Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

But I’m not imagining anything at all, just looking. Our driver is getting impatient. I give him one of my duros from the Shark Cafe. He goes back to sleep. Then a blood-curdling scream from Mom’s throat. She has found a pile of clothes — the shame of it! Trudi went swimming naked! And at that moment the prodigal daughter reappears from her fugitive swim and steps out on the sand. Mom, with her broad back, tries to shield from curious glances this Birth of Venus from the Mediterranean Foam. Luckily, Lieutenant von der Hölle has departed with the General Staff and at this moment is nearing the mountain summit. As a Führer I have not only obligations but also certain privileges, and so I make sure to observe the dressing procedure — from a discreet distance. What I see convinces me that unless Mom keeps her spunky daughter on close tether, some fellow might make a very fortunate catch. I certainly don’t wish it for the execrable Lieutenant.

Daddy, who meanwhile has tipped the driver for waiting, tells me I won’t regret having neglected my duties to the other tourists for his daughter’s sake. I am unable to think of an appropriate Führer -like reply, so I stand smartly at the side of the car, open the rear door, make a formal bow, and as I motion Trudi to enter, she gives me a mischievous smile. Now I can understand her interest in black piglets. Mom spoils the situation by insisting that this is Trudi’s first and last trip abroad. Daddy vigorously agrees. Brother and sister, soured by the whole scene, say nothing. The mood in the car is awful.

I leave the family to their own affairs. Thanks be to Trudi and her threadless enterprise, for now I can snooze in peace until we reach “Alfabia,” where we are going to look at subtropical gardens. Oh, I muse to myself, if only Trudi had shed her clothes as soon as we left Palma Harbor! In my thoughts she writes a long, long letter to her girlfriend back home, a letter in which “awesome” is every other word. And I am flattered that she mentions me: just imagine, he knows, like, everything! And he didn’t leave me behind! But is everything he tells us, like, true? Daddy says it has to be, cuz otherwise he couldn’t keep his job for one week. People would notice if he was making things up, and some of the tourists are real experts. What’s amazing is that he’s been doing this for, like, seven years! I’d go nuts…!

You would go nuts? Trudi, between you and me, your Führer already is nuts, but go ahead and tell your girlfriend everything else about your trip as you see it. It’s true, and if you need more material for a gushy paragraph about the landscape, just keep your eyes open. The drive up to the summit is extraordinary, and not only in Baedeker. From the top you can see the plains and the ocean far down below. Tourists often get tears in their eyes, the view is supposed to be so splendid. Supposed to be? Exactly, for I’ll be seeing it myself for the first time today. It is my maiden voyage, too.

We stop at the summit. But the ladies and gentlemen prefer to stay put in the car. “Let’s keep going.” And so we careen down to the depths around countless hairpin turns.

Dozens of cars are still standing in front of the country estate “Alfabia,” and this tells us that we have made up our lost time. But the distraught family won’t get out here, either. Punishment for Trudi! What will become of her? She’ll end up in a brothel! Perhaps so, but then only in the “Torre del Reloj,” on the majestic mattress.

So we zip past the Moorish gate to the gardens. I’ve taken off my number and Führer emblem. I’m on strike, and from now on traveling incognito.

Our leave-taking at the pier was strictly pro forma. Mom avoided me altogether; brother and sister said hasty goodbyes; Daddy kept his word and pressed a 25-peseta note in my hand. That’s how much he was willing to pay for his daughter’s exposure. He did this, incidentally, with practiced sleight of hand; the driver, who had an eye out for his own gratuity, didn’t even see it.

Trudi was the only one who gave me a warm farewell, and in doing so elicited a poisonous glance from Mom. I was about to wend my way homeward when the girl cried out, “Oh no, my bathing suit!” “But you didn’t have any!” “Yes I did, I always do. But I didn’t want to use it, so I hid it in the car.” “Then I would advise you to hide it even better right away, otherwise Mom is going to skin you alive!”

Vigoleis was dismissed. He went home, pulled the shades in the bedroom, and threw himself down on the pilarière , sunburned, lacerated in body and spirit, tormented, filled with disgust at the behavior of the human herd. Heine, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer had each told bitter and biting truths about the Germans. How might they have let go with all barrels if they had ever played tour guide to Germans for an entire day around the island of Mallorca? Did I say played ? And yet my first experience as a Führer was in fact child’s play compared to the tours with the packs who arrived later on Strength Through Joy ships and infested the island.

Beatrice returned exhausted but not demoralized, much less in desperation. I’ll admit, she said, that these Germans were riffraff one and all. Crowds of them are repulsive, they have no idea how to behave in a foreign country, and that scene in Porto de Sóller! No other nationality in the world would behave that way.

“Not even the Swiss? Or will they only start behaving that way when the franc takes a nosedive?”

For a while longer we tore into our respective so-called fatherlands. That pulled me out of the slough of humiliation. Then out of a blue sky I asked, “Tips?” and proudly smoothed out before her my 25-peseta bill. Beatrice fished around in her purse and came up with 2 reales, which equals 50 centimos. A lady had pressed the coins in her hand, while the others had preferred not to tip.

“A German lady, of course.”

“I’m afraid not, she was Swiss. But,” she added as a mitigating point, “from Basel.”

“ck….dt or photo-Phischer?”

“More or less, and filthy rich.”

“But in Valldemosa you said that your group was so charming!”

“The charming people are neither Germans nor Swiss. The charming ones are always whatever you aren’t, Austrians for example. Didn’t you know that?”

Over the years we led tours of this kind regularly, also for other agencies, and made good money at it. But I never got rid of the disgust. Starting with the third one I had to throw up even before I hit the streets, and this happened every time. Basically, this technique of preventive purgation worked out better; it was an expression of my cowardice, for anyone else who reacted as I did might have wanted to spit in the tourists’ faces or quit on the spot. Gradually I got to know the places we visited inside and out. I not only knew the names of the paintings, but also which ones were genuine and which were forgeries, just like a professional art historian. I knew who was buried in which tomb, whether he died of old age or had been poisoned or skewered with a blade. I knew why a certain church stood here and not on some other spot.

I learned all these data with the aid of tradition and scholarship. But still I kept on fabulizing for my clients, and my reputation grew. On one occasion, angered by the behavior of the philistine mob, I gave forth the unadorned truth — and they grumbled at me. The masses have an unerring instinct for the tawdriness of real history. As in Cologne at the “Pressa,” here too I was asked to take over for VIP visitors. Among others, I guided (and misguided) abdicated kings, archbishops, chairmen of the board, generals, prominent whores, millionaires, and world-famous artists. I didn’t get rich doing it; I don’t even possess a single autograph. After that first tour nobody dared to offer me a tip, and that disturbed me. Guides who clung to the stupid truth pulled in huge harvests of tips — a psychological injustice if there ever was one.