Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

But that came sometime later. I’ll give you due warning when the Führer ’s local henchman rises to power, so that you’ll know that he’s after you, too. And a few years after that, when the Caudillo starts shooting and once again you start getting hot feet, you’ll want to be right there along with the rest of us. You won’t be able to breathe free again until we are all on board a British destroyer that will take us away from an island that has become Hell on earth.

Steamy adventures, loose women, candles for María del Pilar: is this the end of it? Yes and no — I’m not making any promises.

Let us not profane Christmas Eve with jarring previews of later chapters. We must allow the angels to sing their eternal hymn of glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to men of a kind of good will that, unfortunately, nobody believes in any more.

If the world contained nothing but famous people, it would long since have dribbled away like dishwater and left nothing behind but slops in the cloacas of the Last Judgment. God the Inscrutable has seen to it that His creation has not attained the supreme heights, and that the supermen have not sprouted forth in such abundance as to grind lowly humans down completely as they goose-step onwards into eternity. History tells us that humanity is stronger than its yea-saying and nay-saying geniuses, its saints and heroes. Both types are freak occurrences that either threaten us or beguile us. It seems as if the nameless drift of society can at times suddenly bring forth a profusion of great individuals whose names are destined for immortality. When this occurs, rational people take fright, wring their hands, and ask, “Will this never end?” For the most part, such fears are baseless. How many truly great Popes have there been? None of them has been able to topple the Church from its rocky heights. Not even an Adolf Hitler has succeeded in driving Germany into a cesspool from which it can never arise again. True greatness is to be found in true anonymity, in the mode of existence of the vermin of this world. The Spanish all-around genius Gregorio Marañón has written some very readable ideas on this problem in his book on that Great Nameless One, the Man on the Street, Henri-Frédéric Amiel.

I am writing these thoughts on greatness and fame in the city of Amsterdam, in a house situated on a street named after a famous writer: Jan Frederik Helmers. I’ll have to confess that I have never read a single line of Helmers, and in my circle of literary friends I have yet to meet anyone who knows who Helmers was, much less has read him. And yet this bard is so famous that the Amsterdam city fathers have named not one but three streets after him. This is more than a writer has a right to expect after his death, especially one who then goes completely out of everybody’s sight. My friend Pascoaes, the mystic and vintner whose works and wines I continue to advertise shamelessly, was overcome with dread when he learned that potentates in his home town of Amarante wanted to name a street after him. “Don’t they want to read me any more? If my work is not of a kind that is cherished by posterity on its own merits, then let it perish. I do not wish to be buried alive as a street.”

The fame enjoyed by the Dutch writer Helmers on the city map of Amsterdam far exceeds that of the Spanish General Barceló in the eyes of the Mallorquins, for only a single street bears his name. It is a thoroughfare that would hardly deserve the designation “street” if it didn’t widen out slightly at its upper end. At the point where it merges into Calle San Felio, it is inhabited only by the better sort of people, such as the wealthy Dr. Villalonga in his old palace and, kitty-corner across the street, by Mosén (Monsignor) Juan María Tomás, a heaven-inspired musician and one of the finest characters we got to know on the island. At its bottom end, the street becomes narrow and snakes off into sheer poverty, presenting nothing at all worth commenting on. Little people live there, the kind who see to it that the island doesn’t become extinct. Two cloisters are located there, showing the street their gloomy facades and their consecrated portals, the one opposite our house for male inmates, and the other, farther up the street and with better exposure to sunlight, for the female variety. I am unable to verify whether the two pious establishments are connected by an underground passageway. This is, however, the case with most Spanish or Portuguese cloisters.

I once entered such a subterranean tunnel in the former convent of the Sisters of Santa Clara, the “Casa da Cérca em Cima” in Amarante, now the residence of my motherly friend Doña María da Gloria Teixeira de Vasconcellos Carvalhal, the sister of the writer Pascoaes. Standing there in the tunnel, I envisioned the pious parade passing back and forth, and it is no wonder that I came under the spell of the delightful lunar eroticism that I have otherwise experienced only in early Iberian mysticism. For the history of love-letter writing, it is fortunate that the Convent of Conceição in Beja, where Sor Maríanna Alcoforada served the Dear Lord, lacked such a corridor to the realm of the monks, for otherwise this Portuguese nun’s letters would never have been written — if indeed she wrote them herself, which I doubt.

Presumably General Barceló was born on the street named after him. Or perhaps he died here, because I can’t imagine why the city didn’t pick a better spot to perpetuate his fame. He lived from 1717 to 1797, the great son of an island that has produced many great children. He cleansed the Mediterranean of the plague of piracy which, with billowing sails, infested the high seas at the time. Antonio Barceló succceded in sniffing even the most dastardly corsairs out of their coastal lairs, forcing them out on the main and blasting them to the salty depths. He was no less victorious on dry land. You can still hear today a popular quatrain composed during the hero’s lifetime: “If the King of Spain had four like Barceló, Gibraltar would belong to Spain and not to the English, No! ”

Don Francisco Franco, himself a general of the most superlative type, once a much-feared freebooter in Morocco and a man who now has the most elegant avenidas in the whole country renamed after him, has yet to grab Gibraltar from the British. Thus he actually pales in comparison with his historical comrade-in-arms, General Barceló. No one knows how many General Francos Spain might need in order once again to sing “Not to the English, No !” And if anybody did know, he would be shot anyway. Be that as it may, this is not of much importance for my story, whose course is just as void of great individuals as human history itself, within which it is a mere leaf drifting in the wind.

In a dismal stable on our street there lived a shoe repairman, who kept himself alive with his awl and the sale of charcoal and olive-wood, the island’s fuel of preference. We soon started calling him “Siete Reales,” seven reales (one real = 25 centimos), because he always miscalculated prices to his own disadvantage — quite a feat when dealing with Vigoleis, who never got past the basic times-table. Siete Reales was illiterate, but he spoke a spotless mainland Spanish, and that is why I enjoyed chatting with him. I even profited from his philosophical insights, and this led to friendship — though we never went so far as to clap each other on the shoulder, for this would have raised too much charcoal dust. With the baker Matías — who wasn’t a baker at all, but a schoolteacher, and hence Don Matías — who ran his shop a few houses down the street in the shabbier direction, I regarded this indigenous gesture of eternal friendship as less unpleasant, although not entirely innocuous. At any rate, with him the dust clouds were not of the sooty type. I shall return to this flour-bedecked fellow, with whom I enjoyed a similarly philosophical commercial relationship, as soon as the Nazis emerge from their historical hinterlands and send one of their Mata Haris on a special Balearic mission to turn men’s heads before they get their necks wrung.