Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

How quickly all the misery can disappear, how easily an ordeal can peel away when you have a goal in sight and a work horse in harness in front of you. Arsenio clicked his tongue louder than a whip. The hooves sped on; sparks flew.

Our arrival on the General’s street caused no little commotion. Word had got around that a foreign couple was moving into the empty apartment. If the street hadn’t been so narrow, the neighbors would have lined up on both sides to greet us. So they stood in a cluster of curiosity on the convent patio across the street and observed each piece of the action with such attention that we felt quite flattered. This time we drove up to an apartment without a palefrenier in tow, but Arsenio made an even bigger impression. Turkeys were gobbling away on all the balconies, as if to celebrate our arrival.

But hold on, cher Vigoleis, we are not interested in how, step by step and hoist by hoist, your belongings got lifted off your prairie wagon and taken inside your new piso . Or how an old granny came up to you and told you that you would find a bed in the entryway that was meant for the new tenants since she didn’t know what to do with it otherwise. Some other time you can tell us how the old lady’s husband introduced himself as fellow tenant and professional custodian; he claimed to be well over ninety but still on the job as gatekeeper over at the convent. Who would have thought this of the wizened old gent? At twelve, as the little bell sounded at the convent, the street suddenly emptied. Not one soul was interested any longer in the German writer who was arriving with a cart full of stuff and a brain full of ideas, waiting for the time when he could sit down at his typewriter and set to work creating his pilariario íntimo . But now, you clever scoundrel, perhaps you could at least tell us what you said in reply to Arsenio’s question, “What about your furniture?” “Our furniture, Señor Arsenio, is at the customs warehouse. I hope that we can fit it all in, because the rooms are smaller than they looked when I first inspected them. It’s Swiss furniture, by the way, a small fortune in freight, insurance, packing, and customs! If we had got to know you sooner, we could have brought it all on land the back way. Your ship captain could have torpedoed our furniture piece by piece onto the beach into specially constructed padded docks.”

For days and weeks prior to the birth of the Redeemer, households are oddly busy preparing elaborate celebrations of this feast of the poorest of the poor. We had to compress all this work into just a few hours, for that’s all the time we had between arrival in our new digs and the moment when the little bell under the Christmas tree would signal the sharing of presents. A pair of pants, a shirt, and some underthings were deployed as dustcloths and scrubbing rags. I skated across the black-and-white square floor tiles and gave them such a glossy sheen that the Christ Child Himself, if He had dropped down from Heaven again, could have seen his mirror image in them. But since He had his own experiences in a stable with oxen and donkeys and a crib of straw, He studiously avoids the hovels of the destitute and prefers houses that have Persian carpets on the floor. Beatrice cleaned the kitchen, which was redolent of the previous tenants’ cooking habits. We didn’t have any incense, but used orange peels for the same purpose. I roasted them over a manuscript that was ripe for immolation. Then I arranged things in our bedroom. A couple of hoists and snatches, and the job was done. Two more heaves in the roomy sala with its view of the idyllic yard outside, and our miracle of the boxes and suitcases was complete. In order to vanquish emptiness you need a special sense of space; it helps to be familiar with the secrets of Gothic structures. I put the rest of our stuff in one of the windowless alcoves. Then I made myself scarce. Beatrice, too, had errands to do.

I knew a spot near the harbor where there was a stand of cactus, the common opuntia , a giant variant growing on a dangerously steep incline. Twice I came roaring to the bottom with landslides, but on my third attempt I got a firm foothold and, not without loss of blood, came away with a large central trunk with two offshoots that looked like ears. I filled a bucket with soil and returned home, grubby but happy. Our Christmas cactus stood one meter tall. I melted down two candles left over from our rage at the Madonna for sending rain to the Tower, twisted a few wicks, and shaped some pencil-thin tapers that I stuck on the cactus needles. If in all your misery you are still clever and buddy-buddy with the Muses, you will take Rilke’s New Poems, Part Two , thin-paper edition, out of a box, tear out the already foxed blank flyleaf, and write on it your own poem “For Beatrice,” a work that bears (or rather bore since it no longer exists) the same relationship to Christmas Eve as a Spanish fig-cactus does to the German Christmas spruce. Just don’t start wallowing in potato-pancake nostalgia! Just don’t remind yourself that somewhere on the Lower Rhine a home-grown goose is getting roasted to burnished yellow-brown crispness, yet not too soon for the ceremony of gift-giving.

Employing my South European palette, I composed a thoughtful letter entitled “Christmas in Spain,” with the intention of diverting my parents’ and my brothers’ attention from the domestic goose. Instead of singing Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht with half-crocked solemnity, I meant them to break out in a fit of envy: how they would yearn to be down here with me, ambulating under the palms, standing at the blue seashore, letting the sun beat down on their skin, while up there — damn it all, somebody go check! — it’s about five below zero, and what’ll it be like when the privy freezes up? They don’t have to know that down here in the Southland, their Prodigal Son’s pipes froze at well over 100° above, that the two of us were skating on a different kind of thin ice, or that before we could exchange Christmas presents, we had to hang a shirt over our window so that the young ladies in our back yard couldn’t peek inside to watch our private celebration. Or that when our candles have gone out, we’ll be sitting in the dark since we have no money for a light bulb — but would they actually believe all of this? It’s possible to boast romantically of even the direst poverty. Successful writers are fond of depicting their youth spent in misery: lousy grades in school, quitting school at thirteen, paper boy, scrounging for food, time in prison (the latter is particularly popular nowadays; no writer can be taken seriously who hasn’t spent time in the pen). I can just hear someone urging me to add this question to my seasonal letter: “And do you, too, have roast turkey in your casserole?” This “someone” will know that for Spaniards the Christmas goose is invariably a pavo . And which vintage had we chosen? A Malvasian from Bañalbufar?

Suddenly there are footsteps in the corridor— porra ! — it’s Beatrice. “Stop, don’t come in! I’m busy! What are you thinking — that this place is like some poor people’s house where the Christ Child is lying on his tummy with the whooping cough? Just hand me one of your slips. I have to cover up something. Fine, now you can come in…”

Then it was my turn to be invisible; the gift Beatrice was bearing for the Feast of Lights also looked imposing. I went into one of the front rooms and peeked through the blinds to the street outside, where padres were coursing back and forth in their picturesque cassocks. On Christmas Eve these gentlemen have more on their minds than just some pagan tree symbol.

Beatrice arranged a dining space on top of our book crate. In conjugal harmony we sat on the edge of our bed and consumed our Christmas Eve repast. Like laborers at a construction site, we ate off paper. This comparison with professional carpenters is not at all far-fetched, for the two of us were, after all, construction workers: we were building our home and our future on the island.