Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Would Vigoleis have reclined differently next to this verdant meadow? Would his temples have pulsed less feverishly? Would his hands have been less moist as he turned the pages of her scrapbook? His eyes, too, would have leapt from their sockets, and he too would not have noticed that he was being spied upon. Like Don Matías, he would have unpacked in every detail his dealings with the traitor Don Vigo from the General’s Street, the guy who just happened to be Count Harry Kessler’s secretary. Nobody who sees red when he sees green would have been aware that this lady in the shimmering white skin was entering all this information in a separate scrapbook. Like Don Matías, I would have been thinking: my God, during intermission she writes poetry! She’s a naked, unblemished instrument of Eternity!

When I again met up with the two thwarted suitors on the Plaza Atarazanas, they were purging their sorrow with milk of magnesia. On the previous evening, Eva had been deported to Barcelona. When Don Matías limped behind the Spanish screen, her pilarière was empty. The blind bard was strumming his lyre, the deaf tenor was singing his gargled flamenco. There was no audience at all, for nothing was left on the stage to focus on. Thus the musicians had plenty of time to rehearse; surely it would now be possible to harmonize the lyrics with the strumming of the guitar.

Don Matías gradually recuperated in the bakery from the damage to his heart perpetrated by the Führer ’s blonde beast. Once again he returned to philosophy, insofar as it was obtainable on paper, to Honduran political topics, and to his Honduran fiancée. This woman, who did not possess any visible green powder puffs, was still busy embroidering the banner for the pronunciamiento . I eventually learned that Eva had quizzed her adoring acquaintance about my humble person. With a gesture of desperation he beat his brow, and said he had been a traitor. I salved his conscience by asserting that Kessler was fully able to take care of himself, and that as far as my own welfare was concerned, surely he was aware that I had no intention of keeping the sensational secret with which Eva surrounded herself. He must not forget, I told him, that I regarded Hitler as a gangster from the very first day of his regime, and that I had always acted accordingly. Furthermore, he mustn’t forget that as a student I had given a whole lot of attention to criminal psychology, next to theology the field that was my world and my underworld. It was only natural for the Nazis to think that someone who curses the Führer so openly must have some organization behind him. Who is he spying for? Goering? Goebbels? Hess? Any of the above, each of whom would love to see the others hanging on the gallows?

Intellectual feats of this kind, rather amazing for Vigoleis, actually saved our lives. On separate occasions I was able to play one criminal against another, in Spain, in Switzerland, and especially later in Portugal. That’s why the stupid Huns in my home town haven’t been able to bury me in one of their Stone Age sepulchers.

Don Matías was grateful. He shook my hand, and we looked each other squarely in the eye. His own eyes were aflame with memories of the Honduran savannahs, yet at times obscured by the insect swarms that the winds brought to the Mosquito Coast. But what was Don Matías seeing as he peered into my eyes, and through them into the bottom of my soul? Following one of our conversations about Germany’s decline, he told me that inside my pupils he could see the gigantic menhirs of the distant Nordic past — tombs of the Huns. I stopped him short: “Please, Don Matías, if you value our friendship — no Huns! No Huns, because the time when the cemeteries will be full to bursting with cadavers, as in your Espronceda, is already on the march. I can already hear the tramping of the rosy feet of the twilight of the idols.”

One week after Eva’s deportation from our island paradise, someone broke into our apartment.

If the captain of the Ciudad de Palma wasn’t still swinging in his hammock pilarière below the bridge with his lover, a personage who without fail had an astatic effect on the compass needle (as was carefully explained to me by my battiest pupils, William and Charles Batty, compass adjusters for the British Fleet during the Wilhelminian War), then the ship would be tying up at seven o’clock at the Palma wharf. By eight o’clock, our apartment bell would let us know who had come across the Mediterranean, and for what purpose.

On the stroke of eight the bell rang. Was it our milkman? A telegram from Herr Silberstern asking to be rescued from an erotic cul-de-sac? Nina trying to escape from Silberstern’s sexual advances? Count Kessler fleeing from my double Thälmann? An emigré? The Dutch writer Marsman, who was expected any day now?

It was Zwingli, our absconded Melanchthon (“black-earth man”) and Oekolampadius (“house illuminator,” also baptized as “Martinus”), alias Don Helvecio.

Yet it wasn’t he who was standing at our door — not yet, anyway. It was only his shadow, which he had sent ahead in the shape of a muscular guy, who now asked me if I was Don Vigo. When I said yes, he pointed to the dark stairwell and said that all the stuff belonged in our apartment, plus everything that was down below. Before I could ask him who sent the stuff, I was pushed aside. “Sent?” Our Don Helvecio of the Príncipe was back again, he said, and ordered me to lend a hand. “There, that box. It’s got books in it. He’s starting up a university.”

No sooner had I uttered the word “Jeez!” when Beatrice came and said, “Jeez! It’s not Zwingli, is it?”

“Who else? Heaven is once again being merciful, sending our prodigal brother back into our arms. Open up the box.”

“But I don’t understand this at all. Why has Zwingli come back to Spain, and why us?”

“Probably to make sure that the coast is clear, as you told him in your telegram.”

“Well, he’s my brother, after all.”

“And that makes him my brother-in-law — maybe not officially, but in a definite moral sense. He takes lots of stuff with him when he travels — it’s probably an Inca family trait. You know, whole caravans of buffalo. Your forebears weren’t cheapskates. I’ll bet you that he’s also got some woman camp follower along with him, a suitcase full of homeopathic antidotes, and a valise full of Künzli tea for bathing in. His new amante is probably downstairs right now, putting on some rouge, and if we’re in for a really bad break, she’s putting some on her behind.”

But Zwingli had arrived unaccompanied. His pockets jangled with cash, and his get-up was pure haute couture, custom-fit by Barcelona’s leading haberdasher. His pinky nail was clean and polished to an impressive shine. It was Don Helvecio in person. For the trip from Barcelona he had reserved a first-class cabin for himself, but on the way over, out of sheer love of neighbor, he had shared it with a female French painter.

“ Olá , Beatrice, Bice, Bé! Olá, mon Vigo, Vigoleis, Vigolo!”

So here he was, now with an even more probing nose, with shinier black hair, with the familiar fiery look in his eyes, and once again with a sack full of moola. In his current condition he could easily convert his guttologist grandfather’s staunchest opponents to the homeopathic faith. Professor Scheidegger had given back to our island a detoxified Zwingli. Such de-pilarization is surely one of the most impressive feats of this medical discipline — on a par, as far as I can judge, with Beatrice’s rescue from the bubonic plague.

Brother and sister, both of them living witnesses to the efficacy of a much-maligned science, now embraced each other and shared a microbe-free kiss. The Old Testament and its legendary scourges were a thing of the past. I was deeply moved by the scene — I, who grew up in a little house where we had the mumps or chicken pox and could never afford the services of a university professor. We had to make do with the ministrations of a pious local medical flunky, a fellow who in some cases actually achieved success, but whose allopathic itemized bills did their best to wipe out our recovered sense of well-being. Incidentally, this sawbones was the first extortionist whose connivances I was able to study from early childhood on. As I got older, he liked to converse with me in Latin — to the horror of my father, who, lacking formal education, realized right away that this technique of healing by means of academic discourse would cost him a pretty penny. And indeed it did.