Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

That wasn’t a very pleasant farewell gathering, Beatrice said. It was all just because of the old hidalgo . I myself thought it was the nicest farewell I had ever survived. Beatrice would have preferred to go home right away.

At the very moment when the sock got tossed into the trumpet, agents came searching for us at the Pensión del Conde. If we had been there, they could have just lifted us out of our rocking chairs. Vigoleis, the Übersetzer , would soon have experienced his Übersetzung into the Great Beyond, his wife Beatrice along with him.

It began with somebody’s letter to his fiancée on the mainland. Would we be willing to post it in Marseille? Just a brief cordial message, nothing more. This was prohibited under pain of death, as everyone knew, and at the English Consulate they reminded us of this in no uncertain terms. Even the consular mail was being censored, now that the police had established that consulates were spreading “false tales of atrocities” to foreign countries. The German Consul actually pretended to be shocked by such horror stories. He claimed to know nothing about murder and manslaughter on the island.

And it ended with Beatrice once again emptying her little cosmetics kit and placing more and more letters inside. Everyone had relatives on the mainland, but — heaven forbid, nothing of a political nature! One of the anarchist priests handed me a thick letter with the query, “Are you willing to risk this for the Lord’s sake? It contains the truth about what’s happening on our island.” It was addressed to the Archbishop of Paris. I thanked the clergyman for his confidence and stuck the letter in my breast pocket, where I also carried with me my uncle’s letter of recommendation. But first I placed some important-looking seals on the letter to the Archbishop.

It was madness to agree to this courier service: 200 letters, more or less! Could there possibly be so many loved ones back home?

Angelita, too, the beautiful Angelita, asked us to take something along. She was the only one who had no loved ones across the ocean, but she packed a basket of provisions for us, delicacies from a secret hoard in her shop. Did such things still exist? Sobrasadas? Turrón ? Her aunts wept, and the volatile Paquita was also rather moved. But she tapped her temple with her finger. As the cashier at Bauzá, the premier clothing store on the island, she knew that I was leaving Mallorca without my custom-cut Bauzá suit.

To make a decent escape is also to be like Don Quixote.

This time, our exit from the Pensión del Conde took place without fanfare, without the other tenants lining up to say farewell, and without porra ! and puta ! There was no Beppo there to toss a handful of dirt at us.

Don Alonso had scrounged up a taxi to fetch us at the most god-awful early hour I have ever crept out of bed. The driver was reliable, he told us, and had exact instructions. Josefa, the cook, gave me her blessing. If here and now I let the Vesuvius of her mighty bosom send forth smoke one last time, it is only because my memory retains the touching image of that sacrificial altar of hers. For like Don Joaquín’s pipe, hers too had long since gone cold.

They didn’t like to see us go. As amateur conspirators we had earned everyone’s respect. The Spaniards have a special liking for aficionados . In these circles, no one expected the war to end soon. But all of them, except for the priests, thought it would end well.

Our taxi driver was one of those Spanish proletarians with the air of a grandseigneur . His co-pilot was no less splendid in his nameless valor. He played the role of herald: “Make way for Catholic Germans on a special mission!” he shouted as we turned onto the Paseo Sagrera and a few dozen rifles blocked our progress. The car stopped. Pistols banged against all the windows. The copilot yelled at the gang and waved a bill of lading. “Friends of the Movimento Salvador ! Deputies of the Caudillo! Mission to the Führer ! To the harbor! The cruiser won’t wait!” We were allowed to pass through unharmed. There was a clicking of boot heels. German steel helmets, paid for with Mallorcan money, wiggled on heads that were racially too small for them. We sat in the back, fully composed and conscious of our mission. On my lap sat my one and only piece of property, my typewriter. On Beatrice’s lap was our suitcase containing, instead of my “Tombs of the Huns,” some much more dangerous written material. A second armed patrol let us pass, but a third didn’t fall for our ruse. Halt! Passports! Out of the car for inspection! An officer waved to some of his men to approach the car.

We stayed seated. We were exterritorials! Earlier on I had once accompanied Kessler on a visit to the Immigration Police in Palma, so I knew how ambassadors and envoys were supposed to behave. I had clipped my uncle’s letter to my passport in such a way as to make the Archbishop of Mallorca’s signature and seal immediately visible. The officer studied the Latin text and peered in at me. “Special mission?” Yes, I said, and showed him the letter from the priest to the Archbishop of Paris — we were in the special service of the Church. He made a gesture, his men snapped to attention, and the officer saluted with his sword. It was all very ceremonial, somewhat like a Solemn High Mass. It could have been our funeral. One minute later we were at the pier.

The scene that now presented itself to our eyes reminds me today of certain illustrations in the old Swiss Chronicle by Reverend Diebold Schilling. I say “today,” for although what we saw on that October morning was no less colorful and quaint, it was by no means a romantic image. But that, too, is only half of the truth. The scene was romantic enough, but we just couldn’t appreciate it.

As I squeezed forward to get out of the car, I noticed that my seat was sopping wet. It was dry when we had entered the taxi. We were surrounded by a thicket of pointed rifles, each rifle containing at least one bullet and ready to fire. The miracle was that there were still any living people on the island. Even the Spaniards aren’t capable of such rapid procreation. But come to think of it, no matter where you can hear gunshots, at your county fair or on New Year’s Eve or in a war, humans can still activate their libidinous genes. Thus it is likely that the human race will survive the atomic fireworks that will happen in the future.

Flags were fluttering on tall staffs — the standards of the various consulates. Gathered around them were larger and smaller groups of refugees. Men with arm bands and clipboards, in some cases the consuls themselves or their deputies for refugee affairs, were scampering about. If we had been Dutch citizens, for example, we would have joined half a dozen others with Oranje boven snapping above them in the breeze, signifying that they were now in safety. These Hollanders had regained all of the jovial, weatherproof, and infectious joie de vivre that makes them so unpopular with one another in railroad stations and landing piers anywhere in the world. It was certain that none of them had any early-morning garden snails run away from them on the island. We weren’t Dutch, but neither were we the citizens of any other country that was showing its colors here at the harbor.

One particular group here wasn’t showing any colors at all, for the simple reason that it wasn’t allowed to, but not because it was politically neutral. I recognized a few faces of German emigrés who had lost their citizenship, a cluster of nobodies, the German nation’s rubbish. Even here on the island, where lead bullets were a dime a dozen, they weren’t considered worth the price of a spoonful of gunpowder. There were Jews among them, politically innocuous people who had kept their mouths shut. We had nothing in common with them, for we had indeed displayed our colors.