Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Mamú expected me to say that I wanted an automobile. She obviously didn’t know me well enough to realize that I wouldn’t bother mentioning something I took for granted.

It wasn’t until the final months preceding the outbreak of the Civil War that Mamú’s marvelous plan developed to the point where we could prepare for the actual move to Miramar. Her finances permitted such a momentous change of abode. We were to commence with the writing of her life story before the grape harvest. I was determined to give it the title The Royal Baking Gang . But we ought to wait a bit on that, the multi-millionaire heiress said. For a title she would prefer something “beautiful.”

Her daughter in Paris was against our plan, likewise the daughter in Budapest, likewise her son, likewise the bristly German nanny. Without exception they regarded poor Vigoleis, in whom Mamú was plainly infatuated, as a fortune hunter. Mevrouw van Beverwijn, who hated me because I refused to swallow her story of the Miracle of the Four Paws, went after Mamú with all the tricks of her pseudo-science. Mamú stood fast. Arguments from envy couldn’t touch her. The fact that all of us on our island were soon to become failures was a matter of separate destiny, one that bore the unique and unmistakable features of a two-armed general.

Thus, in place of Mamú’s memoirs I am setting before the reader the applied recollections of her friend Vigoleis. Here we have been unable to tell the story of this enchanting fourflusher with the amplitude she so fully deserves, for better or worse. But there is surely enough in these pages to show how greatly I loved her. Never have I enjoyed so much being led down the garden path by a person who was my friend. Not one bad dream has ever darkened my memories of her.

On the other hand, as I look back in careful judgment of those experiences, there is one figure who returns to memory as fundamentally wicked and mendacious. It is the person who constantly prayed for her human and animal fellows, Mevrouw van Beverwijn.

1933

In a southern country you can get along best if you succeed in switching off completely your sense of time, and as completely as possible your ideas about space.

Sometimes it is already tomorrow, when you would swear that it is still yesterday or the day before or, on happy occasions of absolute temporal confusion, no day at all. You can always cancel out Today; that is a mere philosophical abstraction. Iberian Man — and that is the character we are talking about here — is at all times standing on his earth made of clouds.

During our seven years of politico-poetico-mystical exile in Portugal, at Pascoaes Castle in São João de Gatão — our Mediterranean island and all of Spain were already behind us, Switzerland too, France too, plus the anxious hours of our second escape through Spain. One day I said to Beatrice, looking up from my manuscript, “When is Easter? I’d like to send Mother a Resurrection message up there in her deutsches Reich , which is getting bigger and losing more blood every day.”

If sent by telegraph, my time-conscious Beatrice replied, tongues of fire might arrive just in time. We were three days away from Pentecost.

Even with this hyper-Iberian compression of time, there was a certain amount of loss due to friction, for we eventually figured out that the Outpouring of the Holy Spirit would be taking place the very next day.

That’s how late it was, and we hadn’t noticed anything. While we were snoozing away on our island amidst the raucous daydreaming of the Mamús, Patucos, and Uluas, the vagabond Suredas and Pedro (constantly making progress as a painter), surrounded by porras and putas and Pilars, corpses that weren’t dead and living persons who refused to die — Germany had awakened. And because an awakened Germany meant a Jewry that must croak — there’s no heroism without sacrifice — the nation of poets and thinkers, which is also Hagen’s nation, was joining up with the Führer .

How large was the number of people who were slated to die with their limbs sticking out rigidly from their bodies? Millions, probably. Two of them could already be stricken from the list. The Führer needn’t worry about them any longer. Adele Gerstenberg and her son were resting from their own death in the cemetery over in Alicante. Millions minus two — does that make any difference? If one million people kick the bucket, are two people of any consequence? If everybody goes along with the plan, the nation can get things done with no trouble at all. Everybody has to help out, everybody! No one can shirk from the business of murdering, for whoever does will get whacked himself. That’s what Hitler and history have in mind. And here is Vigoleis, still insisting that he doesn’t believe in history. Just don’t count the dead: that’s what Don Patuco and Hölderlin teach us.

After years of national humiliation, ethnic snubbing, and darkness across the entire country, the German dawn was finally approaching — the Dawn of the Gods, an uprising of house and home and kit and caboodle. Now there could once again be collective rejoicing, a closing of the ranks for an orgy of fun-making. The more people who got murdered, the more heartwarming it all was. And because Joy gives rise to Strength, the process was given a name: Strength Through Joy. With the strength that proceeded from joy, the populace embarked on Strength Through Joy ships — for wasn’t our country also a Volk ohne Raum ?

The newly awakened nation also found its way to Mallorca, the end of the world, the hinterland, the underworld — but still world. Here was a scene to be gaped at. You could have joy at the sight of the lowly, such a stark contrast to one’s own cultural heights. Everything is better back home! But things will improve here, too. What a mess! They don’t even have beer! “Oh Führer , sir, where in the name of the Führer can one get a halfway decent…?” But before I, as the local Herr Führer , can pass on these fellow-countrymen’s complaint to the Führer , I have to make sure of just where we stand.

This I learn from Herr von Martersteig — an informed source, for as I have mentioned, it had finally happened, and we hadn’t noticed it. We didn’t subscribe to any newspaper. My home-town gazette arrived irregularly, and at the German bookshop we read only the literary stuff. At Mulet’s tertulia international affairs were discussed with intensity, but only in their timeless aspects. Mamú’s easy chairs gave us glimpses of royal baking powder on the rise, Jaume’s flour sacks were a site for deciding the fate of Honduras, and on the Suredas’ three-legged chair we discussed the fate of the Sureda family. Everyone was concerned solely with his own little world. Thus I had no idea that overnight I had become the citizen of a master race, and that my Führer in quotation marks was the image of the Lord Himself.

It was an ordinary day, and an ordinary crowd of people was strolling to and fro on the Plaza Cort at the late-afternoon hour when the paper boys hawk the Ultima Hora with their lusty, high-pitched, singsong paeans to Uultim-mooooooooo-ra! — the genuine swan-song of the “final hour” of world history. Whoever has heard this will never forget it— uultim-moooooooo-ra! But now, whoever was that man limping out of the Colmado Parisién, where only Mamú and other millionaires and perhaps Robert von Ranke Graves did their shopping? It was Baron Joachim von Martersteig, more sallow of complexion than ever, more furrowed of feature, more crippled of gait. We hadn’t seen each other for an eternity. Were things going badly for him here on the Golden Isle, where it is always Blue Monday? With his old, familiar gesture of amazement he placed his monocle to his eye and let it drop again, but this time he had to reach out farther to retrieve it.