Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

When I came to her house looking for a rental, she had experienced sheer terror, for I was the spit and image of a ship’s officer with the East India Line. He had been engaged to her friend, who lived a few houses down the street. A year ago he had left her, which is to say he never returned and never sent word of any kind. She, Madame, had taken such pity on her friend that on her own she initiated a search for the blackguard, but with no success. She was told that he was still with the same shipping line, but that he was now sailing exclusively in Indian waters. When I had ascended her stairs with my prognathic jaw—“ un peu brutal, mais pas du tout du boxeur féroce ”—she had been able to master her fright only with difficulty. For here he was, the absconded lover, in clever disguise with loden coat and soft-brim hat (my romantic-egghead getup of the period), returning to make her the confidante of his machinations. But as soon as I had come halfway upstairs she realized that it was a case of mistaken identity.

I told her that I remembered the rather unfriendly reception she gave me, but that I ascribed it to my clumsy French. It was, she said, precisely the way I garbled her language that had put me in her favor. My mutterings had displayed such queer distortions and such totally un-Gallic sensibility that she found it charming—“ et elle l’est toujours, Monsieur !” So she abandoned all suspicion of offering shelter to the double of a mangy canaille . One token of the fondness Madame henceforth felt for me was the enormous double bed in place of a single-sleeper.

I knew that since the death of her pauvre Perronet Madame cherished only two creatures in this world: her monstrous tomcat Melchisédech and a woman friend, Trüüs, whom oddly enough I never laid eyes on — the jilted fiancée. Our first encounter had taken place on that fateful Saturday afternoon. Madame was late with her shopping, and the girl had come over. As usual, I opened the door from above, and in the semi-darkness of the stairwell Trüüs took me immediately for her lover and thought: back from India and now having a secret love affair with my best friend! Treachery! Back home she wrote a few deranged words of farewell to her parents and then turned on the gas oven. The police and the municipal health authorities were summoned to the scene. They roused Madame from her bed and took her to her friend’s house to identify the corpse. Madame testified that the probable cause of Trüüs’ suicide was the girl’s encounter with me — therefore I had better prepare myself for an interrogation. The following day an officer from Criminal Investigation actually came and looked me over. In profile and frontal view he compared my visage with a number of photographs of the sailor. The session resulted in his complete satisfaction: I had the young lady’s suicide on my conscience.

This Doppelgänger syndrome, cleared of all the humbug associated with it ever since Samuel Johnson, this thing that had already afflicted me inside my sleeping bag — now it was after me once again at the pier in Palma, triggered by Beatrice’s remark about the phantom double, as we approached the landing platform inch by inch. Again I saw myself on the dead girl’s album pages, held to my view by a policeman: Vigoleis with the rank of an officer of the Royal Dutch Merchant Marine, with gold epaulets and chevrons and tam-o’-shanter. Even my own mother would have recognized her prodigal son, delighted that he achieved such success — not, to be sure, as a devout parish priest (bearing the bishop’s crook beneath his cassock, in keeping with our family tradition), but as a fully respectable, seaworthy subaltern. What mother likes to show around a son who, far from having made anything of himself, chucks the products of his hard work into a coal stove? As a sailor he would travel the seven seas — earthbound, to be sure, and lacking any claim on a pension in Eternity — but not a bad alternative at that. Ah, dear Mother, my breast was too narrow for the clergy, and not tough enough for the merchant marine. A few verses, that’s all that has entered it, and a few sparse hairs, that’s all to be found upon it. And anyway, Mother would never have approved of a tattoo with the symbols of the cardinal virtues, not to mention a purplish one of a naked woman… My Spanish comrades-in-dreams up on the bridge of the Ciudad de Barcelona were doubtless more suave; they also looked more arrogant than us palefaces. They fit exactly the image I had, ever since reading pirate stories in my youth, of the occupation I should have trained for. But because I was neither a Spanish nor a Dutch seaman I had cost a human being her life — that is Vigoleisian logic, which gets less and less convincing as I apply my fantasy to playing tricks on the laws of ratiocination.

“Vigo! Olá ! Vigoleis! Vigo!”

I had lost sight of Beatrice, and found her again only after hearing my name called. The voice was coming from the pier, and we both looked simultaneously towards the spot where again we heard, “Vigoleis! Olá ! Vigo! Vigolo!”

Far back in a crowd of people stood our moribund Zwingli, or perhaps someone who thought he was or was pretending to be Zwingli — I must be careful not to breathe life into a spirit that has no such claim. But that fellow over there, incidentally a filthy chap, can’t be the Zwingli I remember from Cologne and a polite visit in my parental home, the urbane, sophisticated interpreter for the travel agencies of Kuoni and Cook. And yet, and yet…!

“Beatrice, if that guy over there isn’t your brother Zwingli, then I’ll…”

Well? What did I intend to do? For the life of me I can’t remember. Something quite drastic, though, of that I am certain, for all of a sudden I was absolutely convinced that this man… and then I only had time to lift up Beatrice, who had collapsed on a suitcase. I too was devastated — not by Zwingli’s resurrection from the dead, but by the fact that a woman with the most variegated travel experiences imaginable, some of them approaching the uncanny, was sitting there on a piece of luggage like a classic heap of misery. Beatrice was acquainted with a world I knew only in novels. She had served as female companion to the wives of millionaires, women who regarded the marriage bed as a trampoline built for leaps into adulterous pleasures that in turn led to poisonings and inheritance swindles. It baffled me totally that she should now behave like this. Of course, the leave-taking from her mother in the Basel hospital had been awful. Not until the telegram arrived later announcing her passing did she dare to tell me, and then with a depth of sorrow unusual for her, about her last hour at the bedside — and even then she told me nothing new. Meanwhile came our trip, one she was inwardly not at all prepared for, toward yet another separation from a loved one. Her family was disintegrating member by member. Her father died of typhus in the Argentinian pampas. Mother and children returned to Europe, the embalmed corpse lodged in the hold of the selfsame freighter. Later came her life at the side of her beloved Vigoleis, who constantly kept her in a state of febrile anxiety ever since their days in Sacred Cologne, where she once pulled him out of the waves of Father Rhine. In a sudden relapse the irrepressibly cheerful nihilist tried to drown himself, willfully breaking his contract as an easily replaceable stage extra in the Lord’s Great World Theater. Strictly speaking, I had committed no such misdemeanor, except in the form of theological rhetoric after the fact. For I stand firmly in the midst of Creation like one of Frederick the Great’s corporals, thoroughly hazed until he learns to stand at attention. But with a difference: Vigoleis has learned to endure better than those historical automatons.