Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

All of a sudden I saw The Eye. I quickly bent down, lifted the grail out of the jumble of inferior receptacles, and my two-eyed glance met that of the Mystical Eye. I was in Seventh Heaven.

There was loud applause. The snoozing tradesman woke up, and the raven crowed. Only the painted-enamel Eye remained silent, but the caption beneath it spoke volumes: “You scoundrel, I see you!”

If I was to avoid being attacked by the environment, I would have to start haggling. In my mind’s eye I saw Beatrice seated before me. But no, sorry, not seated upon The Eye, but slaving away in some palace or other offering language instruction to elaborately cosmetized señoritas . I had sworn eternal love to her, and here and now I could prove that I would march over chamber pots for her. Over ceramic and clay pots, over pots made of enamel and pots made of stone — among these piles I even spied a finely polished granite Celto-Iberian urinal — I slowly advanced toward En Xaragante, held my chosen pot under his nose, and asked, “How much?”

“One duro.”

“Just because of the Eye? It has a crack in it.”

“The Eye is two, Lady Hamilton three pesetas, that makes five, Sir.”

Lady Hamilton? What does, or did, Fanny Hamilton have to do with this piece of crockery? I began to have indiscreet thoughts. Don Juan Sureda would have put a tag on the handle that told this story.

En Xaragante said that he no longer knew exactly how it went, but an Englishman had told him that this pot was doubtless from Lord Hamilton’s collection. And so it was only natural that his wife…

Peals of laughter emanated from our audience of curious, pressing onlookers. To my consternation I spied an acquaintance among them, a robust fellow wearing a colorful kerchief and a shopping hat: my employer Robert Graves, who didn’t let on that he knew me — for which I was grateful. As an art collector, historian, and Englishman he had a threefold interest in this transaction. Not a collector myself, I was unmoved by the patina attached to this chamber pot, a feature that testified to Lady Hamilton’s versatility. I desired the pot simply as a medium for The Eye. I would gladly pay two pesetas for it, but not some extra charge for historical considerations.

In the negotiations that followed, I was the loser; my skills as a Führer left me in the lurch. The audience was thoroughly amused at the expense of this foreigner who was trying to haggle with the greasy tradesman while brandishing a chamber pot. Urchins who knew the pot’s secret were teasing me: Yo te veo, bribón , “I see you, you rogue!” The raven squawked and flapped its wings, rattling the cage.

“God lives in every pot,” is how Santa Teresa de Ávila famously put it, and this assertion of hers quickly came to mind as I realized my ridiculous situation. But this mystical insight was of no help. I started wishing for the proverbial hole in the ground where I could disappear together with the accursed eye-pot. But the earth did not open up to receive me. The fat salesman was getting impatient, telling me to make up my mind — he didn’t like wasting time with customers, and especially not with the likes of me. This I could understand. There’s not a junk dealer in the world who feels he must get rid of his stuff — that is the secret of their success. As a sign that neither I nor anybody else was of further concern to him, En Xaragante once again closed his piggish eyes. I ought to have set God’s Eye back down on the ground then and there and walked away. But I was under a spell. I stammered, “And your raven? Marvelous animal! I’ve never seen such a large one. Where I come from, they aren’t any bigger than a fat crow.”

The potier de chambre reopened one of his eyes and peered at me. My praise for his shaggy critter touched a place in his heart as yet unsullied by commerce in such disreputable merchandise. He stretched a hairy arm to the cage and raised it up to be admired. The raven opened its beak, thinking that it was about to get a sobrasada from En Xaragante’s carrion kitchen.

“Is he for sale, too? How much for a devil like that?”

“He can talk. One duro per language, basta .”

“How many languages does he talk?”

“Three, and that makes 15 pesetas. A treasure for your whole life long. This guy will live to a ripe old age. Your grandchildren will still be enjoying him.”

The onlookers shouted “ Olé, olé! ” and came in closer. The spectacle was getting to be more and more fun, but no one came across the barrier formed by the mute crockery lying on the canvas.

The raven’s decrepit master, who now opened his second eye, put the cage back down and egged me on. “Well?” “Stand your ground, señorito !” shouted the audience. The sweat was pouring from my brow. My brain was boiling. I grabbed the handle of the round cage and held out the animal in front of me, as if to gauge its value. There I stood, in one hand the disreputable pot with its Eye of God gazing at me; in the other, the cage with its mite-infested inhabitant giving me wary looks.

“I’ll take the pot,” I said to Fatso. I placed the vessel on the ground, took the duro from my pocket, and tossed it to the scoundrel. But now the crowd went wild, much as they would at a novillada . My mistake was having the duro in my right-hand pocket and neglecting to set down the cage. “A magnificent animal,” I said as if offering an excuse for not buying the bird as well. “Three languages — that’s a lot! I know a cockatoo that can speak Spanish and Portuguese.”

One of the street urchins piped up: “And you speak Spanish like a raven!”

At this, even the junk dealer had to bare his rotten teeth and laugh. Was Robert Graves still standing there? Don’t look, Vigo! To top everything, I had now failed a philological test, too, and that spelled my utter downfall. Holding the arch-raven in my left hand, I stepped over the pots to the edge of the junkshop arena. The fat man was yelling something after me that I couldn’t understand. I was completely dazed. The audience was clapping. It was an edifying exit.

I noticed too late that I had botched the whole affair. I was followed by a mob of cheering kids; Corvus corax squawked for all he was worth, and this brought even more kids into the jubilant chorus. They accompanied me with their yelling all the way to the General’s Street, offering practical suggestions all the while as to the proper way of training the beast, how to feed it one live rat and assorted carrion every day, and how I could expect to find lice on it that would gradually eat away all its feathers. I had already noticed this phenomenon, but assessed it as merely a case of natural molting. The kids estimated the squawker’s age at 30 years. For the moment I wasn’t worried about such things. I was finally home. But what now?

My arms were stiff, my joints ached, my billfold was empty. I placed the cage on Doña Carmen’s table and started talking to the bird. He answered in his indigenous raucous lingo, refusing to respond in anything resembling a human tongue. I was experienced with members of the Corvus genus, so I knew that he would first have to get used to his new environment and his new master. Besides, he seemed to be feeling what I myself was feeling: hungry. As they say on the farm: first the livestock, then the hands. Within minutes, this guy devoured everything we had on the kitchen shelf. It wasn’t much, but it would have yielded a modest meal for the two of us people. And still the bird wasn’t full. Certain omnivores consume a multiple of their own weight in a single day. We could simply never keep up! The Eye of God would have been cheaper to maintain. And like all omnivores, this bird stank to high heaven, and he was impudent to boot. When I held out a fly he hacked at my hand with his powerful beak. “A fly?” he probably was thinking. “Who needs a fly? I want carrion, pounds and pounds of carrion, or better yet, sobrasada made from pigs’ cadavers!” En Xaragante had all such stuff. If I had only let him keep the bird. And what will Beatrice say?