Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Mr. Thank God, too, was looking at me with the eyes of a cow, and this frightened me. His attitude completed the aura of misery that now filled the shop, with Matías sitting there on his sack, while at the same time he seemed somewhere off in the distance. My two friends kept staring straight ahead. With a gesture of petty-bourgeois neatness I brushed off my seat, then noticed too late that it was a sack of flour, so now I stood transfigured in a cloud of white dust. The three of us had departed the confines of earthly existence.

What had got into these guys? I could have asked them, but my accursed reticence prevented me from penetrating the mysterious silence. If we were truly friends and in league with each other, sooner or later they would have to start talking. So I sat down on my hundredweight of flour.

Was it some new worry? Had an emergency arisen in Honduras? Should I start offering them friendly consolation, seeing as where Germany was also undergoing an emergency? Was the savannah beckoning to them, at a time when these heroes were unable to girt sabers or display a banner of the peasant’s revolt? Were they perhaps so downhearted because they lacked money for the ocean voyage? Was it Ulua? Had his gunpowder gone moldy? Was it Don Patuco? Had some over-zealous Christian faith-healer charmed his missing arm back onto his body, bringing a sudden end to his stumpy military prowess? And what about Pablo, Don Sacramento, alias El Enorme? Was he now behind bars as a ringleader of the Thälmann demonstration in downtown Palma?

The two fellows still sat there as if bewitched. Not a word. Not a single movement. Should I grab my bread and go home, leaving them to their fate? I stayed on, and began telling them the story of my advancement to the position of writing assistant to the German emigré Conde de Kessler. In the telling, I of course elevated my job title to that of Private Secretary. The old gentleman was writing his memoirs, I explained, and needed help mining the ores of language, and sometimes panning for golden words, and always in the context of world history. That’s how I narrated my story — not entirely in accordance with the truth, since as Private Secretary I was sworn not to tell tales out of the scriptorium.

“Thank God” was the first one to pull his glance back from infinity and focus on the image of the Conde that I had conjured up, here among the flour sacks. Thank God that at least one of them was willing to see beyond the stars of his own destiny. In my narrative I soon recounted how Beatrice had baked especially for the Conde the Basel and St. Gall specialties Biber and Leckerli , pastries that I had sometimes asked Jaume to warm up for us in his oven. The mention of this brought Don Matías, too, back into the real world. He said, immediately ad rem , that the next time I brought around some of those Totenbeinli he would have to take a taste of them, seeing as some world-famous personage had liked them. But he added that he had never heard of this world-famous personage “Kessler.” “How about you?” he asked, turning to Thank God, who had never heard of the fellow, either.

The patriots’ memory obviously needed some prodding. It was impossible, I said, that they had never heard of the Conde de Kessler. That man’s name was practically synonymous with Western culture; he had written a famous book about Mexico, and he had closed Nietzsche’s eyelids not long after the philosopher opened them up to see him. All they had to do, I insisted, was poke around in their memory, and they would surely find this or that nugget, this or that event that now, set down on paper, was embedded in Kessler’s recollections. And behold, it wasn’t long before my two Hondurans began to see the light. Like a prestidigitator pulling a worm from some dupe’s nose, I helped them along, and soon enough the renowned man’s momentous achievements lay there in our midst. First of all, there was the Agadir Affair of 1911 or thereabouts, the first bolt of lightning on the political horizon, the first skirmish of the Wilhelminian War, the German panther’s leap to Morocco, tension with England concerning the naval fleet, panic in the stock exchange, panic in the Louvre, where someone had stolen La Gioconda — a feat that certain newspaper pundits interpreted as an evil omen; unrest in Lisbon, unrest in Mahón, the largest naval port in the Mediterranean, where our General began feeling ever greater hunger for his favorite omelet dish. That was the moment when Count Harry Kessler first stepped upon the stage of world history!

Don Matías and Don Gracias a Dios now recalled these events with great clarity. The literary world, to which they both belonged, could never forget the famous letter of gratitude that Bernard Shaw had sent to the German count for having preserved the peace. They weren’t aware that the letter was printed by Emery Walker — but I didn’t know that, either. Kessler the patron of the arts, Kessler the discoverer of Aristide Maillol — lights were now flickering on among the flour sacks, and all eyes hung on my every word. Kessler was a thief? The fact that he liberated Pilsudski from the Magdeburg Fortress — that didn’t make him into a thief, did it…?

Maillol had the “somewhat un-artistic” habit of chipping away at his statues after they were cast, which failed to improve them. Kessler once commissioned him to create a sculpture — as far as I can remember it was The Boxer — and he bribed the foundry manager. Before the artist could begin his late-term chipping, Kessler and his accomplices had the pouring form secreted out of the factory inside somebody’s coat. In the Count’s presence the statue was broken out of the form and taken to his apartment. When Maillol was told of the thievery, he was enormously upset. Kessler was immediately summoned. He put the Master at ease, took him home with him, and showed him a work of art that was exactly to his liking.

My Honduran revolutionaries were thrilled. Maillol, they cried, none other than Aristide Maillol must create Don Patuco’s Statue of Freedom for the Plaza de la Liberdad in Tegucigalpa! On the day it gets unveiled, all of us, led by Kessler, would break open the form. “ A cire perdue! ” Don Matías interjected, and I said, “I’m amazed at all the things you know!” I of course offered my services as an emissary to the French sculptor through Kessler as intermediary. And once again, this time with his wrestling sweatshirt even tighter around his belly, Don Matías swore with a handshake that he would see to it that I was appointed Honduran Special Attaché for Occidental Freedom Movements and Monument Production. That very evening he would visit the general and give his report. Then came Kessler at the League of Nations, Kessler as the pioneer of bible-paper printing, the Grand-Duke Wilhelm-Ernst Editions — surely they had heard of these things? They had indeed. So now we discussed the prospect of Honduras’ classics on bible paper, published exclusively by the Cranach Press — but hold on, for patriotic reasons there would have to be another name for it. I suggested Ediciones Maneta , “One-Armed Classics” in honor of Don Patuco.

Kessler’s life and deeds filled the bakery. Down below, Jaume kneaded his bread loaves and shook his head — was he doubting our sanity or just shaking the sweat from his brow? The customers were serving themselves. There was a coming and going, until I started telling how Kessler (the Hondurans knew it already), dressed in a jailer’s uniform with hitched-up collar (I used an empty flour sack to illustrate my story) and carrying a key-ring and a lantern, had freed Pilsudski in Magdeburg. A car bearing the Reich Imperial insignia was waiting outside, and together they sped off. Then the Polish general snuck like a ferret behind the Polish front. It was an action similar to the somewhat later one involving another Count, Schulenburg, who acted as intermediary for the same progressive Kaiser in allowing Lenin to sneak out of Switzerland and return to Russia.