Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

There were other Argentinian farmers on board, quite a lot of them, with their whole families. Obstinate characters, they refused to eat the snow-white bread offered them by the Englishmen. They demanded their familiar country bread with the dark crust. I spoke with one of them, a friend of the fellow who had lost his son. God? he said. What was a farmer supposed to know about God? God is the one who sends rain when rain wasn’t wanted. Who sends drought when the earth longs for a drop of rain. Farmers didn’t know anything about God. God was something for priests and nuns. As for the death on a cross that was costing his friend his sanity, what was there to say? Maybe somebody else could understand it, but he certainly didn’t. Pepe’s son was nailed to a cross because the boy didn’t believe in God, and people had told him — he himself couldn’t read — that Jesus Christ, the guy in the Bible, was crucified too. This guy Christ, the one in the holy book, actually believed in God, or at least that’s what he kept on saying. But maybe all this stuff the priests were spreading around was a bunch of lies to keep people stupid. As far as he was concerned, — “ Me cago en Dios !”

I was thunderstruck.

Off on the horizon we spied a little cloud. Or was it a sail? Fog? The farmers pointed it out to each other. Full speed ahead, we sailed toward the spot, right through a sky that soon changed from azure to black. Suddenly we couldn’t see our hands in front of our eyes. The foghorns started barking, the engines were stifled, and the rolling and heaving ceased. The Grenville seemed to be running on without steam. It was uncanny here amidst the cold bank of fog, for what seemed like hours. Suddenly the cloud lifted, the foghorns went silent, and the destroyer leaped full speed ahead into a resurrected world. Blue, blue, as far as the eye could see.

An officer came on deck and raised his hand as if to command attention. Aha, I thought, a speech! That’s part of his duties, and at the end we’ll all stand up and sing “God save the King!”

The officer made it short and sweet: change of course. Instead of heading for Marseille, we would land at Genoa, where other ships would take passengers to their various destinations.

Italy! From the frying pan into the fire! Were the two of us destined, after all was said and done, to be buried in my home town’s Hunnish tombs? Nailed to the Führer’s hooked cross? Somebody shouted, “Mussolini!”

Franz Blei rose from his sitting position. In the interest of historical accuracy I should stress that he stood up on one of the coils of rope. He turned to the officer. He was not speaking for himself, he said, for as an Austrian he was still a free individual. But persecuted Germans were on board this ship, as well as stateless persons, and it was unconscionable to land these people on Italian soil. For all of them, that would mean Third Reich , concentration camps, death! Whereupon Franz Blei stepped down from his podium and again took his seat on the rope coil. The officer said nothing and disappeared down a hatch.

Nothing but water and a black-azure sky, a leaping dolphin, and the music of our stuttering sea journey. Not a cloud in the sky, not a cloud on the horizon. The ship’s wake told us that we were making the wide course change in the direction of Mussolini.

The father of the crucified boy regained his senses. The Englishmen’s white bread, their pap for sucklings, had performed a miracle. Fortunately the man had one last dark crust in his breast pocket.

“God,” said Franz Blei, who also noticed this, “God will bless anybody’s true bread.”

The officer came back on deck with a new announcement. The ship had made contact with the admiral on board their flagship H.M.S. London in the harbor at Barcelona. His British Majesty’s Mediterranean Fleet, the radio communication had said, would not discharge any passenger against his will in a hostile country. Grenville , however, would not be heading for Marseille; she had orders to go to Genoa. We would be landing at Barcelona, where the refugees would spend the night on the flagship and would depart the next day on another destroyer for Marseille. “All right?”

“All right,” said Franz Blei, to whom the officer had directed his last question. “God bless the King!”

“God bless him!” added Beatrice with a sigh of relief. She has a weakness for anything British, and she is familiar with such slogans. This ocean-going coup of Olde England left me speechless. Such grandeur on the high seas, while their landlubber Consul kept strictly to his orders! One wave to the steersman sufficed to make our ship curve toward liberty. We noticed the change of course by watching the ship’s wake. The circle was closing; with redoubled speed our destroyer first headed back to where we came from, but then wheeled sharply to port.

Nature herself provided the final thrill, but I don’t want to make it sound melodramatic. Once again the sirens wailed, and once again we were inside a cloud. Was anybody else noticing this? A ghoulish whiteness surrounded us. The ship’s deck was rigid. The world was soundless. The azure maritime day was invisible above us, and down below was night, veiling our destination.

Our destination: freedom.

Ever since man was forced to depart from Paradise and enter the nature reserve of his own culture, a place where he can survive only so long as he retains his instinct for creating borders beyond which he is in danger of being executed, the history of his freedom has been a history devoid of meaning. One cannot retell this history without causing acute embarrassment. That is why I have allowed Nature to enter here, allowing Her to arrange a large bank of fog that will now descend upon this final scene in the recollections of Vigoleis, instead of some dazzling, fanciful

finis operis.

In my “Notice to the Reader” you will have read that “all the people in this book are alive or were at one time.” What I meant by that pronouncement was that my book is not of the kind inspired by poetic fantasy, but one that takes actual fact as its point of departure — or if you prefer another formulation, it is a book of recollections shaped by poetic means. This makes it different from works whose exclusively poetic authors say, in order to avoid legal complications or other intrusions into their métier , that all their characters are fictional, and that any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

For this reason, there can be no talk of “pure coincidence” concerning the living or dead persons in my book. Each and every character in it makes an appearance in the flesh, in his or her own shadowless image, although in certain cases where political entities or individual grudges might present a danger, my reader must be detoured away from precise identification. This was decidedly not the case with my Kathrinchen from the Rhineland, who appears in my memoirs as the complete nymphomaniac that she was in reality. The same is true for her male counterpart, the piggish lecher Silberstern, although I must admit that with this particular fellow, a man who was worth his weight in gold, I have altered his surname from “gold” to “silver.” This admission will no doubt be of help to his family. Here and there in my book I have changed certain phonemes within proper names, but the bearers of these names appear as they actually lived. I changed nothing at all that concerns my own person. As the author, and as a human being, I felt that I had no choice but to expose myself to any and all personal attacks.

Many of my acquaintances had already passed on from this world before I decided in the year 1952 to set down my recollections, aided by nothing more than my magically comprehensive, logarithmic memory and that of my constantly courageous and loyal partner Beatrice. Other people gave me their blessing as I naively wrote out my memories, and even later when they appeared in print. Today, as I write this Afterword with the intention of canceling an erroneous inhumation, the number of departed souls from our Mallorcan world has already risen sharply, and I don’t even get to read all the obituaries. Zwingli, the real-life originator of my second-sighted island adventures, the man who, like his sister and me, was listed to be liquidated during the Spanish insurrection, was lowered into an early grave in Santa Fe de Bogotá. Mamú, our lady in charitable Christian memory; Don Juan Sureda; both of the Counts, Kessler and Keyserling; Villalonga; Mulet the Great — All of them are now no longer with us.