Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The next day, Antonio found out where the pilarière was located. A little later a messenger came to us with the news that Doña Beatriz’mattress was already on its way to our new apartment, balancing on the skull of a street loiterer. The señora had, however, not been willing to part with bed linen, pillows, the darning egg, the comb, etc. Antonio, the psychological anthropologist, advised the one woman to refrain from provoking the other. In good time we would have everything back. Mañana .

I then went to the customs warehouse, where I obtained the release of three of our crates of books, under the proviso that the rest of our belongings would remain there as surety.

The thieving couple at the Tower was saddened to learn that we were going to leave our cell the very next day. This calls for a celebration, said Arsenio, and asked us to attend a party to which Antonio would also be invited.

We had leg of lamb à la mode bisaïuele , plus two dozen other dishes, including donkey cheese for Beatrice. There were toasts to our prosperity on the Street of the General, as well as to the well-being of the Tower and all it stood for. After midnight we were joined by the sea captain, who had a drink with us and then quickly disappeared. Whenever this underwater smuggler was at the Manse you could be certain that some important job or other was being pulled. But this time his haste was due to the babe who was waiting for him on the bed of luxury. He was getting signals to dive.

No sooner had he left when Arsenio came forth with a question that had been on the tip of his tongue for a long while. I was finally to come clean, no more secrets, no further need to hide anything from each other. I knew very well what he was up to, and why the carabineros always kept an eye on him. But, by all the Saints, he hadn’t any idea what my game was. What Antonio had told him about Pilar — whom he knew, by the way — could well be true, but he thought that this story was a feeble kind of make-believe. “So now, out with it, Don Vigo! Who are you, and what kind of a double life are you leading at my place, in the city, on the island?”

I told him the truth. But that isn’t what he wanted to hear. Anybody, he said, can make up nice stories. He was hurt; it was a matter of confidence for confidence. “Go on now, don’t leave me hanging. Or do you want me to tell you who you are and what you are up to here on my family estate?”

“By all means, go ahead and tell me.”

The Giant sipped his piping-hot coffee and enlightened me concerning my Balearic mission.

Unlike his boss, he was not illiterate, although he had not read a book in his entire life. But he knew that there were such things as books, and such things as people who wrote them. His security department had investigated my case, and here was the result: I was a writer, I had never denied it, and one look inside our cell was enough to confirm the nature of my profession — by reading the clothes hanging on the line, as it were. There were well-known cases of people who wrote books and who took jobs as waiters or cabin-boys, as grape-pickers, or in the Foreign Legion, or anywhere at all, and then acted as buddies just so they could collect material for their work. It was no doubt my intention to write a Spanish novel of manners, and that’s why I decided to move in at his place of business. A Spanish writer would do the same thing in Germany, but with this difference: he would leave his wife back home. He laughed, we laughed too, and then he continued: now I was finished collecting material, tomorrow I would load all our stuff on a wagon, his wagon—“No, no, that’s fine with me, it’s a question of honor”—and then I would start writing my novel in our new lodgings. “But please, caballero, not one line about me as long as I am still alive!”

We toasted Vigoleis’ novel, the Clock Tower Cadaver Murders , a few soggy, rain-smeared chapters of which hung on the line as we spoke. Before I sent them off to the publishers, I would have to squeeze them through the wringer. Prost!

By naming Arsenio’s name in these pages twenty years later, I am not breaking my promise to him, for the robber chieftain was eliminated in the first few days of the Civil War. His death must have been dreadful; I have heard several versions of how it happened. He was not even given time to escape in his U-boat. Which is to say, his ship-captain friend decided to return to snorkeling for Germany.

We allowed ourselves a few hours sleep, and then we began dismantling our hovel. I untied the ropes and carefully pulled each nail out of the wall, placing all of them, straight or crooked, in my pocket. I also took along the boards and fence pickets that I had found on the grounds of the Manse. I regarded them as my own property on the basis of the right of salvage, whereas previously they only fell under beachcomber’s rights, unqualified by any whore’s notions of private ownership. I was touched with melancholy as I took apart our universal bidet. Where would my inspiration come from in the future? While packing our books, I started leafing through familiar works that were always the source of new discoveries. But Beatrice, who can spend whole days packing books, urged me to make it a rush job — no time for that now, on Barceló there would be so much to set up. “And besides, tonight is Christmas Eve!”

Christmas Eve — and the trees are in blossom.

A hired hand loaded the wagon. We took leave of one and all, large and small. The crone wiped a tear as she turned a fish on the spit in the acrid smoke; she was the only one who probably never had a single thought as to what we might be doing there at the Manse. For her we were just there, friendly foreigners who never got in the way, never betrayed her boss to the police, never tried to blackmail him. Like the rats and the hookers, indeed like herself, we were simply part of the household, with no apparent purpose except to turn the spit. Why does any given tree stand in the landscape here rather than over there? One just accepts it like Nature herself; one doesn’t puzzle over it. Whoever tries to will go insane, and most people would rather not. Only when the tree is cut down do we notice that it is missing, and often not even then. The cloven carob tree — to which, incidentally, my Notice to the Reader at the beginning of this book does not refer — was soon dug up by Arsenio, and no one seemed to mind. The bandit had designed another kind of tree for the guys who manned his catapults.

Adeleide returned a few pesetas to us as overpaid rental — a little gift that made us beam with pleasure. The boss hitched his shaggy draft horse to the wagon. We took our seats in the quaint coach, and Tschüss and Ciao , Palace of the Whores! People waved and shouted, dogs barked, maids came by and bared their teeth in merriment, children turned somersaults. The century-old matron picked up her chair and limped out to the highway to see us off. A brood of black piglets scurried off across the field with people chasing after them. Dust, and more dust, behind which the “Clock Tower” then disappeared.

Now cross your heart, Beatrice: you were ready to blow up the whole Tower any day when the rain came down on our cot through the canvas and your Unkulunkulu, when the moisture gave us bone cramps, when mold started growing between the typewriter keys, and when your Parisian hat started growing a beard where the fashion designer never would have put one. And when the big bat got caught in our hanging library, to your great shock, and contrary to all the textbooks of zoology that say that a bat is incapable of making such a mistake, you were ready to jump out of your own skin — but you stayed in it. Admit it: it was nice there after all, and we led a peaceful domestic life there beneath the nuns and the monks.