Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

He gave us the following report: Pronunciamiento ! Our buddy General Franco had mounted a sudden attack in Morocco, and the conflagration spread to the mainland. During the very first night our island had fallen to the insurrection. So it wasn’t clay pigeons after all? People make for better target practice. It was war, but it was a Holy War, one being fought for the greater glory of God and His generals.

The background of the insurrection is obscure, and to this very hour no historian has been able to explain it thoroughly. In all our years on the island I was never able to get a clear picture of Spanish politics. For one thing, I have no sense at all of such developments. Worse still, I just don’t care who wants to exert control over me. As an honorary guest of the island, as an exterritorial and thus exempt from paying taxes, my interest in Spanish politics was all the more feeble. Yet of one thing I was sure: what was happening in Germany, the herding of an entire nation under the leadership of a single bleating sheep, could never happen in Spain. As I had got to know them, the Spaniards seemed much too self-centered for such foolishness, too convinced of their own importance. They were very much their own persons, and would never fall victim to massification. All the rest of Spanish politics, insofar as a foreigner could take notice of it, seemed simply ludicrous.

As an example, let me cite the reaction of cloisters involving both sexes to a stern decree from the Republican government, stripping monks and nuns of the privilege of teaching school. Two religious orders housed on our street maintained separate educational institutions, for boys and for girls. We ran across nuns and monks every day, and exchanged greetings with them. I had many a stimulating chat with one or the other schoolmaster in front of our house. Those people were highly educated. I never spoke with any of the nuns, for that would have been sinful. Some of them were quite beautiful. They gazed out wanly from between the black blinders of their habits, revealing to an onlooker the passionate fires that were consuming them inwardly.

The School Secularization Law was meant as a coup against the clerical orders. But all it did was create for them the simple problem of choosing the proper attire: off with the robes and habits, on with the middle-class duds. The Pope issued the proper licenses, while the Brothers and Sisters closed their schools for three days. They sailed to Barcelona and returned as bourgeois personalities: Señor González and Señorita Sánchez, Don José and Doña Carmen, the men wearing collars, neckties, and straw hats, the ladies in jacket and skirt or, for those with shaved heads, combination wig-hats. The political Left was furious; the Right was delighted. The satirical papers had a field day in all the parties. Then, as new elections approached and attempts were made to force a victory for the Right, everyone including the nuns had to step up to the ballot box. Even nuns living in lifelong seclusion were given a free day, and re-emerged into God’s sunlight. They instantly became the butt of jokes, but they took all this with dignity and recitations of the Rosary.

Clothes make the man — and they make for hostility, too. In Mulet’s tertulia the politicking now became hot and heavy, opinion clashing against opinion. As far as internal Spanish problems were concerned, I stayed out of these quarrels, explaining that I had even less comprehension of such matters than the members of the Cortes themselves. But when the subject of the Third Reich came up, I leaped willingly into the fray.

After Pedro disappeared like a thief in the night, we sat for a long time at the edge of the well and listened. The constellation of Orion was still up there in all its eternal glory, but the night sounds were different. That is, they now had a different meaning. There were gunshots. We heard shouts, children whimpered, dogs started barking. The night around us and below us was speaking to us, but no longer in the familiar language of island nights. Not long before this, I had translated a passage in Pascoaes’ Saint Paul about the rampaging Saul of Tarsus, a passage that the publisher Rascher’s bumbling Leipzig affiliate had taken for a caricature of the Propaganda Apostle Goebbels: “He broke into houses, took the occupants captive, convicted them, and threw them into prison. He was acting as a criminal in the name of the law.” The Disciple Goebbels was likewise breaking into houses, taking captives, and killing them in the name of Audhumla, the Primeval Cow. On the island of Mallorca, mass murder was occurring in the name of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. That is just how the flag-wavers behaved: they took prisoners and killed them by the thousands — no one has ever calculated how many thousands. The other side, the Red side, killed in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. All of them were on a rampage in the name of the Fatherland. Isn’t that what it’s all about, justifying what we are doing by doing it in the name of what is nameless?

Our island was the scene of the Spanish War’s most dreadful carnage. The butchery committed by Right and Left on the mainland was nothing when compared to the Divine Scourge that descended upon the Balearics. There was no escape. Everybody on the lists was cut down. You couldn’t get through to your political allies on the other side; you were sitting in a trap. The initial salvo of the pronunciamiento caused the island to collapse into the hands of the Catholic General Staff, which proclaimed a Holy War. It was a sudden regression to the Middle Ages. The coup on Mallorca was ignited by a no doubt authentic grandee, Marqués de Zayas, who together with some accomplices was imprisoned in San Carlos Fortress for having planted a bomb at the Trade Union headquarters. He was liberated, and from that moment on he was a rampaging Saul. I have no idea whether he ever turned into a Saint Paul.

War, the Holy War Against the Saracens, as it was called on the island, had erupted. But no matter how holy a war is, no matter which side claims that God is on its side, no war can go on without gold. The contributions poured in, and whoever refused to contribute voluntarily was shot. Liturgical vessels, some of them of the high-karat variety, were melted down together with secular utensils and sent to the German Führer , who promised to deliver warplanes, weapons, and all kinds of technical assistance. The Third Reich , constantly in search of foreign trade, delivered promptly, but of course only such goods as it had no need for at home. I saw Heroes of the Iron Cross, sporting their uniform buckles with the blasphemous motto Gott mit uns , which neatly matched the maxim proclaimed by Franco: “To die in battle is the highest honor. One dies only once. Death comes painlessly, and dying is not as terrible as it looks. It is more terrible to go on living as a coward. Long live Spain! Long live Christ the King! Long live Franco!”

An old priest, well known as a preacher at the Cathedral, thought rather differently. That is to say, he had grown so senile in his service to the Creator that he couldn’t think at all any more, and that was his undoing. He mounted the Cathedral pulpit and preached. All his life long he had done nothing besides preach. He had a reputation for being a gripping speaker — a Spanish Monsignor Donders. Many thousands had already been murdered, and the killing went on like the war itself, week after week, as wars tend to do. The combatants were unable to stop. Besides, the problem of available gold hadn’t been solved; there were negotiations with representatives of worldly and celestial powers. In the midst of all this, appealing to the fateful message of Christ, Monseñor uttered the even more fateful admonition: “Thou shalt not kill!”