Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Kessler was unfamiliar with this saga of the coffee pot, which had taken place some few years back. When I recounted it for him, he said, “Aha! So that’s what’s behind this piece of trickery! Keyserling had better watch out!”

Keyserling’s plan was to assemble a select audience in the small auditorium at the Príncipe, treat them with some nuggets of wisdom, then ask for a random topic from his listeners and, after a minute for meditation, deliver an exhaustive discourse on the subject. Quite a number of philosophy aficionados had arrived from the Spanish mainland, people who out of sheer ennui were preoccupied with problems of life-enhancing wisdom — a dangerous kind of audience in a country that has never produced a real philosopher, since every citizen already possesses his own philosophy of idleness. Ramón was not invited; Hermann wasn’t about to take any risks. So it was a stroke of luck that this other conde , his old “schoolmate” Harry, was staying on the island. It was Hermann himself who recommended Mallorca as a suitable place of exile and a site conducive to the writing of memoirs. Counts of a feather will flock together, so they soon found each other.

Hermann began their conversation by railing against the Nazis, especially Goebbels, who had detained his wife as a hostage at the Darmstadt School. He, Hermann, was forced to take an oath stipulating that during his lecture tour in Spain he would keep philosophy and politics strictly separate, a feat that has been one of philosophy’s great accomplishments since the days of Plato. Then Hermann cooked up his fairy tale about his and Harry’s common schooldays. God only knows where that common school was located, for Keyserling was born in Livonia and Kessler in Paris, 12 years apart — although such a time differential is perhaps irrelevant when dealing with minds that functioned at such a sublime remove from space and time. According to Hermann’s fable, Harry, the older of the two, had more than once had to repeat a whole school year — a most unlikely sequence of events given Harry’s superior intelligence, even for a youngster brought up on a remote country estate.

In short, Keyserling badgered poor Harry so relentlessly that he finally surrendered, in order to maintain his composure and his ability to go on with his own work. He agreed to attend the lecture at the Príncipe, make believe he was just some guy in the audience, and suggest a topic for Hermann to discourse upon. Conde de Keyserling would make a few introductory remarks, greeting his guests in six or seven different languages — but of course only after consuming a liter of red wine and a few armadillos. Then he would ask for the evening’s topic from his esteemed audience: “Just step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and don’t be shy, because this mental acrobat can handle anything.” His circus-barker railery would give rise to genteel merriment, perhaps even some genuine surprise at so much un-academic clowning. But no one would come forth with a topic. Each member of the audience would be thinking, “Let somebody else make a fool of himself.” Keyserling knew from experience that the first few minutes were non-threatening. The moment would arrive when the piston reached the dead point. The danger would be past, the lecturer himself could breathe easily and suggest a few subjects to choose from — unless, of course, some Ramón stood up… That would have to be avoided, and so, Harry my old friend, why don’t you and I think up a topic, and you pretend to be an aficionado in the audience? The big advantage was that nobody at all would recognize Harry.

Kessler told me that this kind of chicanery disgusted him. But now he couldn’t get rid of the man. What should he do?

“Play along with him, Count Kessler! Suggest some topic to Keyserling, give him three days to prepare his spiel, and when he gets up there on the stage and motions to his accomplice, you trip him up by announcing a completely different subject. One swindle is worth another. But both topics must be of a kind to give him real trouble. It’s time that the charlatan got his comeuppance!”

Count Kessler was unwilling to enter into this double-dealing fakery, out of a real fear that the Baltic philosopher would strangle him alive coram publico . He agreed only to concoct for his schoolmate a particularly thorny subject: “The Machine as the Upstart of Our Century.”

In the meantime Count Keyserling gave a two-hour public lecture in a large theater in Palma on a subject dear to his heart: “Spanish-Mediterranean Culture as the New Hellas.” He spoke without notes, partly in Spanish, partly in Catalan, and was a huge success. All the Hondurans were on hand, as were all the island’s anarchists, a few clergymen, several aristocrats, and even a nursing mother whose presence the Kalmuck count found particularly touching and inspirational — again and again his glances wandered in the direction of the place where Young Hellas was getting suckled. My friend Enorme was sitting next to me. As a Krausite he was interested in Keyserling, and as a conspirator he had already been clued in by me concerning the conspiracy being hatched by the two counts. Enorme and I decided that the best way to outwit the philosopher was for us to shout some questions from the audience that would take him out on political thin ice.

With Zwingli’s help, Keyserling arranged everything perfectly. Rows of seats were set up in the auditorium of the Príncipe with a respectful space in front of the stage; a long green table, and to the right and to the left of the table some artificial palms, just as at Pilar’s, but bigger. The select audience was truly crème de la crème , and Zwingli knew most of them. They represented literature, music, the visual arts, journalism, banking and industry, as well as the feared aficionados of all the above fields of activity. They spoke a good dozen different languages, and Conde de Keyserling, flushed with a red vintage, chatted with each of them in the appropriate tongue. He was in his element, the grand monde , the sounding-board for his boundless wisdom. Many beautiful women had also arrived; all around the hall there was a swishing of fans, a sparkling of jewelry, an aroma of intellectual excitement. A thin and wordless Count Kessler pressed his way through the noisy crowd, visibly annoyed, and intent upon avoiding his old schoolmate. As soon as he spied us, he rushed over, and I introduced him to the Krausite Don Sacramento, whom Kessler took for a Mexican. Then Zwingli arrived in his capacity as Don Helvecio. He asked us to take first-row seats that he had reserved for us. Kessler declined such a prominent focal point. Like his ancestor Johannes in St. Gall, he took a seat on the hindmost bench.

The event proceeded on schedule. Kessler, the programmed “anonymous man in the audience,” sat anonymously in the audience. Then he was approached by the Reverend Don Francisco Sureda Blanes, a Mallorquin writer, amateur philosopher, and Ramón Lull researcher. He was the organizer of this charla , he knew Count Kessler, and right away fished him out of his anonymity. He pulled the reluctant count forward to the green table, where some members of the lecture committee had already gathered. For the most part these were local dignitaries, but they also included a foreigner who was being celebrated throughout Spain: Francis de Miomandre, a hispanist who had produced a monumental new translation of Don Quijote into French.

Don Darío whispered to me that even though Conde de Keyserling had quaffed a lot of wine, he wasn’t even tipsy.

Taller than everyone else in the hall by a head, a head that was now redder than ever and that (it must be told) emerged from a pink shirt with green necktie, his beard fluttering smartly, his eyes twinkling with excitement — there he stood before us, and listened as Reverend Don Francisco introduced him: “You have come to witness something that has never been seen before…” I realized right away that when God created a Keyserling, He could not have had this particular Keyserling in mind, for the little ditty we learned as Lower-Rhineland kids went this way: “When God’s breath became a paltry thing, He created the famous Count Keyserling.” To create this Hermann, God would have required His full diapason. The ditty is more fitting for his cousin Eduard Keyserling, the melancholy narrator of Baltic aristocratic family chronicles, a personage whom a mild zephyr could have blown off the face of the earth.