Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

With these words Don Francisco tore up the file and threw it in the wastebasket that — I forgot to mention this — was also in his office. We were dismissed. You could tell from Don Francisco’s behavior that he didn’t want to waste any more of his time with us. And for our part, we were eager to leave this citadel of bureaucracy. Down in the hallway, Pedro danced the bolero and sang a picaresque ditty. I maintained my professorial decorum until we arrived at the Plaza Cort, when I, too, finally let loose. Beatrice, far from embracing us in our triumph, said that she didn’t believe a word of our flea story. Be that as it may, in all our later years on the island no one ever again sent us a tax form, much less a process server.

I was deeply impressed by the sophisticated manner in which a Spanish civil servant had fallen for some hare-brained nonsense. This was Spain in its quixotic unpredictability, one of those mild attacks best described as half insanity and half clownishness, although there is really nothing ludicrous about them. Don Quixote ’s foolish mistakes can appear ridiculous only to someone who thinks he knows the limits of being serious. I loved that Spain, and still love it for its mystics, its ecstatic poets, its morbidly erotic priests, for its Pedros, and for Pedro’s philologically tortured father, for its God-fearing whores of the streets, and for the cheap hotels that light a candle to the same Virgin to whom the torero dedicates his life before he walks out to face the bull’s horns. I love the stubborn pride it displays in the face of the ridiculous, and the absurdity with which it confronts the obtuseness of the world. I love it for its “ mañana, mañana ,” for the simple reason that every Tomorrow will without fail turn into a Today. How would a German tax administrator have reacted to getting an erudite flea planted in his ear at Pedro’s instigation? He, too, would have tapped his little silver bell. But instead of some office minion, two guys would have appeared, strapping fellows both of them, pointing to Vigoleis and saying, “This the one?” And they would have taken him away in a paddy wagon. And amid shouts of Heil dem Führer !” he might have been released as “cured” sometime in the year 1933.

Shouts of “Hail to the Führer ” had been resounding in my fatherland for years, but the new Savior was not yet officially recognized. Up to now, the only one who had resurrected and commercially patented the historic Roman Greeting was Mussolini, who had acolytes in Spain and on the island of Mallorca. They were few in number, only a tiny coterie gathered around the fasces. And oddly enough, unlike in Germany, it wasn’t representatives of the underworld who sided with the insurrectionist leader. The first followers were from the aristocracy who were betting on the future. I say “oddly enough,” but why, exactly? The nobility’s purses were empty, too.

Beatrice’s fame as a language teacher was rising, like my own star as a flea scientist. So for a while we both shone brightly in the firmament. She drummed respectable languages into Mallorquin brains manifesting varying degrees of density. Meanwhile, she also began teaching at a lycée, since she had excellent recommendations, plus an even more valuable Swiss diploma. This school admitted only daughters of the richest, most prestigious families. Founded by Germans, it was still called Colegio Alemán, although its ownership and direction had long since passed over into Spanish hands, those of an intelligent and pedagogically talented woman, Doña María, who had many names, many children, and many grandchildren. One of whom, a wild mestiza of enchanting beauty, presented her with vexing problems. Doña María was urbane, much-traveled, and married to an ailing husband who, nevertheless, was a wine connoisseur, fond of offering copious quaffs to guests at his table. Doña María had discovered this new teacher, Beatrice, and hired her on the spot. She dismissed in silence rumors that her new profesora had once been of the ilk of the Pilars.

Pedro had opened up for Beatrice the palaces of the impoverished nobility. Each one was occupied by uncles, aunts, and cousins whose consanguinity was even more tenuous than the ancient, traditional labels named after parts of the body. From the head to the tip of the middle finger, there was at one time such a thing as a “fingernail cousin.” Beatrice gave lessons in all of these domiciles, showing the señoras how to decline and conjugate. Some got left by the wayside, others took their place, and Pedro told all of them that Doña Beatriz had a husband who was worth looking into: a little crazy, a little shy, very learned, and not very handsome — which a man doesn’t really have to be. There was a statue of him in a German cathedral. This aroused the young ladies’ curiosity. They urged their parents to send Don Vigo an invitation. It happened, and he accepted. He found the girls charming, and not at all so abysmally stupid as Beatrice had described them. He engaged in polite conversation, blushed readily for no discernable lubricious reason — an annoying legacy of Original Sin — and at times caused the young ladies to blush. Those were very pleasant moments in the palacios listed in every Baedeker, homes that we now could enter for reasons rather different from what Zwingli originally had in mind for us and his concubine.

One of these citadels of pedagogy was the palacio of the Count de la Torre, situated on Portella, the “Casa Formiguera,” which was connected by an archway above the street with the Casa Marqués de la Torre. During my first visit, walking through abandoned rooms we spied priceless treasures dating from a time when the island was owned by a half-dozen of these grandees. We also met a genuine matriarch, whose age I estimated at a few hundred years. She seemed so very authentic in these authentic surroundings that I could have converted then and there to a classicistic theory of history, until the Count told me that this was his own mother. Had she been artificially fossilized? Her son was scarcely older than I was. He had many children, very many, perhaps in deference to the name of his dynasty, Formiguera, which means “ant hill.” The girls were learning French and English. One of the older daughters, perhaps the oldest, was married to a captain who, although a soldier, was not the worst specimen of his kind. His private cook was particularly good. Soon we were clapping each other’s shoulders in friendship. I told him how I had restored honor to a Spanish general, while not concealing that I didn’t think much of the military. Whereupon this officer invited us to his fortress, and ordered the casement cannons to be winched up to their threatening positions above the ramparts. These were his pride and joy. Just a few more stars, and he could have been Julietta’s father. Later his cook/aide-de-camp sprang into action. In peacetime, the trench surrounding the fort served for the most part as a rabbit trap. We ate râble de lièvre au Madère . My compliments, Captain!

The Counts de la Torre had a friend who likewise belonged to the military caste, and about whom they liked to tell stories. As a strapping young officer he had participated in the Moroccan Campaign, after which he was immediately appointed commander of the military academy in Zaragossa. As ambitious as the famous Corsican, he strove for higher and higher ranks, and his model was Il Duce.

Like so much else, I knew the Italian dictator only from the newspapers. What he was aiming for was unclear to me, but how he was going about it couldn’t have been more obvious. Since everything was happening in uniform, his movement was distasteful for me from the start. Beatrice didn’t like Il Duce either, although her antipathy was based on personal experience. She had lived for a long time in Italy and witnessed Fascist acts of terrorism at close range. Her years in Florence were particularly clear in her memory, when she and her paleographic brother belonged to the intimate circle of the historian Guglielmo Ferrero and Dina Ferrero, the daughter of Cesare Lombroso. Ferrero was on the Duce’s blacklist, and thus exposed to harassment that also extended to members of his family and their friends. Beatrice couldn’t take a step without being followed by one of the sbirri . She was taken into custody several times and interrogated, then released as a Swiss citizen and threatened with deportation. But before she could be accused of subversive activities and driven out of the country or dumped into the Arno, she had accepted a position as companion to a German millionaire’s wife who, it must be recorded, poured arsenic in her breakfast coffee — which was surely just as bad as getting pushed around by the Fascists. That is why she responded to the Spanish count who was pounding Il Duce’s drum, “No Duce for me, thanks!”