Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

He was a pale, thirtyish fellow, dressed in black, with hollow cheeks that seemed cadaverous, but in his case were no doubt the mark of his Muse. His cheekbones projected sharply, his mouth was puffy, and a delicate mustachio followed the contour of his upper lip. It wasn’t his melancholy expression that made me realize who this new customer really was; rather, it was the significant look with which Don Matías greeted me on this occasion. What ensued was a rendezvous of the unpublished poets. Beatrice had sent me here for a half a loaf of bread and a pound of flour. But just how important are bread and flour when the inchoate murmurings of a national saga are sitting on a sack in front of you?

Don Matías rose up ceremoniously, took his cane, and limped from behind the counter to effect the introduction: “Don Gracias a Dios, poeta —Don Vigoleis, poeta .” We bowed to each other — I, for my part, with a deep bend of my torso, Don Gracias a Dios less deeply since, doubtless taxed by his patriotic visions, he chose to remain seated on his white throne. Today I am amused to recall this encounter, but at the time I was deeply affected by it. Here we were, all three of us prodigiously gifted poets, all three of us showing great promise, if not the greatest talent. Three poets, three destinies. When would the world sing our praises? Or rather, when would we start singing to the world?

Unlike Vigoleis at various times, Don Gracias a Dios was not one to curry favor with book publishers or newspaper editors. He had a loftier mission; his recognition as a poet would not emerge from the waste-paper baskets of third parties. An entire nation was looking to him, and thus he could keep his mind focused inside himself — which he now did on his flour-sack perch.

“Books have their own destiny,” says a well-known maxim of a certain Terentianus Maurus. But aren’t the destinies of those books’ authors also worthy of a classical quotation? With Don Gracias a Dios this was surely the case, in spite of the fact that his work wasn’t published. For this reason I shall now tell his story, which Don Matías revealed to me on the occasion in question. With a wave of his hand he asked me to free up some space for him on a flour sack, and as the self-serving customers came and went I learned what the Norns are capable of spinning if they have some halfway decent thread on their spindle.

The poet Gracias a Dios was the child of a mother who with annual regularity gave birth to a stillborn baby. This had occurred six times, and her seventh was imminent when a miracle happened: she came to term and bore the child, and it lived. “Thanks be to God!” she rejoiced, “my prayers have been answered!” Hence the boy’s name: Gracias a Dios.

It soon became apparent that little God-be-Thanked was unlike other little children. As the first to emerge safe and sound from his mother’s womb, he was born for higher things; as a poet he was meant to join the ranks of the eternally rejected. He combined in himself the energy of all six of the babies who preceded him but never took a single breath, and the result was that he harbored a longing for all that is infinite and inexpressible. This became manifest when he entered puberty — pale, driving because he was himself driven, brooding with hot breath in the superheated air of his unhealthy homeland. Don Matías pointed to the counter drawer where he kept a notebook containing God-be-Thanked’s earliest responses to divine inspiration. Eventually, he said, they would be preserved in his country’s Pantheon. I remarked that they had a more tragic effect sitting inside a baker’s drawer, and both men agreed. With a dejected gesture of his pale hand Don Gracias a Dios wiped some flour dust from his mustache.

Then came Patuco’s insurrection and defeat. God-be-Thanked’s father perished at the barricades, perforated by bullets of the government forces. Mindful of the miracle of the “living birth,” the general urged the boy to unite his destiny with that of the men who had now become stateless. Henceforth he was to be their guiding spirit, their migratory talisman. Filled with renewed inspiration, he agreed. Has a poet ever failed to comprehend special voices that speak to him from no matter where? Gracias a Dios said farewell to his bride, his lodging, the soil of his homeland, all that was near and dear to him. Sooner dead than slave! And with the others he went into exile, into a transcendent new realm where the destiny of his nation could — and would! — prevail in his verses. For was it not, Don Matías continued, a poet’s mission to seize meteors that plunge through the universe and restore them to the sacred cosmic order? They would return victorious, the band of men declared to a company of weeping women and girls as they secretly embarked at a coastland hideout. They would be back, it was only a matter of time. They would reappear suddenly, and the trumpets would blare for their arrival! They’re at the Mosquito Coast! Don Patuco, Manco, Maneta, the General, our Savior!

Matías portrayed the scene in the most colorful language, surely not without unconscious allusions to the Napoleonic legend of the March to Paris after the hero’s resurrection from the Hundred Days of banishment. God-be-Thanked had reached this phase of the national saga in his notebook. To compose the final stanza he would have to await the fanfare of freedom.

Down below, Jaume toiled by the sweat of his cheese-colored brow, struggling more with his repressed anger than with the viscous mass he was supposed to knead to provide food for the masses up above. He was lacking the proper insight, for surely it is the masses that poets sing and tell stories for, the masses that heroes die for, and the masses that call forth new heroes and new poets. All Jaume could see was the kneading board under him and the time-wasting blabbermouths above him. He sweated all the more, and Don Matías continued:

After the band arrived on Mallorca the poet lived in the pueblo where Don Patuco bided his time and kept his blade sharp, while his daughter Encarnación created a flag for the pronunciamento . (This was the design: from out of an undulant Sea of Freedom a fist juts forth, holding another fist in its iron grasp; the second fist holds a battleaxe, and the scene is crowned by a rainbow in the Honduran national colors.) Then Don Gracias a Dios was ordered to Palma, where he could more readily scan the international press for news of Honduras and gauge public opinion concerning his fatherland. As minimal as this information was — the world hardly took notice of his puny country, no matter how explosive things were, God-be-Thanked’s poems gave reason to believe that the Great Day would soon arrive. The poet’s fingers were literally itching to write his final stanza. “As a fellow poet,” Don Matías added, “Vigoleis should know about such things.”

And how I knew about such things! But I didn’t notice that Don Gracias a Dios had itchy fingers, unless his nail-biting — in which many poets engage — was to be taken as a harbinger of future glory.

With his pallid complexion and his consumptive ardor, Don Gracias a Dios struck me as the affecting epitome of the patriotic young firebrand pining away for his humiliated homeland, awaiting the hour when his nation would rise up as one man, and on the wings of his own song would carry him home as the once-banished troubadour of his people. From my own experience I am unfamiliar with such homesick love for the fatherland, even though for several years I have eaten the so-called bread of exile, which for me has never tasted more bitter than wherever in the world the bread of poverty tastes sour. It’s possible to live it up even in exile. I know several such persons who back home never had it so good as in their stark new surroundings.