“Well, we’ll just have to leave,” said Beatrice. Prolonged hunger can make a person irritable, and snails with prickly pear à la vinaigrette make for very sour fodder. One more week of this stimulating diet and we bleeding-heart pacifists, too, would have reached for a revolver and taken up combat against those outside who were fighting for the glory of God and filling His consecrated cemeteries. We were already benumbed. As for myself, I am willing to confess that the execution of 14 people, for whose death I was unknowingly responsible, did not deprive me of my senses. It would take too long to set forth the tragic details of a mistake that caused the Christian crusaders to commit new acts of terror. When we heard shooting in the vicinity of the Casa Inés, when we heard the screaming of women and children, my heart did not burst. It was the most awful night of my life—the night when my heart did not cease its beating.
It’s an amazing thing about any war, that after committing a few atrocities, a human being can regress to the womb of primeval atrocity.
We had eaten our next-to-last snail, and the last one had escaped, so there was no sense in our staying in Génova. The next day we went to the English Consulate and asked to be evacuated on a warship. No problem, we were told. His Majesty’s Navy stood ready to rescue anybody from this hell, no matter the nationality. “Your nationality?”
“We’re Germans.” That would be all right, we learned, but the protocol of international cooperation would require that the German Consulate stamp my passport as valid for evacuation. Beatrice, who in the meantime had become my passport-validated spouse—a stupid move that deprived her of her bullet-proof Swiss passport—and I just stared at the British official. Was he crazy? A passport stamp that would allow us to flee? From the Nazi Consul, who had already threatened us with documents from back home? I started explaining my unusual situation: I was an early emigré from Germany, but anti-Nazi. Couldn’t this man understand that it would be impossible for me to approach the German Consulate? Beatrice interrupted, asking if we might speak with the British Consul in person. We knew the gentleman; Count Kessler had maintained good relations with him. He wasn’t there; he had been called off to the interior of the island with the urgent task of rescuing British subjects from the threat of execution by reason of mistaken identity.
Doubtless this was the same kind of mistake that almost led to the execution of the Admiral of the British Mediterranean Fleet when he was seen stepping out of a jolly boat on the sandy beach at Coll de Rebassa, all alone and dressed in a white civilian tropical suit. He wanted to take a swim, and that was prohibited under pain of death; every island beach was now a death zone. A swarm of kids, armed to the teeth, let out Indian war whoops and surrounded the man. The Admiral, of middling height and slim, his features the typical English hybrid of old salt and university scholar—we later made his acquaintance on board his ship—remained as composed as Karl May’s Old Shatterhand at the martyr’s stake. “What’s wrong, fellows?” he asked. But the fellows didn’t understand English, and weren’t in a joking mood. All of them had cocked their pistols, and now they were waiting to see who would take the first shot. It was a sure thing that this spy would have to be knocked off.
They couldn’t agree among them, and that is the only reason why the Admiral wasn’t summarily blasted into the sand. They got hold of a truck, and delivered their precious booty to Manacor. His Lordship offered no resistance. He couldn’t speak Spanish, and at Manacor they took him for a kook who was pretending to be the Admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet. They were used to cases like this one: even in peacetime, people on the island pretended to be all kinds of things they weren’t, and now in the midst of a war! This was a time when army generals were being canonized and worshiped. Even so, a few of the Manacor officers were taken aback. This kook’s behavior seemed to manifest a degree of hallucination unknown in Spain. They sent for an interpreter, who after a brief conversation advised them to send this Sir, unexecuted, to Palma. If it was found out that the guy was truly a nut case and hence a spy, he could still be shot in the head.
Meanwhile, in Palma a minor palace revolt had occurred involving rival factions of generals and commanders-in-chief of all nationalistic colorations, some of them the sworn enemies of some others. Carlists, Falangists, legionnaires, militiamen, paramilitaries, Guardia Civil: all of them were busy combing their brilliantine-soaked hair when news arrived that the Admiral of the British Mediterranean Fleet had been shot while swimming at Coll de Rebassa. The officers of the flagship London came to retrieve their boss, who was handed over to them unharmed. The Spaniards were happy to have avoided an international incident. That evening, I was later told by a reliable source who was also a direct participant, all the generals threw a huge party for their whores. The kids had their pistols taken away from them for 24 hours.
After leaving the British Consulate we went over to the French. Evacuation? Yes. Are you Swiss citizens? No. German? Yes. Two seconds later we were back out on the street. It couldn’t go any faster, since there were several doors between the street and the old Verdun warrior we had spoken with. Try explaining to a French consul that you are among the little band of degenerate Germans who aren’t out to lead their Fatherland to victory! But now, what reason would the German Consul have to refuse us, seeing that he considered me his best Führer. “Beatrice, will you come with me, or should I go alone?”
We went together. Beatrice had loaded her face-powder box with pepper, for all eventualities.
The German Consulate was now located in El Terreno, the fashionable residential section of the city, on the second floor of the Consul’s villa. There were no identifying signs outside. For fear of flying bricks, the Führer’s representative had unscrewed the plaque with the national insignia. All the other consulates had put up gigantic flags and painted their national colors on the roofs, a precaution during the continual aerial bombardments originating in Barcelona. Their automobiles, too, carried big fluttering flags, a spectacle outdone only by the adventurer from the Holy See Conte di Rossi, lord of the island, who mounted on his Bugatti a black flag with larger-than-life skull and crossbones.
So the Consul is getting the willies, I thought. He’s unsure of his position. My own courage, a bookworm’s courage, took heart at this idea. The stubborn fellow let us wait for about an hour.
In the course of my story I have been unable to resist the urge to throw out hints concerning the Consul’s crucial query about my having been shot. So now that the moment for that query has arrived, I fear I have squandered the narrative effect it might otherwise have. Instead of letting my recollections resemble a perpetuum mobile, I ought to have proceeded in strict chronological fashion with the aid of file cards to mark the temporal divisions. Every section should have been clearly delineated, all my sources neatly identified, the veracity of every assertion beyond question. Even memory lapses would be accounted for; that is how Count Kessler went about it, to cite just one example. I can depend on my Vigoleis only to the extent that he, the hindmost part of history, has no idea what his head has in mind—to quote Lichtenberg. But there are organisms that move more efficiently with their tails than with their heads. Like the whales, they can whip themselves right out of their milieu with a single whack of their flukes. When they plunge back into their element, it causes an earthquake. In this sense, we could say that the recollections of Vigoleis are being written with his tail. Count Kessler was one of the last remnants of a cerebral culture that is no longer with us. I regard it as one of the most vexing puzzles of my lifetime that he, such an intellectually superior individual, could ever don a uniform—and the Kaiser’s uniform at that. This very topic would have found its place in the third volume of his memoirs. It’s a shame that Kessler didn’t write his book backwards. When I once broached the subject with him, he reacted only with a pitying smile, as so often when I brought up matters or made suggestions that were foreign to his way of thinking. Did he think of me only as the idiot he first encountered when he found me stark nake
d under our Unlulunkulu? If so, then his polite silence was just the proper kind of behavior.
Yet if he had begun at the hind end of his story, he would have exposed himself to the danger of being shot by the Nazis immediately following the publication of Volume One, just as the Mexicans wanted his head because he, as the first European, reported in his 1898 Notes on Mexico on the satanic Ley fuga (“shot while trying to escape”) enforced by the dictator Porfirio Diaz. In Mexico he was placed on the Most Wanted list. It was terrible, the writer thought, to be shot while trying to escape. But in 1921 he saw fit to add a footnote to the new edition of his book, saying, “In Germany since the revolution we have unfortunately also had experience with the Ley fuga.” And something similar: the suppression of a conspiracy against Don Porfirio, discovered by the governor of Veracruz, who asked the dictator for instructions. Porfirio Diaz telegraphed back, “Matan los todos!”—Kill them all! That same night, Kessler writes, the governor arrested nine young men aged nineteen and twenty in their homes and ordered them shot under their own roofs. The bodies, with bullet holes in the back, were handed over to their parents. So what was happening on Mallorca, or for that matter in the Third Reich, was not so original after all. But perhaps it was more historical.
A stronger claim to imaginative planning, albeit one involving a leap backwards by two thousand years, could be made for the crucifixions that took place on Mallorca. There were rumors that people who didn’t believe in God, or who were branded as deniers of the Divinity (the Inquisition itself never created a reliable test; even Szondi is evasive on this point) were crucified by bands of extremely devout Falange fanatics, nailed to the famous 1000-year-old olive trees that were not only the pride of the island, but also a huge advertising success for the travel agencies. Gustave Doré himself was fascinated by the bizarre shapes of these olive trees. He used them as a model for the images of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. In other words, these were very special trees, perfect for committing carnage in the name of religion. In earlier times trees were likewise used for massacres when not enough crosses could be built in time. So again: it’s all been done before. But is it really true? Were people actually nailed to the olive trees on Mallorca? I could find no eyewitnesses who could have confirmed this. I heard only whispered rumors.
Bernanos, who tracked down all kinds of inhumane acts, nowhere mentions a single instance of crucifixion, and we must bear in mind that this writer, with a conscientious zeal motivated by a bad conscience, would have recorded anything that could serve—for his own private purposes—to exculpate his soul. To use the term “bad conscience” is, from the point of view of psychology, to speak quite superficially when applied to a thinker for whom the problem of Original Sin was a simple matter, but who fell for the abysmally stupid slogans of the Spanish monarchists in a manner matched only by a certain provincial German Nobel-Prize-winning philosopher who swallowed Hitler’s double-talk. When Bernanos once invited me to come and discuss a German translation of his Journal d’un curé de campagne, I refused. Tell me what company you keep, and I’ll tell you what you’re in for. Bernanos frequented the same exalted Catholic and aristocratic company on the island to which we had also found access, and which was the source of the Revolution. Does this mean that I should have gone against myself? A court jester can take liberties that a king must forego. If at the time I had read more of Bernanos’ work, I would have told myself, “Sooner or later this guy is going to have to wake up.” Miguel de Unamuno underwent an even more serious kind of blinding. He actually saw in the two-armed General Franco the Redeemer of Spain, and he suffered greatly as a result. With him, I was sure that the scales would fall from his eyes. It didn’t take long for him to recover, but he was soon put under arrest and didn’t survive the incarceration.
A big one-armed general contributed to the performance of this miracle. No, not our Patuco—unfortunately not him. Millán Astray provided the immediate cause for Unamuno’s uttering his famous pun, a faux pas that cost him his life. In front of his students in Salamanca, Unamuno waxed prophetic: Franco and his minions would, to be sure, be victorious (vencerán), but they would fail to convince (convencerán), and his beloved Spain would emerge from the Revolution—“Like you, General”—and he pointed to the one-armed Astray.
It was high time that this university professor got tossed in jail. Unamuno was famous for his words, which took wing as soon as he spoke them. Just hours later these words of his were circulating in tertulias in the remotest provinces of Spain, along with dozens of other bons mots about the King, dozens about Primo de Rivera, one bon mot more clever than the other. Such utterances have been known to dethrone kings. Franco was aware of this, and he also realized that an apostate Unamuno was more dangerous than a Don Miguel who was against the New Redeemer from the beginning. Don Miguel had to be muzzled. Ley fuga? The circumstances didn’t permit this to happen, and so they employed “protective custody.” Necessity breeds invention, and it also strengthens group solidarity. To grab the Rector of Salamanca University, a religious thinker of world renown, and in front of all his students simply to…
“You? Haven’t you been shot?”
There you have it, dear reader, the question concerning our hero’s destiny from the mouth of the German Consul himself. It shook me awake from my reveries, and before I uttered my already familiar counter-query, as the victim of my complicated instincts I probably gave way to a very Prussian urge to leap up, stand at attention, and shout, “Am I supposed to be?” When, says St. Paul, will I be delivered from this mortal body? When will the rebellious citizen Vigoleis be delivered from the poisonous garb of his nationality? Anyone who was raised among wild animals will, even years later, start grunting as soon as the barking of a jackal reaches his ears. Madame de Manziarly records just such a regression to Paradise in her Pérégrinations asiatiques.
The Consul let us have it. He sat down behind his desk. I was seated next to Beatrice, whose expression was stony. She had taken her powder box out of her purse. Ever since Consul General Dr. Köcher in Barcelona had blessed our union and—lucky for us—reduced the fee according to the poverty laws, she had been a citizen of the German Reich. Now she was looking straight through the official representative of her obligatory fatherland—which is not to say that she saw through him.
In the course of a lengthy scolding we learned the following: on the night when the rebellious generals first struck on the mainland, on Mallorca a number of German emigrés were arrested and put in jails where they were to be tried. Among them was the famous Captain Kraschutzki, who had taken part in a mutiny in Kiel in 1918. For many years he lived as a stateless person on Mallorca, where he bred chickens. He, the Consul, had arranged the release of all of these people with the exception of Kraschutzki, since he lacked jurisdiction over individuals who had lost their citizenship. Franz Blei told us later that all the rest of those people had also been shot to death. Our own names were likewise on the liquidation list. And quite naturally so; we didn’t deserve any other fate, since we were against the Führer. A squad had entered our house on Barceló and asked questions. The hens had flown the coop. Where to? Pepe, my loitering friend from Palma Harbor, knew our new address but refused to reveal it. They shot him, and left his body behind. For three weeks afterward, a truckload of a dozen Falange goons, accompanied by a German interpreter, drove across the whole island looking for us. They eventually gave up the search. The Consulate was informed that we had been shot. But now, months later, these two sub-humans suddenly reappear and betake themselves straightaway to the monster’s lair!
Were we aware, the Consul inquired, that our presence in his office could compromise him? How so? Well, it was his duty to inform the leadership of the Falange that two presumably executed individuals were giving themselves up at his consulate. “Giving themselves up?” Well, at least that they were making an appearance there. Beatrice toyed with her pepper powder. Was she getting ready to blow out the man’s eyesight? I gestured to her an
d then said that all of this was news to us; we had known for quite a while that my fellow German citizens were intent on doing us in; he himself had repeatedly referred to certain ominous documents from my home town. Now he and the others, I went on, the whole brownshirt gang, were the victors, and we had lost the game. So—“Please?” “Please what?” Well, I said, now he must not shirk his duty as an employee of his other Führer. He must call up the Falange and pass the case on. Just two shots, and everybody would be happy. “What are you saying?” “You must do your duty,” I replied, “and call up the Blue House!” The Consul went pale: had I gone crazy? “Not at all,” I said. “If I were crazy, I would be a Nazi. So now get to work! Orders are orders!”
The Island of Second Sight Page 115