Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

On a nearby street, the Apuntadores, there stood a little shop owned by two elderly ladies, one of whom had two beautiful daughters — one of whom, in turn, waited on customers in the store. This was Angelita, whose eyes were larger than the most alluring night-time sky. Every time I stepped up to the counter, she fluttered those teasing eyelashes with their fly-leg adornments, and I immediately forgot what I was supposed to bring home. I heard a buzzing noise around me, as if the flies were still alive whose legs made this little she-devil so dangerous to someone like me — who grew up on the banks of the Niers and whose Mama once took him through bordellos looking for a suitable apartment. Under such glances, everything collapsed. By the way, Beatrice was of the opinion that Angelita’s lashes were natural — she didn’t have to hurt a single fly to turn into a she-demon. As for myself, I prefer her, even just the memory of her, with fly-leg eyelashes. And she didn’t have to go far at all to lay in a supply of such a cosmetic: right next door was a butcher shop presided over by a sour old hag, where we sometimes went to buy a cut of lamb. This butcher-lady was crabby, and barked at anyone who came to disturb the peace and quiet of her swarms of flies. One day she was found dead behind the counter, and now it was her turn to be covered with flies. This was in mid-summer. Such an edifying end for the proprietress of a butcher shop: to get buried by flies in her own store. The shop lacked a meat cooler; if it had one, she could have slumbered off flyless into the Great Beyond.

I believe I have paid my proper and sufficient respects to our Street General, so that he need not feel outpointed by Julietta’s father. But the real reason why I spent so much time on the various streets of the town is that in our house there isn’t much to see. It is an empty house — that is to say, an empty apartment. The money that Santa Claus pushed under the door would have been enough to equip the rooms with the necessary furnishings. But we considered it more advisable to buy back our books from the customs office before they got eaten by rats. For 300 pesetas we were able to repossess our world of print. The remainder of our belongings wandered off into the same furniture warehouse where we went with the whore to buy our sofa bed. We purchased a rickety table and two old-granny style chairs, and this left us with a few measly coins for a postage stamp and a loaf of bread.

Such was our modest debut: a table and two chairs in the kitchen. Krupp’s beginnings were more meager than that, and even Diogenes found shelter in a barrel. We were lacking many things, but in our condition of enforced asceticism we never went so far as to take pleasure in our lack of pleasures. On the contrary: we were jubilant whenever we undid the knot in our money stocking and poured out enough change, calderilla , to afford a cooking pot, or perhaps a knife. On such occasions we would look deeply into each other’s eyes, down to where you can espy a mysterious glimmer, and would say, “What do you think? We’ve got by for so long without a cooking pot. How would it be if we just waited a few more weeks? And do we really need a knife? Or a spittoon (an item that in Spain is almost more urgently necessary than cooking utensils)? What do you say we go out and buy a book?” A book! That’s it! And then we would fall into each other’s arms, which we kept clean despite our destitution, and would feel that we had hit the jackpot.

The better I got to know our new language, the clearer it became to me that there were untold treasures to be unearthed here. I discovered writers whose very names were unknown up in the North. Spain? That meant Cervantes and the classical dramatists, and that was all. I was thrilled by the prospect of reading Saint Teresa, the Confessions of Juan de la Cruz, and Fray Luiz de León in the original. I didn’t dare to even think of reading Don Quixote , however; that seemed to me to be an assignment for a more mature spirit than my own, just as it is only now, at the threshold of my own half-century of life, that I am able to read Goethe with profit, if not yet in the classy Artemis Edition. I should probably wait until I am a hundred — but then again, I don’t think Goethe is worth that. We literally ate our way into Spanish literature, simply by eating less. Each of us had a special field. Beatrice delved into history, while I, with my aversion to all forms of tradition conserved in books, plunged into the immutable imaginative world of rhymed and unrhymed poetry. I can be fascinated by historical writing if the historian has a one-sided view of things — if, that is, he writes with one eye to the ground, much as a chicken must look down in order to see the sky above — if, that is, the historian can elevate history into legend, thus redeeming it from so-called professional scientific accuracy, which in any case never can exceed astronomical approximations. Thousands of works have been written about Napoleon, and the literature on this rewarding subject keeps growing. But what do we know about him? Who was Napoleon? Every biography has to create him anew from the germ cell of a human existence, perhaps his own. According to the latest calculations, the world in which we bring up such questions can expect to last another 20 billion years. Or maybe it’s only 15 billion. And there’s the fly in the ointment: Napoleon was a savior, but it’s also possible that he was a criminal, or perhaps it’s the other way around. Whoever enters “history” has ceased to be himself.

Chatting for hours in this fashion helped to slake our hunger for “real” food, the pangs of which were often painful. I was the advocate for poetry and legend, the champion of a form of truth that resides in the clouds. Beatrice clung with a physical and mental sobriety to historical reality; with her sharper intellect and with the help of her frightening, emasculating erudition, she defended what I, in my impotence, insisted (and still insist) on calling the Historical Lie. Will Vigoleis one day be her victim? It was hard to stand up against her — or rather to sit down against her, for I was sitting and Beatrice was sitting, too. During such disputations we both squatted in a mood of harmonious hostility on boxes of books, later on our rustic chairs, which after a time sported a coat of paint. Later still — indeed much, much later — we sat in real living-room chairs made of straw. Two years (the chronology is not very precise) had to pass before we could afford such lacy sitting-baskets. But no sooner were they broken in, when they collapsed, and we reverted to our primeval style of living as box-squatters. Our edifying literary discussions did not suffer from the change, but our ability to expand our library certainly did.

Our living room, pantry, kitchen, and bedroom were situated one adjoining the other, and as I have explained, the windows and the large French door of the sala looked out upon the yard. Nobody could peer into our kitchen or bedroom, and there we had wooden shutters for blocking out a blinding sun or curious onlookers. Things were worse, though, in our living room, which was at the same level as an outside patio. We couldn’t reach the patio from our floor, since it was separated from us by a light-shaft that was like a castle moat. And besides, the patio was not included in the rent. In addition, we were separated from the world of the proprietary class by an iron fence. Our view was usually blocked by laundry hanging on a line. In the South one does the laundry every day, with cold water and on a stone. So there was a constant fluttering in the breeze, large bedsheets and the little things that lie closest to the body. I was soon able to assess the cup sizes of Mother and her daughters, and also of the maids, besides which I learned the schedule of their lunar phases and eclipses. It was embarrassing when we invited company and saw these pages from the domestic calendar hanging on the line outside. At first, Beatrice was upset at this spectacle. I didn’t mind it so much. I didn’t exactly think it was beautiful, but was my clothesline-full of poems back at the bordello any more stylish?