Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Then one day back then, as I stood beneath the just-completed model of my special new umbrella, naked as a newborn babe and feeling the naked euphoria of the successful inventor, in walked Count Harry Kessler.

Beatrice already owned an umbrella, an object she clung to like her books. It was a gift from her mother, a valuable piece of property whose history would take even me too far off the track. In brief, this umbrella’s handle was a clump of honey-brown, lightly flamed amber containing a fossilized insect, a millipede, but one that had lost a few hundred legs — a feature that made it even more remarkable from a zoological standpoint. It’s possible that some child of the Eocene who wasn’t familiar with the maxim “Never pull an insect’s legs, or you’ll end up in the dregs,” had yanked out the missing appendages. My first meeting with Beatrice, in pouring rain in Cologne, took place under this roof. But soon I became jealous of her umbrella, since I got the impression that she loved it more than she loved me. She gave it constant attention, adoring it with a kind of silent and unseen worship, just as the Kaffirs revere their highest divinity, the Creator of the Kaffir universe, the god Unkulunkulu. At the time, I was searching for a decent religion, one that wasn’t mired in externals, sanctimonious cliquishness, and money-grubbing, petty-bourgeois hypocrisy like the one I grew up in. So I was reading a lot about belief systems and superstitions among the primitives, and hit upon Unkulunkulu, a god who isn’t served by any visible cult. The Zulu who worships this god is never tempted to feign anything to guard his reputation. This made an impression on me, and so I christened Beatrice’s umbrella “Unkulunkulu.”

Unkulunkulu was made of silk, with opalescent green and gold on the surface and blood-red inside. But now I must digress for a moment on the subject of this play of colors.

One of Pascoaes’ brothers, João Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcellos, spent twenty years in darkest Africa hunting elephants, purely for the sake of adventure. I often sat at his hearth, listening to his hunting stories. When asked about my umbrella god Unkulunkulu, he told me that in the forests of the district of Inhambane he had met up with Vatzua tribes who call their god Inculuculo, using the name of the bird “culuculo” or “inculuculo,” an animal sporting brilliantly colored plumage. Its feathers were green on the outside, and its head was blue, but when this bird spread its wings and took flight over the sweltering savannah, when seen from below it seemed to glow with the color of blood. I never found any reference to this natural connection between bird and divinity in the books on religious history that I consulted. I was deeply touched by the fact that when Beatrice’s umbrella was opened it glowed as red as blood. I had instinctively given it the correct baptismal name.

But her umbrella’s days were numbered.

I screwed off the amber handle with its entomological contents and hung it around Beatrice’s neck with a string. This gesture pacified her somewhat for the destruction of her beloved Unkulunkulu. She didn’t wish to concede immediately that the invention I was working on was of the epoch-making variety. Her domestic instincts were even less thrilled when I told her that I would have to use our only piece of cloth, the sheet for our conjugal newspaper pallet, for my technical research. She objected to this move — in French, no less. But I remained firm. I explained that bed linens were unnecessary household items, citing the ones that María del Pilar had purloined from us. With our fabrics in her possession the whore had regained her independence in Barcelona and now, with the use of our sheets, things were going much better for her than for us on our jerry-built bedstead. Beatrice shook with disgust, but now I had the cloth I needed for my expanded Unkulunkulu.

I cut the sheet apart, and sewed on a curtain that extended from the edge of the umbrella to the floor. By manipulating a network of strings and by pressing a spring, the curtain could be made to descend, allowing the user to stand under it with full protection from the elements down to his ankles. Three pushes on a mechanism set into the umbrella’s shaft sufficed to raise the curtain to its original position. The thinner the fabric, the smaller was the roll of cloth that formed on the closed Unkulunkulu. My prototype was ungainly; the umbrella’s skinny rods barely supported the weight of the curtain. But it worked, and it would work even better if the curtain were made of the finest silk and with little sewn-in transparent windows — plastics didn’t exist at the time — and a small reading lamp clamped to the shaft for nocturnal readers promenading through a rainstorm. “Book production will rise, Beatrice, and the book prices will fall. Maybe someday readers will be demanding to read Vigoleis under an Unkulunkulu, in the softly falling rain.”

I am no fan of nudism, although I can’t say that I prefer the sight of fully-clothed human beings. When the weather gets too hot, I strip off. As an emergency measure, not on philosophical principle.

It was a doubly hot day when I put the finishing touches on my Unkulunkulu prototype. I was red-hot from the insular sun, and white-hot with the success of my invention. And there I stood in my barest humanity beneath my African deity. The curtain was lowered — one push on the spring, and with an audible click I was closed off from the rest of the world. In my confining twilight I savored my triumph: Beatrice’s sacrifice had not been in vain. Then I heard voices in the corridor. Were they speaking French? Was it Beatrice talking to herself? That’s not her way; I have never caught her doing such a thing, not even uttering a curse, the briefest type of monologue. She had got over the loss of her umbrella, but she apparently missed the only bedsheet we ever owned in our gypsy marriage. Was she now sending forth streams of French invective at my creative achievement? But that’s not her way, either. With her dignified Indian genes, she knows when to keep her mouth shut. But now she just burst forth.

“ Chéri , it’s Count Kessler!” There was noise in the hallway. Sweating under my Unkulunkulu, I heard it, and also the squeaking of our glassed-in double door, and I said to myself, “That damned door! I really ought to plane off the edge. But Unkulunkulu comes first. Porra and puta ! It worked a minute ago, and now it’s stuck!”

The heat underneath the glistening wings of the bird Inculuculo was becoming African in intensity. What was Beatrice saying? Kessler? And: Count? “Open, Unkulunkulu!” But the god wouldn’t move. “Get a move on! But is somebody else here?” I yanked the curtain strings and said, more for myself than for Beatrice, “Hmm…, Kessler and Count — that’s something you can only find on Mallorca. A ‘Kessler’ is either a professional tinker, a ‘kettle man,’ or he’s a Protestant reformer. If it’s the latter, then he’s a religious gangster, and we’d better be on our guard. And a ‘Count’? That’s the least that anybody can be on this island, and nobody will doubt you. But what about me, chérie ? Look out, I am Unkulunkulu, and it’s only the Kaffirs who believe in me! Watch, just one bang on my drum here, and you’ll see! Damn it all, the spring is stuck, the curtain won’t go up! I swear on your millipede-in-amber that it was working just a minute ago. If you had arrived one second sooner, porra ! It would have gone without a hitch!”

Profound silence. Was Beatrice still in the room? Was I hallucinating? Was I, without my knowing it, a Vatzua, under the spell of the bird Culuculo that personified the forest divinity? We didn’t have any pots and pans for some tinker to work on; we did our cooking in tin cans, and… Damn you, Unkulunkulu, if you refuse to go up now…