Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Pedro, standing at his easel, turned into a pillar of salt. “Papá!” He didn’t even need to go out into the hall to be certain of what had happened. The grandee lay prone and bare-bottomed on his bed, his legs stretched out across the hall carpet, loudly conjugating verbs. Can there be a more dreadful, a more fear-inspiring sight for a lady who came to have her portrait painted? And apart from the sight, this incomprehensible yelling coming from the oblivious old man’s mouth — German, or perhaps Greek, Homer, Goethe, Hölderlin…? The domestic guards had let down their guard, leaving Papá alone to follow the nameless urgings of his philological passion.

It speaks for Pedro’s virtues as a human being, and as the son of his father, that he refrained from whacking the old man over the head with his palette. Who, in a similar situation, would not have spit a wad, or at least tossed a shoe tree at the naked old gent lying there?

We were shaken.

“There’s nothing for it,” said Pedro, bringing his account to a close. “Vigoleis… What would you have done?”

“I would have locked Papá inside and left the scene.”

“Locked him in? You idiot, it’s obvious that you come from a country where not only philosophical systems, but also doors can be ‘locked.’ Did you ever run across a door in our piso that can be properly locked? The bathroom door, for example, can be locked only from the inside, and even for that you have to know just how to do it, or else you’ll never get out again. If it were any different, that thing never would have happened to Mamá’s nun.”

I listened up. The princess has a nun? One to whom embarrassing things have happened? I have always been interested in nuns. Once, a nun was deeply in love with me and wanted to sleep with me. Another nun once stole a blackbird I had carefully tamed — she killed it, fried it, and ate it. Since then I have looked upon these black-veiled ladies as the archetypal manifestation of corporal and mental aggression. At my insistence Pedro told us a remarkable story, and in the telling he forgot his own frustrating escapade with the English lady. When he left after midnight he was his old self again.

After escaping the fateful apartment, we later learned, this British portrait dame leaped into a taxi and asked to be driven to His Majesty’s Consul. There she filed a charge stating that under pretense of having her portrait painted she had been lured to a dark house on a dark street. There she was greeted by a short woman and led into an artist’s studio that, as she later realized, was not an artist’s studio at all.

This short woman then showed her some blue man she claimed to have painted herself. And then the real painter came in, claiming to be the famous Jacobo Sureda. He stood behind an easel pretending to paint her portrait. Then this awful thing happened — we wondered just how she depicted it to the Consul.

That same evening the British lady left the island, in flight from the tortured buttocks of a Spanish grandee. Incidentally, the grandee himself never learned the mischief he had caused with his philological blood. Deaf or partially deaf persons always have the last word — the only word they can be sure of. In the story of the nun, this word once again belongs to Don Juan Sureda, although it was Pedro’s sculptress sister Pazzis who rescued the cloistered lady in question.

Having strewn about so many hints, I can no longer hold back from giving an account of this tragedy. Besides, I am of the opinion that by relating such quixotic adventures, I can offer my reader a clearer image of Don Juan Sureda, a man who gave my own existence such a significant new direction, than if I were to linger over a description of the double bags under his eyes, or over the fact that owing to my Habsburgian donkey’s chin I was often taken for the son of Papá Sureda himself, whereas his true son Pedro had to go on playing make-believe in the kindergarten of the Thirteenth Alphonse, the King of Spain, El Rey .

The princess never kept a nun in her house in the same way a prince of the Church keeps a house chaplain. Doña Pilar was ill, and preferred to be under the care of a nun rather than any of the numerous members of her family. Nurses visit many households, rich or poor, and they can adapt quickly to local conditions. They don’t ask many questions. In the Sureda home, Sister Amalberga was put on her mettle more severely than in most other houses. Soon she figured out which doors could be opened, and which it was best to leave closed. The problem was finding out how. She located the bathroom all by herself, but no one instructed her in the tricky matter of the inside lock.

The mishap occurred during her first night in the apartment.

Pedro shared a bedroom with his older brother Juanito, a student of jurisprudence. His academic specialty was Canon Law, but his chief field of interest was a form of pious idleness.

It was perhaps around midnight when Pedro was awakened by a noise. He listened, and it sounded as though someone were knocking. Was it a nocturnal bird pecking against a shutter? All he could hear was his brother snoring. Pedro turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but now he heard this rapping noise more clearly. He listened again, and this time there was no mistake: someone was knocking! But who? He immediately thought it must be the nun, locked in the bathroom and unable to get out. Damn it all, nobody told her how to do it! What now? While he was no left-winger, Pedro was no particular friend of the Church either, and thus as far as he was concerned, Sister Amalberga was a subject of strictly clerical interest. So he shook his brother awake and said approximately as follows: “Juanito, stop that un-Christian snoring! There’s a cloistered woman in our house who right now is in cloistered distress. Listen!” The knocking was still audible; it was louder but still restrained. Juanito agreed at once with his heretical brother’s assessment of the situation: no doubt about it, Sor Amalberga was locked in the throne room!

The brothers sat upright in bed and listened to the knocking, which could now be heard at regular intervals. After a while, Pedro said that it was Juanito’s job, as a Catholic, to liberate the nun. Juanito was not so firmly convinced of such a doctrinal obligation; he defended his position by alluding to both prevalent modes of jurisprudence, although Canon Law would have sufficed to justify his preference for malingering. Then Pedro had a brainstorm that once again showed him to be a faithful son, this time on his mother’s side. In the current situation, he said, it was probably not the nun who needed help, but their mother who needed help from the nun. But then it would be Mamá who was knocking, said the clever student of the law, and the scales of justice sank for a moment in his favor. Silence. The brothers tried to figure out whether the knocking was coming from their mother’s room. The ghost decided not to do them any such favor. There was more knocking, this time louder than before, and it was coming from the bathroom.

Pedro: “Maybe Mamá is too weak to give a signal. What’ll it be like if something happens to her while the nun just stepped out to the john?”

Juanito: “God forbid! But I don’t believe in such diabolical coincidences. But how about this: why doesn’t Pazzis just let her out?”

Pedro: “Pazzis is at the Carnival Ball. Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday.”

Juanito: “Tomorrow? It’s already past midnight, and the big fasting has begun. The time for repentance has commenced. So come, dear brother, let us both arise and together release the nun from her penitential plight, so that in the fullness of time we may be forgiven our sins.”

“Amen, you Jesuit,” Pedro might have said if he didn’t actually say it. In any case, the lazy brothers got up and marched in their pajamas to the bathroom. Juanito addressed the sister: “Sor Amalberga, listen carefully. We want to help you. Put your right finger at the left under the latch, down where it’s broken off, but not all the way in the slot. With your left finger give the spring on the clamp a little push upwards, but don’t press too hard. It’ll be easier if you use a match. At the same time, press against the door with your foot, let go of the latch, and the lock will click open. We should have shown you this before, but you can do it.”