Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Don Matías didn’t know whose praises he should sing more ardently, those of his true-love-become-flesh or those of his future father-in-law, Don Patuco, who was responsible for the miraculous Incarnation.

Don Patuco, the Honduran general, was tasting the bitter sopas of exile on the island of Mallorca. As a young soldier he made his name protecting the construction of the Inter-Oceanic Railroad against attacks by brigands, losing his right arm in a skirmish. He battled gangrene in stinking field hospitals, and finally won. Once the stump healed, he began his rapid rise through the ranks. His country’s supreme command sent him from one endangered borderland to the next; wherever the manco made his appearance, the one-armed warrior, the enemy retreated. He played a role in every insurrection and pronunciamiento , and it wasn’t long before his name came to stand for a free, united Honduras, under God and beholden to no other power. In the 1920s a carefully planned coup d’état failed as the result of the bribery of one of the conspirators. Don Patuco and a small band of followers were forced to leave the homeland soil that contained his arm and his wife. Deported by the neighboring countries, and after indescribably difficult wanderings, this stateless group of warriors eventually landed on Mallorca, in the same village where Don Matías was struggling to wrest the younger generation from the Spanish vice of illiteracy. I never learned the general’s real name, since he was living incognito. Don Matías would reveal only that the father of his future bride was a direct descendant of the Zambo general Guardiola, a famous personage in Honduran history.

Since time immemorial priests, generals, and whores have been the great sources of energy and progress in the Southern lands; their history can never be written without giving close attention to this Trinity. Don Matías and I did just that during our sessions on the flour sacks. We determined, for example, that two of the categories were subsumed and united under the third, whereas enmity could prevail between the servants of a militant Church and those of the state. This play of forces makes the South more attractive for me than the sun, but not more attractive than its wines.

Don Matías shared my antipathy to the clergy, although he was not as enraged as I was to see representatives of this caste pursuing women with flowing cassocks and fanatical leers, then seeking out the next best church, casting themselves down before a crucifix, and flagellating themselves. Matías had his own experiences with Men of God, and I had mine. “Be on your guard against generals with two arms and priests with forked tongues!” he said to me one day when waves of political excitement entered the bake shop and raised much dust — though not the peaceable white dust from which bread is made.

I knew several priests with forked tongue, but I couldn’t quite figure out what Don Matías meant by two-armed generals. He explained this eloquently, using as an example Don Patuco, who had passed on the maxim to him:

A general must display his courage in front of his troops; he must leap into the breach, race across the savannahs, and aim straight for the enemy’s heart. “None of your remote observation posts for field marshals, Don Vigoleis, none of your map-room strategy! Don Patuco won all his victories with his sword in his fist. It was only natural that certain limbs might remain behind on the battlefield. When the militiaman Don Patuco chased after the brigands to rescue the pouch containing funds of the Inter-Oceanic Railway, a bandit sliced off his right arm. The robbers were close to being victorious, but after the field surgeon bound off Don Patuco’s arm stump, our hero declared that he wanted to fight on, and someone handed him a sword. But then an amazing thing happened: Patuco refused to re-enter the battle without his own sword. So they looked around and found his blade still in the fist of his severed arm. In their haste they were unable to loosen the rigid fingers from the handle. Patuco, mindful of bloody old myths of the Mosquito Coast mestizos , took the other sword and with a single blow separated his former hand from his former arm, grasped his dead right hand with his fearless left one and, sensing now a double unity with himself and the spirits of his forebears, he cried out, ‘Follow me!’ Before sundown the railroad funds were again in the hands of the Trans-Oceanic Company. Patuco was promoted to sergeant.”

“What a glorious hero’s life! What grand material for a mythological-religious epic! Isn’t there any Honduran bard who can render this in rhyme and meter for posterity? The whole epic tradition pales in comparison, the Germanic and Greek heroic sagas and even the astral myth of Gilgamesh. You are the one, Don Matías. You must compose this song of the double-fisted sword. You owe it to the father of your Little Flesh!”

Don Matías gave me a pleasant smile. And then he picked up his cane and, as if it were a scimitar, slammed it down first on my flour sack, then on his own, raising such a cloud of dust that we disappeared for a few minutes from the censorious glances of the baker down in the underworld. When we finally surfaced from our mythological mist, white-in-white like the shades of another world but plagued by a very earthly attack of sneezing, he said to me in a conspiratorial tone, “Don Vigoleis, my Teutonic friend, before the flour in the sacks we are sitting on has been baked into bread, I shall introduce you to the poet of the Honduran national epic. All things take time. Poems that are meant to outlive the generations do not simply grow like the blossoms of a single summer!”

I wrapped up my bread, paid at the counter, and rushed home. At first Beatrice just shook her head, then she shook me. I had never before returned from the bakeshop so completely covered in white. “Did the bakerman finally chuck you out? If I were he I wouldn’t have just kept gaping s-o-o long at the two of you!”

Just shake me as much as you want, I thought to myself. You’ll be astounded as soon as I start telling you my Wild West story. “Don Patuco…” But my tale of derring-do made almost no impression on Beatrice; she would have preferred any dime-store detective novel. She already knew South America. As a child she herself had raced bareback across the savannahs and herded cattle with cowboys. Without doubt, she said, my “General” Patuco was known in his home country as a much-feared and much-sought-after cattle rustler, one of the big-time sort who ravaged entire ranches. And we were supposed to think that he was the savior of his country? All right, why not? Any dictator we could name was also a cattle rustler, and the South American variety had plenty of models to take after, most of them beasts of the pure-bred sort.

“But what about the Honduran national poet, the one who is writing the saga of Patuco? Aren’t you touched by that idea?”

That she would have to see with her own eyes, said the Swiss theologian’s daughter, all at once renouncing her own Indian heritage and her wild chases across the savannahs. That’s what makes her so complicated: her unexpected transitions, her wavering between Basel and the Inca lakes.

Was it two sacks of flour that got baked into bread, or was it more than two? Far be it from me to take literally Don Matías’ prediction, one that he uttered in a rush of enthusiasm for the Honduran national cause. But I actually got to meet the poet.

For me, meeting a poet is always a moving event. Poets embody all that transcends mere reality — as long as one doesn’t get too familiar with them. In my lifetime I have met several of them, great and not so great, published and unpublished. None of them has ever resembled the Honduran poet I met on my flour sack when on this particular day I entered the shop for my daily bread.