Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Pedro was ten years old when they took him to the little island populated by goats, where the funeral was held for a gentleman of whom it can at least be said that he knew how to hide from the prying eyes of the world — which, by the way, seems to be a talent that this dynasty passed on by inheritance. At the back of the procession was the wobbling casket, which had been caulked with pitch, just like a sea-going vessel. Now it stood on a cliffside in the midst of the bleached bones of the 8000 French soldiers who were abandoned here on Cabrera after the Battle of Bailén. One cannot imagine a more appropriate final resting place for a phantom corpse. The devout family was of the opinion that the fish would eventually deliver up their uncle, since his body contained a soul, and since he was, after all, not some insensate being that one simply devours in order to stay alive. Once he was spewed up on shore, a family member would have to arrive at the spot immediately to place the cadaver, which would no doubt be in sorry condition, into the coffin with the customary Christian ceremony.

Despite their intense patriotic piety the Suredas did not believe that Almighty God would go so far as to keep their uncle miraculously alive in the sea monster’s belly. Perhaps they were also aware that their uncle’s pattern of living was such that he was undeserving of being spit out whole, and that they would have to be content with his return in any shape whatsoever. I don’t recall how long the island vigil lasted. In any case, the uncle never showed up. But every so often people caught sight of a shark’s fin, a dolphin’s nose, or the tail of some unfamiliar sea animal. Whenever this happened, the lookouts would catch their breath and think: if only this were our uncle! Then the sea would close up again, the waves would resume their rhythm of breathing with the air that coursed above them. The loyal family made the sign of the cross, ended their long wake in the name of the Lord who giveth and taketh away according to His will, and rowed back to Mallorca.

An aged fisherman, who was familiar with the ways of man-eating sharks, explained to the Suredas that all of their watching and waiting was useless. One simply could not expect that the fish that had swallowed the gentleman would ever vomit the gentleman out again. If some mysterious case of nausea were ever to cause the shark to do so, then it was certain that one of its less finicky cousins would immediately rush to the scene to devour the gentleman for a second time, and in so doing would turn over on its back, making the attack all the more grisly to behold.

If this uncle had been a prophet, the fish would in all likelihood have spit him back up onto the beach, permitting him to fulfill God’s mission on terra firma —just as had happened with Jonah, who, after his release from probationary imprisonment, went on to spread God’s words of anger against Nineveh more eagerly than ever before. But this Sureda fellow was only a Spanish grandee, a debtor to boot, and on top of it all a man in the habit of writing down his weak-willed, desperate thoughts in letters that later fell into Pedro’s hands. From these, Pedro concluded that his uncle had every good reason to turn himself into a missing person. There was little doubt that he had decided to take up his hiking stick and vamoose far away from his island homeland, at the very same time that his relatives put on mourning and had Masses read for him, and as little Pedrito sat on the desolate cliffside weeping because the big fish wouldn’t give him back his uncle.

“Did you cry a lot over your lost uncle? And didn’t you think a lot about the biblical story of Jonah, who was also swallowed by a big fish?”—I could just see the pageant of yesteryear, painted in bright Mediterranean colors: a weeping boy sitting next to a coffin on a rocky, weather-beaten cliff that juts up from the surf, like Salas y Gomez in Chamisso’s poem, the sea gnawing eternally at the shoreland.

Pedro hadn’t thought of Jonah, but he was reminded of the three youths in the burning fiery furnace, Daniel in the lion’s den, and Lazarus in the state of decomposition. And he hadn’t really cried, since he didn’t even know that uncle of his. All he did was keep a lookout over the ocean. Perhaps this relative that the family was telling such tales about might come walking on the waves, a puta on his arm. For even then, Pedro sensed that some woman must be part of the story — a rather advanced apprehension of human nature for a ten-year-old.

When I was as old as Pedro was then, I wasn’t sitting on a cliff next to an empty coffin, waiting for some up-chucked uncle. I was sitting obediently on a much too narrow bench at school, listening to our religion teacher, who was trying to sow the seeds of biblical truth into our souls. Since this priest lacked real experience of God, his instructional method was patterned on the reform-school model. His approach to the Book of Jonah was to portray it as the saga of a minor prophet’s mission, disobedience, and punishment. He claimed that the great fish was a whale, and that in addition to the insolent prophet, it also swallowed a table and a stool for him to use inside its roomy guts. This was a time when one of our classmates’ fathers was in prison for having neglectfully caused a fellow-worker to fall into a ditch, an accident that had a lethal result. We kids were terribly stirred up by this incident, and when the story of the minor prophet’s imprisonment came up in religion class, we imagined Jonah as being like Otto’s father and vice-versa, with the sole difference that Jonah could not get to see visitors through iron bars. Later, when I started dabbling in theological matters myself, I learned to my amazement that it probably wasn’t a whale at all but an authentic man-eating shark, or according to some expert zoologists the feared Jonah Shark itself, Carcharias verus L., which rendered full credit to its scientific name by gulping down that very prophet. Back then, I believed every word of what the priest told us, even though I knew from reading books that a whale’s esophagus has only enough room for a middle-sized herring to pass through. The miracle — and this aspect of the story is what the Church deemed important — seemed all the more miraculous.

Our priest wouldn’t have been able to hoodwink Pedro with such a tale. At ten years of age he was so mature that he was already visiting bordellos in order to familiarize himself with that national institution. We boys up in Germany, holding our teacher’s hand, visited a traveling menagerie. We got to see a flying dog that didn’t fly, and a rattlesnake that didn’t rattle, all for the 10 Pfennig that Mommy had given us. For 10 centimos, which he stole, Pedro too went with his whole class, but sans teacher, to a menagerie of lust, and made his first grab into the bosom of Mother Nature, who had not yet decided between animal and human characteristics. In order not to lose out on more lucrative business, it was usually the proprietress herself who undertook the erotic initiation. She sat on a chair, loosened her garments, asked each of the inquisitive rascals first to drop his coin in her hand. Then she made certain gestures and said, “ Basta, otro! ” and in this fashion serviced entire grades of school kids in just a few short minutes. As soon as you pass beyond the borders of your home town, things become radically different: here is Jonah at latitude 52º N, sitting obediently on his stool in the belly of a whale, waiting for a bell that will signal his release. And at 40º, in the Mediterranean, here is a boy sitting on a tiny island waiting for a fish to spew up a real Jonah who happens to be the boy’s real uncle, though twice removed. And to think that fate had already permitted this selfsame boy to touch a woman’s breast, an object that some of us kids in the German school may have imagined to exist, but which our religion teacher denied under threat of extra homework. Not even Eve in Paradise had a breast. Her kids were fed from a bottle containing Soxhlet-brand formula — that’s what I, too, believed. The Bible as a collection of tales from A Thousand-and-One Nights —it’s a ticklish subject, even today.