Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

There I stood, agape. There Pepe stood, agape. Another Spaniard came down the gangplank, holding his pavo so tightly under his arm that the wart-covered bird was pale with near-asphyxiation. Then came a spindly English lady, carefully tapping her way down the plank with her umbrella. Next, a few porters, a pile of baggage, and suddenly the Ciudad de Palma was empty. No sign of Albert Helman. On the way back home I couldn’t help thinking of that young fellow in the fox-trimmed overcoat who had set foot on our island bearing a quite amazing suitcase.

A few days later I received another note in Helman’s handwriting. This time it was a letter with a musical emblem printed at the top that made me think of boy-scouting, a mode of existence that is completely lacking in Helman, either genonymously or pseudonymously. Indeed, in spite of his extensive travels and his cosmopolitan ways he is anything but a guitar-strumming hiker in this world. The letter bore the cancellation: Valldemosa. The writer expressed his regrets at not having met me at the pier, and since the only address he had for me was that of my post-office box, he was unable to look me up. Now he would be expecting me at such-and-such a time at the Café Alhambra. I would recognize him by the means he had previously indicated, except that this time the albatross would be lying open on the marble table at which I would easily find him, although I might mistake him for a Spaniard.

The albatross on the table?! Open?! Had he slaughtered the bird? His jungle instincts had obviously won out, finally smothering his sense of Western high culture. But before I collapsed from fright at the thought, before I could envision a writer tearing the heart out of his Muse in the cruel Mayan cult of his race, the scales suddenly fell from my eyes: Helman’s albatross was a book. It had to be a book! And with the jubilation of a triumphant explorer I cried out to Beatrice, “Beatrice, Helman’s albatross is a book! The writer is traveling with a book!”

“Of course it’s a book. An Albatross Edition. What did you think it was?”

Of course it’s a book. A writer travels with a book, not with a puta or with an animal under his arm. I was the incorrigible ignoramus, a guy eternally slow on the uptake and with frightful gaps in his education that were embarrassing even amid an ambience of palm trees. This was the year1933, I was already thirty years of age, and I still hadn’t realized that books got printed in editions other than the old Tauchnitz series. As yet I knew nothing of the growing menagerie of animals in the publishing world: the Penguins, Zebras, Albatrosses, Salamanders, Kangaroos, Bantam hens, and Owls. What is more, if I may be permitted this damning admission, I was fully conscious of my ignorance. Such willful stupidity is bound to backfire sooner or later. It can get you into unpleasant situations, and is easily misunderstood. There is always somebody ready to raise a finger and single you out as woefully uninformed. For Vigoleis the only remaining pious consolation lies in occasionally being ahead of the others on the basis of his second, prophetic sight, not the sight that peers through the eye-slits of a mask. For instance, at this very moment I have a feeling that somewhere in the world a publisher, bankrupt from trying to sell volumes by precocious young poets, is preparing a series called “Mole Editions,” with which he will blindly attempt to tunnel through the steadily increasing mounds of masterpieces of world literature, in the process throwing up mounds of his own that will indicate exactly where the digging is good, with the result that literary merchants from all continents will follow him with their shovels at the ready. Poor Vigoleis! You can have such vague dreams, but your mediocre education has blinded you to what any educated man should know.

Having now mentioned this gap in my education, I sense that the moment has once again arrived for my reader — whom I continue to address, although he ought not to concern me personally at all, in a style that was common and pleasing in a past century — to confront me with the vexing question of just what an unfortunate gap in my education and my relations with the writer Helman — whom I met at the appointed hour at the Café Alhambra, seated with the mien of an intellectual and with Spanish nonchalance at a marble table, a modern-day Ancient Mariner casting his roving eye past his Albatross toward any stunning female who might enter the premises — it’s again time for my reader to inquire just what these topics might have to do with the young man and his Saratoga bag. Come to think of it, what does anything in this life of ours have to do with anything else? What has the snorkel got to do with Helman? Or Helman with the young man? Or again, the young man with Vigoleis? If all of this were not connected somehow to the idea of education, I could easily separate concept from content. But I prefer to approach the heart of the matter using the same method that I apply in all my attempts at gaining knowledge as well as in the process of forgetting what I know. We must all have patience. As so often, the detour will prove to be the quickest way. Our present detour can lead us directly back to our domestic quarters on the General’s Street. My reader has nothing to fear. No more gobbling turkeys will cut the thread of my narrative, although there are plenty of them tied to the balconies around us, fattening up for the Holy Night of their sacrificial death.

This was a time when we had not yet obtained new furniture. Our apartment was as virginal as on the day we first moved in. Wooden crates were the best we could do to simulate bourgeois respectability. Only the Lladó with its beauteous sounds hove up like a bowsprit above the swells of the void. The little Swabian and the two tall North Germans, who collectively called themselves “Hasenbank, Schmidt & Kleinschmidt, German Booksellers” with limited liability and unlimited trustworthiness, provided us with scrap paper for a few centimos per kilo, most of it unsaleable newspapers from the Third Reich. Scrunched up in a pile of clothes, this made for a quite comfortable bed, one that we could easily fluff up with just a few kicks, although the arrangement had no further advantages at all. My reader can no doubt imagine what it means to go on living after you have lost practically everything. Today, when the world around us is a heap of rubble and people are living in caves, this may not seem like such a dreadful set of circumstances. But at the time we had no psychological recourse to “normalcy,” such as is felt by someone whose house has been bombed to the ground. Thus we lived on in the metaphysical space that is situated somewhere above the worldly struggle for existence, the place that Nietzsche, that bourgeois anti-bourgeois, calls the only proper setting for obtaining an education. In this sense, Vigoleis can be said to be a truly educated man. But rather than being a consistent disciple of the great iconoclast Nietzsche, he was a fellow equipped with a talent for clever mimicry, and as such a faithful pupil of the philosopher Max Scheler.

But let us pass over these hybrid intellects. They could once again retard our current chapter, and perhaps I can give them their due in a later section. It is high time that I introduced Mister Hutchinson. As an island customer with an open wallet, he deserves certain privileges. Besides, by letting him finally take the stage I shall be fulfilling my duty of politeness towards my reader. The American, on his part, fulfilled his own polite duty by announcing his name “Hutchinson,” as if responding to a stage cue. I myself — dramatist, actor, and prompter all in one person — had no need for a special cue. I bowed slightly and said, “Vigoleis.” Both of us were very pleased to meet each other.