Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Ulua lived in Palma in one of the dilapidated houses lining the square near the dilapidated post office and bordering the more elevated portion of the city — the square where Julietta used to dance. It took courage to risk your life clambering up four floors on rotting stairways. His wife was the daughter of Mallorquin immigrants, and it was she who advised our freedom fighter to take residence on the Golden Isle to await the Great Day. Their marriage was blessed with a son named Sacramento. While still young he began to abjure the God to whom his pious mother had dedicated him at his baptism. His name, meaning “Holy of Holies,” no longer quite fit his nature, and so he latched on to “Pablo” as an innocuous substitute since no one associated it any longer with the Prince of Apostles. He had just turned twenty, but like all of these kids with mustaches, he looked older.

Gracias a Dios took a room in Ulua’s house, thus closing the circle.

My first meeting with Ulua’s son took place of course on Jaume’s flour sacks. Pablo himself initiated our second encounter by rapping the iron fist at our front door. “Welcome, Don Pablo! Beatrice, here comes a combatant from Don Patuco’s legion. Up to now he’s only been a punctuation mark in the epic poem of our mutual friend Gracias a Dios, but soon, who knows…?”

“ Enorme !” cried Don Pablo, “ enorme , Don Vigoleis, a punctuation mark! And perhaps only a question mark! And that’s why I have come. Doña Beatriz, I would like to learn English, for quite frankly I don’t think much of this mania of our old guard for upsetting the world with hollow bones. Every month a revolution, and then once every year Holy Communion at Easter time— enorme, enorme , but that’s not getting us anywhere. I want to go to England, and then to the States.”

This was Don Pablo the skeptic, the young man who doubted the revolutionary efficacy of hollow bones. From then on we called him Don Enorme, because this was his every second word, and that is what he was in every respect. He worked as a clerk in a shoe factory. In his free time, which in Spain means during working hours, he occupied himself with literature and philosophy. He had learned German by reading, and for this it wasn’t necessary for the god of language to enter his Golden Vein. He was of course a Krausist, he knew his Nietzsche inside out, and Stirner too, whose maxims he had taken to heart: “For me nothing is more important than myself.” He dismissed Ortega y Gasset, the darling of the philosophical set, with a few barbarisms, only to sing the praises of Count Keyserling’s Latin American confessions—“ enorme, enorme !” Now that we had staked out the landscape a bit, he asked how much Don Vigo would charge for philosophical instruction twice a week. But please: I was to understand that what interested him most in German philosophy was whatever seemed most obscure to the teacher himself; the two of us could make an attempt to find our way together on the basis of our very different intellectual backgrounds and attitudes.

Things became more enormous than ever when I suggested that we collaborate on an anthology of German octopus philosophy. We would work together on the Spanish translation, then translate from Spanish into English, from English into Italian, and through further antagonistic languages eventually back into the original German. The resulting work, a dilution and distortion containing many new gems of wisdom, I would then recommend to a publisher as a collection of aphorisms by a long-lost Sanskrit philosopher of personal redemption.

We did not end up undertaking this philosophical chrestomathy, long a favorite project of mine. Rather than tempt the gods, we stayed with the tried and true. Until the outbreak of the Civil War Pablo remained my indefatigable disciple, and a dangerous one with an enormous brain that absorbed and assimilated everything with frictionless rapidity. On only one other occasion have I ever dealt with such a quick-witted, exotic thinking machine with interchangeable gears and dust-free lubrication vents: the aforementioned Surinam writer Albert Helman. I stand in amazement at these prodigious cerebrators, and not without trepidation at witnessing forces at work in them that the Western world has long since lost sight of.

Now one might suspect that Ulua and Don Patuco would be proud of such a champion of their national uprising. But no. Don Gracias a Dios, pining away in pre-matrimonial love for the fatherland; Encarnación, sewing away at the national banner; and a certain Don Sulaco, a drug dealer with connections to the Clock Tower who provided the group with the necessary financing — all these received more attention from the crippled warrior than the philosophy student who could never wield a sword, much less hurl a petard stuffed by his father’s swarthy thumb, without blowing himself to smithereens in the process. His conflicts with the Old Guard were approaching a crisis, and the shoe factory paid a minimal wage. — “Doña Beatriz, a year from now I must know English perfectly!”

Ulua was getting less and less pleasure from his Sacramento. The latter, not a stick-in-the-mud like his philosophical preceptor, who is more afraid of unexploded bombs than when they actually go off, was growing tired of the “old guys” constant nagging him about creating a revolution. He said that the next bomb to go off in Palma would get tossed by his own hand, in front of pre-arranged witnesses. Would I care to be on hand?

One day he came for a lesson and instead of taking a philosopher out of his briefcase he pulled out a bicycle-racing cap with blue and white stripes. Tomorrow he would be on the Plaza Cort at 12 noon wearing this cap as a signal to his cohorts, and would throw a powerfully loaded bone into the Ayuntamiento. “The Spanish revolutionaries can take care of the rest, I’ll have nothing more to do with it. Everything has been carefully set up. Later you’ll have to let Don Patuco know through a third party that Ulua’s son will stop at nothing.” He gave a thunderous laugh, and then we lost ourselves in a discussion of Cogito, ergo sum and its bearing on anarchism.

Sacramento, Ulua’s son, threw his bomb at the stroke of noon. It did no more damage than the local petards from the workshop of the anarchist Count. The insurrection was put down with a few rubber truncheons. Sacramento escaped. He threw away his racer’s cap together with the explosive bone — an ingenious double stratagem by the philosophically trained terrorist. We harmless passers-by, surprised by this revolt on the streets, noticed a pickpocket lifting up the cap and heading off in the distance. But a policeman with lightning-fast reflexes immediately put bomb and cap together in his mind; since a bomb obeys laws that hardly concern a Spanish policeman, he chased after the thief, whose legs, unfortunately for him, were shorter. He was dragged over to the constabulary. It wasn’t until much later that the actual cause of the disturbance was ferreted out.

Don Patuco was said to be amazed, indeed moved in his patriotic heart by this baptism of fire of Ulua’s offspring, who had been given up for lost. I myself was surprised by the un-Spanish punctuality with which the bone got tossed. Later that evening Pablo told us the revolution had failed precisely because of this punctuality, because the main actors were still sitting in a café when the internal marrow blew apart the bone — and nothing else.

“Anarchy and punctuality! Don Enorme, voilà , there’s the topic for our next lesson!”

“ Enorme , Don Vigoleis, enorme !”

Ulua as cobbler: in the opinion of Don Matías, the spiritual advocate of all Honduran affairs, his work was of the finest custom craftsmanship. “Elegant fit,” the increasingly feeble bard added. “Not as bad as one might expect,” said the shoemaker’s own son, who preferred his employer’s mass-produced footwear to his progenitor’s hand-sewn products.