Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Opposite our house stood the Main Headquarters of the Blue Shirts, the Falange. For a brief moment I felt a chill in the seat of my lily-white linen pants, although it was 102 degrees in the shade of this Holy War. But I collected myself and strode quickly and proudly into our house. At the top of the stairs I ran into the woman who lived in the apartment to the right of us next door, to whom we had failed to make the customary initial visit when occupying the place. She ran down toward me several steps, grabbed my arm, and told me to open our blinds on the street side immediately: there were snipers, and closed blinds were a target. She was the wife of a Falange officer. She had informed the Falange boss that the next-door apartment was occupied by a German who had gone off on vacation to the mountains, and that she would guarantee the security of the building. But now, near twelve noon, the deadline was almost up. If by then all the blinds were not open, they would start shooting. There were just a few minutes left. I ran into our apartment, raced to our windows, and threw open the blinds. In the Blue House on the other side of the street they had already set up a machine gun on the top floor. I didn’t like this kind of punctuality. A Spaniard who is ready to shoot today instead of tomorrow — how very odd! I saluted across the street, and the kids saluted back. It was like ships passing in the night.

I packed a few books, took with me the beginning of my translation of Jerome with the intention of continuing this Pascoaes work in Génova, pinned one of my pretentious business cards to the door, turned the lock four times, stuck some clumps of wax here and there as a security measure, and left the menacing neighborhood.

Once a day, in keeping with my sound digestive regularity, I stepped out with newspaper in hand into the Princess’s cactus grove. At the same time, another man, our neighbor the sailor, whose digestion was apparently coordinated with mine, also approached the rows of cactus. This spiky venue, conducive to discreet soul-searching, was large enough to permit visitors to avoid speaking with one another if that was what they wished. But rather than wishing to avoid each other, the two of us sought each other out. The old seadog kept me informed about developments of the insurrection. I combined what he told me with events I witnessed myself, wrote some war reportage and sent my articles to foreign newspapers. To get this done we had to go to the harbor in Palma, where Beatrice made friends with sailors on foreign warships who, for a few cigarettes, agreed to deliver my letters. Evading the censors in this way was a capital offense, but that didn’t prevent us from sending off reports once a week. Apart from my sailor friend, I learned all I needed to know about the crusade against the infidels from a well-placed personage in Palma. To raise the Cross of Christ it takes people who aren’t deterred by thousands of other crosses. On Mallorca, there were plenty of people like that. And I figured that this, too, had to be reported openly.

Bobby occasionally came to visit, just as in peacetime. Life went on in the daytime, whereas the nights were devoted to bloodshed. Bobby had witnessed a thing or two in Valldemosa, up in the mountains of his new homeland. Doña Clara sent a message, saying that if we had nothing more to eat we should go to her place and await the end of the war in her hospedage . Where there was food for a group of twelve, two more hungry mouths wouldn’t bring about starvation. But we still had a little money, and Doña Inés’ sardine cans hadn’t been used up yet.

After several weeks, when Bobby returned telling tales of more horror, he found us emaciated. Our money was gone, our bank account was frozen, the sardine cans were empty, and the jug of oil was down to the last half-inch. For three weeks we had been living on tea, vineyard snails, and prickly pears. It was a stroke of luck that Doña Inés’ rock garden was crawling with snails, if one is willing to accept the word ‘crawling’ as referring statically to the great multiplicity, and not dynamically to the back-and-forth weaving and slithering of these tasty creatures. By day they were invisible; like the crusading gangsters, they emerged from their hiding places only at night. While all around us we could hear the death squads in action, while motorcycles roared, and while the populace of the island was getting thinned out according to the perceived degree of Christian faith, or lack of the same, the two of us searched the ground for snails using dimmed candles. One night Bobby took a snail census: he knew exactly how many there were, and figured out their marching routes and crossways. The mollusks had long since ceased being a delicacy, but now, just as in an emergency the Devil will eat flies, we hunted down our creepy-crawlies. Our Folkwang huntsman Bobby, absolutely convinced of his prowess, led me to the places where his calculations told him we could still locate the animals: four underneath that potsherd, two under that moldy cactus leaf, seven under the jagged agave, and two more down near their copulation stone. He would snatch them blindly, if our sailor neighbor hadn’t already squished them with his feet. Our neighbor, however, had done just that, and so all of a sudden we came up with no snails at all. But wait, Bobby said. Let’s not be so pessimistic. There was one more snail out there, he said, and since on occasion he was able to hear his own beard growing, we were confident that he would get on the trail of our very last snail. We had just one match left to cook our last meal. This was one of those Southern nights that are luminescent, and snail trails also glow in the dark. But after a full hour Bobby returned minus a catch, his face flushed with frustration. I went out in the garden myself to try my luck. Nothing doing. Our last snail had got the jump on us, and we couldn’t catch up.

“Well, we’ll just have to leave,” said Beatrice. Prolonged hunger can make a person irritable, and snails with prickly pear à la vinaigrette make for very sour fodder. One more week of this stimulating diet and we bleeding-heart pacifists, too, would have reached for a revolver and taken up combat against those outside who were fighting for the glory of God and filling His consecrated cemeteries. We were already benumbed. As for myself, I am willing to confess that the execution of 14 people, for whose death I was unknowingly responsible, did not deprive me of my senses. It would take too long to set forth the tragic details of a mistake that caused the Christian crusaders to commit new acts of terror. When we heard shooting in the vicinity of the Casa Inés, when we heard the screaming of women and children, my heart did not burst. It was the most awful night of my life — the night when my heart did not cease its beating.

It’s an amazing thing about any war, that after committing a few atrocities, a human being can regress to the womb of primeval atrocity.

We had eaten our next-to-last snail, and the last one had escaped, so there was no sense in our staying in Génova. The next day we went to the English Consulate and asked to be evacuated on a warship. No problem, we were told. His Majesty’s Navy stood ready to rescue anybody from this hell, no matter the nationality. “Your nationality?”

“We’re Germans.” That would be all right, we learned, but the protocol of international cooperation would require that the German Consulate stamp my passport as valid for evacuation. Beatrice, who in the meantime had become my passport-validated spouse — a stupid move that deprived her of her bullet-proof Swiss passport — and I just stared at the British official. Was he crazy? A passport stamp that would allow us to flee? From the Nazi Consul, who had already threatened us with documents from back home? I started explaining my unusual situation: I was an early emigré from Germany, but anti-Nazi. Couldn’t this man understand that it would be impossible for me to approach the German Consulate? Beatrice interrupted, asking if we might speak with the British Consul in person. We knew the gentleman; Count Kessler had maintained good relations with him. He wasn’t there; he had been called off to the interior of the island with the urgent task of rescuing British subjects from the threat of execution by reason of mistaken identity.