Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Religious fanaticism? Not bad for Spain. Great tradition! How can you tell?”

“He starts shouting, ‘Woe is me, woe is me if I do not preach the Gospel!’ Or ‘When will I be free of this mortal body?’”

There was no contradicting Pedro; this was clearly a case of religious hallucinations. If I had been the maid Pixedes, I too would have flown the coop. As Vigoleis, however, I kept listening. It’s one thing to use a bathroom for meditation, learning grammar, or doing a crossword puzzle. But for preaching? I pictured the Sureda family gathered together and flinching at each new outburst of their patriarch’s heretical phantasms, a form of blasphemy that no amount of patient reasoning could ever suppress. I saw them sticking the man’s trumpet in his ear and shouting, “Cease and desist! For thou knowest that thou art cursing the Lord!”

But from inside the room in question the tirade continued: “Christianity is the religion of the evening, which veils all things in its twilight. But then the heavens, which during the day are kept from sight by the azure air, open up a thousand tiny, gleaming windows. Christianity is the religion of the final hour, the time when our only salvation is to be found in hope, the somewhat desperate hope of St. Paul. Let us seek our salvation in hope!”

“Papá, come out of there! Papááááá, come out!”

“God perceived the imperfect nature of his Creation, and He was unable to undo it. But then Noah entered the Ark. Now Creation could only be modified, and the crime only eventually atoned for. That is the profound meaning of Golgotha. Jesus, the Son, is God’s bad conscience.”

The family left their pontificating father to his own fate. Pedro fled to General Barceló Street. Juanito took succor in devotional exercises; together with his pious sisters he prayed for Papá, though he didn’t overdo it. He was the only one in the family who eschewed exaggeration, for he was lazy and always tired, though not as a result of general dynastic torpor. Only Doña Pilar, the princess, stood firmly rooted in reality. Her Juan had not gone crazy, and he hadn’t turned more Quixotesque than otherwise. He had simply found a certain book — where? At a literary tertulia , of course. It was a book that had inwardly captivated him and was now keeping him outwardly captive at the odd location that could no longer be kept secret. She didn’t scold him, since from long years of marriage she knew that he would eventually come forth. The Suredas always came forth. The family coat of arms features a ferret. When he finally came forth, she would simply take the book out of his hands, and peace and tranquility would return to their home.

“Does anybody know which book it is that’s causing Don Juan such ecstasies? What kind of new gospel is he reading?”

“It’s a book about St. Paul, written by some Portuguese writer. That’s all we know.”

Doña Pilar actually succeeded in wrenching the book from her mystically transported husband, the book from which he continued to recite passages out loud at night, in bed, albeit only certain passages that received his imprimatur. During the daylight hours, pursuing his career as a Spanish grandee on the Promenade, at the cafés, in the clubs, or in the palacios of other grandees who were not yet financially ruined, he hid the book from sight. It was, after all, heretical in the highest degree, a threat to the salvation of his family’s souls, especially his daughters’, and it belonged on the Index. Doña Pilar, less concerned about saving souls than about the stability of her household, sneaked a peek at her husband and, when he left the house, took the book out of its hiding place. Don Juan, finding the place empty, went into a fit of rant: “Stolen!” He suspected one of his friends, a doctor whom he considered not only capable of robbing a tabernacle but also worthy of such an act. In the middle of the night he drummed the man out of bed. “You have stolen my Paul! Woe is me if I don’t preach the Gospel!”

Unlike many doctors who are enraged when somebody gets them out of bed for some petty ailment, this one kept calm. Since he hadn’t stolen the book, he wrote Don Juan a prescription for a purge, the Spanish panacea, and dismissed the despondent hidalgo .

But I still didn’t know which book Don Juan had found, and my curiosity increased. A book that could aggravate that man’s inborn nuttiness must indeed be one of the world’s greatest works of literature. I pocketed a duro, apparently our very last.

“That’s our last duro!” Beatrice cried out after me.

“I know! But we’re always living down to our last everything. Ciao !”

At the time, there was one bordello for every 1000 inhabitants of Palma. Which is to say, the statistics were even more favorable if one added the casas that were not officially sanctioned. More significant still were the figures for intellectual activity: one bookstore per 40,000 citizens. Not counting Mulet’s lending library, where it was sometimes possible to obtain certain volumes under the counter, Palma had two such stores. My search for St. Paul, the disturber of Don Juan’s peace and his family’s sanity, led me to Palma’s premier bookstore, the one on the Plaza Cort.

A book about St. Paul. What did I know about St. Paul? Precious little. I knew that Nietzsche called him the “dysangelist” and saw in him a hate-filled rabble-rouser, the incarnate loathing of the Roman Empire as of the world itself, the Eternal Jew, and what not else? Unamuno dealt with him in his Agony of Christianity , which he regarded as deriving from Paul’s personal agony. Cervantes calls him the Knight Errant of Life, the patron saint of death who arrived at ultimate serenity. The Nazis, too, were busying themselves with this personage; for them he was the Jewish sub-human, and they placed him on their index together with his Master and all the disciples. I also knew Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans , a cold, arrogant piece of writing. I hadn’t read Schweitzer’s The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul .

I made the acquaintance of Barth’s book when I was studying in Münster. The work caused quite a stir. Divinity students were discussing it heatedly, either in the university corridors or over plates of fried potatoes and pancakes in the dining hall. This was the period when Professor Magon was giving his famous lectures on Kierkegaard, who was not yet fashionable but who drew crowds into a large lecture hall. Kierkegaard was “in the air” at the time, along with Johann Georg Hamann, the “Wizard of the Northland,” with his Diary of a Christian . Hitler, too, was “in the air” with his Mein Kampf , considered by some as a work of divine revelation, by others as a brick to toss at Jewish store windows. Dr. Robert Ley’s mouse-catchers were already at work. They entered Jewish restaurants, ordered potato salad, took a dissected mouse out of a matchbox and stuck it in the salad, started complaining loudly, and then smashed the windows. That was the year 1927. Professor Wätjen was still teaching during this incipient German riffraff rebellion, delivering his fawning lectures on the history of the Hanseatic League before select audiences. His talks were social occasions. Amidst a clanking of spurs, generals with glistening monocles kissed the hands of beautiful ladies. The ladies played the coquettes with their fur boas and wrote down a few of Wätjen’s elegant formulations with gold-plated pens in gold-embossed notebooks. When some insignificant general of the accursed Reichswehr kicked the bucket, the entire lecture-hall audience emptied out to follow the cortege to his grave.

René van Sint-Jan rubbed his carefully groomed Flemish beard, submitting Vigoleis, student of Netherlandic philology, to a test to see whether he qualified for admission to his advanced seminar. If so, he would have two pupils instead of just one. For almae matres as for flesh-and-blood mothers, the only-child system is not to be recommended. He handed his seminar candidate a poem by Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft and said, “Here, interpret this.” Vigoleis read through the work slowly. It was one of those charming, playful verses dedicated to a schoon nymfelyn named Meisken Ina Quekel, who is courted successively under the names Diana, Iphigenia, Dia, or Amaryllis. Amaryl de deken zacht / Van de nacht …