“If I’ve understood you correctly, that local saint was also a fake, conjured up by your enterprising philanthropist.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Why ‘afraid’?”
“You can look her up in hagiographies. She actually lived, and kept herself alive in the forest with snails and herbs. Like all saints she could talk with animals, but not with human beings. She kept those robber barons away from her skirt, and did a whole lot of other things besides. Someday I’ll write her biography, in mystical-mariological style, to shield her from her own sanctity. For if she had never lived, she still would have been able to perform miracles.”
“Your people will strike you dead if you take away their saint and the annual church fair devoted to her.”
“Go visit the Consul, and he’ll tell you that I’ve been condemned to death even without a biography of the Countess of Aspeln. It’s in the documents. If a person is unwilling to shed his shell like a crab, they’ll break it open for him. We’re lucky that we’re staying on this peaceful island.”
“Peaceful? What a joke! As soon as we get some money, we should buy a deadbolt lock for our entrada. I can’t forget what that Andalusian gypsy prophesied for us. It’s really frightening. And the nightmares you’ve been having recently! If only Mamú had already adopted you, and we could hide away in Miramar as American citizens! It’s all taking so long!”
In addition to our medicine book, Beatrice also owned a dream book, the text of which was almost more exciting than homeopathic diagnoses and prescriptions. She guarded it like the apple of her eye until the time arrived when, having entered her mesalliance with Vigoleis, both our sets of eyes were so overburdened that we couldn’t think of reading any books at all. Our very lives were in danger, so both books got put away.
The dream book was a personal gift from Grand Prince Alexander of Russia, who in his Paris exile wrote mystical treatises on the merging of dead souls with the Lord. He dedicated one of these works to Beatrice’s mother.
The gift was an Italian dream book from the 17th century. Its amazing treatment of symbols was along the lines of biblical exegesis: long, hard objects were not yet considered as the phallus, and soft, round, hollow ones weren’t yet the female genitalia. In other words, this was a book for the sensible interpretation of dreams—insofar as one could sensibly recall their contents. If things turned out differently anyway, it wasn’t the fault of this Venetian oneiromantic. Rather, it was owing to one’s own faulty dream life. We always came up with correct interpretations, but our dreams were all wrong. As soon as I started having the right dreams, our Italian book was a failure. Beatrice had all she could do to towel up the sweat from my body. In one of my nightmares, Sigmund Freud appeared as an angel with a flaming sword, threatening to drive me out of Paradise. Poor Freud! He was now harmless in comparison with the demons who were pursuing me in real life. The Teutonic savages in my hometown, licked forth by Audhumla from the ice block of the National Revolution, were driving this erudite Jewish pig out of house and home, and robbing me of my peaceful slumber:
I’m seated in our piso on the General’s Street, but at the same time my feet are stretched out under Mother’s kitchen table back home. On the table there’s a dish of sauerbraten and a bottle of Felanitx blanco, and around the table is my family, trying to figure out the prodigal son. I’m explaining that Beatrice, as a result of her Indian genes, is considered by Aryans as an outlaw and a criminal. My brothers rise up from their chairs and start shouting, “Get a move on!” They raise their right arms, and I cringe to avoid the blow. But instead, they just start shouting “Heil Hitler,” and then they try to force me to do the same. I hear myself crying out, “Never!” in Spanish, and then I see myself fleeing the scene. Cowardice is an inherited trait in my clan, and that’s why it’s taking so long for it to die out. I’m racing across the entrance to our house. The family sits down to their sauerbraten meal and lets me escape.
Across the street from our house stands the “Blothus,” formerly the mayor’s office and now the Nazi headquarters, and next to it is the Catholic Hospital, where I was a failure as an acolyte. I’m trying to start breathing free, but I sense the hot pursuit of new enemies at my back: three ur-Teutons, hairy guys wearing hairy pelts and with their red locks bunched together at the back of their heads. I recognize them immediately, just as one always recognizes enemies in dreams. It’s our town mayor, the Catholic pastor, and the pharmacist. Each of them is threatening me with his special weapon: the hammer of Thor; the keys of St. Peter—the very same ones that had attacked my tongue so convincingly that it could no longer intone the Pange lingua gloriosum; and the apothecary’s bronze pestle. I run to the intersection and catch a trolley driven by a weaver friend of mine. I leap aboard, and my pursuers are able to jump onto the rear car. At the next stop, they step to the front car and start observing my behavior. I raise my arm—not to make the Nazi greeting, but to grab hold of the leather strap. The triumvirate goes into a huddle: is he going to salute, or is he just hanging on there? If he’s only hanging on, we’ll kill him in the name of the Führer. “Kill him,” says the mayor. “Kill him,” says the pill pusher. They enter the car to execute the sentence. Their murder weapons slice through the air, and there is a huge crashing sound. The trolley hits a tree and breaks apart. I wake up, and instead of finding my killers bent over my corpse, I see Beatrice mopping me with a towel. I am saved.
Instead of writing a book about Spain, a country I was loving more as I got to know it better, I wrote one about Germany’s self-induced downfall, a process that I experienced through the degradation of my little home town and its citizens, people who outdid themselves in self-humiliation. With enormous expenditures of energy, they trod the bellows of the national organ, pulling all the stops to boom forth the funeral march for their own abasement. And just as today they are taking up arms for the fatherland, tomorrow they’ll be at it again for God Almighty—that is, if they think that in doing so there’s something to be gained for their beer halls, for their old-age pensions, or for the long night that will inevitably follow. Pious bellows-treaders that they are, they will go on pumping air for Heaven’s sake, panting like big-bellied stallions until the organ pipes burst. Such small-town zealotry could make one smile if it did not continually lead humanity into rivers of blood and tears. Love of God and love of Fatherland—unless you go along with these, may you end up in the gruesome grave amid carnage and spoliation. Thus spake the Lord.
As I was busy on the island of Mallorca writing my Tombs of the Huns, German ingenuity was thinking up the fiery ovens at Auschwitz.
When I think of Germany in the night, I find I cannot sleep aright.
XVIII
At times when the source of my lyric creativity threatened to dry up, when it brought forth only meager droplets and when all of the pails I lowered into it didn’t come up with a single line of verse, when I consoled myself by thinking of other poets who also went through long periods of drought, such as Rilke and Marsman—during all such fallow times, Vigoleis the Inventor came into his own.
I have invented so many gadgets that my memory is unable to find room for all of them. “Write that down,” Beatrice would say. “You’re terrible, you never make any notes. You throw away complete poems. Other people use index cards. They write down everything, and they keep what they’ve written. You put everything down the toilet, or you go around telling everybody about your inventions, and then when you read in the paper or in the patent notices that somebody else has used your idea. Then you get melancholy and start griping about human depravity. Just dictate your ideas to me. I’ll know right away what’s what.”
Mamú, too, was intensely interested in my talent for invention, and like Beatrice she deplored my unwillingness to broadcast my ideas. It had already become a Sunday custom to give her a progress report, after the Amazons of the gilt-edged Bible had squawked forth their last hymn. As a savvy U.S.A. business woman she thought over each of my inve
ntions carefully, approving, rejecting, or offering suggestions as she saw fit. In my creative habits I had advanced to the point where I wrote down everything and pinned it up on the walls of our bible-paper room—great minds will always find a way—replete with drawings made with an artist’s pencil borrowed from Pedro. Inflatable pyjamas, containing equally-spaced holes for the evaporation of sweat and which could also be used to prevent drowning in deep water, gave rise to general accolades. This idea was born inside the head of an idiot who didn’t even have a bed of his own. At Mamú’s expense, a prototype was put under contract at a Palma rubber factory. I entered prolonged negotiations with a technical specialist there, who called me the “rubber man of the future.” But the factory burned down, producing such clouds of acrid smoke as to plunge the city into darkness for several hours. It looked as if the end of the world had arrived, as at the eruption of Krakatoa. But it was only the end of my pneumatic pajamas.
So I made another invention: the self-sharpening pencil for students of the Bible who get ideas while reading and want to write them down. I showed Mamú a small sketch of what I had in mind. At first she couldn’t quite make things out, but then she quickly figured out what I was getting at. She stepped over to her desk, saying, “This is probably the kind of thing you’re thinking of. They’re extremely practical!” And she placed my finished and manufactured invention into my open palm. Christian Science had beaten me to it, though of course only in a technical sense. Whenever she passed out Bibles, she added automatic pencils along with them. The brilliance of my idea was confirmed. But who had stolen it from me? “Sue them!” said Mamú. Fine, but who was “them”? Was it the Christians, or was it their Science?
When once again we had starved long enough to save some money to buy a few yards of cloth to make a sheet for our newspaper pallet, I couldn’t wait for Beatrice to finish sewing the long hems around it. So I picked up needle and thread myself, and started in sewing a hem on the opposite side. Between us lay an expanse of white silence. I thought to myself, “There has to be a better way. One of us, or both of us, are bound to give ourselves a painful jab with the needle. What we need is a mechanical contrivance, a sewing machine! Not some unwieldy object that’s no better than a Singer or a Madersperger. No, something like a wheel no bigger than a human hand, which we could push along the edges of the cloth like a perforating device for paper, but which would leave simple stitches.” I pursued this idea for several days; even the berserk wild men of my home town had to take a back seat for a while. I put together a big, primitive prototype. At first glance it looked like a cross between a lawn mower and a pneumatic drill. But it worked like a charm. As I write down these jottings, my Vigoleis Kwik-Stitch Wheel®j (j = junked) is lying amidst all the other detritus of our island sojourn: our dreambook and our medicine book; some books of poetry; some short, some longer, and some very long volumes of prose; about 3000 other books; an autograph (perhaps the sole extant one) of Clavijo (Goethe’s Clavigo); a copy of Count Kessler’s memoirs; an unpublished manuscript of the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia; and every last piece of Vigoleis’ unpublished writings.
Then one day back then, as I stood beneath the just-completed model of my special new umbrella, naked as a newborn babe and feeling the naked euphoria of the successful inventor, in walked Count Harry Kessler.
Beatrice already owned an umbrella, an object she clung to like her books. It was a gift from her mother, a valuable piece of property whose history would take even me too far off the track. In brief, this umbrella’s handle was a clump of honey-brown, lightly flamed amber containing a fossilized insect, a millipede, but one that had lost a few hundred legs—a feature that made it even more remarkable from a zoological standpoint. It’s possible that some child of the Eocene who wasn’t familiar with the maxim “Never pull an insect’s legs, or you’ll end up in the dregs,” had yanked out the missing appendages. My first meeting with Beatrice, in pouring rain in Cologne, took place under this roof. But soon I became jealous of her umbrella, since I got the impression that she loved it more than she loved me. She gave it constant attention, adoring it with a kind of silent and unseen worship, just as the Kaffirs revere their highest divinity, the Creator of the Kaffir universe, the god Unkulunkulu. At the time, I was searching for a decent religion, one that wasn’t mired in externals, sanctimonious cliquishness, and money-grubbing, petty-bourgeois hypocrisy like the one I grew up in. So I was reading a lot about belief systems and superstitions among the primitives, and hit upon Unkulunkulu, a god who isn’t served by any visible cult. The Zulu who worships this god is never tempted to feign anything to guard his reputation. This made an impression on me, and so I christened Beatrice’s umbrella “Unkulunkulu.”
Unkulunkulu was made of silk, with opalescent green and gold on the surface and blood-red inside. But now I must digress for a moment on the subject of this play of colors.
One of Pascoaes’ brothers, João Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcellos, spent twenty years in darkest Africa hunting elephants, purely for the sake of adventure. I often sat at his hearth, listening to his hunting stories. When asked about my umbrella god Unkulunkulu, he told me that in the forests of the district of Inhambane he had met up with Vatzua tribes who call their god Inculuculo, using the name of the bird “culuculo” or “inculuculo,” an animal sporting brilliantly colored plumage. Its feathers were green on the outside, and its head was blue, but when this bird spread its wings and took flight over the sweltering savannah, when seen from below it seemed to glow with the color of blood. I never found any reference to this natural connection between bird and divinity in the books on religious history that I consulted. I was deeply touched by the fact that when Beatrice’s umbrella was opened it glowed as red as blood. I had instinctively given it the correct baptismal name.
But her umbrella’s days were numbered.
I screwed off the amber handle with its entomological contents and hung it around Beatrice’s neck with a string. This gesture pacified her somewhat for the destruction of her beloved Unkulunkulu. She didn’t wish to concede immediately that the invention I was working on was of the epoch-making variety. Her domestic instincts were even less thrilled when I told her that I would have to use our only piece of cloth, the sheet for our conjugal newspaper pallet, for my technical research. She objected to this move—in French, no less. But I remained firm. I explained that bed linens were unnecessary household items, citing the ones that María del Pilar had purloined from us. With our fabrics in her possession the whore had regained her independence in Barcelona and now, with the use of our sheets, things were going much better for her than for us on our jerry-built bedstead. Beatrice shook with disgust, but now I had the cloth I needed for my expanded Unkulunkulu.
I cut the sheet apart, and sewed on a curtain that extended from the edge of the umbrella to the floor. By manipulating a network of strings and by pressing a spring, the curtain could be made to descend, allowing the user to stand under it with full protection from the elements down to his ankles. Three pushes on a mechanism set into the umbrella’s shaft sufficed to raise the curtain to its original position. The thinner the fabric, the smaller was the roll of cloth that formed on the closed Unkulunkulu. My prototype was ungainly; the umbrella’s skinny rods barely supported the weight of the curtain. But it worked, and it would work even better if the curtain were made of the finest silk and with little sewn-in transparent windows—plastics didn’t exist at the time—and a small reading lamp clamped to the shaft for nocturnal readers promenading through a rainstorm. “Book production will rise, Beatrice, and the book prices will fall. Maybe someday readers will be demanding to read Vigoleis under an Unkulunkulu, in the softly falling rain.”
I am no fan of nudism, although I can’t say that I prefer the sight of fully-clothed human beings. When the weather gets too hot, I strip off. As an emergency measure, not on philosophical principle.
It was a doubly hot day when I put the finishing touches on my Unkulunkulu prototype.
I was red-hot from the insular sun, and white-hot with the success of my invention. And there I stood in my barest humanity beneath my African deity. The curtain was lowered—one push on the spring, and with an audible click I was closed off from the rest of the world. In my confining twilight I savored my triumph: Beatrice’s sacrifice had not been in vain. Then I heard voices in the corridor. Were they speaking French? Was it Beatrice talking to herself? That’s not her way; I have never caught her doing such a thing, not even uttering a curse, the briefest type of monologue. She had got over the loss of her umbrella, but she apparently missed the only bedsheet we ever owned in our gypsy marriage. Was she now sending forth streams of French invective at my creative achievement? But that’s not her way, either. With her dignified Indian genes, she knows when to keep her mouth shut. But now she just burst forth.
“Chéri, it’s Count Kessler!” There was noise in the hallway. Sweating under my Unkulunkulu, I heard it, and also the squeaking of our glassed-in double door, and I said to myself, “That damned door! I really ought to plane off the edge. But Unkulunkulu comes first. Porra and puta! It worked a minute ago, and now it’s stuck!”
The Island of Second Sight Page 93