Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

His archive was stored in crates, suitcases, baskets, and cardboard boxes, in drawers, cabinets, under beds, and in corners of rooms where there was always space to spare. After a time it started competing for Lebensraum in the Suredas’ apartment, since Don Juan decided to bring to Palma the portions of his collection that had been stored in the wet nurse’s quarters in Valldemosa. He was planning to compile a general catalogue of his holdings, and asked my advice concerning the best system of classification. I recommended a pocket-sized microcard file; in two or three years the job would be finished, and then I could only hope that Don Juan would be accused of murder. That would be the most fitting way to put the catalogue to its proper use.

Like the fiumare —those rivers that carry water only in the rainy period but then swell up to become dangerous torrents — Don Juan’s life saw the regular recurrence of hectic activity that destroyed much in its path but left behind, in the river bed of his mind, a fertile layer of mud. I am now about to relate the story of how the hidalgo learned German, an account that is as fundamentally important for these pages as it is indiscreet. Perhaps my reader will catch my drift if I say that I wish him to become privy to this story; once we can get past the “privy” part, it will be clear to my reader why it is that my ears pricked up when, for the first time, I heard the name of the Portuguese mystic Teixeira de Pascoaes, the man who has played a central role in my life ever since.

Hemorrhoids are, apart from the discomfort they cause, an indecorous affliction. The euphemistic designation “golden veins” does nothing to remove the stigma. Don Juan suffered from this ailment to an extent that forced him at times to sit for hours on end in an unmentionable location in his house. Under such constraint the pious monk Caesarius of Heisterbach would have pondered the question of eternity. But Don Juan, citizen of a country of autodidacts, pondered his own education. During these hours of outer and inner coercion he drove himself to learn two languages: Greek and German. Since his ailment was chronic, he reached his goal. Still, everyone knows that it isn’t possible to learn a language silently; one must declaim everything to get used to the new sounds. That’s just what Don Juan did, and because he was hard of hearing, he did it very loudly, considering that he couldn’t shout the lessons into his own trumpet bell.

If you will now picture the site where this self-teaching went on, and picture further a housemaid from the countryside, you can imagine that after a few days this maid will start getting the willies. He locks himself in and yells out gibberish — you, too, would pack your things and leave your new job before real insanity broke out. None of these hired criadas , Pedro told me, lasted more than a week, and so Doña Pilar was forced to abandon her easel again and again to do common housework. Her art suffered as a consequence, but Don Juan suffered even more, for over the years the rectal clusters multiplied. From a solely linguistic standpoint, the golden knots that disfigured Don Juan’s second visage were quite beneficial. Over time, the entire household became exclusively oriented toward the grandee’s philological vein.

When we got to know him, Don Juan was already an advanced student. In German he was quite fluent. His affliction worsened, and his family feared that Papá might start teaching himself Chinese. His doctors weren’t much help. As with cases of the flu, they advised waiting until the illness cured itself.

Whenever Don Juan finished a relieving session on his linguistic perch, he left the throne room with his textbooks stuck under his arm, holding his drooping trousers with one hand, while with the other hand keeping his underwear from touching the sensitive spot, and shuffled across the hallway into his bedroom. The bedroom was small, and he had long legs, so he had to keep the door open with his legs projecting out into the hall like a roadblock. The family was by now accustomed to this new phase of his malady, and they hurdled over these paternal stilts as a matter of domestic routine. “Learn to suffer without complaint,” was the doomed German Kaiser’s motto, and our family doctor had it posted on his office wall for the edification of his patients. Don Juan suffered while learning.

Once Pedro installed an eternal lamp in the hall, no one stumbled any more. A wealthy aunt donated the oil, but not out of Christian charity. No, this was a preventive measure to avoid hospital bills that might otherwise ensue. But the eternal flame was unable to prevent a worse calamity.

A British lady commissioned Pedro to paint her portrait. Friends of hers had recommended the “famous Suredas,” and by mistake she approached the nameless Pedro rather than his brother Don Jacobo. Pedro was thrilled: Heaven had sent this errant non-beauty to him and his easel! Art history can point to several instances where such mistakes have given rise to immortal masterpieces. The rich lady from England was willing to pay the price that Don Jacobo would have asked — a few thousand pesetas. All of us shared in Pedro’s excitement: thousands of pesetas! The sittings were to take place in his parents’ flat, mornings at eleven in the little room where I had held forth on Goethe. Pedro outfitted the study as a studio, and at that hour of the day the light would be just right for the job.

But this was the same hour when Don Juan conducted his one-man sit-down seminars. There was a way, they figured, to steer clear of disaster. Pedro’s mother and a number of siblings agreed to keep Papá in check and, if necessary, squelch his loud verb conjugations. I myself offered to stand guard, or to divert Don Juan from his sanguine preoccupation by conversing with him on his favorite topic, Original Sin. But Pedro, trusting in the resourcefulness of his own family, said that my services would not be required.

On the evening of the first day of posing, Pedro visited us, and I could tell right away that something untoward had happened. Those thousands of pesetas had slipped through his fingers. As a proud Spaniard, the kind you read about in books including this one, he didn’t cry. But you could infer from his quivering lips that down deep in his gut he was plotting dastardly revenge. If only he had left this English dame to his brother and shared the loot with him afterward!

“How come?”

“Papá!”

“ Good gracious !” cried Beatrice with the emphasis of a dyed-in-the-wool Brit who has just had the death of her favorite cat predicted by a soothsayer. As in a movie, she immediately sensed what had gone wrong, while I was still groping in the dark.

The dowager arrived at the appointed time. The princess welcomed her and took her to the studio where Pedro had hastily covered one wall with a bedsheet. This had the effect of dividing up the room and gave the illusion of space. One of Doña Pilar’s masterpieces, perhaps the best painting in the entire piso , was duly admired by the lady from England: a portrait in blue of an old friend of the family, Don Miguel de Unamuno. Then Doña Pilar left the room, and Pedro gave posing instructions to his very first paying victim. Using the few snatches of English that Beatrice had taught him, he started a conversation, but soon he went silent. He sketched out some contours, and perhaps even started applying some color — I don’t recall any details of his technique.

Then: intermission for the model. Why of course, she could simply relax. Should he fetch her purse for her? Oh, she must have left it in the entrada —if she wished to get it herself, it was just across the hallway. The lady ambulated out of the studio. She was an elderly personage wearing the familiar English stockings. The ensuing scream was ear-splitting. There was a noise as if someone were stumbling over something, and then an urgent summons to “ Dear God !” Pedro heard a shout of the English vocable umbrella , and then the front door slammed shut.