Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Julietta,” I said in German, forgetting that she couldn’t understand my language, “be a good girl and go to bed. Tomorrow is Sunday, and I want you to show me the city.” And I held my hand out to her.

Julietta smiled, stepped closer, and gave me her hand. Then she half-bowed, half-curtsied to Beatrice, and disappeared without giving the slightest further attention to her mother or her mother’s chum. Pilar entered the kitchen and took up some noisy activity with pots and pans. In spite of the touchy scenes that preceded it, her meal turned out excellent. The wine, too, was good; Zwingli had brought it to just the correct temperature. Temperature, it occurred to me, was the crucial factor in this household. Domestic comfort, not to mention what we Germans refer to as Gemütlichkeit , was in short supply here. We were all so busy sorting out the threads of our separate thoughts that none of us was able to tie the ends together to produce meaningful conversation. Even if that had succeeded, being in the linguistic minority, I would have been left out anyway. Zwingli was ever on guard that nothing should get said in a language that Pilar didn’t understand. Hence the lingua franca of the evening was exclusively Spanish. The reunited Swiss siblings even forgot to raise their glasses towards the Confederated Cantons, where at that same hour skyrockets and patriotic cheers were rising to the heavens. Here in the Street of Solitude, the mood was emphatically earthbound. I don’t mean to imply that we took our meal in funereal solemnity, but the crisply broiled viands called for far more cheerful diners than we were. Around midnight, when the street outside started coming awake, we went to bed. Each of us lay where he or she belonged — though as we know, not where each of us might have wished to belong.

Just where might Vigoleis have wanted to spend this first night on the island of his second sight?

In any chronicle that gets written with truthful intent, with the writer’s hand, so to speak, constantly pressed to his heart, there inevitably crop up certain incidents that the author, out of shame and an awareness of personal imperfection, would rather conceal from his readers. Familiar as I am with the inward and outward factors involved in the present case, and convinced that hushing up the events of the night in question would vitiate the credibility of all that is to follow, I shall now reveal that our hero slept in the Street of Solitude sans pajama, sans fleas, and also sans dreams. But in addition, sans mother and sans bewitching daughter, both of whom come under the ancient Spanish proverb which, in order to avoid flinging open the doors of this bawdyhouse all too suddenly, I quoted at the head of Book I under the disguise of the original language: “The mother a whore, the daughter a whore, a whore the blanket that covers them both.” In Spanish this adage rhymes exquisitely. But Vigoleis is not yet far enough along to combine sound and sense.

We slept well past noon, which shows how Spanish we had become in the space of a single diurnal rotation.

A telegram from Basel had a calming effect on Beatrice, but it also requested immediate word on the conditions we found on our arrival on the island. This was a difficult assignment, not one to be carried out with a few select words of cabled reply. So we wired back that Zwingli’s situation gave reason for hope, ending with: “letter will follow.” The task of composing this letter fell of course to Beatrice, and I recall that she chewed up half a fountain pen before signing off her report with the familial greeting “ Ciao .” We all know what she wrote about, though naturally she rounded off countless details and kept to herself her negative assessment of the long-range prognosis. But she also included certain statements of a kind we are as yet ignorant of, and which I myself only discovered when reading over her epistle to the Baselers. For example, I learned that she was resolved to remain on this island at her brother’s residence until he was again firmly treading the straight and narrow. Between the lines one perceived a certain tone of maternal solicitude, not surprising when we consider that Beatrice had begun serving her youngest sibling as a mother-surrogate ever since destiny had taken the family into distant regions. She had been unable to carry on this role for very long, she wrote in this letter, and in the intervening years had not been successful at it. On a later occasion, waxing sentimental about what she regarded as her failure at non-professional intrafamilial pedagogy, she once remarked to me that many of Zwingli’s transgressions in word and deed had been just as much her own fault. So she kept on doing for Zwingli as much as she could, and as much as Vigoleis would let her do, although the latter, in his proven and increasingly acute guilelessness, continued for the most part to play the role of cautionary advisor. She closed her melancholy positive report with a promise to inform her brother in Basel at regular intervals about our progress. But our progress, the progress we were all to share in, was exclusively of the downward variety.

As we set about to furnish our windowless chamber, Zwingli gave me some enlightening instruction about Iberian domestic customs. I had not known, for instance, that in Spain there was still something called a window tax. In order to minimize this levy on daylight, the less affluent property owners deliberately built their bedrooms without windows, or upon buying a house, walled them up. To me it was clear that such a procedure derived from the Catholic Christian concept of life as a perpetual sin against life. Because the propagation of the human race is bound up in our culture with bedrooms and their attendant malodorousness (exceptional instances en plein air are too infrequent to stem the tides of prudishness), it is quite natural to prevent the Eye of Creation from peeking in on the sinful act. Not even Luna, whom we meet so often in poetry as the “eyewitness to love,” is permitted to enter the chamber where ecstasy so often becomes a curse, and cursing almost never helps at all.

“What about candles?” I asked. They always get blown out, Zwingli explained, right at the start of things, since no Spaniard was interested in watching himself in love, not even one who has read Schopenhauer. In brothels, on the other hand — but perhaps for that very reason — things went on amid an abundance of candles, multi-faceted mirrors, and copulative positions too numerous and various to count. I remarked that this seemed a fairly sensible method of escaping from windowless lovemaking — though I was quick to add that copulation had, of course, nothing to do with love.

A publisher in Germany was interested in a translation of Menno ter Braak’s Bourgeois Carnival . I had sent him a sample chapter from Amsterdam, and the writer Franz Düllberg, who did much to introduce German readers to Dutch literature, had recommended the work warmly to the publisher. The sample I sent pleased the man in Berlin, at least to the extent that he asked me to submit a complete translation, upon which he would base his final decision. My German version was finished, and needed only to be collated once more with the original. I figured that Beatrice and I could get this done in a week’s time if we could use the drop-leaf table for a few hours each day. This suggestion, however, met with resistance from our gracious landlady, prompted no doubt by this illiterate woman’s instinctual abhorrence of the written or printed word. Be that as it may, Pilar disapproved of my appropriating her table for the purpose of writing. I explained to her that a writer needs a surface to write on, and added that I was a “writer” only insofar as the German passport office was concerned, not in the sense of ever having “written” anything. I hoped that by saying this, I might rise in this ravishing woman’s esteem; I would have abjured the entire alphabet, if doing so would place me at her level.