Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The company flourished, and its owners flourished, while Beatrice and Vigoleis kept on starving. Beatrice with her Lladó, Vigoleis with his mystics.

Like every self-respecting Spanish male, Don Darío hated the clergy, the priests, as the source of all that was evil in Iberia. He asked me to invent a gallows that would dispatch a cassocked felon in a single stroke. I referred him to my fellow countrymen in the Third Reich, who were now the experts in mass executions. A postcard to the Führer would suffice. I told Don Darío that the clergy were not my favorite people, either, those sinister mercenaries of the Lord, trained in fanaticism from childhood on, and woe to anybody who refuses to accept the faith! And yet, basically these fellows were just poor dolts with very little income, unless you totted up the not inconsiderable wherewithal they raked in on the side with their brothels, their bullfight arenas, and their schools — which in many cases were schools for scandal. But why string them up? They contributed a great deal to the country’s picturesque image, and were thus invaluable for the tourist trade. Don Darío viewed them, of course, as more than just minions of the Almighty who went around handing out blessings, or just as shrewd businessmen who waylaid his own commercial schemes. Oh, if only all the clergymen in Spain would stick to cultivating the above-named activities — how harmless they would be! Then there would never have been an Inquisition, today there would be no General Franco, and God’s Creation would belie its most painful contingency that allows life to go on only at the cost of other lives. God, conceived of as a monster — it’s an idea that outside of the Book of Job I have found confronted frankly only in the writings of Pascoaes. In any case, I prefer mercantile priests, thieving priests, and whoring priests, men who can do fuller and more appealing justice to the idea of God’s inscrutability, to the sanctimonious vultures and craven cowards who see in each and every human being nothing more than a child of the Devil.

Still, neither in Spain nor later in Portugal did I ever succeed in persuading the witch-hunters that a curate or an abbot commits less mischief if he goes about his work in the interest of financial creditors rather than the souls of the faithful. Would the pastor in my home town ever have driven my politically naive mother, a member of the Catholic Mothers’ Society, into the arms of the Führer if he had gathered herbs on Süchteln Heights, if he had been a partner in the local railway enterprise or, more attractive still, owned the little corner cathouse? He was fanatically devoted to God and the Fatherland, and that’s how he brought about the downfall — not of the Creator, but of his local congregation.

Don Darío regarded my theory as, quite simply, bonkers. Soon enough the Spanish Civil War taught him a lesson. Or rather, it was then too late, even for Don Darío. On his suit he sported not the blood of his ecclesiastical and secular enemies, but his own. He was brutally murdered.

I wrote and wrote, invented and invented. I constructed models, played at being a Wustmann describing Peoples and Fatherlands, and during sleepless nights longed inconsolably for my hour of death. Beatrice practiced and practiced at her Lladó, so persistently that I began thanking my lucky stars that she wasn’t a soprano. And she read and read, and gave lessons, and mended and cleaned. What she was wishing for was not her death or money, not a hat from the Casa de Modas run by the German with hay fever, not some delectable porcupine dish. No, what she longed for was to hear Vigoleis finally giving his imprimatur to some product of his pen, instead of tossing it into the stove or on the manure pile. During all this time Zwingli did nothing at all, and yet of the three of us, he was the one who kept raking in the money. Certain of my inventions achieved success, but that didn’t put any dough in my pocket. For that to happen, I would have to have come up with some specialized manufacturing techniques, and my inventive genius didn’t carry that far. Every creative person is familiar with this defect; it’s the one that all the parasites cash in on, and it’s an age-old conundrum among the academic theologians.

Still and all, every day we had tropical fruit to eat. Zwingli saw to it that our bowls didn’t remain empty. Before this period when he acted as our “house illuminator,” I had often felt nostalgia for my days in Cologne, when with my monthly allowance I was able to buy a single orange each day, and sometimes even a banana, at a particularly friendly greengrocer’s stand. In Spain we usually couldn’t afford such things. Lemons were very expensive. Tropical fruit is a bargain when you can steal it directly from the tree. Once packed in crates, it gets affordable only after it crosses the borders. I had similar experiences in Portugal. Pineapple from Madeira for a song, whereas figs from the Algarve or grapes from the Douro were a luxury. Nevertheless, Zwingli was earning enough from my pobreterías to overcome the prevailing economic tensions. He himself liked Swiss cheese, the real kind that you can obtain in Switzerland only if you have the right connections at Parliament.

Our communal accommodations with my genius brother-in-law went along swimmingly. He did honor to his nickname “Oekolampadius”. Wherever he went, he beamed forth like a lamp into the darkness. There were no womenfolk to steal his light from us, and the dirt carried into our house by Don Darío stayed in the streetside rooms.

Zwingli kept busy planning the foundation of his Academy. His card files were filling up, and “ Buschibuëb ” kept bringing home various island fruits such as apricots, which were normally reserved for the finest kind of pig swill. Our stock of Künzli tea never ran out. Wherever one looked, it was a scene of peace and concord. It was as if the word puta had been struck from our dictionary. Don Darío had his own putas , but we never got to see them. In this he was being discreet, like any Spaniard.

But one day this limping exploiter of my inventions arrived in an advanced state of anger. What was wrong? Had some priest stolen my idea for a rolling bordello, and then gone ahead and constructed one? Were my wagons already coursing through the Mallorcan countryside? Had some cardinal snuck away without paying his hotel bill? Had Count Keyserling, the hotel’s most lavish resident, driven away guests he himself had attracted to the establishment by putting his “joviality” on excessive display? But no, it was only an American millionaire who had enraged my putative business partner. Upstairs at the hotel in his luxury-class rooms, this American millionaire was himself choking with rage at a damned stupid little Spaniard with a pince-nez and a mild limp.

Don Darío was sitting at his reception desk, calculating how much he had earned at his most recent bullfight, how much he would earn later by mobilizing his German inventor, how much he had lost through his most recent lover, and how much he would have to invest in his future lovers. Then he looked up from his ledger, and somebody approached the desk. “ Porra ! That’s going too far!” And it was happening, so to speak, in his own house. He stands up and limps into the foyer, dragging his left leg behind him. There follows a moment of stasis, as the weight of his body rests solely on its right-leg support acting as a axle for the left; his left leg swings forward with an almost merry abandon, causing his body to jerk forward with what one might refer to as a step.

The American guest with the million-dollar bank account proceeds across the foyer with a mild limp. He explains that he has come to Palma for the express purpose of hearing a lecture by Keyserling and to watch Keyserling eat a meal — two talents that this epicurean philosopher loved to display in public. Now the Yankee culture-vulture is limping through the foyer; he is dragging his right leg. There follows a moment of stasis, during which the weight of his body rests solely on its left-leg support acting as an axle for the right; his right leg swings forward with an almost merry abandon, causing his body to jerk forward with what one might refer to as a step.