Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Children are as unpredictable as the love I was speaking about just a moment ago. And generals are as unpredictable as both together: love and the fruits of love.

Julietta, hurt to the quick and publicly humiliated in her love for her father, ran up the steps of the Calle de la Seo, and just seconds later was inside the Cathedral, lying at the feet of the statue of Our Lady on the Column, the Virgen del Pilar . The nuns had taught her how to pray, and she hadn’t forgotten. In the ardor of her despair she invoked her father: “Help me, stand by me! I am abandoned!”

Those who, like me, have forgotten how to pray, are all the more fervent in their belief in the efficacy of prayer, since they have no reason to fear the trial of disappointment. Julietta, still in the initial phase of her piety, still believed in the succor offered by the denizens of Heaven. If an entire nation, “in the fear and misery of a war that threatens the very existence of all peoples and all nations,” can turn to God with a request to decimate another country, then why can’t a little girl place all her trust in the Mother of God, especially when we consider that the latter was the Patroness of her own mother? Julietta never doubted that her frantic prayers would come true, precisely because the Virgin bore her mother’s name. When she had finished praying, she immediately stamped her foot, thus putting the Virgin Mary under pressure to act fast. And on her way out of the Cathedral she stopped to put in a brief insurance prayer with San Antonio.

It was Julietta herself who later told me all this. When her tale was done, she said to me, “Vigo, if your mother had done something like that with the Madonna in your parish, then maybe you wouldn’t have had such hard times.” Oh, Julietta! If you only knew how obstinate our lovely Lower-Rhenish Madonnas are! You can’t force them to do what you want, not even to get you enough money to buy a genuine 13th-century specimen for your living room!

Don Julio was also repulsed, despite his imposing figure with plumed helmet, epaulettes, sash, saber, medals, jackboots, and the rapidly waning glory of his public fame. Yet though he may have been rejected in body, he had very palpably arrived in spirit. His bastard-child had conjured him, though the girl was totally ignorant of occult practices. The Hand of Heaven was without doubt responsible. Thus a dematerialized General came to aid his twice-repudiated daughter, and in doing so foiled his enemies’ strategy. Which is what generals are for, after all.

Here at the Bar Valencia, on a Saturday afternoon, one second before a champagne salvo and without the customary “ Tirez le premier, Monsieur! ” Don Julio appeared in a form and with an effect that are probably not even familiar to our most advanced parapsychologists. I am revealing this occurrence here out of a sense of twofold obligation: first, toward Vigoleis’ recollections, and secondly, no less earnestly, toward science. Don Julio came, as if conjured by a troll’s whistle, or like a cordial to cap off the meal named after him. Just as the Holy Spirit descended upon the assembled disciples, causing them to speak in all languages, so did the General let himself be called forth from his spectral headquarters to visit the couple. And behold, they began to seethe, as if a powerful gale were howling through the back room at the bar, and with all the fibers and tongues of their bodies, they started loving each other.

Zwingli had just enough time to pull the bolt on the door-door — the outer world had vanished, and they knew each other in their flesh. They knew each other, in fact, so intensely that they didn’t know themselves any more, perhaps because their bed of love was anything but comfortable — cool enough, to be sure, but not with the coolness of genuine horsehair. Or perhaps because of the darkness in this area, which they were utilizing for the first time for lovemaking. They bumped against all sorts of paid and unpaid plumbing and machinery. If love-making is to happen in an extravagant location, a padded cell in an asylum would have been preferable.

The Bible tells many stories of how love can be transformed into hatred. Friedrich Nietzsche filled ten thousand or more pages concerning the same problem. Therefore, let us be content here with the brief announcement that Zwingli’s love for Pilar, and Pilar’s love for her Helvecio, soon reverted to intense mutual animosity. And who wouldn’t be seized by a frenzy of anger if, at the moments of highest ecstasy, your skull kept banging against a centrifuge and your foot tipped over a container of ice, causing your limbs and members, throbbing in the heat of lust, to be cooled off with infuriating suddenness, just as Pastor Heumann advises in his Manual of Personal Hygiene : Cold compresses! And if hatred has once made its ugly appearance, it strives to do away with its own immediate cause. Spinoza understood this perfectly. The person I hate must be exterminated, he must go, permanently, and there is no other solution: It’s either me or him.

There is every indication that our two shop owners behind the door-door had intentions of acting according to this tried-and-true philosophical insight. Each of them wanted to remove the other from existence — a terrible idea right before the festive ceremony, or rather virtually during the ceremony, for the front door had already been opened to allow the champagne christening to take place.

Both of them, the young man no less than the blossoming young woman, wanted to kill each other, and to take with them to their graves all the hopes they had every reason to trust in. How did they plan to carry out this double murder? I happen to know exactly how; I have been able to reconstruct everything, partly on the basis of reports from those who were directly involved, partly by my own conscientious research into the contributing factors. It is not for nothing that I have sat at the feet of the Münster criminologist Profesor Többen and his live subjects at the penitentiary in that august city. But the results of my detective work do not belong here. Even the most scandalous chronicle must have certain limits, within which everyone may freely exercise his own fantasy.

The General had won a victory, incidentally the very first and the very last of his much-beribboned career. He instantly returned on the wings of his emanation to his fortress, and to the murky marital moods of his old lady. Julietta, too, had won a battle, the very first victory of her life. It wouldn’t be her last.

The invited guests left the battlefield slowly — the uninvited ones even more slowly. The bartender listened at the door. What he heard was confusing, allowing no firm conclusions as to what was going on inside. Antonio had no better luck when he held his ear to the thin panel, but they both agreed that turbulent events were taking place behind it. But precisely what? If that pump would only stop whining! The two people inside weren’t dead, but they wouldn’t respond to their two employees’ knocking and shouting. Dead people are mute, whereas inside the ice-cream machinery room there was talking going on — and groaning and screaming besides. How odd; such noises do not belong in the copa of a bar. Civilization has provided other venues for such behavior, although often enough people regress to primitive habits and choose just about anywhere to gnash their teeth and wield their tomahawks.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Antonio, after a whispered conference with the bartender. “Honored guests, there has been a slight mishap. An unforeseen malfunction in our mechanical plant has forced the management to postpone our opening until next Saturday.”

Just then Julietta returned to the scene and began to dance. She threw her little arms in the air and snapped her castanets. Music started up, and no one left for home. Antonio served his café negro from the kitchen over at the men’s club, and more and more people filled the terrace, including individuals who had no membership rights. Pepe, who ran a little fonda for donkey drivers and laborers next to the ice-cream bar, waited on the tables in his tavern and raked in the cash from customers who otherwise would never be seen drinking from his glasses. And Julietta danced without a stop. She whirled with flying skirts, approached the men with her hands suggestively at her hips, stamped her feet — a little-girl Argentinita, who today is probably vying with that great star, for I hear that in the meantime Julietta has become famous through appearances at theaters on the Spanish mainland.