Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

A clip-clopping of horses’ hoofs. Equestrians? A berlin comes speeding up, there are shouts of olé! and olá !—“We know you, neighbors from Son Maroig, Miramar, Son Tatx, Es Mirabo! Where are you off to with your steaming steeds?” “To Palma, to the ship!” “The ship? To Barcelona?” “Yes, and then on to London, art exhibition, Tate Gallery, Turner!” “Turner? Caramba !”—“Won’t you join us? We’re in a hurry!”

Papá and Mamá are one heart and one soul, and both of these organs throb only for art. They get in, the carriage rushes on downhill. In Palma the members of the Art Club board the ship, in Barcelona the Suredas purchase necessities for the remainder of the junket, and in London they get undressed, then re-dressed in the proper outfits.

Back home the majordomo greets the first guests — and also the last ones, as the perfect guardian of door, home, and entire premises that he is. His livery buttons shine. His mutton chops are at the ready for all eventualities. Just a short while, then just a short while longer — the Princess and Don Juan should be back any moment now. Yet no matter how politely this loyal servant repeats his announcement of “just a short while,” the hour finally arrives when even the greatest time-killer is forced to notice that the clock is no longer striking. Besides, empty stomachs are making their presence felt.

As the moon rose at midnight and climbed above the Teix to enclose with its ghostly light the Valley of the Muza and the Royal Suredan charterhouse, the majordomo finally declared that the “short while” had expired, and that the host and hostess were now surely on their way home. But they didn’t come home. Had something happened to them? Had they fallen into a gorge? Why didn’t the servants go outside with lanterns and search for the princely couple in the darkest declivities? Oh, those two! They are both romantic souls, nothing is wrong. They’ve probably decided on the spot to saddle up a pair of donkeys, clamber up the Puig Mayor, and enjoy the world-famous sunrise. Or maybe they’ve gone off to play l’hombre at their neighbor’s palace, or… or… there were so many possibilities, and why should anybody worry? Finally, general departure: the horse carriages are summoned, those who arrived by donkey throw their legs over the albarde , and now they all leave fond greetings to Doña Pilar and Don Juan. Bona nit!

The majordomo locked the doors, dismissed the servants for the night, and lay down on his pillow. The next day, he continued to follow his orders: the Princess would give him further instructions when the couple came home. He waited.

A few days later a brief message arrived from Papá and Mamá to the children from Barcelona: they were on their way to London. “Turner!” “Turner?” The majordomo, too, had no idea what this meant. But he had his orders: wait for more orders. Which he did. Then the children heard nothing more. No one heard a single word from the parents who had absconded from the palace. Were they really in England? And who or what was “Turner”? The curate in Valldemosa, an educated man, figured out meanwhile that a Turner is someone who does gymnastics. It was a German word, coined in Germany. So now Don Juan and his princess were doing gymnastics in London — and why not? This wasn’t the craziest thing they had ever done.

Each servant, male and female, was assigned to one of the children. There were more than a dozen to be taken care of before winter arrived. The parents were simply gone. The majordomo obeyed his orders, refusing to act contrary to the wishes of his master and mistress. The servants dispersed and sought employment elsewhere, in order to share their bread with the abandoned children. For their part the children got older, went wild, and turned into a marauding band that came to be feared in the whole valley, not unlike the horde of Sureda dogs that had menaced nighttime Palma. Pedro said that this was the greatest time of his life, this interregnum with no Papá and no Mamá, no hearth and no home.

This paradisiacal situation lasted two years. Then their parents came back home, artistically edified and enriched. Besides Turner, who was in fact a painter and not the gymnast that his name would suggest, they had seen a great deal of art: the Elgin Marbles, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portraits of children, the portraits of aristocrats by Thomas Gainsborough. Time passed quickly. They picked up their children from the servants living nearby. How they had grown! And almost all of them, Jacobo, Pedro, Pazzis, were doing art! It had to be in the blood. Several children had died, and this cast a temporary pall over the happy reunion.

The majordomo delivered his report: nothing had happened. “You faithful servant!” cried Don Juan. “You heart of gold,” the Princess added with emotion. “Unlock the door!” The mutton-chopped steward did as he was bidden and cleared the table, on which certain things had changed over the course of two years. The silver was tarnished, the damask tablecloth was yellowed, and the flowers wilted as at an abandoned gravesite. Underneath the covers, the faux sheep cheese from Mahón sat in mummified condition. There were dead flies, desiccated spiders, bees, wasps, cobwebs, the smell of decay. In a word: a pitiful memento mori .

Some weeks later, Don Juan’s personal spoils from their artistic voyage arrived in Valldemosa. Heavy crates were carried into the cloister. The Elgin Marbles? No, it was a cargo of exhibition catalogues, theater programs, tickets, menus, newspapers, and brochures. Two years’ worth of alibis for Don Juan. Had there been a murder? Was somebody plotting against him? He needed only to reach into one of his crates from England, and his head was free from the noose. Neither Don Juan nor the Princess was ever accused of a crime committed during their two-year absence. And no one came forward to accuse them of a crime against their own family.

That’s how people get poor. And yet the final collapse arrived unexpectedly.

The banker dispatched an urgent messenger to the Palace of the Kings of Mallorca in Valldemosa, where Don Juan was reading his Quevedo, where the Princess painted her pictures, and where Pedro and his brothers played soccer with the skulls of dead Moorish sheiks, Fatimas, and eunuchs that they had dug up in the crypts, to their father’s horror. The banker’s emissary was a classic Messenger of Doom, the kind one reads about in novels or, better yet, gets to see on the tragic stage. His arrival had an effect like a sudden smack at a beehive. People began rushing about, back and forth. They bumped against each other. They shouted. They issued orders. It was like the old times of the Moorish hegemony, when the family first took on the cognomen Verdugo. Had the infidel once again arrived at the gates? Could one again hear shouts from the ramparts: “Death to the Castilians! Death to the Suredas!”?

The event signified peril for the House of Sureda, but this time Mohammed had not sent his Moorish scimitars to besiege the charterhouse. Instead, he sent one of his minor prophets, the botones from one of the Palma gentlemen’s clubs, to deliver the sad news. The cloister would be foreclosed the very next day, the entire property auctioned off. Don Juan! Save all the irreplaceable works of art that you can!

Don Juan’s banker had got wind of the enforced auction, and decided to warn his friend.

Don Juan Sureda Bimer of the House of Verdugo sounded his horn and called down from the battlements of his castle, “The enemy is approaching! Save the valuables of the Palace of the Catholic Kings of Aragón and Mallorca! To the boxes!”

Large and small, major- and minor-domo, botones , hired hands, maids, hangers-on — each was given an assignment. Don Juan personally wrote out tags to be placed on beds, chairs, plates, and platters which famous personages had slept in, sat on, or eaten from. Then everything was carried over to one of the nursemaids’ houses at 11 Street of Bitterness. The naming of this street was a triumph of local political premonition, for now a nameless destiny was being fulfilled within its confines. Every single item that was of value in Don Juan’s eyes got lugged over to the nursemaid’s abode and deposited there, piled up in wild haste. The treasures were heaped on top of each other; the floors sagged under their weight; chairs and baskets jutted forth from the windows. There were boxes containing porcelain, hundreds of salon chairs, armchairs, and stools, plus mattresses piled one upon the other like so many layers of fossilized strata. And then Don Juan’s anxiously hoarded collection of alibis: boxes, more boxes, chests, packages — the sweat poured all night long.