Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

We were not allowed time for such emotionalizing, for Pilar raced like a weasel with us in tow, down Barceló and then left into the Calle San Felio, second house on the right, next to our pharmacy — we were already at our destination. So this is where the loving couple lived, where in fact they had been living ever since they secretly left the Count’s apple, just a hundred paces from our own house, and yet we had never crossed paths! Let no one ever say that we were lacking a benevolent guardian angel when we moved to the General’s Street.

Zwingli was lying on the pilarière with his head hidden in the folds of the pillow. I would have bet my own head that this time he was really dead. His beard was Christ-like, his cheeks more sunken than in real life, causing his cheekbones to appear more Indian than ever before. His white hands lay on the blanket. Oddly, all of his nails had grown out, exceeded in length only by the one on his pinky, which now was bent slightly upward, as if commanding one final measure of respect before getting placed under the earth along with the others. All the magic was gone.

I have never witnessed a human being getting born or dying, and thus as a poet I couldn’t have much to add to what Rilke already said in the words of his Malte Laurids Brigge “One must also have seen dying…” Now I was at least in the presence of death itself.

The room was darkened, and yet I could still make out our wooden wardrobe from the Street of Solitude. Aha! The death of my beloved maternal grandmother, who suddenly passed away at an old age on Christmas Eve during our notorious “turnip winter,” as presents were being exchanged under the tree, gave rise to an ugly dispute over her estate. The altercation actually started at her wake. I was still too young to grasp the value of her earthly belongings, but too old not to be deeply shaken by the rude estate-grabbing indulged in by a devout, doctrinaire uncle, one whom I often saw crawling in the dust before our family Bishop, kissing the ring of this blood-related eminence of ours. Yet Uncle Jean, that wonderful man and expert in human nature, never pushed him away with his other hand.

Now, however, I myself began feeling a certain mercenary urge in the presence of my relative’s corpse. The slut hadn’t given us back our wardrobe, or our table, or our bed linen, which she could now use to wrap the cadaver. But just you wait! The Finger of God can reach farther than your whored-out Helvecio’s magic nail!

Beatrice’s eyes, too, lit upon the wardrobe. But since they slowly filled with tears, she had only a blurred notion of the legal ramifications. Poor Zwingli, she not only thought it but said it, too — in French, which for me had the effect of increasing the misery she was feeling. We stood at the foot of the bed — as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation…

The widow Pilar was weeping out loud, at times crying out in pain, “ Ay Jesús, ay Jesús !” Then she threw herself down on the corpse, shook it, embraced it, squeezed it so hard that if her lover were not already dead, he would be completely out of breath. “Beatrice,” I whispered, “let’s leave her alone in her sorrow.” But Pilar was thinking the very same thing. She rose up and left us alone with our sorrow and with our relative. “If he had only called us sooner!” Beatrice groaned.

Then the dead man opened his eyes, exhaled long and hard through his waxen mask, and, for once forgetting his international prestige, said in Swiss German,

“Is she gone? It was getting to be too much for me with that fucking woman!”

Won’t this man ever die? Does he just want to go on dying forever? Now that’s going simply too far! I felt like hitting him over the skull with the shoe tree that Pedro failed to hurl at his spoilsport of a father. Then we would have an end to these constant false death alarms.

Beatrice, in attendance for the second time at her darling brother’s resurrection, went deathly pale. Even her lips were now white. She didn’t move, she didn’t cheer. She said nothing. There was no water handy to toss at this jackanapes, as if he were a cat or a whore. But as might be expected of her, Beatrice was in control of this kitschy situation.

Pilar came back. Zwingli immediately closed his eyes, but rather than play dead he started breathing audibly. These were the “sporadic sounds” of the deathbed which, according to Rilke, a poet must harken to for the sake of a good line of verse. This part of the scene, at least, worked out to my benefit.

Doubtless already accustomed to such spontaneous resurrections of her bedfellow, the woman didn’t collapse in a heap. “Water,” the dying man now wheezed. Pilar shot from the room.

“I don’t want her here. I’ve got to talk with you two. Send her off to a drug store far away.”

Beatrice wrote down a prescription, and sent Pilar to the Calle San Miguel to buy some homeopathic drops. Vigo would go get a doctor while she stayed on at the bedside.

A Spanish woman’s tears can dry up faster than they can flow. Pilar set off on her mission. Besides buying the medicine, she would no doubt return with ingredients for the General’s Eggs.

In addition to his considerable, very masculine amatory woes, Zwingli had contracted another serious ailment; in fact, he was in desperate shape, not far from giving up the ghost. “Down there,” he said, “everything’s on the fritz.” He would have to say goodbye to the island, and the best thing for him would be to give up on Spain completely and return to Switzerland to undergo a full cure. But he could do this only if he chose to escape. We were supposed to help him with this plan, and it would have to be done with the greatest of care. One false move, and all three of us would get a shiv in the ribs. Zwingli turned his miserable head to one side and pointed to the night table. There lay the Toledo blade, ready for wielding.

“But there’s something even worse than the dagger and almost worse than my health. There’s a card stuck in the mirror over there. Read it and you’ll see why I have to get the hell out of here.”

The card was alarming. It came from a small village in the hinterlands of Valencia, where Pilar’s parents and siblings lived. The note said that they had sold their property and were about to board ship for Mallorca, where they intended to spend their retirement at their daughter’s house! Pilar had at one time informed her family that she was married to a famous hotel manager and had a large piso —and her relatives were expected any day now. All of us cringed at this news. Forgotten were all the spats and conflicts, now it would have to be clan against clan. The two Swiss citizens renewed a historical oath: Ça? Jamais! Niëmols!

My sense of family cohesion is poorly developed, and my patriotic consciousness is best described as atrophied. But to stand together like this at the hour of need — even I thought this was admirable. So as the third member of the cabal I swore an oath to lend a hand and deliver Zwingli from the whore and her hinterlands.

“Once I’m on shipboard,” Zwingli said, “Knoll will help me get out of Barcelona. Then you can pick up your stuff here, and especially, Vigo, my library, my collections. All of it is in my office, part of it still packed in boxes. Nothing must remain here. The combined value is in the thousands. That bitch…!”

But then the bitch herself returned, and Zwingli went back to dying. The pharmacy was of course closed, but Beatrice, who saw through the bitch right away, offered to prepare some Künzli tea — this would work as a purgative and have a calming effect at the same time. In fact it was a miraculous brew, one that outdid the expectations of even old Pastor Künzli, the herb expert who invented it. It was agreed in guttural Alpine German that on the following day Zwingli would sneak over to our house for further discussion of our plans.