Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

The children crowded around us, more of them than on the previous evening. All of them, without exception, were expected to address Arsenio as “Father,” for he alone was their sire. Altogether he had twenty-three under his legal name, and his virility probably accounted for considerably more in the outskirts of his erotic activity. Three sons worked in his business, all of them husky fellows who were perfect for tending to their Dad’s affairs. One was in the army, where he was learning to handle powder and lead. But he wasn’t in training for the defense of his country; the “Tower” maintained a third enterprise, for which the other two served as a front.

I borrowed a hammer and a pair of pliers, and installed my harvest of rusty objects in our cell. In just one hour every single nail and every last hank of wire was in place and doing its appointed task. Beatrice lay down on the bed and, unaccustomed to meditating or staring into empty space (“empty” is meant here in the non-allegorical sense, although there was more allegory here for her, too, than at any other stage of her life), picked up a book and disappeared from my consciousness. That was fine with me, because I needed privacy for designing our habitat. This was especially necessary since I’m terrible at arithmetic, and our living quarters had to be planned out not with a simple ruler but with a micrometer. Precision work, in a word, requiring tight-fitting joinery. Go at it, Vigoleis! Show us what you can do in a field where nobody thought you were worth anything!

I don’t like to be disturbed when I am puttering. I’m ashamed of all the sweating and swearing I do as I fit one thing to another, then take it apart again with more sweating and swearing, and so forth, until finally, based on no particular initial plan, a finished product emerges that is perfect, or in any case better than anything I might have thought through carefully before starting. Such remarks as “What is that supposed to be?” or “You’ll never get it done,” or “That doesn’t look like anything at all”—and the whole thing is over with. I putter in the same way that I write poems. I take the first word that sings to me, often enough some rusty old word or other, and never know at the beginning how it will fit the next one. Somehow I join one thing to another with rhyme and rhythm, and suddenly it’s done, there it is. Then it’s your business to decide whether it’s good or bad. But no matter what, I’m the one who has made it.

When Beatrice awoke from her literary sedation and closed her book because it was finished, my do-it-yourself poem wasn’t complete. But at least I had come up with an opening stanza, which normally gives the direction for the further course and pattern of a literary work of art. I used my practiced fingers, which were unhindered by any Zwinglian cuttlebone, Arsenio’s crude set of household tools, my scavenger’s booty, and the ropes sent by Providence. The combined application of my resources permitted me to elevate these discrete elements into a spiritual dimension, as it were, by imparting to each one a new and higher function, albeit a subservient one. I installed the materials up against the wooden partition in such a way as to yield a practical writing surface — a tiny one, to be sure, but one that was attractive enough in overall aesthetic and pragmatic effect, somewhere between full-fledged Empire and its sober and tasteless German variant, Biedermeier. All that was missing was an inkpot, a goose quill, and a container of sand, and the Right Honorable Vigoleis could have started writing — perhaps an Ode to the Clock Tower, or a Sicilian canzona on the thirty cells of love ’neath monk and nun. But at this unlyrical moment in his life he had neither the heart, nor the sensory alertness, nor the soul for rhyming words together. So he confined himself to showing Beatrice their new brothel board, but then he added a solemn pronouncement in Italian: “ Ecco, la mia bella, il bidetto anche per scrivere! ” But Beatrice, too, was in no mood for intellectual feats commensurate with my cultural achievement. She refrained from using the newly created libertine surface to compose a lapidary statement in Latin, in hoc equidem equuleo … She didn’t even have any florid complimentary words for my skill in cabinetry. She was simply hungry, and she told me so.

Ecco , I’ll set our new table for a topping-out ceremony. We brewed up some Spanish national chocolate, which comes mixed with sugar, cinnamon, and other seasonings. Beatrice took the first taste, and thus it was she who, with a grandly vulgar gesture, spat out the stringy mess on the floor. It was a horrid brew. I was forewarned, and so I didn’t have to spit. Using a well-known hydraulic technique practiced by infants, I made the substance flow back into the bowl, went outside, and heaved the Spanish national drink into a ditch with a splash. Immediately the chickens came running and clucking, hoping for something to peck. Go ahead and peck, but you’ll be better off with a worm. I closed the package and placed it in the single pigeon-hole of our new secretary. Then I boiled some water and we finally enjoyed a hot drink — insipid, but germ-free. Typhus! That was all we needed. Beatrice had terrifying things to say on this subject, and I was familiar with the story she now saw fit to recount once more. Her father had died of the disease in Argentina at a time when she herself had contracted the bubonic plague, the wicked scourge of the Old Testament, the Lord’s Avenging Angel, the Black Death. Her mother defeated it by dosing her with homeopathic miracle drops. The local physician, not to mention the populace far and wide, was astounded at this development; he was getting ready to give her the usual lethal injection. Thousands had already succumbed to the epidemic. Not one infected person had survived; they all turned black, began talking gibberish, and that was the end.

No indeed, we were not about to take risks here at the very borderline of perdition, sitting right next to a ditch full of rats. Having barely escaped syphilis as a result of my stringent self-discipline and my rationalized cowardice, we ought not to let ourselves be ambushed by the miasmatic fever in a simple sip of water. As Nietzsche says, “With various little medications you can turn a coward into a hero — but the reverse is also true.”

Our grape cure had made us weak, but it had also cleansed our blood so that we were immune from hypochondria — one less affliction. The world around us was hostile; we had to be ready for anything, and that meant we had to think through every next step. By purchasing that chocolate soup we had put our exchequer under unnecessary strain. One more mistake like that, and we would find ourselves at the very rim of the volcano that was already spitting at us. This hackneyed phrase about the yawning abyss is what the rhetoricians call a trope: the transformation of an abstract concept into a graphic image. I am employing such a figure of speech here not just to enrich my prose, but mindful of a very specific hole in the ground that threatened to become an abyss for us, and which to our consternation was actually enticing us. Every agricultural enterprise has a manure pile, and since there were large animals and much human traffic here at the Clock Tower, the installation for excretory waste was correspondingly capacious. Architecturally speaking, it fit in nicely with the monastic ambience, although I would not have placed it quite so close to the open-air staircase. It was longer than it was wide, and its masonry extended about a foot above ground, in keeping with traditional dimensions. What surprised us was that this oblong structure also served as the place of retreat for human beings. Visiting it entailed walking out on a plank laid across the pit, which dipped down precariously under its own weight and as a result of its frequent use. The place was partially concealed by dangling vines — a gift of Nature that was particularly appreciated by the female population.