Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

We soon found out that Leentje needn’t have sent her brother’s formal suit. In the boss’s honky-tonk, Carel could have mounted the stage in shorts, and Rahel could have plucked a few strings sporting only a bra and the Cassandra glances that were normal for her. “And do you know, Mamú, the end result of Silberstern’s stupid puffery is simply that the event didn’t meet the Mengelbergs’ fond expectations, which were of a kind that not even a Mevrouw Beverwijn could fulfill. They’ll get over it as soon as they start hiking. Valldemosa, Deyá—they’re going to all those places on foot. No, Mamú, the real tragedy of the situation is something completely different, something awful. With all of their traveling back and forth between Palma and the Terreno, Carel discovered that the one duro they had in their possession, besides some small change, was phony. If you dropped it on a marble tabletop it wouldn’t bounce back, but just lie there. It was a lead slug. The sound it would make is plump , a word that derives from the Latin plumbum , and not one Spaniard in the whole country would ever accept it. No, slugs like that one find their way into the pockets of foreigners. So now Carel was carrying this millstone around with him. Rahel didn’t say anything, because unlike Carel she lives her life in regions other than the Aeolian clouds. To demonstrate the counterfeit, she pitched the duro onto the floor. All of us heard the etymological sound, and were filled with the “inner glow of poverty” that Rilke has made famous. The only one who could, would, and did master the situation was Silberstern. He asked for the duro so he could place a bet on a greyhound at the automatic machine. That, he explained, and the alms boxes in churches is where you can get rid of even the clumsiest counterfeit money. But his betting star was unlucky; he got caught trying to use the slug. The next day he came back and returned it, bowing and scraping to the original owners.

“But he’s a millionaire, Vigo! He should be ashamed! He could simply have said, ‘It made that sound. Here, Maestro, is a genuine duro in recompense.’”

Carel is myopic, and that has made his sense of hearing all the sharper. He can’t tell by looking whether something is genuine or not. Aesthete that he is, and connoisseur of women that he is, he often took some female passer-by for Spain’s most beautiful specimen of femininity. He would follow her, hoping to keep her before his eyes as if he were holding a tuning fork to his ear. He would simply run after her. Rahel, concerned for his welfare and bent on helping her creative partner avoid disappointment — although disappointment can also be inspiring — sounded a warning: that lady wasn’t worth his trouble; Spain’s beautiful women existed only on posters. But Carel, with his special intuition, disappeared from view. And when he returned to us breathless, he would always offer the same laconic report: “ Niet de moeite waard .” As a bona fide Mengelberg of the musical guild his sense of hearing hadn’t deceived him. But he didn’t yet dare just to grab his “beautiful” prey and toss her to the ground like a duro to test her authenticity.

As far as duros were concerned, I myself had already made great strides. Sometimes I heard it make atonal sounds — an inexhaustible topic for a Mengelberg. To make a coin sound just right, it was often only a matter of how you tossed it to the ground. I took our own real, genuine duro — it was also our very last — and made a few prestidigitory gestures unnoticed by the others (the Mengelbergs were too preoccupied with their own misery). I threw it down, and — it rang! Silver! You couldn’t even hear the metallurgic deception perpetrated by the recently abdicated Spanish National Mint with the national currency. And anyway, why should we, the common people, worry about such things? Carel and Rahel, suddenly revived by the music of authenticity, now gave the subject their full attention. Rahel began an incredibly quick-paced lecture. Each of us felt that she was addressing us directly, whereas in reality she was talking to all of us together or to nobody in particular. Her subject was the duro. Never before, she said, had a revaluation of the sevillano achieved so much in such a short time. Rahel sketched out a plan. She conjured up worlds of possibilities for which our arch-miser Silberstern, so thoroughly versed in scrounging pennies, would readily have parted with at least three duros.

During my student days at Cologne, the economic philosophers claimed that money was a fiction. I had my reservations, which were supported by other academic departments, especially the Department of Theology. And now a genuine duro had certified for us the falsity of the economists’ claim. Whereupon we all embraced, and left for Coll de Rebassa to go swimming. Carel paid the trolley fare — a Mengelberg, after all, doesn’t act shabbily. It was warm in the sun, and plenty of beautiful women crossed Carel’s path. Rahel was constantly amazed — how scarce beautiful women were in Spain!

Interested in matters of currency as in so many other subjects, Mamú wanted to know what happened with the bogus duro. She motioned to her servant to refill my glass.

“The next morning I pressed it into our milkman’s hand. He was short-sighted, too, and since we had never cheated him, he didn’t toss the sevillano on the floor, but innocently handed over our change. I breathlessly went back to our shredded-newspaper bed and reported to Beatrice that we were finally rid of the fake sevillano . It was the first time in my life that I had cheated someone, but I explained that the authentic Mengelbergs were worth such a prank. Suddenly our doorbell rang. It was the milkman. He said that lead-slug duros were making the rounds on the island, and often it was foreigners who were the first to get pulled in. All I could say was: right you are, and if it was OK with him we’d pay up at the end of the week”.

“And then…?” Mamú never stopped halfway, which is why she kept going with her gigantic lawsuit.

“I put the sevillano in a metal box where Beatrice keeps souvenirs that we’re both attached to. It’s still in there, a reminder of the Mengelbergs, to whom we never confessed and never will confess that it was for their sake that I became a common extortionist. The left hand must never know what the right hand is doing — isn’t that what your Science ladies are always saying?”

“So it’s a talisman of friendship? How touching. That reminds me of my late Prince, who would have acted just as you did. I like your idea of friendship. And it is friendship, isn’t it, that you have felt for the Mengelbergs?” She motioned, and her servant refilled again. It was an undiluted Valdepeñas.

“It was friendship at first glance, Mamú. And nothing would have changed, even if Stern had used his Who’s Sleeping With Whom? to show that the Mengelbergs were fake Mengelbergs. We liked them in spite of Carel’s rucksack, which in my opinion just doesn’t become him.”

What did Beatrice think about friendship, Mamú inquired. The same as Vigo. In many respects Beatrice and I were contrary natures, but when it came to basic matters of life our ideas and feelings were at the same level. Friendship was one example. Stefan George was not.

Mamú’s servant — for some time now it was none other than Jaime, the skirt-chasing fellow Silberstern had tossed out of his house — whom she was training to become her butler, once again responded to a gesture and rushed to fill our glasses. For Beatrice it was a Manzanilla.

At Mamú’s everyone was treated fairly, as long as we did the same for her. She would of course have preferred that we squirted the wine in a beautiful arc down our throats, directly from a porrón . But her vintages were much too precious to be imbibed only for their value as nourishment, as the Southern Europeans are wont to do. You just can’t squirt and taste at the same time. Admittedly it is impressive to watch a leather bag getting passed around a formal dinner table, especially if it involves expert porronistas . Not one drop on anybody’s white shirt!