Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

On the eve of our departure from the island, at our last gathering at a café on the Borne — at the next table sat a genuine general with his Pilar — we were reviewing event by fascinating event, in joy and in sorrow, the story of our sojourn on Mallorca, the times of near-starvation as well as our days of plenitude at Mamú’s. I inquired, “Pedro, What about that business with the hijo de algo ? Were you involved in that?” He did not reply, for at that moment the general pricked up his ears like a guard dog. Had the writers and philosophers of Mulet’s tertulia , loyal to us right up to the end, done anything to push this little scheme along? Verdaguer? Don Jaime Escat, the Villalonga brothers, or in particular the specialist in depth psychology who could have had a professional interest in the case? It is useless to try to find all this out at this late date. For in my memory the events of our island period, which one or another of my readers may find amusing, have taken on an aura and coloration of sorrow and melancholy that will forever remain constant from top to bottom, no matter how rationally I might try to link together all the strands of so-called cause and effect. I now believe less than ever in the psychology of the moraine and the mythologizing attempts to unravel human pre-history, both of which methods operate hand in hand in the frightful lower depths of existence. Perhaps Vigoleis can be forgiven if he has the conceited affrontery to say that he is too fervently devoted to poetry for such tactics. As I continue to observe him while writing, I discover that Vigoleis, as prone to shame and embarrassment as any fool, has up to this very moment never veered off — or, let us say, degenerated — into abject despair. His merry Weltschmerz has made of him a plaything of destiny. If, like a football, he sometimes flies out of bounds, it cannot be said that he ever gave himself that extra kick. Though continually shoved around, he has never felt that he himself was doing the shoving. Those who wander at the periphery of existence, where no one believes that the instinct for self-propagation can bring about the fulfillment of what is unfulfillable, no matter how sacred that goal might be or how much inner commitment it might entail: such persons simply cannot accept the burden of fostering a child. This non-child’s name, by the way, was Olimpio.

As the child-of-nobody hurled himself with a shriek to the bosom of his cuckoo of a father, his lips were bathed in foam. Beatrice withdrew in disgust. Her Lladó remained silent.

We took the broker and his white elephant, now reduced in price, to the Plaza Atarazanas and loaded the two brothers onto a cart; Pedro insisted on doing the driving. As a businessman, Don Fulgencio was dead; he was a dead man. Olimpio was delivered to an institution, Fulgenico to his palace.

I went back home. I was incapable of clear thoughts. I felt as if my mind were in a vise. All I could do was make a sudden decision: Matías! Go buy some bread from Don Matías! I sank down on the flour sack like… an empty sack of flour.

“The Nazis?” the baccalaureus asked. “Have you locked horns with the Consul?” I told him I would explain things tomorrow. I bought a loaf of bread, and went back home where Conde de Kessler would be waiting for me. But what would Beatrice say?

She greeted me with a look of such dark, smoldering despair as I hadn’t seen in her eyes since the ordeal with the whore Pilar. The sight of foam at the mouth of the goitrous cretin had stifled every last trace of maternal feeling before it could express itself. Besides, our corridor was now filthy, and our bible-paper apartment had saliva on the floor. But even so — all had ended peacefully. I gave her a questioning glance, and she replied with the oracular assertion, “So that’s what we get!”

She had squeezed up the newspapers in our bedroom to make a place to sit down. And there she now sat, like a mother bird in the nest. “Never again will I let that guy in our house!” she continued. “You’ll just see what happens!”

“Do you mean Kessler? Our schedule for today is pretty full. He and I have a whole lot of solecisms to weed out. Kessler will be punctual as usual, and after this deluge he’ll have mud on his shoes.”

I could tell by her glancing at the ceiling that Beatrice meant neither Count Kessler nor Fulgencio’s boorish brother. Whenever she has fits of superstition, she is unbearable. On such occasions, I feel like grabbing her and dunking her in a cool bath of reasonableness. But — with what strength, and with what justification? So then I, too, lifted my eyes to the ceiling, only to notice that he was really gone. Empedocles! I, too, took fright, but was suddenly thrust back to reality by the ringing of our doorbell.

Whenever I take up a new address, I conduct a test to see if it really works. I issue what I call my Spider Edict.

At the post office I send myself two postcards, each with the notation “Return to Sender.” As the “sender” I put down my own name, one with my old address and one with the new. The second card gets sent a few days after the first. The mailman does the rest of the work. He observes that Vigoleis doesn’t live at the address indicated, and puts the card back in his bag—“return to sender.” On his next delivery round he goes to that address, with the same result. Thus card No. 1 becomes a dead letter. Card No. 2 has no stamp on it, requiring the postal service to make repeated attempts at delivery in order to cash in the postage due. In this manner, delivery eventually takes place, and after I arrive it works like a charm. I owe this clever method to Don Fernando, the General Secretary of the Palma Post Office. It has worked in several countries, even in the Canton Ticino.

My “Spider Edict,” so named after the opening words of the text Sollicitudo omnium aranearum , has other aims as well. I have always been poor. Poverty breeds emergencies. Emergency is the mother of invention. When I move into a new apartment, I make sure that it isn’t swept too carefully, and immediately I pronounce the Spider Edict. I return all rights to spiders, just as Napoleon’s clerical adversary did with the Jesuits in 1814. The spiders must henceforth spin their webs and, on my behalf, catch flies and mosquitoes. I keep them — in southern climes, of course — just as the ancient Egyptians kept the sacred ichneumon as a mouse catcher. In particularly bothersome locations such as above our bed, at my desk, or in our reading space, where the incidence of biting and stinging is unusually high, I have them spin their webs. To this end I open the window, allowing free access to all the flies of the neighborhood. In places where I wish the spiders to settle, I spread honey on the wall or on little sticks that I deploy for just this purpose. The flies immediately form black swarms that serve as bait. Then I release the spiders, which I have captured and assorted according to type and size. One out of ten will begin attaching its web just where I want it. Sometimes it takes weeks for the spiders to take up ambush positions at all the important points.

The first spider I trained in this fashion to keep watch over Beatrice’s reading site was baptized by her, a Bible expert, with the name Mephiboseth. When one day the spider disappeared without a trace, Beatrice said that this meant bad luck — and it did! From then on we christened our chief spider Empedocles, because it kept disappearing into thin air. Some women cannot bear to hire a maid, and Beatrice could not stand having spiders in our employ. That is why I later gave her a mosquito net as a present. It was less romantic, but more reliable. Still, if a mosquito ever finds its way inside the net, there’s hell to pay.