Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“The Nazis, my dear. The Führer ’s cossacks sent a piano man over here with a demand for 3000 pesetas for your wrecked piano. I took care of the matter and prevented a legal suit that would have cost us a whole lot of money and trouble. This encargado said that after we got settled back in he would come back, then four more times, and then the whole thing would be paid off. But by that time Hitler will have had us shot. What happened today is just a warning. You watch, this is only the beginning.”

“That’s just about what I was thinking.”

This was a stroke of luck in the midst of disaster. For whenever Beatrice “just about” anticipated some calamity, we were already on our way to preventing it from happening. What, she asked, was I suggesting that we do?

“All I need to do is say the word, chérie , and the Consul will offer me a job in the party’s foreign service: Madrid, Barcelona. He has said so several times, and there’s no doubt about it. 1000 pesetas a month, minimum. We could leave this place. The piano man wouldn’t get a cent.”

“ Jamais !” Beatrice said.

“ Nunca jamás !”I replied, using the more emphatic Spanish expression of denial.

That night we slept on a pile of clothes. We could have asked Mamú for help, but Mamú was having trouble enough of her own. The split within the Mother Church was getting more serious. She had received upsetting news from her lawyer in New York. Her daughter in Budapest reported that her lecherous brother-in-law had booked some more children on Mamú’s family charity account. Her attorney in Vienna announced that the mortgage payments on her little palace would no longer cover the increasing expenses. Mamú was desperate. This time I told her that she should insist that the dirty old man in Hungary wear a permanent chastity apron, or she would cut off his funds. Mamú didn’t know what a chastity apron was. I gave her a historical explanation, adducing the Etruscans. She thought that the image, when applied to her brother-in-law, was quaint, and she perked up a bit. She hadn’t come to Barceló Street for several weeks — why discuss menus when there’s no money to pay for the ingredients? Pigeons from Brindisi, morays from Tartessos, cranes from Milo — all this was past history. Without compromising his art, José the cook was having to make do with the local fare. It was all right with us that Mamú didn’t visit us any more; we just couldn’t ask her to sit on a wooden box.

Pedro was speechless at our naïveté—more specifically, at mine. That piano man would have been satisfied with a single chair, provided that I had promised him all the rest with the great eloquence I was surely in command of. What a failure! And I had been in the country for such a long time! Pedro shook me. “We’re going to go see that man. It’s not too late yet. I know the company. Lladó pianos are famous. It’s an old company, right nearby on Rambla, right-hand side.”

Inside the spacious hall at street level there were many instruments in various stages of playability. A very old lady was sitting in a wing-back chair in the middle of this world of music. She was somehow disabled, and wore a straw-colored wig that made no pretensions to authenticity. Right away, like the monkey Beppo, I felt an urge to swipe it from her head. She was the piano company’s inheritor, and the piano man was only her factotum. He built, sold, and auctioned off the instruments. Evidently the company was not having the best of times. The lame old lady was very friendly. With the healthy half of her body she pointed out a few instruments that were already varnished. She thought we had come to buy or rent a piano. She pounded the floor with her cane, at which sign my piano man came shuffling over, the same encargado with whom I had concluded our friendly financial settlement. Pedro, the born haggler, took the man aside. He pointed over to me. The man scratched himself in several places, nodded his head wordlessly, and then came over and shook my hand. I was, he said begging my pardon, a big idiot. Why hadn’t I protested? Turning then to Pedro, he reported that I had said, “Do what you have to,” and so he brought in the movers. The lame lady nodded. She was very attentive, knew exactly what was going on, and agreed to everything. Several times she raised her good hand to an itchy spot in her wig — an odd, touching regression to the times when she still sported a full head of hair.

Unfortunately the man had already sold the ruins of our piano for junk, making less profit on it than he had expected. He was disconsolate about this sad affair that involved, as usual, a whore and high-level politics, but what was he to do? Here, too, Pedro knew just what was to be done. Lladó & Co., Pianos Lladó, Palma de Mallorca, Baleares, gold and silver medals, etc., must place a Lladó at the disposal of the plaintiff Don Vigoleis on behalf of Doña Beatriz, pianist, pupil of Juliusz Wolfsohn. No rent would be charged during the first months — this would count as restitution for the hasty removal of private property. Doña Beatriz had come to select an instrument. The man agreed, and was greatly relieved. Full of bluster and self-assurance when he first arrived at our apartment, now he was suddenly pliant and deferential. His only aim, he said, was to serve art. The old lady nodded and scratched herself once again at the place where, a half-century before, she felt an itch. The smashed piano was now likewise a thing of the past.

Stepping out onto the Paseo de la Rambla, I ventured the opinion that the piano man was crazy. “No,” said Pedro, “but he’s well on his way to getting there. All of us here on the island face that prospect. Whenever people get that far, there’s not much that can be done about it. The best time is the transitional phase. Papá has got worse over the last few years. You haven’t noticed because you didn’t know him in his great period.”

As a matter of fact, the piano man later became a clinical case of insanity, as Joaquín Verdaguer told me when I asked. “ Se volvió loco. La fábrica ya no existe ”—gone mad, the company doesn’t exist any more. Period.

A few weeks later some men came by and, using a huge belt, heaved a Lladó into our apartment. The emptiness there was extraordinarily beneficial for the acoustics. Day by day, Beatrice’s playing kept the name of Lladó alive and well. But first, another man arrived.

This other man was a gentleman who did not spit and did not scratch himself anywhere. He was tall, well-fed, robust, nattily dressed in an expensive tropical suit, and carried a briefcase that was too large for a traveling salesman and too small for a captain of industry. What did he want of me? Was he an insurance man? Unlikely. Such companies employ agents who dress differently depending on the clientele they serve. This visitor didn’t seem to be observing any rules of social mimicry. Was he a writer hoping I would type a manuscript? That would be a blessing. The piano man hadn’t taken away my typewriter — I told him that it wasn’t my property, that I was paying off installments on it. Businesses are willing to respect such arrangements. No, this new gentleman was not a writer in my exalted sense of the term. He came from the Reich; the Consul had sent him to me with greetings and a cordial inquiry as to how things were going. As he spoke these words I led him into our bare living quarters, and he looked around with quizzical glances. I hastened to ask him to ignore the sparseness of our surroundings, adding that we were expecting painters to arrive tomorrow to do the whole flat. Tomorrow? Well, within the next few days; here in Spain one must learn to be patient.

The gentleman from the Reich: “Our Consul has not misinformed me. Your situation is lousy, and you have a certain quick-wittedness about you. Painters or paper hangers tomorrow? Clever of you. That’s why I’m here.”