Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Oh, this accursed island of Balearic polluters!” you once said, my dear Beatrice. And I could only repeat: “Oh, this polluting scoundrel of a Vigoleis! Why doesn’t he finally write a poem that will buy us a doormat, a spittoon, and an ashtray? Just you wait, ma chérie , you’ll see how life can get transformed when a guest of ours gets up out of his chair, walks over to the corner, and with an audible splash and visible gratification spits his load into a gracefully tapered vessel. Sometimes he might aim wrong and return to his seat with a shrug of his shoulders. In such cases I will get out the broom, and we should be grateful if about 30 % of all shots hit the bullseye. Day and night, my dear, I wrack my brain to figure out how to invent something truly great that will earn us 1000 pesetas — in writing: One Thousand! Just imagine if I ever succeed in working out the formula for my fluorescent printer’s ink. Henceforth, mankind would be able to read in the dark. It would mean an end to bedtime squabbles when one of the partners wants to read and the other wants to go to sleep. But nobody is willing to recognize my genius, not even you — and that is a bitter pill to swallow.”

Let the reader be aware that I have just recorded thought-patterns and snatches of conversation that move far ahead of actual events. For up to the present moment, no Spaniard has ever had an opportunity to spit on the ladrillos on our apartment floor that we polished so assiduously with our shirts and pants. Besides, entre nous (although I could announce this in public, since Beatrice has known all about it for a quarter of a century): what I wouldn’t give to have been born with such intrinsic greatness as to permit me to spit on anybody else’s apartment floor, to eat with my knife even when nobody is looking, and to walk into my house without scraping the mud from my soles! Why hasn’t Vigoleis achieved anything in life? Because he doesn’t spit, that’s why. Because he behaves himself. Because he insists on wearing buckled slippers even in his miserable garret at 3E Helmersstraat, Amsterdam. I am singing the praises of public spitting, and I am fortunate enough to have found a publisher for these jottings who is a full-throated master of this art. It’s hard to say what the result will be. After all, it’s a little late. And a little early for an unknown writer to come forth all of a sudden with a heap of jottings.

Well, here’s Nietzsche on this subject: anyone has a right to produce an autobiography after his fortieth year, because even the least among us can have had close-up experience of something that is of rewarding interest to a thinker. During the period in question, I experienced my Vigoleis in extreme close-up. And if you, dear reader, are the thinking type, then we are on just the right path and I can continue my wandering. Therefore, let us consider it a compliment if I allow Pedro Sureda the privilege of being the first Spanish hidalgo to spit in our piso . This is, as Beatrice has just remarked as she spies over my shoulder at my manuscript, not historically accurate, because Pedro himself came from an un-Spanish household. I think it would be a shame if Pedro were not a born spitter, and so I’ll make him into one right here. History, let me repeat, is not a waxworks museum where every birthmark gets pasted on where it belongs. Herodotus is guilty of much worse historical transgressions. And just think of all the things the authors of the Old Testament make Yahweh do, not to mention Christian Morgenstern with his Palmström! What, my friend Sureda was never a spitter? Why shouldn’t the world that matters to us be a fictional one? Doesn’t your friend Nietzsche say so?

If you have ever seen portraits of Alphonse XIII, the last King of Spain, then I needn’t go into specifics about Pedro’s appearance. He was the (forgive me!) spitting image of the great Bourbon. His mien was more intelligent, and he lacked the effeminate arching of the brow. His glance was livelier than that of his King, and his nose was pinched slightly to one side. But otherwise he was the very likeness, the mildly distorted mirror image, of the monarch. This often led to misidentifications that Pedro handled with regal aplomb, and the resemblance led also to gossip. For how can somebody have a king’s face, when he ain’t no king? It would be nice for the island of my second sight if Pedro stood in the same relationship to the King of Spain as Julietta did to the General from Fort Mahón. From a sociological perspective, this would expand considerably the circle of my intimate relationships, and today I could only regret the fact that I never embraced the coalman Siete Reales simply for lack of a romantic opportunity — Vigoleis enjoying converse with charcoal merchants and royal offspring in the lofty regions of the island. It just wasn’t to be. Not with the man in black, because of the dust, and not with Pedro — no disrespect for the King intended — because as we know, kings aiming to freshen up their bloodline are wont to use the servants’ stairway, whereas Pedro’s mother was in her own right the progeny of ducal nobility. “But that’s no argument!” say the genealogists, people who are habituated to grafting branches onto family trees at will. True enough, but this particular Spanish princess is still among us, living out her waning years on her island.

On his mother’s side, Pedro hails from ancient Iberian nobility. His family flourished on the banks of the Tajo under Carlos V, and later under Philip II, the one with the name that is so abhorrent to the Dutch. Even if we discount such questionable royal connections, Pedro’s lineage on the paternal side points back to the Spanish mainland. The ancestors of the Suredas arrived on the island with James the Conqueror in the year 1229, the year that is sacred to all Mallorquins. After a long siege, on the 31st of December of that same year, the Christian king delivered Palma from the hands of the Moorish dogs. Pedro’s ur-grandfather was on hand for this. Clothed in a coat of mail he raged furiously among the heathen hordes, for he had a specific grudge against the moros : to this day the family bears the name “Verdugo,” which means executioner, hangman, or beheader — to memorialize the bloody deed that kept the clan in fealty to the Spanish Crown.

I’ll relate the story in a variant that comes closest to satisfying my penchant for gothic sagas. In Don Paco Quintana’s version, fewer heads roll, but otherwise every detail is exactly the same. It’s the thirteenth century. The castle of the Suredas is undergoing siege, and we hear the battle cry, “Death to the Castilians!” Battering rams wham up against doors, gates split apart, black devils clamber up the ramparts, a massacre commences. The lord of the castle falls under the swipe of a scimitar. The noble lady and her children, the sole survivors of the blood bath, are brought before the Sheik. The latter pronounces his decision: “Death to the Castilian infidels!” —But with this proviso: if the mother will behead her children with her own hands, one hijo varón will have his life spared. The lady agrees, but it is not she who decides which of the children is to survive the infanticide. She places her children around her in a circle, lets herself be blindfolded, picks up a sword, and whirls around several times, swinging the weapon like the hand on a clock. When she stops twirling, the blade points to a varón , a boy, the one selected to continue the noble line. She kills all the rest, and then herself.

I have often recounted this ancestral saga, and have yet to meet a mother who says that under similar circumstances she would act the same. To kill for love — is that so difficult? Or does a mother’s love not extend beyond the grave? Death is a good thing only when the masses say it is.