Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Her children grew up, married, had children of their own, got divorced. While the suit was still in progress, her husband died in the aforementioned “beautiful” manner (in Mamú’s Viennese it was “ ein scheener Tod ”). Stones started forming in her kidneys; cancer made its appearance and ate at her innards. If it hadn’t been for Mevrouw van Beverwijn’s powers of persuasion, Mamú would have died with her million-dollar suit unsettled, and the Royal company would have gleefully won the case de jure factoque . The Dutch lady thought Mamú could go on for another twenty years, and thus it made sense to start working again in earnest with the legal documents. Mamú put herself to it with renewed energy and with the counsel of the Spanish prosecuting attorney who was courting Auma. This fellow knew a lot about law, but he had never seriously studied gangster methods — and anyway, his mind was more on the young woman from Finland. Still, he helped to fill reams of paper with figures — figures about interest and compound interest, dividends and margins, profit-sharing, and other fancy concepts that are beyond my understanding. Mamú had studied up on these things, and so the prosecutor was able to broaden his professional horizons at the same time that he could keep an eye on Auma. She was still maintaining her distance, however, and we wondered why. The two of them were in such a state about each other that it was painful for us bystanders to observe. As with Mamú’s court proceedings, love had come to a standstill. They talked and talked and got nowhere. Mamú’s monthly income was substantial, though by a multimillionaire’s standards it amounted to peanuts. The legal fracas was taking its toll. Other American millionaires on Mallorca behaved very differently. They arrived with sumptuous yachts, traveling private casinos, and stark-naked women, whereas Mamú had to get by with a rented automobile and well-dressed domestic servants.

It wasn’t only the court battle with the Royal Baking Gang that was eating away at Mamú’s bank accounts. She was having a great deal of trouble with a brother of her late husband, an odd bird indeed, old, over eighty, he too a prince, and living in princely dissolution. He resided in Budapest, and each year was required to pay enormous sums in child support as a result of his habit of siring progeny all over the place — not only in Hungary, though that was his main hunting preserve. Mamú had sworn to her husband that she would pay debts, coûte que coûte , for his profligate brother Ferencz. And she kept her promise, despite the constant flurry of new paternity claims piling up on her lawyer’s desk in Vienna. “If only the old lecher would just go impotent!”—how often Mamú expressed this wish with a sigh when mail arrived from Vienna. I told her she should cut him off totally, but Mamú was not one for the scalpel. This meant that her financial condition was in flux and unpredictable. She had already rented out her palacete in Vienna and used the income to pay the smaller child-support claims.

We ourselves would soon feel the effects of this ancient brother-in-law’s second adolescence. But first we must let Mamú’s husband die his “beautiful” death.

Mamú and her prince had gone to a little town in the hills near Vienna — I don’t remember its name. They were on a walk, and stopped at a stone balustrade to gaze at the landscape below them. They noticed a little church with a cemetery next to it down in a valley, and in the cemetery a couple of men who, from this distance, looked like little ants working at the ground. From their motions, it was apparent that they were digging a grave. Mamú’s husband, who had built skyscrapers and opera houses, who as a dynast had the privilege of being interred in his forefathers’ mausoleum, who furthermore could afford the most expensive style of cremation in the States — this man now went weak, got tears in his eyes and said, “Ethel, down there, see that churchyard? That’s the kind of world-forsaken place where I would like to be buried. Will you promise me that, darling?”

Mamú, deeply touched, made the promise, and they continued their walk. They had gone just a few paces when her husband suddenly felt ill. He grabbed at his chest, had trouble breathing. They spotted a bench. She led him to it. He slowly sat down, fell over, and was dead.

Mamú bought the grave plot, which on the following day was to have received the remains of a well-to-do local citizen. She also paid a huge sum for maintenance of the gravesite for decades to come — I think it was for 50 years. She signed the proper papers, and later she stored them in a portable metal safe.

What I have just recounted would have occupied many pages in a written version of Mamú’s story. For Mamú had a wonderful gift for storytelling, comparable only to one other person I have ever known, though not of quite the same caliber in matters of romantic impact: the mother of the writer Pascoaes, Doña Carlota, about whom there will be much to report in a later book. Mamú also wrote down a good deal. She told us that stacks of her diaries were in safe keeping in New York. But ever since that business with her kidneys, she tired easily, a behavior Mevrouw van Beverwijn hadn’t been able to pray out of her. And so one day Mamú asked me to enter her service as her chronicler. She would recite for me the novel of her life; I could freely rework everything, add excerpts from her own notations, and generally shape it as I saw fit. For this collaboration we would have to be together all the time.

The idea arose, as do all great ideas, out of the void. It came to Mamú one day as she was carving a roast capercaillie. It was a daring idea, fully worthy of this grand woman. Beatrice, who thinks “the void” is a concept for cowards, later said that the idea certainly came more from Mamú’s heart than from the roast bird; the woman was obviously in love with me. In any case, from whichever source, heart or roast grouse, the idea had arrived.

Near Valldemosa lies the large estate known as Miramar. Ludwig Salvator, Mamú’s late husband’s friend and Archduke of Austria, had purchased it along with other landholdings, then renovated and enlarged it. The legal circumstances were obscure. The Archduke had sown his wild oats on the island, there were paternity suits, and now no one knew exactly who owned the property that was once the archducal demesne. One of the country houses at Miramar, a small summer residence praised in Baedeker, was for rent or sale. Mamú decided she just had to have it; there the three of us would live. The roast game bird stuck in my mouth, something that doesn’t happen to me often.

Auma’s prosecutor started negotiations with attorneys for the Archduke’s heirs, and we went out to examine the castle by the sea. The premises were ideal for our trio. I was familiar with the various portions of the estate from my days as a tourist guide, when I had explained the sights in my own fashion.

Beatrice would get her concert grand if she promised to play for Mamú every day. If everything went well across the ocean with the baking powder concern, she would install an organ, Beatrice’s second-fondest wish.

“And my dear Vigolo, what would you like?”

“A donkey, Mamú.”

Did Vigoleis intend to become Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at one and the same time, here on his mirror isle of Barataria? Yes. Don Quixote because of the millions that now, with the aid of some majestic baking powder, beckoned like a mirage. And Sancho Panza on account of the wooden peg to which he would have to bind the Knight, for the latter was such a fool that he was constantly and literally fit to be tied. And furthermore, neither of these two fools had much over the other one.