Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

This whimpering king of the mendicants was squatting there as we climbed the steps of the Calle de la Seo to the square of the same name, from which the cathedral ascends in all its majesty. Porfirio — this was the misshapen fellow’s name — crawled his way over to us and intoned his little speech in German. I gave him a few coins and received his assurance that heaven would reward me — not up there (his eyes, veiled in green, pointed in the traditional direction), but here upon our earth, “Right now, Sir, today, before the arrival of the evening!”

The sea was as smooth as a mirror. Boats with drooping sails drifted in the void, waiting in vain for a breeze that would take them back into harbor. We found a bench and waited for the air to freshen up. Tomorrow was another day. Everything would work out all right if only we stuck together.

We had been sitting there for an hour gazing morosely out to sea, each occupied with the other’s thoughts, when we noticed two persons walking down the avenue of palms along the quay. They climbed the theatrical staircase that led to the cathedral — two tall women holding each other close, no doubt a mother with her daughter. I am not often subject to attacks of sentimentality, but following those inhumane scenes in the Street of Solitude, where a prehistoric world loudly demanded its rights with tooth and nail, this sight of pacific familial love touched my heart. Every now and then they stopped; the mother caressed the tall girl, the tall girl kissed her mother, and then they both looked out on the seascape and continued their walk up the steps. What an edifying sight, this exclusive affection of two people for each other, occurring here at such a romantic place, a spot that no one who has ever stood there is likely to forget: beneath the gothic arch showing the scene of the Last Supper, the Puerta del Mirador. Our two incarnate symbols of human concord directed their steps to this portal in order to enjoy even warmer waves of elation in the presence of these saintly images with their whitewash of pigeon droppings. And no wonder, for no one who lives in Palma lets a week go by without mounting these ramparts to gaze outward to the blue expanse from whence, centuries earlier, the conqueror approached under sail to deliver the island from the scimitar of the infidels.

As mother and child came closer, we recognized them as our mother and our child, the horny nag with her filly. And they recognized us as the infidels, the Saracens, the pirates, the incorrigibles, the grandparents of the devil — and who knows what all else. Pilar crossed herself, Julietta spat in our direction — two gestures corresponding to their respective ages and world experience. Then they passed on slowly, with the same dignified air as when they arrived. Soon they will be among the beggars, and before they enter the cathedral to genuflect before the image of the Holy Maid of the Pillar, they will already have bribed heaven itself — and with our money, too, because we had been keeping a common household budget, albeit a rather one-sided one. It remained to be conjectured just how much money they would toss to the mangy pimps of heaven and hell. Your fate depends on it, Vigoleis! For you must not forget that heaven hears the pleas of those who sin in its name, and who allow love to be made in its name, and for the greater glory of the Lord. And do not forget what you have already been told: that in Spanish bordellos there is a little shrine in a corner, where the ladies see to it that the eternal lamp never goes out. In her apartment boudoir Pilar, too, had a little silver vessel with just such a gentle flame floating in it, illuminating with its golden glow the many-colored garments of the Queen of Heaven. If the two of them agree to do business up there on the cathedral square, and if they contribute one single perro chico (five-centimos) less than you did, then just like Beatrice, who is superstitious, I will take it as a disastrous omen.

In Pilar’s quarters supper was at nine o’clock. We pondered whether we shouldn’t grab a bite somewhere else, and then rush to our room as soon as we got home. But that could surely be interpreted as desertion, a verdict that, oddly enough after our virtual defeat in battle, we wanted to avoid. Among humans, all friction is said to arise from misunderstandings — a theory I firmly believe in, because I regard the world itself as a misunderstanding. My biggest misunderstanding was without doubt to have interfered with mother and child at a moment when they were in the process of working out their own little misunderstanding.

When we entered the house entrance and stairwell for the second time on this day, something came whizzing down the dark passageway and landed loudly on the stone floor right in front of us. Another object arrived directly after this one, confirming the laws of free-fall velocity that had given me such torments back in my German schoolroom. Then it rained once again from above; this time something came bounding down the staircase, and then the upstairs door was slammed shut. The lighter elements of this precipitation hovered for a second in the air, then fell slowly downwards like the snowflakes in those magic glass spheres that fascinated me when I was a child. It was leaves — inscribed leaves, literature — that came flying toward us and landed on their originator. For a moment I felt like a tourist feeding the pigeons on the Piazza San Marco in Venice.

Beatrice’s and Vigoleis’ possessions were being evicted, and the two of them would surely have been tossed out as well if they hadn’t exalted themselves above all earthly concerns by tarrying for a half-hour inside the cathedral. What is more, blood would have flowed — not from scratches and lacerations, but from gaping flesh wounds inflicted by that Toledo blade. But as bad as this bouncing of their belongings was, heaven had prevented worse events. I would dearly love to know how much the bitch placed in those gouty palms on the cathedral square. But heaven, at least in Spain, does not permit anyone to peek into its cards. The Civil War gave me the hugest problems in this regard.

A pile of plunder on the Feira de Ladra in Lisbon, on the Waterlooplein in Amsterdam, on the old Jewish market square in Warsaw — just to name a few famous collection points for abandoned household goods — this was the scene of our heaped-up caboodle in the entrada of the Count’s apartment complex in the Street of Solitude. The owners stood by speechless. But it was only this mute behavior of theirs that made them differ from the dealers at junk sales, whose job it is to fob off the stuff they’ve bought on even lower types than themselves.

It was nine o’clock, supper time chez Pilar. “Aha,” I was just thinking to myself, “there’ll be two less place-settings tonight.” But wait! What is that sound? It was a low tone, like a gong announcing “Ladies and gentlemen, dinner is served”—and then there was a horrible crash.

“She’s destroying my piano, that crazed slut!” Beatrice shouted in French. “Quick, quick, the key to the apartment!”

Beatrice had allowed mother and daughter to commit reciprocal mayhem; she had rescued Vigoleis by applying her Indian stratagem of slow poison; but now that her beloved instrument was having its wiry heart violated, there was no more question of methodical calculation. I grabbed her skirt and held her back. What a superb climactic moment for a small-town, low-budget amateur theater! Minimal props: a few pieces of rickety furniture, some scraps of used paper. But now witness the great scene of our hero Vigoleis — or let’s call him Don Vigo for the sake of local color — which the author will now create with bated breath:

Thou fool! Thou darest snatch the evil axe

She holds aloft to split thy skull in two