Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

At the beginning of every week Mamú came to Barceló Street to discuss with me the menu for Sunday. With time I got more and more fastidious and adventuresome in gastronomic matters. My revulsion against bread and potatoes grew stronger, and this meant that we had to shop for ingredients from many different countries. The calmados in Palma didn’t sell such delicacies. Mamú had shopped at gourmet retailers all over Europe. She owned a huge library of cookbooks in a variety of languages. Now and then, after the spirit had brought her back to health, she regarded these extravagances as sinful. I soon recognized the danger that threatened this new domain of mine, and quickly talked her out of such silly notions. I had never eaten bear’s paws, and was curious to get a taste of them, or at least to find out whether it was only snobs who sang their praises.

It was reasoning of this sort that led me to recommend to Mamú a kind of compromise: she should buy a set of Bibles in the languages represented in her gastronomic library. Mamú thought that was a fascinating suggestion, though hardly a Christian one. Right away she sent word to her book dealer in Vienna to take care of everything. Her Portuguese Bible served me well when I later studied the works of Pascoaes. This, too, was a manifestation of destiny, as Mamú wouldn’t deny. The youth with the twitching arm, the dog’s paws, the Portuguese Bible — everything on this island had a dual essence, a twofold incarnation. Still, one had to be careful with such things. Islands themselves have their own ways about them.

Mamú’s bookcases contained not only cookbooks, and Frau Anna didn’t only trip over volumes of Holy Scripture. Mamú owned a first-rate collection of contemporary literature in many languages. She knew most of the writers personally. Take any book from her shelf: there was an autograph inscription. Or Mamú would say, “What’s that you have there? Oh, Blei!” And immediately she would tell a story about Franz Blei, one in which she herself was a star performer. “Fülöp-Miller?”—Mamú hadn’t exactly unraveled this writer’s bibliographic snags as he was working on his book on the Jesuits, but she had used her connections to help him out, connections that extended to some very obscure ecclesiastical archives. She had known the unpronounceable Stanislaus Przybyszevski, a writer I much admired, and she once had entertained him as a dinner guest. And of course our friend Madame Gerstenberg, but also the great Frenchmen Gide, Valéry, Romain Rolland, the great Englishmen, the great Americans. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Papini, and Pirandello, who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize — they all were alive in Mamú’s amazing memory and in her even more amazing library. In addition, a certain number of deceased authors, she claimed, had entered her abode. That didn’t bother me, though it did Beatrice, whose memory is as solid as it is merciless.

All of these exalted personages had at one time been Mamú’s personal guests, either in her palazzino in Vienna, at the estate of her late husband somewhere in the Hungarian hinterlands, perhaps on one of her father’s farms in New York State, or in her Paris apartment on the Quai d’Orsay, designed by Henry van de Velde. It is not uncommon for an American heiress to marry a Hungarian prince. Yet with the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, this particular prince forfeited all his property. He was able to polish the tarnish off his title with dollar bills, and Mamú used hard cash to buy back his castle. In those years, the feudal Europe of yore was literally haunted by tradition-starved American heiresses of Mamú’s kind. It was even plausible that her Hungarian Count or Prince — her deceased spouse sometimes surfaced with the one lineage, sometimes with the other — had not been a wastrel, but an extremely gifted architect whose talents had bestowed upon the citizens of America the Metropolitan Opera, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and a few dozen skyscrapers of somewhat lesser distinction.

When Mamú, in our presence, ascribed the Metropolitan Opera to her late husband, the man who had died such a beautiful death, Beatrice, who is a devotee of world history, started figuring out dates. Did she perhaps think that Mamú was faking? A millionaire heiress, I was convinced, had no need of such charades. Only poor people tell lies. For 25 pesetas you could buy a lie from any tourist guide.

Mamú was a millionaire. How many times over? For someone like me, someone who is forced to stick with the second-grade multiplication table of daily existence, it is immaterial how many million times a million his friend owns. A single million can suffice to hone away the rough edges that so often plague a friendship. Be that as it may, Mamú was a thousand times a millionaire.

Her father, a typical American, invented a baking powder. Twofold genius that he was, he gave his invention a majestic name: Royal Baking Powder. It was a success the world over, putting Dr. Oetker’s continental products to shame. In no time the inventor’s business flourished, and he became a billionaire. Mamú was an only child, and a veritable deluge of wealth cascaded upon her. She went to the very best schools, and spent her vacations on long cruises on her father’s yacht. In her own words she grew up in a timeless world, just like a millionaire’s daughter in a novel. As we all know, life begins to get interesting only when it touches on poetry.

Her father, she told us, died during the First World War, when she was already living with her children in Vienna. Meanwhile she had married the Hungarian aristocrat and put him back on his feet. A building contract detained her Prince in Barcelona. Returning to New York in wartime was impossible, although neutral diplomats offered their services. For the entire duration of the war her husband was listed as missing. In fact, he had gone to Mallorca to wait out the end of the world conflagration at the estate of his friend, the Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria. But the Archduke had already left the island in a submarine. Either he was now residing at his royal-cum-imperial summer home, or he was dead.

1918: Armistice. Mamú flies (in the sense of hastens) back to America, searches for her husband and finds him, searches for her multi-million inheritance and doesn’t find it. “Vigoleis, do believe me, that was quite a blow!”

“I can’t think of a blow that hasn’t hit you!”

“Oh, you’re just being nice. But listen…”

Anything having to do with the Baking Powder millions, Mamú told and discussed only in English.

Irregularities had occurred within the company. It all went into the very high numbers, and what those numbers meant was that she, the sole heir, had been bilked of her Baking Powder shares. There was talk of dastardly deeds; perhaps her father hadn’t died a natural death. A certain cousin of hers was thought to be behind it all, a fellow she had no hesitation in calling a gangster. Many years ago he had courted her and her millions. For doing battle with the company thieves, she had recourse to smaller sums that were invested elsewhere, a drop in the bucket when compared to the bakery hoard, but a cool million nevertheless.

Her lawyers encouraged her to sue. Her son, at the time just beginning to grow whiskers, said, “Shoot ’em, Mamú!” One of her daughters urged settlement out of court. The other daughter, who had wedded her own millionaire, shrugged and told her to do whatever she wanted. Wisely enough, the Prince was not asked for his advice. Since she had the money for it, Mamú sued. She pressed her case with elegance, vigor, patience, and all the other necessary qualities for that sort of thing. What she lacked was a good lawyer, and of course she had totally mistaken notions about the type of justice that gets practiced and perverted in courts of law. True enough, she had read Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas ; I spotted a copy on her bookshelf. But that was only literature, she said, and anyway, all Kohlhaas fought for was a few horses, whereas in her case it was a matter of millions of dollars. That was grotesque logic, but I accepted it. The company that was her antagonist in this affair was working against her with a frightful weapon, one whose natural and insidious deadliness Mamú never recognized as clearly as we did. Had the Royal Baking company bought her lawyer and the judges? It was as simple as that.