Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

With the other term that he learned in the Portuguese ship captain’s language school, Lorico was rather less conspicuous among Spaniards. A Portuguese Josefa would have wrung his neck on the spot. In Spanish, porra can mean walking-cane, truncheon, boasting, obfuscation, thunder, and several more things, but never anything that one wouldn’t utter in the presence of the most innocent of young female souls. In Portuguese, on the other hand, porra is not presentable. The Portuguese vernacular, by means of an embarrassing process of localization, has confined the word’s meaning almost exclusively to its etymological root. Lorico was not a linguist in any academic sense; he used the term in its Lusitanian definition, just as it had been cherished by the old salt who knew his way around all the oceans and all the harbor brothels of the world, and who in all his seafaring days had probably never once heard of semantics or metaphorical discourse. Here on the island, Lorico remained loyal to his original tutor by parroting forth his rudimentary ABC’s even after the captain had jumped ship and taken off somewhere with his puta without paying the harbor innkeeper’s bill. The illiterate Josefa had no inkling of the curious processes that allow a language to use one and the same word to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes.

To be honest about it, I wasn’t aware of such subtleties at the time, either. But years later I was vividly reminded of our grandee’s Inca cockatoo when Pascoaes, whose parents had been close to the Portuguese court, told me the story of how King Don Carlos felt obliged to reject the credentials of an Italian emissary who bore the resounding name of Conte Porra di Porra. From a Portuguese perspective the surname indicated a lineage of the most suspect kind. Might the Italian court, the King inquired with a fine sense of humor, not have sent a less insistent nobleman? A simple “Porra” was perhaps acceptable, but such a painful reduplication, Porra di Porra, was too much of an affront even to the emissary himself.

British ladies, ignorant of the Iberian languages, had great fun listening to this squawking bird, and often inquired as to what it was saying. Again and again I was asked to interpret His Master’s Voice, and this was not at all an entertaining assignment. Each time it happened, I was stymied by the inevitable question, “Does he really mean it?”

Beatrice had the same effect on the bird as a red cape on a fighting bull, or the sight of a priest on Don Darío. On the bird’s part, it was hatred at first sight, and this drove Beatrice into alliance with the cook. It was probably due to Lorico’s alert intraspecific instincts, which sensed in this new guest a degeneration of the Inca bloodline, abetted by an official action of the Immigration Service in Basel. Lorico was outraged at such a corruption of his race. At first Beatrice was oblivious of such connections, but when I explained them to her, she treated this bigoted bird with the same contempt that she was later to present to the Nazis, who would likewise accuse me of “profanation of the blood.”

I have yet to mention Pepe, a young errand-boy and jack-of-all-trades, whose extended notions about the meaning of “it all” brought considerable dishonor to a house that he served as adroitly in his blue livery outfit as Beppo did in his scarlet one. Like the monkey, he was a thief. Today it is not easy for me to give an accurate portrait of Pepe. With his agile fingers he already points us in the direction of Portugal and the vintner’s palace of the poet Pascoaes, where a similarly caparisoned diminutive lackey was also prone to confusing mine and thine. This Lusitanian Pepe, Victorino by name, with his pranks and his thirteen-year-old bravado, obscures my image of his less cunning Mallorquine counterpart, so I think I will save him for a book on my Portuguese adventures. There were of course differences between them. Pepe got trounced daily by his exalted master, whereas at Pascoaes no one laid a hand on Victorino, since according to the castellan’s thesis, proclaimed in all his books, man is not to be regarded as a sinner but as sin itself. Pepe stole on a small scale, Victorino in a big way. The anarchist’s clients thought of the modest drain on their funds as a kind of visitor’s tax, levied by the management under the table in return for the privilege of witnessing highly dramatic scenes of chastisement that were gleefully applauded by the monkey and the cockatoo.

I never blamed the boy for playing fast and loose with other people’s property. What was he to do, living in a community where bombs were manufactured for the violent redistribution of the world’s wealth? Unfortunately we were ourselves the cause of Pepe’s getting thrown out of the palace personally by Don Alonso. I had left a fairly large sum of money in our room, unlocked, and the little thief’s anarchistic tendencies veered rather rapidly toward a dangerous capitalistic karma. He snatched our cash, was caught by a cleaning girl, but wasn’t told on until after he had blown all the pesetas. The scene of dismissal was grandiose, and compensated us to an extent for our no less grandiose loss. Pepe scratched and bit and, using Lorico’s vocabulary, spilled out to all within earshot the most intimate secrets of his revolutionary employer — this in the presence of Doña Inés, whose morose features remained stony. The cockatoo went wild with joy on his perch, sending his feed pellets flying through the breakfast room, which was the site of these leave-taking festivities. Over and over again the wise-acre bird let go with his two words, which now became truly germane to the situation. No doubt, the parrot felt transported back to his old teacher’s below-decks cabin, where goings-on of this kind were the order of the day. Captain von Martersteig, summoned forth by the martial hubbub, shuffled in wearing his huge fur slippers, but he went directly to his room when I told him that Pepe had just been convicted of stealing a considerable amount of money. The old soldier wanted to make sure that the little pilferer hadn’t made a visit to his musette bag, where he kept the meager pension sent down to him through special channels by Field Marshal Hindenburg himself. But nothing was missing. The cook prayed. Beppo, waiting in sleazy ambush on the courtyard stairway, tossed dirt in his fellow miscreant’s face and then leaped back up, barking and screeching, into the palm fronds. Nevertheless, his simian freedom was not to last much longer. A few days later he was put on a chain, but one that allowed him to continue his business of keeping the tree free of dust.

After all: Beppo, too, was a robber. An English lady was busy painting the romantic interior courtyard when with a lightning leap he went at her hair to swipe a beguiling silver barrette. Instead, her entire head of hair remained in his grasp. The lady became quite exercised, trying with both hands to cover her bald skull, while the shameless thief set to plucking her wig to pieces. For a long time afterward her scalp hung like a hunting trophy from a thin strand of the coconut palm, to the silent amusement of a sickly Dutch plantation owner, Mr. van Beverwijn. He had lived for many long years among the headhunters of Borneo, probably none of whom was as threatening as his Mevrouw. Mijnheer van Bewerwijn was now reminded of life in the jungle, and for a time he regained his spirits. But then he relapsed and atrophied further like his sclerotic kidney, which was the reason he had left the colonies. I daresay I bestowed some light on his darkened soul during the weeks we spent together at the rooming house. I was the only one with whom Mr. van Beverwijn could hold a conversation in his native tongue. He preferred not to listen to his wife, because she spoke in the tongues of Christian Science. In Book Three we shall again encounter these guests from the East Indies; Mijnheer will be even more withered and lonesome, and Mevrouw will have made further advances in her increasingly un-Christian hyper-Christianity.