Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Screaming now, I told this guy that if he didn’t leave at once I would throw him out. And then the happy phrase suddenly occurred to me like a cue from out of my subconscious, where it had lain dormant for years. “Get a move on!”

During this historical, courageous moment in my life, my vision suddenly blurred. I saw before me the image of three clenched fists: the double fist of the Honduran general, and the no less frighteningly cramped fist of my brother Jupp— Oh childhood, oh disappearing world of charm ! The Nazi recruiter must have also seen this last magical fist getting clenched, for before I could shout my thundering threat for the third time, this time in a powerful baritone, as if I myself were the master and he the muzhik, the slave, the ox under the yoke, the man had already tossed all the documents into his briefcase and snatched up his hat. At first trying the wrong door, since our place was uniformly empty, he finally hurried away muttering dismal threats. I shall refrain from recording those threats here, for we shall later have the opportunity to recount how they were put into practice.

The Reich Commissioner left his cigarette case — it was made of pure gold — on our book crate. Without claiming a reward, I returned it the next day to the consulate. But the gentleman had not forgotten to take his precipitous leave with a ringing “ Heil Hitler !”

Beatrice came home earlier than usual, so I didn’t have time to polish the floor. With her strange notions of floors and how to walk on them, she immediately reached for the waxing mop. I gave her the latest news, explaining that once again I had just tossed out the window a completely furnished apartment, 1000 pesetas a month, and a genuine Reich Commissioner.

Beatrice sniffed, catching the aroma of the expensive cigarette.

“Bullet-proof vests — that’s the first thing we have to go out and buy. Right now that’s more important than a bed.”

I begged to differ. Bullet-proof vests? Nonsense. On this island the Nazis are using poison.

My prediction that in the long run events here would not at all turn out to be terrifying appears to be incorrect, for long before the Civil War broke out, we arrived in very dire straits. Have I consciously misled my reader in order to keep up his interest? And what’s with that boastful business in my Prologue about “my having a say in the matter”?

That’s not working very well. For one thing, I have overestimated my powers of memory, and for another, I have underestimated the Nazis. Yet in order to detoxify the atmosphere I shall now introduce a harmless youth who also smokes expensive cheroots from a golden quiver. He will get a chapter all his own, and even his own chair to sit on.

The youth’s name is Hutchinson, George Brewis Hutchinson. “George” is common enough, there’s nothing special about it. But “Brewis” was a Christian name I had never heard of. I learned that it meant “brew,” as in soup — a kind of bouillon from meat extract. And this was the name he went by.

He’s an American, he’s consumptive, he is in possession of a college degree from Princeton University, as well as of a head of fiery-red hair that would be the envy of any woman who sought salvation in cosmetic rinses. But perhaps it is best if I put all of this in the past tense, for he died long ago. His tuberculosis was not of the benign sort, and he was given to profligate habits beyond those of the intellectual kind. It even seems likely that it was his organic degeneration that drove him into an adventurous life with women, with a knowledge of eternal, transcendent matters, and, for that matter, with the likes of Vigoleis. Yet we shall not allow suppositions concerning his later destiny to prompt our memorializing of the man by name. The split within his personality was at the time so marked that it could have given rise to all kinds of misdeeds. Besides, in these recollections every person makes his appearance with the features that he himself presented to me.

No, I have nothing scandalous to report about this young man, no incidents that would prompt the future student at a German university to cross swords with me or, since he was a Catholic, to engage me in fisticuffs. Quite the contrary: I owe to him the idea for one of my inventions. My inventions! They would deserve an entire chapter of my recollections, but here I shall mention them only in passing. Vigoleisian inventions have not taken human progress a single step further, but only because they have never been put to practical use as I conceived them. In cases where they have benefited civilization anyway, such as gunpowder, they were invented by someone else. Nevertheless, I have repeatedly experienced the elation of creative moments, and that is what is most important to me.

While I’m at it, I should add that right at the beginning of Hitler’s war I got a whiff of the whole tragedy of Vigoleis’ career as a failed inventor. The two of us, every day becoming more and more stateless as victims of the brown behemoth, anxiously followed the reports of the increasing threat posed by German U-boats. In those days we were living with tacit political reservations, but with personal security, in Portugal at the viticultural and poetic Pascoaes Castle, a name that has already made fleeting appearances in these pages. The master’s aged mother — she was approaching one hundred — liked to gather numerous important people at her hospitable table — to the consternation of her son, who constantly tried to avoid such invasions, many of which occurred with the purpose of seeing him up close, the great mystic, and listening to his prophetic pronouncements.

At one of these magnificently improvised meals, arranged by the fascinatingly ugly, perky, and almost dwarf-sized Doña Carlota, the widow of the last peer of the last King of Portugal, I had the opportunity to expound, to an audience of several dozen attentive listeners, my theory of underwater breathing mechanisms in diving vessels. My ideas arose during the act of speaking, from sheer ad-hoc inspiration. It was a display of technology tinged with mysticism, abetted by my consumption of exquisite food and drink — or did I not owe my eloquence, rather, to Justina, the head cook, who may have been in league with the Devil and his Black Art of culinary wiles? My solution to the problem was as follows: build anti-submarines with a long hose attached to a buoy floating on the surface. The hose would serve as an extended air passage for renewing the oxygen supply, obviating the need for the vessel to surface. I vividly recall that I got this idea from seeing Doña Carlota’s garden hose, several hundred meters long, lying totally useless in her yard summer and winter with a thousand punctures and leaks, stretching from her fonte dos golfinhos to her beds of roses and groves of fig trees, an element of Nature like a root or a vine. My lecture, which I illustrated with clever waving of my table napkin, made sense to many of my listeners. A navy lieutenant in particular, who was famous for having suppressed an uprising on the island of Madeira within firing range of his pocket destroyer, nodded in assent. Dependent as I am on an echo for igniting the spark of my inspiration, I got more and more excited. After just one or two more gulps of wine my invention was complete. It was up to the admiralty to put the thing into practice.

Accordingly, I expressed the desire to rush immediately to Lisbon, about 500 kilometers from the scene of my hydrostatic “Eureka!” using the senhora’s automobile — with her kind permission, of course. I would go to the capital and visit the British Embassy, where I would offer His Majesty’s Navy my invention, still warm from the incubator and as belated thanks for my evacuation from the Island of Second Sight. That trip would mean the triumph of my idea. But this request of mine had a sobering effect on the assembled dinner guests. As raptly attentive as they had been during my presentation, now they began to think I was crazy. They whispered to each other that I was a jokester, a comical fellow who had gone through all kinds of madcap experiences on the island and who was obviously capable of creating such antics right here and now. At this moment the little dinner waiter Victorino was serving the guests backwards with his right hand, because with his left hand he was trying to cover a hole in his trousers, although his white glove was just as conspicuous as the shirt flap it was meant to conceal. The guests urged him to refill my glass. No one was willing to court embarrassment among the higher authorities on my account. All of a sudden the Pascoaes Castle, normally the scene of all kinds of excess, became a bastion of prudence. This turn of events quickly sobered me up, too. And as always when I have plunged from the heights of creativity, I considered both myself and my brainchild completely bonkers. I mumbled something about the ratonera speculum of the poet Pio Baroja (a mousetrap invented by the poet, designed to make the animal fall on its mirror image), and reached for consolation to the source of my inspiration, the dinner oporto, the wine from the sands of Collares that we already knew from Mamú’s table, and the heady, fruity Vinho Verde from Pascoaes’ own castle vineyard, a label already familiar to us from feasts at Mamú’s. Pascoaes, an Icarus-type himself, reassured me by referring to that misunderstood mythical genius, and by holding forth on the dubiousness and futility of all technological activity, a subject that looms large in his works. Be that as it may, he writes these works not by candlelight or in the glassy twilight of the tear-shaped lamps he praises so often, but beneath a naked 100-watt Philips bulb.