Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Now the conversation became loud. Don Juan swung his trumpet like an elephant’s trunk; now he held it to this person’s mouth, now to someone else’s, in order to take part in the repartee. His comments revealed, however, that he wasn’t very quick on the uptake. Pedro explained to him that I was the Catholic German he had told him about. Papá didn’t catch this, so Pedro shouted, “ El alemán católico !” The horn conveyed this information effectively; the old gentleman nodded with satisfaction and then explained to his wife that the first phase of the visit was complete, and the guests could now follow him into his study. This was a small room piled high with books, most of them old folios. And behold, it contained some real chairs and a canapé. We sat down with no danger of breaking a leg.

Pedro tooted into the trumpet that this Catholic German knew everything — all he had to do was ask him questions. Then he took Beatrice’s arm and led her out of the study. It would be better if Papá had his German all to himself.

Don Juan shifted a pile of books, drew forth a stool, and sat down facing me, ready to receive information. With my weak lung I have often had doctors sitting in front of me like this with their auscultating apparatus in hand, asking me to take a deep breath. Don Juan placed his mammoth stethoscope near my breast, but first set about wheezing and sputtering himself. Then he said, “Goethe is dead.”

The trumpet bell was now at my lips. Don Juan closed his eyes and held his head with one side turned upwards, so that part of his face was before me as in a concave mirror. It was yellow and wrinkled. A sprig of hair jutted from one nostril, and it moved up and down in rhythm with his breathing. When this fellow is dead, it won’t be necessary to hold a feather under his nose to check whether he’s still alive. Long, stiff hairs also protruded from his ear and covered the bony mouthpiece of his hearing apparatus. I remained silent, and the old deaf gent thought his trumpet might be plugged up. He banged it a few times with his hand, stuck the mouthpiece more firmly into his fur, and repeated the century-old communiqué that Goethe had died.

I was quick enough to reply, in English, with the almost century-old expletive “Dead as a doornail!” The hidalgo nodded. I had hit the nail on the head. After a pause for reflection there came the first question, one that caused me no little amount of confusion: “Now that Goethe has been dead for a hundred years, what influence do you think that this has had on his style in his later years?”

I made no reply. Don Juan continued: “As a German you will have pondered this problem. Ich bin ganz Ohr .”

The German he had taught himself in the john and with a program of reading at the club was not all that bad. To be ganz Ohr —this was no mean feat for a Spaniard. On the other hand, if a deaf man says that he is “all ears,” he means of course his trumpet. To prompt a reply, Don Juan poked my chest with it a few times, then placed it again at my mouth and closed his eyes. “Well?”

At the very same hour when I sat facing this aristocrat’s reverse loudspeaker, getting taken to the cleaners more pitilessly than any student at an oral exam, all over the world distinguished speakers were standing next to pitchers of water holding forth in honor of Goethe — all the Bertrams, the Heuslers, the Ortega y Gassets, the Gundolfs (if he lived long enough to take part in this celebration), the Gides, the Schweitzers. To be sure, a hundred years after the Olympian’s death, Goethe scholarship was still in its Wertherian phase, and none of the professors would have been able to blast forth any great wisdom into the Great Sureda’s trombone. So it’s no wonder that the likes of me had to take recourse in empty blather. I did so for a whole half-hour. Don Juan shook his brass instrument frequently, he repeatedly poked the earpiece into his hairy orifice in order not to miss a single word of my anniversary oration. He nodded in assent, as if to indicate that my jerry-built disquisition was taking the words right out of his own mouth. Deaf people are mistrustful, but if they are convinced that their amplification apparatus is working properly, they can become as gentle as the blind. I passed my orals with distinction. How amazed Don Juan would have been if I had already made the greatest contribution of the current century to Goethe scholarship, my discovery of Goethe’s conversations with Mrs. Eckermann, my surprise gift to the professorial guild on the occasion of the poet’s 200th birthday!

When, at the end of my improvisatory rope, I brought my declamation to a close, I was hoarse. Don Juan set down his trumpet and thanked me. I looked over at the door with the intention of escaping, but the grandee held my arm, pulled a small poetry anthology from his pocket, and asked me to blow forth a few poems as the final gesture of our celebration. He checked off the poems he wanted to hear, and now he heard them: durch das Labyrinth der Brust — wandelt in der Nacht . Oh, thou eternal hour! When silence returned, Don Juan glanced at me and said with emotion, “Goethe is alive. You have brought him back to life! A great spirit!”

Who, Goethe or Vigoleis?

In the Book of Joshua it is reported that seven priests blew seven trumpets of rams’ horns, and the walls of Jericho fell down flat. That is amazing. But it is no less remarkable that my blowing into a deaf man’s horn reawakened the dead Goethe, and on the very same day when the scholars were pummeling him with all due solemnity.

Don Juan was an erudite grandee, and travel had further educated him. I don’t know if Ernst Haeckel ever sat on one of his chairs, slept in one of his beds, or ate from one of his plates, but a copy of that writer’s Miracles of Life with a dedication from the author, written in large script across the whole flyleaf, was in the hidalgo’s library. Yet more important than the library was Don Juan’s collection of tickets from all the trains, trolleys, toll bridges, ships, theaters, museums, and the like that he started amassing at a certain point in his life. They filled dozens of boxes and gradually displaced some essential items of furniture.

A brief word in this connection: during the last decade of the previous century, Don Juan made a trip to Germany. At the time, a criminal case was in all the newspapers. A certain man was accused of murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. He maintained his innocence, although he couldn’t prove it. He claimed that on the day in question he wasn’t in the city where the crime was committed, but in the distant town of X. Shortly before his execution, his defense lawyer, conducting another search through the man’s house, found one of his defendant’s old suits. In one of the pockets he came upon a ticket for a horse-drawn tram. He ascertained that it had been issued on the fateful day in the town of X. The man was acquitted.

Don Juan, who followed this case with increasing dread, began imagining himself the potential victim of a miscarriage of justice. The Dreyfus Affair was also in the news at around this time. The public was getting nervous. It was felt that it was important to have an alibi at all times. Don Juan returned from this journey with a suitcase full of material that would save him from the gallows. He insisted that his relatives never take a single step that they couldn’t document years hence.

His mania for collecting extended also to newspapers, and in this regard he doubtless exceeded my mentor Karl d’Ester, the professor of journalism whose students even had to protect their sandwich wrappings from his prying fingers. Don Juan had once read of a case in which an entire year’s worth of a particular weekly suddenly became critical evidence and was worth thousands. Ever since then, he kept all periodicals and subscribed to a host of obscure serials.