Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Indeed this was a persuasive explanation, even for someone who doesn’t believe in such eruptions of marsh gas from the depths of the human soul.

Kessler’s close friend, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, who played such a significant role during his Weimar years and whom I met during the writing of this book in connection with the disappearance of Kessler’s posthumous papers, was a modern Pantagruel, ninety years of age, dressed in a cleverly designed zippered suit he had invented as a final transcendence of Jugendstil , he almost persuaded me to join him on the carousel at the church fair in Zug. Professor van de Velde, too, found the Thälmann story captivating, but he doubted that Harry had ever stood on a barricade anywhere. He couldn’t recall any such thing, and it was he who ought to know about such things. As for myself, I don’t consider it odd that a Red Count would lend a hand at a street blockade. A red shirt would have fit him just as nicely as those Mallorquin canvas duds. Professor van de Velde was gathering material for his own account of his friend’s final years, and when I told him that Kessler wrote parts of his memoirs in the Alhambra or any of the thousand other cafés in Palma, the old Kessler connoisseur said that it had never been Harry’s custom to hang around and write in cafés. If I hadn’t been working on a delicious rack of lamb at the moment, I would have replied that no matter how firmly rooted in his own personality a man might be, he could still be easily shaken into oddball behavior by two types of situations: marriage and exile.

Count Harry Kessler was a bachelor, but he didn’t escape the experience of exile.

But now Harry Kessler was said to be a gorgeous late blossom on the venerable Reuss family tree, blooming forth above peoples and fatherlands? And why not? Nothing is impossible in this world, and anthropology and genealogy have no doubt had to solve some even more vexing riddles involving love children. As long as human reproduction doesn’t take place in numbered copulation sacs as with the silkworm Bombyx mori , official family trees should be banished into the realm of superstition. Still, I would be the last to deny that a Mr. Jones Jr. is in most cases the bona fide offspring of a Mr. Jones Sr.

Harry Kessler was one of the most polite persons I have ever met. But was his politeness a consequence of his elite education? Was he a man of the world because he was a child of the aristocratic court? When he was about to take his shoes off so as not to dirty up our apartment — was he fulfilling Beatrice’s secret wishes because he knew that we couldn’t afford a housemaid? Or can this be explained, rather, as a manifestation of genetic impulses that formed his character? The science of eugenics is still in its cradle; in 1933 no less a personage than Eugen Fischer proved this to be the case. No one can have much confidence in its findings, perhaps none at all. Things have become a little clearer with the research of Szondi, the Hungarian scholar working in the field of human destiny, and his theory of unconscious drives that lurk within a family. Be that as it may, it makes me wonder when I read a certain passage in the memoirs of the church reformer Johannes Kessler, a passage that his dubious descendant Harry quotes in fragmentary fashion. It’s where the young theology student Johannes K. tells of entering the Black Bear Inn in Jena with his travel companion. Sitting there comfortably and eating a hearty meal next to them was none other than Martin Luther. The innkeeper, a jovial fellow, encouraged the young scholars—“Come right in, gentlemen!” But Johannes Kessler, a child of humble origins who had just recently abandoned an apprenticeship in saddlery for the study of theology, felt embarrassed because he was wearing muddy shoes. Whereupon he performed the same act for his new religious idol that, four centuries later, Harry, the child of ennobled parents, would repeat on General Barceló Street: he started taking off his footwear. “For our shoes were (Johannes K. continues), if the reader will permit me to say so, so shamefully covered with mud and dirt that we could not simply enter the establishment. Thus we crept behind a door and sat down on a little bench…”

Harry hadn’t crept over to a bench, for the simple reason that Vigoleis, the proprietor at the General Barceló Inn in Palma de Mallorca, didn’t own a bench for his entrada .

Reticence is a conspicuous and frequently humbling trait of Vigoleis — humbling for his own person, of course. A shy person is convinced by instinct and experience that humans are often all-too-human to other humans, and this insight has the effect of restricting his behavior in the presence of others. Having had his fingers and his tongue slapped as a little kid by godforsaken schoolmasters and by even more hopelessly godforsaken priests, just for having raised a few impertinent questions about basic matters, having been sent into the corner, into the darkness, where he learned to answer these questions by himself and achieve his own salvation in the process, he finds that he has the pusillanimity of his educators to thank for the smidgen of floating earth he now occupies in comfort and safe-keeping, though he remains constantly worried that his little island could someday simply melt away beneath the soles of his feet. This explains his penchant for metaphysics. “Oh,” Nietzsche says, “if only someone could narrate the history of that exquisite feeling called loneliness!” Right here, dear reader, an attempt is being made in just that direction: a lonely Vigoleis among his friends on Mallorca, where he practiced reticence in the company of those friends, but not with his enemies. But after all, the Nazis were not humans. They placed themselves above humanity, thereby becoming bestial. That’s what we had to watch out for.

Don Matías was my friend. We were one heart and one soul, and together we shared in divine concord the flour sacks at Jaume’s bakery, thus transforming them into much more than the background and basic ingredient for the daily bread and Sunday ensaimada of our ongoing Spanish tertulia . We shook hands warmly and clapped the flour dust from each other’s shoulders until no dust was left. But we never kissed each other — that kind of activity we left to the ardent members of the famous 18th-century Göttingen Poets’ League back in Germany, whose antics were the subject of many of the stories I told Matías. We Brothers of the Flour Sacks loved freedom more than we loved each other. This was a satisfying type of bond, one that could hold its own against any other, and one whose third member was still Don Gracias a Dios, “Mr. Thank God,” who in increasingly fervent ballads, and with increasingly copious shedding of tears, kept on lauding the goal of freedom for his Honduran pampas.

All of this took place one bread-shopping day after another, over the course of many such visits to the bakery. Then one day I noticed how Don Matías, after glancing straight at me, suddenly looked right through my eyes and off into the void behind me. This was a kind of ominous ocular legerdemain I had experienced a few times before, in particular in the presence of poets who were entering a state of inspirational bliss. Don Matías was also a poet, one who at times dealt with the ineffable, but I had never seen him go into a trance. He was, after all, an Iberian, and as such predestined not only to have moments of mystical afflatus, but to write about them too, as if they were the most natural thing in the world — just like Santa Teresa. Was his brother-in-law involved in an affair? And if so, was the lady going to enter his orphaned conjugal bed and, by the same token, fill the vacancy behind the bakery counter? Would Don Matías have to start teaching class again?