Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

But all this, he said, was causing him to digress from our urgent problem. He advised us that since poison might also harm Beppo’s master and benefactor, we should move to one of the windowless rooms on the building’s courtyard side, perhaps switching lodgings with Fräulein Höchst, the bovine Valkyrie who occupied one of these. Such quarters were, he admitted, unhealthy. But they were conducive to meditation, and thus more beneficial for mental hygiene. He, too, was living here in a form of retreat from the world; for him, never again a room with a window, and most definitely not one with a window on the street, which after dark turns into a staging area for the lowest classes, who arrive on hot nights with mattresses and marital squabbles coram publico .

Don Alonso was convinced that in just a short time we would get used to Beppo’s style of blowing reveille. Just pay no attention to the little chap, he said, and he would leave us alone and pick out some other targets. In fact, the animal did just that: he targeted an irritable old couple, a Spaniard and his French wife, who lived in constant warfare with each other, and now were joined by Beppo as a crafty co-belligerent. No one could tell why the monkey sometimes went to the aid of Madame and at other times gave Monsieur his support. The gymnast from Dresden couldn’t afford the higher rent, and so we exchanged rooms with this disputatious couple, who in the process of moving were able to keep the peace for a full twenty-four hours. Then their skirmishing started anew. As much as I despise marital strife, I’ll have to admit that this pair raised spatting to new levels of sophistication. Beppo now indulged in a period of egregious misbehavior, shaming himself as well as all of us boarders. The Inca bird, too, had a field day. And so did we, for our new mystical chamber was about half the price of our previous larger quarters with the musical shutters.

Half the price: “Beatrice, this will make a difference in our finances. We’re not yet exactly in abject penury, but if we start imagining abject penury in real terms, for example, as a gutter, then I have no doubt that we’ll be lying in it before long. Our pesetas are shrinking, my manuscripts are getting sent back to me, and we haven’t heard a word from the movie people in Berlin.”

No, the lords of the silver screen weren’t interested in me. Why was this so? The originator of this promising venture, a resident of Amsterdam, the novelist, poet, essayist and playwright Victor Emmanuel van Vriesland, wasn’t writing to me either. He had published an important novel that the folks in Berlin wanted to turn into a film. They had a nose for money and fame, and both were to be had with Vriesland’s book. Vigoleis had translated it, and my German version was to serve as the basis for a screenplay. The title was Goodbye to the World in Three Days , but it turned out to be farewell forever. A film star had told the writer that it would make a sensational movie. This middleman was actually a very beautiful woman; it was she who drew up the contract. Beauty and the cinema: the most natural match in the world. My manuscript had wandered off to Berlin, where it lay dormant. Where the beautiful woman now lay, I had no idea, but I supposed it was in Amsterdam — a good reason for the creator of the Urtext to cloak himself in silence. Recumbent women require loving care — who would ever take umbrage at such a thing? Or take notice of Vigoleis?

The world had forgotten him, just as he might have forgotten the girl Pilar and her eponymous erotic bedstead, if the loose-talking cockatoo didn’t remind him of her daily with a word of two syllables. Meanwhile, Beppo had been deprived of his freedom by being put on the chain. He could still shake things, but his pilfering days were over. The English matron had a new wig, and with gentle colors and lines she resumed painting the courtyard fountain, which, at least on canvas, did not dry up. The art-supply salesman and his woman left the scene. Fräulein Höchst gave indications that she had the same thing in mind, but then, because of an injured foot she had to stay on a week longer. Pepe was kicked out amid circumstances that I have already sketched out. Friedrich remained his mother’s daily and nightly concern, the increasingly enfeebled pageboy to a flighty queen introduced to him by Mr. Emmerich. Captain von Martersteig was back in Deyá, where his enemy was apparently willing to temper justice with mercy. His room was now occupied by a Catholic priest in civilian garb who was busy negotiating a very complicated probate matter for a mainland religious order. His interest in the female sex was considerable, as was his thirst for wine and free-thinking philosophy. I enjoyed chatting with this erudite man of God. La Gerstenberg became more and more friendly toward Beatrice and me, and in turn, we became more and more fond of her. The half-blind Count went on peeling potatoes, Josefa puffed away at her shag and let the smoke waft merrily from her bosom, evoking our veneration like an ambulatory liturgical thurifer.

And thus things went on, day by day. I read a good deal of Spanish, especially the Old Testament, because that is a book I love and because one can learn to read a foreign language most conveniently with a familiar text. We heard and saw nothing of Zwingli. As if by special agreement, the twin stars Gerstenberg-Ginsterberg never mentioned his name again, and of course our arch-coquette was likewise forgotten completely. Once in a while Julietta crossed our path when we went to the post office or to Emmerich’s to buy newspapers and thumb through books by the two writers who represented German literature on the island. Every now and then the bookseller asked me hesitantly when my own name would start drawing customers to his shop. “May I help you?” “Oh yes, do you have the latest by Vigoleis? Simply fantastic! He’s all anyone is talking about. What? Are you living on the moon? What else in God’s name is a German supposed to read on this island?”

To me it is an exciting idea to be a writer whose works get read, particularly when you hear racy things about yourself when eavesdropping in houses or when, in a bookstore, you observe how your books get snapped up like hotcakes. Back in Cologne I often visited a tiny shop where Max Scheler liked to browse. The famed philosopher was the main attraction in this establishment, making his appearance sewn and bound on the shelves, and, very much unbound, standing at the counter with his round metaphysical head lifted from the pages of a book and gazing off with almost animal-like despair, into the void. Otto Dix has captured much of this posture in his frightening portrait of the man, and that is how Scheler lives on in my memory. At his lectures I was so disenchanted with his bald pate, plus the incomprehensibility of his explanations, that I soon joined those who helped to thin out the student ranks. By skipping what he said and sticking to what he wrote, I got what I wanted.

At any rate, in this bookshop nobody was asking for Vigoleis’ latest, for the simple reason that his latest hadn’t yet been authored. It was yet to be born, and in order to be born it would have to gestate a while, and in order to gestate, it had to be conceived. The author had come to the island with this purpose in mind. There he wandered about in double role beneath the glowing sun, no longer the target of a floozy’s anger, no longer Zwingli’s object of pitying indifference, no longer Julietta’s steamy predator.

No, no one inquired as to Vigoleis’ newest book, just as no one ever inquires about the heroic feats of a child unborn. Let us, then, begin a new chapter, one that will give us some glimpses of new light. Frankly, we had expected more at the anarchist Count’s boarding house: at the very least a palace rebellion, with a broken window pane and a hysterical English matron, deciding she would rather live on her own home island with no sun, no oranges to be savored fresh from the tree, and no daily anxiety about the ups and downs of the exchange rate of the peseta.