Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

During the night the plank was a shadowy rendezvous for the rats. They were reluctant to depart when, in your state of secret need, you walked the plank and sent it dipping up and down with your steps. Month after month I conducted nocturnal observations of rattish behavior, and often regretted my lack of talent for sketching. Yet out of respect for the aesthetic sensibilities we are so often reminded of, I shall refrain from further depiction of the goings-on at the edge of this crater. I shall only add that my regular nocturnal vigils were finally rewarded by the sight of a snarl of living matter, a shadowy black mass of tails and legs and snouts that could be nothing else than the fabled rat-king. Overcome with zoological excitement, I nearly fell into the marl-pit. After this fright, instead of continuing my intense observations and perhaps experiencing the approach of this swarm of creatures towards me on the plank, I confess that I behaved unprofessionally: I leaped up, ran off to Beatrice in our cell, and reported to her that there was something good to be said, after all, about the place that she preferred to avoid for a thousand reasons. “A rat cluster!” I stammered. “Come quick, or it’ll be gone! There must be thirty of them, all knotted up together!” Beatrice turned pale and waxen with disgust. A single rat was enough for her. “Not even old man Brehm ever saw such a tight-knit family with his own eyes! Just think what he might have given to hunker down there with me on the plank for an hour or so.” Beatrice said something about the bubonic plague that gets passed on by rats, and that there were still cases of it in Spain, especially in Barcelona. I slunk back out to the diving board, but there was no repeat of the miracle. I squatted there with stiff knee joints for quite a while, until someone came and chased me away.

Incidentally, I solved Beatrice’s double phobia against pits in a way that once again did credit to my talent for invention. It was a carpenter’s stratagem that not even the ingenious architects of the Middle Ages had thought of. After we finally departed this cloister of lust, my contraption was dismantled, and no chronicle, least of all the sketchy present one, will ever again relate the details of my cunning technical-hygienic installation. To this day Beatrice often thinks back to that period of horror and its dark menace, but she is touched to recall with gratitude that Vigoleis never got so cross with her as to chase her out on the plank. No, that he never did. This woman was chased enough to begin with. Love, in combination with inventive skill and a bad conscience, is what led to an appropriately sanitary solution.

Our first day at the cloister ended with us having arranged our moveable goods as sensibly as possible within the immoveable cell space provided. To achieve this I had to nail the chair to a wall in such a position that it could be reached when we wished to place it at the desk — entirely in keeping with the philosophy of Either/Or, which under the circumstances must be judged not as a purely intellectual insight, but as an element in the art of living. I hoisted our two large trunks on top of the partition at the places where it formed a T with the neighboring box, thus giving us something like a homey ceiling and made the room feel more like a room. We just had to trust that this invasion of the next-door space — it was a matter of a few inches at most — would not elicit objections. If it did, I would have to screw down those big pieces of luggage, but where would I find screws? Simple: I just removed a few from all over the room. No one ever bawled me out on account of this annexation; there could be no question of a violation of law in the vertical direction, since all I did was take up some free space. Our trunks now towered above us, but we had to tie them in place with the ropes, for otherwise I might have to spend time in jail for manslaughter.

After two hours of moving things around, which meant creating order at one end of the space by causing disorder in the other, we were exhausted. Each of us took a swallow of germ-free water, a ration of biscuit carefully apportioned by Beatrice, and gave each other a germ-free kiss. Then we embraced tightly and fell asleep. The day had been a busy one, and not without its blessings, considering that neither of us considered murdering the other in order to usurp space. We shared it like two people who have not yet arrived at the knowledge of good and evil.

Nothing disturbed our peace. No noise from above descended on our pallet. The encampment was utterly silent. Beatrice was right: the youth of Spain does not go hiking. All the more restless, however, were the rats. Yet their hustlings and jostlings, their scatterings and bumpings were no match for the deafness of our slumber, even though there must have been quite a hubbub when the swarm took possession of our cell. There wasn’t much to be had, but enough to keep the indefatigable tooth of a rat quite busy. The sleeping couple did not awaken even when the grisly gnawing horde attacked their stock of provender. Was the mangy old lady-rat among them? I rather doubt it, for she would have to have been tugged up over the walls by the her younger cohorts, as I once observed a suckling mother rat do with her entire brood. The invaders will have been amazed to find suddenly, in this one compartment, more to gnaw on than was to be located anywhere else in the cells. There, they would be happy to come across a banana skin, a piece of chocolate, or a crust of bread. The truly lucky one would hit upon a cardboard packet containing a dose of Vaseline — that oily stuff was yummy, something to bare your teeth and hiss about. Since tubes have come into use, hardly any forager can sniff out this greasy delicacy any more.

The animals paraded in a row along the vertiginous top edge of our partition, their tails hanging down like a single broad band across the upper edge of the wall — could we have watched it move? They sniffed at everything; not a suitcase, not a package, not a book escaped their attention. This cell, and these inhabitants of it, are from now on to be kept under close surveillance. Of particular interest was this small box, shaped like a suitcase. It didn’t look easy to gnaw through; one’s teeth just slipped across its hard surfaces. But wait — there emanated from inside it such a tempting fragrance that one ought to have a go at the corners. This was the container, at one time used by a Dutch traveling salesman to carry around his samples, where Vigoleis now kept his manuscripts, especially poems, which in spite of his advancing years he still wrote, but which in a spirit of unhealthy modesty he concealed from everybody. Not even Beatrice was allowed access to this little hoard of work in progress. Vigoleis kept alive her interest in his poetic idiosyncrasies by showing her works that had already been stored long enough to mature, or by telling her Herostratic stories about verse manuscripts long since immolated. These were conversations in the realm of the dead, like those famous ones that were popular when Frederick the Great was king.

The morning of the second day found our two anachorites up early. Their bodies were numb from sleep; here and there they had sleep-marks on their skin, and it took a while before they could distinguish which limb was whose. The plunge that then occurred was an intentional one, and it didn’t hurt Vigoleis at all. There was no kissing — that would have been a mockery, a virtual desecration of the original cultic motive for such gestures: the transference of energy from one person to another. Not to mention the connotations… But enough, the reason they refrained from kissing was their immediate notice of the havoc visited upon their room during the night. As if with a single breath they both exclaimed, “Now we have nothing to eat!”