Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Pilar began to abhor our literary morning devotions. Owing to her increasing irritability, we had switched our collating activities to the later forenoon. I have never comprehended what caused all that anger over a week of boring professional drudgery. Zwingli came forward with an explanation that struck me as patently unconvincing. But then, his knowledge of women was never more than skin-deep, though he had often performed in-depth research on the skin itself. He was, for example, an imaginative expert in the nomenclature of the erogenous zones. He entered long lists of terms in his anatomical atlas, which he intended to put to use, not like Mr. van de Velde in marriage manuals, but for purely aesthetic ends in his future Academy of Nude Modeling — an idea that escaped even Leonardo da Vinci, who overlooked hardly anything amidst the skin and bones of the human erotic machine. With Zwingli’s technique, the models were presumably made to assume the appropriate aesthetic attitudes by a carefully mapped-out tickling procedure. And, it is fair to ask, why not?

It was Zwingli’s considered opinion that Pilar felt put upon, in fact she felt demeaned in her illiterate womanhood by our constant nerve-racking recitations of literary verbiage in a foreign tongue. What nonsense! But perhaps I am mistaken. To err is human, wrote St. Jerome in one of his letters, a dictum that I, Vigoleis, prefer to revise upwards a degree or so by stating that to err can also be divine, an insight I have attained through unbiased reflection upon what the Creator has made out of me. Anyway, what Zwingli said couldn’t possibly be true. Pilar’s lack of education in reading and writing actually was a distinct advantage. What is more, it turned out that she got just as annoyed by the tight-lipped, wordless sulk I had been wallowing in for days now. This behavior of mine became all the more obvious, the faster I made progress in Julietta’s oral language method. With Pilar things were now at a standoff. Most people react to the kind of potent abstinence that Vigoleis was practicing by finding it either ridiculous or pitiful. That’s not how I construe it. To me, as a poet, it is like the timorousness felt by one rhyming word in search of another.

Still to come was my secret tryst with Pilar, my smuggler’s tour to her inner sanctum. I was waiting for the opportune moment, which I foolishly thought of as imminent, once Beatrice and I had finished our comparative textual ordeal. It was as if I were expecting my Carnival ritual to imbue me with the courage to descend into the real world of Ash Wednesday. That was insane, and a palpable example of how one can overestimate the power of literature. And we were still working our way through the “Carnival of the Faithful”—it would be days before we dealt with the “Carnival Morality” in ter Braak’s final chapter. Vigoleis was hoping to achieve two goals at once.

“Vigo, what are you reading? I can’t find anything like that in your translation. There you go again, engaging in bizarre textual behavior!”

“Oh, sorry, Beatrice! I skipped a section, ten whole lines. It’s because I have to drone on like this, and it’s dark in here. Literature should always be read in artificial light, the same kind it gets written by. But listen to this, ha ha! Here it is, black on white, this is why I got ahead of you. Just listen, and we can go back to where we were in just a minute. Here it is:

“Mysticism is the natural opponent of the Church. The bourgeois community of the faithful can tolerate such an intruder only if the former is willing to forgo its claim to uniqueness in the game of words. For the bourgeois as for the poet, words mean only what is to be found behind them.”

Clank, clank! Two firm knocks of the bronze door clapper downstairs always meant Pilar’s apartment. Who can it be at this early hour, which according to Don Helvecio’s erotic timetable is still the middle of the night? Don’t those people down there know that the absentee boss of the Hotel Príncipe can’t be roused from his bed by two knocks, especially since he’s sharing that bed?

Those people down there seemed to know all this very well. And they were even better informed than that, for they also knew who would open up for them. That’s precisely why they decided to knock at this hour.

Just as “those people down there” expected, our door was opened for them — by Beatrice, let it be said, who was just the opener they were hoping for. But it was only one person who had come, a gentleman, a resplendent specimen of Mallorcan male worthiness. He was clothed in a black suit that had shiny spots here and there from long wear. He had on white hemp sandals, identifying him as a member of a lower social class. He spoke fluent Spanish, not the insular dialect that is related to Catalan, and which I, incidentally, despite years spent on the island, was never able to master. This man was polite, in fact he was gracious in the extreme. He had just the proper manners, a not unusual trait among the common people anywhere, and certainly not among Spaniards of his social standing.

This gentleman knew just how to behave in the presence of a woman who appeared before him in her morning negligee. She inquired what he had come for, then listened and watched as he reached into his pockets and took out a clutch of soiled papers. These documents were decidedly greasy. Our messenger must have carried them around with him for quite some time, and surely this was not the first time that he had drawn them out and shown them. He started searching through the papers with his knobby fingers. Oh, please, said Beatrice, just put them on the table and sort them there. So there they lay, next to my manuscript translation of The Bourgeois Carnival , which suddenly took on the pale, remote aspect of anemic philosophy.

The man then drew out two sheets from his deck. For a split second I had visions of an itinerant fortune-teller who has a trained canary pull fortune cards out of a drawer. Our own visiting itinerant, whoever he was, clapped one hand down on the two sheets of paper. He didn’t mean this gesture in an unfriendly or threatening way. Rather, he remained quite the gentleman and started talking in the most cheerful manner. Soon he would be in a state of pure rapture; you might say that he had foretold his own future with the greatest exactitude. Beatrice and I, intrigued by this strange visitor, recognized the gaudy strokes of Zwingli’s signature, the symbol of his extraordinary business acumen, compared to which my own scrawling way of signing documents seemed picayune indeed.

“Debts?”

Not at all, said the dunning agent. That was too harsh a term for the minuscule credit balance he had come to straighten out. And yet, he averred, the time was soon approaching when this matter ought perhaps to be taken care of, for otherwise, mmm…

Mmm… This “otherwise” is an all too familiar expression. In the form of “Get a move on!” Tied to a fist, it had befogged my childhood, and now here it was again, accompanied by a stranger’s hand spread out on our table in the interest of an amicable business settlement. Every country in the world harbors these vestiges of the caveman with his club. When we translate their message, it always comes out reading “distress warrant,” “bailiff,” “debtor’s oath,” or time in the tower. I understood precious little of what this gentleman was explaining so suavely, but the bills spoke their own clear numerical language. As a matter of fact it was a negligible sum; I seem to recall that a hundred-peseta note would have sufficed to get rid of our intruder.

With his permission, we repaired to a corner for a conference. As it happened, it was the corner next to the corridor door. Beatrice quickly disappeared through the door, and returned just as quickly with the pesetas. She had fished them out of our moneybag.