Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Over the years I saw many bombs from Alonso’s atelier go off in Palma. These explosive pronouncements had the best intentions of doing away with the entire clerical clique. But when, for example, they got thrown at streetcars whose passengers were politely asked to disembark beforehand, it still took some powerful anarchists’ shoulders to overturn the vehicle. On the other hand, the bombs made short work of window glass. The shattering noise mingled promisingly with the explosion, the bomb-chuckers cheered in the cause of “freedom,” cursed the bourgeoisie and the clergy, and then withdrew to a café to discuss their next plot. When Franco exploded the big bomb that turned the whole country into a cámara ardiente , Don Alonso and his buddies were forced to realize that what they had been up to amounted to stuffing butifarras —about which, more in my Epilogue. For the moment, let us enjoy peace for a while longer. It is so profoundly calming now that the noise of the fireworks has died away.

Doña Inés was love itself, kindness itself, solicitude itself, and she was all these things regardless of the fact that she was also ugliness itself. Having no children, she was as busy as a bee — a cause-and-effect relation that would make no sense in northern Europe. In Spain, mothers with multiple children are condemned to indolence, a result of their tumbling from one trauma to the next as they deal with their offsprings’ plight, which is so seldom mitigated by happiness. I never saw Doña Inés with empty hands. She was fierce even with a dust cloth, although she always conducted a losing battle. Her staff knew well enough why they weren’t asked to do the dusting. It would have required the entire army of monkeys commanded by the German guest in Room 13 to assist Beppo in keeping the grime from fulfilling its bourgeois function. Doña Inés didn’t lay her hands in her lap until the day she died. A few months ago a friend told me of her passing away. She was in her early forties when we committed ourselves to her care. Her hair was already then snow-white, and her face featured a constant smile that wasn’t meant to be one. What caused this illusion of merriment was an unfortunate play of wrinkles near her mouth. Perhaps “play” is saying too much, for as an innkeeper she might well have worn a perpetual smile without harboring an iota of good will toward her guests. “Keep smiling”—that’s what the Americans call this technique of using a lie to smooth over the rough edges of life. It is certain that I never saw her laughing, but then it was no laughing matter to keep charge of the crowd of bungling domestics who served under her scepter. Come to think of it, she herself served under the cudgel of her gigantic philandering husband, the one who had chopped down his family tree so that he could crawl around all the more conveniently in the depths of the shrubbery.

Among the female personnel, the most remarkable was the cook. She was a short, plump girl with a significant bosom, from the depths of which there rose little clouds of smoke, making her appear as though she were always carrying a steaming bowl of soup. She believed in God with the type of faith that keeps the believer from ever having to blush in the face of the One believed in. We could have thought that she was constantly offering a ritual gift of incense to the Almighty. But this was not the case. As she went about her chores Josefa puffed on a pipe, and she stashed it in her capacious cleavage when working at the stove, while explaining a Spanish recipe to her guests, or while she had to carry in the food herself because the table waiters were off wallowing somewhere else. An expert in matters pertaining to smoke, Captain von Martersteig, later told me that Josefa wore between her breasts an asbestos pouch hand-crafted by our friend the Count. As a reconnaissance pilot in Baron von Richthofen’s squadron, Martersteig had enjoyed a bird’s-eye view of many events, and thus we can believe that he made reliable observation of the cook’s bosom. Unfortunately, his current status was limited to low-level flying of this sort, which is to say… But I am not yet through with our little fireplug of a cook, Josefa.

Everybody in the house loved this little ageless, God-fearing, honest girl with her smoke-producing gentleman’s vice. I soon took her into my heart, and more than once she pressed me to her ample cushions. She was a good cook, Josefa was, but always with the same menu — which wasn’t her fault. The Count’s Boarding House was not, after all, a “Príncipe” with a chef who, if he worked in Germany, would be awarded the title of Privy Councillor or, like some painters in oils, a professorship. At the Count’s house the menu had to be inexpensive, in order to keep the price of lodging within reason. The hot water sold by my grandfather was no doubt cheaper still, but I don’t wish to make invidious comparisons. At Doña Inés’ table no one suffered hunger or thirst. And if the two of us did feel such pangs later, it was not at her board, but out in God’s open air.

Everyone loved Josefa, even old English spinsters and even Beatrice, who normally kept in check her feelings for fellow humans. And yet this cook had enemies under the Count’s roof against whom she was defenseless. She had two enemies: Beppo the monkey and Lorico, the Inca cockatoo.

Beppo pestered this roly-poly girl. He leaped on her shoulders from behind and groped lasciviously down between her smoke-cured breasts to steal her pipe, a move at which he was sometimes successful. With such an incubus on her back, Josefa could have earned more money in a traveling circus than here in this anarchic island hostelry, where the clients could watch the entertaining spectacle for free. Of course, Josefa hurled choice epithets at Beppo, but the colorful terms she used were not authentic curses, for she did not permit sacred names to pass her lips. Thus she always lost out, and always got pelted by the screeching Beppo with all sorts of objects that weren’t nailed down. As if to excuse her defeats, Josefa would say that if only the monkey didn’t look like somebody’s kid, she would long since have slaughtered him with the big kitchen knife that she whetted every morning on the stone staircase in the courtyard. During this process she was regularly spied upon from up in the palm tree by the crafty Beppo. Too meagerly endowed with human sentiments after all, the sacrosanct temple animal was of course unaware of her sacrificial yearnings. With all due respect for Josefa’s man-fearing Christian attitude, it must be said that even without such inhibitions she never would have skinned this monkey alive, simply because he was her master’s favorite pet.

Her conflict with the cockatoo was of a different sort, although here, also, human-all-too-human impulses broke through the barriers of animalhood. Lorico had a loose tongue. His former owner, a Portuguese ship captain, had taught him two words that probably meant the whole world to someone who had nothing but water and sky around him for weeks on end: porra and puta . With these vocables the bird assaulted everyone who approached his perch, each time raising his red and yellow crest feathers as if emitting these words in a state of highest excitement. Not even Count Hermann Keyserling, who on one of his visits to the island inspected the palace of his renegade fellow nobleman, was able to discern whether Lorico was enunciating his words in rage or in jest. Years later he remembered this bird when I mentioned in his presence the phenomenon of animal speech, thinking that I might offer him some novel zoological perspectives for his work on The Cosmos of Meaning .

Josefa was hated by this Inca blood, and she hated the bird too, and thus the animosity was mutual. The bird’s reasons must remain obscure, but the cook’s were an open book. Josefa took offense at one word in the educated bird’s vocabulary — a term that is probably the one most frequently used in the whole Spanish language: the little disyllable puta . In Spain, nothing at all will work without this word, simply because things will not work without the thing that the word signifies. The more often our distinguished anarchist cheated on his even higher-born spouse with the types thus signified, all the less did Josefa tolerate the use of such colloquialisms in his house, where she went about her work with the touching loyalty of servants who often are more solicitous of their employers’ reputation than the employers are themselves. It goes without saying that she also had personal reasons for wishing to gag the bird. Josefa was a chaste person, and her primness was in no way vitiated by the acrid smoke from the noxious shag that at times wafted up out of the crater of her bosom. That nasty word puta wounded her sense of shame just as severely as did the monkey’s habit of letting his hands rove around in imitation of human lechery.