Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Like any Spaniard who can read and write, and who thus stands above the masses and is devoted to things of the mind, Don Matías also wrote poetry and short prose works. He collected these products of his ecstatic moments together with certain sarcastic analyses and pantheistic effusions in an oilcloth folder. By the time I got to know him, he had filled several dozen paper pads with his writings. He told me that they were stored in his library in the pueblo , the village where he worked as a teacher, and where he figured he would resume working once Jaume had found someone to replace not his wife, but him, Matías.

He told me that he would go out and get these folders, since he wanted to get my opinion. The drawer under the shop counter was also soon filled with home-baked literature, and on a shelf behind our flour sacks some metal cans got replaced by a small personal library. Thus whenever our conversation centered on a writer whose work Don Matías “had somewhere upstairs,” he didn’t have to limp up to his room; he just reached up behind him, and in a cloud of flour dust we both bent over the passage in question.

In this way, a small-time bakery in a poor section of Palma became an intellectual focal point of the highest significance.

I was able to draw Don Matías’ attention to a few aspects of the original Krause that he had overlooked. The bakery business suffered, but that was unavoidable. Hadn’t Catherine II once mocked the incurable world-improver Diderot, by saying that his grand ideas would yield fine books but a lousy economy? What hopes did we have, two unpublished writers, of exerting a meliorative influence on this woman-less bakeshop? One thing was in our favor — or rather in favor of intellectuals who chose to converse amidst sacks of flour: Pío Baroja, the great novelist, was in his younger years not only a physician but also a baker. In spite of his ck-dt pedigree, Jacob Burckhardt had engaged in some of his world-historical reflections while seated on a sack of flour in a house in the suburb of Sankt Alban where he rented a room. I was, by the way, delighted to introduce that cultural historian to Don Matías, explain Beatrice’s relationship to his clan, and point out this remarkable detail of his biography.

The relationship between the two brothers-in-law deteriorated as a result of the teacher’s ineptness as a shopkeeper. The clientele threatened to take their business elsewhere. Beatrice, too, took umbrage at the intellectual substitute baker. It piqued her that my shopping for half a loaf of bread kept me from doing other important things, and also that on the way home I so often made a detour to the Municipal Library to fill gaps in my education. For me nothing was more embarrassing than to step into Don Matías’ presence like a schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework. At Mulet’s tertulia I was never grilled so thoroughly as when sitting on Jaume’s flour sack.

But now it was Beatrice who put new life in the bakery business, and she did it by becoming an inventor — which is supposed to be my own forte. Here’s how it came about: it was taking me too long to come home with our half a loaf, and Beatrice decided to go fetch it herself. She entered the bakery at a moment when Don Matías was reading aloud from one of his works. Besides myself the audience consisted of a bunch of women and kids from our neighborhood, who had come not for literature, but for bread. Instead of yanking me by the collar and dragging me home with the bread, as many a plebeian wife would have done, Beatrice reached out by herself for a half-loaf, her lower lip pushed forward menacingly. From my stories and my hunger for learning, she already knew of the local schoolmaster and his Iberian mission, and she didn’t want to interrupt his recitation. In this respect she was acting like the other women, who listened open-mouthed to the brother-in-law’s declaiming, while down below Jaume kneaded dough, weighed it hastily, and threw it with a loud and angry report onto the mixing table. Beatrice, not the least interested in the oeuvre of my praeceptor Iberiae , grabbed our bread from the shelf, paid at the counter, and disappeared. This was the signal for the other customers to follow her example, and it left no one but me to hearken to the rhapsodical verses of the Krausist in the wrestling shirt. There ensued a siege of the shelves. People took what they came for, one girl turned on a machine and pared off the thin slices she wanted for today’s sopas , and one by one they paid their money and left the shop. It was the world premiere of the self-service store, a triumph of remarkable female audacity — inspired, to be sure, by my own — that is, a born fabricator’s — absorption in abstract spirit. Today such stores can be found the world over. The Americans and the Swiss Migros boss Duttweiler are competing for ascendancy. The patent belongs to Beatrice.

Because this shop was patronized only by little people, there was practically no cheating and no checking up on the customers. Don Matías was grateful that everything around him went so smoothly, for this meant that he could devote himself all the more passionately to his philosophical and belletristic endeavors, and pursue his studies to his heart’s content. Sitting as a shop regular on my personal flour sack, I remained loyal to him. Then came the day when he began writing at the counter. Not ordinary literature, not l’art pour l’art , but love letters! He was not just a theoretical love poet, he was actually in love.

His girlfriend filled his entire being. He called her his own, although according to Spanish custom he would first have to conquer her. This task served as an impetus for his thirty years, his nimble pen, and his winged spirit. The girl’s name was Encarnación.

Can there be a more beautiful name for a beloved woman — Love made flesh and blood? Three times a week, Don Matías carefully shook the flour dust from his shirt, from the chest hair beneath it, and from his trousers, threw his black jacket, a so-called americana , over his shoulders, stuck his guitar under his arm, and waved Adios down to his brother-in-law in the oven room — he was off to the pueblo . There, where he taught school, is where she lived, and one day she was meant to fulfill the biblical injunction, implied by her name, that she and Don Matías should live as one flesh. But Jaume would bake many sacks of flour, and I would purchase many half-loaves of bread, before the amorous schoolteacher would let me peer into his heart. On one occasion, filled with ardor but free of any tinge of jealousy, he showed me the contents of his scapular medallion. People who are receptive to poetry, mysticism, and philosophical ruminations are often quite shy and reticent when it comes to interacting with their fellow men. But once the veils are lifted and the dams breached, there is no holding back the floods of emotion. What I am reporting here is the result of a long-term friendship and secret literary/philosophical conspiracy, kept alive by means of our daily bread. It could serve as a refutation of my own theory concerning bread as the most graphic symbol of poverty. Let us bear witness:

Encarnación was the daughter of a general — incidentally, the fourth man of this rank to make an appearance in these recollections. Heaven had bestowed upon her many charming features, but left one of her eyes out of alignment. Her mother died shortly after giving birth, and the baby was given over to the care of an Indian ama who carried her only on her left side. Her father, who thought of Carnita as the apple of his eye, likewise was in the habit of holding her only by his left arm. But while the nurse acted only from thoughtlessness or force of habit, for the general this was a matter of sheer necessity. His right arm was missing. So the infant would wander from the left arm of its nurse to the left arm of its father, until it finally reached the age when it no longer wanted to be carried. By this time, however, Carnita was seriously cross-eyed, and the general was told that there was nothing to be done about it, although the condition might correct itself as the years went by. In a civilized country, any number of techniques would have been applied to bring her eyes into line — special glasses, for instance, or Christian Science, or homeopathic henbane in the proper dosage. But little Encarnación was an exotic flower not only as a general’s daughter; she had entered the world inside an authentic buffalo-skin wigwam high up in the Honduran Cordilleras. This took place around the time when her father lost his arm; it was the price he paid for heroism. But he had not yet attained the rank of general.