Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Please, Mr. Silberstern, wait here outside the warehouse. I’ll go in first and talk with the officials, and they won’t be interested in Furtwängler’s Ninth. Madam Froitzheim is another matter entirely. I know her personally, and in the Gürzenich cafeteria we often had knockwurst and beer together.”

At the customs warehouse I knew just who to go to. It was the friendly fellow who had arranged customs for our stuff with Antonio. He dealt with the most serious cases by waving his hand and going back to sleep. But he wasn’t there. I asked for the Customs Director. What did I want from him, I was asked; the Director wasn’t to be disturbed except in highly unusual matters. I told the fellow that my client had just such a highly unusual situation. “There he is, standing over there, the stocky little gentleman with the fancy hat.” The customs officer, taking one look at Silberstern, laughed. “That guy? What a pain in the ass! What a pig!” I motioned to my “client” to be patient a while, and walked to one side with the officer. “What’s up?” I asked.

I was given the following explanation. Some books had arrived from Germany, from some place called “Furzeburg,” addressed to a “Mister Silbersterren” at the Pensión “La Sagrada Familia” in Palma. The customs inspection had revealed an entire collection of dirty literature— pornography. The warehouse walls turned red at the discovery. “It was such a pile of smut, Señor!” But interestingly enough, nobody here realized that there could be such an enormous number of dirty books. The Germans, he said, were very meticulous people. But filth is filth, and we foreigners would just have to learn to abide by the rules of his Catholic country. Then the customs officer snickered, and I snickered back. We both knew all about Catholic manners.

Hiring an interpreter at 10 pesetas an hour, Mr. Silberstern had already started negotiations at the warehouse. The interpreter, a Spaniard in the employ of Cook Travel, got nowhere, since he, too, was mesmerized by the filthy books instead of palavering them out of the possession of customs, pocketing his fee with a redoubled grin. He sent the German pornocrat to the Tourist Office, where the boss was a German who had been in the Spanish tourism business for more than thirty years. He wanted nothing to do with the affair, and sent the emigrant to the German Bookshop, which in turn sent him to me, right up to the edge of my Tombs of the Huns.

“There’s nothing we can do,” said the officer. “The Director has confiscated the entire shipment, which is now under lock and key. In what capacity have you come here?” I had no idea, so I went outside and asked the brother of Attorney Muthelm Silberstern from Frankfurt, Dr. jur. and Ph.D., to tell me quickly what my duties were to be in this morality play. “Haven’t you understood? You are my legal consultant.”

I relayed this information to the puzzled customs officer: I was the jurisconsultus of the gentleman from the city whose name, when pronounced the Spanish way, sounded faintly shabby. My credentials, I explained, consisted in the fact that I was standing here discussing the case. This he seemed to comprehend, and so he went off to notify the Director. He asked my client to enter the building and take a seat. Under my legal guardianship, Mr. Silberstern’s case was becoming official.

The crates containing suspect literature, he then told me, represented only a portion of his personal library — basically just the more frequently consulted volumes. The remainder of his collection was being shipped together with his brass bedstead and his automatic wardrobe. The confiscated material was a small collection of (here Silberstern raised a chubby index finger) scientific erotica, assembled for scholarly purposes.

The Customs Director asked us into his office. I introduced myself as procurator and prolocutor , pointed to my client, and reached for my breast pocket. But the Director didn’t want to see my papers. I said, “Please tell me what’s going on here. My client is experiencing harm by being barred from consulting his scientific literature. In the name of free scholarly inquiry, I wish to protest!”

The Director laughed. Did I want to know what was going on here? “ Momento! ”

He pulled forth a huge tome, slammed it on his desk, opened it to a dog-eared page, and then slapped the volume with the flat of his hand. “ That’s what’s going on here, sir!”

Pink like lard or marzipan, the buttocks of a beauty queen peeked forth from her discreetly lowered lace panties. Bent over forward, she turned her head to the spectator, revealing at one and the same time both of her very similar visages. It was only the smile on her second visage that looked any better than the other one.

My client’s eyes swelled out of their sockets, gazing in watery glee at the illustration. I remained in control of the situation. I wasn’t standing in some steamy apartment corridor with María del Pilar. I was legal consultant for scholarly research on the subject of sleaze. So I replied with confident dignity to the Director’s impatient query, intoned as he again slapped the picture, as to what I thought that was supposed to be.

“Director, Sir, what we have here is the hindquarters, shorn of their usual covering, of what I take to be a French virgin — plus a view of her countenance.”

“Aha! Here in Spain we call this stuff filth, horrible filth. The worst kind of filth that anyone can imagine.” Once again his hand slammed down on the corpus delicti . My client asked me to translate what the Director had said about the picture. So I translated, and that brought Mr. Silberstern to life. His eyes bulged out even farther, but now it was from sheer indignation. “The worst kind of filth, you say? Well now, let me show you what’s in this volume!” With a flip of his practiced hand and without the aid of a dog-ear, he laid bare a page where things were really going strong. This time it involved a couple, a she and a he. Once again my client’s expert eyes took on a moist gleam. It was such a long time since he had lost sight of his beloved bare-asses.

The Director clapped his hands a third time, now as a sign for his assistant to go fetch the “whole pile of crap.” Soon the top of his desk was completely filled. The smutty evidence spilled over onto the chairs in his office. Wherever we looked, we saw naked babes, savage pimps, and horny chambermaids in the most flagrant poses, all of them openly engaged in love-making of the most unbridled sort. The owner of this scholarly collection pointed out some particularly significant specimens, naming secret sources, prices, and the availability of discounts for serial subscriptions. Then he asked me to inquire of the Director if he might be interested in subscribing.

Meanwhile several other customs employees had entered the office. Volumes and sliced-out pages from the collection were making their way from hand to hand amid chuckles, brief discussions, and appraisals, just as at the pre-sale confabs at an auction. They all agreed that this was filth, and they were appalled that it was made in Germany. I noticed that certain officers were stashing some smaller specimens in the pockets of their smocks. The Director then made up his mind: “ Quemar !” I translated: “Burn it all!” My client blanched — but not on account of the threatened auto-da-fé. Dripping in sweat, he rummaged among his treasures, pulled forth a few books that had already passed through the officials’ hands, and began furiously thumbing through the pages. “Right here, Herr Doktor! Look here! That’s exactly where the very best of it was, and these gentleman have used their pen knives to cut them out. You must register a protest!” So I enunciated a formal protest: willful larceny of an entire corpus of intellectual property. The Director laughed and said, “Maybe some judge will fall for that one. We make autonomous decisions.” He went on to explain that he himself had cut out the most blasphemous examples, spending whole nights working through the collection. Remaining calm and matter-of-fact, relying on my experience as an assistant to German university scholars, I inquired of the Director just what, in light of a unified concept of erotic scholarly research (difficult to put into Spanish, but I managed), he meant by the word “blasphemous.” By employing this term, I added, he was giving the entire case a theological turn. Was he aware of the possible consequences?