Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The woman led us up the steps and told us our place was inside. She had arranged one of the corner rooms near the entrance. We would be comfortable there, she averred; a room like this one would surely get more air and light. The main entrance was closed off only chest-high, by a half-door of the kind they often have on old farmsteads to prevent the livestock from strolling in at random. I am very fond of doors like that; to me they symbolize peacefulness and domestic leisure; they seem built to encourage meditation. Here the top half had been removed. It would be replaced in winter time, our landlady explained, probably anticipating an objection from us. That was hardly necessary. Every last feature of this house was material for a whole volume full of objections, as the reader will soon find out.

Ahead of us was darkness, which swallowed up a long corridor that I would later pace off at sixteen of my footfalls, each measuring two feet six inches. In the dim light we could barely make out that there were doors to the right and left, many doors. In fact, the corridor walls seemed to consist of nothing but doorways. Were we standing in a hallway flanked by cells? Monastery cells? As a child I often played in a historical tithing barn used for rolling cigars. I recalled that now, perhaps from a similarity of smell. In any case I immediately associated this place with something religious such as cloisters and storage sheds. By now my eyes had become accustomed to the gloom, and I made out at the far end a large mound. Our luggage, as I determined with a certain measure of relief. We were standing in front of the first right-hand door.

“Where your baggage is, there you shall feel at home,” my landlady once declared when I was a student in Cologne. So now we had come home once again. But why hadn’t the almocrebe taken the trouble to put everything in the room, when helping hands were there for the asking? Oh well, we’d take care of that ourselves in the morning, and we’d do it our own way. But now my typewriter, of all my possessions the one nearest and dearest to me — where is my precious Diamant-Juwel? Ah, that black object up on top! And then I watched as the black object started to move and divide into two, three, four black objects. Was my writing instrument giving birth, and I hadn’t even noticed that it was expecting — except of course the progeny of my mind? The pups plopped one by one to the floor and scampered between our legs. Once more Beatrice screamed. Rats again. “Throw water at them,” I said, but it was a poor joke. These spreaders of the plague carried on their voracious gnawing even within the sacred confines of a cloister.

The woman — her name was Adeleide, and they called her Señora Adeleide because she wasn’t of the proper standing for Doña— Señora Adeleide opened the door and switched on the light. There in the yellowish gleam of a bulb with the lowest possible candlepower, we saw just how poor we had become and how little our trusty guarantor Antonio was worth, even among friends. “Here’s your little room,” said Adeleide “How do you like it?” We both replied with a single voice: yes, we liked it, we liked it a whole lot. We were in such a rush to spit out our lie and get rid of the woman, who said “Good night” in Mallorcan and left. We were alone.

Vigoleis, how did you feel as you stood there in Beatrice’s way, and as your darling Beatrice stood there in your way, after the door was closed? For we each stood very much in each other’s way, contrary to the proverb that says there’s room even in the tiniest cottage for two people in love. Didn’t our heroes love each other any more? Was it all over, fini ? Had they grown tired of one another? Had La Pilarière undermined their relationship? Was this a whore’s revenge, with a time fuse set for the moment when Adeleide leaves the couple alone with two or three creeping creatures? No, kind reader, none of the above. It is rather a purely technical form of repulsion. An architectural disinclination had taken hold of our two friends, or to be more exact: an antipathy based on room design. For where one of them stood, there the other would have to stand also, whereas for both of them to stand on the selfsame spot was a clear impossibility. Therefore Beatrice fell immediately onto the bed; in this little booth every structural detail seemed calculated to force one of the pair to fall on the bed, and the other to fall on top of the first. Once that had happened, the problem of living space was solved in a highly pleasureful manner for both. Because it was night and we needed sleep, we solved the problem exactly in the spirit of the house Antonio had delivered us to. In doing so, we sinned against a certain Judaeo-Christian myth I was quite familiar with, though not in the sense that we sinned against any Tree of Knowledge. I am fond of making love in the shadow of that particular tree, but I resist the idea of being asked to join in the harvest. And I don’t like fallen fruit at all.

Beatrice embraced her Vigoleis tightly, and Vigoleis didn’t move. He thought he heard her sobbing; he had the impression that her body shuddered every now and then, but these perceptions were perhaps only illusory, caused by the partial dream state he had already drifted into. The wine had been heavy, and now it made him light as a feather. As in classic nights of love, the two lay together and slept the insular sleep of their merged bodies. This occurred beneath the third roof of their continually disrupted Spanish sojourn. Let us grant them peace and privacy, slumber and joyful dreams; it will be morning soon enough. The cocks will crow them awake all too soon, and the asses that led them to this place, one and all under the spell of Arabian fairy-tale magic, will be prompted by the first sign of daylight to trumpet forth their bone-shattering, stuttering yells. Dogs will start barking, human voices will flutter about. Then Beatrice will rise with a start. She will open her arms in fright, freeing her husband from her almost botanical embrace — exactly the opposite reflex to that of the sensitive mimosa plant. Vigoleis, already disposed to looseness in earthly matters, will forfeit his last hold on things — a mere half-turn at first — and then promptly fall out of bed. Then, we presume, he will rub his eyes, but also the back of his head where a bump is beginning to swell…

Let us spare Beatrice the discomfort of having us as witnesses as she drops her beloved Vigo on the very first morning in their new home. Let us, rather, return to the blackness of night — which God the Almighty did not create in order to confound the Day, although human behavior might often lead one to believe otherwise. At this point, and for special reasons, I am more than willing to aid and abet nature’s nocturnal schemings. I do so for the benefit of my heroes, for whom this particular night cannot last long enough.

Once again we shall place asterisks at the end of a section of our book — three little stars from among the myriad that have risen over Vigoleis and Beatrice, even though they themselves may not notice them. There are always stars in the heavens that we humans do not notice — perhaps because the world around us hasn’t yet turned sufficiently dark. If you look up a chimney on a sunny day, believe it or not, you’ll be looking at a tiny portion of the starry firmament. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are…?”

Three starlets have now been borrowed from the heavenly regions, where no one will miss them as I put them to use as a closure for my Second Book. There they stand, twinkling away, doing their best to fend off the pinions of night, a night that is allowing our heroes some sleep and giving me some time to work out a continuation of our narrative — but now especially to deal with this vexing problem: how can I possibly let our two schlemiels know that they have just jumped out of the frying pan into the fire?