Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Ulua?”

“ Nous verrons !”

In the meantime, my Uluas had been expertly reworked by the cobbler Schira in Loco into hiking boots that could withstand glaciers and granite. I now wore them every day. What did Beatrice mean by her warning? These clodhoppers were still giving me excellent service.

Christmas Eve in the Casa Peverada, beneath a crumbling ceiling covered with prancing cherubs, in front of a crackling fireplace and within decaying walls that you could see through to welcome all the Good News descending from heav’n above and the snow-topped Salmone — on this Holy Night the big present waiting for me was Muschler’s novel. I hadn’t yet got indigestion from the sweets sent with the book by the bookshop owner Barbara, a kind mentor to all the starving writers who lived down in this part of Europe. I threw my legs over the arm of the rickety easy chair, got good and comfy, and started making the long-sought, long-delayed acquaintance of White Mary. Beatrice also had a Christmas writer, and each of us a seven-armed candelabra.

One page tells you nothing about a book. Twelve pages don’t tell you much about a book. But Matthias — were you pulling my leg back then, exactly ten years ago? Books do not ripen like wine and women. Whatever is contained within their pages can undergo transformation only within us readers. In themselves, books are dead. I was holding a corpse on my arm.

I was overcome with sorrow, in combination with hot flashes and a desire to drown myself. Beatrice peeked over at me from behind her own writer, to see how my encounter with Bianca was getting along. But before this woman with gold in her heart could look up the aforementioned symptoms in a medical book and pour out some drops of Aethusa cynapium into a glass, I tossed the hunk of trash into the fireplace. We didn’t have any Karl May at hand, but we had some grappa and a sheaf of galley proofs.

“Don’t cry, darling,” Beatrice said, “you’ll get over this calamity, too.”

White Mary was ablaze in the fireplace, our candles were burning down in the Christmas Eve drafts seeping through cracked walls into the sala where Marsman had done some writing.

If someone wants to get far in literature, says Don Quixote, it will cost him time, sleepless nights, hunger, and nakedness; it will cost him a swirling head and stomach cramps and other things connected with the above-mentioned symptoms.

Perhaps I can be permitted, as Sancho Panza, to supplement the Knight’s insights by averring that a writer who produces works in the manner described can have similar effects on his reader— ècco : Bianca Maria.

Mémé, her grandchildren called her. She loved this childlike name which stood in such marked contrast to her austere, passionate, uncompromising nature.”

With these words, Count Harry Kessler begins the first volume of his memoirs. I am copying them down now for the thirteenth time. The first twelve times, I did it from the author’s manuscript, emended many times over. Now I am using the printed text, which incidentally is nearly identical to the one I remember from the days when I took a step upward and became the exiled writer’s secretary. Both he and I often stumbled over that opening objective-case proper noun, but Kessler could not bring himself to write simply, “Her grandchildren called her Mémé.” When he sent off the typescript of his memoirs, he had a weak moment: he reinstated the somewhat inelegant version of his opening sentence. Mémé retained her place of honor as an ornamental initial, a detail the rather humdrum Fischer edition of Times and Faces fails to highlight. When Kessler showed me his author’s copy, he was pale with rage and literally trembling over his whole body at the unauthorized textual alterations the publisher had made out of fear of the Nazis. He said to me, “They couldn’t even leave my first sentence alone! How could I have ever let pass such a monstrosity?” He was disconsolate, until a letter from his dear friend Annette Kolb revived his spirits. This writer praised Kessler as the superb stylist he in fact was, pointing expressly — I haven’t forgotten it in all these years — to page 13 of the book. Right here, she wrote, we are confronting a great master of German prose style.

Aha, my reader is thinking, finally a character of world renown in the Recollections of Vigoleis, after all these dubious types like Zwingli, Arsenio, Ulua, or whatever their real or manufactured names are! But please be patient; Harry Kessler is going to get a chapter to himself, maybe even two. As yet the Nazis haven’t chased him out of Germany; the madhouse hasn’t yet flung open the doors of the solitary cells. The Count’s head is, for the moment, only on somebody’s blacklist somewhere. In our next chapter we shall hear the crazed shouts calling for Germany to awaken and for Jewry to croak. Patience, please! I needed the reference to Times and Faces in order to introduce into my narrative another Mémé, our own Mémé—a personage who, I’ll grant you, wasn’t quite as beautiful as the Count’s mother, and whose name, to be honest, was a little different. But all we need to do is change two letters, and to avoid objections from syntactical nitpickers, I won’t put her name at the beginning. In all other details I can easily borrow from Kessler. And that brings us to the true beginning of this chapter.

Her grandchildren called her Mamú. She loved this childlike name that stood in such marked contrast to her austere, passionate, uncompromising nature. Austere? Did Mamú have an austere nature? Right away our description is beginning to get shaky. And when Kessler goes on to say of Mémé’s childlike name, “She seemed to cherish it as a cloak and a shield against a hostile, cold world,” our reservations begin to multiply. For to the very end of her life, our Mamú used a different method to defend herself against the world’s enmity. With the aid of Christian Science she erected about herself a fortress replete with embrasures, moats, and spouts for pouring down boiling pitch. Her ramparts were patrolled by a squadron of aged and aging ladies who were devoted to the same science, who sang its hymns badly out of tune, and who took care that no un-Christian influences ever threatened their recent converts’ trust in Scientism or, what would be worse, ever prayed their way into her fortune of millions. Yes, Mamú was a millionaire. As such, she had an easier time than most in making progress within Christian Science. Faith is difficult with no money at all. The Vatican would long since be a heap of rubble if the rock on which Peter’s church stands didn’t have veins of gold that can even withstand the aqua fortis of hypocrisy. But let us remain for the present with our high-carat faith in Mamú. Soon enough we shall see that sham and pretense can also exist outside of the various established churches.

“Until her final hour,” Kessler continues in his description of Mémé, “she was and remained beautiful and regal.” If we just delete the words “beautiful and,” his words again fit Mamú. She was regal, but with a light tinge of Viennese coloration, which is what made her so irresistible.

What Kessler goes on to say in praise of his mother is irrelevant; from here on I shall have to be content with my own recollections.

In Mamú’s retinue there was a Parisian cosmetician, who herself embodied the worst kind of advertisement for her profession. She was beautiful, and had no need whatever of salves and lotions; sans rouge she had rose-colored cheeks. She never used lipstick, yet she sported the kissable cherry lips illustrated in the marketing brochures she passed around. Her eyebrows were thin lines that required no plucking, and not one single false lash disfigured her eyelids. The girl’s bosom — a poem, whose accents took full effect without the aid of foam rubber. She possessed, of course, noble fetlocks and marvelous hands; her hair was of iridescent chestnut hue. She had turquoise eyes that deep down harbored obscure secrets. Who would be the lucky treasure hunter to explore their depths? Her voice — to continue in this fanciful vein — was like the murmuring of a conch shell. Of course many men had put this shell to their ears, but the one she actually permitted to do so was a Spaniard, and then he did it all wrong. The girl was not a Spanish beauty; she came from the opposite end of Europe, from Finland. She laughed at us when we complained about the millions of mosquitoes on the island. Back in her native Nordic lake district, she was used to them by the whining and biting billions that darkened the sun. This exemplar of pulchritude, this hovering goddess with so much experience of mosquitoes, this natural beauty who challenged Nature itself, and whom a Spanish suitor desired with such desperate passion that he turned more and more ashen as time went on — this young woman’s name was Selkä Kyliki. In Mamú’s house she was called “Auma.”