Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Apparently it took a while before the three booksellers suspected a fly in the ointment. Then they must have burst out in gales of laughter, which the American completely failed to understand until they explained everything down to the last detail. This inventor of a pioneering new method of language instruction was a highly imaginative writer of verses, a failure at everything he undertook, not to say a clever con man. As for his teaching method, it was named with his typical wittiness after the single piece of furniture that Don Vigo owned, because he was living in very dire straits. Things would get even worse for him if he didn’t soon declare loyalty to the Führer . Happily, though, there were still ways and means to remind a German living in foreign climes of his patriotic duty. We’re all familiar with this now-broken record, one that is getting glued back together again as Vigoleis writes down these words.

According to reports, the American broke down in tears. First of all, because his dream had been shattered, and also because he no doubt felt sorry for me. He had indeed taken a strong liking to me. His character was soft and as yet unspoiled by his encounter with Europe, and thus my joke affected him all the more bitterly. In the midst of his tearful anger and impotence, he showed them his father’s checkbook, explaining that he was a millionaire. Just a single word from me, and he could have furnished my entire apartment, easily ten times the value of the single-chair classroom. But now this! “What a shame!” He could never look me in the face again, I had betrayed his confidence, I had exploited his thirst for knowledge and, worse still, his ignorance. He felt just generally ashamed, of himself and of me. His world was collapsing…

Let us put it more calmly: the only thing that was collapsing was our borrowed chair.

Thus far the report from one of the three German bookstore gentlemen.

I do not know what later became of this duped hero of my recollections. In any case he left the island immediately in disgust. Did he remember his teacher on the General’s Street, holding forth as he paced back and forth in front of him? Did he later sit at the feet of Jaspers and Heidegger, those two luminaries of decidedly non-improvised existentialism, and listen raptly as they held forth on “the being-at-hand and being-on-hand of our state of being thrown into the world”? Without any doubt, my private seminar was more digestible. On the other hand, our chair had collapsed under my disciple, just as if it were the three-legged one from the House of Sureda.

“Few people write,” says Schopenhauer in his treatise on writing and good style, “in the way an architect builds, by sketching out a preliminary plan and thinking through every detail. Most writers go about their work as if playing dominoes. In this game, one piece fits another partly by intention, partly by chance. And that is how their sentences and their context follow one upon another. They hardly ever know what the finished product will look like, or what it will all mean. Many of them honestly don’t know, and they write the way coral polyps construct their colonies, by adding sentence to sentence and clause to clause, according to some inscrutable divine design…”

The coral polyp that constructed our insular destiny, setting storey upon blooming storey in such a way that we often wondered what it all meant — this metaphorical animal finally located a table to add to our chair. That is to say, it caused me to locate one, and I paid for it with money that I amassed by my fraudulent career as a Führer , working now more crassly and angrily than ever as a result of the triumph of that other Führer . It was a remarkable table, and not only because of its origins. It served as a writing surface for the poet Marsman, who later became my great literary friend, and also for other notables of Dutch literature, all of whom wrote immortal words on it. It was used by the imperial-democratic Count Harry Kessler for part of his memoirs, and by the transhistorical Count Hermann Keyserling for a postcard sent to his wife, who was being held hostage by Goebbels inside his own “School of Wisdom.”

And Vigoleis?

He, too, added sentence to sentence and clause to clause on this tabletop, and he rhymed “love” with “stars above” and “newt” with “shoot” and many other things besides. None of this granted him immortality, but it made him a fitting target for the Nazis’ bullets.

The young American remained among the missing; our single chair remained an orphan. Worry held sway in our apartment, along with sadness and a mood of Quo vadis ? Then Pedro arrived, danced his paso doble for us, snapped his tongue and his fingers, and said, “Come with me to Valldemosa! Why stay here without any furniture and without a bed? We still own a cottage in the village that used to belong to a nanny. It’ll be swell out there. And it’s about time that you made the acquaintance of Don José, the former private physician of His Royal-Imperial Majesty, Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria.”

He didn’t have to say this twice. We locked the apartment and went out to Valldemosa, where Chopin and George Sand spent their famous tragic winter of love in the Sureda family cloister, and where now a small colony of emigrants were causing no less irritation than the hard-pressed lovers had done a whole century previous. George Sand strolled around the village wearing trousers, and hiked across the moonlit mountains in no more than a shirt. Now, Pedro told us, a German nobleman was trying to emulate her by claiming that he was the son-in-law of Franz von Papen. He didn’t wear trousers, and the shorts that were meant to cover his aristocratic nakedness were tailored in such a way that the legs ended exactly where they began; out came His Excellency’s long, hairy gams, always powdered to prevent premature tanning. Tanning drove him crazy, because it reminded him of his “brown” father-in-law, whom he would rather disown except for his stable of racing horses. Otherwise, this powered nobleman was a friendly fellow who bred poultry, collected stamps, and taught German to our friend Paquito, the son of the ducal private physician. Teaching German is what almost all the emigrants did. They converted their mother tongue into a tongue that would earn them their bread, for most of them had been unable to smuggle anything else out of the Third Reich.

The nanny’s cottage, now the property of Don Juan Sureda, was on the Calle de la Amargura, Number 11. Amargura means “bitterness, sourness,” but also “worry and trouble, woe, weariness, and lovesickness.” It connotes all that is in the highest degree painful, anxious, and objectionable; with some authors it means disease, distress, and dismay, displeasure, discontent, and disaster. That little word contains so much, and much of what it contains is what the Suredas had to go through: Papá, Mamá, the deceased, the living, and the surviving children. This gives them the right to have a little street named after their fate, especially when you consider that in Palma a whole palace still bears their family name.

An old, dented, sickly-blue bus stood with a head of steam on the Plaza Olivar when we began our journey with our minuscule baggage. Because of the steam, we couldn’t depart. The engine was overheated, bursting the radiator. They would have to do some drilling, boring, hammering, and soldering, the bus-line manager told us. He used this opportunity to change a tire, too; that would obviate the need to perform this operation on the way to Valldemosa. The tire, he said, was bound to blow out otherwise, without any doubt. “Any doubt about it?” he asked a passenger whose expression doubtless conveyed certain doubts. This fellow shrugged his shoulders, walked three paces to the nearest tavern, clapped his hands, and was served his coffee. The Spaniard likes to have his café close at hand, and his bus stop close to a café.