Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

No, Julietta, there is no need to conjugate that meaningful verb with your mother. What is going on between her and me is taking place in rather special tenses and modalities, in a very tricky form of the pluperfect subjunctive: Hubiera amado , “I might have loved”—if I had been lucky. But I hadn’t been so lucky, at least not yet. That would require a little more time, the right opportunity, and—“Well, what else, Vigo?” Julietta, my child, you wouldn’t understand, even though you already understand more than your mother approves of. The time factor is no great problem; we’ve got nothing to do here, we’re living the life of Riley, dolce far niente . It’s really a question of opportunity — which, as the proverb says, makes a thief. It can also make an adulterer, though the methods of the two criminal types may differ slightly. Our house is small, we’re constantly bumping up against each other. We’ll just have to wait; we’ll have to put this one on the back burner. Are you familiar with the expression ‘the back burner’? Of course not, and I’ll be happy to provide a full explanation as soon as my three words of Spanish have turned into three thousand. What I mean is that pretty soon, our little sight-seeing promenades through the city won’t involve all four of us adults. Such things are only for the time being. We’ll soon be over the stage of being guests who get treated to festive banquets. Soon we’ll have our own house key, and all of us can come and go as we please. You know what that means, don’t you, you little renegade? Then I’ll be ready to start reciting that verb with your mother, and nobody will rap my knuckles if I sneak a few irregularities into the very regular conjugation. But that’s again too much for you to grasp, mon poulet . Just a few more years and you’ll be offering a course for advanced students, and that will be so far beyond Vigoleis that he’ll go right back to your mother, and that means big trouble. I can see it coming…

“Vigoleis! Don Vigo! Where are you?”

“Julietta, forgive your absent-minded pupil for letting his thoughts wander. Where did we leave off?”

As a clairvoyant observer, Beatrice had long since noticed that I had lost hold of the instructional thread. Zwingli, too, sensed what was going on. In a real school, the inattentive culprit is first given a verbal reprimand, then a note is sent home to his parents, and finally a bad mark is entered on his report card. For life itself there are no marks as such, but that didn’t keep Vigoleis from dreaming of an unusually sublime category of marksmanship here in his German-Iberian Arcadia.

Comparing two lengthy texts, for example a translation with the original, is just as time-consuming and tedious as proofreading. Such a chore becomes literally mind-numbing when you are seated at a table that holds pages and pages of your own writing, thousands and thousands of words you would simply like to be rid of, or perhaps never to have set to paper in the first place. This type of post-creative heartburn can become so unpleasant that some writers pass on their manuscripts to a publisher with instructions never to bother them again. Their works are like fledglings that get tossed from the nest to seek the world of art and beauty on their own. No matter if they perish. Next year’s mating season is sure to arrive, and after a period of deaf and blind gestation, a new chick is guaranteed to see the light of day. It is different with another species of literary nestling. Besides regular meals at the nipple, this type requires constant loving care; its diapers need changing, its bottom has to be powdered, and you have to offer the supplemental bottle if the little tyke isn’t kicking just right. There is trouble all the time, and not only with seven-month preemies that have to spend time in an incubator. Flaubert and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer are prominent examples of writers who have exercised this kind of admirable, expert baby care; both of them pampered their little darlings into solid maturity. The literary infanticides, on the other hand, one of whom was Vigoleis, are members of a category that the scholars have yet to investigate.

As we collated my translation of ter Braak’s Bourgeois Carnival , I sat at one end of the table and read the text mezza voce . The vestibule was dark and cool, impervious to flies and the noise from the street below. The workers in the post office across the way were busy sorting and pigeon-holing without much fuss, which is to say, quietly. María del Pilar was asleep, her “ señorito ” was asleep, and Julietta, who used this term for her house-uncle Zwingli, was also asleep — unless she was lying on her bed watching the crack in the folding door and awaiting the arrival of her new benefactor. For meanwhile, that is just what I had become in her eyes, with my regular good-morning kiss: her fatherly friend, innocent of any ulterior desires. On this particular morning she had not yet received her matinal smooch, for I was mindlessly intoning, like a deacon at solemn high mass, the text of ter Braak’s chapter on “The Carnival of the Faithful”:

“The love that transcends all reason; the ‘light,’ the ‘word’ that ‘was with God in the beginning’… and poetry; all of these are revealed to us through hatred, darkness, silence… and bourgeois existence. What meaning attaches to such feeble phrases as ‘transcends all reason’ or ‘was with God in the beginning,’ other than that we strive, using the coordinates of space and time, to give expression to concepts that ultimately defy verbal designation?… It is the bourgeois who, by inherent nature, swear by and upon mere words: ‘transcend,’ ‘in the beginning’…”

I recited the Dutch text mechanically, all the while picturing to myself, in another stratum of my consciousness, a less abstract, less dialectical, less doggedly philosophical kind of Carnival. A carnivalino , one without masks, and at the present hour one without costumes, too — or rather, in the costume of Adam, which is no costume at all. I pictured Eve’s costume as an even more naked one, although generally speaking the barest woman is one who has yet to let fall her last item of clothing. In order to relish my erotic breakfast-table fantasy to the utmost, I had to imagine her conjugal Adam, him of the luxuriantly hirsute chest and the magical claw, as banished from her enchanting company. At certain moments this mental repast became so delicious that, to continue with my extravagant metaphor, I began to smack my lips. But then the thin partition separating the two regions of my consciousness suddenly dissolved. I stumbled and halted in my chanting of ter Braak’s lines, and I heard an objection spoken from the other end of the table, where every linguistic and emotional deviation from the written or unwritten Urtext was being duly registered.

As a woman, and on such a morning as this one, one must be firmly convinced of one’s own worth, and be in possession of considerable inside information besides, to refrain from throwing every last manuscript page, the book, and the table itself at the dreamy numbskull sitting opposite and shouting, “Go ahead! Move right in with her, why don’t you?”

Why didn’t Beatrice do that? Was she the masochistic type who seeks to intensify pleasure through suffering? Was she a superior being who was offering herself in sacrifice to Vigoleis, in the grand tragic style: “Tread upon my bleeding heart, pass over my corpse and enter your beauteous lover’s bed, that despicable venue of empty infatuation, etc. etc.”? To finish this renunciatory outcry of hers, I would have to quote from the novels of Hedwig Courths-Mahler, which I don’t have right at hand and wouldn’t inflict on Beatrice in any case. Even after twenty years such a comparison would annoy her greatly. If asked to choose between Pilar and Hedwig, she would undoubtedly take sides with the illiterate against the woman who spent a lifetime in concubinage to the alphabet. No, Beatrice is not one to grab at the petty stratagems of bourgeois marital discord. She is, I must repeat, a woman of cosmopolitan background and, most decisive of all, she is familiar with the writings of her Vigoleis. When necessary, she is capable of pulling this fellow back from the edge of the abyss. What means does she employ? Have patience, dear reader! Her curatives differ from those of normal, traditional medicine. We often read the familiar exhortation, “Shake well before using”; with Beatrice, the shaking gets done after the fact, and that is the source of its amazing therapeutic efficacy. Not for nothing is Beatrice the granddaughter of a famous homeopath.