There was loud applause, honestly proffered and well deserved. Dr. Sureda Blanes thanked the speaker in the name of Lullian Science and all of its devotees in attendance, for the great German philosopher’s brilliant impromptu discourse on such an extraordinary subject. An exhaustive discourse, he went on, again speaking for all those present. Surely there was nothing to add to the Count’s explanations—or perhaps there was? If not, then if the audience so desired, we could proceed to the general discussion, for Conde de Keyserling would surely give us the pleasure of taking up some of the more obscure points… Hermann nodded, mais naturellement—just ask away! Darmstadt was ready to provide all the answers.
No one budged. Someone had turned the electric fan back on, and it blew the pearl fisher’s beard out toward the audience. His green tie glistened, the palms swayed. The gentlemen at the green table were also swaying, and Harry too, who looked as if he wanted to say something. A few words of thanks? He stood up, and the custom tailoring of his Bauzá suit presented a distingué contrast to his would-be schoolmate’s pink shirt. The latter gestured to him as if to say, “Well, I’ll let you speak a few nice words, Harry, but keep it brief. If the audience likes what you say, we’ll take that as a recommendation for a repeat performance sometime, and then we can take off and enjoy a bottle together. I’ve got it all prepared.”
Harry did express his thanks—oh yes, indeed. His old friend, he said, had made some interesting points concerning the proposed topic. But—a thousand pardons—although Count Keyserling certainly had profound things to say about the subject at hand, he hadn’t truly plumbed the depths—a thousand pardons. Would he be permitted to add a few comments of his own? He had made some notes. Ten minutes, and no more?
There was commotion in the hall, commotion at the green table, commotion beneath the pink shirt. Don Francisco spoke up: “Go ahead, Señor Conde!” There were echoes of “Go ahead!” from the audience in many languages. Then Hermann, circus M.C. and clown in one and the same person, said, “Fine!” and clapped his hands smartly. No one followed his example, so now Harry, his head bent ever so slightly forward, commenced his act of revenge on the louche impostor and his phony story about their schooldays together. One by one, Harry hauled up to the surface all of Hermann’s deep-sea monsters, luminescent animals, medusas, and jellyfish, and burst them apart. When the aquarium was totally empty, Hermann was done for, stripped down to his dawn-colored shirt. The one Count had no need to administer the coup de grâce to the other Count. The entire audience took over this task. They gave Conde Harry de Kessler a thunderous ovation, a tribute that Conde de Keyserling couldn’t out-clap with his gigantic paws. As a self-defined Sage, he clearly knew when the jig was up.
Count Kessler looked over to our corner of the hall. We waved to him. He gestured his thanks. Afterwards he told us that he felt so ashamed on our account that he was worrying how he could possibly set things aright. He succeeded admirably.
Hermann retreated to his hotel suite and, all alone, drank up the chilled bottles, all six of them. Then he summoned Don Helvecio to his room and discussed with him his departure. He wasn’t interested in a return engagement at Formentor. He had urgent commitments in Barcelona, Madrid, Salamanca…
The local newspapers took notice of the Príncipe event. Who was this Count Kessler, the man whose age, compendious knowledge, and cleverness had so astonishingly outpointed the famous, popular, hispanophile Count Keyserling? He was reported to be a foreign guest on the island, and a renowned personage on all the continents. But why had Mallorca not heard of him before? It was said that he was composing his memoirs, and the hope was that they would be published in Spanish, too.
During the following days Count Kessler was inundated with letters of invitation: conferencias here, conferencias there, requests for pre-publication copies of his memoirs and for copies of his Notes on Mexico. Kessler rejected all of them. It was not his intention, he said, to claim the spotlight. He had simply wished to give the insistent Hermann a lesson. Hermann, for his part, cursed the day when he shared his platonic schooldays with Harry.
Harry once again submerged into his days of imperial glory. Hermann, after a return to the Spanish mainland, enjoyed continued acrobatic success as the prophet of an Iberian Hellas.
I was not aware that the German publisher Samuel Fischer was known to his friends as “Sami.” And thus at first I couldn’t understand why Count Kessler was so upset at reading this man’s obituary, or that he, who even in exile observed all the forms of etiquette, came knocking at our door late in the evening—a type of behavior that we could have expected only from Herr Silberstern.
“Sami is dead. May I come in?” To judge by the newspapers that we found in our corridor, it must have been a night between Saturday and Sunday. Kessler made no attempt to take his shoes off. He was in distress, and kept saying how horrible it was that Sami was dead. Not until he added, leaning against the bookcase in our bible-paper room, that Sami’s successor would no doubt turn out to be his coffin nail, did I realize that the person he was mourning was none other than the famous S. Fischer. There would be trouble, he told us. All their wonderful collaboration on the literary journal Pan was now over with, all the leisure he, Kessler, needed for the later volumes of his memoirs. Then he wandered off in recollections of the post-Bismarck years: the heyday of Naturalist drama: Gerhart Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, all the great European writers that Sami had assembled from near and far: Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Georg Brandes.
Conversing further on, he eventually focused on an episode to be recounted in the final volume of his memoirs, which he intended to finish with his flight from Germany. It was a scene that took place in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. He was involved in negotiations in a private room with personages whose names I have of course forgotten. A waiter arrives and says, “Gentlemen, the Reichstag is on fire!” Someone grabs Kessler’s arm and whispers to him that it is high time that he pack his bags and escape to England or France. Kessler doesn’t even take the time to return to his apartment on Köthener Strasse, the rooms designed and decorated by Henry van de Velde. Instead, he takes the very next train to Paris. His head was on the list of those to be liquidated when the Nazis faked a Communist assassination attempt against the Führer. Kessler had a copy of that list, given to him by friends of his at the German embassy in London.
That business about Sami Fischer’s successor as Harry’s “coffin nail” made a big impression on me, since I was thinking that a writer of such universal renown as Count Kessler must be immune to the vagaries and chicaneries of any publisher, especially his own publisher. Today I know that an author must consider himself fortunate if his publisher doesn’t send him, along with a publishing contract, a finished coffin—one that would probably be a few sizes too small. It’s a lucky thing for the future of literature that most writers feel so sheltered from death that even in sight of the proverbial four boards, they continue to compose their own epitaphs.
Count Kessler left the island in the spring of 1936. His health was ruined; he was spitting blood, and he looked terrible. Before he departed, in Barcelona and in the Galerías Costa in Palma he arranged exhibitions of highly acclaimed works from his Cranach Press.
We agreed that I should continue par distance as his scribe. He would send me his manuscripts, and I would edit them with my Wustmannian marginal notes. A few letters and manuscript packages went between General Barceló Street and his new refuge, the Hostellerie des Compagnons de Jéhu in Pontanevaux. The outbreak of the Civil War brought all this to an end.
Count Kessler was lucky to have reached French soil when the disaster started. He would not have survived the Franco night of July 18th-19th, 1936. The gun-toting Nazi from Königsberg, the one who took upon himself the purging of the German colony, would have made short work of him. For quite a while a rumor spread that Kessler had been shot on Mallorca. Under normal circumstances the Nazis could have left him alone for a few more years, since he was relativ
ely harmless. He never gave reckless speeches against the Third Reich, and was not involved in any conspiracies. It is only because the collaboration between him and his Wustmannian, Thälmannian, Thelemannian amanuensis worked so well that he hadn’t sought out some politically innocuous secretary. There were times when he was anxious about my unpredictability. Only the completion of his fourth and final volume of memoirs could have given Hitler reason to eliminate him. “That must never be written,” I was told later, by a man sitting next to me on a coil of rope on a British destroyer, a man who had reason to fear the same fate. It was the writer Franz Blei, Kessler’s friend from the time of their collaboration on the literary journal Pan.
XXVI
It’s always the same when a person is going down the drain: those nearest to him never notice the problem until it is too late. That’s how it was with Zwingli. One day we observed that he had stopped taking baths, that he no longer did us his customary little favors, that again and again we had to tell his limping business partner that Don Helvecio hadn’t come back to us, and that his clothes got dirtier and shabbier. In short, a woman!
She was a dancer of the unclothed variety, her name was Konákis, which suggested Greek origins—or rather the Greek origins of her art. For although she pretended to be a child of Hellas, she was Italian, came from Chicago, and had Irish blood. She could be sporadically observed in the altogether at the dingiest of nightclubs, where she was lauded and serenaded for her beauty.
Like many high-bred women, Konákis preferred men who exuded the aroma of the cave. She, too, yearned to be abducted and thrown into the bushes by hairy chimpanzee fists, and to view above her a powerful male chest with hair containing clumps of earth that she could pluck out one by one, chanting “He loves me, he loves me not,” only to have the depilated savage take out his bloody lust on her. Zwingli had fished up Konákis at the Torre del Reloj. Now he was in her thrall, and quickly went primitive in order to grab hold of her all the more securely. Without such a mutation he wouldn’t have been nearly earthy enough for her. What the two of us were mourning as yet another form of deterioration was for Zwingli, on the contrary, a new awakening. The horn on his pinky once again showed the old signs of accumulated grime. His brain was hatching audacious plans, and producing so much dandruff that a light snowfall occurred whenever he shook his head, which he now often did.
In the center of the city he rented a half-derelict villa for his Academy. His millionaire sponsor was still hiding behind his bank account, but was expected to arrive on Mallorca, where rooms in the Príncipe were long since awaiting him. Yet because this man was still invisible, Zwingli was hard at work with his local genius for the founding of institutions, Don Darío. My inventions had already earned them “quite a wad.” They were now investing the wad in higher art education. This started with a series of sketching classes with nude models for beginners and advanced students, plus a master class. There were peepholes for the “aficionados of nudity,” and the entire enterprise went forward under the aegis of Spain’s famous painter Doña Pilar, whose full surname was several lines long although her single noble title would suffice to fill the classroom with standing-room-only. It goes without saying that Pedro’s mother had no idea what mischief was being perpetrated in the name of her alba. She learned about it from her indignant relatives, who had seen their name emblazoned on banners, posters, and leaflets. One more crazy Sureda escapade? That’s what people were asking. The sketching classes were a front, they said. This was surely a bordello with a fancy new cachet.
It was a fact that Zwingli could hardly keep control of the applications for his academy. He had only a single model: Konákis. Old geezers, bored with their sterile club activities, applied for admission as beginners. They were loath to pass from this life without sketching a live nude. They had never done anything like it, and didn’t even know that it could be done. For them, women’s bodies existed to be fallen in love with, stared at, slept with, married, locked in, beaten, sent to church, and allowed annually to enjoy the heaven-sent gift of pregnancy. But now a domestic animal of this kind could be possessed with the aid of an artist’s pencil at Don Helvecio’s International Academy of Art. Who could resist?
The posters and brochures announced that, in addition to the modeling studio, there were two further new affiliated educational institutions: one for foreign languages and one for herbal tea.
Zwingli distributed thousands of advertisements across the entire island. He hired minions to cruise the Borne, shout the name of the new academy, and pass out fliers to pedestrians. One time I heard my own name being called out. Curious as to what Vigoleis had now got himself into, I took one of the brochures and learned that the new Academy had obtained for its faculty a certain Professor Vigoleis, trained at German and Dutch universities, widely traveled, and famous as the inventor of the One-Chair System of Pedagogy. Attendance at his ¾ hour One-Chair seminar was listed as costing 25 pesetas, instruction in any of the major languages, and “Please turn.” When I turned, I found this: Mens sana non potest vivere in corpore sicco—Rabelais’ parody of Juvenal’s famous motto: “A healthy mind cannot live inside a dried-up body.” Ergo: “Drink Pastor Künzli’s Herbal Tea! Samples served at the Academy!” The trinity of wine, women, and song was hailed in this broadsheet, along with the little deviancies that can make such a combination so fruitful. The wine was Künzli Tea, the woman’s name was Konákis, and the song would have to come forth from Vigoleis’ throat.
Elated by my appointment to the faculty of the new Academy, I rushed home. This was, finally, going to be my great stroke of luck. Beatrice must be the first to hear about it.
In front of our house, furniture was being loaded into vans. Zwingli was in charge of the procedure with his pinky nail. Next to him on our balcony stood Konákis, a desirable specimen of Mother Nature even when fully clothed. Neither of them noticed my arrival. I ducked beneath a desk some guy was lifting, and entered the stairway.
I found Beatrice in our spare room. Had she been crying? After so many years and so much trouble in a constantly vulnerable marriage, it is difficult to be sure in retrospect. There is no question that she had reason to shed tears, not to mention tearing her hair out. I could claim the privilege of all writers of memoirs and have her behave here in just this way, but only if she had a natural inclination toward theatrical masochism. Just this much: brother and sister had just emerged from a terrible fight. She had tossed water at him, and he had tossed bottles of medicine at her, with his Greek squeeze goading her earthy troglodyte companion to clobber his prude of a sister. Beatrice accused Zwingli of exploiting the honorable name of Pedro’s mother, telling him that she knew full well that his new establishment was nothing but a brothel camouflaged as an academy of art. With that, Beatrice had uttered the fateful word, and the above-named objects started flying about our apartment. Zwingli’s choice of bottles of medicine to toss must be understood in the context of the bout of typhus from which he had just recovered, a disease we had nursed him through for several months. We had to summon Dr. Solivellas, because neither brother nor sister had any further confidence in their grandfather’s homeopathic drops. Zwingli didn’t trust Spanish hospitals. Vigoleis didn’t trust Zwingli. And so forth…
It’s such a shame. If Konákis hadn’t been on the scene in her fully clothed state, instead of squabbling, brother and sister would have embraced each other, and Zwingli would have moved off to his Institute of Female Art. But as it was, he now burned all his bridges behind him. The only thing he took with him, at Konákis’ insistence, was the list of my inventions. I was flattered.
I soon convinced Beatrice that we should be happy that Zwingli’s cathouse academy was not to be located inside our own apartment. I meant this as a form of consolation, but quickly enough it became a fly in the ointment. Beatrice was unable to rid herself of the idea that the very possibility of such a development had desecrated our living quarters. She was unwilling to stay where we were, yet she wasn’t su
ggesting that we once again try jumping into the ocean. A move to the Archduke’s palace at Miramar would be possible only when Mamú’s millions were finally available. But in the meantime, Mamú wasn’t even in a position to pay back the tusig Fränkli we had lent her.
“OK, let’s move out,” I said. “You’re sick of this apartment. For you it stinks of this Konákis woman. I’ll go look for another place.”
I found a new apartment on the 7th floor of a new building on a street we knew, one named after a more than familiar personage: the Avenida del Archiduque Luis Salvador. “Salvador” means “redeemer.” The Suredas had recently moved with kit and caboodle into a flat just a few doors away from us. Could we have hoped for a nicer neighborhood? When we negotiated the rent, the paint was still wet, but that didn’t mean that we were “dry renters”. This piso had a bathroom, a custom-made kitchen, and a roof garden with ocean view. Our finances were in satisfactory condition, but our health had gone to the dogs. It was over-exertion, Dr. Solivellas told us. We should go out into the countryside, into the mountains, for three or four months. For that length of time the two of us should do no work at all, for up to now we had knocked ourselves out like slaves. He offered us his cottage at the seaside near Pollensa. But mountain air would be better, he said. Valldemosa, Génova, Monasterio de Lluch…
Mamú had a woman friend who didn’t belong to the Christian round table, a Swedish painter of indeterminable age but of quite determinable lineage. She called her Swedish king “Uncle,” an appellation she employed every year during the vacations she spent at court with her relatives. One of her passions was tennis. Her name was Agnes, so on our island she was known as Doña Inés. She let us use her house in Génova for four summer months. So our switch to the new address on Archduke Luis Street was in effect a twofold removal.
The Island of Second Sight Page 112