Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

It never rains but it pours. On the night when the Captain conjured up his father’s chalice of poison; when an item of ancestral Martersteig furniture shrank from a respectable hardwood commode to the miniature dimensions of a jewel box, the kind that gets placed on top of a respectable commode; when we slept in a genuine bed for the first time in ages, but without ever getting to sleep — on that night, all the stars rose in the heavens and the moon did its utmost to save the lord of the atalaya the price of a candle.

On the following night we exercised our settlers’ rights at the whorehouse, and in the adjoining booths certain fellows feathered their own nests with exemplary gusto.

Around noontime the sky became overcast. The old crone predicted rain, and you didn’t need a century’s worth of meteorological experience to agree with her. But as evening arrived, the wind from the Teix blew apart the clusters of clouds, and since we had no crops of any kind to harvest anyway, we ignored whatever the heavens had in mind, went to bed, and slept.

One second later — one hour later? — we were awakened by a cannon shot. Great Scott, has Arsenio now decided to roll out Big Bertha? Isn’t he satisfied with his U-boat? The report echoed loud and long. A storm hovered over the city. Bolts of lightning illuminated the cathedral vaults, our walls started shaking under some higher power, and all of the stuff above our heads began to oscillate. Now whistling, now with a hollow roar, the storm sped through our books and writings — how we wished we owned a wooden chest for preserving them smooth and clean! As puny and miserable as a human being may feel when the elements decide to break into an uproar, one of those oaken commodes that my grandmother had back at the Scheifes homestead could have given us significant moral support during this riot of inorganic and organic nature. From all of the occupied cells we heard not the great kettledrum of lust, no raunchy Kate groaning for “more!” No almocrebe clicking his tongue. Instead, there were entreaties to the Mother of God, begging her to lend succor against lightning and conflagration. Yet the name most often invoked was that of Saint Barbara, that glorious lady who is listed among the Fourteen Intercessors ever since she performed a miracle ages ago to save the life of a certain Hendrikus Stock in the town of Gorkum in Holland. This is something the local hookers were of course not aware of, but I was informed in no uncertain terms that their Saint Barbara could do more to ward off lightning and fire than the Mother of God Herself.

During the current emergency, and amid deafening salvos of thunder, I was glad to have a cookie from Cell No. 2 tell me just how the Celestial Fire Department worked: who manned the buckets, who stroked the pump, and who wielded the hose. This pious whore knew all about these matters; she didn’t hurl a shoe at me when in all the confusion I happened to gaze down on her across the partition. I had to rearrange our ropes, for otherwise the tempest would have scattered all of our carefully stowed possessions all over the cubicle. In a state of semi-undress, the girl was kneeling in prayer at her pilarière , her eyes raised to Heaven and thus to me, although I was in no position to perform miracles. Her bull lay asleep on the mattress. Only a direct lightning hit, or a renewed invitation to the dance, could have lifted him out of his snooze. She asked whether my girlfriend wasn’t afraid, too, that the world was coming to an end; she wasn’t screaming or praying, and we hadn’t lit a holy candle. No, I explained, my girlfriend had long since conquered fear. She wasn’t much for praying, and anyway, God didn’t care much for mockery. No sooner said, when a bolt of lightning hit the barn. I tumbled back off the chair on top of Beatrice, a loud peal of thunder rocked the Manse, the rafters shook, and piercing screams went up all around us: the Torre is on fire! The place smelled of sulfur and the cheap laundry bleach “Legia,” the scourge of all foreigners who cannot afford new clothes every six months. Underneath me Beatrice was trembling from head to toe, and I myself was trembling under the mess of our belongings that this celestial knockout punch had sent down on me with our network of ropes. For a split-second that seemed like an eternity, all was quiet. And then the clouds split apart. Rain splashed on the roof. Nuns and monks started dancing.

If this were a novel and I its author, I would now introduce the filles de joie one by one and have them tear each other’s hair out over the question of who was responsible for seizing that lightning bolt and, in the very last fraction of a micro-second, flinging it outside the barn at the carob tree — was it Saint Barbara or Our Lady of the Pillar? O Santo da porta não faz milagres , says a Portuguese proverb: the household patron saint doesn’t perform miracles. In this barracks of sin there was no shrine to Saint Barbara, and thus it was she who had prevented the disaster. The Tower was not consumed by flames, although the carob tree was now two carob trees.

Nevertheless, this meant an end to love-making. This, too, makes my jottings different from a novel, where the writer would show his little couple sauntering across some field or, in a higher-class plot, have them mounted on horseback, both of them filled with glowing ardor and quivering emotion. Then with a swift change of mood the author would make a storm appear. At the first big raindrops he would have the two of them head for the nearest haystack. The heavens would open and pour down oceans of water, a second Great Flood. But our two heroes would remain neither soaked nor satiated; they would make love endlessly, as if there were no such thing as hay since Adam and Eve… Unfortunately, I can’t depict such a scene for my own little couples, because there are too many of them, and I wouldn’t know where to put them. Outside it’s pouring cats and dogs, and inside the barn too. Even if the nuns and monks had allowed all the stars and planets to enter the Manse, they would have been powerless against the waters. The water level was rising in the cells. Sauve qui peut! Après nous le déluge!

The electric wires shorted out. I lit candles — not holy candles, but working candles. Man the pumps!

Deploying our raincoats and Beatrice’s miraculous Unkulunkulu, I was able to divert the torrents; at least we were now protected from the worst inundations. All around us was chaos. My poems, my great prose, my published renderings of other people’s writings, our sugar, our sprig of vanilla — all this had now turned into a soggy, dripping, watery mess. The sole survivor of this catastrophe was a little spray of domestic parsley that Beatrice hung on the ropes to ward off vermin; it devoured the moisture, turned greener than green, and emitted a delightful fragrance as in the month of March.

I spent the rest of the night squatting like a hen on my typewriter, trying to protect it from the liquid elements. Beatrice cowered under her exotic umbrella, fast asleep. The outcome of this cloudburst in our palace of God-fearing lechery was bound to be either renewed suicide or a double case of pneumonia.

As dawn arrived at our hovel, I made a firm decision: we must leave this churning water mill. Out of this pigsty! Away, as fast as possible!

My reader will be thinking: who is he to be making decisions? He’s quick to find words, but just where does he think they can go, Vigoleis and his girl, seeing that he doesn’t even have money enough to take a trolley to the terminus of his own life, not to mention the train fare to Deyá to negotiate for a commode? Another reader will recall his mother always telling him that moving three times is just as expensive as having your house burn to the ground. Yet another reader, a classically educated one, will start murmuring, “Oh,” or rather “ Evoe! Plus salis quam sumptus habebat .” Be that as it may, my dear reader, we would simply have to leave this churning water mill.