Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

In a country like Spain, where worldly goods are distributed very unequally, those who cannot afford a siesta comprise a scandalously large majority. In a city like Palma, with well-nigh 100,000 souls, the majority is sufficient in numbers to make the street scene picturesque in the extreme, even during the hour of well-heeled snoozes.

The closer we got to the inner city, the livelier became the traffic, the crowds, the hurly-burly of the masses of scrawny little people who are forever in a rush to get out of the sun — or to get out from under poverty. But sociological conjectures such as this are never very reliable in countries where the sunset turns nighttime into daytime. Little burros trotted past with lively gait, everything on them ashake — ears, tail, and the burdens they were made to carry: baskets, burlap sacks, large clay jugs filled with water, mother and child in the perennially touching pageant of a Flight into Egypt, Joseph with his walking-staff taking up the rear. Yet how unsaintly these patres familias looked with their motley sashes holding up their pants beneath their overhanging bellies! The biblical ass always and everywhere makes for a charming sight; even outside the realm of literature, Cervantes has granted protection to this animal all over the world against verbal and other kinds of abuse. To me, asses are also a delight in the intellectual-artistic sphere. Their numbers there are probably even greater than in the animal kingdom, where I am told they are doomed to extinction. In art and the life of the mind, they are not bound to a particular climate. Having evolved upwards into beasts of gluttony, they will perish only with thought itself. They are a romantic fauna, and I feel that I have a certain consanguine relationship with them, Is this mystical vanity? Perhaps, perhaps…

It wasn’t only the little burros that held my attention here in the mid-city. I was registering everything. Each and every step provided me with material for the travel articles I was going to write for a Dutch newspaper. I had already peered into a few courtyards, making mental note of them for special visits later. Then I discovered a merchant who, besides the usual rubbish, was selling devotional wares. His hottest item was a self-illuminating crucifix for one peseta, unmistakably “Made In Germany.” If you peeped through a pinhole in a cardboard box, you saw Our Savior surrounded by rays of light. The inventor of this phosphorescent masterpiece, a carpenter’s apprentice from Saxony, had become a millionaire in just a few short years. Next to the peddler of sacred images, a commercial scribe had set up his table. A girl was dictating to him — presumably a love letter, and what a shame that I couldn’t understand a word.

“Beatrice, come over here and make yourself useful. I am consumed with curiosity as to what that child is getting the old man’s pen to write for her. What do you mean, indiscreet? There are a whole lot of other people standing around and listening. It’s a public institution here. But what’s going on? What’s the rush? That bed’s not going to run away!”

Zwingli had dashed off on the double, Pilar likewise and, locked arm in arm with her, Beatrice perforce also. Then all three made a sudden turn — eyes right, for’rd march ! Whereupon the trio disappeared into a murky passageway. I had all I could do to keep up with them. The narrow pavement was cool underfoot. By stretching out my arms, I could touch the houses on both sides. These houses seemed to be leaning toward each other — that’s how very tall they were, and that’s how very black the strip of daylight was that closed off our view of the sky like a shutter.

I stopped and took a breather in the shade. And then I lapsed into one of those alleyway reveries that befall me whenever I enter such a narrow urban defile. This has happened to me ever since I made the acquaintance, some thirty years ago or more, with the writings of the German arch-lampoonist and “autocogitator” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Among his aphorisms concering the human countenance I once found a passage that amuses me even today: “In Hannover I once took up lodgings in a flat whose window opened out on a narrow street that connected two broad thoroughfares. It was pleasing to observe how people’s faces changed expression as soon as they entered this lane, where they thought they would be unobserved. One fellow would take a pee, another would adjust his stockings, still another would laugh to himself, and yet another would shake his head. Girls would break into a smile as they reflected on the previous night, and would rearrange their underthings preparatory to further conquests on the adjacent avenue.”

It goes without saying that I did not recall this passage quite as literally as I have quoted it here. But I remember clearly drawing a mental comparison between the typical connecting passageway in a typical German town and this Spanish metropolitan chasm that snuffed out one’s eyesight completely, blinding one even to the shafts of intense light that held shut each of its entrances.

But of course, I mused, Pilar has to make a habilimental adjustment of the kind that requires women to enter a dark doorway or step behind a lamppost. “Don’t look!” cries the purely symbolic lamppost when approached by a woman, who then executes the classic motions of lifting and shifting, perhaps displaying for a split second certain visible attributes that otherwise, were it not for the presence of the chaste lamppost, might cause a minor traffic snarl. I am one of those men who dutifully avert their glances whenever a lamppost forces citydwellers into strict observance of their puny morality. This is an embarrassing vestige of my careful upbringing, the worst imaginable training for the struggle of real life. It was so wrongheaded, and in its wrongheadedness so ineradicable, that it pursued me over and across the Pyrenees as far as — well, as far as Africa, if we grant any credence at all to the theories of those ethnological savants who draw Europe’s southern border at the aforementioned mountain range (probably because they know so little about Europe and nothing at all about Africa, which they refer to as “Europe’s subconscious”).

And thus my childhood superego followed me across the sea all the way to this island, where it was totally out of place. It pursued me right into this confined and confining alleyway, where at this moment María del Pilar — and in spite of the murk and the gloom Vigoleis shut his eyes, just like a newly-ordained curate hearing a young female confess her transgressions against the Sixth Commandment. At precisely the right moment, however, the neophyte priest suddenly loses his resolve, interrupts his pious thumb-twiddling, and peeks through the screen. Vigoleis, too, was unable to resist earthly temptation. He now peered toward the place where a shapely hand was about to raise a skirt and a lissome leg would — but instead he sees both legs, still very much covered, tripping along ahead of him. In fact, to all appearances they have never stopped tripping along. Not a sign, my dear Herr Lichtenberg, of garter adjustment, not a trace of indecent activity of any kind. It remained to speculate whether my dear friend Pilar was having any thoughts of the previous night, or of the coming night. Was she smiling? My only view of her was from behind. And how she did dash onward! All three of them were playing the disappearing act, that was the only word for it. Good heavens, what can possibly be the matter? They shot around another corner and were swallowed up by the next street. Gone in a trice was my quasi-literary reverie, my semi-erotic noonday fantasy and canyon meditation.

After running through the alley and out into the light, I spotted my quickstepping relatives well ahead of me, so I immediately took up the pursuit. Giving both elbows to fellow pedestrians on the way, I finally got to within a few paces of the trio, only to notice Zwingli taking another right-angled turn, this time disappearing into a store. Pilar, whose regal stride we earlier had occasion to marvel at, sped in after him, with Beatrice, manifesting an air of resolute dignity, not far behind. Willing or not, I followed them in.