Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Oh, of course. She’s Spanish? From Valencia or somewhere…?”

“From Kleinbasel, the other side of the bridge. Beatrice is beside herself, clapping and shouting Olé! Hats, skirts, mantillas get thrown down onto the arena floor, where the bullfighter, having come within a hair’s breadth of getting killed himself, accepts thanks from the most beautiful specimen of Spanish womanhood. It is only now that one notices that blood has been shed — just as it is when you visit the dentist and he says, “Now rinse.” Chulos arrive on the scene with a mule team and drag away the bull’s enormous carcass. Other workers rake sand over the black pools of blood, and then the aficionados start arguing among themselves so vehemently that it looks as if they, too, want to shed some blood.”

“But excuse me, Herr Führer . What about those horses that they say always get slit open? You don’t have to give us the details, but you must have seen that kind of thing?”

This is an embarrassing question, often asked and difficult to reply to. But I’m able to parry it just as a powerful bull shakes off a badly applied banderilla. I refer my interrogator to Montaigne, who, I say, in the second volume of his essays provides an incontrovertible answer. I say this while trusting that no one would ever admit ignorance of a literary passage that was never written, and one that I myself have never read.

In Sóller matters were getting so tense that the nautical-travel boss asked the land-travel boss to pick out his best guide. The German citizens would have to be distracted by holding a general roll-call. Vigoleis would take care of this. “Get them to think about other things. But do it so that it’s all Greek to them. We’ve got three hours to kill.”

Vigoleis gave a lecture — a very good one, I was told — on the choice of Spain as a new homeland. Nothing political, and therefore edifying and even constructive. But Vigoleis can never stick to his subject. He’s not a nuclear scientist, and always finds more interesting things going on at the margins of any problem. Soon enough he was talking about the rise and decline of the House of Sureda, although it wasn’t very clear just who did the rising and who did the declining. Afterwards we would be visiting the Cartuja , so I explained that each and every stone at that place breathed the breath of a Sureda. And then there was the cute story of the Cell Rebellion: for years, two particular cells at the monastery were shown to visitors as the places where Chopin and George Sand had kept house. But all of a sudden someone claimed that the famous couple had made love a few cells farther on, or downstairs off the corridor. This led to trench warfare, since the precise location for the lovemaking would bring in hard cash for whoever owned it. Foreign tourists, it was said, must be shown only the genuine article, as in a museum. The two cell owners battled it out. There were experiments with a dowsing rod and with telepathy. Finally Count Hermann Keyserling stepped in and uttered the philosophical words that saved the day: “The two cell suites are in different corridors, so why don’t you show both of them?” The second cloister apartment was quickly furnished in identical fashion with the one sanctioned by tradition. Then began a scramble to find the proper tour guides, who were bribed with cigarettes, wine, and anise. On days when the tourists arrived in crowds, the groups were kept apart and nobody noticed. It was only when just a few people had to be dragged through the Cartuja that things got dicey, since the sacred hallways then took on the aspect of a bordello, in which the madam makes the assignments, and each girl has a separate room.

I lack historical intuition, I don’t smoke, and I spat out the terrible wine offered me by the hostile cell-owners. From the start, I left it up to my tourists themselves to smell out the authentic cell apartment. Chopin’s piano, I explained, the one he played on when he was here, had in any case long since been removed to Paris. Later, in Valldemosa, I would show my group the very house lived in by the man who sold it in person to a French antiques dealer. The man I had in mind was my friend Don José, personal physician to His Royal Highness Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria. Soon enough, I heard myself talking about the disobedient dog responding to the name Pistola, the clinic pet that ran away as if shot from a cannon whenever its instinctive Izibencan cowardice came to the fore. If we were lucky, I told my group, Don José himself would be standing in his doorway. I would point him out to them, considering that personal physicians have gone out of fashion. If he wasn’t standing there — which was most often the case, but I didn’t say so — I would point to some other man and some other dog. This always worked. Great is the power of suggestion. Any Führer can testify to this, whether he is guiding tourists or entire nations. It’s only people leading bears around who have to be on their guard. They solve this problem by carrying a long cudgel to keep the chained animal from molesting the guide himself.

On this historical Day of the Führer I closed my oration, as always, with a discreet bow to my audience and a studiously humble word of thanks for their kind attention. Stormy applause! Bravos! Hurrahs! Waves of gratitude as never before: “Long live our Führer !” No people on earth, I was thinking, has been so unlucky as the Germans in their choice of a Führer . And yet I had to admit that they were better off raising Vigoleis on their shields as Führer here on the Plaza Grande in Sóller, than that other bigwig back in the Thousand-Year Reich . Assuming that the latter hadn’t already been massacred.

The bloodthirsty German Mother in the crowd was steaming with indignation. Others, too, and not only women, regarded such a spontaneous demonstration of reverence for their Führer as out of place, in particular those who had heard my earlier Speech to the German Nation in the train compartment. But no one dared to murder me. The big unanswered questions were of course: who can ever be the genuine leader of a genuine nation? How do you bring down a bogus leader? How and when will he kick the bucket? These problems could obviously not be solved on the island of Mallorca; on this day they couldn’t even be put up for discussion. They were being answered back in the Reich with revolvers, and without a trace of doggish Ibizencian timidity.

Beatrice, too, wouldn’t soon forget this day. Her great moment occurred with an ocean view, at the seaside cliff with its wave-spilled gorge, the Ponta de la Foradada. This was a favorite spot, one that delighted the tourists even when it was raining. Beatrice loved places where nature revealed itself with a purity otherwise seen only on picture postcards. The whole group focused its eyes on the big hole in the cliff, admired the rocky arch formation, speculated on its diameter, compared the sight with other famous holes at other locations in the world, and gazed into its depths. “Yes indeed, 400 meters! And just look over there to the right, do you see something moving? No, a little farther, under the rock with the tin can on top of it. That’s an octopus! Look how its arms throw ghostly shadows! With just a single reach of its tentacle it could grab a person and pull him down…” But I don’t want to interrupt Beatrice’s harangue. In brief, while nature was unfolding its marvels to a grateful assembly, one gentleman kept staring at the group’s guide, with the result that his bile got the better of him. Mixed in with the bile was this fellow’s honorable Teutonic blood, and there began a swelling and heaving to match the foaming ocean surf far down below. He looked around in a fury, and shortly found the person he could address with his grievance, who was none other than Vigoleis. He cried out, “Herr Führer , this is going too far! I protest! Where can I register a complaint?”