Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Beatrice recovered quickly from the blow. What gave her the most anguish was to have been so distant from her mother during her final weeks, caught up in involuntary adventures that one might call uncomfortable. All of us felt that death had brought release, a thought that caused the woman most directly affected by its occurrence to downplay her own personal concerns. She was further plagued by the idea of having failed to accomplish during the period in question what she had set out to achieve with Zwingli. His own life’s path had yet to be smoothed out; to get this done, someone would have to come along with a heavier earth-roller than we ourselves could pull. And to tell the truth, I had become a useless draft horse.

Time, said Beatrice, will take care of everything. First her poor brother’s debts would have to be paid off, and then she would see what could be done for his physical and mental well-being. Beatrice as an apostle of salvation — why not? People have made worse mistakes about their own capabilities. It was true that our exchequer was beginning to dwindle badly; soon I would be reaching into my pocket like Zwingli, and coming up with nothing. We would have to lay out considerable sums for gas and electricity, now that workmen had come by one day to shut off both utilities. Several print shops presented their bills and were promptly paid. Vigoleis thought for a second. With that money you could have published your poems in a bibliophile edition, along with a blurb sheet composed by Zwingli, and in no time at all you would be as famous in the literary world as Pilar was in the demi-monde of the island. But fate does not permit such meddling in its affairs, least of all on the part of versifiers who take their greatest delight in watching their works go up in flames. The lyrical effusions of the scribbler in question had nearly all turned to ashes; they were but dust, and unto dust they did return. Some few of them tried to escape this earthly auto-da-fé; they set out for other parts, pleaded with editors and publishers for the right of asylum, got shooed away, and after extended wanderings returned dirty, tattered, and maimed to their progenitor in the Street of Solitude, the scene of agonies and anguish. These stanzas could have had much to say concerning affronts, insults, kicks administered in arrogance, the executioners’ sardonic laughter, and so forth — but they remained silent. They were discreet; at most they just shrugged their shoulders as if to say, “We’re back! Nobody likes us!” Occasionally the Main Post Office in Palma took pity on these rejected children and allowed them to disappear amidst the frightful welter of confusion that prevailed in that decrepit building. They never resurfaced. With human beings, the legal condition of permanent disappearance used to commence when the missing person would have reached three score and ten years, the statistically assumed point of life’s termination. But what is the assumed point of termination for a poem? When must posterity declare Vigoleis’ missing verses as non-existent, as “disappeared without a trace”? This is a question that will be answered in near-miraculous fashion in a later chapter. When we arrive at that point, my reader will be advised to recall Pilar’s blasphemous plagiarism: “Vengeance is mine!”

One extraordinarily fine day, Pilar and Zwingli had finally attained the moment when they could pass through the city of Palma in all directions without fear of being waylaid by a creditor, getting yanked inside his shop and then confronted with the debit side of their existence. The soft cushion that, according to the German proverb, a clear conscience places beneath our head, ought to have benefitted Zwingli’s slumber. But other demons arrived to plague this condemned man’s nights.

Our stockpile of pesetas was rapidly melting away, and so we avoided larger capital outlays. Beatrice regarded the healing of her kid brother’s economic condition as a matter of highest priority. As I have mentioned before, she hates any kind of dirt, be it in the form of a speck of dust on the piano keyboard cover, or a smudge on the neck of someone close to her. Such grimy deposits were, by the way, regularly removed, and further cleanups occurred daily. Thus the little gold bracelet on Zwingli’s left wrist no longer had to serve the purpose of a leather strap around the axle of a bicycle wheel; once again it played an aesthetic role as pure ornament, although it would be incorrect to think of its wearer as a dandy. The bracelet became him, in the same natural way that a nose ring becomes a Papuan or a golden ear chain becomes a Volendam fisherman. Just how Beatrice imagined the installation of an internal sewage treatment system for her brother, she did not reveal to me. She was not inexperienced at this sort of thing, she said, and I ought simply to let her do what she wanted to. I readily obeyed. She headed off toward her goal with the determination of a migrating bird on its way to a remote destination. Any ornithologist can tell you that every year countless thousands of birds end up crashing into lighthouses; nowadays such hazards are illuminated faintly from the outside and surrounded by safety nets. Beatrice had not reckoned with Pilar, our own gleaming pillar. Nor had Vigoleis.

I had sufficient publishers’ fees outstanding to keep us alive until the guarantee for an enormous honorarium arrived from the film company in Berlin. But no money found its way to us, neither via the bank nor via the mails. Soon we would be high and dry. Had I been blowing soap bubbles?

There came a dawn like any other: the same sun, the same fly circling around the fleck of sunlight in the vestibule, the same heartache at still being among the living, the same hunger for stupendous literary renown, the same Beatrice practicing her instrument. Yet in one respect this day was different. Beatrice began practicing quite early, explaining that she had to work through a particularly difficult passage. I had long since become used to the idiosyncrasies of practicing pianists, and thanked my lucky stars that Beatrice didn’t sing or play the alpenhorn, for in that case I would have taken to the streets with Julietta. So I stayed home, even on this particular morning — a morning that, by Spanish standards, was still in its diapers. I communed with a medieval mystic, worked a bit on my posthumous literary works, conjugated a few irregular verbs with mutating consonants, and wrote a picaresque letter. Time had of course not stood still while Beatrice and I each practiced on different instruments. But I first became aware of this when Pilar, with elevated arm, strode through the room balancing her matinal greeting. Beatrice didn’t even notice her; one of her piano fingers was misbehaving.

Later Zwingli came limping in. He too had been practicing, and his legs were misbehaving. Such a workaday family, my reader will be thinking, in which each member crams away separately, riding this or that hobby horse with cries of “giddyap!” and “steady there!” and “whoa!”—trotting off toward some goal or other, with a feedbag that gets emptier all the time. Zwingli’s goal on this particular morning, the one that began so inauspiciously, was obvious: eggs, sausage, and wine. And where was that chaibe Julietta, who was supposed to go fetch him this stuff? Zwingli had once been what Don Darío liked so much about him, and he had reason to believe he would soon have to be that special something again. Julietta was more eager than usual. She realized what faced her if things went wrong again in there behind closed doors. She’d prefer, she said saucily, a mother who was hitting the bottle. I had given her some money (Zwingli couldn’t quite locate any of his own); “she” was in the kitchen, and, well, within the family you just don’t bite on individual pesetas. So step on it, girl, this is a rush job. The girl stuck out her tongue and vanished. Everything was happening smoothly.