Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Don Matías was overcome with sadness when I told him that this was the very last loaf of bread from Jaume’s oven we would be consuming here, on our last day on the street named after the General we had come to love and admire. Oh my good friend, he said, let’s not lose sight of each other! Why were we moving to a new apartment when important things were about to happen in Honduras? The new flag was ready. The Honduran nation was ready. Don Patuco had packed his military knapsack, and the only thing left was the official pronunciamiento . “When are you moving out?” I told him that we expected the moving van to arrive at dawn. Our furniture would be placed in storage for a while, and we would then be on our way to Génova and the house owned by Princess Inés, whose behavior on the island was so democratic in nature that she was known as Citizen Agnes.

Mamú, too, chided us. Our decision to move was too hasty. Why change our address, when her millions would become liquid in just a few weeks, and all of us could establish princely new lodgings in Miramar? I told her that it was just one step from the Archduke’s Street to his regal palace. As soon as the first promising droplets of financial rain started falling upon us, we would gladly make the additional move. “Don’t you trust me?” That’s not what it’s about, I said. It was just that with Mamú, things seemed to be proceeding at an un-American pace, although this was not her own fault. It was the fault of the lawyers on both sides of her case, whose work she, as a devout Christian Scientist, was apparently unwilling to disturb. “Live and let live”—wasn’t that the motto of her late husband?

No matter where Vigo and Beatrice met friends during this period, they both had to explain the reasons behind their good fortune. An apartment with bath and roof garden, one whole duro cheaper than their previous one. A vacation at the Casa Inés, a rosy future in the palace of the Archiduque. All that remained for us to wish for was the success of the published German version of the Lusitanian mystic Pascoaes, my “Hun-less Tombs of the Huns ,” and one or another of my inventions. This would take us both out of all our trouble. We had withstood a great deal of starving and unhappiness. Our final gesture in the direction of triumph for us little people was the acquisition of a bullet-proof vest, which we wore by turns. Not long ago in our vicinity, the Nazis had dispatched an enemy of the German nation with a shot from a revolver.

Our move took place without incident. The men arrived shortly after noon, early enough to establish ourselves in our new digs in Génova on the same day. We left all our other things in disarray in our old apartment.

Our main concern now was to take a rest — one week, perhaps two weeks. Let’s do nothing at all. Give me a few days to finish the final chapter of my “Huns,” and then I would send the completed manuscript to the publisher Querido in Amsterdam.

I had installed a second security lock in the door of our old apartment. If someone wanted to break into our piso , he would have to break down the wall. We closed off everything with four twists of the locks, and an hour later we opened the door to the Casa Inés by means of a prehistoric bone. This door, painted green, featured the coat of arms of the Swedish royal dynasty — a token emblem placed there in understandable family pride by the painter who later saved our lives and the lives of dozens of other people.

We had four months ahead of us, and to us they seemed more endless than the shimmering blue ocean we now had at our feet, quivering beneath the cloudless skies we had enjoyed for all the past months. But how much water was left in the local wells? A neighbor of ours guessed that we had two or three more weeks’ worth if we were willing to conserve — which most foreigners weren’t willing to do. Rain? Hardly a chance. I resolved to forego bathing until the next rainfall.

The painter who owned the place had laid out a rock garden, whose un-Spanish cuteness was in stark contrast to the luxuriant abundance of indigenous plants, agaves and yard-tall stands of cactus that formed a border between the terraced house plot and a steep hill in the back.

Our aristocratic gardener had not been able to improve on the background of this vista: the Cala Mayor inlet, opening into the Bay of Palma. As we looked out, tiny lights began to sparkle on the water, fishermen with their fire baskets, setting out for the catch. Standing watch over all this was the constellation of Orion.

Our day was at an end.

Our day was at an end, and it also was supposed to mark the end of the first volume of these applied recollections of mine. That would have been a happy ending for a book that begins unhappily. We would find Vigoleis and Beatrice sleeping in the heavenly bed of a real princess, their shimmering linen sheet strewn with Keating’s Gold Insecticide Powder, hummed into slumber beneath a gossamer net by mosquitoes, and left unplagued by bad dreams during this night under Orion, who outshone the threefold constellation of my would-be assassins. Outside, the fireflies sparkled and the crickets fiddled furiously in anticipation of the big rains to come — to our dreamy ears it sounded like Bach fugues played on the organ that Mamú was going to have installed in Miramar — she had already received a cost estimate from an organ builder in San Sebastián. Somewhere on the island, my personal burro was rearing up on his bed of fermenting straw, waiting to be pushed into his stall at the Archduke’s fly-free stables.

This is where my book should stop, with Orion holding his glistening pilgrim staff over our heroes’ slumber. Peace all across the island, peace in our hearts, peace in each and every cricket’s burrow. You, dear reader, already know from my countless hints that much blood has yet to be shed, especially the blood of Vigoleis, who after precisely five nights was slated to be one of the bullet-riddled corpses. By replying to the German Consul’s hesitant query, “What? You haven’t been shot?” with the touchingly foolish counter-query, “Am I supposed to be?” he has earned the right to postpone his Finis operis by the length of one more Book, although it’s going to be a Book with only one chapter — meaning, of course, with no chapter at all. A book of extended leave-taking. I myself am no longer frightened. I was supposed to be bumped off, and yet I was still standing. Any reader can shoot me now by slamming the book shut. If he does so, he will be spared the sight of other people’s fright — Angelita’s, for example, who didn’t believe her eyes when she saw us still alive. Every one of our not yet gunned down, drowned, hanged, or crucified friends got the cold shivers when we knocked at their sealed front doors to say goodbye. Some of them slammed their doors shut in a faint. In most cases, I was able to shove one foot inside and, using the password, let them see my true face. These people let us in and bolted the lock behind us, whereupon we, the Resurrected Ones, started giving report after report.

For a certain length of time back then on the island, anyone who hadn’t been killed was considered to have risen from the dead. I’ll be brief about this, although I could fill chapter after chapter with descriptions of encounters during the first, second, and third months of the insurrection: my encounter with the limping Don Matías, with Don Gracias a Dios, who was now redeeming himself by composing patriotic verse hailing the Spanish pronunciamiento —like so many other foreign conspirators.

In Jaume’s bakery, the Hondurans had already held a little memorial ceremony for the murdered Don Vigoleis. But now here he was, out on the street, stretching out a hand that at first no one dared to touch. The amazing thing in those days was that nobody had the courage to say to us, “How did you escape getting killed? You’re both supposed to have been shot!” In Don Matías I still saw the old Krausite and Decipherer of the World, my flour-sack buddy. But now this pseudo-Honduran was holding back his feelings. He had become as stiff as the little vest he was again wearing. I inquired as to the welfare of the one-armed general Don Patuco, explaining that I was being guided by this man’s inspired warnings against priests with forked tongues and generals with two arms. I was on my guard, since General Franco still had both of his arms. Don Matías suddenly went pale. “Be quiet,” he whispered. “If anybody hears you, you’ll be shot. They’ll think we’re in a conspiracy.” As for himself, he was now for Franco, and his daughter Encarnación was for Franco. After all, a man could have two arms and still be a swell guy and a successful revolutionary… “What about Ulua the cobbler?” He got thrown down a well. They put a stone on top. His wife was thrown down another well. Stone on top. Their son got away with false papers to Uruguay.