Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Blood — and this is all that I have meant to convey by telling the story of this petty bourgeois tragedy — had already flowed copiously on the Street of the General. Was our own blood now to be shed in all innocence? Was our blood to attract the frightful curs of Palma, the progeny of the hordes of canines that ravaged the city at the turn of the century? These hounds were housed in a kennel owned by Don Juan Sureda, who kept them as guard dogs for himself and his increasingly numerous relatives. At that time he still was living on Calle Zavellá, in the town palace named after his clan. Every evening the hungry pack was let loose, and instead of protecting life and limb of the nobility, they swarmed out across the city, raided private houses, and had a particular weakness for butcher shops that were kept open to take advantage of the cool night-time breezes. On these nightly self-service expeditions, the bloodhounds provided themselves with the food that their kennel master no longer could offer them, since by this time Don Juan was already among the aristocrats who could afford to make bets at his club like the following: “Do you want to bet that I can make an omelet that will cost X thousand pesetas?” Take a frying pan, an egg, a drop or two of olive oil, stir constantly over a low flame fueled with hundred-peseta bills. — Whenever the barking band of beasts descended on the city, there was general panic. For years afterward, the population had memories of the widespread outcry, “God help us, the Suredas are on the loose!” On one occasion we ourselves were the cause for the general alarm getting spread almost daily on our street.

I had agreed to type out some manuscripts and do some partial German translations for an English travel writer. Her husband was a war invalid, suffering from a strange form of the gout that could be cured, or at least made bearable, only by constant moisture, and for this reason the couple always sought living quarters in a humid environment. This didn’t help much. So the determined wife bought a tiny sailing sloop, stuck her gouty spouse in the little cabin, set sail, and in this way evolved into a popular author of travelogues. Hydrophilus was not seaworthy, the owners even less so, and this meant that on their voyages they had to stay close to the coastlines. But this, too, was dangerous, since the chubby lady didn’t know how to sail, and the crippled warrior was no help in any case. So the intrepid voyagers bought two Great Danes and trained them to leap to the other side of the boat to keep the balance every time she tacked.

They had already explored all the French and German rivers, testing them for humidity, and now they arrived in the Mediterranean to check out its literary and hygroscopic possibilities. They made the passage over to Mallorca roped to a freighter, then they got towed around the whole island and finally threw anchor and moored their floating sanatorium at the Paseo Sagrera dock in Palma harbor. The lady’s stories were pure kitsch, miserable pulpy stuff, but since she always staged her plots on the ocean, they were grabbed up by the maritime-obsessed English public. In Emmerich’s shop her books went like hotcakes. No wonder this writer, whose name I have forgotten, was able to pay me well.

The lady always arrived in the company of her Great Danes — that is to say, her dogs dragged her to our house and then proceeded to riot in front of our door, scratching the varnish and tearing apart the doormat we had purchased after so much physical and mental sacrifice. What is more, lacking any house to live in, they were not housebroken. Even before running amok on the landing in front of our apartment, they created havoc on the street outside. Like heralds of the court they swept a path for their mistress. Our peaceable neighbors, who loved to sit on low-slung chairs near their doorsteps and knit, mend fishing nets, or — their favorite activity — do nothing at all, gathered up their children and belongings at the first sound of barking and rushed into their houses. Chairs were scattered on the street; degenerate dogs that didn’t realize quickly enough what was in store for them, got bitten to death. Cats hissed and scrambled up the naked walls. Nuns blessed themselves and instinctively pressed their flat bosoms against the wall. And then the writer herself came on the scene, a pith helmet propped on her weathered coiffure and tied under her chin with a veil, carrying the large palm-frond basket that contained her manuscripts. She readily paid for minor property damage that neighbors complained to me about — such things, she said, were material for a good story. But once when a child got bowled over by the Danes and had to be taken to the hospital with internal injuries, this was a bit much for the lady from England. We made an agreement that henceforth I would fetch her manuscripts from on board their sloop and later return them there. From then on — and this is why I am telling this story — there were no more shouts of “God help us, the Suredas are on the loose!” on our quiet street. As in days of yore, the neighbors sat calmly on their chairs mending and knitting, cobbling, sewing mattresses, tying fishing nets and nursing their babies.

Later the British lady geared up their sloop and set sail again with husband and canine herd. For a while longer her travelogues appeared in the magazines, but then her byline disappeared and their little boat was never sighted again. Presumably the Great Danes committed a nautical error during a difficult maneuver, consigning themselves and their masters to a glorious mariner’s death at sea.

Blood, then — I am reaching back a few pages — blood that attracts dogs: would it start flowing again from House No. 23, this time from Vigoleis’and Beatrice’s veins? Will Heaven not grant surcease? I preferred not to trust to a Higher Power, but far and wide there was no sign of a whore coming to flash her blade. I could have spared myself the effort, but I quickly changed my mind when we entered the bookshop around noontime. “One minute sooner,” the proprietor told us, “and a crazed fury would have skewered you both!” Pilar had come by and made a search of the premises, thinking that Zwingli must be hiding somewhere in the ice-cream bar copa that they both knew so well.

The man who reported this to us was no longer Emmerich from Cologne but his successor, a short, ash-blond, very friendly fellow from Swabia who learned only too late that he was not made for Spain. It cost him his nerves, his health, and his own and his wife’s savings. He was still quivering over his whole body, and I, two heads taller but no less fearful of raging whores, now likewise felt the touch of cold steel at my back. This time someone was bound to end up lying flat on the battlefield, rubbed out either by Pilar herself or one of her kind. Zwingli once told us that Pilar had stabbed more than one individual. Mortally? My gooseflesh told me: mortally. The new owner of the bookshop hadn’t yet learned a word of Spanish, so all he knew was that on this particular hunt, we were the prey. He was, of course, familiar with the details of our whorish adventures, right down to the matter of the rapidly abandoned deathbed. It didn’t cheer him up at all when Vigoleis was asked, “You’re still here? I could swear that I saw you just last night on board the steamer, wearing a loden coat and a floppy hat, when I was taking some last-minute mail down to the ship.”

But then I told him our story. He and I were in great excitement, whereas Beatrice started calmly leafing through books on the shelves. Antonio came over from across the street, where Pilar had also made a visit, and warned us, “Watch out! That woman is unpredictable. At any minute the dagger can pounce from her stocking!”

That evening I once again barred our door and installed a clever alarm contraption that would wake us up immediately if anybody started fiddling with the lock. But the contraption didn’t spring into action until next morning when the milkman arrived. No sign of María del Pilar.