Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

On certain occasions these Rhine Maidens — the very personification of humility and watery contentment — became a nuisance. There was, for example, a woman from England, one of the thousand old and decrepit ladies who came across the Mediterranean to Mallorca every winter with the regularity of migrating birds. This one had been coming to Valldemosa for many years for recuperation in Don José’s abode. Doña Clara, the physician’s niece and caretaker, had converted the property into a pensión , a kind of private sanatorium named “ Hospedage del Artista ,” which she presided over. Not everyone was permitted to enter a name in the guest book; you had to be an artist, or an invalid, or mentally ill. Once these conditions were fulfilled, you could enjoy a heavenly stay with Don José and Doña Clara. This British hybrid lady too, partly splenetic and partly diabetic, referred to the amazing couple’s hospedage as her second home. But she had never been inside the copa . As a proper lady she refrained from such forms of domestic intimacy. Then one day she had a moment of weakness and entered the pantry to sneak a bite to eat — Don José was keeping her on a strict diet — and what did she see? Her gaze suddenly perceived a preliminary phase of human existence, slowly revolving twofold upon itself in a shimmering greenish medium inside a glass jar, as in a dream. Was this salmon in vinegar and oil? Curried lobster in jelly?

The lady screams and faints away. Tumbling to the floor she knocks over a pot of marinated olives, and then she herself metamorphoses into a ghostly Rhine Maiden. The house personnel rush to her aid. Don José, who cannot bear the sight of a corpse, is staggering. Paquito and Manolo, Doña Clara’s very grown-up sons, give their attention to the doctor. Clarita, as her friends call Doña Clara, bends over the lady who is presumed dead.

Bobby, a German friend of the family, a poor emigré artist with Valldemosan experience who, to the delight of the establishment, was a walking expert in first aid — Bobby soon revived the lady on the floor. She immediately called for a taxi to Palma, and on the very same evening she boarded ship for the mainland. Mandrakes with bulbous heads do not belong inside pickle jars, much less in the copa of a convalescent home.

“That’s how it goes,” said Don José, “when patients don’t follow my instructions. Now she’ll never come back, and I could have made her healthy.”

No patient had ever died under the hands of this physician. How many doctors can say that of themselves? Does this suggest that Don José was a miracle worker, or rather a fake and a quacksalver perhaps in league with Mamú’s Christian Science ladies? Or was his success due to the fact that he had no patients except for His Highness, who had long since laid himself down to die at Brandeis Castle? Don José had more patients than was beneficial for his hobbies, and in a larger area of the island than his mule could reach: in the Valley, across the mountains, in Sóller, in Deyá, even in Palma. His name was in excellent repute everywhere. And yet he hated the sight of blood, and looking at a dead body was the living end for him. A person, he said, should die alone; dying was a completely personal matter. Like the animals, no one should make a fuss about it. He was a great friend to mankind, and all the more so in order to speak and act as he did.

Whenever he was summoned to the bedside of a patient whose hours were numbered, whose fate was already in the hands of Almighty God and who had begun the death struggle, our doctor always fainted. On such occasions the peasants or fishermen had a hard time lifting this portly gentleman, and in the process forgot about their own dying relative. It is well known how dependent poor folk are on the local doctor, pastor, and schoolteacher, especially in countries where these are the only people who can read and write, and sometimes not even that. They would feel relieved if Don José came to with the aid of age-old nostrums and magic amulets and, strengthened with a gulp from the porrón , could finally be heaved up onto his mule. “Hurrah, saved again!” How awful it would be if the doctor had croaked under our noses! Croaking, in the meantime, had been taken care of in selfless fashion by the patient, thereby fulfilling the will of the Almighty, who disdains the ministrations of even the most expert of medicine men. This, by the way, was also Don Juan’s opinion as a strict Catholic, and it was a view shared by our own private physician in Palma, the equally congenial Dr. Solivellas, who never concealed from his patients that he was first and foremost a Catholic, and then a doctor.

Don José collected stamps the normal way, with the aid of a scalpel that feared the sight of blood. And he collected specimens of human nature with the aid of a wax nose. He practiced applied psychology, but without succumbing to the ridiculous ambition of competing with his bottom-feeding colleagues in a search for the primordial origins of human consciousness. He was at a far cry from such presumptuousness. He did not plumb the depths; he avoided the abysses where physician and patient become indistinguishable, and out of which they emerge with transposed heads, requiring both of them to undertake an even more dangerous descent into the inferno. Don José put all such experiments behind him. He had studied it all in Barcelona, where he was respected for his scholarly publications and deemed worthy of an academic career. The great histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal had just taken notice of him when the calamity occurred. Don José fell in love; he looked deeply into the eyes of his novia , and even more deeply into her soul, but failed to observe that at the surface his girlfriend was attached to another guy. This discovery broke his heart and shattered his trust in the science of the human soul. Henri-Frédéric Amiel went through similar crushing experiences, but his natural cynicism provided him with a diving suit resistant to the pressures of the depths. Don José was no cynic. He remained outwardly calm, made no further mistakes, left the mainland, became a country doctor in Valldemosa — and took care of the rest with his wax nose.

We are seated at table, delighting in the exquisite tiny morsels Doña Clara is serving up at a meal with at least 24 courses. Her cooking is famous on the whole island. The diners are chattering and arguing, there is excellent wine and carefully prepared dietary dishes for the clinical guests. Suddenly Don José arises and leaves this table d’hôte that he insists upon for the main meals in his establishment. We all assume that he has gone out to saddle his mule and ride off to visit a patient somewhere beyond the hills. But he returns after only a few minutes, and resumes his seat at table. But look — what has happened? Don José’s features have changed. Is he the victim of a spontaneous hypertrophy of the bodily extremities? Doctors speak of “acromegaly” when certain parts of the body suddenly become enlarged as a result of a disease of the pituitary gland. This is a mysterious organic process, as yet little understood by the medical profession. Don José’s nose is swollen, reddened by a network of capillaries, and now three or even four times as long as before. Don José performs his transformation into a carnivalesque pathological specimen, but not by means of a clever tweaking of his hypophysis — that would mean plunging into the inscrutable depths. No, for this purpose José installs a prosthesis, in common parlance a wax nose, and one might say that there is no more superficial solution to the problem. Don José is interested in the reactions of ordinary people who visit his house, most of whom are his patients, to this miraculous change in his appearance. He then draws his conclusions, which can be called infallible. He is particularly pleased by reactions of acute fright. He told us of one instance — thereby violating medical secrecy out of sheer professional egotism, a trait that he normally lacked — when the sight of a new nose emerging from behind his handkerchief suddenly caused a lady of high noble standing suddenly to pass a tapeworm. Which is to say, the nose had an anthelmintic effect, whereas traditional applications of anesthetics had been unable to dislodge the parasite from its aristocratic hostess. On another occasion, Don José forgot to remove his waxen proboscis when, while sipping his café negro , he was suddenly summoned to attend to a patient. The patient took such a fright at his appearance that it was no longer necessary to apply the leeches he had brought with him. The blood clot broke up by itself, and the patient recovered then and there.