Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Now wasn’t that a case of hard-heartedness and failure of imagination? How did I think things had really happened, my priestly interlocutor wanted to know. This way: when the man awoke from his rigor mortis and was about to rub his eyes—“Where am I?”—his hands hit the coffin lid. Buried alive! Having survived this moment of mortal terror, the saint thanked his Creator for granting him this final trial, one which he, in his steadfast faith, was to endure before he should meet his Heavenly Father face to face. Bedded softly on luxurious ecclesiastical textiles, with head raised, as comfortable as one can be inside a granite container, he lay there and started thinking. Not frantically, for he knew what was proper for a future saint. It was his desire to die humbly, as he had lived. With one final effort, he twisted around to the lowly belly-down position, one that is indeed dishonorable for a bishop, and gave up the ghost. The Lord took him unto Himself. Holy Mother Church anathematized him.

The priest listened to my legendary version of the legend, shaking his head all the while. Then he said gently that I had things quite wrong — not about the Church, but about the saint in question. That man was, he said, the author of The Imitation of Christ . — “What? My fellow Lower Rhinelander Hämerken?” —“Hämerken?”—“Yes, Thomas à Kempis?”—“The very same!”

I was astounded. My fatherland had manufactured a stab-in-the-back legend about its war heroes, and now I stood at the cradle of a belly-down legend about a Christian saint! Not just any saint, but my mystic friend whose Imitatio hung in the handiest position on the line back at our Tower of Meditation…

The Palma cemetery administration, yielding to pressure from the populace, permitted the mother to set up home next to the youth’s body. There she sat, waking and praying. God, who had given her son back to her, would surely be willing to pester some official into declaring the death certificate null and void. That is what the mother, not a very intelligent woman, was hoping for. The Lord had done what He could, the rest was up to human beings. But humans, especially if they are officials, seldom cross the narrow borders of their own stupidity. A certificate is a certificate. Doesn’t God know that? Well then, we now have before us the age-old question of Job, which my mentor Pascoaes answers so beautifully.

No one wanted to bury anyone any more. Many people didn’t dare to lie down to sleep, for fear of waking up in a coffin. Some of Beatrice’s pupils called off their lessons, refusing to learn anything more until the miraculous youth was either truly dead or truly alive. In the midst of this mania there arose anguished notions of self-chastisement, fear of the Lord, the devil’s touch. Mamú’s household also had come profoundly under the influence of the chiliastic movement spurred on by the boy caught between death and life. Mevrouw van Beverwijn came along with her legend of God’s mercy to canines, and threw it into the heady brew of pious hopes. Not all threats of death bring death itself! Behold the youth at the Palma graveyard! Her story of her dog and his four paws fell on well-tilled soil. Mamú announced that she was willing to have her kidneys prayed for.

Afterward she confessed to us that without the twitching youth she never would have fallen for the Christian Science rigmarole. The boy had dropped out of his box just in time. No hay mal que por bien no venga —this saying was getting truer and truer on our island.

Mamú thus became a devotee of Christian Science — not what one would call an impassioned believer, but a very active and hard-working member. For the Mallorcan chapter of Scientism her house became what the cottage of Lydia the dye-seller at Thyatira had been for the early Christian movement of the Apostle to the Gentiles: a church.

Our second visit to El Terreno took place at a time when Mamú, in the opinion of all her doctors, ought to have been dead or at least in an ambiguous condition somewhere between extremes, perhaps lying next to the youth at the Palma cemetery. But she was alive and chipper. Her features, formerly distorted by the imminence of death, now had a kind of sallow plumpness that was to stay with her to the very end. Her abdominal cramps had ceased, she had no more hemorrhages, her entire arsenal of medicines went into the garbage can, and her live-in nurses had been dismissed — with a generous bonus, of course. Such was the scene when we revisited Mamú. We celebrated privately her resurrection. Her cocktail-mixing daughter had left, and telegrams had been sent to her other children: “Alarm over. Mamú prayed to health. Death nowhere near. Live Mamú welcomes visitors.” They never showed up.

Mevrouw van Beverwijn told her that spiritual healing was not connected with diet. Intercession with divine forces had nothing to do with recipes, so long as no one ever laced meals with poison. This was an important matter for Mamú, for she very much liked to eat good food. At one time she had enjoyed the same close relationship with Madame Sacher in Vienna as her late princely spouse had enjoyed with Franz Joseph, the Austrian Kaiser. Despite the fact that I have never been at all close to such prominent individuals — which I did not hesitate to confess to her— I, too, am dreadfully fond of excellent cuisine, and thus our ancient heiress was all the warmer in her feelings toward me. In the course of time Mamú discovered further amiable qualities in her friend Vigolo. For example, that he had had some intriguing experiences during his brief life span, and that he was capable of recounting them with spicy affability. That there had been adventures, for example, regarding a genuine Spanish puta . That in my student days, arm in arm with my mother, I had visited the mothers of the City of Cologne. Or again, that the “Torre del Reloj,” a Mallorcan cathouse, had sheltered us for months beneath its extremely porous roof. Mamú beamed. I was the “nice man” who would have been welcome at her interment. But she liked me better at her table and in relaxed conversation.

José, the Catalan cook, Monica, the part-time cook from Santa Catalina, and Celerine, the assistant cook, all performed their assigned duties as in the days prior to Mamú’s horrendous disease. Only Anna, the nanny from the Black Forest, crabby like all servants kept on beyond retirement age, wasn’t pleased with the new dispensation. She thought it was just fine that her mistress was still alive — that was the proper thing for a mistress to do. But that Mamú had found religion — this turn of events she liked less, and even less than that, the constant fuss about “The Science” and the hymn-singing ladies. Nowadays, she said, the house was chock full of Bibles, and the Lord’s word was getting bandied about here in all kinds of foreign languages, whereas she, Frau Anna, approved of it solely in Martin Luther’s version. But what she liked least of all was the presence of that man Vigoleis, who kept telling stories that in her opinion had precious little to do with Christianity. But on this point this simple, extraordinarily diligent old lady was quite mistaken. Francisco, the gardener who had already discussed with his mistress the details of landscaping her grave, tended the grounds, Mamú’s “park,” with the same adeptness as before. There is little to report about her other maids, a seamstress, and a young messenger, except that they were collectively louder than one might expect in a wealthy household. But Mamú was living in Spain. Miguel, the chauffeur, had his own opinion of the crones who lately had become his chief passengers.

This was the start of a marvelous epoch. We spent every weekend with Mamú. Sometimes Miguel picked us up, but usually we walked the narrow boardwalk along the bay with its rippling waves of not quite pure sea water, a route that now has been transformed into the Paseo Marítimo. We had the key to a gate in her “park” wall.