Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The nun had no match, no technical dexterity, and no memory for verbal instructions. So she couldn’t do it. Moreover, she was ashamed to ask the señoritos for more precise directions. So instead of making any reply, she prayed.

The brothers consulted with each other, faced now with this cloistered stubbornness. Pedro offered to climb through the bathroom transom, which was missing its pane of glass anyway. Or rather, he offered to climb up, hang down through the transom, and with half of his body show the imprisoned lady how to work the latch. But the nun rejected this idea. “ Señorito , in Heaven’s name do not come at me through that little window! I prefer to wait here and pray until morning dawns and I can obtain help from someone else. God does not abandon those who are close to Him in prayer.” But Juanito, for his part, could not agree with this plan, for he said, “Sister, please consider that Mamá could be in need of your help. If you will just step up on the toilet and stretch your arms through the transom, we’ll be able to pull you out. Bind up your skirts, and we’ll have a table ready for you to land on.”

Sor Amalberga regarded this suggestion as even more impertinent. She would rather die than be pulled out of a bathroom by two young gentlemen. I can see her blessing herself at the very idea of such a maneuver. So the brothers had to consult again while the nun, resigned to her fate, prayed on.

Suddenly Pazzis burst into the house, in the merriest of moods after dancing through the night, covered with spangles and with confetti in her hair — the same artist who with her gouges carved marvelously sensual Madonnas out of olive wood, and who turned my head with her beauty and an intensity of Weltschmerz that was eventually her fatal undoing.

Pazzis was never at a loss for advice for anyone or anything except for herself, and that is what made us so similar. After just one glance she diagnosed the situation, laughed at her incompetent brothers, and spoke a consoling word to the nun through the peephole. Then she said, “That big log in the fireplace in the sala! ” “Ram it in!” she added when her brothers still couldn’t grasp what kind of strategy she had in mind. “Let’s break down the door!”

This log had its own special history. It was indeed inside the fireplace, but woe to whoever would think of burning it up! A note attached to it announced that it was the last remaining piece of the tree under which their grandmother had given herself to their grandfather — if only in the form of her verbal consent to marriage.

Sor Amalberga received new instructions, this time of the sort that would be neither difficult nor sinful to obey. She was to stand up on the toilet bowl and press her body firmly against the back wall, with her back to the door so that she wouldn’t get hurt when the door burst in. The nun did as she was told, relieved to hear a helpful female voice. All right, now she was on top of the bowl and facing the other way. She kept on praying. The brothers grabbed the log and swung it back and forth, at first to get the heft of it. Then Pazzis counted one — two — three, and on three there was a loud bang. Not only the tricky lock but the entire door split apart, and they barely missed sending the pious lady off into the Great Beyond. Her natural padding withstood the onslaught, and she didn’t even scream.

At this point I must confess to delaying a dramatic stylistic coup in my account. Following the bashing of the bathroom door, instead of lingering with the pious lady I should have gone on this way: there was a frightful crash, and as the door was smashed apart, another door opened, the one to Don Juan’s room. Dressed in a shirt that reached to his feet and pale with fear, the grandee dashed out into the hallway swinging his trumpet and calling out with a croaking voice, “Revolution! Revolution! Every man for himself!”

Before his children could inform him that no new tyranny had broken out, but only that a small palace revolt had been successfully quelled by his daughter’s intervention, the old gentleman was already on the stairs. And he ran through the night-time streets of the city announcing the bloodbath: “Revolution! Revolution!”

Pedro kicked in what remained of the bathroom door, and the nun was free. With pale dignity she stepped down from the toilet bowl, offered the siblings a grateful “Praised be Jesus Christ!” and returned to duty at the beside of the ailing princess.

The foregoing account is a description, fashioned from a variety of perspectives, of the place that was to facilitate the Occidental mission of the mystical writings of Teixeira de Pascoaes, whom I was about to discover.

Have I mentioned that the mysterious Count, the proprietor of the “apple” in Book One, was Pedro’s uncle? Yes indeed, he was a tío on his mother’s side, from the house of Alba Real del Tajo. I can’t remember why he was going through life simply as “Conde” and not wearing a prince’s crown on his head, although Pedro once explained this to us. In Spain there is a great deal of commerce in noble titles; it’s possible to exchange them within families, and you can raise or lower your rank as your sense of snobbery dictates. From the standpoint of hereditary biology, this is a healthy form of simony, one that is also widely practiced in Portugal, but it hasn’t put a stop to the overall decline of the nobility. This whole subject has now re-entered my mind with the same casual spontaneity as my inclusion of Pedro’s uncle in my island adventures. Let me add that the bronze knocker on Zwingli’s front door was a copy of one of those high-nosed Carthaginian divinities that you can see so many examples of in the museum on Ibiza. Was it perhaps Tannit, the guardian of heavenly love, who was summoned to drive out the tenants from their pilarière ?

The knocker at the entrance to House No. 23 had no such art-historical value; the builder found somewhere an iron hand that corresponded to the tenants’ social class. The noise it made was, however, the same. Because we occupied the bel-étage , a single knock sufficed.

Just one bang! — and it was for us. Seconds later the bell at our apartment door was given a twist. Who could that possibly be on a Sunday afternoon? Pedro used a special signal. I opened up.

“Santa Barbara!” I cried like a devout Spanish lady in a thunderstorm. It felt as if lightning had struck me. Pilar was standing at our doorstep.

María del Pilar, the woman who was Vigoleis’ libidinous undoing; the raging scourge of Zwingli’s bed; our collective misfortune. My brother-in-law’s degenerate concubine looked at me with eyes reddened from weeping, and said, “Come quickly, before it’s too late!” She handed me a note. In my brother-in-law’s no longer elegant handwriting I read the words, “Am dying. Zwingli.”’

Oh sure, my dear fellow, we know what your dying is like! You have every good intention, but intending is as far as it ever goes. You can’t fool me this time. I handed this premature obituary back to Pilar and said something like this: give him our best wishes for a blessed death; perhaps some other time. But the woman grew very angry and gave me a piercing look. She stamped her foot, which was shod in a shiny little golden slipper, and yelled, “Where is Beatrice? Your brother is dying! Follow me!”

This was not an act; I went in and told Beatrice. She put on a mantilla, and we followed the bearer of tragic news.

The novelistic tradition contains many examples of relatives hastening through night and wind, over hill and dale to the deathbed of a dear one, and usually they arrive just in time to look soulfully into the eyes of the dying one, grasp his quivering hand, or hear from his lips, “I did it, I buried the body, God be merciful to my sinful soul…” On such a journey the relatives have plenty of time to conjure up whole other novels: the dying man’s life passes in review before their mind’s eye. “Oh Lord, if Thou wilt but spare his life, we shall make peace with him. All shall be forgiven and forgotten!”