Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The Immigration Police never bothered us again. We were now tax-exempt honorary citizens of Palma de Mallorca. I wish to add that Don Patuco’s spy reported to his general that the incriminating registration card was missing from the file. By means of an authentically Llullian feat of prestidigitation, we had been effectively dematerialized in the sense of legal accessibility. When the Civil War broke out, this would save General Franco two bullets.

Now we had no aspect at all any more. And we had beaten the Führer at his own game of racial humbug.

The state’s attorney later reported to us that the Commissioner’s dog had given birth to a litter bearing the unmistakable earmarks of T’uang’s Imperial lineage. The proud breeder had let it be known all over the island and beyond that his T’atsu had produced offspring of T’uang.

Would Mevrouw van Beverwijn now…? Was this evidence for the validity of her Christian Science? If so, I would have to do a lot of apologizing.

I have a friend in Spain who is sad whenever he thinks of the hour of his death. Not that he is afraid of dying. A brave fellow and a swashbuckler, on research trips he has come to grips with Red Indians and predatory animals, and on one occasion, strapped to a martyr’s stake, he thought his final hour had arrived. He has two children whom he loves more than himself, although he remains the self-admiring type. He loves them more than his treasures and his real estate, which together amount to a sizeable fortune. When he dies, his children will be as poor as churchmice, for out of the thicket of anonymity there will emerge the more than thirty illegitimate children that this man, still leading a life of Old Testament fecundity, admits to having engendered in his home country alone, and they will all claim their share of his estate. He has taken no measures to prevent this from happening. The earlier count of thirty has in the meantime risen to fifty and more. His devout wife, who he believes is still ignorant of his profligate paternity, prays every day, beseeching God to take all these bastards unto Himself, begging Him to visit a plague upon them and annihilate them as products of her husband’s lascivious habits.

When Vigoleis closes his eyes forever, no one will contest ownership of his repeatedly decimated personal library, so often replenished by means of starvation campaigns. It is the single item of value that he will bequeath to the world. With its dispersal, all of his forms of existence will come to their final end. Anyone who claims to descend from him will be a liar, and such a lie will not even be useful in the search for truth, as was the case with Dr. Herman Baruch.

I have remained childless, by reason of having transcended on a metaphysical plane the cunicular Christian pattern of sublimation. But I love kids just the same. And in order to have one without committing a sin against my own convictions, I chose the route of adoption.

Adoption, the scholars assert, is an imitation of nature, and hence a problematical matter if one is willing to admit, as any primitive human and any Naturalist writer can confirm, that nature is very difficult to imitate. That is why the Ancients decreed that no castrati could adopt children — a wise move if you bear in mind how an adolescent son’s voice will change in comparison with his father’s. Such considerations were irrelevant in Vigoleis’ case, although he was blacklisted by the Nazis on the basis of having committed racial contamination with Beatrice. One day he found a warning in his post-office box: the Reich Gelding Commission was keeping an eye on him. His Janus-faced character — a poetic aspect together with an innocent, boyish nature — would remain intact, and he could go on writing. What was alarming was the official stipulation that no poor citizen was permitted to claim a rich citizen as an adopted child. This legal detail set the stage for a thoroughgoing perversion of the natural course of events.

Fantasies about synthetic paternity clotted my mind as Mamú’s lawyer investigated the matter of whether, how, when, and where I could be adopted by Mamú. If the case ever arrived at a favorable result, I would be an American citizen, and thus could marry Beatrice with no need for her to exchange her innocuous Swiss passport for one printed on criminal brown paper.

My wild, feral marriage, which continued to gnaw at my mother’s heart, was in the eyes of the Children of the Mother Church in Boston more than just an annoyance. They regarded it as one more piece of evidence for our debauched nature and satanic wickedness, curable only in the fires of Hell. As soon as this bluestocking coterie heard about the adoption plan, as a result of Mamú’s and my own blabbermouth habits, their sense of outrage knew no bounds whatever. To them, this amounted to a bare-faced attack on the Royal Baking Powder millions, engineered by a couple of beggars who slept on torn-up newspapers. They would have liked to tar and feather me, or better yet, put me in a cage together with Rabindranath. Nevertheless, Mamú remained firm.

What would these guardians of morality have said if they knew that Mamú’s prospective son was himself aiming to adopt someone?

As the island’s most expert tourist Führer , I was of course aware that Mallorca was in the business of exporting children, in addition to its more famous products such as the delicious bacon derived from the Mallorquin sweet hog (Sus dulciculus maioricensis V.) , prized since the days of the Roman consul Caecilius Metellus (nicknamed Balearicus), a delicacy that has placed the cuisine of the Adlon Hotel in Berlin far above the average for German hostelries — as Count Keyserling well knew.

This particular feature of Balearic commerce is overlooked by all of the available travel guides — but then again, the shortcomings of our Baedekers are all too familiar. The only person who could have written a truly comprehensive guide to the Island of Mallorca was my dear friend and journalism teacher Günther Wohlers, a scholar specializing in Joseph Görres and an expert on women and spiritual beverages. He died as a result of his own versatility, at about the time when a Baedeker discovered him. After his death, in my estimation it was only Don Vigoleis who could stand in as a worthy successor in matters of Mallorquin detail, albeit one who was at several removes from the original when it came to all-around vagabond tourism. In fact, Don Vigoleis had already taken up Wohlers’ scepter in the form of hundreds of letters to his friends, letters that were often copied out and sent to friends of these friends, with the result that he could lay claim to being the most widely read picaresque epistolographer of the entire Mediterranean world.

Don Flugencio’s Children’s Aid Agency — Established 1876, Gold and Silver Medals, References Upon Request — was not among the attractions one must visit if one wished to have “done” the island.

Pedro told us about a certain fellow on the island, drawing sketches of him in a variety of professional poses, who plied the trade of corredor de niños : Supplier of Children. In Mulet’s tertulia there had also been talk of some such business, but I hadn’t been able to form a very clear picture of its operations. In my mind’s eye, I saw a large knife with blood on its blade, the blood of a child. And weeping mothers surrounded by innocent kids at play, kids who were destined to fall victim to the well-honed blade. Was my thought process too German, too sadistic? But if so, then the tertulia attendants were equally guilty, because they always “ventilated” such matters in such a way that the wheat got thrown out with the chaff, leaving no useful grain behind. In the South, the sky is chock-full of stars and saints. Similarly, on Southern terra firma there is an overabundance of words, even from the mouths of people who are constrained to reticence by pipe-smoking — as in the case of Don Joaquín Verdaguer — or by gout and other ailments of a former military career — as with Don Miguel de Villalonga.