Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

My own homegrown shoes were long since worn down to the inner soles. In summer and winter I now wore nothing but alpargatas , the footgear of the little people, 50 centimos the pair. Yet there came the day when we had saved up enough to afford a pair of shoes for myself — ordinary shoes, nothing special. But just a few months more, said Beatrice, and we could place a custom order — with Ulua the cobbler! So we waited. This was as natural as the black powder in the shoemaker’s hollow bones.

Our links with the Honduran cause were meanwhile so close that even without an awareness of certain prospects I would not have offered a commission to any other craftsman. What was the nature of these prospects?

Don Matías left for the pueblo not only to serenade his beloved, teasing notes from his guitar that were meant to soften the girl’s heart and direct her healthy gaze at his eyes full of yearning. During each visit he also met with Don Patuco to report on world events, insofar as they affected Honduras. Enfeebled though he was, albeit not in the heroic manner, over time he came back into the general’s good graces, and now exercised the office of messenger and advisor. After the revolution, he was slated to enter the Ministry of Culture as specialist for combating illiteracy. All this was contained in the as yet unwritten new Honduran Constitution. At the very next opportunity Don Matías intended to bring “my case” to the General: I was to be appointed attaché for Western European intellectual affairs, to the extent that they had bearing on Honduran matters. My philosophical attitudes, my antipathy to Church and State and their forked-tongue, two-armed emissaries, my inventive talents, my Sitzfleisch ; Doña Beatriz’ half-Inca heritage, her half-Swiss allegiance — the latter important with regard to the gold reserves behind the Honduran lempira —all of these qualities increased my chances as a member of the revolutionary government. It is no wonder that I started picturing myself in Tegucigalpa, sitting in meditation behind an empty diplomat’s desk made of solid rosewood, 3200 feet above sea level and immeasurably far above my own self.

This was not the first time in my life that I came in line for a government job. “My good man,” my teacher and friend Dr. Wilhelm Kremers said to me on more than one occasion, back in the days when he was recruiting up and down the Lower Rhine for his Separatist coup d’état, “My good man, I can use someone like you when we proclaim our Rhenish Republic. I’ll need you for our Ministry of Culture!” At the time, I was either a weaver or a mechanic, but wasn’t interested in upward mobility. On the contrary, I was hoping to enrich my biography in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, this prospect of official employment hung by a single hair — a fateful state of affairs, since the hair in question was one of those that grew back on the previously tonsured pate of the lapsed priest Kremers, and it didn’t have much tensile strength. The Separatist Putsch in October was an immediate failure. Dorten and Smeets, Kremers and Pepi Matthes had built up their ideas for a Rhenish Free State in league with boozehounds and beer-bellies, phony beards, swindlers, pimps, and degenerate army veterans. It’s common knowledge that priests and soldiers create havoc when they engage in politics. But perhaps it’s different in a Wild West country; Don Patuco would have to test this out. In the case of the Separatist Kremers and in the current case of the one-armed general, it is biographically significant that everything be planned far in advance, and that the leaders have a talent for picking their co-conspirators. Once in power they must be able immediately to appoint major and minor functionaries, or else their coup will be a flop with the direst of consequences. On the day of the Röhm Putsch in Germany, Count Kessler, who was quite shaken by the event, asked me this: if Hitler were ever actually toppled, what then? The German emigrants were ineffective; they were a phantom element, and there was no one to depend on inside Germany. Don Patuco would not be a phantom, I said. Don Patuco? Who was Don Patuco? So I told him a few things about the fate of my Honduran friends, about the tertulias and Jaume’s flour sacks. For the author of Notes on Mexico , none of this was out of the ordinary. “Since the publication of my Notes there’s been a price on my head in Mexico. But speaking in general, I think all of us should emigrate to South America.”

So I would order my new shoes from the cobbler Ulua, with or without the promise of a government ministry.

This was the beginning of exciting times. The Swabian bookshop owner, once he was duly clued in about the goings-on, willingly provided us with foreign magazines. Don Pablo brought us illustrated catalogues from his shoe factory. Pedro, beholden to his art and to nothing else, came forth with some designs for my new footwear. Vigoleis compared, considered, rejected, selected. Beatrice was listened to. And eventually we arrived at the solution which tended from the very beginning in the direction of the point-toed shoe.

I know of no other country outside of Spain that gives as much attention to shoes. They must fit exactly right, they must be polished to a mirror shine, three or four times a day if the shoe tips get dusty, or if one hasn’t anything else to do. For every Spaniard there are 100 generals, for 50 Spaniards there is a cura , for every 10 a limpiabotas , and for each and every last Spaniard — general, priest, or bootblack — there is one María del Pilar.

I could have climbed the stairs to Ulua’s workshop to issue my official commission. But no, I preferred to savor the whole idea; I postponed the day when, with my elegant new footwear, I would saunter among the beautifully shod citizens of the island. I let a month pass by in cognizance of the fact that the journey is more fulfilling than reaching the destination, that the hope for redemption is more blessed than redemption itself, as the Old and New Testaments both assert. But then the time came after all. Philosophically schooled readers are familiar with the phenomenon of intellectual hyper-pregnancy (superfoetation), which I chose not to forego just for the sake of a pair of new shoes.

Ulua was a shoemaker of a definitely original cast. There was nothing at all mystical about his craft, and he didn’t possess a crystal ball. His tripod was squeaky-clean, a sign that his manner of sewing leather was conscientious. He had a remarkable thumb, unmistakably a thumb for mixing and tamping gunpowder, one that could fit into even the largest hollow cattle bone. As I entered, Pablo’s mother, a native Mallorquine, quickly stuffed a clump of horsehair back into an upholstered stool and asked me to take a seat. Our conversation immediately took flight — to be precise, we landed at 3200 feet in the center of the capital of the embattled and besieged Central American homeland that was waiting for its liberator. Then we hovered back over the headlands where the ghost of Karl Marx lay in wait for us. Just as Don Matías had stopped in his limping tracks in the funeral procession when he learned that I had never read a line of Krause, now Ulua stared at me when he learned that he was sitting opposite a man who had not only never read Marx but wasn’t about to do so, either. My candid confession resulted in a lengthy summary by Ulua of his “Carlos’” aims and goals in the world. His dissertation, plus a mug of pulque and a few slices of turrón , made me forget why I came there in the first place.

A second visit to this versatile craftsman’s workshop was devoted to the clarification of fascism. Several monasteries would get blown up, the Jesuits once again banished from the country, Juan March hanged, and his millions funneled over to the Honduran Freedom Movement. Ulua was prepared to accept responsibility for all of this. Not wishing to remain idle or to seem cowardly, I volunteered to rip the ribbons from every general’s uniform and the red stripes from their pants, just as I had witnessed in 1918 as a schoolboy in Germany. But with these suggestions I had come to the wrong man; after all, Don Patuco, the future breadwinner for all of us, was also a general. But the anarchist’s disappointment rapidly subsided when I told him that it was only the two-armed generals I had in mind, and more specifically the Prussian-German exemplars of that caste. I named name after name, and was back in my interlocutor’s good graces when I remarked that very soon an army of monkeys would be ready to march in Germany. On this occasion I also learned that Honduras had swiftly declared war on my Kaiser just as he was getting ready to pack his bags. Then Ulua took my foot measurements. He praised my noble nether extremities — not a single bunion. They had never felt the pressure of army boots.