Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The 100-peseta note I once received from a business magnate was not meant as a tip, but as hush money. It was none other than the owner of the passenger line for which I was inventing all the pertinent history not to be found in Baedeker. He was traveling with his own wife, his own daughter, and his own ship. I was assigned to him as a personal guide — that’s just how important a man he was. He would be taking the same tour as everybody else, but our agency boss insisted that he was under no circumstances to be allowed near the common tourists. He hated that sort of thing. He wanted to be undisturbed, but I would have to explain things as usual.

The Chief Executive Officer himself took me aside and told me emphatically, but amiably, to keep the camera-carrying hordes away from him and to spare him the long lectures; I wouldn’t regret it. Astute businessman that he was, he named the amount right there and then: that evening at the pier his secretary would hand me 100 pesetas for my trouble. Or rather, he could take care of that himself, right here and now. No sooner said than done. His wife and daughter went along with the scheme, only here and there they asked a timid question or two, which I then answered — truthfully, but also very briefly and in a conspiratorial whisper. The most exquisite automobile in running condition on the island was chartered for this tour designed to foster the Chief’s meditative experience. Somewhere at the shore we stopped for a picnic. I ate up heartily, the ladies decidedly less so, and the Chief didn’t touch a bite. He sat off to one side on a rock and contemplated the blue horizon. Possibly he was in love, or maybe his flotilla was foundering.

In Sóller we did have a run-in with the madding crowd, but there were no serious consequences. The driver stepped on the gas, and we disappeared in a cloud of dust. We arrived on the dot at the Palma pier where the ship’s longboat was waiting. The Chief’s secretary came up to us with a mournful look to render a brief report on the day’s receipts, and a few items didn’t add up right. Pointing to me, the Chief said that his guide was to receive 100 pesetas. All day long I had been on my best behavior, but now at the final minute I made the stupid mistake of explaining that Mr. Chief Executive Officer himself had already taken care of this small matter, but now had obviously forgotten. What a fool I was! If only I had kept mum there, too — seeing as where I had been hired to play a mute! “Talk is silver, silence is golden” indeed.

Walking homeward Vigoleis swore to himself that he would keep his mouth shut forevermore, for by doing so he might soon advance to Chairman of the Board himself. But this went the way of all good intentions. To this very hour he has advanced to nothing of importance, because he’s always opening his big trap at just the wrong time.

Pedro arrived in civvies; the time for wearing his humiliating carnival costume was over.

We celebrated the Feast of the Miraculous Disrobing with sobrasada , wine, and bread, and we gave a toast to freedom. The food resembled the General’s Eggs, but it didn’t serve the same function. Pedro picked up his pad and began sketching: Vigoleis as Tourist Guide. A second sheet: Vigoleis as Padre with Cassock and Biretta. A third: Vigoleis as Spanish Army Recruit, Engaging in Mutiny. The fourth sketch showed him as a knight with hand to breast, ruff collar, and saber, freely after El Greco. This fellow was a talented artist, but he never succeeded in depicting Vigoleis as Vigoleis, despite hundreds of drafts and sketches for a grand portrait. Later, when he took lessons from the German refugee Segal and asked me to pose for him, a shadow of my second aspect gradually merged into my primary visage. But before the work could be completed, Segal packed up his utensils and left the island, and I fled soon after him.

It wasn’t only Pedro Sureda who had returned to humanity. We, too, had reached a tolerably humane level of existence, thanks especially to Beatrice’s persistence in hammering several languages into some very resistant brains. She made a name for herself in Palma. Our house became a crowded place. In her field, she was just as much in demand as I was in my capacity as a cicerone. Prosperity lay just around the corner. In our kitchen there was a real saucepan on a hook, and each of us had our own pillow. We no longer had to roll up our clothes. We even had bedclothes, including a woolen blanket, an attractive second-hand peasant model that cost us more to de-flea and de-Pilarize than a new one would have. But easy come, easy go; our common oddball vice, books, was the reason why we still had no doormat. At the foot of the bed lay my old black loden greatcoat, as spooky to look at as some trophy from the hunting grounds in a world of ghosts. On our bookshelf one Rivadeneira classic stood next to another. We also spent quite a lot on clothes; in the South, more than in most other places in the world, clothes make the man.

I began translating Spanish literature, first only for myself as an exercise in getting to know the texts, but then in order to create an audience for Iberian literary art in Germany — I should say more modestly, a larger audience. I translated works by Padre Feijó, Baltasar Gracián’s Criticón , novels by Pío Baroja, a few books by Mario and one, a gem of a book on the art of pipe-smoking, by Joaquín Verdaguer, the relative and literary confrère of the great national poet Jacinto Verdaguer. And some other things that I can’t recall. Pedro helped me tirelessly with linguistic difficulties; Beatrice, the walking dictionary, provided the solution in doubtful cases. I started up a busy correspondence with publishers. Our private exchequer shrank in direct proportion to the German publishers’ regrets that at the moment they daren’t get too close to Spanish material.

Was this a reflection on the quality of my translations? Later on, Professor Karl Vossler had lavish praise for my ability to render the spirit of Iberia.

I remained faithful to Dutch literature. At the beginning of an earlier chapter I mentioned the name Slauerhoff; it was ter Braak who brought him to my attention. But no sooner did I write down his name than I got sidetracked to my own literary dog food. That’s how it always goes in the life of Vigoleis, and thus that’s how it goes, necessarily, in these pages. But now I can report I completed a German version of Slauerhoff’s unique novel on the life of Camões, The Forbidden Realm . I expended a great deal of time and care attempting to emulate this writer’s famous chaotic style, and I was proud of my chaotic German version. The first publisher to hold my manuscript in his hands dropped it on the floor and lifted those selfsame hands to the heavens. Back to the sender. Other publishers rejected it on the grounds that nationalistic circles could take offense at the novel’s title; the “Third Realm” was about to come out of the forge. The Great German Carnival was about to happen, and that is why a dozen publishing houses also gave political reasons for refusing Menno ter Braak’s Bourgeois Carnival . People were being careful. Even Verdaguer’s little book on the tobacco pipe, which finally came out in Germany around this time but not in my translation, caused one publisher to go into a world-historical fit. Even as a non-smoker I knew that you can burn your fingers on a pipe. But for political reasons? Simple: Hitler didn’t smoke.

Vriesland’s Departure from the World in Three Days was taking an eternity to write. It was sent to me down on the island in separate waves. In the first line of the book a Jew makes an appearance — and on the horizon the Forbidden Reich was about to dawn forth.