Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Then we departed, leaving the moribund Swiss citizen in the clutches of the vampire. Yet now the spirit of the Rütli patriots hovered over the chamber of death.

Back home we trickled out our pesetas; we would have just enough for a sail to Barcelona. Spain, said Beatrice, was Zwingli’s undoing. Now it was up to us to rescue him at any price. But then he must never return to Spain.

Zwingli arrived stealthily at the appointed hour. Not with the springy gait of a conspirator, to be sure, but with the haggard limp of an emaciated Lothario who is already toying with the idea of entering a monastery. He was accompanied by a street urchin carrying a large but light suitcase. As usual Zwingli reached into his pocket, but all the bravado of that gesture was now a thing of the past. I bedded down our friend on our mattress since he couldn’t keep standing up. Bedridden for weeks, he had wanted to send for us, but the bitch would have nothing of it. When he learned that her relatives were going to move in, he staged the dying scene. A Spanish proverb has it that the greatest obstacle in life is the family. One can manage with putas all right, but not with their hangers-on…

Julietta was gone. Following an almost fatal beating, she had left the island. Some “uncle” had offered to take in the saucy and promising young kitten. He was having her trained as a ballerina in Barcelona.

As physically wretched as he was, Zwingli still commanded active mental powers. And since there was now no Pilar around to interrupt him, he started emoting about his plans for an academy. The initial concept was all worked out, and soon a lengthy memorandum would be sent to an American financier. In addition, he had in mind setting up a shoe factory and a horse-racing stable. We had the hardest time focusing his attention on the one immediate, central idea: his escape. He had forgotten all about it.

Because there were no ships leaving for the mainland on Sunday, we settled on the following Saturday as our day of our departure; that way, Zwingli would be one day ahead of a possible pursuit by Pilar. He arranged the following: she would go to the movies with a girlfriend of hers, and after the show she would wait for him on the Plaza Santa Eulalia. The doctor would give him some injections to make him more or less fit for the trip. Pilar, a movie fanatic, wouldn’t have the slightest suspicion. As far as she was concerned, everything would be fine as soon as her Helvecio once again stood up like a man. She even went back on the street to raise money with her heaven-sent talent for the General’s Eggs.

Zwingli thought it was too dangerous to enter his real name on the passenger list; he feared that Pilar would inquire right away at the shipping line. For this kind of camouflage he didn’t need to search very far. His father, schooled in Christian patristics, had let him be baptized with a plethora of first names including, among a few concessions to bourgeois normalcy, such echoes of Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation Era as Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Oekolampadius. The latter, a Basel reformer and one of the most feared religious gangsters of his fanatical time, carried the bourgeois surname “Hausschein,” and it was under the name of an obscure “Señor Hausschein” that Zwingli intended to make the trip to the mainland. It was his hope, of course, that such an erudite disguise would put Pilar and her confederates off the track. But on the day of our departure Zwingli sent me a note asking me to go right ahead and buy his ticket. I did so using my own name, Vigoleis — which amounted to a double deception, although at the last moment the game took on a certain legitimate aspect when I draped my loden coat over the escapee’s shoulders and propped my floppy hat on his brow.

It was a favorable moment for an escape. Fog lay over the seascape, concealing the harbor and the low-lying section of the city where we lived. Beatrice said goodbye to her worrisome brother, who was now barely distinguishable from myself, either in clothing or in mood. Then, ciao ! and “Don’t forget to write!”

We walked separately. Ahead of me in the mist walked my loden coat under my symbolic floppy hat. But the Vigoleis who was propelling this getup along seemed to be either congenitally lame or plagued by the same affliction that caused Don Juan Sureda to speak in so many different tongues. If Beatrice had not found just the right word at just the right time back on the Street of Solitude when I was lusting after my brother-in-law’s wife, I myself would now be plodding along like a crippled capon behind my own double.

I said goodbye to Zwingli before we reached the dock; I didn’t dare follow him to the brightly lit gangplank. Zwingli gave me some good advice: don’t be a stick-in-the-mud, take good care of Bé, and get his archive away from the bitch, even if it meant calling the police…

“Should I go find a bullet-proof vest?”

“One night with her and you’ll have everything!”

“A knife in the ribs, or syphilis?”

I received no reply to this superfluous question. My double had disappeared.

As I turned the corner into Barceló, a foghorn started wailing. The Ciudad de Palma had weighed anchor and was steaming toward Barcelona.

Now Zwingli could shake off Vigoleis and climb back into his old, tortured skin. I see him standing in front of me like a horse being brought to stable. He never learned how to sleep standing up, but he was certainly an expert in the horizontal position. We wondered whether he could truly get mended in Switzerland. His intention was to have himself de-pilarized in the clinic run by a well-known homeopathic specialist and friend of the family, old Dr. Scheidegger. His entire family was committed to homeopathy; one of the grandpas had achieved a certain notoriety in the field. His “Home Guide to Homeopathy” was a bedrock of the siblings’ private library, and they consulted it for any and all ailments. Beatrice owed her life to homeopathic drops. Surely this potent liquid, dribbled into a glass by an expert hand, could do the trick against the Pilarian toxin. Since the treatment is based on the principle of similarity, he would have to remain for a while yet under that woman’s scourge — but such a method could make the withdrawal cure all the more humane.

After arriving home, I barricaded the door. We realized that Pilar would immediately suspect us of being accomplices to the escape, and that she was capable of asking pimps to help her force an entry. I knew that she still maintained cordial contacts with the Mallorquin underworld.

That night, our lives weren’t worth a fig.

A few days before, a bloody drama had occurred on our street. A man discovered his wife in bed with another guy. This is called adultery, and for people who haven’t thought much about the ways of the world, adultery is a rotten spot in Eve’s apple. Our neighbor murdered the violator of what he considered his personal integrity, dispatched his wife with a second blow of the axe, and with a third, the sister-in-law who lived with them. Blood flowed in torrents down the staircase, a crowd raced to the scene, a few butchers’ dogs had to be chased away, and kids were kept from viewing the carnage. As a relative of the murdered sisters, “Siete Reales” knew the details, and thus I got a full report from an unimpeachable source. Above and beyond the metaphysical blindness of the perpetrator, I took a special interest in this case as a study in ethnology. The police locked up the murderer, who hadn’t even tried to escape since, as the shoemaker explained to me, every Spanish married man has the right to kill his wife and her other bedfellow if he catches them in flagrante . A few days later the judge set the man free, and all his neighbors accompanied him in a triumphal parade to his house, which some helpful ladies had washed clean of any trace of the deed. Not long after that, this defender of his personal honor took another lover to his bed, someone else’s wife, a woman he had been “visiting” for quite a while previously — a likeable young lady, by the way, who whitewashed walls for us in our apartment. Nobody could whitewash like this adultress, who charged only two reales per hour.