Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Pedro once explained to us that the average Spaniard never emerges from luto , and thus never really doffs his black suit unless he deliberately scoffs at the idea of mourning and an age-old tradition that dictates just how many years, months, and days must pass between “heavy” and “light” mourning, calibrated according to the degree of relationship with the deceased. Sometimes a person who has walked around for 20 or 30 years buried in black will tell himself that the time is up. Just 23 more days, and finally he’ll be able to put on a bright new suit. He goes to the tailor, gets measured up, chooses the fabric, and senses that this time it’s going to work, unless he himself dies and ends up all in white in a box. And then an obituary notice arrives in the mail— caramba , a long forgotten uncle seven times removed, related to the cousin-in-law of a long since deceased great aunt — this will cost him three weeks! The tailor undoes the stitches and sends the fabric back to the dye works.

With his pedagogically trained eyes, Don Matías noticed right away that I was a foreigner and the only “intellectual” among those attending the funeral. He was limping along beside me; I shook his hand, and he learned that I was Vigoleis, Don Vigo, a practitioner of the writing trade from the nation that cradled poets and thinkers. For him this meant consolation on the day when he was burying not only his sister, but also to his hopes of wearing a white suit again anytime soon.

From among my poets he was familiar with Goethe and, from among my thinkers, with Krausse. “What was that name again?” “Carlos Cristiano Frederico Krausse.”

Aha, Krause. I had never read a line of his writings, and had never “had” him at the university, unless I was absent the day he was mentioned. Krause? When I get back home I’ll have to look him up right away, no doubt he’s in Sternbeck. But because it is a cardinal principle of philosophy to tell the truth, or at least to aim in that direction, before the corpse was placed in the earth I confessed to her mourning brother that I was basically unfamiliar with this fellow “Krausse.” Don Matías immediately stood still in this crowd of gabbing, smoking, joking funeral guests and, supported by his cane, looked at me as if yet another of his hopes had been dashed to the ground. “What? You don’t know him? Is it possible that a German doesn’t know his own Krausse?” I maintained my philosophical composure and replied with the bitter truth, “Sorry, no!”

Don Matías approached his school authorities and was granted a period of so-called hardship leave, which would permit him to help keep his brother-in-law’s shop going until a permanent replacement could be found for the deceased woman. It was good for me to know this, for it meant that I would be seeing Don Matías every day and would have to be on my guard. To soften the blow to my intellectual pride, I could have blathered something about “Krausianism” to a German professor of philosophy. But I had to be careful in the presence of a Spanish aficionado , an amateur who devoted himself with passion to philosophy. Just think: a Krausista , a Neo-Krausian! It was stupid of me to spill the beans, telling this fellow right away that I was a writer and that I didn’t know Krause. I am normally so wary about associating myself with a profession that, in my hands, amounts to nothing. My indiscretion resulted in our eating bread from another bakery for three days — three days of boning up on Krause. Beatrice never saw me studying so hard! But now I could calmly approach Don Matías and orate to my heart’s content about Krause’s primeval being, his primeval inwardness, and his pantheism, without fear of a failing grade. And in the process I could buy a loaf of bread from him.

“But Don Vigo, you told me that you didn’t know Krausse.”

“You Spaniards say ‘Krausse,’ whereas we Germans say ‘Krause.’ It’s a pardonable mistake, considering that we were in the middle of a funeral procession.”

Don Matías had already considered the possibility of mistaken identity; for him it was axiomatic that any German would know his Krausse — no other thought was possible. From my reference books I learned that Krausian philosophy had achieved a particularly strong following in Spain. At Madrid University there was even a professorial chair of Krausism, which was the springboard for an indigenous political-ideological movement. Its adherents were called Krausistas , they counted in the thousands, and Don Matías was one of them.

Nonetheless, our second encounter did not take place under the aegis of German philosophy. Had I tortured myself in vain for three whole days with that Masonic pantheist? Don Matías took only superficial notice of my re-Krausification, and immediately began declaiming an ecstatic lecture on Spain’s greatest lyric poet of the previous century, José de Espronceda, who considered himself the Spanish Byron: a seducer of women, hero of the barricades, political conspirator, and pioneer of Weltschmerz . “A model to be emulated, Don Vigo!”

Sitting on a sack of flour behind the shop counter, Don Matías delivered an emotional recitation of this poet’s controversial stanza about a cemetery that he claims to envision, one filled with corpses: de muertos bien relleno, manando sangre y cieno, que impida el respirar . There are stronger passages in Espronceda, and the scholars aren’t sure whether the one I have quoted is original or spurious. But coming from Jaume’s flour sack, it became moving poetry. It was incisive, no matter how many corpses it contained. One mark of great poetry is that it holds nothing back. Only Jaume himself and the ladies and girls in the shop thought that his Dance of Death was out of place, especially in a house in mourning. The Week’s Mind Mass had not yet been celebrated. Some of the women blessed themselves, saying “But Don Matías!” From below, too, came the admonitory cry of “Matías!” From below — that doesn’t mean from the Nether World, but from the oven room situated adjacent to the spacious retail shop, but lower by about a man’s height and separated from the shop by a metal grill. This was the realm of Jaume the widower, who from morning to midnight and often beyond, in the broiling heat amidst his vats and pans, earned his bread by baking it himself while watching his brother-in-law and that foreign intelectual sitting up above on his flour sacks, gabbing away about matters that transcended by far the subject of one’s daily bread. He didn’t like this one bit, but he kept his peace; his house was still in mourning. His brother-in-law, on hardship leave to keep the shop going, was taking great pains to solve the world’s mysteries along with one of their most insignificant customers: half a loaf of bread a day. The creator of biscuits and rolls had figured out that this was what the two of us were in fact up to, though he was oblivious to the wonderful, if only temporary, solutions we arrived at. Needless to say, as solvers of the world’s problems we made the flour in the sacks musty. We were all for sacrificing the Good in favor of the Better.

During these first days — more precisely, prior to the Week’s Mind Mass — Don Matías sat on his sack in his close-fitting black suit, serving the customers with the politeness proper to a teacher on leave from the classroom. Later he neglected to brush himself off — what for, anyway? Flecked in white, he delivered his orations or listened to my disquisitions, selling baked goods in between. Then the heat in the shop got to him. First he shed his collar and black tie, with the result that he lost none of his imposing, magisterial mien. As a symbol of eternal mourning, he kept two black buttons on his white piqué shirt, which he seldom had to change because at his new job it remained snow-white. Things went this way for a while, until one day I came upon him without his jacket on, and in place of his shirt he had on a wide-mesh wrestler’s jersey. He wore a scapular around his neck, but the one sported by this Krausist did not contain a picture of the Mother of God. Inside the little golden capsule was a photograph of his fiancée, the fabled Doña Encarnación — Carnita, “Little Flesh”—about whom more later.