Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Just one more glimpse of whiteness, and I have reached the far end of our hallway. While making a careful balancing motion so as not to spill the contents of this red-and-gold-painted receptacle, I open a whitewashed door. Suddenly the ravishing vision has disappeared, and with her the chamber pot in her delicate, royal hand.

The person referred to on preceding pages between unkind quotation marks as “bitch” or “uneducated individual,” the one we have blasphemously circumscribed (or perhaps circumvented) in analogy to the unnamed deity of the Old Covenant — this person has now made her entrance into Vigoleis’ applied recollections in a manner more stately than could possibly be imagined. Again Vigoleis took a deep breath, but this time it was not, as at the close of Chapter I, to fill his lungs with the air that wafted across the island. This time he inhaled a woman’s aroma, which beguiled the room he was sitting in. Then with both hands he took his heart, which was up in his throat and choking him, and pressed it back down into his chest.

The child’s flesh, which had clung to his hand in the dark — if such a thing can happen with young flesh, then what must the fully mature flesh of the mother be capable of?

If I hadn’t been sitting down, it certainly would have been my turn to collapse onto a piece of luggage. Beatrice was staring ahead, and her eyes seemed not to focus on anything at all. But my dear bamboozled Zwingli — where have you gone all of a sudden?

Our good friend, the male concubine, had fled the scene entirely.

The sun appeared to be sweltering in the glare of its own light as, at the apex of midday, we stepped out on our street, which at this moment was living up to its official name. It was deserted, save for a few errant dogs and cats that were performing the service of public sanitation. Growling and hissing, they slunk into entryways and tugged out to the street the contents of garbage cans, cardboard boxes, and crushed paper bags. As we approached, they scattered. When the Calle de la Soledad emptied out on a square surrounded by decrepit buildings, we suddenly noticed, in the expanse of white dust, a crowd of teenage boys and a few ragged kids standing around a lanky young girl. She was dancing, egged on by wild shouts and the wheezy music of a squeezebox, flinging her naked arms upward amid a clattering of castanets. It was a colorful scene. I was just about to join the throng of young onlookers when there was a piercing scream, whereupon these other disturbers of the noontime peace also scattered to the four winds. The square was thus vacated for the passage of our little group à quatre .

María del Pilar, as gorgeous in name as in figure, displaying her little Renaissance tummy in precisely the manner savored by Spanish swains (until, swelled up by the Good Lord’s annual blessing, it must be replaced by one having the proper proportions), and with the graceful prominence of her pointed breasts, anatomical features that might never spell profit for a corsetiere but could doubtless be abundantly cash-producing for the personage who sported them—

Her Helvecio (a.k.a. Zwingli), so sleekly shaven that his face glistened like a blue shad in a running stream in his Confederated homeland. The man was groomed and, quite contrary to his occupation, clothed only in trousers, glistening white shirt, and white cord sandals, making the overall austere impression of a corpse on a catafalque; a handsome fellow of 25 at the side of a handsome woman who was but one minuscule year his senior—

María del Pilar’s sister-in-law, enlisted as her bosom companion, a broad-minded guest in her darkened apartment: Doña Beatriz, trying rather awkwardly to synchronize her broad Northern European gait to the mincing steps of the individual who, here at least, shall pass without the faintest taint of quotation marks—

And finally my humble self, her brother-in-law and would-be heart-throb, her premature obituarist, and the as yet unscathed victim of her connubial prowess: Don Vigo, who no doubt occupies her thoughts just as much as she does his…

Thus this domestic quartet ambled across the square. But then Pilar, too, became aware of the musical entertainers. There was another scream, an echo of the first one but weaker, more like a sob from deep within, like a devout ejaculation uttered in abject despair. And just such an ejaculation it indeed must have been, for it contained the sacred names of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. All doubt of its reverent nature was removed by the sign of the cross she swiftly made with her right hand over her face, following it up immediately with the larger analogue of the same ritualistic gesture. My own mother used to go through the very same motions when proceeding through the Stations of the Cross — more sedately, to be sure, and with more deliberate gestures of self-benediction, while insisting that her little boy follow and do likewise. But there weren’t any Stations of the Cross here. In Barcelona I had noticed that gentlemen tipped their hats when passing a church, and ladies crossed themselves. But here, there wasn’t a church in sight. How silly of me to forget that this same symbolic gesture can be used to exorcise the devil or to ground a bolt of lightning! So many oddities and novelties had descended upon me since landing here — I ought to have anticipated such a twist as a public, gratuitous Declaration of Faith in the Triune God, delivered wholly without expectation of reward. And there I was, thinking that I knew all the ins and outs of Roman Catholicism, a cultural institution that, to be truthful, no longer enjoyed my allegiance.

Keep your eyes and ears open, Vigoleis! For now you are living in a hyper-Catholic country, the selfsame land that perfected the Inquisition. Perhaps they will no longer escort you in hair shirt and devil’s cap to the gibbet — but be careful just the same! Beatrice, too, must be on her guard here, accosted as she already has been by a terrifying, fanatical glance on that boat on our way over here! Is it obvious from her looks that she is lacking a Catholic baptism? Once again, Vigoleis, take care! You are walking among religious fanatics, oh thou of no faith at all, in an exceedingly religious country. But hold! “Faithless Among the Faithful”—wouldn’t that be a dandy title for the diary you really ought to start writing now that you have begun a new life? A new external life, let it be stressed, for internally, in your heart and in your soul, let’s grant that there’s not much that can be done. Pursuant to the promise you made (permit me this gentle reminder!), do send soon a few diary quotes to your dear uncle, the Bishop in Münster who, prior to his summons to episcopal office, himself once traveled through Spain with a hiking staff and a beret that concealed his breviary. How comical were the tales he told of his extensive wanderings in mufti! And yet he can scarcely have ever found himself in such exciting Spanish company as his nephew at this moment, who, smooth-shaven and pressed to the nines, is on his way to buy a bed.

A bed? Aren’t you and Beatrice going to reside in the Hotel Príncipe? Or have you decided, rather, to take up quarters in the Street of Solitude? If you are to be the house guests of María del Pilar, then doesn’t she have a guest room with sleeping facility? And what about that nail on Zwingli’s right pinky? Has it lost its magical efficacy? As is well known, the Little Cologne Helpers are wont to perform their lilliputian domestic favors only at nighttime. But of course there are always exceptions. Besides, they weren’t afraid of the light back there at the port of Palma. And Pilar’s apartment was just the place for doings in the dark.

Earlier, as soon as the lovers had left the apartment by separate doors, each bearing a different burden in hand and mind, Beatrice had whispered to me, “What a frightful situation this is! Poor Zwingli! It’s enough to make you sick. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if what we have here isn’t a severe case of sexual bondage. When that happens, the victim just gives up taking baths.”