Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

No, dear reader, nothing of the kind. On this occasion the General twirled his oily mustachios just as on any other day. And just as on any other day, he made his way to the barracks, the officers’ club, or the bordello — the usual routine for a Spanish general. What did get fired on this particular day was the kitchen maid. Taking with her all her belongings, her severance pay, and her baby, she departed the little isle of her misfortune and set sail for the larger Balearic, where she planned to continue practicing her culinary arts in other houses.

She had learned her manners at the highest level of the military, and perhaps this would be of help as she picked up the pieces of her life. I personally have my doubts on this score, but that’s probably because I am prejudiced against all mercenaries with their flashy gold braids. Our ten-star General naturally wanted nothing more to do with his child. Generals are persons of privilege, like priests. When they breed offspring, they do it, as the untranslatable Spanish phrase has it, a la buena de Dios , and it’s up to the offspring to look after its own welfare. Generals and priests are in the professional service of death, and why should they concern themselves with every thing that creepeth upon the earth? If there were no such thing as a death cult, no such professions would be thinkable; and but for the Balearic field marshal, there would be no such person as Julietta. But for Julietta, Pilar would have stayed on Menorca; but for Pilar on the island of Mallorca there would have been no Zwingli to cower under her erotic cudgel, etc. etc. There you have the chain of cause and effect that has led right down to this line in my book. In sum: without the General, my second, insular aspect would have remained forever concealed beneath the mask of my first.

It is quite some panorama, when you come to think of it. Here is a high-ranking soldier, beribboned with decorations earned by his saucepan-rattling heroism, sporting the stars of his rank and the stripes on his pants, and confident of the respect of his nation. He’s stationed somewhere on a romantic island in the Mediterranean. He’s bored with his worn-down wife, and so he orders a pert little recruit, in between stretches of K.P. duty, to perform certain types of hygienic drill several times a day. Thirty years later, somewhere in an attic flat in the decidedly unromantic city of Amsterdam, there sits a man by the name of Vigoleis — nary a star, nary a rank on his trousers, only the blotches and rumples of his sedentary lifestyle, and heroic ( sadly heroic) solely in the pages of his book. He sits and writes himself sick with the ague. If that isn’t divine predestination, then I haven’t the faintest idea what we mean when we speak of God’s miraculous ways. But we haven’t yet reached the end of the ways and byways of this island. So let us whittle ourselves another staff and press onward in our text.

It was of course rude of Zwingli to use the term à la Général for the egg-and-sausage mixture that Pilar had been asked to prepare after each service maneuver carried out on her strapping body. It was doubly impolitic of him to do so in the presence of Julietta, who was proud of her highly-placed father, a public servant whose career was already giving rise to adulatory legends. How I envy illegitimate children, who can have kings or cardinals as fathers, while the rest of us who are born safely within legal wedlock must forever be content with Smith or Jones. We humble products of bourgeois normalcy are forced to invent our own personal myths, including important elements of our dream-lives, in order to escape the corruption of contemporary society. Pilar was a good mother, this much I can say for her. She was good enough to give her child the General as her father, rather than some bootlicking subaltern. Julietta knew her male progenitor only by means of a magazine photograph, which showed the commander of the land forces standing in full regalia next to his seaborne comrade-in-arms, a Grand Admiral by the name of Miranda (if I remember correctly), who looked like a latter-day Kapudan Pasha with saber and horsetail, ready to take on the combined armadas of the whole world. Legend has it that he performed meritorious service by expanding the harbor fortifications on Menorca. Someone even suggested that as a tribute to this man, the island should be promoted to the geographical status of a continent.

One day I upbraided Zwingli, for although I myself can often wax quite cynical, there were times when I felt he was going too far when conversing about Julietta’s relative in the military. After all, I felt sorry for the girl. She was still at an age when she could feel ashamed for being a come-by-chance. But Vigoleis, mon cher (this is roughly how her artificial father reasoned with me), Julietta is now approaching the age when she herself will have to start cooking that recipe I have named after her procreator, and she’s better off learning about the consequences in advance.

Nevertheless, my scolding succeeded in making the two lovers more careful. The scenes came to an end. What is more, with a single stroke I was able virtually to rehabilitate the reputation of Julietta’s father within the family circle. I promoted his press photo to the rank of room ornament, soon acknowledged by all as a secular votive image. This cost me a few pesetas, a sum that, back then at least, was hardly worth the fuss the others made about it. The girl was so delighted that she could scarcely be pried loose from around my neck. At this moment she was again the little child in need of a father she could look up to, even though this father might well be a simpleton.

I cut the General out of the magazine and had him enlarged by a photographer, then tinted and framed. Afterward I gave the original back to Julietta, and it found its way into a cardboard box, where it yellowed in the company of other mysterious trifles of the kind that girls collect when they begin to realize that Paradise is drifting away.

On Julietta’s birthday, which as her mother told me coincided exactly with the General’s, the icon was unveiled. To dignify the event, I lit a few candles in the rejected daughter’s bedchamber. In the dim light, her martial ingrate of a father appeared to gaze down sternly on his child’s bed, the logistical focal point of his extramarital campaign. The scene had something of the atmosphere of a burial service, complete with weeping in the congregation. Julietta wept for joy over the symbolic promotion of her papá . Pilar wept for reasons we shall leave unexamined here. Beatrice and Zwingli behaved like Protestants at a Catholic mass: they were decorous but uninvolved in the liturgy. And I? My eyes, too, remained dry, but I felt my chest starting to expand and was suddenly seized by the impulse to deliver a short speech, something I hadn’t dared to do since I committed an oratorical faux pas at my parents’ silver wedding anniversary dinner. Here I could make the attempt without causing misunderstandings about my actual intent, unlike on that earlier occasion when, as a growing young man making his first Faustian pilgrimage through Western intellectual history, I had recently arrived at Spengler’s morphological theory of the destiny of civilizations. Here in the little bedchamber I was understood well enough, in spite of my stammering and slips of the tongue, precisely because my tiny Spanish vocabulary was unequal to the task. Zwingli came to my aid. Incidentally, this was the first time in my life that I had ever taken part in a military action. The simple ceremony ended amid universal mirth and cork-popping. From that day forward the virginal bedchamber was referred to exclusively as “The General’s Room.”

This meant that the spicy egg dish had now become anonymous, but it by no means disappeared from our hosts’ breakfast table. Pilar was one racy number. She was also apparently insatiable. Nighttime often started over again for the two of them soon after their private roosters had crowed them out of bed; thus the saucepan would get placed over the charcoal fire a second time at about six in the afternoon. Frequently it was I who broke the eggs into the skillet and stirred in the little red sausages to make a tortilla. Hay que ser hombre , “You have to stand up like a man,” was Zwingli’s way of explaining these between-meals snacks that in Spain could — and often did — get ordered in restaurants at any time of night or day. I had learned at least this much: that Zwingli had to stand at attention whenever his chick got horny. On such occasions there could be no loafing, gold-bricking, or deserting — at most perhaps an armistice, following which the trench warfare continued as before. I, Vigoleis, who am also on the skinny side, might devour dozens of the General’s pancakes and I still would probably die a hero’s death out in no-man’s-land, nameless, without eulogy and without posthumous promotion to private.