Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

At the time of the Byzantine Iconoclasm, the Caliph of Damascus ordered that the Church Father Chrysorras have one of his hands cut off for alleged high treason. The worthy Father asked for the return of his severed hand (oh, Don Patuco, it has all happened before!). He then pleaded with the Virgin Mary to aid him in his struggle against the iconoclasts, and to let his hand grow back again as the only means of proving his innocence. The hand grew back. Or so the legend has it. With the Lord nothing is impossible. And a dog, Mevrouw van Beverwijn said, is neither closer to nor farther from His omnipotence than a human creature, be he a sinner or a paragon of piety and virtue.

The dog got well. I have seen photographs of the four paws. Mamú got well, because she believed in the restored four canine paws. How to explain this, the devil only knows.

In those days, when Mevrouw van Beverwijn had joined with God or the gods in the struggle for Mamú’s kidneys, a wave of faith in miracles swept over Mallorca. A mother’s son — I’m telling this in biblical style, which is how it came to pass — had died, and he was taken out to the cemetery to be buried. In southern countries, because of the heat, dead persons are often buried on the very day of demise, or at least they are brought to a mortuary. This youth was therefore taken to the morgue on the graveyard premises and had to wait while the earth was opened. His mother was an extremely poor woman who had lived on her son’s earnings. Now she was penniless. Should she go begging at the cathedral? She prayed to the Lord, Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, and the Heavenly Hosts, that her son might be returned unto her. And Heaven heard her plea. When the men came and lifted up the casket to place it in the earth, the miracle had already taken place. From inside the coffin the pallbearers heard a knocking sound. And they were sore afraid, though they were rough men used to handling dead bodies as if they were inanimate objects — which of course they are. One cannot expect a gravedigger to have respect for the dead. The men were, I say, sore afraid; they dropped the box and fled. As it hit the ground, the box burst open and the dead youth fell out. His mother, who had gone to her son’s burial with trust in the Lord’s great power, was not surprised when she heard the knocking, for it was as if she were just waiting for the moment when the casket would open. She picked up the boy in her arms and carried him back to the ossuary. There she laid him down with maternal care on a wooden scaffold. The youth raised his arm, as if to strike or caress his mother. She, whose faith in the Lord had moved Him to make manifest His omnipotence, prayed in a loud voice, sang hymns of praise, and thanked the Almighty. The future would take care of the rest. The main thing was that her kid was alive.

News of the miracle spread throughout the city like wildfire. Great throngs of people streamed out to the cemetery, some discussing the marvelous event among themselves, others singing hymns of praise. A number of ecstatics beat their breasts and openly confessed their sins. An unsolved case of robbery that had taken place years before found its solution here: the thief chastised himself in public. At length the authorities saw the need to intervene. Physicians were alerted, in particular the one who had made out the death certificate, and whose career was therefore in jeopardy. No one wants to be buried alive, but doctors ought not to be blamed for every little mishap. The doctor in question pronounced the boy dead a second time. “But how dead is he?” the Palmesans inquired. Surely not as dead as Dickens’ old man Marley, who was as dead as a doornail. “As dead as a coffin nail!” said the doctor. He stood by his diagnosis, and as far as he was concerned, the case was closed.

But not as far as the boy was concerned. Every once in a while he raised his arm — one could never quite determine whether this signified a blessing or a threat. At other times he even sat up. His mother never left his side. Because she was poor, she was unable to persuade the authorities to have the boy taken to her home. The death certificate had been issued, so the boy was supposed to be dead. Just who did this young fellow think he was? Who was he protesting against? Why, he wasn’t even eating anything.

The professor of medicine from Germany, the one who made such a grievous error with Mamú’s kidneys, learned of the case and examined the young man. This time he made no mistake. The boy was alive, he declared, but he would soon die unless taken immediately to a hospital, or if necessary to his own, the doctor’s, residence. Clinically dead? No, very much alive, but totally gone to the dogs. He offered to treat the patient for no fee. Once again the authorities intervened. This German professor did not have a license to practice medicine in Spain. He had a reputation as a quack, but they let him continue examining the boy anyway. Colleagues had arrived from the mainland. They percussed and stethoscoped the patient all over. Their victim remained motionless throughout, except for an occasional arm-raising and now and then a twitch that went through his whole body. The diagnostic literature on “twitching” could have been amplified significantly there at the cemetery in Palma, for the dead youth kept on living and twitching for a full six weeks more. Then a sudden, universal twitch shook his entire body. He was now so very dead that Professor Hufeland himself, Germany’s famed specialist in clinical death, would have attested to this agonizing exitus in writing and without the faintest scruples.

The pilgrimages to the cemetery were taking on dubious forms. At the gate, religious hawkers were selling chewing gum, holy pictures, turrón , roasted chestnuts, white mice, lemonade, holy water, and rosaries. My grandfather would certainly have nailed up his coffee sign. The excitement in the city grew. Holy Mother Church remained silent, awaiting further developments. As much as She welcomes any and all true miracles, She is strict about such things and refuses to be misled by a simple case of clinical death. With this in mind, I discussed the case with one of our neighborhood patres , and I quickly let go with the assertion that when it came to clinically dead people, the Church — how could it be otherwise? — was cruel and lacked imagination.

Proof? Years ago I had heard a bell tolling, but I no longer remembered precisely where it hung. The good Father kept prying, and so I gave him the story of a canonization that failed. In the heat of our theological disputation, and urged on by subconscious feelings of regional chauvinism, I decided to have things center on a certain Electoral Bishop of Cologne. This servant of the Lord had accomplished more than the required number of miracles for canonization. His name was firmly anchored in the minds of the faithful. The advocatus diaboli had raised no objections. A papal bull recounted the life and deeds of the candidate for sainthood. Everything was shipshape — no doubt even more so than I reported in my story.

Only one act remained, and that was to exhume the bishop’s mortal remains in preparation for his “translation” into a special vault. But when the stone tomb was chiseled open, the priests and prelates were seized with horror: the candidate was lying on his stomach! That is, the skeleton showed unmistakably that the corpse had been set in its final resting-place in prone position. Was that a proper way to bury a Christian? Clerical minds started working feverishly: what had actually happened? Holy Mother Church came up with a clever way to wriggle out of the embarrassing predicament these prone bones had put Her in. The bishop, She declared, had been mistakenly buried alive. Waking from his rigid state, he had been stricken with fright and started blaspheming. He ought, of course, to have yielded to the will of the Almighty and awaited the hour when it would please the Lord to lead His servant out of apparent death into the arms of genuine death. Yet instead, the bishop tossed and turned in his tomb until, lying on his belly — an outrage to all sainthood, a slap in God’s Eternal Countenance — he breathed his unworthy last. It would be unthinkable to canonize such a sinner! God forbid! And so they plugged the almost-saint back into his stone box.