Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Historical authenticity on the one hand, with its dry and rarefied scholarly mission, or on the other hand, legend as leaven for poetic truth: both impulses have combined most effectively here to help describe — but my reader will have guessed what I was getting at — Zwingli’s shirt. It was of “isabella” shade from top to bottom, save for blackish areas on collar and underarms. Had Zwingli, too, taken a vow? Had he pledged himself to someone in eternal grubbiness? Was he besieging something or someone, or was he perhaps himself under a state of siege? The subsequent course of events will provide historical answers to all these questions.

Earlier, as we were driving to this domicile where “she” was reported to be so superb in bed, Zwingli had waxed progressively more subdued and fainthearted. This fact, together with the fruitless reach of his hand into his bottomless pants pocket, had led me to conclude that the uneducated “individual” who was as yet unnamed, or whose identity was being anxiously circumscribed like the One and Only God of Hebrew Scripture — that this person must be a powerful force indeed. And here inside the apartment I received further confirmation of this conjecture. Zwingli’s shirt, plus the kitsch hanging on the walls — whoever could put up with such menaces must be in possession of superhuman strength.

I might have gone down to defeat at the sight of Princess Isabella’s chemise, but I am invulnerable to kitsch. More than that, I love kitsch wherever it is appropriate, which is to say, wherever it fulfills the purpose it is without doubt intended to serve. The important thing, of course, is to understand what that purpose is. The fact that we as yet don’t know what its overall objective is, need not deter us from our research. Why, even today, we still have no idea why the common flea, the crabgrass of the fields, or mankind itself stands in the midst of Creation. Were we ever to find out, then at that very hour everything would lose its poetic or religious meaning. I regard myself as so immune to kitsch that I would even permit Paulus Potter’s Bull to hang in my study with no danger to my soul. I have just cited an enormously famous work, one that I consider a classic example of the genre.

The longer Zwingli remained silent, all the louder did those reproductions on the walls speak to me.

“Nothing to eat around here?”

This question, posed by Beatrice although it had been bothering me for quite some time too, put some life back in my brother-in-law. Fruit in a picture frame is lovely to look at, but it remains nature morte and in the long run cannot satisfy even the birds that occasionally peck at well-painted grapes. In reply Zwingli put both hands in his pants pockets and pulled them outward in the manner of a circus clown. So I made my second dive for loose pesetas and dribbled a handful on the table.

“Is this what you’re looking for? Go ahead, help yourself!” Money rules the world right down to the tiniest corner of our planet, right here to the darkest Street of Solitude. Money can get you anything. Kings and popes have groveled in the dust before it. All that matters is the purchasing power we assign to those thirty pieces of silver. If the scribes and high priests had taken back the blood money, Judas Iscariot would never have strung himself up in a fig tree.

I have seldom observed the power of silver as on that morning when it breathed new life into the ebbing Zwingli. It was clear that with my transfusion of cash, I wasn’t mistaken in the blood type. Zwingli took the pesetas and stepped over to the window. As he opened the shutters, light, air, dust, and noise flooded the room. He let out a sharp whistle, shouted a few words down to the street, and threw the money down after. This performance impressed me, even though it was taking place at my expense. That’s how the powerful of this world act at great moments in history: they show themselves on balconies and toss gold to the rabble.

“Are the masses standing assembled down there?” I was about to ask, but before we heard any “Huzzahs!” or “Long lives!” the sovereign ruler closed the shutters, and our silent vigil could continue. I’m told that people sit around like this in the waiting rooms of maternity wards. Well then, let’s wait for the event that, if our luck continues, is bound to be another miscarriage. “Shall I make some coffee? Where’s your kitchen?” Beatrice didn’t want to stay idle, but her offer was refused.

“Coffee is on its way. I ordered it from across the way at the club. Our kitchen is over there.” Zwingli pointed his thumb at a narrow door in one corner. “But she’s going to want to use it right away. I mean, it’s still so goddam early!”

Meanwhile it was nine o’clock, quite early indeed in a country where evening begins at midnight and where most people, like the pigs, sleep well into the daylight hours.

Although the two siblings had much to say to each other, they had not yet had a private discussion. Were they inhibited by my presence? Hardly, for over the years I had become just as much a part of their extended family as my reader is doing at this very moment. Even so, I didn’t quite fit this melting-pot of a family — though I don’t mean to imply that my role was supposed to be that of a simple metal lid. No, for the proper fit I had to be ground to size like an engine valve: a dash of emery powder, a few drops of oil, and the rest is taken care of by rotary motion.

“No mail from Basel?”

Beatrice began talking about their mother.

I stood up and walked across the room. In the background was a third door I hadn’t noticed before. It was partially hidden by one of the palm stands, and wasn’t easily recognizable as a door because its surface blended in with the whitewashed walls. I thought it would probably lead to that special place one could enter without asking. So I opened it and disappeared without ado into even more intense darkness. Brother and sister, their tongues finally unstuck, had started a conversation. Beatrice was using French, and that meant that matters were serious. Zwingli took refuge in Spanish. That’s all I heard, and then I closed the door behind me and stole away as if not wanting to disturb lovers in a tête-à-tête that could make or break their affair. Inwardly surrounded by a murkiness seldom pierced by a ray of light, from childhood on I have been a successful if rather timid groper in the dark. Now this compensatory talent once again came into its own. The wall along which I was fingering my way was rough to the touch, and was probably whitewashed also. I felt a doorframe, then a door that was slightly ajar, inviting me inside. It seemed the natural exit from a narrow corridor that led, or so I believed, to a larger room. The door was of the type with a hinged fold down the center, and when I put my shoulder to the outer panel it stuck a bit, shook, and rattled. As I entered the new premises the gloom became even more impenetrable. Out of habit I felt the wall for a light switch. There was none.

When one of the senses fails, another will take over the job. I was sightless, and so I began using my nose. How wise of Mother Nature to arrange things this way! And what now entered my nostrils — Vigoleis, that’s something familiar! When you were a boy it intoxicated you, and now — just sniff it! It is the fragrance of natural body vapors, veiled by dried petals of rose and violet to minimize their deleterious effects on clothing. Vigoleis, no matter how vigorously you whiff and scent and snort, what you are smelling is none other than the sweat of a woman’s armpits, and she is right near you, and that urge you are beginning to feel, I understand it only too well, at such an early hour and in such a strange place, what can this possibly lead to, and now, led by the nose one step farther into the darkness, oh Lord, he’s standing next to the bed!