Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

One day the Formigueras sent us an invitation to a party in honor of their friend, the aspiring Duce Don Francisco Franco y Bahámonde, who was vacationing with his wife in their house on the island. They explained that it would be necessary to hold a conference to practice the protocol for the event. We were both expected to attend, especially Don Vigo as representative of a nation that was responding so positively to the Italian Duce.

Don Francisco Franco, General of the Infantry, had been sent in 1931 from Azaña to the Balearics as Military Governor, but he soon returned to Morocco. In the Formiguera household he was referred to as the Cabdillo or Caudillo , which means “chieftain”or “gang leader”: Il Duce.

The word “practice” gives me a bad taste, no matter whether it is applied to the times-table, a machine gun, or the Communion altar rail. It conjures up visions of my Vigoleis’ predecessor, and how an aged priest wielding the Key of Saint Peter whacked his tongue for not sticking it out far enough, with the result that he never again joined in the singing of Aquinas’ wonderful hymn of praise, Pange lingua gloriosum … And now I was expected to show up to practice lifting my right arm and shouting “ Ave Caesar !” to a general. But let’s go anyway. It won’t hurt to take a look at this nonsense.

Young people were gathered in the halls of the residence. There was dancing and flirting, people made grandiose declamations into the void, and then the guests practiced saluting a make-believe general. All it took was one go-through, for after all, inside every human being there sits a monkey.

It’s strange, but even in jest I couldn’t be persuaded to step up to the straw man, lift my arm, and say “ Viva Franco! Arriba España !” Sometime later — not in this book — I’ll relate how I did this very thing years later at a Spanish border station, dressed up as a general. We let it be known that we would not be attending the party. We didn’t want to be spoilsports, especially since it now seemed to us that for all these people, playing at Fascism was a bloody serious affair.

“Just as you wish,” said the grandee from the House of Formiguera, who earned his bread as a subaltern in a bank. “But later you will regret having failed to make the acquaintance of a future man of prominence. Hitler or Franco — we’ll see which of them hits the top first!”

The general appeared, and the party was a huge success. For days afterward, the daughters kept telling Beatrice how much we had missed by being so strangely reluctant to attend. What the señoritas had in mind was not so much the political aspects of our refusal to come to the reception. They were thinking mostly about the glamour, the show of wealth, the erotic game-playing with mantillas and clattering fans. Despite their fascistoid parade of the capes (suerte de capa) , how could these girls or anyone at all know that four years later this glory-seeking general would bear the superlative title of El Generalissimo?

Vigoleis, the champion of missed opportunities, with books as with second-hand women, with his choice of a century to live in, and with the narrative of his second sight — the later world-famous Caudillo is not in bad company with this tissue of failures. But Vigoleis has never shed a single tear over this particular fiasco.

Who has never heard a washerwoman boast that she works only in the finest houses? Seamstresses, midwives, and hired butchers all have their pride of place. Beatrice makes no special claims for her professional standing, in fact she would rather get paid one duro less for working in a faded palace, than be given wads of money by some belching nouveau riche . Common folk, who were intelligent and eager to learn, left their cottages to come to our apartment on Barceló, bearing with them even less than a duro, but gifted with the bright alertness and appealing decency that you can still find in the lower segments of society. All of them, with or without money and with or without brains, dirtied up Beatrice’s living quarters, but that had nothing to do with education. It had to do with the doormat that still was nowhere to be found at the entrance to our apartment. Books were more important.

The houses that I frequented were not rich, and certainly not elegant. I was often drawn to the charcoal bin and cobbler’s shop occupied by “Siete Reales” for a bit of conversation, centering on the inner world experienced by this sooty man, who enunciated his sentences word for careful word, and who could well be regarded as your “man on the street” for the simple reason that he had no door to separate him from it.

And then there was the bakery! The panadería was an even greater attraction for me, but before this could happen, the baker’s wife had to die in childbirth and leave her five famous little worms and her little pink infant motherless in a cruel world. This is an old story, and I wouldn’t be able to give it a new twist even if I tried. Life goes on via the back stairway of death. God wished it so, and Jaume the baker yielded to the will of the Creator, in Whom he believed less and less. But he had no time to give serious thought to his fate. For whereas God reigns unapproachable in eternity, and whereas to Him one day is like an hour or an eon, these kids kept screaming their heads off, the dough had to be kneaded, the apprentice had to be slapped around, and loaf after loaf had to be put in the oven. And there were always these customers! Women from the neighborhood took care of the kiddies; if one of them had just given birth herself, she would put the strange infant to her breast. Poor people aren’t finicky about such things. Where one baby is slaking its thirst, there’s room for a second. See for yourself: a contented lower-class mother will open her dress, proudly lift a heavy sphere out of its covering, and with practiced hand squirt a stream of milk against the wall. That’s persuasive. As prudish as Spanish women can be, as soon as they become mothers they lose all traces of modesty. Breasts are an ornament that they display like a farmer showing off a particularly luscious turnip. In Spain, mothers often nurse their kids for three or four years. This can result in amusing scenes, as when a thirsty tyke takes things in its own hands, pulls forth the spigot, and starts sucking away amid curses and screams like those of the Inca cockatoo. It’s an undying privilege of babies to press their demand for the nipple. It took me a long time to get used to this everyday manifestation of maternal happiness. With these Madonnas, the miracle of the female breast, which invites conception and then sustains what was conceived, lost its mystery and became nothing more than an udder.

In this fashion, Jaume’s youngest little worm was nurtured along with other infants. He lacked for nothing; he screamed along with his siblings and joined in their chorus of giggles. He was bent on enjoying life as long as it lasted. In these countries it is always doubtful how long that will be. There are deaths in many families where a dozen children is the norm; God giveth and taketh away, in His inscrutable fashion. Whatever remains will eventually engender another dozen. But for Jaume the real problem was the customers who came to his shop. They were more important to him than his God-given family nest. Matías took care of them for him.

Matías was the brother of the baker’s deceased spouse. His left leg was shorter than his right one. He had entered the world with this deformity, and so he became a teacher. As a teacher he had claim to the title “Don.” I made Don Matías’ acquaintance at his sister’s funeral. He was dressed all in black. If I had got to know him a year sooner, he would likewise have been dressed in black, and a year earlier than that: also in black, although the shine on his suit would have been less scuffed. His appearance of perpetual mourning stayed the same.