Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

A loud knock at our door echoed up the stairway. And just as we might count the seconds between a flash of lightning and the thunderclap, each of us counted the tapping steps as they approached our landing. Now — now! Pedro lifted his hands as if starting a dance, spreading all his fingers. And then the doorbell rang, thrice.

“ Ave María purísima! ” said Pedro. I responded like an altar boy, “ Sin pecado concebida! ” and I went to the door.

If I were a novelist, at this juncture I would plant some doubt as to whether it was truly Don Fulgencio with our child who was asking for entry despite the letters NHN, thus granting Beatrice her little triumph: Aha, it’s all a swindle! It’s only the night watchman who’s come to pick up his weekly pay! Yet historical veracity demands that I open our door for the broker to enter. It’s odd, though, that he appears to be rather taller than I remember him from his palacete . Perhaps this is because the dimensions of our living quarters are giving rise to optical illusions. Everything looks big to little people.

Don Fulgencio filled up our door frame completely. I even feared that he might hit his head against the upper molding. Would he allow me to precede him into our apartment? Then I espied a second figure — probably the chauffeur, while down below the carriage waited with our kid and the servant girl. This second visitor, smaller than his putative boss and rather less imposing in dress and manner, looked well into his sixties, although probably he was only fifty. He clicked his tongue, suggesting that I was correct in identifying him as the coachman. He made a bow — something a Spanish cochero never does, but — all right, let’s enter the room where Beatrice and Pedro await the visit with poorly feigned nonchalance. If I say “poorly feigned,” it is because no one ever approaches an encounter with another person without fearing a violation of one’s own selfhood. There were no mutual introductions. No one asked about the child. If Don Fulgencio had lit up a party cigar or if Beatrice had started yodeling — she never yodels — all of us would have welcomed this as a perfectly natural prelude to the festivities. Instead, Pedro began humming softly his favorite copla: “ Ay si, ay no, ses at lo tes em dinen, que’l m’ham de teiar …” The coachman belched resoundingly and spat with grandezza behind our piano. I didn’t dare to look at Beatrice.

We chatted about the weather, last night’s thunderstorm, the newly rinsed palm trees in the beautiful girls’ yard. Then someone piped up about political matters and that fellow Hitler who seemed to be sitting more squarely in his saddle and was now further than ever from getting tossed out, contrary to what Don García Díaz, the Berlin correspondent for the paper El Sol , kept prophesying to his readers every Sunday. Don Fulgencio’s opinions were more remarkable than I had recalled them from our exclusively personal conversation at his herbarium. They were decidedly not my opinions, but at least he seemed open to discussion. The nameless fellow whom I still took for the coachman — though now, standing in full illumination, he looked more like an accountant or a bailiff — didn’t open his mouth except to burp or spit, further proof that he represented some anonymous authority, perhaps a notary who had come along to make official the transfer of the child. His faulty upbringing was of course his own business.

My immediate train of thought led me from coachman to dray horse to civil servant to red tape. Even in Spain, where people were not yet degraded to cannon fodder and the civil servants were still bribeable, you could still meet up with an aberrant representative of the official sphere who would insist on rubber stamps, illegible signatures, and above all on the proper document — what the Germans call a Schein . The meaning of this German word, which originally signified brightness, glory, and brilliance, mutated in the late Middle Ages into a designation for “written proof” or “documentation.” Spoken threateningly by a civil servant, it is among the most fearful words I know. “Do you have a Schein ?” I have only the most dreadful memories of my school years and my teachers, with the exception of our principal, Father Kremers. I would prefer to end my days in a ditch rather than relive those years in the classroom and get harassed by slave-driving teachers. Even so, I am never tortured by nightmare memories of school. In their stead, what often awakens me in a cold sweat is being pursued by civil servants. I fear asphyxiation, and I cry out. Over the course of the years Beatrice has become used to these nocturnal attacks, whereas I myself am repeatedly the victim of such ambushes. You simply cannot become inured to bad dreams, no matter how often they occur. Those who explore the depths of the human soul might conclude that instead of “sharing my bed with my mother,” I had shared it with a civil servant. “Try to shuck off the burdens of the world, and you will have to bear them. Let someone else succumb.” The goblins won’t leave me in peace. That’s why St. Augustine’s City of God stands on feet of clay. This precursor of modern psychology refused to employ civil servants in his civitas , not even in subaltern positions. The civil servant is the very salt of the state, its very own salt-lick. My own personal Oedipus once confronted me in the following manner (I hope Don Fulgencio will forgive this digression back to Cologne, where this Oedipus of mine held sway behind a counter in the Municipal Post Office).

I was a freshman at the university, and I was overwhelmed by new experiences. I wanted to purchase some stamps, but the counter window was lowered. I knocked ever so discreetly on the glass. It was 2:00 pm, the time when the public was permitted to do business. Behind the dull glass I saw a dark, roundish shape that could only be that of the clerk’s head, apparently awaiting the victims of his afternoon shift, his moistened pen already in hand. Suddenly the window opened with a bang. This servant of the Reich poked forth his skull, which was adorned with the same bellicose brush haircut as the portrait of Hindenburg on the stamps he had to sell, and he snarled at me, “What are you, illiterate? We are closed until two!” The window snapped shut with another bang, much like a guillotine. It failed to decapitate this particular post-office terrorist only because, with reflexes closely resembling those of an aged pensioner in a split-second I succeeded in retracting my head into my collar. In my fright I took a step backward, causing me to step on the foot of the customer behind me. This fellow, in turn, gave me a quick shove forwards, making me lurch into the counter. These post-office counters were built in such a way that the clerks lacked a completely clear line of fire. The principle of free-roaming, introduced decades previous in zoological gardens by Hagenbeck and Lutz Heck — the zoo visitor can stand eye-to-eye with the wildest of animals and not get eaten — had not yet found its adherents among the architects of public-service accommodations and their counters.

Be that as it may, my would-be Hindenburg had now delivered a shot with his Prussian muzzle-loader, and now sat smoking behind his window, which still rattled from the preceding fracas. Suddenly the official clock, set just a few seconds behind my grandmother’s First Holy Communion watch, tolled twice. The counter window leaped upwards, and the selfsame Reich bloodhound who had barked at me asked in the politest of tones, “May I help you?” In between the rifle shot from in front and the shove from behind I had forgotten what I wanted. I stammered something, heard the fellow behind me grumbling, and fled the scene. It took months for me to muster the courage to approach another post-office counter. A fellow student consoled me. He had just flunked his all-important state exam with the philosopher Scheler, who on his part had offered solace to his student with the phenomenological dictum that in order to understand him, Scheler, one must be literate. Was the post-office clerk aware that I, too, was a student of Scheler? And did he possibly think that I understood him?