Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

For Don Fulgencio, however, I was at this moment simply a potential client waiting for an attractive offer. To signal my inner relaxation, I sat with one leg crossed over the other, but in reality I remained the gullible simpleton, miles away from being the Padishah imagined by the servant girl who was still eavesdropping at the door and was now about to learn what was what.

Don Fulgencio must have been a resourceful businessman, to judge by the furious efficiency with which he now set out to make our deal. A racing oarsman at a feria couldn’t have done it much better — which makes me think I should retract my analogy with Field Marshal Hindenburg. The boss succeeded in explaining what seemed to me an attractive offer. I found myself concocting arguments that I could later use against Beatrice, in case I once again returned home with an anthropomorphic raven. Incidentally, the abandoned child now under discussion was of the male sex — somewhat disappointing for me, since I would have preferred a little girl to play with. Pre-natal determination of sex is still an obscure area of science. But in the present instance, post-natal sexual identity was a bitter fait accompli that I had to accept.

I allowed myself to be persuaded that the child should be set aside for me for a few days. In a short time I was to inform the broker whether we would take the boy. I forgot to ask the tradesman to show me the object of our negotiations, so overwhelmed was I by being outmaneuvered. How often I leave a store with a purchase I had no intention of making! I rose. Don Fulgencio stepped forth from behind his herbarium, and I heard the servant girl flit away from her listening post. Cats sped across the courtyard, and then I was standing out on the street blinking my eyes, as the day had lost none of its dazzling brilliance. I folded my beret to give it a visor, and made my way home.

I chose a long detour as the shortest way, given that I had to ponder my strategy for any and all further negotiations arising from the promise I made to the broker. I did this more for my own sake than for Beatrice’s, who would be shocked. First a raven, now a kid.

On the way I met a German war invalid, a fellow whose heroism (Iron Cross, Second Class) had now drifted over into the “Never-Again-War!” movement. He suffered from hay fever, or catharrus aestivus , as he himself preferred to name his affliction, but except for that he was living happily and contentedly with his Spanish wife, who ran a millinery store. Anyone who wanted to be seen on the streets of Palma bought her hats from this woman. The injured German veteran, whose father was a schoolteacher and a creator of (rhyming) word games, made his own purchases in Paris, and that was a huge mistake. His fear of aggravating his hay fever was so great that he avoided all contact with flowers, even artificial flowers, the idea being to preclude any thought whatsoever of blossoming meadows. His wife had to switch to selling brassieres, stockings, and the like, since no one wished any longer to wear her neurotic hats. Beatrice was her last victim.

I completed the remainder of my homeward journey in my usual state of absent-mindedness, which turns me into a dangerous pedestrian. I probably wasn’t even thinking of the state of fatherhood that the gods of the island were plotting for me.

I found Beatrice sitting on a box, absorbed not in some murder case, but in Padre Feijó, whom I had started translating in order to acclimate myself to the misty atmosphere that surrounds his world of thought. I was copying the technique used by underwater workers, who first enter a compressed-air chamber to exercise their breathing before descending in a diving bell. This is the only way I know of to adapt to a foreign mentality. I would like to have produced for a German readership this Benedictine monk’s great essay on the mischief committed by nationalist zealotry. Of course this would get nowhere in the Third Reich, but perhaps there was a market for it in a periodical run by emigrés? I corresponded on this subject with Klaus Mann, who, I assumed, would welcome with open arms for his journal Die Sammlung such a contribution on nationalistic superstition. But he, too, had no room for a three-hundred-year-old voice of the spirit against the anti-spiritual.

“Well now, has Vigoleis made a successful business deal? And how did Pedro wiggle his way out of it?”

“I’m not at all sure that what I have just accomplished can be called business. As far as Pedro is concerned, you can rest assured. I didn’t see Pedro, but instead went straightaway to Don Fulgencio. As you know, he lives on Morey, in a palacete that’s swarming with cats and domestic servants. That’s the street you’ve always shunned because of its questionable elements. That’s where he lives, and nailed to his door is the Sacred Heart and a palm branch. What did Angelita sell you?”

“Some goat cheese from Menorca, some soaked garbanzos, and a can of squid in their ink.”

“I just… But guess who I met.”

“Bobby, fleeing from Don José’s gynecological machinations? So then he’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll keep the chickpeas and my portion of the squid for him, as long as he spares me his abstract art.”

“Our young friend from the Folkwang School can certainly get by for a week in Valldemosa without applying the forceps. No, I met Mr. Hay Fever!”

“Oh my God, you just can’t escape bad luck! Did he bore you to tears?”

“He complained bitterly about the failures of medical science. They can’t find anything to cure him of his malady — not even the Germans, and for him that’s the worst part of it. But since Hitler, he hasn’t been swearing so loudly that there’ll never again be a war using weapons filled with flower pollen. But at the moment the important thing, it seems to me, is that I made an agreement with Don Fulgencio. You can see in me the Angel of the Annunciation, you may speak your Ecco ancilla , and our plundered apartment will be our Bethlehem. I’m going to zip back to the adoption agency. But don’t we still have a drop of Felanitx around?”

Beatrice handed me the bottle in silence. I placed it to my lips as she, standing at the hearth, stirred the calamari a few times in their ink. I was prepared for anything, for heavy artillery and for some French sniping to underscore the seriousness of the argument. Allons-y!

“Well then, it seems that this time I’ve come out OK. To be honest, I was preparing for the worst, especially after you sent me Mr. Silberstern with his disgusting money and girl problems, a trampish pharmacist, Kitschoffer the exhibitionist (this was an unfortunate Spanish schoolboy whose Swiss forebears were named Kirchhofer), the unwashed Miss Joan, en chaleur perpétuelle , and instead of my longed-for grail with the Eye of God, a mangy raven. Now it’s just a kid? You’re running out of ideas. Are you sick? What are we going to do with the brat? I hope it’s already housebroken and won’t mess up my newspaper. We can find some milk, but I refuse to wash diapers.”

This was, in the form of a politely delivered speech, a rebuff — a blow with the flat of the blade, to be sure, but a blow in any case. I parried with a gulp of Felanitx. For ulcers of the spirit, alcohol is still the most beneficial balm, and the brand I’m talking about had 16 % of it.

If what I am recounting here were pure narrative fiction, something made up, I would now let you hear a knock at our door and the special doorbell signal used by Pedro, who has a key when he comes down the corridor to our apartment. Or I’d have Mr. Silberstern (may Beatrice forgive me) demand immediate entry with four rapid knocks, to tell me of some new sexual quandary and ask me to help him out, or at least listen to the details. Beatrice would dash away, absolving me of all further explanations concerning the orphan. But unfortunately, these jottings are beholden to reality. Here I am endeavoring to depict everything that happened in those days, down to the last pictorial detail and the most insignificant area of shade, against the background of our furniture-free everyday existence. Beatrice is not some wispy phantasm. And provided that the phenomenon of existence can tolerate being set in the comparative, Don Fulgencio is even less so — although Beatrice would have liked nothing better than to wave him off into the realm of fable and Pedro’s masquerading intrigues. Least of all, myself — although I must confess that I have lived through moments when I felt like some monster’s sweaty dream. But who would ever want to have a fool like me in a dream? That, too, is something I must take care of on my own; I must be my own nightmare and torturer. There’s no one to blame except Creation itself. “Shame, shame — that is the history of mankind!” Thus spake Zarathustra.