Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

During my thespian presentation of scenes from Kessler’s World Theater, the bakery customers forgot that they had come to buy loaves of bread. The Hondurans conceded that there still might be important lessons to be learned from an otherwise contemptible European Continent for their own goals of national liberty. My personal prestige rose to gigantic proportions; all that was missing now was the accursed pronunciamiento in Tegucigalpa, and all of us — Ulua and Thank God; Sacramento; Conde de Kessler with his Private Secretary; Beatrice with her busted Unkulunkulu; Don Patuco and his chaste, immaculately conceived daughter as the prospective bride of Don Matías; Pedro Sureda with his nature-conservancy plans; his father, the collector Don Juan; Mr. Silverstar from Furzeburg; Ludwig Salvator’s personal physician with his assistant Bobby — all of us would be setting out for Honduras on board a sleek caravelle. And Mamú? Well, Mamú would blow the financial winds into our sails with her Royal Baking Powder blessing, which surely was overdue to prove its culinary efficacy…

The Christian Science ladies would be left behind in their state of blind gullibility, until one day their beloved ersatz savior Hitler would have them all hanged as sub-Christians.

Flying off in advance of our barkentine would be Rabindranath as the Eagle of Liberty; Empedocles and Spinoza would be waiting inside their matchboxes for the swarms of insects on the Mosquito Coast.

No sooner had I ended my theatrical presentation when my two friends once again sagged down on their flour sacks and resumed their vacant staring. Were they seeing ghosts? I took my loaf of bread, paid up my real, and departed.

“Seeing ghosts?” said Beatrice. “You’re just as crazy as those guys. It’s got to be women!”

“Some Pilar, do you think?”

“Can’t get any better.”

It was in fact a Pilar who was behind all this, but a Pilar who was in the diplomatic service — that is to say, one who could act as a double agent of fermentation.

The world can collapse on account of women, some philosophers have maintained. But unfortunately, women can lift the world back up again.

At noon I met up again with the Honduran guerilla brothers on the Plaza Atarazanas. They had exchanged their flour sacks for chairs at a sidewalk café, and were sitting in the blazing sun — two melancholy patriots gearing up for a life in the tropics. Arsenal Square was depopulated; Pan’s hour had already passed, but not a single burro was to be seen far and wide, not even a human being. And what were these guys drinking? Something was foaming up inside their glasses: milk of magnesia! That’s good for the stomach. It can cause healthy elimination and help keep you in good cheer. On this urban square and at this hour of the day, the only discernable movements were the gastric ones inside Don Matías and Don Gracias a Dios.

“ Olá , friend! Olá , friend!”

“ Olá , my friends!”

I sat down with my friends, clapped my hands, ordered something that never came, and yet I was happy. The tables reminded me of Zwingli’s ice-cream parlor and the whore Pilar. To start a conversation I said that round marble tables always led me to baleful thoughts. My two friends seemed to be reacting similarly, for they both cringed and, each in his own way, started moaning, “Eva! Eva!”

Two hours later I tried to offer Beatrice a triumphant explanation as to how I had maneuvered the proud Tegucigalpians into passive, blank-eyed silence. “And our bread?” asked Beatrice. “Where’s our bread?” I had forgotten it. To be on the safe side, she decided to go fetch it herself, and I suggested that she take a short detour across the Plaza Atarazanas to see Eva’s two victims cowering there, just like Rabindranath on the lawn in front of Mamú’s chair, his head bent to one side, his beak bleached by the noontime heat, one eye looking up to the sky, the other down to the ground — the epitome of torpor. But Beatrice just wasn’t interested. She was tired of stories about whores— putas over and over again, as if nothing else existed in Spain. I told her that this was just it: whores were the salt of the earth, and without them Spain would taste terribly bland. But I also excused her from listening to the story of this thousand-and-first Eva, for I knew I would find a more grateful listener in Pedro.

This was only half true, since Pedro had already made the acquaintance of Eva. But he hadn’t collapsed, although this was the fate that appeared to be looming for the two Honduran rebels. A Sureda can conquer even the portals of a bordello. They are a very ancient family, with a resourceful woman to be espied at the blurry dawn of their history, with a quiver-bearing ferret in their coat of arms, and with the contentious family motto “Who will retrieve it?”

Eva was entertainment that occupied an entire evening. No wonder, said Pedro, considering that she displayed her abundant nudity at such a small fonda . And besides, it was always the same sets of eyes that were glued to her voluptuousness: Don Matías, Don Gracias a Dios, Don Sacramento, Ulua — in a word, all of Honduras.

“So you know the story?”

Pedro knew only Eva and her worshipers, among whom my bakery friends were the most devoted — that is, they had been, for Eva was now gone. Higher authorities had ordered her to get dressed and leave the island.

Too bad, but that’s all I was able to get from my friend Sureda. He knew his half of the story better than I did mine. So I went to Mamú, who had the talent and an educated ear for risqué tales that revealed people as something slightly less than socially presentable. Especially now, for since her escapades with the biddies of Christian Science she cherished a calm immersion in a world that, with its off-color hues, reminded her of Vienna.

Mamú chuckled with delight at my story. I hadn’t disappointed her. As a reward she promised me roast pigeon à la Binisalem for the coming Sunday, and for two weeks hence I requested roast suckling pig à la broche .

“And in return…?”

“You’ll get the highly piquant tragedy of Adelfried Silberstern’s latest sexual calamity.”

Eva was entertainment that occupied an entire evening.

“Yes indeed, Mamú. ‘Occupied’ in the double sense of filling both the stage and the audience, and all the more effectively, since the two areas weren’t separated by any kind of rood screen. Eva was much too gregarious a person to allow any such barriers to interfere. She needed to maintain touch with her artistic surroundings. But you mustn’t imagine this scene as being similar to La Patti at your departed prince’s Metropolitan Opera, or to La Gerstenberg as Maria Stuart at the Burgtheater. No, it was much smaller, Mamú, cozier, more intimate. She displayed herself at a certain Café Cantante on San Miguel Street. Completely undressed except for a bile-green powder puff pasted in front, some rouge on her backside, and around her neck a scapular that was stuck to her skin with tape, so that it stayed anchored to her bosom during her wildest dances. Spanish men love scapulars, and Eva was familiar with this form of etiquette. She sang and recited her own poems in French — not just doggerel, but profound lyric verse. I’m going to get some copies. They say that Eva was a second Vittoria Colonna, and behind the stage there was a back room, something with a curtain where she had her pilarière . She lay there resting during the intermissions in the company of her visions, or maybe with some aesthete who was interested in her visions and her poetry.”

“During the performance? How exciting!”

“Oh no, Mamú. She never let anybody get close to her. Pedro told me so himself. It was all in the service of art for art’s sake.”