Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Because my characters present themselves in dual cognizance of their identity — for which I wish to express my thanks at this point — my task is rather different, though with some of them it isn’t easy to have faith in the ameliorative effects of a memorialist’s cleaver. Anyone who has observed the aforementioned Kathrinchen, grunting with pleasure on the butcher-block of her own flesh, will not have received the impression of a split personality.

With the traditional seal of confidentiality now on our lips, permit me to invite my reader to follow me into Book Three — no, not up the wide stone steps, not through that door. Nor are we in league with the limping devil of the poet Don Luiz Velez de Guevara — surely you know the story (Goethe mentions it in a sentence in his autobiography): one night, as a favor to a friend, the devil lifts off all the roofs of the city of Madrid. Even without having signed any diabolical pact, it will still be easy for us, right here and now, to get a bird’s-eye view of our heroic duo. For you see, their room at the Manse had no ceiling.

The black-and-blue welt on the back of Vigoleis’ head does not play a significant role in his recollections. Yet because these are recollections of the applied variety, or rather since Vigoleis himself intends them that way, it will be appropriate to include here all manner of experiences and insights, byproducts of his pure, undivided ego, that can be grafted organically or wilfully onto this account of his life. He trusts that these words will suffice to justify a few empirical lines concerning a goose-egg that made him into a bright and clever fellow.

The hummock on my noggin — how did it get there? What I mean is this: from what contact with what object in the space that confined and imprisoned us two mortals, the space that might well be called our death cell? My question is not a frivolous one. It would be if I had simply bumped my head on the floor, a surface made of the traditional local clay tiles. But no, I fell against an object made of metal, one that was located at the head of our bed within reaching distance, like a night table, though it served other purposes — hygienic ones, to be precise. In a room where there was virtually no room at all, this seemed to me to be an impudent luxury — and not just because I came into painful contact with it. Today, of course, I know that this pesky apparatus with its hip-shaped metal basin was just as integral a part of the room as the women who habitually made use of it — astradddle, as prescribed by the Italian term from which its name derives. A bidetto is a little horse, a pony so small that when you ride it your feet touch the ground — an extremely apt etymology. On the very first morning of our island sojourn, we (I include my reader, who by now is part of our family, and in whose presence we can discuss the most intimate matters) — we made the acquaintance of Pilar’s love-vessel. And now here, at first blush of a new dawning in our existence, we confront a similar object, one that is even less modest, and doubtless rather more expensive, than its counterpart on the Street of Solitude. I gave it a swift kick, sending it clanging against the door. Then I rubbed my bruise and looked around for something cold to place on it. My mother’s bread knife came to mind. She used to treat our bumps and bruises by pressing the blade lightly against the affected spot. It eased the pain and helped the blood circulation. We didn’t have a knife among our possessions, but why not use the basin itself to cool my skull? As I stood there with my head crowned, steer-horn-like, by this curved feminine utensil, I must have looked like some ancient Egyptian deity. But it worked. The throbbing stopped.

“Just where are we?” Beatrice asked. She had not yet fully awakened to life in our new Paradise. “And why are you wearing that stupid bucket on your head? Cold compresses! Isn’t there any water around here? And anyway, what a place! To me it looks like a youth hostel, or some kind of stopover for itinerant craftsmen.”

Voilà , there she is again, my Beatrice with her faulty imagination when it comes to the grittier aspects of life. On a purely cerebral level she could have made significant contributions in the field of comparative linguistics. Her extraordinary ability with languages, a twofold inheritance from father and mother, would suggest this kind of career as the most fitting one for her. She can grasp the most remote etymological nuances at a single glance. But we cannot expect her to look at an egg and deduce from it the hen that laid it, or to think back from some chewed-over carrion to the vulture that spat it out, or from Vigoleis to Don Quixote.

“Beatrice,” I therefore said in the spirit of the Encyclopedists, who crusaded against chimeras and rank superstition, “ la mia Beatrice , you can chalk it up to my cranial hematome if I venture to enlighten you while holding this peculiar object to the back of my head. It just seems to me that your choice of words is erroneous, because once again you haven’t figured out the connections properly. You speak of ‘itinerant craftsmen,’ whereas I would suggest itinerant crafts ladies . And if you’ll permit one further correction, instead of ‘itinerant’ I would select some term or other that implies a static condition. All this may sound rather pedantic, especially so early in the morning. But don’t you agree with me that the solution to this puzzle is more likely to be found among the horizontal señoritas —assuming that it is any of our business at all to figure out the social significance of this embarrassing bathing stool? Let’s just be happy that we have a roof over our heads.”

In reconstructing this conversation with Beatrice I have just employed an obvious figure of speech, one that was not entirely applicable under the conditions prevailing at the time. If our heroes will only look upward, they will find out what we already know: that in that direction, too, not all is as it should be.

Neither of us had yet dared to glance ceilingward. The previous evening, in the murky light, I had the sensation that the space above our heads had a certain infinitude about it. My eyes could not discern any horizontal structural element. Everything here seemed to point upwards, towards the heavens. The entrance to this edifice was markedly unconventional; the corridor led to nameless depths, thus suggesting a cloister-like purpose for the building, a presumption supported by the size of our room with its dimensions of a monastic cell. It seemed only logical, then, that the building’s topmost structure should likewise lead one’s glance toward the celestial regions.

And it was just so. Our room had no ceiling. The perceiving eye searched long and hard until finally getting lost somewhere up in a jumble of roof beams. The roof itself was outfitted with curved ceramic tiles, in antique Spanish style. And because the roof lining was missing, one could see above the rafters the naked tiles, installed according to the system that the master builders of yore dubbed “nuns and monks”: one “nun” underneath, one “monk” on top, and so forth, all for the greater glory of God and to keep mortals from having their pious daily chores rained upon. Many of the tiles were broken, and several had slipped out of their overlapping fit, with the result that narrow beams of daylight penetrated through the open spaces. This lent our cubicle an ambience like that in a cathedral, a play of light refracting into a colored spectrum as it passed through broad areas of cobwebs gently undulating in the drafts of air. On clear moonlit nights the pitched roof resembled a star-studded tent. Little points of light lay scattered out above us, reminiscent of a passage in Immanuel Kant, a statement so cogent as to make one almost forget his reputation as a creative destroyer: “Two things fill my mind with repeated and increasing amazement and awe the more often and intensely I reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”