Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The old diplomat and utopian man of international peace expressed admiration for my equations: Heil Hitler! = May Judah Perish, May Judah Perish = Crime, ergo whoever says “ Heil Hitler! ” is a criminal. He said that if all Germans could see things so clearly, Hitler would long since be in an asylum. “Exactly,” I replied, “but now it’s us who are in the asylum.” What I meant by this was the island of Mallorca, but I kept an embarrassed silence under the gaze of this guest of ours, who hardly five minutes before had found me standing in embarrassing circumstances under the Unkulunkulu.

The Nazis had charged Count Kessler with tax evasion. Since they were no longer in a position to hang him, they at least wanted to grab his fortune using legal means. He was accused of selling a painting from his collection — was it a Renoir? I can no longer remember — for a million, and reporting the sale for a much smaller sum. His German lawyer had asked him to make out a sworn statement in the presence of a Spanish notary, but this wasn’t possible given the linguistic deficiencies on both sides. Kessler spoke just a few words of Spanish, and the notary understood nothing but Spanish, not even Latin. The Count had obtained my address from Zwingli; Keyserling had recommended the Hotel Príncipe to him. I bowed and said that he had come to just the right man, but would he kindly call me Thelen and not Thälmann. And I explained that Beatrice was Zwingli’s a.k.a. Don Helvecio’s sister.

Count Kessler looked a bit startled, but he took the documents out of his folder for us to translate on the spot into Spanish. It was the first time I had ever observed a diplomat at work. In this case, the work was admittedly in his own personal interest, but with a man like Kessler there will not have been much difference between a formal state conference in tie and tails and an attempt to prevent extortion while wearing a Mallorquin canvas suit.

He asked how much he owed us. I mentioned a price reserved for needy emigrés, but he would hear nothing of that. All of us were poor, he said, and he went on to say that I was no doubt poorer than he was, since he was still receiving a monthly check. I replied that he was probably right, but that as soon as my Unkulunkulu went on the market, I would be a rich man, and then it would be an honor for me to take him in under my umbrella. At this the Count laughed out loud. His final thoughts must have concerned the strange detours one is forced to take when in exile.

Scarcely had our door closed behind Kessler when I said to Beatrice, “See? Unkulunkulu performed his black magic. Just when I wanted to raise up the curtain, he tangled up the strings. But now the Count will be thinking that he’s come out of the frying pan into the fire. Was he standing in our doorway? I was so excited that I overheard the bell ringing. And now the whole contraption is lying off in that corner over there!”

Beatrice had met this gentleman on the Apuntadores, just as she was emerging from Angelita’s store. In broken Spanish he told her he was looking for General Barceló Street, and Beatrice, replying in French, said that she was headed that way, just a few steps. What number was he looking for? 23? “ Mais, comme c’est drôle ,” said Beatrice, adding that they could walk there together. Arriving at the house, they discovered that they both were headed for the second floor, but Beatrice told him that he wouldn’t find up there the man named Thälmann he was looking for, but rather me. One glance at his notes gave him the assurance that I was exactly the person he had been told to consult. In his confusion he began to speak with a mild stutter. Then came the weird scene with the umbrella. Beatrice had almost fainted with embarrassment: there I stood, buck naked underneath that stupid contraption. The gentleman had seen it all, and he would surely have run away if he could have. He just stood there like some primitive idol — an image that amused me no end: a god and an idol together in our miserable hovel, staring bug-eyed at each other. I asked Beatrice if she had recognized him right away. Yes, she said, but meeting him on the street was a mere coincidence. On her way home she had learned at the German Shop that Count Harry Kessler had been living on the island for quite a while. So the man she met could only be him.

Beatrice, who has made a hobby of politics, had read Kessler’s biography of Rathenau. And since, for her, music was an even more impassioned hobby, she was also familiar with the Strauss-Kessler ballet Die Josephslegende . All I knew about the man was his reputation for versatility. I hadn’t read a word of his writings, and now I would probably never see him again, never again touch the hand that closed Nietzsche’s eyelids. But hold on! — I didn’t know this at the time. Kessler told us about it much later.

On this historic day I did no more work on my Unkulunkulu invention. The grandest product of my creative ambitions now lay in a corner of our sala immaculata , tangled up and shorn of all its glory. Had Vigoleis too, its last worshiping Kaffir, lost his faith? Not quite. It was my firm intention to start fiddling with it again the very next day. But the very next day, Count Harry Kessler returned with a thousand apologies and asked me if I would be willing to be his amanuensis.

Whenever Beatrice left the house on errands, she never took with her our large-sized apartment key. We arranged a bell-ringing signal, and I would open our door in whatever get-up I happened to be wearing — which very frequently was my Adamic costume. When the temperature reached 100 degrees that was invariably the case.

I heard the agreed-upon signal, ran to the door, opened it, and had to acknowledge two things at once: that I was as naked as a jaybird, and that I was not a born nudist. The old Berlin rooftop-nudologist Richard Ungewitter, the author of several treatises on the unclothed human body, would have stood right there at our entrance in all his bearded dignity and with the folds of skin that enveloped his torso like a toga, and received Count Kessler like any person in full formal attire. But I, with my Adamic inhibitions, took a powder and hid behind the door.

“A thousand pardons!” said Count Kessler, “Once again I’ve arrived at the wrong time. But please don’t be embarrassed, it doesn’t bother me a bit.”

“But it bothers me!” I took my raincoat from the hook and wrapped it around my nakedness. Unkulunkulu would have been a better camouflage. I was more than ashamed. But now our visitor, seeing me for a second time in all my earthbound divinity, immediately helped me overcome this moment of mortification. He pointed out the window to our sweltering back yard, where one of the pretty girls’ pet armadillos was lazily ambling along. I heard him say that he was enchanted with the way we lived here. From the outside one would never believe that in this house, on this street, there was a rear view of Paradise itself. “If it’s Paradise,” I cried out, “then my state of undress is excusable.”

The Third Reich, Count Kessler began, would last a very long time. Distinguished emigrés, among them Georg Bernhard, Leopold Schwarzschild, and whoever else, were underestimating Hitler and, even more so, the German people. Things would go on like this for years. Then would come a war, and finally a horrible end to it all. He explained that he was a pessimist, but amid his pessimism he had become an optimist, for he had started writing his memoirs. That is to say, he had begun sketching them out a good deal earlier, but here on the island he intended to work on them full-time, no matter what was happening in his beloved Germany. With his life’s forward path now barred to him, he would start living backwards. And he hardly dared to inquire whether I would type out his manuscripts for him. Typing was, he knew, something frightful, a form of penal servitude. But—