Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

I’m seated in our piso on the General’s Street, but at the same time my feet are stretched out under Mother’s kitchen table back home. On the table there’s a dish of sauerbraten and a bottle of Felanitx blanco , and around the table is my family, trying to figure out the prodigal son. I’m explaining that Beatrice, as a result of her Indian genes, is considered by Aryans as an outlaw and a criminal. My brothers rise up from their chairs and start shouting, “Get a move on!” They raise their right arms, and I cringe to avoid the blow. But instead, they just start shouting “ Heil Hitler ,” and then they try to force me to do the same. I hear myself crying out, “Never!” in Spanish, and then I see myself fleeing the scene. Cowardice is an inherited trait in my clan, and that’s why it’s taking so long for it to die out. I’m racing across the entrance to our house. The family sits down to their sauerbraten meal and lets me escape.

Across the street from our house stands the “Blothus,” formerly the mayor’s office and now the Nazi headquarters, and next to it is the Catholic Hospital, where I was a failure as an acolyte. I’m trying to start breathing free, but I sense the hot pursuit of new enemies at my back: three ur-Teutons, hairy guys wearing hairy pelts and with their red locks bunched together at the back of their heads. I recognize them immediately, just as one always recognizes enemies in dreams. It’s our town mayor, the Catholic pastor, and the pharmacist. Each of them is threatening me with his special weapon: the hammer of Thor; the keys of St. Peter — the very same ones that had attacked my tongue so convincingly that it could no longer intone the Pange lingua gloriosum ; and the apothecary’s bronze pestle. I run to the intersection and catch a trolley driven by a weaver friend of mine. I leap aboard, and my pursuers are able to jump onto the rear car. At the next stop, they step to the front car and start observing my behavior. I raise my arm — not to make the Nazi greeting, but to grab hold of the leather strap. The triumvirate goes into a huddle: is he going to salute, or is he just hanging on there? If he’s only hanging on, we’ll kill him in the name of the Führer . “Kill him,” says the mayor. “Kill him,” says the pill pusher. They enter the car to execute the sentence. Their murder weapons slice through the air, and there is a huge crashing sound. The trolley hits a tree and breaks apart. I wake up, and instead of finding my killers bent over my corpse, I see Beatrice mopping me with a towel. I am saved.

Instead of writing a book about Spain, a country I was loving more as I got to know it better, I wrote one about Germany’s self-induced downfall, a process that I experienced through the degradation of my little home town and its citizens, people who outdid themselves in self-humiliation. With enormous expenditures of energy, they trod the bellows of the national organ, pulling all the stops to boom forth the funeral march for their own abasement. And just as today they are taking up arms for the fatherland, tomorrow they’ll be at it again for God Almighty — that is, if they think that in doing so there’s something to be gained for their beer halls, for their old-age pensions, or for the long night that will inevitably follow. Pious bellows-treaders that they are, they will go on pumping air for Heaven’s sake, panting like big-bellied stallions until the organ pipes burst. Such small-town zealotry could make one smile if it did not continually lead humanity into rivers of blood and tears. Love of God and love of Fatherland — unless you go along with these, may you end up in the gruesome grave amid carnage and spoliation. Thus spake the Lord.

As I was busy on the island of Mallorca writing my Tombs of the Huns , German ingenuity was thinking up the fiery ovens at Auschwitz.

When I think of Germany in the night, I find I cannot sleep aright.

At times when the source of my lyric creativity threatened to dry up, when it brought forth only meager droplets and when all of the pails I lowered into it didn’t come up with a single line of verse, when I consoled myself by thinking of other poets who also went through long periods of drought, such as Rilke and Marsman — during all such fallow times, Vigoleis the Inventor came into his own.

I have invented so many gadgets that my memory is unable to find room for all of them. “Write that down,” Beatrice would say. “You’re terrible, you never make any notes. You throw away complete poems. Other people use index cards. They write down everything, and they keep what they’ve written. You put everything down the toilet, or you go around telling everybody about your inventions, and then when you read in the paper or in the patent notices that somebody else has used your idea. Then you get melancholy and start griping about human depravity. Just dictate your ideas to me. I’ll know right away what’s what.”

Mamú, too, was intensely interested in my talent for invention, and like Beatrice she deplored my unwillingness to broadcast my ideas. It had already become a Sunday custom to give her a progress report, after the Amazons of the gilt-edged Bible had squawked forth their last hymn. As a savvy U.S.A. business woman she thought over each of my inventions carefully, approving, rejecting, or offering suggestions as she saw fit. In my creative habits I had advanced to the point where I wrote down everything and pinned it up on the walls of our bible-paper room — great minds will always find a way — replete with drawings made with an artist’s pencil borrowed from Pedro. Inflatable pyjamas, containing equally-spaced holes for the evaporation of sweat and which could also be used to prevent drowning in deep water, gave rise to general accolades. This idea was born inside the head of an idiot who didn’t even have a bed of his own. At Mamú’s expense, a prototype was put under contract at a Palma rubber factory. I entered prolonged negotiations with a technical specialist there, who called me the “rubber man of the future.” But the factory burned down, producing such clouds of acrid smoke as to plunge the city into darkness for several hours. It looked as if the end of the world had arrived, as at the eruption of Krakatoa. But it was only the end of my pneumatic pajamas.

So I made another invention: the self-sharpening pencil for students of the Bible who get ideas while reading and want to write them down. I showed Mamú a small sketch of what I had in mind. At first she couldn’t quite make things out, but then she quickly figured out what I was getting at. She stepped over to her desk, saying, “This is probably the kind of thing you’re thinking of. They’re extremely practical!” And she placed my finished and manufactured invention into my open palm. Christian Science had beaten me to it, though of course only in a technical sense. Whenever she passed out Bibles, she added automatic pencils along with them. The brilliance of my idea was confirmed. But who had stolen it from me? “Sue them!” said Mamú. Fine, but who was “them”? Was it the Christians, or was it their Science?

When once again we had starved long enough to save some money to buy a few yards of cloth to make a sheet for our newspaper pallet, I couldn’t wait for Beatrice to finish sewing the long hems around it. So I picked up needle and thread myself, and started in sewing a hem on the opposite side. Between us lay an expanse of white silence. I thought to myself, “There has to be a better way. One of us, or both of us, are bound to give ourselves a painful jab with the needle. What we need is a mechanical contrivance, a sewing machine! Not some unwieldy object that’s no better than a Singer or a Madersperger. No, something like a wheel no bigger than a human hand, which we could push along the edges of the cloth like a perforating device for paper, but which would leave simple stitches.” I pursued this idea for several days; even the berserk wild men of my home town had to take a back seat for a while. I put together a big, primitive prototype. At first glance it looked like a cross between a lawn mower and a pneumatic drill. But it worked like a charm. As I write down these jottings, my Vigoleis Kwik-Stitch Wheel®j (j = junked) is lying amidst all the other detritus of our island sojourn: our dreambook and our medicine book; some books of poetry; some short, some longer, and some very long volumes of prose; about 3000 other books; an autograph (perhaps the sole extant one) of Clavijo (Goethe’s Clavigo ); a copy of Count Kessler’s memoirs; an unpublished manuscript of the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia; and every last piece of Vigoleis’ unpublished writings.