Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Is it any wonder, then, that Beatrice’s mention of this term electrified me? I flew to the kitchen and began scrubbing my hands like a surgeon before an invasive procedure. Using my feet, I dragged the albornoz up to the door of that dangerous carrier of microbes. Let her pick it up and don it again over her seductive leprosy, I shall never again touch the one or the other!

There are certain kinds of window pane through which somebody standing outside a room cannot see in, while those inside can watch everything that goes on outside. Pilar was that sort of thing: a distorting glass, an enticing toxic blossom, hemlock, a center of contagion and a diabolical swamp, a highly evolved plantlet of the family droseraceae , commonly and eloquently known as Venus’ fly-trap — and Vigoleis was the insect whose juices the goddess was going to devour! It was enough to make one speechless. Meals presented a delicate problem. Was it safe to eat off her dishes, with her forks and spoons? Did it make any sense to wipe them off surreptitiously with the tablecloth, as we did in railroad-station restaurants? Perhaps we should place on the table a sterilizing apparatus, just like an electric toaster, and put on face masks and rubber gloves. And then? Then there would be a public fracas. Contagious persons get very sensitive if they notice that other persons have noticed what nobody was supposed to notice. Pilar the Witch realized soon enough that Vigoleis, the fugitive from her bed, always washed his hands whenever she crossed his path. Haha, this little coward is forever washing his hands, in the stupid innocence I was unable to rob him of! Just wait, I’ve taken care of many another, and I’ll get to you in my own sweet time.

“Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord. That is an audacious figure of speech, and it has often given the theologians much to think about. They have come up with an erudite term for the obvious ascription of lowly human feelings to the Divinity; they call it “anthropopathy.” But with God we can still negotiate; we can try to change His mind. People ask Him in prayer to keep His eye on their concerns, to send down in the Great Lottery the number we own one-tenth of; to destroy an enemy of ours or to help us pass an exam. If I believed in God, I wouldn’t care to sully a feeling of that kind with commercial transactions, but that is of course a private matter. Pilar, who likewise would eventually take vengeance, couldn’t be negotiated with, because her emotions were not the subject of learned semantics. They defied any and all systematizing, and could never be lifted out of their natural urgency by means of complex conceptualizations. For this reason she smote Vigoleis, sending him from the frying pan directly into the fire.

The first to pay the price was Zwingli. To be sure, he was the one who had brought to their house these clean relatives of his, with their firm views on hygiene. But beyond that, he was not responsible for my fears, and even less responsible for the term Beatrice had used to send back to her bed of straw the Cinderella we were supposed to be improving and educating. Once Helvecio’s bedtime pet, now this animal began sucking the juices from his body. He rapidly lost weight, and neither omelets à la Général , wine, nor fancy aphrodisiacs were of any help. He turned into a rattling cadaver of love. If he refused to obey on the pilarière , he got stomped on like a bale of peat. Their bedroom was gradually transformed into an erotic clinic. Scattered around lay packets and vials marked with notations about optimal dosages, but none of this helped a bit. More than once, I sat at his bedside offering him pious consolation, and recommending certain home-baked nostrums once employed by a student friend in Cologne who pursued life in all its manifestations. I failed to mention, of course, that the youth in question had been unable to control his progressive deterioration. But Zwingli just laughed at these bits of wisdom from a bookworm’s almanac. The “bitch” would never succeed in placing him six feet under. One day, he appeared at table for warmed-over omelet missing his magic nail, and I took that to be an evil omen. I noticed it right away, for that is how visibly this otherwise insignificant horny accretion determined the man’s entire bearing. He couldn’t have looked more fully disrobed if he had worn a beard and suddenly appeared clean-shaven. He noticed my glance in the direction of his talisman — well, it had broken off in the heat of the fray, just another month and it would be back in all its magical prowess; he’d just have to wait things out sans horn. I could not rid myself of the dreadful feeling that he would now go swiftly downhill. And we had not even reached the portals of all the palaces where we were planning to introduce his lover by means of our new-style art. The only progress we had achieved was the piano that a few days from now would resound in the vestibule, to Julietta’s delight.

As committed to two-fisted techniques as Pilar was by reason of her profession, when it came to sating her instinct for revenge, she chose other methods. Her second victim was Julietta, who now got slapped around at least once every day, causing her to scream like a sow tied to the carriage wheel while getting ever so slowly stabbed in the throat, a practice still quite common in Iberian climes. Her mother differed from the long-knived butchers only in that she screamed along with her victim, so that an outsider could never tell who was threatening whose life. We knew, of course, and Zwingli knew also, but so little was left in him of Don Helvecio, the Citizen of the Confederation, that he was unable to take up arms against this violation of human rights. His attempts in this direction ceased abruptly after his first fatherly objection, which he meant to sound like a peal of thunder. Heavy objects got thrown to where he was standing; if he hadn’t ducked, a motion he fortunately had already been trained in, his handsome male visage would have suffered some damage. Pilar’s throwing skills were scarcely up to the legendary Balearic hurling tradition — but then again, she was not a descendant of those famous Balearic Slingers.

Julietta henceforth preferred to go dancing on the street, rather than serve as scapegoat for her mother’s erotomania. Yet whenever she got caught doing her precocious turtle-dove turns, the little golden slippers came at her more pitilessly than ever. One such occasion made Zwingli conclude that things had gone just too far, and so he resolved to interfere. If he had acted with swift determination, there would have ensued a three-way bout of fisticuffs. As it happened however, he gave the infuriated woman reason to hurl an unusually massive object at him, the third member of this family triangle, as a signal that he had no right to interfere in her pedagogical methods. She selected a flatiron. Zwingli ducked, thereby keeping his attractive head safe and sound for loftier ambitions. The iron followed a trajectory calculable according to the laws of ballistics, shattered the apartment window, soared across the Street of Solitude, produced a more distant sound of splintering glass, and finally a hard thump. The projectile had zoomed into the Main Post Office, where it came to rest with its sharp point piercing the desk-top of Don Fernando, the Chief Secretary. The following day it was delivered by the district letter carrier at the routine hour, bearing a label that said, “Refused. Return to Sender.” Don Fernando, whose acquaintance we shall make shortly, was the author of this little stunt.

The piano seemed to bring salvation. Peace returned to our bel-étage . Bach, Beethoven—

Pilar listened with the air of a connoisseur. She soon learned to sit in such a way as to suggest profound comprehension and rapt attention with inner and outer ear. If she could strike such a pose in the palaces and music salons, Don Helvecio was bound to be gratified. She would, he said, be staying right on course for the role his hopes were shaping for her, and which she herself was aiming toward. Just don’t applaud, Pilar, even if you think the piece is over. It’s those long pauses that reveal whether a listener is familiar with the score, so don’t make a fool of yourself! No, Pilar would not applaud too soon, for the simple reason that she never applauded. Her own profession, which deeply unites performing artist and appreciative client, meant that she was accustomed to the noiseless morendo that always follows the grand final chord.