Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

What was truly disturbing was the source of this open-air exhibition, the daughters of the house who emerged onto the patio several times a day. Without fail, they sent their curious glances into our room, and were always amazed to see nothing but boxes of books and our Christmas cactus, which, by the way, was starting to sprout. What — hadn’t “they” moved in yet? Have “they” just thrown down their stuff here while they live somewhere else? Foreigners act strangely on Mallorca — everybody knew that, and everybody disapproved. One day one of the señoritas screwed up her courage, spied me out, and asked me straightaway, “Are you here yet?” I was standing at the fence, gazing at the exotic display. In the bourgeois way that I have with little matters that are of no concern to Vigoleis, I began to fib, thereby committing the sour sin of cowardice: I fed her the same story that I had already handed out to Arsenio, about our furniture that was waiting to be processed at the customs office. To be on the safe side, I transplanted the whole saga of forms, declarations, value estimates, oath-takings, and deposits to the city of Barcelona, for it was possible that this little lady’s Papá knew the Customs Director very well. One false word, and all our stuff would be out on the General’s Street before sundown. When chance and coincidence have repeatedly tripped you up in your lifetime and caused your prospects to shrivel away, you get over-cautious — and end up in the soup worse than ever. “Barcelona?” our neighbor’s daughter asked. “Papá knows the director of the Main Customs Office. You should talk with Papá, all he’d have to do is say the word, and all your stuff would get sent over on the next ship. It must be terrible to live without any furniture! I mean, you can’t even…”

Which saint should I have implored for aid against this kind of proffered assistance? I wasn’t aware of a single one that specialized in such complex matters. And Beatrice, who invoked Saint Anthony for any and all problems, wasn’t within earshot. So I kept on lying. I thanked the girl for her kind offer, and told her that our most recent communication from Customs gave promise of the release of our belongings in short order. It was only our Bechstein piano that would be kept under bond, since we owed 3000 pesetas in duty.

“3000 pesetas?”

“3000, as I say. And at the moment we haven’t got that much.”

After this conversation took place, we bought some drapes as a protection against the prying glances of the considerate daughters. I hate drapes. They remind me constantly of how cramped this world of ours is, and that I am too poor to keep it at a distance. I would give anything to have a private study on the top floor of a skyscraper. And please: no drapes at the windows — get away from me with your gypsy-wagon puffery! My life is one uninterrupted battle against the potato and bolts of chiffon, both of them symbols of an Icarus who can’t even fly high enough for the wax on his wings to melt.

In the Count’s pensión , Madame Gerstenberg hosted a farewell dinner. She could no longer endure life on the island. She was suffering from insular anxiety, an affliction that had escalated into insular rage, a dreadful illness that later would befall Beatrice, too. There are only two types of cure: leave the island, precipitously if need be, or bang your head against a wall. Our dowager tragedian chose the deck planks of the Ciudad de Alicante, and departed with her son to Alicante, from whence they had once arrived. It had simply become unbearable to her to be separated from the world by an ocean. She felt as if she had been locked in a pillory. I tried to reassure her with the sophistical remark that one can never be quite sure at what point a continent begins, geographically speaking, to get demoted to an island; science just hadn’t progressed far enough to set standards on this subject. And then I unloaded on her my monetary theory: an island was actually no more unbearable than any arbitrary point on so-called terra firma . All that was necessary was sufficient wealth to afford a motorboat or an airplane, like the banker Don Juan March. Why, that man could enjoy a more serene existence on some coral reef than Adele Gerstenberg could experience in Alicante.

Instead of replying, Madame Gerstenberg just gave me a look with her yellowish face, causing me to fall mute and feel like a simpleton. Captain von Martersteig, the only true Icarus in our local flying circus, had not come to the festivities, although he was still in town. Doubled up with gout and heroism, he sat alone in a bedbug-infested apartment, and to make matters worse, agonized over an open letter of ultimatum to President Hindenburg: either the calcified old Field Marshal must raise his pension as a war invalid, or — but no one ever found out what dire consequences lay in store for the Reich President if he should refrain from appending his martial signature to an edict of augmentation. The reason is that Adolf Hitler made short work of this particular little paper tiger. He bought our old air warrior’s loyalty for the price of a glass of beer, two Frankfurt sausages, and a dollop of mustard.

I exchanged a few letters with Madame Gerstenberg, but then the intervals increased to the point where both of us stopped writing to each other. Friedrich died of tuberculosis, and half a year later his mother followed him to the Realm of the Shades. Terra firma , it turns out, was even more confining than the island. Both of them lie buried in the Alicante Cemetery. The Captain, on his part, will inter himself for a few more years in his ghostly palace in Deyá. There he will live on as if in a cremated state, nursing his pique in a dank and barren cell. Not even his arch-enemy von Ranke Graves will be able to scare him away. His pension will once again be reduced by a few marks — and that says everything. But now let’s leave him alone to gather mold; soon enough the Führer will appear on the scene and yell out to the whole world, “Germany, awake!” This clarion call will in fact awaken our Captain, and he will reappear in these pages with his monocle, his fur-lined Turkish slippers, his Pour le Mérite , his bottles of poison, and his winged words about the gratings of a green cheese.

Anton Emmerich will now gradually disappear from our view. He has big plans, and hankers to get out into the world. He is not suffering from insulitis, but he simply has had enough of this grubby island Paradise. He offers us his shop for a song — Zwingli’s debts to him came to a much larger sum. But since we couldn’t even cough up a song, since in fact we were poorer than the people in the folk ditty, “Please give us a penny — Sorry, haven’t any!”… In brief, this crafty potato-pancake German patriot departed from the island after selling his business to a new arrival from the homeland. This gentleman came from the banking business, had a few shekels, and was remarkably short in stature. Behind the counter he looked as if he were standing in a trap door. And a trap door was to be his insular destiny.

Now that we’ve swept away our friend from Cologne, I have room for more characters.

If my extrapolations are correct, I have already used up more than half of this book to depict the consequences of our shipwreck — which, strictly speaking, was not a shipwreck at all, since we lost our footing as soon as we stepped on the island. Our existence became grounded only after we moved into No. 23 on the Street of the Hero Against Piracy, which then led to a fierce struggle for our daily bread. This struggle lasted years, and ended with complete victory: we finally bought a bathtub. This was possible only on the basis of several uneaten meals and several unpurchased books. For me, the bathtub meant much more than a vessel for cleansing the body. Seated within its walls, I experience the Archimedian Principle in its spiritual manifestation. Beatrice, as jaundiced as our friend the dowager tragedian, has cursed the island more than a thousand times, and more than a thousand times I have implored her: “Do not curse the island, curse me , your Vigoleis; curse Vigoleis, who is not just an avatar of myself, but rather my self’s court jester, even if I’m not wearing a fool’s collar and a cockscomb. Take him as the symbol of an attitude that is sufficient unto itself, and therefore sufficient for self-induced implosion. Sure enough, I probably continued, the Spaniards have a lot to learn. They aren’t housebroken. If you don’t have a spittoon handy, they spit on the floor, and they mess up your apartment with cigarette ashes. A house and a public street are all the same to them. But is it all that bad? I clean up after them every time. Like the circus clown who runs behind the elephants with dust pan and broom, I follow our Spanish house guests around all the time. And frankly, I get a fright every time the doorbell rings and you open up to welcome not some dear friend of either sex, but a company of spitters, ash-droppers and butt-tossers. Why, to look at you at such moments, you’d think that these guests of ours were about to lift their legs and have a go at our deluxe Bible-paper edition of The Great Philosophers.”