Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“How marvelous,” said Mamú as we treated ourselves to her Sunday meal. Once again José had outdone himself — which is to say, for the first time he prepared for us the legendary, ancient Mallorquin dish called erissó , using a secret recipe long thought to have disappeared. It was a sautéd sea-urchin of such delicacy that it seemed almost like a stroke of Divine Providence to be savoring it on the day of my Christian rehabilitation. “How marvelous were those things you said in my Mother Church!” But that business about Mevrouw’s bank account — that was going a bit too far. Still, otherwise…

“Mamú, it’s pretty obvious that Vigoleis is a priest manqué. If you can locate the proper church for him, he’ll turn out to be an excellent confessor and proselytizer.”

To accompany the erissó José offered a Portuguese vintage that grows in the sands near Collares. He always came out to serve special dishes himself. Mamú liked that.

Beatrice kept slaving away in one of the palaces that stayed loyal to us, trying to teach a señorita whose kitty-cat memory couldn’t retain a single item of vocabulary. The work didn’t enlarge our income by much, since the girl’s noble parents were so impoverished that they had no fear of the specter of Communism, and since their palace had already reverted to bank ownership. I kept seated at my machine and wrote for eternity. Then the man arrived.

Why deny your own name when standing in the doorway of your own apartment, if you aren’t a crook? Yes, I was Vigoleis. And the man said triumphantly, “Finally!”

He was poorly dressed; short and skinny. He was draped in loose-fitting Mallorquin homespun. His cheeks were hollow, and he was unshaven. His hair was white, the skin of his hands sagged over the bones. He handed me a note, asking if I recognized and acknowledged the signature. I didn’t recognize it; it was dark here in our entrada , and as for “acknowledge”—this began to sound like Zwingli. A tardy creditor? I felt that I had to humor him. “Sir,” I said, “I’m glad you have come. I can inform you that Don Helvecio hasn’t lived on the island for quite some time now. You see, he was dying, and he had himself transported to Switzerland so he could be treated by Professor Scheidegger, the detoxification expert. He’s going to get well, and in his case that isn’t just some medical figure of speech: you see, homeopathy…”

At this the man said, in a tone of indignation that I would never have expected from such a cockroach, “What are you talking about? Homeopathy? Don Helvecio?” That was none of his business, he had nothing to do with such stuff. Doña Beatriz had signed this piece of paper — was he at the correct address or wasn’t he?

Beatrice, going into debt in my immaculate name? My heart stopped. This was serious. The daily rag in my home town used to publish humiliating notices sent in by respectable citizens, warning readers that they were not responsible for any transactions effected by their wives. How I empathized with the disgraced husbands, especially if I knew them personally! And now I was in the same kind of situation. Beatrice! I led the gentleman into our apartment.

First of all, he spat a wad on our floor. If I hadn’t been so familiar with Spanish custom, I would have been doubly enraged by such contemptuous behavior. I’ll wipe it up, I said to myself, before Beatrice arrives. Just don’t let her arrive before I get to it, because no doubt she’ll make a big scene. “Please,” I said, “do have a seat. What can I do for you?”

The man not only had bad manners, he also was cruel and calculating. His explanation was so overwhelming that I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling over. In brief, he was demanding 3000 pesetas for a demolished piano. O whore Pilar! Your urge for revenge extends all across the ocean!

“Pay up!” the man said, “or else you’ll face a court-sponsored auction of your belongings!”

I told him that I couldn’t pay, which meant that everything would go under the hammer. Now in control of the situation, I said “Do what you have to!” How could I have been so petty as to suspect Beatrice?

The man stood up and said, “ Momento ”—a term readily understood by anyone. But what then happened was again incomprehensible. He went to the door and entered the corridor. Gone! I thought. I relaxed and wiped the floor. Now Beatrice could come back any time. But instead of Beatrice, it was the man himself who came back, with a bunch of other men in his train, strapping fellows, every inch of every one of them a Robert von Ranke Graves. I thought my final hour had arrived. But no matter how often and with what metaphysical yearning I might have longed for this moment, this wasn’t at all what I expected.

The man said that he had given the matter further consideration. Court case? Enforced auction? Lawyers? All this was nonsense. We could earn the money for the piano ourselves. I immediately thought of Mamú’s agonizing baking-powder affair: no, let’s avoid a legal suit at all costs! The man nodded and made a sign to the others. They were well trained; muscle-bound though they were, they quickly assessed the situation in our apartment. Amid a banging of doors they carried what little we owned out of our piso . He was willing to leave us our bed, but wanted all our books. They weren’t really worth anything, he said, but — at a wave of his hand the thugs headed for our makeshift bookcase. I rushed over to stop them. “Don’t take those! I’ll hand over our bed and my black dress suit!”

“As you wish. As it is, your junk will cover only one-sixth of what’s due. I’ll come back when you have settled in again.” He bent down and tossed our doormat to his gang. We had owned it for three whole days.

Easy come, easy go. The expenses for lawyers and legal perquisites would have amounted to much more. That bloody whore!

“Is that bloody slut back on the island?” I asked when the man was already on the stairs.

“What do you mean, slut? There ain’t no slut. The law’s the law!”

“If the law’s the law, how did you find out my address if Pilar didn’t give it to you?”

“Make a note of this, Don Vigoleis. In Spain the worst evils are politics and the family! Adios !”

“The Nazis!” I thought. This was the Führer ’s first attack on our private property! But he didn’t get our books!

The damage, though hard to estimate and in any case not covered by insurance, was extensive enough to make one wring one’s hands. I wrung mine all right, but not for long; this was a time for action. Beatrice must not get to see the filth all around our apartment. Like a licensed maintenance man I swept and wiped. The place was sparkling when Beatrice arrived, battered and mauled by her drudgery in the upper-crust palace, a line of work that she pursued with such energy that even her students took fright.

Catching sight of our empty apartment, did she think that I was going to surprise her with a relocation to a more respectable part of town, as in the golden days of our move from the Clock Tower? She spoke French, and that means that she felt dark premonitions. We walked across the apartment over to the room that had been our dormitory. — “Well?”

I let out a deep sigh and explained to my chérie that it would have been best if we had jumped into the sea from our Leucadian Cliff. That way, the long arm of the Führer never could have reached us.

“The Führer ?” Beatrice had tears in her eyes, and more tears were dripping down her cheeks; one of them fell on our spic-and-span ladrillo , and she wiped it up.