Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Our national chocolate was done for: it was simply inedible, and would be so even if we had put it somewhere less accessible. We wished we could have hurled it at the rats. We were rigid with despair.

Whispering to each other, we pondered what to do. One of us should set off alone for the post office, because we now had to conserve bodily energy. I went and returned with one empty hand, and no trace of the bundle of bank-notes we were expecting. In my other hand I held a bunch of grapes I had stolen. I saw them hanging down in front of me as I walked, and so I took them along. Perhaps they were public property, but in any case my conscience was unburdened. The grapes were for Beatrice. For myself, I also brought along some rusty hooks and a tiny horseshoe. These were for my next handicraft project: a rat trap.

Beatrice was lying on the bed, smoking. She wasn’t reading. She wasn’t doing anything at all. She was on strike.

The rats, she said, had come back. In broad daylight, or at least during the daytime hours in this shadowy cell. She had tossed books at them. Disgusting beasts. She just couldn’t stand this much longer. “Did you get the money transfer?”

Here I stand, displaying for her my grapes and my rusty metal, and she is asking me about money?

“Beatrice, you have less imagination than Adam and Eve before the Fall. I pick up a money transfer, and then walk all the way back home carrying this junk?” I placed everything carefully on the bidetto . “I would have raced back to you in a Hispano-Suiza, I would have honked the horn, tossed roses to you and abducted you. Maybe tomorrow. But no, tomorrow you want to leave.”

“Forgive me. I’m so stupid and tired. Be so good as to pick up all the books I threw at the beasts. They’re in the rooms next door.”

I clambered through the neighboring cells until I had gathered up our personal library, and then I took the chair down from its nail, stepped up on it, and began a careful repositioning of the trunks. I would rather have read some poems. I imagined myself as Sir Wigalois, standing watch over his fair damsel, doing battle with rats instead of dragons.

Today I wish I could retrieve my actual frame of mind at that moment. My book collection contained the first complete edition of poems by Georg Trakl. For the edification of Beatrice from the homeopathic family, simila similibus curantur , I could have read her his poem about rats, one that was surely inspired by a “Clock Tower” experience. It’s almost all the same: the whistling noise, the empty silence at the windows, the shadows under the eaves, the horrible stink coming from the toilet. Still the “winds that groan in the dark” were not “icy” here; at nighttime they reached temperatures that would have sent us kids in Germany home from school because of the heat. The moon is everywhere white and ghostly, in every poem and in every evening, except when it’s a question of making love under a lilac bush. The vision of death that Trakl, with Hölderlinian grandeur and accuracy, conjures up amidst decay, repulsiveness and decomposition, could have given us strength back then when the vermin were plotting our downfall. Beatrice, too, cannot now recall which author she chose do help her do battle with the evil forces in that loathsome house of joy. Perhaps, she says, it was Angel Ganivet’s Idearium Español . She was smitten by this Andalusian writer and diplomat who, while still young, took his own life in Riga as the result of a love affair. I myself was later much taken by the mystical-religious attitude that led Ganivet to reject Catholicism, while Beatrice’s sober, more foresighted mind was captivated by the racial-political reflections that inform that writer’s Idearium .

We read. But even the most severely addicted reader will drop his book if the flesh is weak. Reading requires a certain minimum of flesh on the bones.

The third day: as far as our practical routine is concerned, it was just like the day before, except that it was Beatrice who made the pilgrimage into town and came back “without nothing.” And because she is neither a thief nor a scavenger, her hands were completely empty. There was hot water, each of us picked up our favorite writer, and then we drowsed off into a state resembling sleep, in which clear thoughts played the role of dreams. When we awoke we exchanged our thoughts about these thoughts; Beatrice spoke of “lucid stupefaction,” while I preferred to call it “mystical catatonia.” It thus appears that starvation was good for something, after all. Then Beatrice suddenly said that she wanted to end her life. I was constantly talking about suicide, she added; she was actually going to do it. I was crushed, for wasn’t it Beatrice herself who, just a short time ago, had given me Nietzsche’s works as a gift intended to bring a little light into my sullen existence?

Beatrice never gambles. This means that Schiller, in his missionary role as educator of the human race, would deny her a place among humankind, since only that person is human who has a sense of play. And because she shuns any and all gaming tables, she certainly had never gambled with life, much less with any thoughts of ending a life. I mean, of course, her own life, not someone else’s, since other people’s lives are meaningful only in a collective sense. Which is to say they have no meaning at all, as our wars and the current rapid transition in the Western world from humanism to hominism so amply displays. The fact that Beatrice desired to wring the hooker Pilar’s neck is sufficient proof that she has not yet fully abandoned the realm of common humanity or become a sociopath — or should I put all this in the past tense? No, today she remains grounded in the Old Testament, despite the crisis in the Clock Tower and despite all the other crises she has endured through war and escape from war, renewed hunger, and her chronically senile Vigoleis. Her list of potential victims still contains a half dozen names of persons who ought to be eliminated illegally from this world, insofar as this world impinges on her private world. The number remains magically constant, while the names change over time. Some depart from the scene, new ones appear and get on her nerves, and thus there is a quite natural, seasonal continuity to her roster of contemptibles.

I myself do not disapprove of suicide, which Creation itself has demonstrated for us in impressive examples. In fact, I consider the concept of suicide as more sublime than that of a death than can strike us in the form of a flower pot plummeting from the sixth floor and hitting our skull — with God’s prior knowledge, to be sure, since He has even included the lone sparrow dropping from the sky in His Master Plan for the Universe. Every human being has the right to do with his own life whatever he pleases; if it pleases him to end it, that is his own business. And yet it is someone else’s business whether fellow humans approve of his deed. Most people regard the act as a violation of nature—“What if everybody…?” And there’s the rub. It is pure egotism that makes a person who feels superfluous want others to go on living, or to die by their neighbor’s hand. “The ethics of any pessimistic religion,” Nietzsche says, “consists in excuses not to commit suicide.” Even a person who believes in God and attributes solely to the Almighty the right to bring a life to an “unnatural” end before its “natural”one, might be persuaded to see in suicide the Will of God, of a God who in such cases, using a finely calculated and masterly plan, chooses a technique other than a bubonic plague, a Pilarian bacillus, a flower pot, or a Massacre of the Innocents to gather human souls into His presence. In the words of my poet Pascoaes, whose brother was hounded to death as a student in Coimbra by a professor who was his intellectual inferior, “He chose to decrease the distance between himself as a creature and his Creator.”