Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

But I am interrupting Don Matías’s account. I meant only to point out that in conversation with the bard of Honduran national shame and rebirth and his Spanish friend, the suitor of the cross-eyed embroiderer in the pueblo , I once again had occasion to point to the Western literary heritage. I could name any number of historical models. I could tell these men about German greatness and German love of Freedom, about the German night and German grave-digging, about emergence into the light of a New Day, about ethnic and patriotic poetry, about lyres and swords, about Körner, Schill, Arndt, and the latest German uniformed seer Ludendorff. That got their attention! It roused the youth on the flour sack from his lyrical reveries. His eyes took on a fiery cast, and he was about to rise from the sitting position. But apparently his legs had gone to sleep — like my own — and he dropped down again against the metal grill. For a while he was hidden by flour dust — one no longer saw him, but heard his voice intoning an original stanza out into the bakeshop, upwards and downwards. Just a single stanza — he had to conserve his energy. When he again became visible, his singing had already died away.

Don Matías, moved by the puzzling outburst brought on by my German Sturm und Drang , now came into action in his steamy wrestler’s jersey. With one swoop he pulled open the counter drawer, fished around in it, but couldn’t find what he was looking for: his own contribution to this memorable moment. Probably he had left it in his classroom desk out at the pueblo .

I leaped into the breach — which I was able to do since I happened to have with me the Insel edition of the collected works of Hölderlin. I had already told Don Matías about my thin-paper philosophy, and he declared that he also wished to possess a volume like this one on papel biblia . “Death for the Fatherland,” I began, “by Hölderlin.” This majestic, cynical stanza has probably never had such a rapt audience as these two men, Gracias a Dios and Matías, sitting there on Jaume’s moldy flour sacks. Speaking for the German Parnassus, I urged youths to descend in waves from on top of their hills to engage with the murderous enemy rising up from the valley below. I infused them with the soul of their own youth and enjoined them, like a band of magicians, to do battle in their just cause. And their patriotic songs — Gracias a Dios knew this just as keenly as Hölderlin, who was close to insanity — weakened the knees of the dishonorable foe, and finally victory was ours: “Live on, O fatherland, / and do not count the dead! For you, / beloved country, not one too many has fallen.” Not one — i.e., none!

I recited these verses first in German. Not very well, not like Wüllner the professional elocutionist, although like him my hair was white. Then I translated word for word. I received sincere applause. Even Jaume down below was clapping, but not for me; he was slapping mounds of dough into a trough. I made my biggest impression on the two poets with the line about not counting the dead. How far would we get if people started counting them? Don Gracias a Dios explained that beginning with his very first pronunciamiento , Don Patuco had made it a sacred principle never to count those left behind; only in this manner would the battle for freedom be won. I agreed, although Hölderlin hardly needed my support. A soldier fallen on the field of battle is of course only a legend. He becomes real only on the pages of written history. If it were any different, how many youths would be willing to descend from the hills in waves? We should leave counting to the chroniclers who juggle and manipulate numbers according to the particular philosophy of history they serve. How many soldiers fell on the fields at Chalons, at Waterloo, at Stalingrad? Only a worrywart carves notches in his rifle-butt. Me gusta ver un cementerio de muertos bien relleno , Don Matías was now declaiming in the words of his pseudo-Espronceda, and it was just as convincing as my Hölderlin.

The hoarse bakeshop doorbell jingled incessantly. The little people, the cannon fodder of our patriotic songs, came in for the bread they had been toiling for ever since that unholy story about a woman and a snake, one of which stepped on the other’s head while the other snapped at the first one’s heel — it has never been cleared up which was which. Their domestic labor was at least as strenuous as that of Jaume, who was now baking their bread while muttering curses.

Don Matías later explained to me that the Honduran youth’s sallow complexion was not only the result of patriotic fervor and homesickness. Gracias a Dios had an inamorata in the city of Palma, a girl he sang to while standing under her window, like the thousands of other mortals who night after night lift their gaze to their beloved until the girls, chased away from the window, move over to the next house so the serenade can continue. Gracias a Dios was used to this game; surely it helped him cope with his sorrow, and it kept the embers of poetry alive in him. All the situation needed was a puff of air, and the torch would again burn brightly — for Honduras!

Well then, said Don Matías, now that we had talked over so many things and, as it were, given heaven and earth a good preliminary plowing to reveal what the noble bonds of humanity and friendship could achieve, he saw no reason to conceal from me the final truth, insofar as I, a poeta, had not intuited it already. Don Gracias a Dios also had a genuine, home-town girlfriend named Asunción (Ascension or Assumption), whom he intended to marry when he returned to Honduras with flying colors. He thought of her every single day — and this was weakening him.

“ Hay que ser hombre , Don Matías,” I said. “You should stand up like a man, even in exile!”

Like bosom comrades we clapped the flour dust from each other’s shoulders. I strode homewards carrying my bread, while Matías remained seated on his sack behind the counter, still in trouble with his brother-in-law Jaume, who thought that things were getting more and more out of hand.

For a few pages now I must leave Don Matías out of sight, but not the cause of Honduran independence, as I introduce my reader to another exiled combatant from the one-armed general’s platoon. His name, borrowed from the geography of their home country like those of all their fellow conspirators, will in my hazy memory always be associated with Reinhold Conrad Muschler’s novel Bianca Maria . This new fellow was the cobbler Ulua.

Ulua not only had two names — that was normal for an insurrectionist — but two professions. Besides being a shoemaker he was a petardist, or perhaps I should say a petardero , since in Spain the word petardista is reserved for a crook or extortionist who secretly lights fuses and blows up whole houses with his home-made bombs, the petards. Ulua was no extortionist, though one might say that he was extorting himself, which is true of any good revolutionary or blind adherent of a militant political movement. There can be no victory without idealism. But we shall go no further into that.

Ulua had fought at the side of Patuco; he had undermined many a stretch of railway and filled many a hollow bone with explosives. This was in fact his specialty: bombs made from bones. As soon as he was appointed chief fireworks expert of the Honduran national movement, Don Patuco’s fame rose as the most feared cattle rustler in Central America, a development that brought discredit to his pronunciamientos for quite a long time. Ulua needed cattle bones. He sneered at the paper bags that others, Don Alonso and his gang among them, were always glueing together. For him that was child’s play, whereas “we in the Cordilleras, we in the savannahs…”