Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Beatrice listened carefully to the tumult happening around us, and began some cerebral analysis, dissecting the fragments of language that to my ears were simple noise and inarticulate grunting. She then tied them back together to shape an initial hesitant hypothesis: something awful must have happened in the doctor’s office. A pail of bandages…

“Stop, chérie ! Don’t say one word more! I know everything! That pail! Don José has discovered in his pail a human body. Some frightful mother has smuggled the fruit of her womb into this most innocuous of places, and now Doña Clara is refusing to hand over one of her pickle jars.”

“Yuck!”

“What do you mean, ‘yuck’? Don José is an embryophilogist, so what else would he want to pickle — herring, maybe?”

But this was something different. There was no need for the courts to step in. No mother had committed a crime against a burgeoning human life. Beatrice could now hear certain things more clearly: the doctor’s office assistant must have forgotten to empty the hermetically sealed rubbish pail. Don José, Inspector of sanidad , was understandably incensed by this dereliction — but why was he so wildly out of control? In Spain? Messengers were sent into town to fetch the assistant. Don José was still fuming. He took no notice of us whatever.

A short, fat, roundish, thoroughly pudgy woman, Doña Clara, greeted us cordially. We were welcome as friends of Pedro’s, but this unfortunate incident… “Pedro, take my place for just a minute, I…”

There was renewed commotion in front of the house — which is to say, the commotion was coming from the direction of the village and getting closer. Now they were chasing some poor dog! The dog-chaser was a pale young fellow with long legs and pitch-black hair: Paquito, Clarita’s youngest son, who had been fleetingly introduced to us during the earlier attempts to calm down the physician. Everybody was shouting: “You coward! You bad dog! You miserable beast!” So now, in addition to everything else, their dog had run away. It never rains but it pours.

From one moment to the next, Don José stopped his raging and was once again the dignified private physician of His Royal Majesty. He stood still, smoothed his laboratory smock, pulled out a red handkerchief, and blew his nose with a loud report. A small crowd gathered reverently around him, and at his feet lay the whining bitch. The office assistant seemed completely forgotten; a greater crime was here awaiting its punishment. Spinning on her own axis in the dust of the road, the dog wagged her tail and cowered as people berated her with epithets. The anathemas were uttered in Mallorquin dialect, so I didn’t understand a word. But the dog seemed to know exactly what was meant, even though, as I later found out, she wasn’t a native Mallorcan. She came from Ibiza, the little island of the Balearic Group, and she was a pure-bred Izibenca, from a race of some of the most beautiful dogs I have ever seen. She was a bit like a short-haired greyhound, ocher-colored with white spots. One characteristic of the breed is that it is confined to Ibiza and can procreate only in that environment. Even the short move to Mallorca can shorten its life. The ancient Carthaginians knew this dog, praised it, and ate it.

“You miserable cur!” Don Juan probably was shouting. “Just what do you think you’re doing, running away like that? So that’s the thanks we get…!” There followed a list of the reasons why the dog should feel grateful to its master. And then the doctor’s mood softened. That was the end of his moral diatribe. “ Adelante! ” he shouted, “Onward!” The Ibizenco registered her master’s change of tone, wagged her long, sickle-shaped tail in joyful obedience, and jumped up at the doctor’s denim trousers. But Don José shouted, “Get away! Do your duty!” and pointed sternly in the direction of the house. Pistola obeyed, thankful for this resumption of trust. With a single bound she leaped over the window sill into the doctor’s office.

Pedro motioned us closer to the window — it would be worth our while to watch the proceedings. The dog stood in front of the pail, placed one paw on the lever at the bottom, and pressed it. The lid lifted slowly, and Pistola began emptying it. Beatrice screamed with disgust. Now sick as a dog, my wife had to submit to pharmaceutical treatment by Don José.

This performance, which to me seemed like a perfect display of animal training, was in fact an example of Ibizencan dilettantism. Attracted by the contents of the hygienic container, the dog had taught herself the trick of opening it. She didn’t even belong at this house; she didn’t have any home, but just strayed around the village. For years now she had been performing this minor service in Don Jose’s office with amazing punctuality. The only times of irregular rubbish removal, said Pedro, occurred when the dog was in heat. Incidentally, the doctor had no other clinical assistant, and this was one further reason why he wished to take on this German Folkwang School fellow as an apprentice. What the dog did for him, Bobby could do in his sleep.

Don José never considered me worthy of donning the clinical smock, even though on a number of occasions I offered him proof of my skill as a handyman and a quick learner of matters technical. Besides, as a university student I had dabbled a bit in medical subjects and even taken first steps toward starting a collection of embryos. I wouldn’t have rejected such a career. It would have given my life a new direction. But then Pascoaes would have remained undiscovered and this book unwritten — which of the two would be worse?

We stayed in Valldemosa for three weeks. I finally became acquainted with the Charterhouse that I had so often shown off to other people. Pedro explained everything to us, including the nail from Christ’s cross, which was Don Juan’s property and only by chance had not been taken to the nursemaid’s home by his pious servants. Some ancestor of the Suredas had gone off to the Holy Land on a mission of piracy and brought home the nail as a relic. Since I regard Pedro as a better Führer than myself, I had no reason to doubt the authenticity of this sacred piece of hardware. Nevertheless, on my own tours I stuck to my legend of the plague torch, which never failed to grab the tourists — and that’s what my employers wanted. There are thousands of Nails from the Holy Cross, but my taeda pesti s was unique.

We also got to know a postman who was no less crafty and resourceful than the bitch Pistola. He was of course illiterate, but he had the capacious memory of such lucky souls, a phenomenon that historians often underestimate because it doesn’t fit in with their theories. The postmaster, who knew how to read and write, sorted the mail and read off the addresses in the sequence of the delivery route. The letter-carrier memorized the names and delivered each item without ever making a mistake, which certainly can’t be said of your run-of-the-mill literate postman.

We took hikes down to the Valldemosa cala and caught fishes and turtles. Our nets didn’t trap any man-eating sharks, not even the little sharks that my touring compatriots tucked away with such relish when I told them that they were not the common fish you could buy cheaper and better in Germany. We camped out, collected driftwood, and cooked our meals over it. Because of the mosquitoes, we kept the fire burning day and night. Pedro told us pirate stories and filled in the history of his family, supplementing his chronicle with romantic, classical, and heroic medieval details, and arrived at the tale of a certain uncle, a tío twice removed, who met his death in the belly of a sea monster. In the waters of Cabrera and Conejera, the island homeland of Hannibal, a shark swallowed this fellow whole, skin, hair, and bones, with all of the debts, shady dealings, disappointments, and hopes that clung to him as a Sureda from the House of Verdugo.