Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

But what if it rains? We haven’t reached that point yet and probably never will, for the Mallorcan Tourist Office’s statistics on annual precipitation would make it totally absurd for any moisture to find its way down through our damaged roof. Moreover, the rainy season wouldn’t start until the late fall; until then we surely could make an escape, perhaps even an escape devised in the spirit of Pure Reason — although we can doubtless rely on our friend Vigoleis, the Man of Unreason, who likes to boast of his talent for improvisation. He just won’t let rain interfere with the lugubrious workings of his mind, much less with his everyday business.

The walls of our cell were as high as I can reach with my arm extended, which is to say 7 feet 7 inches. The walls themselves were made of boards that partitioned off the whole building into little chambers. The windows were set so high that I couldn’t have cleaned them even with the aid of a stepladder. One of these sources of light in the masonry wall, an opening that tapered to smaller size on the outside, was located right above our room. Later, with the aid of an orchard ladder, I transformed this into a storage area for our laundry, not without encountering difficulty with the sharply angled sill. It was a daredevil kind of a job, and it had an effect on my health that ought not to be underestimated.

Our furniture consisted of the barest necessities: a bed wide enough for the shoulders of a strong Mallorcan male, but decidedly lacking his length; a primitive chair of the kind used by the old matron as seat and crutch; the aforementioned bathing stool; and a three-legged metal toilet stand painted in white enamel, whose aperture was no larger than a soup bowl. Beneath it was a pan containing a generous variety of insects, an indication that our cell had remained unoccupied for a long time — or, on the other hand, that the previous occupants were not the bath-taking type. The bait for this swarm of bugs, a repulsive substance of inorganic nature, was stuck to the bottom of the pan. Luckily Beatrice hadn’t noticed it.

I climbed on the chair to survey the remainder of the abbey-like quarters we had been assigned to, and counted fifteen gaping tops of cubicles. That meant fifteen compartments, ×2 = 30, and when multiplied according to the dictum that two shall always be of one flesh, the result was a good sixty people, i.e., threescore or about half a gross, that this barracks of love could entertain in one shift. The chamber sharing a partition with our own was furnished in just the same way, and all the others presumably likewise. It was a uniform setup, completely standardized, a clever way to rehabilitate an old unusable barn and turn a profit from it. That is exactly what had taken place here; without any doubt it was a brothel. But why hadn’t Arsenio gone ahead and added a few more floors? All at once I saw exciting possibilities that this edifice offered if extended upwards — possibilities for the cheapest and saddest way of fulfilling the command “Go forth and do not multiply.” Illumination would be a problem, but for such activity light is not a true necessity; a single bulb, as in our own space, would suffice. Air could be let in through specially installed ducts — but if you ask me, that too wouldn’t be a matter of high priority. An entryway built in the style of…

“What do you see up there that’s so interesting?” Beatrice said, interrupting my architectural reveries. “Is the box next to ours occupied too? People who come here to live must be very poor.”

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I had seen, and what I now knew incontrovertibly on the basis of all I had observed, including that pan underneath the toilet stand: that we had landed in an establishment of the lowest conceivable price range. Twenty-five pesetas per month is what Antonio paid for this flophouse, which included a towel and probably also the entertainment tax. 25 pesetas for a month of joyless shelter was one huge rip-off.

“I can’t see anything at all, chérie . So what you say is probably right. We’re in a youth hostel, and in summer business is slow. Who would want to go hiking in this heat? In winter it’s different, I can imagine that Adeleide always has a full house then. She’s probably got just what it takes, a hostel mother with a warm heart and a firm hand.”

“Maybe. But that would be the first time I’ve ever heard of Spaniards who go hiking. The place is probably exclusively for foreigners, and they really don’t start coming until winter. What I’d really like to know is, what you think we should do from here on. We have five pesetas left. I won’t be able to stand it here very long. It’s so awful. I could just strangle that Pilar woman! Go ahead and laugh. I don’t see anything funny about this situation of ours. What do I smell? It’s probably coming from the toilet!”

There ensued a lengthy tirade in French, one that was not very flattering to me, and in spots even hurtful. To understand all is to forgive all, I thought to myself as I continued my elevated reconnaissance of our quarters. And besides, I thought this thought in French, which reminded me of my grade-school teacher, the one all of us kids were in love with and who spoke these words of wisdom every time my classroom performance left something to be desired. At the time, she wasn’t thinking of love but of my stupidity, but now I am constrained to think of Zwingli, who was actually the one who plunged us into this doubly distasteful whorish adventure. Instead of strangling Pilar, it would be more reasonable of Beatrice to consider fratricide. But who can expect logic from a woman early in the morning, still in bed, with no makeup on, no roof over her head, with a well-trampled mattress beneath her, and next to her a man who wouldn’t even have been able to come up with installments for the chair he was standing on?

“Our next steps? My love, I can’t reveal that to you until after I’ve been to the post office. I’m going back to the city right away, unwashed and unshaven. My shoes aren’t even polished, so you can see what a rush I’m in. You are so very right. Something has got to happen, and something will happen. But don’t forget that as a last resort we still have our ropes.”

“Our… you’re going to…bah! That would be unaesthetic. And then I would just be on my own, trying to get out of this filthy place. Thanks a lot!”

Our ropes — oh my dearest, there you go again getting everything backwards! Once again you fail to comprehend how one thing connects up with everything else, or even that there is such a thing as Providence, which leads us to destinations that Providence itself can envision only at brighter moments. Our ropes! I truly had no intention of stringing them up in the dizzy heights of the roof beams and shoving my neck into the noose. In any case, before I could bring off such a sinister feat, I would break my neck scrambling around in the roofwork. I tried to explain this to Beatrice, but with no success.

I have had suicidal tendencies for quite some time. I have a significant metaphysical interest in the course of my personal planetary orbit, and experience with several botched jobs by way of diabolically conceived attempts to do away with my own person. But this time, any such plausible idea was far from my mind. The ropes were for something else; my idea was to use them as an element of interior architecture, to tie them up not vertically but horizontally, as I then later did. I had a complete picture of how we could convert this box-for-an-hour into a somewhat liveable, perhaps even comfortable habitation. I sensed how, by putting to use all of my failed careers, by combining the intuitions of a paleolithic handyman with the highly involved technical skill available to myself and my century, I could create for Beatrice a home of the kind that otherwise only a Henry van de Velde could offer her. So let us now leave her in her angry mood, pondering her fate with compressed lips (the lower one jutting forward ever so little), with quivering chin, and with one bloodless hand held downward like a fin in a gesture of extreme resentment — but also of extreme misery. Her fate? Having an absent-minded theologian for a father, an exotic cosmopolitan woman for a mother, a Zwingli for a brother, a lady of the streets for a sister-in-law, and me, Vigoleis, the zero-grade writer, for an unmarried husband. Let’s hand her over for a good long while to her devastating thoughts, and listen in the meantime to the story of our ropes. It is briefly told.