Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

I stumbled over the very first word, as if I had never been confronted with pastoral poetry before. There was no need in the world for me to know that certain tuberous plants go by the name Amaryllidae, but I happened to know it. The blood that had leaped to my head flowed calmly back down into my circulatory system. Taking botany as my point of departure, I focused on what I took to be the verb amarylleren . I cleared my throat and began to translate: “Let us, gently like the flowers, smooth out our nocturnal berth…” Today I would call that thing a pilarière . The professor smoothed out his beard, and kept smoothing it ever so pensively as I waxed more and more audacious in my exegesis of the poem, fully conscious of the academic failure facing a low-semester student who at the same was supposed to offer proof of his talent and overall intelligence. But this student didn’t fail either test. Mijnheer van Sint-Jan told me that he actually ought to flunk me, but that he would desist for two reasons: first, his other candidate would be staying on only for a half-semester longer, after which he would be getting his doctorate, leaving the professor with no more students at all and forcing him to shut down his seminar. Second, he was interested in my “case”: a gift for thought-associations that was as amazing as it was academically dangerous, but all in all a knack that, if nurtured in the proper pedagogical manner, could bear interesting fruit. Besides, the two of us would soon be entre nous . He welcomed me, and said that he would support me in his department. And he had a dissertation topic that would suit me perfectly.

My uncle Jean on Münster’s Cathedral Square had also welcomed me. He also considered me dangerous because of my hopping from subject to subject, and for that very reason preferred that he and I meet alone — which was just fine with me. Over dinner he sent away his servant, and we got along famously.

Professor Günther Wohlers taught an academic course in journalism before a no less select audience: Vigoleis and the overbred son of an aristocratic line. This fellow made his doctorate under Wätjen with a thesis on Lord Grey, but his dissipating womanizing kept him short of the coveted summa cum laude . His breakfasts consisted of a banana and strawberry-flavored sparkling wine, whereas Professor Wohlers, with our permission, always brought along to the seminar a stein of beer. As for myself, I practiced abstinence, out of continued abhorrence of the ur-German custom of alcohol-laced Frühschoppen , particularly when pursued in a university classroom.

On Sundays after the last Mass in the cathedral, where Donders’ sermons attracted even godless listeners, the fraternity students, those with and those without their special “colors,” marched around Cathedral Square — an al fresco ballet that never ceased to strike me as a gigantic prison courtyard where the inmates are allowed a few minutes of exercise.

Old Professor Mausbach, a sly little peasant type, taught us his notions of morality and cultural politics.

That was my little world at the time, the world that coursed around me and gave me direction. It was largely by accident that my closest friends were students of Protestant theology. It was stimulating for me to get to know the hearts and souls of these young people who, a few years later, would don their robes and bands, ascend the pulpit, and declaim the Word of God with the same lips as would sing the German National Anthem as the times required. They were firmly set on rendering to God that which was God’s, and to the devil (Caesar) that which was the devil’s (Caesar’s), even if the latter, such as for example Adolf Hitler, lacked the proper imperial format. “Our Father” and “God Save the King”—for me, that just didn’t rhyme. I was of course familiar with Catholic attitudes. Oddly enough, the Protestant fellows were intensely interested in my opinions. They knew that I was a sometime “writer,” and the fact that I did my writing for a posthumous readership was in their eyes just as impressive as the fact that I was a propinquus of Auxiliary Bishop Dr. Johannes Seifes, highly regarded in Protestant circles for his tolerant ideas.

Incidentally, it was these same students of divinity who hung on me the nickname Vigoleis. In a seminar on the origins of the novel, taught by the highly dramatic Papa Schwering, I discovered in the chapbook narrative Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberg a few picaresque motifs that a hundred years or more of literary scholarship hadn’t brought to light. I was pioneering in philological terra incognita , and even Schwering could easily have rewarded me for this with a formal doctorate. If I’m not mistaken — and here I’m truly not — the divinity students, by nature lacking in imagination, thought that my discoveries were ingenious, and they baptized me “ Wigalois ,” the Knight of the Wheel, by which they meant the emblem on the writer’s illustrated armor helmet. By my own interpretation, the emblem stood for the little wheel spinning inside Wirnt’s head, and I was proud of this. But I revised the name Wig-alois , “because of Alois,” to Vigoleis, a variant form also to be found in the documents, thereby alluding instinctively to the Iberian regions where Wirnt’s story takes place. By doing so, I turned the tables on my fellow students: what they had meant as a tease now became for me a knightly honorific. What I didn’t realize at the time was that by bestowing upon myself such an exalted sobriquet I was entering the company of Jacopone da Todi, the Umbrian poet of the Laude, who likewise endorsed his own nickname. I was even less aware that ten years later, on the island of Mallorca, this echt-Münster type of anabaptism would save my life.

The divinity students gave me a copy of Karl Barth’s The Epistle to the Romans , asking me to read it and then make an oracular pronouncement on whether the author believed in God or not. My soothsaying decision: if God was a writer, as we often were told He was, then Barth believed in Him in the same way that Bohr believed in his model of the atom, Planck in his quanta, and Professor Többen in his convicts. Life would be so nice if the academic departments of theology and law no longer had to be subsidized. It would be Paradise. No bird would gobble up a mosquito, and yet it would go on living. No wolf would kill a sheep, and yet it would go on living. No Adam…

… and there I was, standing in front of the bookstore on the Plaza Cort and feeling the necessity to suppress my recollections of student days. Or was it that I just didn’t want to sacrifice our last duro for a St. Paul?

The lady at the store said she had never heard of a book on San Pablo , and certainly not one by a Portuguese writer. By a Portuguese! She laughed, just as everyone in Spain laughs at Portugal. And she asked me whether I knew the couplet, Los portugueses pocos y estos pocos locos . From my geography lessons I knew that Portugal had a small population, and that it was a little Iberian offshoot next to the Atlantic. But that the few Portuguese citizens were also crazy — could such a thing be possible? Once you’ve been to Spain and met Don Juan, Don José, Don Matías, and Don Pedro, is there a surpassing degree of locura ? A Seventh Heaven of screwiness, so to speak?

I was on the right track. Beatrice would never see this duro again. I remained undeterred. I asked if I might be permitted to look on the shelves by myself. Yes, was the reply. In fact I would have to go take a look for myself, since she didn’t want to be bothered, and certainly not with questions about books. Imagine what things would be like if just anyone could come in off the street and ask for a San Pablo —written by a Portuguese! Because in my own personal library the books are arranged neither by language, author, nor subject, it took me only minutes to find what I was looking for: a volume printed in Barcelona by Editorial Apolo — Verdaguer’s publisher, and as such a recommendation in and of itself. The cover showed an Iberian portrait of Saint Paul. Title: San Pablo ; author: Teixeira de Pascoaes; foreword: Miguel de Unamuno. This four-leaf clover could not have been more impressive. Three copies still stood on the shelf. I stuck one under my arm and asked the price. The lady didn’t move, but instead sent a hostile glance at my book. I felt embarrassed, as always in the presence of an illiterate. All of a sudden I was ashamed of knowing the alphabet by heart. It was not until we reached Portugal and the mountainous region of Travanca, where the wolves circled our house at night and only one person was barely able to read and write, that I learned to my amazement that one must approach this problem from a completely different angle.