Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Perfectly,” I called back. “We’ve just got engaged!”

A roll-call aboard the Monte Rosa showed that about a hundred of the German citizens were missing. News reports from the native soil were such that they preferred not to return home. One can get hanged anywhere in the world, so who needs a fatherland?

The next day I went to the travel agency and received the 50 pesetas wage for myself and my Persian bride. The agency manager, none other than the German Consul himself, was once again in full control, just like his main Führer , if not like his best one. The Röhm Revolt had been suppressed. Some heads were still rolling, and Herr von Papen’s son-in-law, whom I met on the streets of the city, had left his legs unpowdered. That was his ceremonial form of mourning.

We buried a great painter, Jacobo Sureda. Elly Sackett, an American banker’s daughter, had given support to Jacobo the man, while Mother Ey in Düsseldorf championed the artist. He was the best painter on Mallorca, which is saying a great deal, since the island was teeming with painters. Pedro had but one desire, and that was to achieve as much with brush and palette as his brother. So he painted more and more intensely, while Jacobo painted less and less. Jacobo’s lung ailment got worse from year to year. When we got to know him during our first island winter, the season that stood completely under the sign of the hellcat Pilar, his health was comparatively good. He was able to afford an annual visit to the St. Blasien spa in the Black Forest. He loved Germany, a country where he was no longer a stranger. Mother Ey had discovered him. She was in rapture over the young consumptive nobleman, who began as a poet and who personally set the type and printed his own first small volume of verse using the press owned by his friend Josef Weisemberger. The title was El prestidigitador de los cinco sentidos , and the poems did justice to the title: magically expressionistic, and deploying all of the five senses. When Jacobo died, his best paintings were hanging in Mother Ey’s gallery — or rather, they were in Mother Ey’s hands, since the Nazis had liquidated her gallery, accusing her of sponsoring “degenerate art.” It is probable that Don Jacobo’s pictures were likewise annihilated as “degenerate art.” They have never been found.

I never knew Mother Ey in person. Our only halfway intimate contact occurred when I slept on a historic mattress she had once reclined upon. Judging from the stories I heard from Pedro and Don Juan Sureda, from Jacobo himself and from our Folkwang School teacher, I understood perfectly why it was that Don Juan paid equally intense reverence to the mattress and bed linens used by Señora Huevo , as the Sureda children called her, just as to the beds once occupied through sleepless nights by His Catholic Majesty and his rival Don Miguel de Unamuno. The castellan protected Josef Weisemberger’s mattress, too, from profanation, and he no doubt had his special reasons. Was it because this German was a friend of his most talented child? Perhaps. I am unfamiliar with this man’s contributions to the world of art; I only know that in the House of Sureda his name will outlast the mattress he slept on. Josef Weisemberger was the first person to walk the streets of Mallorca in wintertime without a hat. Baedeker fans, those who are sworn to historical accuracy, should make note of the fact that this particular honor does not belong to Chopin.

Jacobo died of a pulmonary hemorrhage in his attractive artist’s home Ca’s Potecari in Génova, cradled in Pedro’s arms. In Barcelona he had undergone a difficult operation performed by a Catalan surgeon, a pupil of Sauerbruch’s, who did his work so badly that the operation was a success, but the patient succumbed. We had argued that he should go to Germany to be operated on by Sauerbruch himself. Elly Sackett would have financed this. But Don Jacobo didn’t want to go to Germany, because it was no longer his Germany. Should we summon Sauerbruch to Spain? Count Kessler, who took an interest in the Sureda case, told me that Sauerbruch would come immediately by plane with an assistant surgeon and a nurse, and the result would be one cured patient and one devastated bank account. Kessler himself had once been duped by the same “pork butcher” (the term was not Kessler’s) many years before, when he lay sick in London. A rather hesitant diagnosis by his English physician upset Kessler’s sister. She kept telling him he should ask Sauerbruch to come to England; after all, the two men knew each other. Sauerbruch flew over, tapped the Count’s chest, auscultated, reassured the patient, wrote out prescriptions, and casually inquired whether the Count would mind if he, Sauerbruch, stayed on a day longer to dine with the King’s personal physician. Kessler had no objections, and in fact he arranged the dinner. The surgeon’s bill for medical treatment and time spent in London was in the thousands, an amount that caused even a Count Kessler to blanch. He was about to sue the “blackguard” (Kessler’s term), but his sister took over the entire expense to spare her beloved brother all the anguish of a lawsuit. I had already heard a similar account of Sauerbruch’s padded bills from my uncle, Bishop Jean in Münster. A scion of the Westphalian Droste clan had an only son who was deathly ill. The professors at the university clinic all said: call in Sauerbruch. He came, he carved, he sewed, and left the patient out of danger. His rich, generous, happy Papa wrote out a check for the doctor on the very same day, for the fat sum of, let’s say, 50,000 marks. The surgeon telegraphed back: “50,000 is what one offers a clinical assistant, not a Sauerbruch. Signed: Sauerbruch”.

What an amazing message! It is a mark of true greatness if at the proper moment you can formulate words that can become proverbial. That is how I ought to have come back at Adelfried Silberstern on the subject of my consultation fee. “Zero point zero pesetas is what one offers one’s lawyer brother, not a legal and sexual consultant named Vigoleis. Signed: Vigoleis.”

I would give anything for a painting by Jacobo Sureda, especially for one created during the period of his physical decline — his Almocrebe , for instance, which presents Spain’s pride, misery, poverty, and steadfastness, depicted in the figures of a jackass, its master, and the shadows they cast across the baking soil. The picture wasn’t large; it would fit nicely in the place where I have hung a map of Mallorca, a sight that fills me with longing for my Island of Second Sight, now extinct. That is to say, I am overcome by saudade , as the Portuguese call it, and as Pascoaes — my Pascoaes! — uniquely delineates it in book after book. Or rather, as he once delineated it, for now he is dead. Just now, before I start explaining how I first encountered his work, I have received the news of his heroic, tragic demise, the death of the last Portuguese mystic, the man who intoned the swan song of Iberian mysticism.

In the senior apartments at the Suredas’ house things were constantly topsy-turvy. But one day Pedro told me that the place was now a madhouse. Papá, Mámá, and everybody else had gone completely off their rockers, and now they were obliged to use the WC at their next-door neighbor’s. Papá was locking himself in the toilet for hours at a time and reciting out loud. Pixedes, a housemaid who had stayed on longer than most because Papá went through a quiet phase, had now run away also. Pedro brought with him blankets and sleepwear, since nights at home were unbearable. Had more “golden veins” made their appearance? And which language had Don Juan opted for now?

“He’s not cramming any new ones. At first we thought it was Arabic, which he’s always been interested in. And it was our idea that while learning it, he forgot the trick with the door latch and couldn’t let himself out, just like that nun. What surprised us was when we first heard him yelling, ‘Paul, Paul, open up Spain!’ Pixedes packed her bundle and fled the house. Pazzis is desperate, because it’s not golden knots any more, it’s religious fanaticism that’s broken out in our house.”