Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“Smelling salts!” my reader will be thinking, “Why doesn’t the idiot hold some carbonate of ammonium under his lady’s nose?” Kind reader, for the moment I’m willing to overlook that “idiot” business, but smelling salts is truly a mistake. It’s not in my pocket calendar under “First Aid in Cases of Personal Misfortune,” so I never carry any with me. Furthermore, you must realize that Beatrice would have politely taken the bottle out of my hand and thrown it into the Bay of Palma.

You don’t know her well enough yet. She is a modern woman with feather cut and plucked eyebrows, and we ought to show some understanding toward her mild attack of enfeeblement. What is more, with her sense of courtesy, which at times assumes comical proportions and which in reality masks contempt (you’ll find this out soon enough), she would beg our pardon for the incident if she sensed that at this moment in her life — which has now turned into a moment in my book — anyone might be trying to stop her from feeling anything like simple fatigue.

“Yes, I’m all right. It’ll pass as soon as I can get some hot food in my stomach. Let’s go on land, the crowd is gone.”

A porter finally picked up our bags. Unsummoned, like one of Cologne’s Little Magic Helpers, he lugged everything onto the pier, where that man Zwingli reappeared, shouting commands in resounding Spanish and reinforcing them with authoritative gestures of the outstretched little finger of his right hand. Things happened quickly, and then brother and sister stood facing each other.

It was the Year of Our Lord 1931—owing to the downfall of the monarchy a notable year in Spanish history, and owing to his own downfall into the world of Don Quixote an equally memorable year in the history of our friend Vigoleis. Moreover, it was August the First, a day on which a gleam enters the eyes of Swiss citizens the world over, a day on which they take special pride in their status as offspring of their wee homeland. Here were two such offspring, but there was no flag-raising, no blowing of the alpenhorn, nor was even a little hanky lifted to eye — surprising enough when we consider the bizarre reverse entombment that had just taken place.

Vigoleis took a deep breath. He sucked his lungs full of salt-spiced Mallorcan maritime air. For five years he will have the privilege of breathing it, until a finis operis will lead him to new adventures in other latitudes and altitudes of body and soul. Adelante ! Onward!

Brother and sister stood face to face, but I didn’t have to step aside respectfully and pretend I was busy with our luggage. Nor is my reader required to look up from the page to avoid disturbing an emotional exchange between two persons celebrating a grotesque reunion at the edge of the grave. What kind of angel had pushed aside the stone?

“ Salut , Bé! Salut , Vigo! How wonderful of you to come! When I didn’t see you at first in the mob that inundates our island every day, I thought you probably got swallowed up in the Barrio Chino in Barcelona. More people disappear there every year than the police are willing to admit. Did you have a good trip, Bé, in the company of your hermit escort?”

We hadn’t seen each other for four years, Zwingli and I. But now we exchanged greetings as if just yesterday we had been in Zwingli’s flat in Gravedigger Firnich’s house in Cologne-Poll, indexing curses in our lexicon file or philosophizing about Dostoevsky, my young culture-vulture friend’s favorite author.

“But Zwingli, what’s happened to you? You look just terrible! And what was that telegram all about, the one that said you were dying? How’s Mother, have you heard? Any word from Basel?”

“Bice, my dear little sister, sorrelina , there you go again, taking me literally,” Zwingli replied in a very soothing Italian dialect — Tuscan, as I later found out. Brother and sister, both of them having a gift for languages, always conversed in polyglot fashion without transitions — a fact that impressed me no end, monolingual naïf that I still was at the time. Once in a while, out of patronizing respect for me, the linguist of the book-lined study, Zwingli would deign to speak German. He, of course, had absolutely fluent command of my language, though not without the rolling rrr’s and the gargling noises that were, to quote my dear poet-friend Albert Talhoff (who, as a Swiss himself, ought to know), part of his gravelly Alpine heritage.

“You always take me so literally, Beatrice, Bice, Bé. Think of me as a page in scripture, where the meaning is something else again! My dying is of the spiritual kind, or to be more specific, it’s psychic in nature. The bitch is totally uneducated. She can’t even read or write.”

I pricked up my ears. What “bitch”? Aha, wouldn’t you know, the cause of his horrifying decline was a woman. Beatrice said nothing. She was pale; I noticed a twitching in the corners of her mouth, which always lie in the shadow of a few whiskers, an unmistakable mark of her race. She had pushed forward her lower lip — this meant that she was registering concern. Zwingli would have to be careful not to overdo.

“Oh, I’m sorry. In bed…,” Zwingli went on without pause like someone following the One True Path. “In bed she’s superb, a first-class revelation as in the Book of Genesis. But otherwise? That’s why I asked you to come. We’ll take care of everything, so everybody gets what’s coming to him. You’ll get a concert grand. Music is what I miss most down here. And Vigo will get a comfy study he can crawl into. See, I’ve got everything all figured out. My dear sister, let me embrace you!”

Now I was truly frightened. In my opinion Zwingli’s brotherly heart, though at times a trifle expansive, was as true as freshly mined gold. Yet at the moment, the outer casing thereof lacked that certain degree of cleanliness that might prompt Beatrice to take it to her own. She abhors dirt; she avoids it wherever and whenever possible. Would she now allow her brother…?

But before any sibling contact could occur we heard a voice: “Don Helvecio!”

Zwingli, appearing to respond to this name, dropped the arms he had raised for the embrace and turned toward a man now approaching him. He was wearing blue denim trousers, a motley waistband, and an even louder ascot tie. The two of them had a brief conference, and of course I couldn’t understand a word.

Don Helvecio? Did I hear this right? Was that the name used for my brother-in-law? Suddenly the thought occurred to me that I was once again the victim of some satanic mystification. With a quick glance in my direction, Beatrice, too, let it be known that something was amiss here. Was her sudden reticence an instinctual reaction against this usurper of brotherly attention? Here is an explanation, based on later experience: on this island everybody without exception gave Zwingli the sobriquet “Swiss,” a generic term used popularly in Germany for cowherds and in Vatican City for doormen and bodyguards. That is the origin of the appellative “Helvecio,” to which was added the “Don,” commonly used for persons of higher social standing. The name “Zwingli” can be pronounced only with difficulty by those of the Spanish tongue. Permit me to add here the anticipatory remark that I myself was later referred to, though of course not personally addressed as, the alemán católico , the “Catholic German.” This was a doubly erroneous title. For if by católico people meant “universal,” then I fit the description neither spatially nor temporally. As for the other meaning, the capitalized one, “Papist”…that I swear I have never been.

Once again Zwingli lifted the little finger of his right hand as he gave instructions. And now I saw, at the extreme end of the digit in question, the instrument of his power over the elves on this island. It was the nail, a good seven-eighths of an inch long, with the black underside polish indicative of ill-grooming, and bent upward ever so slightly at the end. A piece of scrimshaw of this kind, protected from breakage at night by a silver thimble, guards its owner against all forms of menial work. By the same token it qualifies its possessor for a high standard of idleness, Thus it is a mark of class, and as such not to be scoffed at. Even so, Zwingli’s nail was less manicured than I have ever seen on any bum.