The Island of Second Sight

by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  My Hunnish graves, my consultancy in legal and sexual affairs, Count Kessler, Leopold Fabrizius—all of these things now took a back seat to my departure into the realm of saudade. The worst to suffer was our cache of savings for postage, for precisely 37 publishers rejected my Pascoaes manuscript until Rascher in Zurich finally dared to undertake this adventure of the spirit. This meant that I had broken the boomerang record for literature, which up to that time was held by Remarque with 33 rejections of his All Quiet on the Western Front. I wrote Pascoaes about this. He replied, saying that in an epoch when for every thousand persons who could write a book there might be a single one who could read one, it was indeed a triumphant accomplishment to have located 37 German readers for his book.

  XXIV

  Gypsies: those were the filthy women with skirts that stirred up dust, wearing heavy gold earrings, striding along barefoot and carrying a suckling infant tied inside a colorful shawl around their waist, leaving their hands free for thievery. That’s how I got to know them in my childhood, the dark-skinned bands of people who went about from place to place in stolen wagons drawn by stolen horses, getting their food by stealing. Their children didn’t have to go to school, nor did they have to go to church—the latter being the privilege for which I envied them most. They trained their kids in larceny, and celebrated bloodthirsty weddings in their camps at the outskirts of town with dancing bears, knifings, campfires, tambourines, and loud chatter. Whenever the gypsies passed from door to door through our town begging and soothsaying, the pugnacious protectors of public order on the steps of the town hall whetted their sabers, used their practiced thumbs to wipe the stains from the blood grooves, and waited just as long as it took for headquarters to draft, compose, sign, and seal the expulsion command. Then it was simply a matter of “That’s it, you bandits! Off with you to the next town!” My mother counted the heads of her loved ones, and then all of us counted our chickens while our neighbor, whose loved ones were horses, counted his horses.

  The personage who was now running around in Don José’s house in Valldemosa—or rather who now, at the moment when I wish to introduce her, was sitting around his house with crossed legs and smoking with a long ivory cigarette holder, wearing high-heel shoes instead of going barefoot—this woman was as swarthy as the night and wore her gleaming hair sharply parted in the middle. Her earrings were so heavy that they made her earlobes hang down like pendulums, and every one of her fingers sported a ring. She was indeed a gypsy, and thus she must be none other than Doña Soledad, the authentic Andalusian gitana Bobby had already written us about. By examining palms, cards, and coffee grounds she could read the future and the past, and with her talent for synthesizing could draw conclusions about the present. What was more, it wasn’t necessary to keep doors or drawers locked when she was around. Doña Soledad wasn’t a thief. We were invited to come out for the weekend; Clarita was expecting us. We were to bring Pedro along, Bobby wrote in a P.S., and added in the margin, “There’ll be armadillo with champignon sauce.” So off we went to Valldemosa. We had never met a gypsy who didn’t steal but was otherwise authentic. Not even in the Balkans had Beatrice seen anything like it.

  Doña Soledad, wearing a red carnation in her hair and with a question-mark curl at her brow, hailed from the cuevas near Granada. She was rich, and no longer needed to filch anything. In the evening she performed gypsy dances. Pedro beat the tambourine and clacked the castanets. Soledad spoke fluent French, but what made her most appealing, especially to Beatrice, was the fact that she didn’t eat with her knife. Things got a little dicey when she started eating with her fingers, but Pedro explained that this wasn’t a gypsy custom, but the proper and polite way to consume armadillo.

  Beatrice’s fortune came first. A man had entered her life—not a major event, to be sure. In fact, more like the opposite. There were no signs that this man would be leaving her just as quickly. She should have patience, and not despair. As for the gentleman in question, certain foreign bodies had entered his life, too, although it wasn’t quite clear whether these were women or perhaps books—in any case they were hard, there was a collision, and that brought an end to it. In addition she saw a voyage, a ship, cannons, once again something hard, a coil of rope. “Do you see a bed?” I inquired. No, not a bed. So we would have to keep sleeping on newspapers. Doña Soledad, as clairvoyant as she was, failed to understand my question. Then she asked, “You’ve told me everything? Added nothing? Then show me your hand.”

  The gypsy woman unveiled my past life by taking one look at my left palm. It wasn’t pretty. Then she gazed at my other palm: a woman would enter my life. “A gypsy?” I asked.

  “No, why?”

  The reason was plain enough: I would love to be abducted by a real gypsy woman. Pilar had certain gypsy-like traits, but she saw everything wrong. And anyway, she wasn’t born in a cave in Sacro Monte. The fiery stream coursing between Doña Soledad’s hand and mine didn’t stop. She saw a person who was both close to me and far away. That person was in danger. Something was going to happen to him. He was going to die. I was hoping that it was Mr. Silberstern. That person was a good person… Oh well, too bad, it wasn’t my exploiter after all. And then Doña Soledad suddenly espied policemen. I was going to have difficulties with the police, though everything depended on my behavior—I held my fate in my own hand. With these words she let go of my hand, which prevented me from imagining that my fate bore the name Soledad Torres Medina. Was that all she saw? No, I would be traveling at sea—cannons, coils of rope, as with Doña Beatriz. Were we going to drown? No, this island was going to drown.

  It was all very exciting. Don José put on a wax nose, the better to fill his role as a seer. Nephew Manola, the Sureda dynasty’s fair-haired boy, principal heir and favorite painter, threatened to have a nervous breakdown in front of the church the next day, Sunday, unless Tío José gave him 100 pesetas. Everyone’s eyes turned to Ludwig Salvator’s personal physician, who had of course mastered worse situations during his lifetime. Peering over his extended nose, he looked over at Bobby who, simply using his optical eyes, had evolved into something like the domestic oracle of this hospedage. Bobby, in turn, looked at the gypsy, who had just taken hold of his hand. One brief touch, one glance at his palm, and she turned pale and immediately let go. A curt shriek told us that she had seen Bobby’s future. But what was it that the Andalusian professional clairvoyant actually saw in the lines of this Folkwang student’s hand? Beatrice, who also can read palms and tell a person’s fortune, would have handled a delicate situation like this one quite differently. She would have pulled herself together, declared that she was so tired she was seeing double, and said, “Some other time.”

  The fright that we all experienced caused Don José to forget to award his nephew the obolus he was demanding in order to prevent his nervous collapse on the morrow. Bobby and Pedro were pleased at this turn of events, for the next day, at the portal of the Cartuja, we would witness how the talented painter would go about extorting his uncle, throwing himself on the ground and, like the mimic of a gigantic spitting cicada, gathering enough froth at his mouth to make a pushover of his Tío José. And that is actually how it happened. But we also got a small bonus, for when Don José saw his nephew go into an epileptic fit, he too collapsed to the ground and was in need of Samaritan aid. Bobby took care of this.

  Back home, the two epileptics negotiated the appropriate economic arrangements, but not before Don José, once again in command of his physical and physicianly shrewdness, turned violently angry and hurled a chair at Manolo. The latter, likewise in full command of his faculties, quickly ducked and fell to the floor, and the chair went flying through the large window pane into the street below. Pistola fetched the debris without chewing a single piece. There followed a grand feast of reconciliation, with gypsy folk songs, superb wines, new glances into the future, and a unanimous protest from our hosts when we announced that we had to return to Palma. The weekend was at an end, but being outvot
ed we decided to stay on for a whole week more. One more week would eventually turn into two or three—a round month, let us say. We both needed a vacation, they told us. Vigo could continue writing his Hunnian epic or study his Lusitanian mystic, and Beatrice would have a grand piano at her disposal. We accepted, but Beatrice would have to go back to the city the next day to retrieve a few things: some clothes, books, sheet music. She would also have to start up my self-watering flower pots. And so Doña Beatriz departed alone.

  Upon her return I saw in her face that something had gone wrong. “Burglary,” she said. “The place was ransacked, but thank heavens they didn’t find your Hunnish Tombs.” She pulled my almost finished manuscript from her cenaia. I had put it in a waterproof envelope and sunk it down in a well, thinking that this might save it in case of a house fire. But meanwhile the Nazis had struck! I rode into the city to examine the damage. Our lock had been opened with a crowbar. I bought a new one, this time with the Yale trademark, with bolts to fit, and I filed down the key so it would fit snugly.

  Mamú thought that our burglary was “thrilling.” She asked me if I suspected anybody in particular. Well yes: the Nazis, or the heinous pillars of Christian Science, or perhaps both of these in subversive concert. “Then it’s a matter for the police,” said Mamú, and she summoned her chauffeur. Auma’s personal attorney in matters of state and matters of love, the man who sat at her feet, reverted for a brief moment to his professional world of jurisprudence and warned us not to inform the local authorities. He was sure that I already knew that the island police who monitored foreigners were especially suspicious of outlanders who made trouble of any kind. Therefore, he said, I should take matters into my own hands.

  “But how?”

  “I thought you were an inventor.”

  I asked Mamú’s chauffeur to take me in her car to Bonanova for a visit with Count Kessler. I possessed manuscripts of his as well as letters and other documents, and thus he was also involved in the burglary case. When I entered his house he was seated at his desk, a piece of furniture obviously designed by anybody else in this world but his private interior architect Henry van de Velde. This desk was a semi-circular affair, a work space for a housemaid, covered with a simple cotton fabric with printed pattern and fringe. That is where I encountered the Count, at the time the most famous man on the island, committing his thoughts and memories to paper for posterity.

  “A burglary, you say? And they didn’t touch my manuscripts? Well, that’s understandable, considering that everything is slated to be published by S. Fischer, back in the Reich. The spies knew all about this, and they had their specific orders.” But they didn’t know the whole story, the Count continued. That miserable Consul wasn’t even aware that he, Kessler, despite being exiled from Germany, had the status of an “exterritorial.” The local police authorities, too, were oblivious—but their ignorance could be called charming in comparison. But no matter. Although the thugs seemed to be aiming at me, Thälmann, Enemy Number One, at the moment the Count was most interested in obtaining a dog. He had the address of some German living somewhere in a hidden corner of the island, a man with a litter to select from.

  A few weeks later Kessler arrived at our door in a state of excitement. Something awful had happened to him. Had he been personally burglarized? Had his new dog, the pup from the secret German litter, raised its right paw to the Nazis and licked clean all the fingerprints from all his doorknobs and file cabinets?

  Count Kessler had paid a visit to the clandestine dog breeder and told him who he was and what he was looking for. He needed a watchdog, trained to spot his true enemy, Hitler. “Hitler? Who’s that?” the man asked.

  “Just imagine. Here’s a man who has lived on this island for decades, breeding dogs. He hasn’t the faintest idea of what’s going on in the world outside. He’s hearing the name ‘Hitler’ for the first time from my lips. And now I have disturbed his domestic comfort in an effort to secure my own domestic security. Now I think I have made a big mistake. I should have bought some local breed.”

  I consoled the Count by pointing out the well-known cowardice of the Balearic species, insisting that there wasn’t much to gain with such a purchase. I was aware, I told him, of how profoundly disturbed he must have been, as former President of the German Society for Peace, and as a diplomat familiar with the wish-dreams of all humanity, during his visit to the Mallorcan dog pound. But it was no different with the natives in the African jungle, I went on. They know nothing at all about Jesus Christ, and they eat each other up if that suits their appetite. Then along comes a troop of missionaries who capsize their domestic harmony, leaving them to do the best they can with a switch to vegetarianism.

  What was it that Doña Soledad predicted for us? I was destined to have difficulties with the police—but that would depend on my own behavior. I avoided contact with the authorities, steered clear of difficulties, and thereby fulfilled the gitana’s prophecy. Her reputation grew. But then she gazed at the moist hands of an elderly gentleman from Palma and foresaw a true bloodbath on our island. With that her clairvoyance became all too prophetic. Henceforth she was shunned.

  A few weeks later I received a telegram informing me that my father had died. My first thought was: the Nazis! I didn’t dare go back home for the funeral. One grave was enough, I figured. Surely one should love one’s enemies, but the Bible says nothing about helping one’s enemies to love one back. Our gypsy had once again prophesied correctly.

  Some years later we sat on coils of rope on board a British destroyer. All around us we had refugees, cannons, misery, and whining. Behind us was our island, sinking in the flames of civil war in night and fog—just as the gypsy had foretold. This was our voyage across the waters.

  Her predictions for Bobby likewise came true. Taken all together, it was what Henri Bergson called the phenomenon of déjà vu.

  XXV

  Count Harry Kessler dug deeper and deeper into his glorious past. He was up to his ears in his notes, diaries, letters by the thousands, memoranda, finished manuscripts, and other documents in a perpetual state of Wustmannian half-completion. There was hardly a single current event that could ferret him out of his burrow. He claimed that since he was in the process of retrieving the past, he surely ought to know whether he went to school with Hermann Keyserling—although he realized that Hermann wasn’t talking about his school in Darmstadt. He simply couldn’t recall the two of them having school years in common, although Keyserling insisted that they had. This must imply, he said, that he was writing his memoirs without being able to remember his own self. I begged leave to point out that similar cases occur in world literature: Don Quixote, for example. He replied that rather than making fun of him I should just tell him how he could steer clear of that obnoxious fellow. Why, Keyserling was probably going to follow his steps to General Barceló Street! And what was that man after? He needed accomplices for his private harlequinade. For weeks there had been announcements of a session of Count Hermann Keyserling’s School of Wisdom to be held at the Hotel Príncipe Alfonso. And since they went to school together, Keyserling was thinking that he, Kessler, was bound by conscience to assist him at this overseas outpost of German philosophy. But Kessler could remember nothing about schooldays in common…

  There are lots of things I can’t remember, but schooldays are not among them; they are forever hammered into my memory. In this respect I differ from Kessler, who from the day he was born was destined for a career at the end of which he would put down his recollections on paper. I was destined for a career at the end of which only I myself would get put down. And that’s why I have never made notes, never kept a diary, never scribbled things on slips of paper and placed them, like Don Juan Sureda, in boxes and suitcases—building-blocks for my applied recollections. If I ever had, then no sooner would neatnik Beatrice have wiped up Kessler’s boot marks from our floor than I would have committed my “Conversations with Kessler” to paper with the verbatim quality of fresh memory,
which permits only subtle differentiations such as that between “crook” and “blackguard.”

  Still, nuances of this kind could have no effect on the moral depravity of the person so labeled, especially since that person was a book publisher whom Kessler was intending to pillory in his fourth volume. Speaking of his own publisher, he said that this man would turn out to be his coffin nail. But that, too, strikes me as a matter of subtle nuance. Publishers, he explained, were a writer’s eternal gadflies. Having bad luck with a publisher meant that the writer could simply fail—and he was beginning to have bad luck. Or did he say “misfortune”? When I once asked him about such details, Kessler told me that when recording actual conversations it was not verbal but psychological accuracy that was important. This is what Bismarck must have said, given all that one knows about the man, or noted down after speaking with him, or has read in Bismarck’s own writings, or the like. An insight like this one from Kessler has reassured me while I write down these recollections of mine, in which a single publisher can at once embody verbal reality as a crook, psychological reality as a scamp, and historical reality as my coffin nail. It goes without saying that, besides, the publisher is a scoundrel.

  Count Kessler recounted for us many episodes in his life that were meant for the later volumes of his memoirs. He explained the context of each event, and told us where it would fit in his personal narrative. If I had kept careful notes for my own “memoirs,” I could offer a little assistance to the world’s historical memory, now that everything is in the past and will no doubt soon be forgotten.

  “What does Keyserling want from you? He is his own man as a philosopher and as a person, and in my opinion he doesn’t need anybody else to help him out. And besides, he lives in the Príncipe, where they idolize him as the establishment’s most effective advertisement. That’s what my brother-in-law Don Helvecio has told me.”