Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

World literature is rich in depictions of two people meeting in the straits of evil opportunity, performing what nature has prescribed for them, as if they were simply flies or squirrels. Poets have exploited the scene, and some of the greatest prose treats of this eternally unique topic. Just leaf through the canon with this in mind, and you will soon hit upon the suggestive line speaking of “broken flowers and grass” and the lava of love, surging over page after page. Albrecht Schaeffer, through all his years of creative activity, had a constantly inventive pen when it came to making two people into one. When I first read his Helianth , I waxed breathless in the chapter entitled “Ecstasy”: Georg scoots up a ladder and enters Anna’s room, whereupon neither the writer nor the couple wastes any time. They go all the way: “He heard her moan softly. He felt pain himself. He was confused. But then arrived the instant of inchoate sobbing. Suddenly he was urged on by some invisible giant fist towards mad spasms of lust,” etc.

“The instant of inchoate sobbing”—superb! Experiencing tingles of bliss, I lowered the book. I meditated on this inchoate instant, I let it pass before me; I relished it. The instant became a whole minute, then another and yet another. The couple was already finished, Georg, arising from his depletion and torpor, had long since jumped into his duds and scrammed. But I kept on savoring that instant, I re-read the passage until all of a sudden — the magic burst. What I was reading was a totally banal sentence. I heard a voice urging haste: “Come on, my friend, get on with your inchoate sobbing! On the double!” and I closed the book. If ever you take a word with familiar meaning and repeat it several times out loud, it loses its sense; it says no more, it becomes hollow noise. In just the same way, you can repeat a line of verse or prose to the point of jibber-jabber, and all that remains is pure kitsch. My “inchoate sobbing” had turned into kitsch, just as love itself will, if you film it in slow motion.

What I was sensing there next to my Pilar’s pilarière , a few moments prior to the crucial one, would, if written down word for word, yield some highly dubious literature. Even in its primordial, pre-verbal state it was problematical enough, but — it was real!

I was still attempting to strip away the last mundane trappings from my goddess, when the Divinity Herself bent down, grasped her right stocking, and drew forth a dagger. I shall be brief, and shall refrain from creating steamy depictions out of this confession of my weakness of the flesh, which was to end in cowardice of body and soul. Otherwise my chronicler might be accused of pornographic intentions, a charge that has not even spared the Song of Solomon. What Pilar held in her hands was a blade of finest Toledo manufacture. She stood there like Charlotte Corday, ready to bless the hot bath before I stepped in. Never would I have imagined a stiletto at such a breathtaking location on the female body! “Breathtaking” is in fact the single appropriate word here, doubly significant in this context. For one thing, the sight of her beauty choked me up; I became almost numb, as if I were standing before the portrait of a solemn, monumental Madonna. And during these inchoate instants of impending suffocation, the tiny remaining gulp of air that might have rescued me also vanished when I saw the glint of steel before my eyes. The knife had caught a beam of light that had crept in through a knothole in the shutter to take part in this biblical tableau. The thought of murder flashed through my mind: a crime of passion! She wants your blood, she’s crying for your blood! She wants revenge for having kept her unsatiated for so long! She will make love to you, and then plunge the blade up to the hilt between your ribs. Yet this shimmering Fury could also dispatch you before any thought of climax. Would there be a more beautiful death for a melancholy poetaster?

Before I could answer this question to my own satisfaction, I myself turned biblical. Like the Egyptian Joseph, I fled, but in somewhat variant fashion: rather than leave my cloak in the hands of the chippy, I slipped through her door holding her albornoz, got entangled in the garment, and would almost have collapsed in the hall if a benign spirit had not lifted me up and guided me through the dark passageway, one breathless step ahead of my potential murderess. Great heavens, I have barely escaped the treacherous needle of her unrequited love! You have viewed her nakedness, Vigoleis, and have renounced it. You must die!

Thus far, Vigoleis’ own account of these happenings. His appearance here has been just as naked as that of a poet within his own stanzas, which is perhaps the most blatant showcase for human exhibitionism. If questioned whether he still believes that Pilar lured him to her bed in order to get rid of him, he will be in a position to reply that just a few weeks into his Spanish sojourn, he had familiarized himself with the habits of several women. Pilar was simply about to place that avenging blade on her little night table, so as to allow no sharp foreign object to come between herself and her taciturn purveyor of lust. Permit me to add that this episode’s hasty denouement diverges in one further respect from the trial of the chaste biblical dreamer: Potiphar threw Joseph in prison, whereas Vigoleis got off scot-free — for the time being. Later, he was to feel the humiliated woman’s vengeance sorely enough. A separate chapter will recount how María del Pilar showed Vigoleis the truth of a saying, still controversial among theologians, that has long since found its way from the Bible into sensationalist literature in the grand manner: “Vengeance is mine!”

But now back to the question, juris utriusque , that has necessitated an excursus leading us very close to union with a Divinity: did Vigoleis commit adultery in spirit? And this brings us, in strict consequence, to a second question: how, afterwards, did he stand before his Beatrice, who, after all, was not some arbitrary choice of partner who could be casually cheated on with “another woman.” To be honest about it, our hero didn’t “stand” before her at all, but was lying on the pilarière in their own room when Beatrice returned from a walk through the city with Zwingli. She wanted to rent a piano, and had tried out several instruments, but now she came home to some atonal music in ultrasonic registers: what on earth had been going on? Because the apartment alcove was not a tailor’s shop, the albornoz lying in a heap on the floor spoke the expected volumes, whose pages we shall simply leave uncut. A clever reader can snatch something of their contents by rolling a leaf or two into a tube, and peering through. It is not false modesty that prevents me from employing a page-cutter. It’s just that my reader, too, ought to exert himself a bit and apply his imagination. Such cooperative effort can increase the pleasure of reading, as I have myself experienced with others, and engender a certain sense of comradeship that can sustain a spirit of exploratory enterprise all the way to the finis operis . Since these pages of mine contain so much talk of coupling and conjugality and cohabitation, perhaps I may be permitted to beg my reader quite unequivocally for a kind of connubial understanding.

In the text I’m speaking of there is one little term that easily stands out because it is printed in bold italics. After twenty years, reproduced verbatim from the source, it now reappears here in these jottings of Vigoleis as a singular indication that, at the time, did not fail to make an impression. That term is: mal de France .

Every Spaniard carries this disease, but for centuries now, it hasn’t harmed these people at all. They have become immune to the dreaded poison, just as experienced apiarists do with bee-stings. Entire sequences of generations have brought this about by dint of selfless, indefatigable preventive therapy. Their motto has not been “After us, the deluge!” but, more fraternally and humanely, “After us, immunity!” Still, whoever arrives from abroad as yet unstung can get pounced upon by the bacilli, just as flies search out meat in the marketplace stalls. In Cologne I attended a course on the dangers and problems of venereal infection. Right after World War I courses of that kind, along with related medical examinations, were required for students of all disciplines at all German universities. At the time Germany was thought to be the most seriously threatened country in Europe, and as a good European in Nietzsche’s sense, I washed my hands religiously. It won’t be my fault, I told myself, if the Decline of the West is going to happen on account of this disease. I became a syphillophobe, and came to think of myself as already corroded, in fact already eaten up. As gladly as I might often wish to venture beyond the Stygian stream — still, please, not this way! Experts were speaking of the devil, and so I became careful, or if you will, just plain scared. If it was to be imbecility for me, I would prefer to have incurred it as the result of a poetic parthenogenesis.