Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Everyone knows that the “snorkel” was invented and deployed a few years later by the German Navy. There can be no question of a theft of intellectual property — or was my idea somehow leaked from the dining hall of the Casa de Pascoaes to the Führer’s main headquarters? Besides, the British naval attaché would hardly have considered me a “man of the moment.” Enfin , you are a clever inventor, Vigoleis, but what has all this got to do with the youth who was supposed to be the subject of this chapter? Well, not much, I’ll admit. This youth was the point of departure for another kind of snorkeling expedition, one that can once again reveal the melancholy misapprehension of intellectual endeavor. And the fellow who came away from it in sobered condition couldn’t even seek solace in a wine glass.

I think it was a morning in November. At any rate I am certain that the first year of the Third Reich was not yet behind us, and I was standing on the jetty that stretched far out into the Bay of Palma, watching intently the difficult docking maneuver of the Ciudad de Palma , which ferried passengers to and from the mainland. I was expecting a guest I had been corresponding with on literary matters, but whom I had never met in person. The person in question was the writer Albert Helman, whom I have mentioned before. His pseudonym was by this time as transparent as the secrets it was meant to conceal. Disgusted with the culture of Holland — he was a native of Surinam — he was living in voluntary exile, perhaps the bitterest form of banishment, on a hilltop near Barcelona, out in the uplands of San Cugar del Vallés. A few days earlier I had received a postcard in his minuscule hand, announcing his arrival. He would be sailing with the Ciudad de Palma , and I would recognize him by means of an albatross. I found this odd — not because of the animal qua animal, but because of this particular animal. We can never visualize Saint Jerome without his lion from the Desert of Chalcis. The writer of the Apocalypse is often depicted with an eagle hovering above his head. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson has entered literary history with his cockatoos and his araras, which were most definitely not his inspiring muses, as one envious rival once claimed. Minnesingers look out at us from the illuminated manuscripts carrying sparrow-hawks on their outstretched fingers — so why not Helman with an animal, too? But an albatross? He would be carrying the bird under his arm, if I had understood his postcard correctly. I knew the West Indian stories by this exotic fellow, Het euvel gods , and above all his masterpiece, the dramatic short novel Mijn aap schreit . Thinking analogically, I expected that if the writer were indeed accompanied by an animal, it would be with his pitiful monkey on one shoulder. Yet ever in search of variety — this was his lot in life — he had no doubt traded in his humanoid pet for the bird that traverses the world’s oceans. The very idea of domesticating such an animal was enough to command deep respect. Be that as it may, monkey or albatross, it would be well-nigh impossible to mistake him as he stepped out on the gangplank.

Meantime the docking process finished. Many people streamed forth on land, especially foreigners, for Mallorca was getting more and more popular. The international travel agencies were touting the Balearics as a rendezvous for their customers. Only a few proud Spaniards could be sighted among the passengers, and most of these were carrying turkeys under their arms, culinary delicacies that they snapped up more cheaply on the mainland than on the island. I have already mentioned that the pavo is the Spanish equivalent of the Northern European holiday goose. Tied by foot to an apartment balcony, the incessantly gobbling turkey cocks are force-fed in the open air. You need only to have spent the season of Advent in the old section of a Spanish city, gobbled at from every level of houses whose balconies feature cacophonous turkey debates from early morning to sundown, to prefer the Feast of the Resurrection of the Lord and its festive bullfights to the miracle of the Savior’s Birth. For long before the wattled bird has been shoved into the baker’s oven, you have become so heartily angry at the beasts that you lose all the joy of the meal.

In any case, if Helman had chosen a turkey instead of an albatross as a poetic travel companion, I would have had a very hard time picking him out in the crowd. Assisted by my buddy Pepe, a harbor rat from Barceló Street, I kept a strict lookout for the fowler from the West Indian jungle, but we espied not a single poetic personage with an albatross under his arm. But wait! Maybe he had the bird attached to a string like a kid’s balloon, so it could circle around in the air above everybody on the dock! If we followed the string down to the man’s finger, it would be a simple matter to single out our exotic traveler from amongst the surging masses at dockside. Pepe must have been thinking the same thing, for we both looked upwards to the shimmering white sky, where the only circling fauna were the squawking seagulls, none of them connected by a string to anyone’s finger. I was about to turn on my heel and leave the scene when Pepe tugged my sleeve and pointed to a distinguished-looking gentleman, and I mean a truly elegant fellow. Like all street loiterers, Pepe had a weakness for distinguished-looking persons. Was this the guest I was expecting? The young gentleman strode down the gangplank, but minus any pet animal. We kept him in sight.

He was wearing a light-grey felt hat, the hairy kind preferred by the British, on a full head of fiery-red hair, shiny black shoes with white spats and, apparently in studied color combination, a leather greatcoat with a fox-pelt collar the same color as his hair. This coat would be the envy of any East-Elbian landowner, even down here at 40º latitude, if it were not for the fact that wolf-skin had meantime become the swashbuckling fashion in such circles. In his left hand our man was carrying a suitcase. And what did I see? It was unquestionably a Saratoga bag, all the more certainly since a colorful serape, looped casually through the handle, was hanging down almost to the ground. I must confess with shame that up to that moment I had known such items of baggage only from novels and from a crazy journey once undertaken by Don Juan Sureda. Today I myself own a Saratoga travel bag, and while it may be an exaggerated sense of possessiveness on my part, and although it is long since cracked in several places, I would not give it away for anything. This unique object came to me from the Brazilian estate of Count Werner von der Schulenburg, who at the time was still among the living. He was a member of the Protestant branch of the family, and upon another occasion I shall tell the story of how I inherited his possessions ante mortem .

Pepe and I were the only ones who were slaking our boundless curiosity by observing this unmistakably dandyish personality. Both of us were loiterers with higher aims in life. Pepito’s ambitions were confined, enviably, to doing nothing at all, whereas I, a wretched practitioner of German thoroughness, was still aiming to achieve nothingness by means of action. Our friendship can be explained on the basis of this concept of nada , and our camaraderie lasted until Pepe’s death when the Civil War demanded its hecatombs.

The finery worn by this foreigner, who wasn’t Helman, was just as poorly adapted to the climate as the pith helmet sported by the German who descended the gangplank right behind him. But in contrast to such headgear, he at least didn’t seem ridiculous. This fellow in the greatcoat had style; he exuded the special charm you can encounter in the works of the Portuguese novelist Eça de Queiroz. In his free hand he carried an open wallet out of which, with magical motions of his fingers, he was compensating for whatever he lacked in familiarity with 1000 Words of Spanish . He evidently lacked a great deal, to judge from the number of coins he dropped into the palms of the fellows who always stand in wait at landing piers. He was distributing pesetas in a way that I have always imagined stock dividends getting distributed. To this very day I regret that my personal destiny has been that of a floundering loiterer among mankind rather than a prosperous stockholder or pension swindler.