Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

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That maddened maenad? Let her vent her bile

On wood and wire! Desist, if thou hold’st sacred

Thy brother’s life and limb!

But Vigoleis wasn’t standing onstage at your local Thespian Club. Instead, calmly and in resigned tones, using the voice of his own small-scale personality, he stated, “Beatrice, just let that slattern up there chop up anything she likes. Nothing can hurt us any more. If you make a false step now, she’ll chuck out our dear Zwingli too, and then we will have come to this island for nothing at all. It would be better if he had just up and died, as he promised us in his telegram. But in this accursed country nobody ever seems to want to stick to agreements. Where is that study I was supposed to be occupying? Where is that concert grand for you? That piano was nothing but a miserable honky-tonk upright! As soon as the money comes from Berlin I’ll get you your Bechstein, you can depend on that as solidly as you do on your superstition. Let’s just take care of our own situation, which now looks pretty grim. We’ll have to…”

Once again the second-storey door opened, and once again it rained cats and dogs down on us in the darkened stairwell. Pilar had transformed the piano into kindling ready for the stove, not including a few sturdy metal hinges and bolts — not a bad job of lumberjacking, considering the short time it took her. Only the bronze sounding board and the wire strings had resisted her efforts at demolition. Zwingli later had these carted away. In the aftermath he told us that he thought his final hour had arrived when the wrecking action started. If Beatrice had entered the apartment, he would, he averred, have breathed his last — a conviction that we share with him completely. Pilar had fumed about that wh… of a sister of his and her boche of a boyfriend. Not until she began taking out her rage at the musical commode had Zwingli begun to feel momentarily more secure in his own skin.

And so Beatrice had saved her brother’s life after all. The power of music.

Upstairs the music had come to an end. Peace again prevailed under the roof of the Conde’s “apple.” While I certainly would not like to be inside Zwingli’s skin, it would be useful to have that nail of his to get us out of this terrible mess. I decided to look up Mr. Emmerich, who had already had many experiences in Spain, and who could probably give us some advice in this perilous situation. With a few brief words I brought him up to date. The scars on my face left him no doubt that I had been waylaid, that the robbers had stripped me, beaten me sore, and left me for dead. Emmerich, a man of imposing words, was also a man of quick action. All our stuff went into the back room of his shop, not the first time that this space had to bear the consequences of Pilar’s rabid erotic behavior. Like an energetic ragpicker of my own existence, I schlepped our gear around the respectable street corner, and by eleven the job was done. My fellow-countryman, whose elbow-room was getting tighter all the time, told us about a pensión where he himself had lived for a few years. It was owned by an impecunious count from the mainland, who had married the even poorer daughter of a count and countess from the island. It was right nearby, just across the Borne in one of the little streets that lead to the harbor. Should he make a quick call, he asked. Single room, twin beds?

In the Pensión del Conde there was a room for us, a single with twin beds, and we were lying in them by midnight.

On the wall opposite the beds were two wooden panels with burned-in lettering, products from the hobby workshop of our half-Catholic, half-anarchist aristocratic landlord. “The Lord’s Ten Commandments” hung where one usually expects to be told to ring once for breakfast, twice for the maid, thrice to make a complaint. The Ten Commandments are no less famous, and so we know exactly what the hobbyist’s glowing stylus had inscribed in ninth position: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”!

Vigoleis didn’t see the panels until the following morning. Yet even without an Old-Testament warning, during the preceding night he had not coveted his neighbor’s wife — indeed, if truth be told, not even his own. He slept, and Beatrice slept, too. Dreamlessly, both of them, for they had each taken a tablet to ward off evil spirits. We should let them have their rest. It had been, as we have noted, a very hot day.

Three stars, my dear reader, separate us from our sleeping heroic couple, and that is a more respectable form of insulation than three layers of whitewash on an apartment wall. Thus we shall not need to whisper, as we stay together a while to take stock of what’s happened, and to make a tentative survey of what is to come.

The first part of my jottings is finished. You have followed our heroes’ footsteps through thick and thin, though thickness has admittedly outweighed thinness in this report. You might have expected such a development, however, since the Spanish proverb you saw at the threshold of this work was meant as a clever warning: whoever would prefer not to mingle with such a dissolute brood ought to put the book down and say, “Please, not that kind of thing!” In any case, you are under no coercion to read me, considering that the publishing industry offers you hundreds of authors who outstrip me in every way. And yet you did not take fright at first sight; you joined in on our trip to accompany a relative of the author’s on his final journey. Then it turned out that this relative was only seemingly dead. In actuality, he never again became truly chipper. That is to say, in our Fourth Book he will lift himself out of an anabaptism with a grand gesture, and with unabashed audacity. But then we shall already be hearing the first explosions from Morocco, a sign that General Franco has completed his apprenticeship with Mussolini and Hitler, and is handing in his journeyman’s test piece. We shall lose sight of Zwingli, and almost of ourselves as well.

This vital toughness of his, his cynical announcement of impending death, when death wasn’t close by at all, his appeal to our soft-heartedness and Christian altruism — such behavior has meant bad times for all of us. But for us heroes, things have been a good deal harder to withstand than for you, my reader, who have had the option from the beginning of shutting my book at any passage that strikes you as too extravagant, too shameless, too objectionable, too candid, or too sentimental. As the pacemakers for this story, we have had no such liberty. We were caught in the pincers; we had to stick to the text, which often enough turned out to be an Urtext of the most cryptic kind. But now tell us honestly: Haven’t we heroes of your book behaved quite courageously? Isn’t it true that we have neither kept anything under wraps nor added anything, so help us God? At the moment we are lying comfortably next to each other on our beds in a palace, on mattresses of kelp, the kind that needs no cooling layer of horsehair, and are enjoying a somewhat artificially induced slumber.

Surely you have already noticed: once again they are under a count’s roof! Can that be just happenstance? You will recall that Vigoleis once accused himself of aristocratic tendencies, whereas Beatrice is regal by nature and by virtue of her double legacy, as a daughter of the Incas and as a child of the oldest monarchy in the world, whose throne is occupied by a sovereign who rules the world in more than a proverbial sense. Nonetheless, our heroic duo was not led to their new shelter by feudal considerations. They had no time at all to ponder any such subtleties as they departed from the Count’s “apple” amid scorn and contempt, unless you imagine that Anton Emmerich, our Little Helper from Cologne, might have nudged their destiny somewhat in this direction. At this point we shall refrain from investigating the matter further. But count’s roof or no count’s roof, I can assure you of one thing: for quite a while you will see nothing more of the aforementioned brood. In the palacio owned by our anarchistic grandee, rabble of that sort are never spoken of — that is, not by human tongues. The fact that a parrot does so, is not without a certain annoyance, but we shall just have to look the other way. This feathered blabbermouth had a faulty upbringing, and now he thinks it is his duty to remind the residents of the rooming house that they are in Spain, in case they may have forgotten, in spite of the heat and the fleas — as is actually the case with Mr. Joachim von Martersteig, Army Cpt. Ret., in Room 13. But we shouldn’t reproach this roguish bird — I mean the one from the family of the psittaci —for following his nose and telling tales out of school.