Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

When it got dark, I lit the candles, not without some difficulty keeping them upright. Then we exchanged presents.

I had fastened my stanza to a spine on our brightly lit cactus. Thus illuminated, the single sheet of bible paper looked elegant indeed; but did it also have a solemn inner glow? I could only hope so.

My present lay underneath Beatrice’s slip: a book, one that has passed through how many hands? The paper was yellowed and dog-eared, but from every last page there came forth an intense light: Las Moradas, The Interior Castle, of Santa Teresa.

When our candles burned down to the last stump, we went to the cathedral to attend the “Missa del gallo.” According to ancient custom, so we were told, at the Christmas Mass a Moorish boy would intone Moorish chants. It was an experience. The brightly lit cathedral, the little black boy warbling his sing-song from up in the pulpit, the ladies with elegant mantillas on top of towering combs, and right in front of us a man stretched out on the pew, snoring away the Holy Night. I had to think of Felix Timmermans and a louse-ridden tramp from my childhood, the one we called King of the Bees because of the insects that inhabited him. He spent his nights inside a small forest shrine, and in my childish ignorance I considered that the profanation of a sacred site. The local police smoked out this bum, but not for reasons of sacrilege. The snoozer in front of us took up the space of five seats during his silent, holy night, and nobody bothered him. Everyone celebrates the advent of the Redeemer in his own fashion, and this fashion apparently struck everyone as not the worst way to celebrate. For who knows? Perhaps this tired fellow, already beyond his last crust of bread, was in his dreams a shepherd keeping watch over his flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and the glory of the Lord shone round about him, and he was sore afraid. And in his slumber he heard the sound of wings, and an angel descended and said unto him — but you can read the sequel in the Gospels, unless you know it already by heart. This particular angel will have spoken to our local deadbeat in Spanish, or even more likely in the Mallorquin dialect. All of a sudden the whiskered snoring came to a halt; the star stood still above the stable, and our dozer caught sight of Mary, Joseph, and the Child lying in the crib, and he emerged unblushing through the strait gate to Heaven. And the other shepherds returned to their flocks, fanning the flames and glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them. Then our man turned over on his other side and resumed his snoring for the length of three whole Masses.

The streets and alleyways were alive with people. In Spain Christmas Eve, the Night of the Rooster, is not a time for quiet contemplation or for decorous quaffing of spirits at home in the family circle. Not after the Christ Child has been placed back in His manger with fresh diapers.

Taking a long detour, we too returned to our domestic hearthside. We now knew just where we belonged, and that we were all by ourselves as soon as we closed our door. No rats, no riotous shouts from 2×29 throats, and not only a ceiling but also a blanket over our heads. No donkey to wake us with the gentle wafting of its biblical exhalations, rather than with bone-shattering screeches.

Vigoleis had saved one more candle. He stuck it on the topmost spine of their opuntia natalis and lit it. He hoped that its little flame would send some light out into the empty night. He dotes on this tragic mood of hopelessness. Once in a while he likes to turn over his egg timer and watch the grains of sand trickle down for no reason at all, just as the days of his life trickle away, grain by grain, for nothing and for no reason at all. Just as the stars twinkle in the firmament, eternally and without any meaning.

On this night, too, the heavens were dotted with little lights. Since it was a remarkable night in his lifetime, he looked up and lost himself in the sight of eternity, a spectacle that never fails to convince him to the point of physical pain that there cannot be a benevolent Father up there. One star might contain God, but millions and millions of them…? On a Night of the Redeemer like this one, you’ve got to be wearing a golden tiara as a protective helmet if you don’t want to feel like reaching for the bottle…

Vigoleis closed the window. The night’s breath was cool. He turned around to his Beatrice, but she was gone. She was lying on the bed, and he was just about to check under her pillow to see if she had placed his stanza there when he remembered that the accursed Pilar hadn’t forked over their pillows. Doctors will tell you that it’s healthy to sleep without a pillow, and these are the same doctors who say that the vegetarian regimen is better for you than meat-eating. On this particular night, what would Vigoleis have sacrificed for a crisp roasted goose, the fragrance of which reached his nose in rather un-Christian fashion several pages ago? Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle , perhaps? Perhaps. Or his last shirt.

He covered Beatrice with the cloak of Bethlehemite charity and lay down next to her fully dressed. And there was peace on earth at this spot, where two persons of good will were one: on the Street of General Barceló, in house No. 23, second floor, in the room at the end of the corridor, where I had to close the window to keep out the chilly air from the palm-adorned night.

Let’s hope that we don’t catch cold!

A special star, dear reader, shone over the night with which I am bringing this Book to its close. So let’s have a little asterisk stand here * as a typographic symbol for its ending. It is the same star that legend tells us led the Magi from the East to the stable of the Redeemer; it’s also the star that pricked the conscience of a young man from the Swiss cantons, urged him to rise up from his pilarière , put on his pants, and head for the Street of the General. His footsteps did not echo through the house, for he was shod with alpargatas . He knew that two people were abed in a piso at this location, and thus that they had found a place to lay their heads, but that’s all they had found. The young man regretted this very much, for he considered himself responsible for the fate of this couple. He didn’t plant a candle-lit Christmas tree in front of their apartment door — that will be taken care of in a later chapter by an American millionairess, or rather by her servant. This Swiss fellow, not a millionaire, but just a few zeroes away from it as long as he lived, slid an envelope under their door. Inside were a few hundred pesetas and a note with the words,

Merry Christmas! You’ll hear from me

as soon as the bitch lets me go! Zwingli.

Our heroes discovered this belated Christmas present the next morning as they padded through the empty house. It was a long time before they heard from Santa Claus again. When he finally surfaced, it was already high time for our heroes to intervene: Caesarian section! They performed this operation with great care after disinfecting the area completely, and although Vigoleis was confronted by Pilar’s drawn dagger, he did not run for it. He did not flinch. All of this will be put on paper in good time. At this moment we are taking a breather. There’s no reason to rush things, for our couple spent nearly five years under the same roof.

You, perdurable reader, may continue to follow their footsteps, or you may choose to go your own way on the path of other characters by other writers, just as you like. If you knock, it shall be opened unto you. On the other hand, you might find the door already unlocked. The key is of the old-fashioned kind. It’s huge and unwieldy, not a work of art like the ones produced by the Nürnberg master Hans Ehemann. This key is one that you’d rather not take with you when you go to the store run by the pretty Angelita or to Don Matías the baker, who is in reality not a baker at all but a great philosophizer. You’re probably thinking: aren’t there burglars on your island? No, the Barceló is one of those streets where, at its far end, people live who would sooner hack off their own fingers than stick them in other people’s pockets. Later, around about the end of 1933, things will get different; spies will make their appearance everywhere, political flunkies doing their job at the behest of a man they worship as their glorious Leader, checking things out in the so-called German Colony in the Balearics, a community to which our Vigoleis also belongs on the basis of his German birth. To them he looks suspicious. So they’ll break down his door with a crowbar and sniff around inside: what’s this guy writing about, anyway? Stuff against our Führer ? A Führer is not some god you can believe in or not as you choose. So behave yourself, little man, or we’ll take care of you! — “A Yale lock,” said Beatrice, “and always hook the chain.”