Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

When I translated this page years ago at the writer’s house, I was reminded of how my own baptismal tapestry, with its smell of overnight schnapps and beer, tobacco and other incense, that penetrated to the misty regions of my developing personality. It was a dubious ray of light, but nonetheless a ray. Even someone who is averse to mythological trends of thought will readily interpret my aversion to beer and inferior forms of brandy as what it in fact is: an intellectual acknowledgment of the lessons derived from my experience of a profligate anabaptism. Of course this has no bearing on the identity of my personality with my Self. It serves only to confirm that, in keeping with the laws of entropy, I was handed over to destiny while lying on a counter in a bar.

Among the books in my personal library there is one that I cherish very much, the illustrated Handbook of Geography by Professor Daniel, who was part theologian and part geographer. The fact that in Book One I was able to compare Pilar’s kitchen table to a catamaran is a detail that I owe to my godfather, who, no doubt guided by his innate sense of panta rhei , bound this book in such a way that his binder’s needle failed to penetrate fascicle 42. When he delivered the finished product and I happily began leafing it through, the native Carolina, Palau, and Sandwich Islanders immediately fell out. After that, every time I consulted the Book of Daniel I had to replace these sinister characters between the pages, with the result that their threatening visages remained indelibly imprinted on my mind.

I gave Pedro accounts of this and similar details of my family dynasty, which was never menaced by the maws of a sea monster or by the drawn scimitar of an angry Moor. I told him about the petty citizens of a petty town, people who printed and bound books or, like my father, owned books but never read them: people who lived, made love, drank, and then drank some more, right out of the bottle or from expensive glasses; people who then died, every one of them with the conviction that this was the Will of the Almighty, every one of them a person whom nobody outside the town limits cared two hoots about.

When we left the tiny hidden cove of Valldemosa and clambered back over loose gravel and breakneck goat paths to the fresh-air resort of the Kings of Aragón and Mallorca, we were lugging with us a huge, heavy object: a sea turtle, the largest specimen that had ever been caught at this coastline. It was of extreme old age and, as we learned from a fisherman who was not much younger, not indigenous to Mallorquin waters. It had probably migrated from the great ocean depths near Menorca which were still home to such giants. The one we caught had presumably fled the distressing site of the famous 1756 battle between French pirates and the English fleet under the tragic John Byng, and paddled across the ocean to spend its waning days in the Valldemosa inlet. We now presented this tortuga as a gift to Doña Clara. With the aid of her cook Toninas, she made some delicate dishes from it, including a so-called turtle soup with little turtle sausages and turtle eggs in Madeira au four —a meal for gourmets whose taste hasn’t been ruined by the likes of Maggi. Doña Clara’s tortue au naturel will reap praise long after she has passed away, but with turtle it helps to be a connoisseur. To others I recommend the imitation item you’ll get out of a can. The one from the Valldemosa cala tasted like mammoth from the Arctic permafrost.

We were still seated at our antediluvian meal when a telegram arrived for Beatrice. Was somebody dying again? Or was someone already dead? No, it was just a hasty sign of life, and it came from Paris. The text: “Coast clear? Zwingli.”

De-Pilarized by potent ministrations of Professor Scheidegger’s homeopathic science, my brother-in-law was once again heading for the southern latitudes.

Beatrice now decided that living in this house of art was no longer for us; the place to confront real danger was one’s own house and home. So we left Valldemosa and its heights of historical mattresses and sank back down on the nameless heap of our own poverty. Pedro wanted to give us chairs to take along, a bed, some crockery, a box full of alibis. That’s how a friend behaves when he is at the same time a Spanish grandee. But Beatrice and I, still two very un-Spanish little people, declined his offer as an offense to the Sureda dynasty. Immune to such bourgeois temptations, we were satisfied just to shake hands and clap a grateful drumbeat on shoulders all around. I took one last look at the sleepy pickled euphoria of my embryos: “ Adios , my friends. Don’t worry, we’ll be back!”

Six hours later, we were sitting on crates in our bible-paper room and chatting about how wonderful it all had been, about the immense fortune the Suredas had squandered, how everybody up there in the hills seemed crazy, crazier than here in the capital, and—“Now Beatrice, you’ll have to admit that genuine turtle soup is pretty terrible. Your Swiss friend Mr. Maggi found this out, and was smart enough to put his mock turtles on the market.” Then our conversation turned to the other citizen of the Swiss Confederation, the one who was inquiring whether the coast was clear.

“What he means by a ‘clear coast’ is obviously Pilar, but he’s not asking whether Pilar herself has been de-Pilarized. What are you going to do? The telegram came with paid-up reply.”

“I’m going to send a telegram.”

“Fine, but what are you going to say? I’ll keep out of it. You must act according to your conscience. That’s what we always do, and that’s why we can rest so comfortably on our pile of newspapers. Think it over while I kick our bed around a bit. Tonight we’ll again be sleeping on our own empty life history.”

“But after all, he’s my brother!”

“That sounds like an accusation. That’s not how we want to play the game, and I’ve never been a spoilsport when it comes to other people.”

Beatrice wired Zwingli that the coast was clear — which it in fact was, as far as the tootsie was concerned.

Doña Clara had given us a basketful of food and a bucketful of turtle soup with huge gobs of turtle meat in it. This kept us in haute cuisine for two weeks. Two weeks of haute cuisine are the equivalent of the price of a table and, if you know how to haggle, two chairs. Let’s keep this in mind. We’ll endure the odor of a prehistoric mammoth by holding our noses—“Just a couple of weeks, Beatrice, and we’ll have finished consuming the entire beast…”

During the starvation years of the Wilhelminian World War, when my father lost two-thirds of his body weight, when my grandmother sat down to die before losing all of her body weight, when the high nutritive value of the common turnip was discovered by the same caste of scientists who later declared the common Hitler Turnip as a vitamin-rich fodder for the people, I had already become so skeptical that I no longer believed in the miracle of the loaves, although I still thought that the God we called our own really ought to do something for His chosen people. Or did He perhaps intend, by distributing a few million breakfast rolls, to spare the experts at the Kaiser Wilhelm Science Institute from everlasting shame? This question concerns only bodily hunger, which has never made me into a true grouch. I have long since counted the miracle of the loaves among Creation’s lesser magic tricks. I didn’t even long for it to happen when we went starving for days in the Clock Tower. No, what I have in mind is “the sacred power of genuine, true hunger” that Wilhelm Raabe has his “Hunger Pastor” write about, and that makes me yearn again and again for a multiplication of bread loaves: if only a Savior could appear on the scene and increase my library, decimated by war and persecution, by a factor of a thousand! All the while, then as now, here on the street of the poet Helmers, as formerly on the street of General Barceló, in order to buy books I have had to stint on food. No miracles happen in the house of Vigoleis.