Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Beatrice had long since stopped sketching with her imaginary pencil. She put aside the broker’s letter and said laconically, “Pedro! And you’re falling for it, too?”

“Pedro? What’s Pedro got to do with Don Fulgencio? Can’t there be anything at all unusual any more without Pedro being involved in it? Just because he’s a Sureda?”

This was the attack I was fearing, but it was coming from an unexpected direction: from above. I had to devise a cautious defense of my friend, and try to fend off the worst. If this new model of his started smelling, that would irritate Beatrice, and she would toss out the both of them together with sheepskin and easel. But then what about Pedro’s art? Pedro liked Beatrice, but Beatrice liked Pedro less and less, the closer she looked and sniffed at his artistic trappings, and the odder the people were that he brought to our house. These characters were in fact quite impossible if you insisted on judging them by non-Spanish standards — as Beatrice did. That’s why she wasn’t getting any fun out of the jokes Pedro was playing with his victims.

Here is an example which, while again diverting our attention momentarily from Don Fulgencio, will eventually make his case all the more comprehensible. Pedro knew a pharmacist whose mind worked in ways that were not altogether compatible with the production of pills. This man boasted of being able to tell at a distance of twenty yards whether a woman was, as they say, immaculate. The fellow later became the victim of his own talent, but that is yet another story with a fatal ending. Pedro told this seer about this German friend of his who wrote poems, and who showed other signs of not being quite mentally sound. For example, whenever this friend was introduced to someone, he broke out into gales of laughter. He would get veritable laughing fits. But then, polite fellow that he basically was, he would try to suppress his mirth, and this made the situation all the more embarrassing. Would the pharmacist care to make this gentleman’s acquaintance, Pedro asked? Indeed he would, was the pill-pusher’s reply, whereupon Pedro told me the selfsame thing about the apothecary’s strange habits and asked me the same question: would I be interested in meeting him? The meeting took place in our apartment, unfortunately at the very moment when Beatrice, in despair over the linguistic ineducability of the Mallorquin populace, entered the house. She joined us just as we were standing in the doorway laughing uproariously at each other. Pedro, working his sketch-pad with abandon, winked at both of us in turn: “What did I tell you!” Each of us reacted to the event in the precisely appropriate fashion — most appropriately Beatrice, who turned livid.

It was episodes like this one that, in the course of time, made us constantly wary of Pedro as a house guest. That explains why Pedro had to be suspected of setting us up for this prank with the broker’s letter — I myself, good German that I was, had fallen for this nonsense just as all the Germans had fallen for Adolf Hitler. This was a direct hit! Then began our domestic political feud. Beatrice called my gullibility very German and very Catholic. Just one more step and I would land in the bosom of both Führer and Pope, the two medicine-men of organized mass deception. Well now, I said, how very Swiss-Reformed of you to think that way. Just one more step and… But then I was silent, because, for one thing, I couldn’t really imagine where one next step might take a woman like her, and for another, because I thought we shouldn’t be arguing at all about the Nazis — those people would soon enough find a way to drive a wedge between us. Each of us should go off into a corner and be ashamed of ourselves. But now, what about the kind offer being made to us by the aging broker, the worker of miracles?

Pedro, Beatrice continued calmly, had known for a long time about my interest in this fabulous child-dealer, or child-strangler, a fascination that Mulet’s tertulia had kept at high pitch, probably with the intention of pulling one over on me. It was easy to think that Verdaguer might do something like that. Later he would write a mysterious short story about Don Vigoleis, the guy who believed in everything except God. But the tertulia crowd was made up only of literary types; Pedro wouldn’t hesitate to go farther. Not only did he invent people, he actually brought them to our house. I should be on my guard. It surely was Pedro who wrote that letter. Tonight he would show up at our place all a-twitter. As always he would start sketching, and he would listen carefully to our chatter to find out if we had taken the bait. “Just let him come,” said Beatrice. “I’ll go off to bed.”

“My dear Inca maiden, Pedro will arrive tonight just as surely as he did yesterday and will again tomorrow. He’s a persistent guy. He aims to wear you down, but he’s using the wrong technique. Don’t worry. I have no intention of revealing the secret ways of winning over a transalpine squaw. And besides, with all due respect for his thoroughly un-Spanish inventiveness, he would never be able to concoct such a letter.”

Beatrice reached for a book, which promised better entertainment than a discussion of the case of the child-merchant. Summoning up my courage I continued, “Let’s talk about reality. This letter is extremely clever and subtle. The deceptively blue coloration is bluer than the German Romantic poets’ blue flower, the one whose fragrance we perceive at the source of all forms of deeper knowledge. It is pregnant with cadaver murders as at our Clock Tower. It is a double-edged entity conceived in the dreams and waking hours of the poets. Everything else in the world pales in significance whenever reality begins to bring forth stories — not history, but stories— plotless stories, random stories, just-so stories, stories that don’t care who gets to read them. L’art pour l’art , but with cosmic import. Reality can accomplish anything. It selects topics that our poets do not dare to contemplate. It writes about me, for example, la mia bella . Or about the Don Fungencio Lladó of this letter here. It has the greatest store of experience, of the kind that Novalis or Rilke expected any true writer to have. And it never tells lies, even though its texts may cause us to have certain doubts, just as you yourself are having right now. But then again, you are a theologian’s daughter. You could never resist taking peeks behind the scenes of your Daddy’s study as he composed his Sunday sermons or his university lectures, earning bread for his family in the employ of Heaven itself, just like any other Daddy earning his family’s keep. Such a family background is enough to give a precocious child a life-long complex.

“Now you are no longer a believer in divine revelation. And that’s understandable, given a father who pronounces the Word of God on Sundays, and in mid-week lays down household cash on the table for Mother — what an impossible situation! The Catholic Church has arranged these things much more intelligently and meaningfully — with more eternal significance, I am tempted to say. Or do you perhaps think that the Church invented its rule of celibacy and defended it down through the centuries against all kinds of attacks, simply because the Church’s own virginity required a virgin priesthood, or perhaps because it feared financial burdens on the hierarchy, a debt that would of course grow to gigantic proportions if the clergy, from the village curate to the Pontifex Maximus himself, had to contend with wife and children? Ignatius of Loyola might have devised a militant solution to this problem. No institution in the world outdoes the Catholic Church in combining opulence with beggary. You are well aware that I am still searching for any Servant of the Lord who might actually still believe in this Lord. I am a huge fan of miracles. Romanticism is in my blood.”