Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“But we’ll get Vigo to come around, I’ll see to that myself. The main thing is that he has to begin right away to think in Spanish. That’s just the kind of purgative he needs, so he can start working on new thoughts. The little phrases he picks up here in the first few days won’t be enough to start philosophizing with, so there’s no danger of him coming up with some horribly dreary thought-system. On Monday we’ll go buy him an inexpensive textbook at a run-down little German bookstore. That’ll give Vigoleis a chance to hear some sounds from home, so the transition won’t be too sudden. Anton Emmerich hails from Cologne. He’s the real, genuine article, born in the shadow of the Cathedral. He’s been in Spain for years, but at least once a week he has his landlady cook him up a dish of those awful echt Kölsch potato pancakes, and every Sunday he has knockwurst with sweetened rice! Apart from such aberrations, he’s a wonderful fellow, and I’m sure that, with time, he’ll learn some decent habits down here in foreign lands. He’s a good chess player, by the way. We lock horns over the board every once in a while.”

It was thus, in direct and indirect discourse, that Beatrice reported to me her conversation with Zwingli en route through Palma’s thoroughfares. Well now, that’s just dandy, I thought. We’ll be sleeping on wool with a horsehair filling — without fleas, I presume, without dreams, surely without pajamas and, as far as I am concerned, most definitely without Pilar. Meanwhile I had become so tired that I would have liked to drop then and there on that spanking-new sack and slept a workingman’s sleep right in the middle of the bustling city. But our packman-cum-herald wouldn’t stand still. Continuing his balancing act, he led us in a mad scurry up streets and down streets, upstairs and downstairs, following precisely the tortuous itinerary dictated by Zwingli’s and his concubine’s unpaid bills.

Soon we approached, from the other side, the little square we had crossed in the morning coming from the Street of Solitude. We heard music being played in front of a café. Donkeys, tied to rings in the walls, slept standing up. Zwingli drew my attention to this odd phenomenon — if only human beings could evolve far enough to sleep while standing! He explained that he had been practicing this art for some time now; but because our erect human knees were missing a locking mechanism or the clever musculature of the horse, the only way to avoid tipping over was by means of mental concentration. But mental work of any kind was of course non-conducive to sleep. Thus, he was still in the stage of using walls, he explained further, for otherwise…

… Otherwise he’d fall flat on his face, I thought, but any comment I might have made was suddenly preempted. Before us we all saw that girl once more, the very same lanky one of several hours ago. Here she was again, and again she was dancing. A handsome child, with excellent breeding in her whole body. She bent down and rose up again, leapt up in the air and caught herself again in mid-flight. She skipped and showered sparks all about her, stamped her feet and disappeared in a cloud of dust. She couldn’t be much older than eleven. At that age, back in my homeland, girls still play with dolls and toy grocery stores. But here, a child like this one drives the boys crazy. And grown men, too, for it is not only the half-pints who have congregated again here on the square, like the flies milling around the potroast swinging on its hook back at the butcher shop. Quite a few adult men were sitting and standing around, unable to take their eyes off of this fiery female phantom in her pinafore.

Pilar, too, noticed the whirling imp, and to my great astonishment, she repeated the pious ministrations of the forenoon: she made a double sign of the cross, invoked the names of saints and Heaven itself, in the process dropping to the ground the straw net containing the accessories for the Feast of Resurrection we were planning to celebrate that evening. It’s a lucky thing that I am forever the cavalier in the presence of women, for otherwise our three bottles of Valdepeñas would likewise have bitten the dust and seen their last. Back in the city, I had taken them from her hands — much against her wishes, as it turns out, for she told me that no man carries packages in Spain.

Pilar’s petrification here on the square didn’t last long. She shot forth like an arrow, and I was just able to make out how the crowd of gaping onlookers closed in on her. I heard shouts, soprano screeches, and men guffawing. The scene ended with a loud report that sounded for all the world like a well-aimed box on the ears.

“Oh, boy!” said Zwingli as he picked up our prandial delicacies. “There’s going to be hell to pay. Let’s go on ahead. She won’t get home until she’s caught up again with Julietta.”

“Julietta?”

“Right. That’s her kid!”

Next to the little chamber where I had my first enchanting encounter with the child Julietta, there was another small room, windowless like its neighbor. This was to be our new quarters. It served as a clothes closet and rummage room. A naked bulb hung on a wire from the ceiling. Once our bed was inside, there would be just enough room to set up some suitcases as a bureau or makeshift night table. I could easily stretch some clothesline and come up with other contrivances, if they would only let me go at it. But Zwingli hesitated to allow this until Pilar returned; he had no idea where to put our clothes and other stuff. Surely we wouldn’t mind camping out the first night in the hall?

Beatrice got to work with our luggage, unpacking and transforming the entrada into what soon resembled a fleamarket. We had already loaded our bedsprings with gear of all sorts when, at nine, our mattress arrived. So we unloaded the bed and got it ready for the night. Zwingli expressed surprise that we were about to use the sheets right away, so fresh from the store, where they had been touched by who knows how many hands. Shouldn’t they be laundered first, and oughtn’t we to sleep in the meantime in our clothes? People who never wash have peculiar notions about cleanliness and applied aesthetics. It is not easy to comprehend the principles according to which they live their lives. Just then, Mother and Child made their appearance.

Certain features of body and temperament (my reader will know which ones I mean), certain attributes that in the mother had reached luscious, bountiful maturity, were also discernable in potential, inchoate form in her daughter. Unless my presentiments were sorely mistaken, the future looked truly auspicious for this fledgling that had yet to depart the warmth of the nest. A magnificent offspring, indeed. She stood there now in our midst, shaking her pretty head, stamping her foot, and refusing to greet her new relatives. To think that you, Vigoleis, actually had this bird in your hand this morning and let it fly away! But then again, how typical of you! Anyone else would have sensed immediately, even in the pitch dark, that this little feathered creature in the hand was worth infinitely more than what that miserly proverb says. Take a good look at her now, in the light of day: her hair is black as a raven’s, her eyes are like shimmering coals and as deep as the night. Inside them are little stars that glisten when she lifts her dainty eyelids.

I could continue describing the girl in this vein, piling one hackneyed simile upon another until the portrait is complete. The beauty of the human countenance is infinite, unlike the means we use to capture it in words or images. As soon as we attempt to depict something unique for an audience, we inevitably lapse into triteness. This aspiring young soul’s outward attributes were quite simply flawless. And that glance of hers! Were it not for my early-morning contact with her, I might have naively assumed that such a way of looking at another person was merely childlike. But in truth I was biased toward other interpretations. I blush easily, and I am not ashamed to admit that at this moment, in Pilar’s vestibule, I probably turned red as a beet. It was a risky situation, and not only for me. Pilar realized immediately that her recalcitrant daughter saw in me a target for her incipient instincts, and that she intended to continue her rebellious behavior right here at the maternal hearth, before our very eyes. That would have to be nipped in the bud. And nip it Pilar did, using the technique employed by most mothers in this world: another whack on the face. The girl didn’t flinch.