Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“My wife had a ck-dt grandmother, and now she has a husband with a V as in Victoria. Incidentally, all this orthographic and phonetic pedantry about our pedigree has yet to be declared legal by a justice of the peace, as Mr. Emmerich has doubtless already let you know.”

As a matter of fact, everyone in the boarding house was aware that the Knight with the Wheel in his Head and the V as in Vladivostok in his medieval troubadour’s pseudonym was living in common-law marriage with his Beatrice, the woman accused by the cockatoo of practicing racial pollution.

The Captain listened intently to my philological, confederative thesis concerning mobs and snobs, all the while gazing fixedly into his glass of Vichy water. Jakob Böhme probably peered in just the same way into his cobbler’s lens, locating there all at once the Divinity and Eternal Nature, Good and Evil. Our Captain, rather less wholly transported to the depths of Being, finally lifted his blue peepers and said to us,

“We shall have to go into more detail, Madame, concerning what your spouse has just elucidated. I also have certain connections to Switzerland, though not to your vaunted citadel of humanism. My mother was a von Tscharner. Because of this misalliance, some of the Martersteig aunts broke off relations with my late father, whereas on the other hand, the Tscharners regard our own family as inferior. Are you by any chance familiar with the Bern dynasty of that name?”

Fortunately, Beatrice wasn’t. I myself got the name confused with that of an obscure philosopher, von Tschirnhausen, and this earned me a pitying glance from the Captain. But then we were served black coffee, and so this gap in my education was passed over. We sipped our coffee on an open loggia, where we were further able to determine that a certain Viennese dignitary named Martersteig, whose guest lectures I had listened to at the Cologne Institute for Theater History, was unrelated to our new acquaintance, although quite well known to La Gerstenberg.

Friedrich had another dramatic scene with his theatrical mother, and it was interpreted for us by the Captain. Friedrich, he explained, was still tied to the apron strings, but only during the daytime. At night he was in the habit of leaving his own mother aside and harking back to the Primeval Mother, whom he located with Emmerich’s help in certain houses frequented by our bookseller. First there would be a game of chess at the “Alhambra,” an activity that was in no way deleterious to Friedel’s health. But from there he would proceed to an end game with some queen or other, and this was young Ginsterberg’s undoing. Then the Captain made a discreet reference to Don Helvecio, alias Zwingli — surely we were following his drift? The Viennese Court Actress was a stunned woman when Friedrich finally picked up his briefcase, and, saying “Good night all,” left the scene. Martersteig, too, excused himself to continue writing his Army of the Monkeys. He had just arrived at the passage where the German High Command was conducting maneuvers with the freshly drilled simian recruits — in the Teutoburg Forest, no less. “Kiss your hand” to the ladies, “My good neighbor” to Don Vigoleis, a stiff bow of the kind that was costing General von Hindenburg twenty pesetas a day, and then Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s comrade of the clouds shuffled off to do his patriotic duty.

“I don’t know which of those two young men is to be pitied more,” said La Gerstenberg after a pause. We led her to her favorite place in the shadow of the painted castellan. There, without rocking, she tried to digest what she had heard and what she had eaten. The latter task she could accomplish only with the aid of a medication that Doña Inés had already given her.

“I’m not sure which of them I should feel sorrier for, my Friedrich or Martersteig. They are both at death’s door. With his Prussian discipline the Captain will no doubt outlive my son. Friedel is dying of women. Back in Germany it was bad enough, but now Spain is giving him the final thrust. My ex-husband is insisting that he return home, but we don’t want him to. In Germany the mob is rising up, and Chancellor Brüning is trying to keep them down by making them wear white shirts instead of brown ones. I’m scared, my dears. I fear for us all.”

Our conversation got entangled in politics. I have already mentioned that the old lady had been a success on those other boards that represent the world. Great statesmen and diplomats had paid homage to her. Poets and musicians had frequented her Vienna residence, among them some of the most prominent names of their time: Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Harry Kessler — anyone could add to the list without fear of committing a mistake. She was familiar with our escapades in the Street of Solitude, but it had not yet come to her attention that the Don Helvecio of the Príncipe was one and the same as our Zwingli. She had lived for several months in his hotel, before the manager abducted his slut. She compared Zwingli’s current situation with that of her son, who likewise no longer took regular baths.

At midnight we retired to our room, which was situated next to the Captain’s. He was still performing military drill, earsplittingly, on his Orga-Privat typewriter. Friedrich claimed that Martersteig depended on the noise of his machine to drown out the howling of his monkeys — a redoubled clamor of battle, as it were. When the pendulum clock in the corridor struck twelve, his typing ceased. At the final gong, Martersteig picked up the black oilcloth and covered his monkey factory. He was of the opinion that here in Spain the prohibition of nocturnal disturbance of the peace took effect at precisely this hour, and so he now gave his troops the horn signal “Disperse!” and his macaques scrambled out of file. The Captain himself lay his stiff limbs on his bed and dreamt of the attractive boys he could no longer afford on his skimpy war-invalid’s pension. His epoch of glory lay far in the past. Only once in a lifetime can one be a corporal in the military academy and the commandant’s favorite. Baron Joachim von Martersteig, German Airforce Captain Ret., who had left Baron von Richthofen’s fighter squadron at 15,000 feet and fluttered down into enemy lines, was homosexual, just like the long-tailed comrades of his imaginary army. It was a venerable Prussian tradition, but one that, as Don Joaquín, he had to forswear here in Spain. Once again it was the fault of Paul von Hindenburg, German Army General Ret., who as President of the Reich proved to be just as wooden as the gigantic idolatrous statue of him into which we wartime German kids had the privilege of pounding symbolic nails in the war bond effort. Like a beast entering the slaughterhouse, this martial colossus was marked off in zones bearing various prices. Since my father couldn’t afford a golden nail, I was assigned an inferior portion of the General’s anatomy to drive my threepenny spike into. I was mortified. The biblical Golden Calf was more to my liking.

In Martersteig’s universal conscription for his pan-German monkey army, Beppo had as yet been spared. Thus it came to pass that this immoral Javanese simian once again started shaking his ritual clapper, this time at the crack of dawn, which in Spain is the veritable witching hour. He held on by all fours to the window latticework and drummed us out of our sleep. When I opened the shutter, the little devil lurched up to his lair with a hoarse bark, this time spraying down a foul-smelling liquid that I was barely able to dodge away from. Instead, I got hit on the shoulder by a pebble. I decided to close the shutters again.

“Throw some water at him!” Beatrice called from the bed, “They don’t like that!” She had taken note of the new offensive tactics practiced by the Count’s favorite pet, this plague upon his boarding-house guests, and she now believed that her cure-all against whores and cats would be equally effective in the battle against monkeys. But Beppo belonged to a race of Javanese simians that is not at all hydrophobic, and thus aren’t fazed by a few spurts of water. Perhaps we could get some advice from Martersteig, who was so far along in sounding the psyche of his substitute draftees that he was threatening to turn into one of the four-footed mercenaries of his own all-German horde of the future. It wouldn’t be the first time that an author identified with his protagonists right down to the bone. When we broached the subject at breakfast, our master tactician told us that there was only one reliable weapon against Beppo’s shameless insults and exhibitionistic pranks: poison! As long as that monkey kept up his gymnastic tricks, we would be on the defensive. This was the very reason why he, Martersteig, Airforce Captain Ret., had the intention of submitting to the Reich heads of state his plan, in the form of a novel, to muster an army of monkeys. If his idea could be accepted, then there would never again be a Marne disgrace, never again a Compiègne, never again a deserting Kaiser. Unfortunately, General Schleicher had not yet given him the opportunity to present his scheme for reform of the military…