Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Quite apart from the purely geographic separation between Pedro and me during puberty, I could never have had a real Jonah for an uncle. Pedro is the scion of a dynasty that helped to write world history, whereas Vigoleis comes from a family whose name is at best good enough for a modest role in a village chronicle. His was a dynasty that enjoyed a certain earthly stability, owing to the fecundity of his father’s mother, who planted a total of nineteen seedlings in the local soil. On his mother’s side, two bishops arranged for the necessary linkage to Heaven Above. These achievements can, to be sure, serve as cozy intrafamilial mementos, to be placed and admired in photo albums and on mantelpieces. But will they have any value as history without adding some fictional spice to make them seem important? Hardly. In one other respect, too, they seem to lack real significance: as documentary underpinning of these jottings of mine. Just imagine for a moment the nature of my situation as the authorized biographer of Vigoleis. I have let my brother Ludwig periodically check through the manuscript of this book. When he reached the part where I first mention our grandmother’s 19 children, he wrote in the margin, “ Wrong! Only 9! Typo in the death notice! according to Uncle Joseph. ”—each lapidary remark outfitted with an exclamation point as evidence of this reader’s glee at catching the author in a typographical mistake. It is only Uncle Joseph as the source of this corrective information who escaped Ludwig’s sardonic jibes, for he regards Uncle Joseph as beyond criticism — which he no doubt is, since this particular uncle of ours is a printer, and he is the one who probably used his father’s press to print the death notice.

Well now, I thought, this is going too far, this is irresponsible pedantry. With a single stroke of the pen, ten children are eliminated from the list — this comes suspiciously close to a modern Massacre of the Innocents. Has King Herod returned to wield the Lord’s scourge once again? Ten too many children! And to think that Granny was hoping to make it to the round number of twenty, in order that she could get to see her Wöllem sporting on his overcoat lapel a decoration from the Kaiser for productivity! Granted that if it ever came to a vote, nine children would still be in the minority. But such an act of decimation is still much too harsh. I wrote to my brother, the decimator: what a fine family this is, where you can’t even depend on what’s said in the death notices! I refuse to liquidate a single one of the 19 children; I shall defy the printer’s devil and insist upon the existence of all of them. Have you, my Idumaean brother, considered that among the ten you have slaughtered we might have to count our own father? What, then, about us? Nineteen children — isn’t that more exciting than quintuplets? And just think: almost all of the great geniuses of history came from families with numerous children, usually more than 15. It’s all the more remarkable that no genius has yet come forth from our own family. Let’s assume for a moment that those ten don’t exist, and never did exist. As a long-time fan of circuses and county fairs, you must be fully aware of the attractiveness, for the minds of the common folks as for the great philosophers, of “what doesn’t exist.” Any carnival manager can vouch for this fact any night after the show is over, as he sits in his trailer sipping potato schnapps by the light of his kerosene lamp, counting the day’s box-office take.

There were no further editorial objections. My brother kept his own counsel. Perhaps he was ashamed for being of little faith. Besides, he is not enough of a historian to insist on mobilizing a single dead typographical error against nineteen living persons.

In spite of our numerous uncles — oddly, none of the girls ever reached the age sufficient to make them our aunts — not one of them had the right stuff to be swallowed by a fish, and not only because the little creek that for centuries has coursed through our historically somnolent home town has no pretensions to reach an ocean. Our single mentionable uncle is my godfather, who like all of his brothers was beholden to the bottle and was otherwise a bookbinder, but a man who hardly ever glanced at the contents of what he was binding. Which means that he was highly reliable in his profession, just as an illiterate typesetter can be depended upon to keep strictly to what is in a manuscript. This merry fellow represented me at my baptism and, in the process, lent me his Christian name. Albert — it means “of brilliant lineage.” Unfortunately, I have never detected any of this brilliance in him or in myself. The brilliance must have got diluted or vaporized by the baptismal waters. In any case, once Christ’s work of redeeming my soul was accomplished with my uncle Albert’s assistance and oath-taking, once all of my sins and my eternal punishment for them were washed away and I could partake of grace, illumination, and consecration in the Holy Spirit, thus becoming a child of God worthy of reward in Heaven — spiritual gifts that we no doubt deserve as we are placed into the vale of tears that is this life of ours, but for which I expressed my gratitude by bawling and wetting the ceremonial object I was lying on, a brocade baptismal cushion from my mother’s Scheifes cottage. In brief, as soon as I became a full-fledged Christian soul, the members of my baptismal party felt that they, too, had a right to partake of certain blessings. They betook themselves without delay to the nearest pub in the vicinity of the church, which was the one run by my grandfather. They placed the baptized infant on the counter and started drinking. After this interlude they visited one watering-hole after another. My godfather got more and more crocked, while the baptismal infant’s face became redder and redder, but there was no letup to their alcoholic ana-baptist ritual. My father, my other uncles, other so-called uncles and family friends had no objections, and they drank, too. Soon they drank themselves out beyond the town limits into the outskirts, in each of the taprooms placing the “bearer of brilliant lineage” on the bar, where he screamed for his mother’s breast, until at one of these establishments they finally just left him there. They completely overlooked the original sin that was the trigger for the Christian mystery that had just been accomplished with my person, and, wiping the beer foam from their Kaiser Wilhelm mustaches, reverted to pagan liturgy, victims of the concupiscence that Christian baptism fails to eliminate. They drank without me. And without me they all returned home. Where was their new little Christian child?

Somebody sounded the alarm. They retraced their steps through the various bars, miscalculating now and then, but at none of the stations of their reverse journey declining the bottles that had to be drunk from once again. After hours of intense searching, a local constable succeeded in spying out the bar counter where this little heap of Christianity lay in his soggy, stinking swaddling clothes, abandoned by God and his godfather. I was returned to my mother for the price of a bottle of aged-in-the-cask brandy — but was I still the same person? Hadn’t my baptismal procession crossed another equally un-Christian baptismal cavalcade on its journey from bar to bar? Was I some stranger’s infant, one that, following the sacred ceremony, likewise got carried to the beer spigots? This question has worried me all my life long, and it is one of the reasons why I seek protection behind my Vigoleis — not to mention all the mythological implications!

“So swiftly,” we are told in the first chapter of Pascoaes’ book on Napoleon, “did the birth proceed, that for lack of a cradle the newborn had to be wrapped in a tapestry woven with many-colored scenes of warfare. This account has the ring of both legend and truth. Truth is, after all, no different than legend. It is intriguing to speculate about the influence that these embroidered scenes, perhaps depicting events in the Iliad, might have exerted on our hero’s destiny. In contrast to many living things, dead things can have a vitalizing effect. The child’s very first glances took these images into the misty regions of his soul, where character and personhood were still slumbering, waiting for the first ray of light that would awaken them. This is the hour that gives shape to the Self, when form after form slowly accretes around a central point, giving rise gradually to a more or less definite whole.”