Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

In Book Three it’ll all start up again. Our heroes will get sent up once more, while you, dear reader, will probably have pulled in your sails. No one will hinder you from casting off this burden. But wouldn’t it be better if you returned home right now, seeing that we can’t remain travel companions, not even to mention such a thing as friendship? My addressing you as “dear” reader would no longer be appropriate; I would have to ask you to look around for other literary adventures. Your local bookseller can advise you best in this matter.

But — no offense! And farewell! Perhaps we shall meet again. It is such a small world. And what is more, our Vigoleis’ name is now linked with that of a Portuguese mystic. As above, your bookstore manager will be happy to provide you with details.

But you others — you readers who are still “dear” to us — we must get on with it. Hundreds more pages lie ahead of us, leading us on countless highways and byways. So now, please, here by the rear stairway, let’s enter Book Two.

When a publisher releases a book, he counts upon a certain number of readers whose interest and purchasing power will allow him to undertake such an adventure of the mind. This implies that it is conceivable to consider readers as the retroactive sponsors of a given work, and that is precisely how I think of them. I don’t mean this in the sense of those early-medieval artistic masters who gave their wealthy donors a tiny corner somewhere near the bottom edge of their paintings, showing them gazing devoutly upward at the Community of Saints. No, I’m thinking more of Renaissance artists who placed their benefactors on the same level as the saints and all saintly persons. For this reason, my charitable reader has the right to move about freely in my work. He may even situate himself several levels higher than certain individual characters, a privilege he will surely take pleasure in. It is only natural that I myself remain in control, although as I have said, anyone is free to seek salvation as he wishes. This is especially true here in our rooming house belonging to Count Number Two, a man who tends to attenuate or even abrogate the salvationist claims of his Church on the basis of his anarchistic sympathies.

Beatrice and Vigoleis are asleep, and will remain so until well past noon, but not because they are particularly enamored of Spanish customs. No, they have each taken a double dose of sedative, so that they will remain undisturbed by any outside agency whatever, invited or uninvited. Following their expulsion from the Street of Solitude, they have fully deserved their profound slumber. Let us, then, use this interim to familiarize ourselves just a bit with their new surroundings: their abode, its owners, its paying guests, and its badly paid service personnel.

Once when I was in conversation with the publisher of this book, I mentioned in passing that it would contain a half-anarchistic, semi-Catholic Count. My assertion met with a violent objection on the part of this publisher, the first and most generous benefactor of my jottings. Poking his cigar suddenly in my direction, he cried, “That’s impossible! Either someone is an anarchist or he’s a Catholic. But both at the same time? You must be dreaming!”

“Mynheer van Oorschot,” I replied, “every publisher is at the mercy of the notorious dreams of his authors. And the crazier those fantasies are, the nuttier their ideas seem to be, it’s all the better for the resulting book! I assure you that my ‘impossible’ Count is a pure prodigy of Nature, which every now and then is capable of such marvels. As soon as you reach this spot in my manuscript I trust that you will be convinced.”

We have now arrived at this Count, a person even more remarkable than my publisher imagined, as we shall see when we examine his “impossible” trinitarian makeup: a Count by virtue of his father’s name; an anarchist in his own right and in the name of the freedom that he loves above all else; and a Catholic in the name of his rather less than pious spirit — although piety and Catholicism are not necessarily complementary concepts, as we can learn from a glance at papal history. If, however, a Spanish grandee turns anarchist, this is a much more instructive kind of metamorphosis than the one involving our little Vigoleis, a.k.a Albert, in those faraway years of his childhood, when he sought to protect his cache of toys from his brothers’ tyranny by turning into a girl and playing with dolls. That’s why I have been able to move past “little Albert” with just a few words. I shall have to take more time with our Señor Conde , although it won’t be until we reach the Epilogue that I can do full justice to his true stature and his confusing tripartite nature.

When a Count turns anarchist, he renounces his long aristocratic title. He takes an axe to his family tree. He hammers flat the ring that bears his dynasty’s coat of arms. He then calls his palace a “house”—a rather ineffective form of renaming, for under the same roof there is still room for kings and even for God Himself.

Our Count thought otherwise, and in so thinking, he constituted a minority of one — which is of course just what he had in mind as an anarchist. The renowned Baedeker, for example, couldn’t be bothered about this hidalgo ’s social transformation. The famous tourist guidebook portrayed his palacio for what it was, and referred to its owner as the scion of a titulado , who gets a few lines of his own. I, too, have no reason to call this venerable building a house or a cottage, just to suit a certain apostate’s whim. In architectural style it could belie neither its glorious past nor the fact that many blue-bloods entered and exited through its doors. They held on to money bags that got lighter and lighter over time, and in the end were powerless to retard the downfall of this particular “house.”

“If what you want is loss, then become your own boss,” my grandfather used to say. Whereupon he bought his own tavern and hung a sign on the door saying “Make your own coffee!” This pioneer forebear of mine sold boiling water by the measured pint or quart to whole families, who in long processions made pilgrimages to his bar, asking to brew up their do-it-yourself java. But it wasn’t actually the hot water that attracted these families. My little home town was situated on the pilgrim road to Kevelaer.

Our Count Number Two was likewise a loser. To be more exact, he was well on his way toward becoming one when I met him. He, too, nailed up a sign at his entrance to lure pilgrims from all over the world into his palace, but not to offer them hot water. He provided passable shelter for a modest price. My reader may expect his sign to have read “House of the People’s Friend” or “ Fonda for Catholic Anarchists,” or maybe the other way around, “for Anarchist Catholics.” But no, in gold letters on a blue ground his sign bore the reactionary legend Pensión del Conde , “The Count’s Boarding House.” And behold, it was just as great a success as the hot-water hospice run by a certain Lower-Rhenish speculator in pilgrimages. Beneath the Count’s roof there was always a crowd of guests, people who had either seen, or hoped still to see, better days, just as my grandfather’s water customers were mostly driven by a promise that beckoned in their direction from the goal of their pilgrimage. The Count had made himself the object of his own disbelief. If anyone had pointed out an anomaly in his commercial house sign, he could well have replied that his abode indeed did not contain a genuine Count — but then again, who could expect to find a specific bird at the cash register of the “Golden Swan Hotel”? Or to be served at Sears, Roebuck by a stag?