Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Without a doubt, this Oedipus at Cologne contributed toward my decision to escape into foreign lands before the counter windows closed on the Weimar Republic, long before Adolf Hitler, the Master Civil Servant of the Reich, stepped into office behind his frosty pane of glass, holding a watch that was a good deal slower than my own — slower by centuries.

Satellite are often just as important as the planets toward which they always show the same face. Sancho Panza is an immortal example of this phenomenon. In this regard, let us examine more closely our coachman/civil servant before he signs on the dotted line and disappears into the anonymity of his ledger books — which can also serve as a hiding place.

With such a patently earthbound character, let us begin at the bottom of his feet and proceed slowly upward along his rumpled trousers, across his woolen sash and up to his open shirt collar, from whence there protrudes an impressive goiter, above which, finally, we behold an unimpressive head. Let us begin, that is, at his soles and not at the crown of his scalp, considering that a pedestal is often worth more than the entire statue. Memorable quotations and a bas-relief frieze are meant to distract an observer from the depicted figure, who in bronze is more amazed at his own heroism than he ever was in real life. This coachman wore the hemp sandals of the little people, albeit with Catalan laces. This brand is somewhat more expensive, but for a man of his standing…?

“Take this,” Pedro said. He tore a page from his sketch pad and gave it to me. He had drawn our mysterious visitor on the scale of 1:10, paying more attention to his head than to its underpinning. Only after glancing at the portrait did I begin to notice certain contortions in the corners of the man’s mouth — facial gestures surrounded by stubble and reinforced by wrinkles in the neck. One look at the real-life model convinced me that the artist had seen things clearly, and that I — where had I seen such a visage before, so different from a genuinely human countenance? Why yes indeed, at the prison in Münster, where in a lecture room behind bars Professor Többen was exhibiting his “cases” to us students.

The broker was conversing with his companion notary in Mallorquinian. The latter, getting impatient, stamped his foot hard enough to raise some dust, made a grotesque smile, and swore through his nose, an action that gave rise to a bubble that, no bigger than an egg, quickly burst into spray. I nearly collapsed. Were we going to have a unique, profoundly significant act certified by a notary-public who lived at the borderlines of imbecility? This could result in black-on-white disaster for all concerned! I glanced around the assembled company, looking for allies. Beatrice pulled a wooden box over to the Lladó, tipped it up, and opened the top of the piano. Was she going to start practicing? Now? Very well, I would do it all myself. Making a quick decision, I asked the broker to show me, finally, the child. But if the imbecile was not a coachman after all, there would be no coach down below, no servant girl, no hijo de algo …

“Don Fulgencio,” I said, “let us proceed directly…” But I got no further. With a piercing screech the goitrous fellow leaped to embrace me. Did he take me for a king, the kind of shaman whose “royal touch” some old stories tell us can make a goiter disappear?

This was a primal scream. All of us have used it at one time or another. Without it, the race of mankind would never have degenerated into human beings, but would still be squatting in trees or paddling along in the glassy primeval ooze. Mankind would be at an end, because billions of years ago it would never have got started. There would have been no need for a Jesus Christ to come and redeem us, for pessimists to rake us though the coals, or for non-poetic existentialists to bother themselves with our latter-day enlightenment. The notary cried out, “Papá!”

Strictly speaking, dear reader, what transpired following this brutish shouting in our bible-paper living quarters, the place that was supposed to have been the scene of my most gratifying optation, belongs not in these applied recollections at all, but in a handbook of psychiatry. Here I shall append only the remarkable external events and explain how all of us became the victims of a feat of legerdemain, the consummation of which was abetted by Beatrice’s deep-rooted skepticism and lack of imagination, unmitigated in this case by any sight of reality, as well as by my own, perhaps misguided, ambition and my inborn playfulness, arising from natural melancholy. Not to mention my poetizing idealism, which comes dangerously close to being simiesque and can easily be stimulated by sheer curiosity.

Don Fulgencio de la Fuente y Carbonell de Lladó was a common, ordinary employment agent. Housemaids, waiters, botones , kitchen help, wet nurses and the like were the raw material of his business, commodities that no doubt were not always easy to deal with. At the beginning of his career he developed his talents on the mainland, with headquarters in Barcelona. Later he settled on Mallorca, where he had grown up. He came from Son Ferragut, a village in the interior of the island. Once by accident he received an indirect commission, on behalf of a childless English couple who regularly spent the winter months in the Balearics, to locate an orphan, a hijo de algo of questionable origins, an expósito of the kind that still today are taken to convents to rescue them from even more fearful destinies. The foster parents’ gratitude knew no bounds, as the girl turned into the glory of their barren marriage and kept alive their bonds with the beloved Mediterranean, even when they lived on their estate in England or when traveling. Over the course of the years Don Fulgencio, despite his commercial shrewdness a man with a warm heart, arranged several further adoptions. Inclined to hyperbole, harmlessly whimsical like most of his fellow-countrymen, but probably also with the intention of lending his trade the aura of sanctity, he placed his business under the sponsorship of the Divine Friend to Children. Yielding in his later years to a progressive penchant for dissimulation— pseudologia phantastica in still scarcely studied manifestation — he forged for himself several resounding testimonials from personages of high standing. We have already seen and commented upon his royal missive, which managed to express with heavy-handed irony an anti-monarchist’s unrelenting anger after the collapse of the throne. Presumably it was only Vigoleis who took this bogus document at face value, just as he does his own self, day in and day out.

It was known all around town and across the whole island that Don Fulgencio allowed himself certain irregularities, that he liked to step forth in borrowed plumes, that his ambitions exceeded what a business agency such as his could ever achieve, in spite of gold and silver medals. Yet the authorities never felt the need to go after this merchant in human lives. They turned a blind eye to him, winked at each other, and were no doubt happy that, so far, they had themselves been spared this variant of Mallorcan nuttiness.

Our employment agent’s life was further complicated by the simple existence of a feebleminded younger brother, who was in his personal care following the early demise of both their parents. Fulgencio’s move back to Mallorca can probably also be explained by his new legal status as his brother’s keeper. This brother remained a child, one of the poor in spirit who were — and presumably still are — destined to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. He was Don Fulgencio’s albatross. I know of no other calamity as dreadful as being burdened with responsibility for someone who is mentally retarded. My whole being rebels against such an insane twist on the part of Mother Nature, who even under normal circumstances is insane enough. No one knows when Don Fulgencio first hatched the idea of selling off his brother, who in the meantime had reached full-grown adulthood. It is unclear whether the broker came up with this notion at a moment of profound depression and urged on by his superstitious visions, or whether he had abettors, evil acquaintances bent on making him a laughing stock. I have never been able to establish the truth of the matter. Was Pedro, after all, part of such a plot, in so far as he suggested me as the proper father for the man’s goitrous brother? Puzzle upon puzzle!