Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“You’re not the only one who isn’t so sure. But most people are sure about one thing: that woman he’s living with will soon be the death of him with her erotic fireworks. They go popping off up there day and night. Pilar — well, let me tell you: our Cologne hookers can’t hold a candle to her, and I’m whispering this to you from experience. And they know, as well as you and I do, that this thing they’ve got down there ain’t no Mary Queen of the May medal.”

I had previously bought newspapers in Emmerich’s store, but we had never touched on personal matters. Now, however, he just opened up wide:

“As far as your wife is concerned, permit me, speaking as something like the dean of foreigners here on the island, to offer some friendly advice. I don’t know what your plans are. Are you going to be staying here very long? Helvecio told me the other day that you are a writer and a professor of literature, and he’s going to hire you for his future art academy. As a bookseller, I’ve never come across your name before, not even in the newspapers. Maybe you use a pseudonym, like so many others. But be that as it may, here on Mallorca every one of us is a doctor, a conde , or a príncipe , each according to his taste and the extent of his failures in life. But no matter who or what you are, if you’re planning on staying much longer in Palma, do have a care for your wife’s reputation. People are already talking, I’ll have you know.”

I asked Mr. Emmerich to be more explicit. He couldn’t, he didn’t have the time right now, a tour ship was in port, the shop would soon be full of customers. Perhaps I could return in the evening around seven, and I could bring my wife along if she had strong nerves.

“Beatrice, do you have strong nerves?”

“News from Basel? That last letter has me worried. Speak up! You know I’m prepared for the worst.”

“No telegram. And what you’re supposed to get prepared for I don’t even know myself. Tonight the man from Cologne at Ye Wee Booke Shoppe wants to give us a few tips on how to behave on the island if we’re planning to stay for a while. He’s written a tour guide to Mallorca. As a long-standing foreigner he knows his stuff, but I get the impression that he really wants to talk about personal matters. And what he’ll be telling us for your benefit will apparently require tough nerves. That’s why I asked you that strange question.”

Beatrice’s nerves are like iron. They are constantly in vibration, and emit tones that are sometimes high-pitched, sometimes muted. But as we crossed the palm-lined square at midnight, heading for home, the music had ceased altogether. Mr. Emmerich had treated us to jokes from his beloved home town of Cologne, which oddly enough he never left as a younger man, and to which he was just as attached as he was to the indigenous potato pancakes and sweet rice with wurst. But he had also revealed certain details from the previous life of the amazingly bed-bound Pilar.

Holy Pantaleon! Holy Kunibert! Holy St. Mary in the Capitol! Santa Catalina de Tomás! San Antonio de Viana! All ye saints of the God-fearing communities of Cologne and Palma, whose cathedrals are among the most famous in the world! Come to the aid of our two heroes, whose bodies and souls are skidding rapidly toward perdition!

But the spirits we invoked wouldn’t listen to us pagans. The one spirit that did lend an ear was that of my good mother. I felt her wan, troubled, loyal, and warning glance directed toward me across the ocean, as I strolled beside Beatrice beneath the palm trees. A mother’s eyes can penetrate any darkness. They can follow a prodigal son up hill and down dale. They can adjust to the most fearsome foreign climes better than the prodigal himself, who, though he may keep his eyes open and a firm grip on his staff, is bound to stumble. On that Mediterranean summer evening my mother’s eyes looked straight at me; I became conscious of them as in second sight. Like the legendary Atlantis, the island sank beneath the waves. I felt myself floating on a raft, drifting on the sea of my memory.

Emmerich’s narrative, delivered with a Cologne accent and laced with the argot of Cologne’s side streets, took me back several years — which was the opposite of what Emmerich intended. I saw my mother standing before me with tears in her eyes. Why are you crying, Mother? Is it because I, your son, am lost, the black sheep of the family, dyed in the wool? I wish now to relate this experience that drove tears to the eyes of my beloved parent and gripped me again on that sultry evening on the island. It will take us from Emmerich’s scabrous report back to his beloved city of Cologne. It will become apparent soon enough why this flashback was necessary in order to gauge the ugly, hateful misfortune that ruined this southern sojourn for Vigoleis and Beatrice.

Anno domini … But the exact year doesn’t matter. Germany, with blind trust in the Gott mit uns slogan embossed on its army’s belt buckles, had lost its first world war and was struggling to recuperate. Art, literature, and higher learning were thriving as in a dream-world. Trusting in nothing at all, I had just lost another of my little private wars and was getting ready to begin my first semester at Cologne University, where scholars like Bertram, Scheler, and Nicolai Hartmann would, I imagined, take me by my pale, bookwormish hand. From one day to the next, my parents had decided to accompany me on this maiden voyage to the land of certified higher academics. My good-hearted mother was concerned mostly with my choice of lodging in the big city: no bedbugs, decent bed linen, and the like. She intended to have a serious word with the landlady about my somewhat questionable health (including my physical health), and to offer her some suggestions of a sort that I needn’t enumerate here. Everyone who has a mother knows that there is no end of worries when a child enters the wide, wide world.

My old man also tagged along. A markedly unemotional type, for him the trip meant mainly the chance for a tour of the big-city bars, starting with frankfurters and a full liter mug at the Early Bird on Cathedral Square, and ending at Müller’s All-Saints Pub with long-necked wine bottles. Cologne never meant anything else to him.

I had clipped some room-for-rent ads from the Kölner Stadtanzeiger , and so mother and son set off on the look-see. Together we located the first address in a narrow alley off the Haymarket, in an ancient building with warped stairs and labyrinthine corridors, everything bathed in a twilit gloom that our eyes first had to get used to. Mother said that this was no place for me. We should try elsewhere, surely we could find a more decent house, maybe a bit more expensive, but that was unavoidable. I appeased her by remarking that unsightly portals often conceal palatial chambers, adding that I thought these surroundings were romantic (I hadn’t yet emerged from my infatuation with Romanticism). So I gave a vigorous knock on the first door, hoping to find out which was the landlady’s flat.

A half-naked girl with frizzy hair and voluptuous bosom stepped sleepily into the corridor, gave her visitors a look of amazement, and said, “Hi there, little guy! So early? And you’ve brought your mommy with you? OK, we’ll give her a rosary and she can sit on the stairs, my room is a little cramped.” Then she shouted some names down the hallway in her raucous voice, and added some remarks about this kid who was just weaned and wanted to lie at her breast, wasn’t that a riot? And how much did they think she could expect from lambikin here? All at once several doors opened, and the hall filled with loose-limbed womenfolk who greeted mother and son in the most cheerfully salacious way imaginable. A torrent of obscenities assailed our ears, as we ran the gauntlet on our dash to the exit.