Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

This Fräulein was an academically certified gymnastics teacher, a mannish type with blond hair and aquamarine eyes who spoke no language but German, and this with an inherited Saxon harshness. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about her. She kept modestly in the background, and was always happy when she could go outdoors to practice swimming and throwing the javelin. “The Germanic Fury” she was called out on the beach at Ca’s Català, where people scrambled whenever she heaved her spear into the ocean and dove in to fetch it like a trained dog. She never took part in mealtime conversation. The patriotic history of German gymnastics was not really a proper subject for our chats, not even in Frau Dr. Mensendieck’s diluted modern version.

I would much prefer to have sat at the indigenous side of this table d’hôte , where things proceeded much less decorously than in our Nordic corner. But I couldn’t have done such a thing to Beatrice. She immediately loses her appetite if somebody slurps his soup or pushes a spoon like a coal shovel straight into his mouth — not to mention the artful characters who eat with their knives without cutting their tongues. If industry could ever come out with a “safety knife,” such a prejudice would not endure for very long in the books on etiquette. Which reminds me of a funny story from among the little episodes of our life together. We were at table in Geneva, and the conversation revolved around Hitler and the Third Reich. Miserable victims of Nazism that we were, it was awkward for us there in the midst of a well-heeled though politically neutral gathering, whose members hadn’t yet realized that if the German hordes ever came stampeding across their border, the jig would be up for them too. I presented a political-philosophical defense of our position, while Beatrice remained contemptuously silent. Our host asked her for her opinion. She replied that she was unable to speak at table about Hitler, a man who ate with his knife. At which our host, who had just placed a morsel of food in his mouth with his knife, nearly choked. “ Mais, Madame …,” he said, whereupon the conversation took a sudden turn to the weather and the upcoming grape harvest. It was more than embarrassing.

One master of the skill in question was a boarder from the Spanish mainland, a Spanish Smith or Jones from Burgos, who was vacationing on the island with his wife and two daughters of fetchingly marriageable age. He was not an artist, unlike several who, according to Emmerich, spent time at the Pensión del Conde. But he had connections to the art world as a salesman for Dutch and German paint and brush manufacturers. Everybody who was anybody in Spanish art, Emmerich told us, squeezed paint from this man’s tubes and spread it on canvas with this man’s brushes. Miró, Zuloaga, Puigdengolas, and Sureda were among his distinguished customers. The Count on the easel, too, used to buy his art supplies from him. His hues had a brilliance that even the Old Masters would have been incapable of mixing. This tradesman of the palette was also an expert at mixing things on his dinner plate. My Spanish was too feeble to allow me to join in the discussion across the table. Friedrich translated a few things for me while Beatrice sat at her place with such disgust on her face that not even La Gerstenberg dared to strike up a conversation with her.

Martersteig explained the menu for us. He was familiar with Spanish cuisine, and was particularly expert when it came to salads — not even the tiniest snail escaped his monocular inspection. He would accept responsibility, he told us, for all the ingredients except the typhus bacilli. His earnest caveats on this score meant that most often he finished the entire bowl of salad all by himself. He owed his kitchen finesse indirectly to General Hindenburg. The Reich President had refused an increase in his spinal pension, and as a result Martersteig had to prepare his own dishes in his headquarters at Deyá. Compared to our Josefa, however, or to a Santiago Kastner, he was a culinary duffer, a master of the greasy spoon.

“Martersteig is a writer, too,” Friedrich suddenly said à propos of nothing at all.

“Too?” replied the gentleman under attack, turning around to face the two of us. “This young man no doubt intends his expression ’too’ as a compliment addressed to my person. But this young man is apparently unaware that his mischievous little adverb ‘too’ might also be offensive to you, Mr. Vigoleis. For as we well know, you ‘too’ are a writer. As for myself, I am not a writer ‘too.’ I write because I must. I have a task to fulfill. My writing is in an area quite different from yours, but still I would like you and Madame to hear a few pages of my manuscript sometime. I would be grateful for your opinion — I mean, of course, both of your opinions.”

“Huzzah! Long live our retired Captain, the generalissimo and head chimpanzee of his own army of monkeys! There they are, standing before us in rank and file, and we haven’t even finished our first course!”

It was Friedrich who said this, and it sounded like a victory proclamation. Frau Gerstenberg tried to pooh-pooh this bit of adolescent raillery. There was, she explained, this constant open animosity between her boy and the Captain, and it wasn’t a serious matter. The Army of the Monkeys was the title of the novel that Martersteig had been working on for years. He was continually revising his manuscript. His monkey recruits refused again and again to behave in the manner conceived for them by their author, as fully equivalent substitutes for a force of German national conscripts. Her explanation prompted Friedrich to the equivocal remark that this one-time military man was of course writing from personal experience.

Martersteig remained unperturbed by these words, intended partly as pure information, partly as provocation. Silently he shook his spherical head with its snow-white locks deftly arranged to conceal the bald spots. Then he set his monocle, took his fork, and busied himself with boning a red bream, which he then presented to Beatrice.

“Doña Inés is a clever woman,” said the Austrian Imperial Actress. “Twice a day she serves fish with dangerous bones. That forces our two fighting cocks to give all their attention to the plates in front of them. Otherwise their constant squabbling would be unbearable. Don’t you think so, Fräulein Höchst?”

“Begging your pardon,” said the expert fish-boner, thus relieving the young Dresden lady of the necessity of replying. “Just a few more weeks of your patience and I’ll be returning to my little mill-wheel castle in Deyá. By then my enemy will have calmed down.”

Friedrich, who had finished boning his own bream, started speaking again:

“That enemy of Martersteig’s is a writer, too. Too , I say. And he too has a ‘von’ in his name, but not all the time. Right now he’s one of the island’s most famous residents, although he doesn’t look it. His name is Graves, but as the grandson of our noted historian Ranke, he likes to call himself Robert von Ranke Graves. The Captain, who selects his army recruits so carefully, is also very choosy when picking his enemies.”

“Ginsterberg is a smart aleck, and he’s full of nonsense. By German standards, he’s also amazingly superficial and uncultured. Profundity? Not the gratings of a green cheese! They say he used to be a model student, trying to emulate his eminent father. But now he is sick. We’ll just have to show some understanding. But now let’s change the subject, Mr. Vigoleis. What were you saying a while ago about your V as in Victoria ?”

“Vigoleis with a V as in Victoria ? Oh, that was just a little joke. I was trying to come up with something to match your elaborate title, with your Captain, your Retired, your ‘von,’ and your Magdeburg. And even for this little bit of fun I had to do some borrowing — I could never produce anything of the kind on my own accord. Through my wife I have a certain liaison with the Swiss Confederation — Basel, to be precise. Basel is famous for its humanistic past, but what’s left of that famous city now is all paper. Nowadays they more than make up for the loss by celebrating Carnival and, probably in the same spirit, by the games that old families play with their names. The House of Burckhardt — I mean of course the one spelled ck-dt, owes its immortal fame to its greatest son, Jacob. But there’s another Swiss family, the k-t Burkharts pure and simple. They’ve got along without any upper-middle-class alphabetical snobbery, although they have had to take a back seat to the others—’literally literally’, you might say. Nobody takes the k-t family for real, and the ‘real’ ones insist on not being confused with the pseudo-Burckhardts. It’s pretty much the same with the Vischers with the soft V, who refuse to be tarred with the same brush as the Fischers from the slums — although it’s ironic that a Fischer with his little guppy-like F has achieved immortality through Goethe’s poem. The Meier family belongs in the same category, with their ei in place of the chic ai or ay .