain behind. In the South, the sky is chock-full of stars and saints. Similarly, on Southern terra firma there is an overabundance of words, even from the mouths of people who are constrained to reticence by pipe-smoking—as in the case of Don Joaquín Verdaguer—or by gout and other ailments of a former military career—as with Don Miguel de Villalonga.

  By no means did these men shy away from discussion of the ultimate and eternal problems of life, of which the case of Don Fulgencio was a prime example. Besides, it was only a small step from this mysterious entrepreneur to the mystic Nun of Ávila, a step no greater than that between any case of mundane adoption to the subject of becoming a Child of God. Yet despite my profound admiration for the Spanish habit of lifting any subject at all to the level of philosophical discourse, I soon noticed that, in this respect, none of my fellow tertulia participants was quite the equal of our beloved Santa Teresa. This woman, the patron saint of all Spain and the enfant terrible of the Catholic Church, must have received the gift of philosophical intensity as a baby in her cradle. Quite simply, she was one amazing lady. Her writings, between the lines, have revealed to me a great deal concerning the Eternal Feminine, in an unchaste style tailor-made for the Vatican Index. With amazing frankness, she stirred the pot in God’s and her own convent’s kitchen and was inevitably misunderstood, especially by pious types who never looked at her original texts. Whenever I read her, I am reminded of the words of Hamann, the “Magus of the North,” who said that his mediocre mind could never imagine a creative genius as lacking genitals. My own imagination is insufficient to grasp Iberian mysticism as the pure voice of divinity.

  One particular day, this fruitful subject of conversation—which, by the way, I never tried to explain to Beatrice—took a turn from abstract literary discourse and impinged directly on the life of Don Vigo, which is why I am able to report on the matter first-hand. I received a letter, the contents of which, in summary translation, were as follows:

  The undersigned was in a position to make me a very favorable offer concerning the legal adoption of a child. Through his professional informants he had learned that I liked children, but also that I was a metaphysically and politically persecuted individual, disenfranchised, humiliated, and deprived if the blessings of progeny—a situation that the Church regarded as sinful and the State as unhealthy, but one that was commercially favorable to himself. He would be delighted to provide me a pathway to reconciliation. By following the precepts of common sense and accepting foreign blood, I could rectify the failures of my own blood. This pathway led to his Brokerage for Children, to which was attached an Agency for the Arrangement of Catholic Marriage. For certain personages to whom Nature had been less than kind, a natural child of one’s own could easily become a moral burden, not to mention the financial consequences, whereas an adopted child was an encumbrance only for those who refused to give credence to the saying that where there is food for two, there is enough for three, (or enough for four when there are three, or for five when there are four, etc., i.e., when there are two there is enough for five—I don’t believe in this multiplication of the loaves, since the two of us often had meals that were insufficient for one cat).

  Furthermore, Spanish law guaranteed that an abandoned child, one who could well have been engendered by noble parents, would receive the patent of nobility, which is to say, that of a hidalgo (i.e., hijo de algo, “somebody’s son”). Fulgencio’s Children’s Brokerage dealt exclusively in abandoned infants, the so-called expósitos. The undersigned was now constrained, he wrote, by advancing age and the lack of personal offspring to dissolve his business. He had unfortunately failed to provide himself with children of his own, or to secure a hidalgo for the continuation of his firm. Rather than consider his own welfare, he had devoted all his efforts to the well-being of others. This statement was followed by a passage from the Epistle to the Romans—which gave me pause, since at the time in question I had just discovered Pascoaes’ Saint Paul and was immersed in Pauline lore. Apparently this broker was a connoisseur of the Bible. Upon request, the orphans he obtained fresh from the convent would be accompanied by trained nannies. A limited number of items remained in stock, and he was recommending that I make my selection soon, within the means at my disposal. The times, he continued in this hand-written missive, were indeed confusing; the State frequently discouraged the production of natural children, and besides, he was aware that I had been threatened with forced sterilization. Thus I would be well advised to act before forfeiting my right to personal adoption. If I was voluntarily refraining from adding to the human population in a world where human life was no longer the Lord’s reflection and image— well, that was strictly my own affair. Each and every one of us was master in his own house.

  This letter, a calligraphic masterpiece, ended with the abbreviations still customary in Spain: s.s.q.e.s.m., signifying that the writer was the devoted servant of the addressee, and offering a hand in friendship. This particular hand was being presented by:

  Fulgencio de la Fuente y Carbonell de Lladó,

  Corredor de Niños

  For the sake of caution, before entering into this pact I showed the letter to Beatrice.

  “Read this, and if you then persist in thinking that the Spaniards’ sole aim in life is to kill time, I will never cease complaining about the holes in your national cheese.”

  Beatrice just ignored this childish threat of mine; she was in no mood at all for instant capitulation. She took the letter and read it. I prepared my defenses, fully expecting to demolish the arguments that in just a few seconds would descend upon me and the broker’s epistle. And I say “in just a few seconds” advisedly, for although the broker’s solicitation was couched in long-winded prose, I knew that Beatrice would devour Fulgencio’s manuscript in an instant. Her eyes are not only well-practiced in reading. In addition they have a remarkable talent for digesting a reasonably narrow-set text and, with a single glance, transforming the visual image into meaningful language. She reads lines of text in just the same way as they drop out of a linotype machine. A diagram of the movements of her pupils would thus not be zigzag, but rather a steadily descending straight line. Such acuity of perception brings about an amazing rate of reading speed, but what is more, her brain keeps pace with her optical prow
ess. Like a mowing machine, her eyes simply slash the words down, line by line. As for myself, I read very slowly, and I prefer books in which what I am looking for is contained between the lines, books that burst out beyond the printed page and force me to stare into empty space. Thus it should be no surprise that Beatrice and I have never adopted the custom of married couples who share literary tastes and read to each other while lying together on their pilarière. In such situations, each of us has his or her own book.

  If we add to Beatrice’s optical agility her elephant-like memory, we can understand how she can ingest, digest, and store up for later use enormous quantities of printed material. During this process, her psychic retina remains unaffected. All of this reading has by no means made her more stupid—oh, begging your pardon, I mean that it hasn’t made her stupid. And that, too, is a phenomenon that makes me pause and reflect. I hope that this state of affairs can continue into the indefinite future, in order that the equilibrium of our marriage, based as it is on contrast, can remain undisturbed.

  As far as stupidity is concerned, I consider the type of ignorance one obtains from excessive education a great deal worse than the congenital manifestation. The latter is basically harmless, as long as it does not join that of some fellow human or other to incite a chain reaction, in which case the result can be the establishment of dangerous political regimes. I have had occasion to observe from close proximity how the minds of overeducated individuals can get squashed flat by omnivorous reading, but I failed to recognize the true danger posed by this process. What I have in mind is the German academic type who can be bamboozled by any Kaiser, any sleazy prophet, any charlatan who comes along spouting forth some gimcrack philosophy or other. For these professors, knowledge can become the blind spot of their profession, just as the concept of “God” can, even more tragically, escape the understanding of the enlightened theologians of higher journalism.