Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Small causes can often have large effects. Smaller causes can have even bigger effects, and the very biggest effects frequently have no cause at all. Witness, for example, the world. It was created out of nothing, and that has made it the worst calamity the world has ever seen.

Nothing was happening. And because nothing was happening, Vigoleis’ and Beatrice’s frequent personal financial audits caused us to scowl with increasing concern. Our worry reached a climax the day we were notified of an empty bank account. When such things happen to a business firm, the distinguished gentlemen rub their hands and begin calculating with rapid pen strokes how much the swindle has netted them. A field general spits on his saber, oblivious to how many corpses his day of defeat has cost him. A stoic, assuming that such persons can ever go broke, continues twiddling his thumbs. Because we belonged to none of the above-mentioned types, we would be forced to find another solution to our life-threatening predicament.

Beatrice found it. We decided to keep our room for the time being, just as a roof over our heads, but to renounce all in-house meals except breakfast, which, here too, consisted of café au lait with ensaimadas . By means of this drastic cutback, we could go on for a time, but then…? Then the island would sink into the sea.

Out of a false sense of shame, a vestige of our bourgeois mentality, we refrained from informing our fellow boarders about our straitened circumstances. It left us cold to know that people were pointing their fingers at us on account of a doxy’s wrath, but we were genuinely ashamed of not being able to pay our bills. We were shameful paupers. If one last, urgent telegram to the movie people met with no success, perhaps we would hang ourselves. Did I just say “perhaps”? Always a Johnny-on-the-spot when it came to quick decisions, it was I who suggested this solution. But Beatrice considered suicide ridiculous and cowardly, and besides, hanging was un-aesthetic; she would leave that to Teamster Henschel in Gerhart Hauptmann’s play and similar literary proletarians. If she were ever to do away with herself, she would emulate Sappho, who, still strumming her lute, dove from the Leucadian Cliff into the sea. To this I readily replied that to maintain such artistic standards, we would have to rent a larger wheelbarrow, or better yet a donkey cart, to carry our musical instrument (so thoughtfully disassembled by Pilar) out to one of the promontories to be found everywhere on the island — out at Ca’s Català or Porto Pí for example — any travel agency would gladly provide directions. For my part, I would take along my little typewriter, or perhaps my somewhat more portable Parker Duofold pen, which could symbolize my muse with no difficulty at all. And anyway, the ocean probably didn’t give one damn what I took along with me to its depths.

By the time Vigoleis had this vigorous discussion with Beatrice, he had long since given up on Schopenhauer. He accused him of betraying his own great creation, a philosophy that in its negativity far outstripped Christianity, by lapsing in his later years into pseudo-mysticism and a stuffy, academic doctrine of individual salvation. At the moment, he was in search of a substitute for this German apostate, and had reason to believe he had found one in a dyed-in-the-wool Spanish mystic. He was resolved literally to delve into this new friend, sound out his meaning, and with every deciphered line to cover up the lie he was himself living, to wit: that he lacked the courage to do damage to his pitiful carcass by his own hand, and was thus under sentence of looking forward to a normal demise somewhere on a bed of straw. What he overlooked, however, was the fact that in the proverbial light of eternity he had much too high a regard for his own taedium vitae —for which, incidentally, he had adopted forms of play-acting that were so amusing to others that they refused to take his despair at all seriously. Such a reaction is doubly painful until one learns to ignore it. Vigoleis ought to have offered proof of his chronic melancholy by putting a noose around his neck, a bullet through his head, or a stiletto into his aorta — to name just a few of the proven household methods. Besides, he possessed dexterity and practical inventiveness far beyond his domestic needs. Placed in the service of self-annihilation, these talents could promptly relieve him of the shock he experienced, morning after morning, at his continued existence among the living, together with his first personality, and in addition to his second.

Pessimists are often the greatest optimists. Year after year, Vigoleis closed his eyes each night with the incontrovertible certainty that this would be the last night of a life he never would have accepted in the first place — if the mysterious procedure for placing orders had allowed him to do so. Thrice already, this devious fellow had tried to end things by his own well-formed, talented hand. But it was at the same time the hand of a seer of ghosts, or of a Don Quixote . His moment of departure was yet to come. Perhaps this island would provide an opportunity for a favorable leave-taking. But let us not forget what Vigoleis, once put to the test, is only barely willing to admit to himself, and what he is now trying to shroud in the mists of mysticism: at the sight of Pilar’s dagger he ran like a rabbit. That is the time when he should have put into practice his death-wish. That is when he should have bared his body, which conceivably might already have shed most of its coverings in anticipation of a dramatic Liebestod . Citing his chronicler’s phrase in double inverted commas, he ought to have cried, “Farewell my brothers! Aim for the heart! Stab away, Pilar, release me from this mortal coil!” Instead, he took French leave. Weekend equestrian of suicide that he was, his feet flopped out of the stirrups; at the end of a high trajectory, he landed in the bed of his own makeshift marriage.

It is events like this that should warn us to be on our guard with this fellow. We can’t take his Weltschmerz seriously until a knife is sticking in his ribs, or until we find him, like the Englishwoman’s scalp, hanging from Beppo’s palm tree — to the delight of Mr. Beverwijn, whom I have rather lost sight of for the moment, simply because that man’s wife is a vicious dragon whose poisonous breath I wish to stay clear of in memory and on paper.

For a week we roamed the city eating out of paper bags. At first we treated ourselves to bread, sausage, cheese, and lots of fruit. Then we cut out the less nourishing, merely filling varieties of forage, and finally we took the grape cure. In our initial enthusiasm, we were actually elated at this latter decision, but soon we had the unpleasant feeling of being vegetarians without subscribing to any philosophy of vegetarianism — an attitude not even worthy of a horse. I know some famous vegetarians who eat their meat on the sly, with no one the wiser. Such little acts of self-pollution contain more vitamins than all your vegetables put together. We felt sicker and sicker, but we didn’t die. As for me, I was still far from wishing for the dish I loathed so intensely as a child, and whose alliterative designation makes me shudder even today: “carrot casserole.” No, we would be having no such delicacy in the shadow of the Cathedral of Palma, but also no god-awful potatoes and no biblical bread, symbol of earthly penury ever since the first couple was cursed into eating it by the sweat of their brow.

We sat in the shadow of the Mirador with our vitamins. The ocean at our feet was of the incredible blue to be found in the Spanish National Tourist Board’s glossy brochures. We spat our grape skins into the hot sand, each shot causing a tiny explosion — little dust clouds arose as if on a miniature battlefield. Our conversations dealt for the most part with prehistoric man, his nature and possessions, and I must confess that on virtually empty stomachs we came closer to ultimate truths than during all our gabfests at the anarchist table in the “intellectuals’ corner.”