The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  Mr. Thank God, too, was looking at me with the eyes of a cow, and this frightened me. His attitude completed the aura of misery that now filled the shop, with Matías sitting there on his sack, while at the same time he seemed somewhere off in the distance. My two friends kept staring straight ahead. With a gesture of petty-bourgeois neatness I brushed off my seat, then noticed too late that it was a sack of flour, so now I stood transfigured in a cloud of white dust. The three of us had departed the confines of earthly existence.

  What had got into these guys? I could have asked them, but my accursed reticence prevented me from penetrating the mysterious silence. If we were truly friends and in league with each other, sooner or later they would have to start talking. So I sat down on my hundredweight of flour.

  Was it some new worry? Had an emergency arisen in Honduras? Should I start offering them friendly consolation, seeing as where Germany was also undergoing an emergency? Was the savannah beckoning to them, at a time when these heroes were unable to girt sabers or display a banner of the peasant’s revolt? Were they perhaps so downhearted because they lacked money for the ocean voyage? Was it Ulua? Had his gunpowder gone moldy? Was it Don Patuco? Had some over-zealous Christian faith-healer charmed his missing arm back onto his body, bringing a sudden end to his stumpy military prowess? And what about Pablo, Don Sacramento, alias El Enorme? Was he now behind bars as a ringleader of the Thälmann demonstration in downtown Palma?

  The two fellows still sat there as if bewitched. Not a word. Not a single movement. Should I grab my bread and go home, leaving them to their fate? I stayed on, and began telling them the story of my advancement to the position of writing assistant to the German emigré Conde de Kessler. In the telling, I of course elevated my job title to that of Private Secretary. The old gentleman was writing his memoirs, I explained, and needed help mining the ores of language, and sometimes panning for golden words, and always in the context of world history. That’s how I narrated my story—not entirely in accordance with the truth, since as Private Secretary I was sworn not to tell tales out of the scriptorium.

  “Thank God” was the first one to pull his glance back from infinity and focus on the image of the Conde that I had conjured up, here among the flour sacks. Thank God that at least one of them was willing to see beyond the stars of his own destiny. In my narrative I soon recounted how Beatrice had baked especially for the Conde the Basel and St. Gall specialties Biber and Leckerli, pastries that I had sometimes asked Jaume to warm up for us in his oven. The mention of this brought Don Matías, too, back into the real world. He said, immediately ad rem, that the next time I brought around some of those Totenbeinli he would have to take a taste of them, seeing as some world-famous personage had liked them. But he added that he had never heard of this world-famous personage “Kessler.” “How about you?” he asked, turning to Thank God, who had never heard of the fellow, either.

  The patriots’ memory obviously needed some prodding. It was impossible, I said, that they had never heard of the Conde de Kessler. That man’s name was practically synonymous with Western culture; he had written a famous book about Mexico, and he had closed Nietzsche’s eyelids not long after the philosopher opened them up to see him. All they had to do, I insisted, was poke around in their memory, and they would surely find this or that nugget, this or that event that now, set down on paper, was embedded in Kessler’s recollections. And behold, it wasn’t long before my two Hondurans began to see the light. Like a prestidigitator pulling a worm from some dupe’s nose, I helped them along, and soon enough the renowned man’s momentous achievements lay there in our midst. First of all, there was the Agadir Affair of 1911 or thereabouts, the first bolt of lightning on the political horizon, the first skirmish of the Wilhelminian War, the German panther’s leap to Morocco, tension with England concerning the naval fleet, panic in the stock exchange, panic in the Louvre, where someone had stolen La Gioconda—a feat that certain newspaper pundits interpreted as an evil omen; unrest in Lisbon, unrest in Mahón, the largest naval port in the Mediterranean, where our General began feeling ever greater hunger for his favorite omelet dish. That was the moment when Count Harry Kessler first stepped upon the stage of world history!

  Don Matías and Don Gracias a Dios now recalled these events with great clarity. The literary world, to which they both belonged, could never forget the famous letter of gratitude that Bernard Shaw had sent to the German count for having preserved the peace. They weren’t aware that the letter was printed by Emery Walker—but I didn’t know that, either. Kessler the patron of the arts, Kessler the discoverer of Aristide Maillol—lights were now flickering on among the flour sacks, and all eyes hung on my every word. Kessler was a thief? The fact that he liberated Pilsudski from the Magdeburg Fortress—that didn’t make him into a thief, did it…?

  Maillol had the “somewhat un-artistic” habit of chipping away at his statues after they were cast, which failed to improve them. Kessler once commissioned him to create a sculpture —as far as I can remember it was The Boxer—and he bribed the foundry manager. Before the artist could begin his late-term chipping, Kessler and his accomplices had the pouring form secreted out of the factory inside somebody’s coat. In the Count’s presence the statue was broken out of the form and taken to his apartment. When Maillol was told of the thievery, he was enormously upset. Kessler was immediately summoned. He put the Master at ease, took him home with him, and showed him a work of art that was exactly to his liking.

  My Honduran revolutionaries were thrilled. Maillol, they cried, none other than Aristide Maillol must create Don Patuco’s Statue of Freedom for the Plaza de la Liberdad in Tegucigalpa! On the day it gets unveiled, all of us, led by Kessler, would break open the form. “A cire perdue!” Don Matías interjected, and I said, “I’m amazed at all the things you know!” I of course offered my services as an emissary to the French sculptor through Kessler as intermediary. And once again, this time with his wrestling sweatshirt even tighter around his belly, Don Matías swore with a handshake that he would see to it that I was appointed Honduran Special Attaché for Occidental Freedom Movements and Monument Production. That very evening he would visit the general and give his report. Then came Kessler at the League of Nations, Kessler as the pioneer of bible-paper printing, the Grand-Duke Wilhelm-Ernst Editions—surely they had heard of these things? They had indeed. So now we discussed the prospect of Honduras’ classics on bible paper, published exclusively by the Cranach Press—but hold on, for patriotic reasons there would have to be another name for it. I suggested Ediciones Maneta, “One-Armed Classics” in honor of Don Patuco.

  Kessler’s life and deeds filled the bakery. Down below, Jaume kneaded his bread loaves and shook his head—was he doubting our sanity or just shaking the sweat from his brow? The customers were serving themselves. There was a coming and going, until I started telling how Kessler (the Hondurans knew it already), dressed in a jailer’s uniform with hitched-up collar (I used an empty flour sack to illustrate my story) and carrying a key-ring and a lantern, had freed Pilsudski in Magdeburg. A car bearing the Reich Imperial insignia was waiting outside, and together they sped off. Then the Polish general snuck like a ferret behind the Polish front. It was an action similar to the somewhat later one involving another Count, Schulenburg, who acted as intermediary for the same progressive Kaiser in allowing Lenin to sneak out of Switzerland and return to Russia.

  During my thespian presentation of scenes from Kessler’s World Theater, the bakery customers forgot that they had come to buy loaves of bread. The Hondurans conceded that there still might be important lessons to be learned from an otherwise contemptible European Continent for their own goals of national liberty. My personal prestige rose to gigantic proportions; all that was missing now was the accursed pronunciamiento in Tegucigalpa, and all of us—Ulua and Thank God; Sacramento; Conde de Kessler with his Private Secretary; Beatrice with her busted Unkulunkulu; Don Patuco and his chaste, immaculately conceived daughter as the prospective
bride of Don Matías; Pedro Sureda with his nature-conservancy plans; his father, the collector Don Juan; Mr. Silverstar from Furzeburg; Ludwig Salvator’s personal physician with his assistant Bobby—all of us would be setting out for Honduras on board a sleek caravelle. And Mamú? Well, Mamú would blow the financial winds into our sails with her Royal Baking Powder blessing, which surely was overdue to prove its culinary efficacy…

  The Christian Science ladies would be left behind in their state of blind gullibility, until one day their beloved ersatz savior Hitler would have them all hanged as sub-Christians.

  Flying off in advance of our barkentine would be Rabindranath as the Eagle of Liberty; Empedocles and Spinoza would be waiting inside their matchboxes for the swarms of insects on the Mosquito Coast.

  No sooner had I ended my theatrical presentation when my two friends once again sagged down on their flour sacks and resumed their vacant staring. Were they seeing ghosts? I took my loaf of bread, paid up my real, and departed.

  “Seeing ghosts?” said Beatrice. “You’re just as crazy as those guys. It’s got to be women!”

  “Some Pilar, do you think?”

  “Can’t get any better.”

  It was in fact a Pilar who was behind all this, but a Pilar who was in the diplomatic service—that is to say, one who could act as a double agent of fermentation.

  The world can collapse on account of women, some philosophers have maintained. But unfortunately, women can lift the world back up again.

  At noon I met up again with the Honduran guerilla brothers on the Plaza Atarazanas. They had exchanged their flour sacks for chairs at a sidewalk café, and were sitting in the blazing sun—two melancholy patriots gearing up for a life in the tropics. Arsenal Square was depopulated; Pan’s hour had already passed, but not a single burro was to be seen far and wide, not even a human being. And what were these guys drinking? Something was foaming up inside their glasses: milk of magnesia! That’s good for the stomach. It can cause healthy elimination and help keep you in good cheer. On this urban square and at this hour of the day, the only discernable movements were the gastric ones inside Don Matías and Don Gracias a Dios.

  “Olá, friend! Olá, friend!”

  “Olá, my friends!”

  I sat down with my friends, clapped my hands, ordered something that never came, and yet I was happy. The tables reminded me of Zwingli’s ice-cream parlor and the whore Pilar. To start a conversation I said that round marble tables always led me to baleful thoughts. My two friends seemed to be reacting similarly, for they both cringed and, each in his own way, started moaning, “Eva! Eva!”

  Two hours later I tried to offer Beatrice a triumphant explanation as to how I had maneuvered the proud Tegucigalpians into passive, blank-eyed silence. “And our bread?” asked Beatrice. “Where’s our bread?” I had forgotten it. To be on the safe side, she decided to go fetch it herself, and I suggested that she take a short detour across the Plaza Atarazanas to see Eva’s two victims cowering there, just like Rabindranath on the lawn in front of Mamú’s chair, his head bent to one side, his beak bleached by the noontime heat, one eye looking up to the sky, the other down to the ground—the epitome of torpor. But Beatrice just wasn’t interested. She was tired of stories about whores—putas over and over again, as if nothing else existed in Spain. I told her that this was just it: whores were the salt of the earth, and without them Spain would taste terribly bland. But I also excused her from listening to the story of this thousand-and-first Eva, for I knew I would find a more grateful listener in Pedro.

  This was only half true, since Pedro had already made the acquaintance of Eva. But he hadn’t collapsed, although this was the fate that appeared to be looming for the two Honduran rebels. A Sureda can conquer even the portals of a bordello. They are a very ancient family, with a resourceful woman to be espied at the blurry dawn of their history, with a quiver-bearing ferret in their coat of arms, and with the contentious family motto “Who will retrieve it?”

  Eva was entertainment that occupied an entire evening. No wonder, said Pedro, considering that she displayed her abundant nudity at such a small fonda. And besides, it was always the same sets of eyes that were glued to her voluptuousness: Don Matías, Don Gracias a Dios, Don Sacramento, Ulua—in a word, all of Honduras.

  “So you know the story?”

  Pedro knew only Eva and her worshipers, among whom my bakery friends were the most devoted—that is, they had been, for Eva was now gone. Higher authorities had ordered her to get dressed and leave the island.

  Too bad, but that’s all I was able to get from my friend Sureda. He knew his half of the story better than I did mine. So I went to Mamú, who had the talent and an educated ear for risqué tales that revealed people as something slightly less than socially presentable. Especially now, for since her escapades with the biddies of Christian Science she cherished a calm immersion in a world that, with its off-color hues, reminded her of Vienna.

  Mamú chuckled with delight at my story. I hadn’t disappointed her. As a reward she promised me roast pigeon à la Binisalem for the coming Sunday, and for two weeks hence I requested roast suckling pig à la broche.

  “And in return…?”

  “You’ll get the highly piquant tragedy of Adelfried Silberstern’s latest sexual calamity.”

  Eva was entertainment that occupied an entire evening.

  “Yes indeed, Mamú. ‘Occupied’ in the double sense of filling both the stage and the audience, and all the more effectively, since the two areas weren’t separated by any kind of rood screen. Eva was much too gregarious a person to allow any such barriers to interfere. She needed to maintain touch with her artistic surroundings. But you mustn’t imagine this scene as being similar to La Patti at your departed prince’s Metropolitan Opera, or to La Gerstenberg as Maria Stuart at the Burgtheater. No, it was much smaller, Mamú, cozier, more intimate. She displayed herself at a certain Café Cantante on San Miguel Street. Completely undressed except for a bile-green powder puff pasted in front, some rouge on her backside, and around her neck a scapular that was stuck to her skin with tape, so that it stayed anchored to her bosom during her wildest dances. Spanish men love scapulars, and Eva was familiar with this form of etiquette. She sang and recited her own poems in French—not just doggerel, but profound lyric verse. I’m going to get some copies. They say that Eva was a second Vittoria Colonna, and behind the stage there was a back room, something with a curtain where she had her pilarière. She lay there resting during the intermissions in the company of her visions, or maybe with some aesthete who was interested in her visions and her poetry.”

  “During the performance? How exciting!”

  “Oh no, Mamú. She never let anybody get close to her. Pedro told me so himself. It was all in the service of art for art’s sake.”

  “O, mon pauvre Vigolo!”

  “I’ll put my hand in the fire for Eva, Mamú. If she had ever let anybody come near her, it would have meant the end of her career. She was always diplomatic. In this exposed position in the German diaspora she was working for the Führer.”

  I then told Mamú the whole story in every last detail. Rabindranath listened in, as did Mamú’s pekingese. The two animals had long since concluded a truce, largely in consideration of their mistress’ paradisaical park, which with the chattering of many budgerigars and pink parrots had taken on the aspect of a jungle. The official bird-tender was of course Vigoleis. But Mamú was piqued at Eva for failing to do the honors in her own Paradise, since basically Mamú was too immersed in her gilded Bible to imagine that there could be such a thing as an Eva immaculata, an unblemished woman on an unblemished bed of love für Führer und Vaterland. But then, Mamú was an American and a millionaire, born to bottomless riches, lacking tradition, spoiled by Vienna, and lifted up by her Hungarian dynast to a social rank that she deserved to attain in any case, without the aid of this special liaison.

  A blind guitar player and a deaf tenor provided the musical background for
Eva’s performances. The singer never heard a note of what the guitar was playing, even though he bent down close to the instrument. This acoustically necessary form of acrobatics forced him to sing downwards toward the floor, instead of out into the audience or directly to the racy, shimmering chastity of the Special Female Envoy of the Führer. The guitar player, on the other hand, couldn’t see what was going on around him, clothed or unclothed. He plucked away at his violent, melancholy canto hondo, his blank eyeballs focused on a blind spot which, if he had been able to see, was Eva’s sickly-green powder puff. The audience, made up mostly of members of Don Patuco’s circle, stayed on into the wee hours, and they, too, kept staring at this ominous green spot.

  As a nude model Eva was, according to Pedro, cojonudo—we should probably use the more acceptable term “simply fabulous.” But then again, things were not quite that simple. Pedro had a whole bevy of Evas, whose faces he rendered only in vague outline. Come to think of it, for any artist specializing in nudes, the model’s face is irrelevant. Still, I could have used some more detailed information, since Eva is to be counted among my squandered opportunities.

  A Jewish gentleman of German nationality had recently arrived on Mallorca from the Cape Colony to recuperate from a serious illness, and he intended to continue on to America on business. He was a diamond merchant. The German Shop sent him to me for political advice. He was very rich. Every word of his personal explanation was false, and he wasn’t even in need of telling me anything. It was immediately clear to me that he had fled from the Cape Town Nazis, who were after his non-Aryan blood, but also after his diamonds. I advised him, free of charge, to leave the island as soon as possible, because just a few weeks ago a murder had taken place in Palma, a poisoning that was immediately hushed up. It took place in a lithograph studio, a place that contained enough bottles decorated with skull and crossbones to dispatch whole crowds of human beings into the Great Beyond. The police were conveniently silent (“Who needs overtime?”) about this matter, which was connected with the sinister machinations of the Nazis on the island. The Jewish gentleman told me, not without a measure of boasting, that he had a sufficient supply of English pounds on his person to buy out the entire island and send the Nazis packing. This was, of course, one more reason for him to skedaddle. I had no idea, I told him, how much his life was worth, but it would be a shame if the thugs were to get hold of all that sterling in the bargain. “Take the very next ship! It’ll be sailing in just a few hours!” It was only natural that I started cursing the Germans who were letting Hitler get away with all kinds of mischief, and letting the whole world know how proud they were of it. The gentleman objected to my insinuations against his fatherland—I was to understand that he still regarded himself as a German. Before 1933 he was never aware that he was a Jew. In his heart—that is, underneath the thick wad in his porte-monnaie—he was first and foremost a German. What was the German Consul like, he asked. Not the type who ate Jews for breakfast, I told him; he had nothing to fear on that account. Whereupon this German petty chauvinist with a heart of diamond returned to his hotel.