Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

For the rest, it was now a matter of adapting to life on this island: the infernal heat, the dusty cesspool that was Palma’s inner city, and not least of all María del Pilar and her libidinous static electricity, which gave me more homework troubles than any other subject in my insular re-education. The voltage between us was increasing as in a Leyden jar. Pilar was made of pure amber. His Excellency on Menorca knew very well why it was futile for him to continue rubbing against his marital bedfellow.

And you, my dear Vigoleis, do you now intend to pull sparks from this tinfoil tart? Watch out that the spark doesn’t get drained out of you — it’s all a matter of the proper polarity and insulation. Both of you are charged for bear, and you have that extra charge that we call book-learning, a force that has never been of help to anyone in real life. And with a woman? You should know better.

Yes, Vigoleis was fully charged. Just ask Beatrice. But of course you won’t get an answer, so let’s look elsewhere to satisfy our curiosity. This will require a visit to Mr. Anton Emmerich, who at this hour is in his shop down on the Borne. We already know from Zwingli that he sells books and newspapers, that he still clings to the potato pancakes of his native city, and swears by sweetened rice and knockwurst. In addition, he and I are what you might call close neighbors. For when seen from the perspective of Spain, the mere 40 miles that separate his city of Cologne on the mighty Rhine from my little native burg of Süchteln on the Niers could easily allow us to regard each other as kissing cousins.

This determination of geographic proximity is, however, as far as we ever got, for in the larger scheme of things I am nobody’s compatriot, and potato-pancake chauvinism is not my dish by any means. What does “fatherland” mean, anyway? The events of 1933 in my German “fatherland” demonstrate clearly how little importance such a concept has for those who trumpet it about as the promised site of earthly salvation, and how quickly it can get thrown to the pigs. One of my favorite eccentric philosophers, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who amusingly enough was appointed to the academic chair at Königsberg as the successor to Immanuel Kant, speaks of the inherent ambiguity of patriotic feeling. There exist, he says, natural, vulgar, and pathological variants of this impulse, in addition to a higher form which is the only genuinely humane type. Its vulgar manifestation lacks all moral value, and can occur even among mindless animals. The less educated one is, the less familiar one is with the qualities of other places in the world: all the stronger is the attraction to the patch of land where one first saw the light of day. In this respect, Greenlanders and Laplanders, Samoyeds and Hottentots must be listed together with the cowherd on his Swiss Alpine meadow.

This item of wisdom appeared in the second edition of Krug’s Concise Philosophical Dictionary , printed “in Leipzig at Easter in the year of Our Lord 1833.” I wonder what human type Wilhelm Traugott Krug might have mentioned in place of the Swiss cowherd if he had written his book exactly a century later, supported by the “scientific achievements” of the Third Reich.

The house where Zwingli rented a piso for his fair damsel was located in a cluster, in Spanish a manzana. Manzana means “apple,” and no one knows any longer why a housing complex of this kind ever received such a name. This arrangement had windows looking out on three streets and the aforementioned small square. Of the three streets, the Avenue of Solitude was the shabbiest. The presentable side of the house faced the Borne. The residents on this side, landlords and tenants alike, could gaze out on spreading palms, rather than into the grubby halls and sorting compartments of the Municipal Post Office. The owner of the cluster was a Count, about whom all kinds of entertaining defamatory stories were in circulation. The rent was collected by an agent who soon arrived to make Beatrice’s acquaintance, a visit that was quite flattering for us. He left us with a thick wad of overdue rent in his pocket. I asked him to convey our greetings to the Count. I love degeneracy, and not only in the poems of Quental or Georg Trakl.

Zola would have taken pleasure in the congeries of humanity that entered and exited the Count’s “apple” to go about their domestic business — which often enough was monkey business. But the Conde had never sheltered quite so notorious a party under his democratic roof as the confederated Helvecio and his animated partner. This was told to me by Mr. Emmerich, as I sat with him in his bookshop, having sought him out for the reasons outlined above.

This shop is very important for an understanding of further developments in my chronicle, and so I shall proceed to describe it. It occupied the respectable corner of the cluster. To the right of the door, the Calle del Conquistador began its ascent; to the left, one turned into a short street that opened onto the square where Julietta was accustomed to flaunt her nascent charms to the street urchins. Diagonally opposite the shop was the open terrace of a high-class men’s club, where the members were always sitting at dominoes, drinking coffee, or just snoozing. The long, very narrow bookshop itself displayed inside, at its extreme left end, a door — and I when I say “displayed,” I am not just using fancy language but speaking the truth, for the door pointed to itself with the word PUERTA, which means “door.” The former owner had painted it there himself, in red. Behind the door was a spare room, to which had been added, by means of a wall partition, a lavatory. The whole back area had no window, and thus required artificial lighting.

Obviously this was a very simple shop. Mr. Emmerich had installed a small counter, a few chairs, bookshelves against the walls, and stands for newspapers. That was it. His store was still new, and still the only one in the city where the increasing numbers of tourists could buy foreign papers and books for vacation reading. The proprietor was happy with his little enterprise. He was planning to expand by adding a small advertising agency, and perhaps someday he might start up a weekly English-language newsletter for tourists. He was hardly an idle businessman. He would like to have rented the floor just above the shop, but this was still occupied by the former owner of the store space, and the Count couldn’t just evict the fellow. He had been served notice long ago, and hadn’t paid his rent for quite some time, but… Don Helvecio, Mr. Emmerich continued, was a well-known personality in the Mallorquine business world, and a respected one, although, er…

“Pardon me, Mr. Emmerich, but is the name Helvecio very common in Spain? You just said ‘Don Helvecio,’ didn’t you? Or did I hear you wrongly? I happen to know someone here by that name. He’s a Swiss.”

“I’ll just bet you happen to know him, Mr. Vigoleis! By the way, your own name is a bit out of the ordinary. We don’t hear it very often down on the Rhine.”

“And less often than that up on the Niers. I was re-baptized with this medieval troubadour’s name when I was studying in Münster, the city of the Anabaptists. But that’s neither here nor there. So, you know the gentleman we were just speaking of?”

“Of course I do. He’s the same one that both of us are thinking about — or rather all three of us, if you’ll permit me to say so, because your wife knows him too. You are his brother-in-law.”

“How peculiar! How come my brother-in-law is the former owner of your store? Did you take over the business from Don Helvecio? But he’s the manager or something of that sort down at the Hotel Príncipe Alfonso. Or at least he was until very recently. But then again, I’m not so sure.”