Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“If you keep putting your own stuff into the fire,” said Pedro, “why don’t you try translating cheap novels? For that kind of stuff we have our own Pedro Mata.”

Pedro meant well, but I felt that I meant even better, so I persisted in translating for the highbrows: Eugenio d’Ors, Angel Ganivet, Miguel de Unamuno — all for naught. I didn’t even dare to produce an uncensored rendering of writings by my Santa Teresa de Ávila.

Don Quixote had his windmills, and now Vigoleis had his publishers. A non-Iberian evolution.

Beatrice’s consumption of literature is so huge that not even a rich man would find it easy to keep her book bin filled. She has a literary tapeworm, and occasionally I envy her for it. This is the reason why we scouted around for a lending library. Pedro recommended the “Casa del Libro” on the Borne. There I entered my name in the membership list; their catalogue seemed to justify such an adventure. The fee was manageable; we would just have to send off two fewer manuscripts per month. The library manager was a short, fat man with a mild speech defect. He had an inimitable bleating laugh that drove milky-white bubbles of saliva into the swarthy corners of his mouth. His name was Mulet. From the second day of our acquaintance I felt constrained to pay special attention to this man. In the forenoon he was smooth-shaven, but by five o’clock he had a stubbly beard. At ten in the morning I asked him for a certain book, and he said I could pick it up at five. At five, he couldn’t remember a single thing. One forenoon he accidentally twisted his hand so that it turned black and blue; by afternoon the injury was invisible. Once I saw him sitting in a café on the Borne; I waved and went on my way. When I arrived at his shop, there he was. For a long time I remained the butt of jokes, some of them quite clever, perpetrated by the identical twin brothers Mulet, much to the amusement of the tertulia that met at the “Casa del Libro” around the writer Verdaguer, the tobacco-pipe Verdaguer.

A tertulia is a circle of people that can open up and then close again quite casually, a lodge for empty chitchat, a forum for plying one of Spain’s favorite social vices: verbal idleness. Its particular attractiveness as an institution derives from its higher aimlessness, its unique method of killing the already dead hours. No one can resist it who has even the slightest taste for the void. For me the void is its own purpose; I am a stick-in-the-mud and shy, and therefore the tertulia went straight to my heart. In Spain some tertulias run in 24-hour cycles, at full strength. But to belong to one of these you must have a fat purse, a big mouth, and a willingness to put your shoes on a new polisher’s box every few hours. All tertulias have their own bootblack, a fellow who usually is the center of the group’s attention. His opinions about all kinds of daily and nightly matters are as respected as those of any successful writer. Famous Spanish statesmen have attended a tertulia before launching a coup d’état, checking things out with the limpiabotas before staging their revolt. In Spain, the man of the people is not to be confused with the “man on the street” in other countries. My barber José was a philosopher whose spoken Spanish was just as pure as Unamuno’s or Pedro Sureda’s. Only he didn’t write down his thoughts; for him, he told me, what grows on top of people’s heads was more lucrative than what was inside.

At Mulet’s tertulia I regularly met a young man who drew my attention by the careful way he filled his pipe. He would start “really” smoking it only when it came time for him to leave. Cleaning, blowing through the stem, tapping the tobacco in the bowl, extruding the tobacco from a sack made from the scrotum of a fighting bull, rubbing, partially filling, completely filling, pushing down — he went through all these motions as if they were a liturgical ritual, with long pauses for joining the conversation with his invariably witty sarcasm and dreaded mockery. This was Don Joaquín Verdaguer, the only writer I know who actually follows the path he recommends in his books. He had already written his treatise on El Arte de Fumar en Pipa , and now he was living a life devoted entirely to this archetypal art. It didn’t bother him at all if he burned holes in his pants. Once his pipe was in his mouth, he never lost his composure in front of the students he had to teach in German, English, French, and social economics, or when faced by the super-challenging writings he translated by Nietzsche, Zweig, Dickens, Papini, Mann, Kipling, Istrati, and other fellow-smokers. When he learned that I was a non-smoker, he reacted with a broma , a witticism. He could accept the fact that I was a writer, but the idea that I could translate without smoking a pipe — as a German I would of course use a long one — this presented him with problems that he was unable to solve even with his own pipe. “How do you do that and not go crazy?”—As a Spaniard it hadn’t occurred to him that you could take on such a challenge in the aforementioned condition. My double-sewn leather Sitzfleisch took care of the rest.

His brother Don Mario was at that time working on his translation of The Magic Mountain . Thomas Mann had told him in a wonderful letter that he was unwilling to explain breakneck passages to his translators. So I took over this job, while Don Joaquín helped me in turn when my cart got stuck, and even Pedro didn’t dare to pull me out of the mud. It is with pleasure and sorrow that I recall those years, when the course of world literature got decided in a little lending library, urged on by the bleating mirth of Mulet, the man with the magic beard. As the sole representative of the Nordic branch of literature, I didn’t have an easy time with these indigenous tertulians , whose ranks included notably the two Villalonga brothers, Don Miguel, Army Captain ret., and Don Lorenzo, physician and psychiatrist. Both of them were well-known writers, especially Don Miguel, who is certain to enter Spanish literary history as the “Mallorquin Proust.” This man was, if not the ambulatory, then the sedentary quintessence of melancholy, a satirist who could hold his own against the likes of Lichtenberg. A few chapters later, Count Harry Kessler will take flight from his presence. And Verdaguer’s pipe went out whenever Don Miguel started airing his bleak mood, in the back room where the elite of the tertulia gathered, a group to which I wasn’t admitted until after a year. That’s when I finally had sufficient command of the language to take up a cudgel for my own brand of Weltschmerz . Incidentally, I tried to stir up interest in Villalonga’s charmingly scandalous Miss Giacomini , but with no success.

Some also-rans: Don Felipe, a botanist and astrologer; Busquets, a rich wine merchant who as a typical Spanish autodidact compiled in his bodega an Arabic-Spanish dictionary that was prized by specialists. Whenever he hit upon a word he didn’t know, he sailed to Morocco, got the answer from sheiks he was friends with, and returned with a bag full of the most amazing stories. I must resist the temptation to relate them here. This “Arab” took on special importance for me, because in his library he had the poems of Pascoaes.

The manager of this literary cabaret seldom showed up. His interests tended more toward high-level politics than to the liberal arts, although we gave plenty of attention to political affairs in our conversations. A genuine tertulia doesn’t shrink from any topic; the more vigorously you shoot the breeze, the more convinced you are that you hold the destiny of the world in your hands. When contrary to all rational expectations the Third Reich emerged from its baptism of fire and blood, I was elevated to the position of expert on domestic German affairs; I became purely and simply an authority. It was only when I started prophesying that my prestige diminished, in contrast to the true prophets like the one who was the cause of defeats such as my own. Thus I was forced to realize that I was unaccepted even outside my own country. My clairvoyant eye lifted the veil from things too horrible to contemplate: new Battles of the Marne, a new Compiègne, the Führer flees the scene leaving Germany as a heap of rubble — unless Baron von Martersteig can make a timely appearance on the scene with his Army of Monkeys. I permitted myself this minor proviso; the prophets of the Old Covenant also kept their back doors open. Captain Villalonga, who had served for several years in Africa and had first-hand knowledge of monkeys while his German colleague was merely consulting Brehm, presented the case this way: I must dismiss from my mind any of my friend’s notions about recruiting monkeys. Germany had produced a Goethe, a Bach, a Nietzsche, and so forth, and the country wasn’t about to go to pieces because of some army private. Don Lorenzo, the scientist of the human soul, supplemented this assertion by saying that as is well known, insanity begins inside the head; a nation is no different. The bottom-up insurgency that was happening in my patria would never affect the brain; it was nothing but mud, and it would forever remain weighted down by itself. Erudite as these brothers were, there followed a hail of learned quotations. But Vigoleis stuck by his guns. Since when can soldiers and psychologists claim to know anything about the human soul? Both of them move along in trenches that are forever colllapsing, so there is never an end to the shoveling.