Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“A hundred chairs? Just like that?”

“Yes. Papá saved them when the Sureda fortune crashed. There isn’t one of them that hasn’t been sat on by some famous personage or other. There are tags on all of them, with names and dates. Miguel de Unamuno, Rubén Dario, Alphonse XIII El Rey , Chopin, Luis Salvador, the Duke of Austria, George Sand. Ever read any of her books?”

“Not one line. I only know that Nietzsche called her a horrible scribbling cow, and that she wrote a book on Mallorca that everybody here seems to be reading. In the German bookshop she represents world literature.”

Pedro went on sketching. We chatted on, but then I had to shut my mouth because the contour of my Bambergian upper lip, shaped after Cupid’s bow, was giving the artist some difficulty as it kept moving up and down. Beatrice went back to reading her detective novel, unperturbed by our conversation and my Habsburg bloodline, which years later in Portugal was to blossom forth in unexpected glory.

Pedro tore the sheet from his drawing pad and stuck it on our cactus plant. In Poetry and Truth Goethe relates that owing to a midwife’s blunder he was considered stillborn, and that it was only as a result of strenuous efforts that he actually saw the light of the world. What got reborn here on Pedro’s sheet of paper — as dubious as a Doppelgänger , a hybrid of Goya’s ghost and some medieval German masterpiece — was simply not viable.

The constellation was not propitious. Beatrice turned away in disgust and left the delivery room. Woe to him who portrays her Vigoleis as uglier still than Mother Nature saw fit to create him! The artist, offended, asks me for my opinion. I have often sat for artists. It is always a difficult moment when they ask this question, or when they glance back and forth between the canvas and the model. I gave Pedro my honest opinion, right to his Bourbon face. If, I said, I wrote as badly as he sketched, I would throw myself down in front of a trolley car. Pedro turned sour. He was proud of his Bamberg Knight, and as an excuse he said that he was only just a beginner. His brother Jacobo was making much better progress, and his mother, the amateur princess…

No less sour, I replied that I, too, was just a beginner, and was beginning to fear that there would never be an end to beginning. And then we gave each other a hug. Would I care to exchange my pen for his pencil? Tomorrow he would bring me a pad full of jottings, aphorisms mostly. Would I be willing to read them through and tell him if he should switch from drawing to writing? But those damned army barracks! An hour ago he was scheduled to stand watch in some filthy guardhouse. He was late for duty, and didn’t have a cigarette to bribe the officer in charge to look the other way. “What would insubordination like that cost you up there in Prussia? A whole pack of cigarettes, I’ll bet you!”

I gave Pedro a bribing cigarette from Beatrice’s stash. “It would cost me my head, my friend. And it would cost my family everlasting shame unto the seventh generation.”

“A great people, the Germans! Papá admires them, especially if they’re Catholic. He’s against Luther, and he knows German, too. He learned it in the john.”

“In the…? How do you…?”

My philological curiosity was awakened. I was familiar with several methods of language learning, and a few chapters later I will invent a new one myself. But I had never heard of the one that Pedro just mentioned. Beatrice, a certified foreign-language teacher, had surely never heard of it, either. Unfortunately, Pedro could not be persuaded to stay on. That would have cost Beatrice two cigarettes. He had no money, he said. And we didn’t have any, either. And so he left to loaf through his guard duty. We parted as friends for life.

Only after the door closed behind him did it occur to me that he had not once spit on our floor. As I have already indicated, this is precisely the way I wanted to present him here — with his superior Spanish manners. In this sense, he left nothing behind. But his sketch of me still hung on our cactus plant, and that was just as bad. I took down the sheet and placed it in a folder. But maybe I should have left it in place and invoked Goethe: “Oh, Beatrice, if you were a German instead of this Swiss hodgepodge of ck, ck-dt, and Indian squaw, I would quote the Sage of Weimar, who once told his friend Eckermann that the Germans didn’t know how to respond to strange occurrences, and thus they often missed out on higher things in life without even noticing. Goethe went on, and I quote verbatim: ‘Any fact in our lives is not of value because it is true, but because it is significant.’ Pedro’s sketch and my ugliness, which can never be disguised as some Bamberg Knight, are facts, but they have no significance whatsoever.”

I spoke these sublime words to the wind, for Beatrice entered the room, scrutinized the floor, disappeared again and came back with the pair of pants we used as a cleaning rag. Frowning tightly, she began wiping the floor.

“Now you see how these people can mess up your whole house. There’s no end to cleaning up after them.”

Whenever female intellectuals go on a cleaning rampage, it’s a signal to take off. And if they don’t, then you just have to go to the dogs in your own filth.

But then she, too, noticed that Pedro hadn’t spit on our floor, and her mood changed.

“He must have had a good upbringing. As crazy as they are, those Suredas are first-class people.”

“It’s all a matter, my dear, of his royal blood. Kings spit on their subjects, but never on the floor!”

Beatrice, Pedro has an idea how we could earn some money.” “You’ve had certain ideas, too. But all right. I’m curious. Tell me what he has in mind.”

“Prostitution!”

“Oh, thanks a lot! I rather thought it might be that. You’re impossible, the two of you. Just like smutty-minded little boys. So you want to send me out on the street?”

“Right! Out on the street, but together with me. The two of us, get it? We’re going to pull the big trick. We’re going to be Führer s.”

Back then the word Führer was already somewhat in bad odor, but only mildly so — like the place on a pork chop near the bone, where the smell begins. Führer : the term evoked ridiculous images such as a silly toothbrush moustache and a faggish lock of hair, a madman’s eyes, and all of this stuck in a uniform to bring out the comedy and raise it to tragic German heights. This man was an easy mark for the international humor magazines, though considering that thousands of murders had already been committed in his name, he ought to have been looked into by criminal psychologists such as the famous Dr. Orthmann, director of the insane asylum in my home town of Süchteln. But in so-called heroic times, blood must flow in torrents before anyone realizes that it is blood. Germany itself had to become an insane asylum, in order that the prophecy might be fulfilled: that guy was going to end up in a padded cell.

And thus Beatrice and I became Tour Guides, meaning that we were now “ Führers ” minus the quotation marks.

Pedro introduced us to the manager of a travel agency, a German-Spanish enterprise called Baquera Kusche y Martins. The boss was a German with strong left-wing ideas and much bitterness in his heart. Apart from this, he seemed to be a kindly sort. His birthplace was Hamburg or some other north German town where they sssspeak with sssstrong ssssibilants, and he enjoyed teasing me about my sing-song Rhenish cadences. We got along very well, and we signed a work contract. His company organized group excursions with Woermann Travel, and led tours in Palma and to other points on the island. Each “ Führer ” was given a number to be displayed in a conspicuous place, and a company armband, and each evening, after the tourist hordes had jostled and questioned him half to death, a wage of 25 pesetas. To us that was a lot of money.