Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

In this way, I could fill many pages of this final, chapter-less Book. By doing so, I could easily lose sight of the two of us — not a bad ending, perhaps, for a pair of heroes who entered my story namelessly, plagued by fleas and bad dreams on board a ship taking them to the island — just two out of hundreds of people. That was years ago.

They left the island as two out of thousands, unmolested by dreams, since they were kept wide awake by the reality around them. But they weren’t able to sleep, either — certainly not the kind of peaceful slumber enjoyed by Vigoleis and Beatrice in the celestial bed owned by Doña Inés, who like a girl in a fairy tale could call a king “Uncle,” and who greeted her polyglot house tenants with a strip of embroidery on our pillow saying Godnatt!

Vigoleis turned the pillow over; he didn’t want any pearly greeting pressing into his cheek. Besides, the same idea sounds better in Mallorquin: Bona-nit! Bona-nit contains everything: the mouse rustling around in the palms, the bat’s shadow on the window pane, the octopus’ play of shadow beneath the seaside cliffs, the sea itself, the moon in the sea, the millions of stars, the Queen of the Night opening her chalice, and the red star at Orion’s shoulder, Bed-el-shauza, who with his very name proclaims the glory of the night.

Bona-nit !

Over and over again while setting down these island recollections of mine, whose origins were anything but arbitrary but whose future is anything but secure, I have noticed that the overture to any given chapter has determined that chapter’s structure and length. Since it has taken me so long to realize that mysterious tectonic forces are at work here — as in writing poetry — I might do well to exploit this insight into my work habits when shaping my Epilogue, the only section of my memoir that I am writing with an eye toward its length and toward the way it will come to an end — as both I and my reader so eagerly anticipate.

If, for example, I were to begin with a factual account of how Beatrice, performing her first domestic chores in the Casa Inés, prepared the small guest room for Frederico García Lorca, then I would have to get lost in all the details of Lorca’s planned trip to Mallorca, and how his failure to make it became so fateful for him — and right there I would have transgressed the limits of space. It would be even more dangerous, albeit more tempting, to begin in this fashion: “Beatrice, look over there, to the right. Yes, directly above the seventh cactus from the left, that’s it, down below Son Maroix, that white speck. That’s the terrace at the house I was going to rent, the one I should have rented, for Henny Marsman.” The result would be more than a single chapter, it would be an entire book about my friendship with Marsman, Holland’s great poet and the editor for my Dutch editions of Pascoaes. I would relate our picaresque encounter on Mallorca and our re-encounter in Basel; the way-stations Dornach, Arlesheim, Locarno, and Auressio; the haunted Casa Peverada; Schulenburg’s “Monda”; our weeks together in the ski lodge in Bogève in the Haute Savoie; our flight to Portugal, where Marsman intended to rejoin us and where, at Pascoaes’ country estate, the mystic’s aged little mother prepared the royal guest room for Holland’s King of Poetry with the same loving care as Beatrice gave to the room for Lorca at the Casa Inés. Neither poet ever reached his destination. Lorca was executed on the Spanish mainland. Marsman drowned in the Channel as he fled to Portugal, his ship torpedoed.

On the other hand, what if I were to start out by telling about the last snail we wanted to cook for ourselves, but which escaped us — or rather, which escaped none other than our clever friend Bobby, the young fellow who could surmount any problem the island posed to its foreign guests, excepting of course his own personal problems and those of the private physician’s gynecology? Just imagine — a single vineyard snail got away from him! But I’d better begin at the beginning. Period.

I shall never comprehend why people like us Vigotrices, for whom destiny has reserved no firm place of residence on the globe, have not sung the praises of the sardine, the kind you can get in cans either in olive oil or en escabeche for two reales a can. Consume them with a piece of bread, and you have stilled your hunger for the next ten minutes, or however long it takes until you can get the next can. Doña Inés had piled up many such latas , and she invited us to eat our way through the entire pile, at cost. This was how she re-provisioned her household on an annual basis. Crisp, succulent lettuce grew in her herbal garden, there were jugs of wine and oil, and an old sailor next door brought us our bread. I’m mentioning all this in order to explain that during our first days, without ever leaving the house, we did not suffer hunger. Intellectual nourishment was also to be found on Doña Inés’ shelves, preserved like the sardines: St. Augustine, Cervantes, Pascoaes, Novalis. That’s all that I took with us into our place of solitude, but naming those names here might seem erudite indeed. Reading the urbane, devout Thagastian bishop’s works under the sign of Orion was an experience I shall never forget.

Suddenly there is a gunshot; I look up from my book and gaze in the direction where the explosion is still echoing. A large, many-colored bird drops from the blazing sky to the dark-green foliage of the orange orchard. I catch myself recalling certain verses by Goethe and, turning back to Augustine, I say, “Damn it all, Beatrice, those bratty kids have just shot down another hoopoe! By the time Bobby arrives they’ll be extinct!”

Otherwise, nothing at all disturbed the peace on our island. Just once I saw an eagle. It was flying so low that I could follow precisely its broad sweeping shadow across the red earth.

Sunday began as bright as never before. During the night we had heard more gunfire. “What are they hunting for in the nighttime?” Beatrice asked. “Bats,” I said. “Great substitute for clay pigeons, and cheaper.” The ocean lay calm and contented in the Bay. Not a single sail, not a single wake from a ship already beyond the horizon. Not a single breeze to create on the sea’s surface the familiar shimmering moiré effect. The sky, too, was leaden.

At around noontime some airplanes arrived. They circled Palma and the harbor of Porto-Pí. Oh look! Now they’re diving. And way up, that little dot must be a skywriter. Pretty soon we’ll see his ad, Mallorca clima ideal , and right behind it the word Persil, which will of course earn him more money.

Now and then we heard more shots. Hoopoes, I thought. Maybe ravens, or quail. Sunday hunters? Do they exist in Spain, too?

Several days passed. Beatrice took a short walk into the village, if that is what you could call the dozen houses in Génova, and reported casually that Doña Inés apparently owed some money at the store. The people there ogled her strangely, and hardly even greeted her. Crabby people, Beatrice said; she wasn’t going back. They were probably afraid that we, too, would ask for credit and then disappear from sight. Such behavior was now rather common in the island. That’s how many emigrés kept themselves above water.

A few days later Pedro Sureda arrived — in uniform! And unshaven, and minus his usual loquacity. No jokes, no dance steps, no clapping on shoulders. Pedro, too, just stared at us, as if we were deep in debt, and apparently we actually were in some kind of trouble without realizing it. We owed our lives to a few people who were now beginning to demand the settling of old scores. Someone had told Pedro that we had been shot on orders from on high, and he had come by to see for himself. The fact was that our good friend Pedro simply couldn’t imagine Vigoleis, the fellow with the pronounced death wish, as a corpse. Seeing that we were still alive, he was relieved for the moment. But this is not something that he told us on that day of our resurrection. He, too, remained silent. Why? It wasn’t until the eve of our escape, in a café at a corner of the Apuntadores that was swarming with uniforms of all conceivable political persuasions — some real generals were among them — that Pedro broke his silence. Back then, he said, he had wanted to make sure that I was dead.