Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“You’re going to…?”

“Of course I am. He’s my brother.”

Of course. Some brother! The man took the proffered banknote, held out a few coins in change, and stuffed the papers back in his pocket leaving us the papers with Zwingli’s signature, which for him had now become worthless. Here on this far-flung island, we had just rescued the honor of a Swiss national.

Peering carefully at the receipts, and with the aid of my sparse Spanish vocabulary, I discovered that Beatrice had handed over to the man the monetary value of twelve dozen drinking glasses. Drinking glasses?

“Isn’t that right? Copas means glasses, doesn’t it? Or can it mean something else?”

“No, it means glasses. Why?”

“Then the two of them must own some kind of shooting gallery. Twelve times twelve is a hundred and forty-four, right? When we arrived here, there wasn’t a single glass in the cupboard. That’s what I call the kind of love that knows no bounds. Shall we bound on over to their arcade and try our luck?

The door opened. Zwingli’s queen of the night marched through the room.

And it was the beginning of a new day.

Never expect any thanks in this world of ours. When Beatrice showed Zwingli the paid receipts, he went through the roof. She presented them to him with a gesture of sisterly confidence, as if to say that such a favor between siblings was the most natural thing in the world, and that she expected no recompense. “But tell me now, twelve dozen drinking glasses! It would be cheaper to buy an electric dishwasher!”

“You mean you actually paid that crook? You are both chumps! You are weak-kneed suckers and greenhorns, the two of you!”

Zwingli’s wrath was quite genuine, not the theatrical kind at all. His anger was, however, directed most fiercely at the dunning artist whose nefarious scheme he claimed we had simply fallen into. But this was not the case at all, Beatrice interjected; the man had a perfect right to demand payment. “God damn it all,” countered Zwingli, and then he started assaulting the absent functionary with the type of maledictory vocables of which he had made himself a connoisseur. It was as if his International Lexicon of Invective lay open before him, supplemented by his domestic Dictionary of Swiss Dialect Terms . Just what did that bilking chaib think he was up to? He could easily have been left waiting a whole year more, and then either the statute of limitations would pass by or the affair could be settled fifty-fifty out of court. “Just think of it! He comes in here and attacks my sister with business matters that concern men only! And he probably pulled a fast one on you, too. I wouldn’t trust a Glunki like that as far as…”

But then Zwingli looked over the receipts. When he was through, he not only was satisfied, he was actually beaming. He found a mistake in our favor amounting to 12 pesetas. With pride he announced that we had made a profit for the day.

It’s not everyone who can earn 12 pesetas while still in bed. Such things, I said to myself, are possible only in Spain. We really ought to celebrate, I declared in the spirit of my father, who always liked to reach for the bottle and had a marked preference for the more insignificant occasions. I brought forth two shiny silver duros and the remainder in copper coins to cover our little libation. “Manzanilla?” No, said Zwingli, that wouldn’t taste right at this early hour.

“Julietta, why don’t you zip around the corner and ask the old lady for a bottle of the usual for Don Helvecio. She’ll know what you mean. And bring back some eggs and a string of sobrasada .”

Eggs and sausage, that was the ticket! As the saying goes, where there’s a will there’s a way. But Zwingli had obviously begun to run out of both, for recently the best will in the world had been unable to provide him with regular sausage. The sobrasada Julietta was out fetching was to be paid for with the money that had fallen so unexpectedly into Beatrice’s lap.

Those glasses, Zwingli told us, that was a story all to itself. He would be glad to tell it to us sometime, and Vigo would die laughing. You could write a whole book about the vagaries of his life here on the island. But first, he would have to realize his serious plans here, and we ought to drink a toast to that.

Pilar was going to cook up the eggs in Menorcan style, mixing them with the sharply pimentoed red sausages— à la Général , as Zwingli called the recipe. When Pilar heard him use this culinary term, she turned livid, and there ensued a rat-a-tat of verbal volleys and counter-volleys sufficient to decimate a whole regiment. I couldn’t understand a single word. Beatrice let me know that it was a rather delicate matter, which was why Julietta had been sent outdoors.

Scenes like this one became more and more frequent. Whenever the subject of “the General’s eggs” came up between Pilar and her señorito , Julietta would be asked to leave. This happened more often than was good for anybody’s mental and physical well-being.

Just what was this business about “the General’s eggs”— los huevos del General ?

These memoirs of mine, whose basic outlines I have been planning throughout all the inexorable vicissitudes of my life, were meant to contain a separate chapter on the life and times of our vulture of a hostess, Pilar. My design was to present a unified, coherent portrait of this woman. But I have long since realized that my best intentions in this regard have been for naught. Sometimes the mere lifting of someone’s eyelid can interrupt my narration and propel my thoughts in a different direction, just as it happens in real life. Hence, my frequent digressions are not the result of tensions between poetry and truth, but arise from a desire to make plausible for my reader the implausibility of truth itself — an ambition that reaches into the realm of theology. “The General’s eggs” played such a fateful role in my insular life that I am moved at this very moment, now that Zwingli has ordered them for his table, to serve them up in their double aspect for the reader’s gustatory delectation. Standing here behind Pilar’s back as she cracks them into the frying pan, I’ll relate a few details about their previous existence; there’s hardly any danger that they will be spoiled in the process.

Zwingli had named this egg dish after a specific general — a second Benedict, if you will, although in this case the eponym has yet to enter our gourmet cookbooks. The General and his unit had their base, or their post (I’m unfamiliar with military usage; perhaps “base” is the more fitting term for the Spanish army) at the citadel of Mahón on Menorca, the smaller of the Balearics. And it was in his household that Pilar had the position of kitchen nymph.

Under supervision of the General’s spouse, the girl Pilar developed into a superb cook, whose skill I have never let up praising to this very day. The Iberian entrees we still concoct, in order to keep the lowly potato from our door, we owe at least indirectly to the overlord of that little neighboring island. It was the Commander himself who trained the girl in the other art she was devoted to, and in this effort she likewise proved to be an eager pupil. On one occasion, however, she was apparently a little careless while washing the dishes (in Spain, hygienic conditions leave much to be desired). Nine months later the Generalissimus of the Balearic fleet headquarters, first established in the year 206 B.C. by Hannibal’s brother Mago, had a child.

Are we now to picture the assembled uniformed guards presenting arms, as the General’s aide-de-camp appears before him with the official announcement, coming to attention with all the snappiness that Spanish corporals are capable of? (Not much snappiness at all when compared to the German army, but nowadays even the Spanish military has been thoroughly Prussianized). Did the proud new father fire off the few dozen fieldpieces at his bastion, proclaiming to the island and to His Majesty’s gunships, anchored in port, that heaven had sent him, from the womb of his pretty kitchen maid, a child to be baptized Julietta?