Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

It was astonishing to observe the effects of a little horn like this whenever fingers with worn-down nails came in its vicinity. Here at quayside, hands quickly got busy loading our bags in an automobile that immediately drove away with a roar and a cloud of smelly exhaust. Again Zwingli held his nail aloft, commanding a gigantic Hispano-Suiza to drive up. A man in yellow coveralls opened the door. The chauffeur, dressed in white livery and white cap, did not so much as glance at us. Doubtless he noticed that we were the last passengers to disembark, and so we were now his distinguished customers, with time and money to spare. He knew the score. We got in.

“Just look at you!” Beatrice felt forced to say when reunited with Zwingli — Beatrice, who seldom criticizes anyone at all, knowing that most people are hardly worthy of such notice or such well-meant remarks. She must love her brother very much — either that, or he actually looked more fearsome than I have been able to describe. How did he look? Well, let’s put this brother-in-law of mine under good, close, unprejudiced scrutiny.

When I first caught sight of him near the end of Chapter I, I took recourse to the euphemism “filthy chap” to describe his appearance. And Beatrice, far from greeting him with a kiss or even with a jubilant cry of “I’m glad to see you’re alive!”—Beatrice, in a reflex action, had told him he looked wasted. Now, no matter how I might try to begin a closer analysis of his appearance, I feel constrained to state: from head to toe, or in reverse direction from the soles of his feet to the tips of his pitch-black tresses (which hadn’t seen a barber’s shears for months), Zwingli was all that this embarrassing little word says and connotes: he was filthy, he was a wreck, he had gone utterly and totally to the dogs and all the other lower species, visibly and probably inwardly as well. But for the moment, let us observe only the external Zwingli. Just how seriously the inner Zwingli was affected by degenerative processes — that will become sufficiently clear in the course of my narrative.

A quirk of the blood, measurable not by standards of individual countries, but from continent to continent, had also given Zwingli’s physiognomy a distinctiveness that cannot easily be assigned to any specific racial or geographic origin. Viewed from the point of view of ethnography, his was a kind of Latin passepartout countenance, one that could stamp him as an Italian in Italy, as a Spaniard in Spain, but by no means as a Federated Swiss in his homeland canton. Possessing a well-nigh phenomenal talent for adapting mentally to the ways of the country he was living in at any given time, he was capable of such amazing feats of mimicry as to make him on Spanish soil into a thoroughly genuine Spaniard — so much so that it became necessary to check his true nationality by looking at his passport. Accordingly, the “bitch” always considered him as a “passage-paid” Swiss, a Swiss on paper only. Like a Spaniard’s, his beard had a bluish shimmer when unshaven — and unshaven he had been for several days, leading us to believe that he intended to let his whiskers grow like an aborigine or, as we would say nowadays, like an existentialist, which amounts to the same thing. At fault in this regard was presumably the strumpet, the “bitch.” And how do we know? Maybe she wanted something more on her Helvecio to tug on above the sheets as well. Why not? A woman’s sense of play is mysterious. A man’s is even stranger, especially if he comes under the spell of a hellcat like this one, who isn’t satisfied with a single ball of yarn.

I mentioned above that Zwingli held a leading managerial position at a large hotel on the island, the Príncipe Alfonso, an establishment that, following the deposition of the XIIIth monarch bearing that name, now called itself, by dint of a little democratic ruse, the “Principal Alfonso.” Inspired by the centuries-old liberal traditions of his homeland, Zwingli himself had come up with this gimmick. A high position in hotel management — it’s obvious what that entails: shiny black pumps and black textiles, pinstripe trousers, a swallowtail or buttockless jacket, a shirt with starched front and starched cuffs (minus the little curly doodads worn by ancient schoolteachers who still pull their shirts on over their head). Cravat: a discreet grey modulating into silver, with little black dots, pure silk if possible (purchased at Grieder’s Silks in Zurich, of course). Thus caparisoned, and assuming that certain other minimum qualifications have been met, our hôtelier stands greeting his guests with a smile, ready to serve the haut monde from all over the world. His courteous bows mustn’t reach so low as to appear servile; for mere physical tasks, rank-and-file minions exist in abundance. As a symbol of social peerage he wears a carnation in his buttonhole. With true experts in this field, not even the touchy question of tipping can cause the blossom to wilt.

But the “bitch”—my reader will again notice that information gathered later is playing a role in my narrative — this particular individual had transformed the above manager type, certified the world over, into something like a cartoon by Berlin’s low-life favorite Heinrich Zille. She added certain touches of Käthe Kollwitz and certain bitter contours of the Galician master Castelão. She had made of Zwingli, one might say, a fellow who refuses to hide his personal opinions beneath a starched linen straitjacket, whose heart, now covered by a torn and wrinkled chemise, no longer beats in anticipation of serving his genteel clients. It was indeed questionable whether his heart pulsed for his own sake. In a word, she had created for him a decidedly unstarched private life. Right now, riding in the Hispano-Suiza, we were about to learn details. Must I really add information about the spots on his suit, his scuffed and ragged shoes, the shirt cuffs that hung limply at his wrists and whose color differed only barely from that of his grease-stained jacket sleeves? I do believe that we have said enough; Beatrice was all the more to be pitied.

Vicinity of the city. Gorgeous seaside location. Spacious park at south side. Five minutes to beach. Tram stop at entrance , etc. That’s what we read in the brochure describing the hotel where we soon could wash away, in our “double with bath,” the dirt of our voyage and perhaps also the moral contamination we underwent upon disembarking. Our personal fenders were damaged. Worse yet, we didn’t have any fenders. This matter would have urgent priority as soon as I found out where we were going and how things would turn out. When I have that comfy study to crawl into — how nice of Zwingli to think of me in that way. He’s actually a pretty swell guy — a little seedy, quite seedy in fact. Beatrice doesn’t like that. But she really ought to have been just a trace nicer to him, seeing that he wasn’t dead and all. That would have been a terrible turn of events indeed. Behind it all is a broad; I can’t wait to meet the “bitch.” Back in Cologne he had one like that. We students were goggle-eyed. After a while she went to bed with our friend the gravedigger. She was a necrophiliac, Zwingli told us laconically. She craved certain cadaverous attributes he wasn’t able to provide. Good riddance! If I were him, I would have got the terminal shivers. Not Zwingli. He packed his bags and headed for Brussels, where another affair started up. After that, he hightailed it to Rome, ostensibly to pursue archaeological interests. But his true interest was in digging up women, or at least it had been. Now he was here on this island, with a woman in quotation marks, and surely we weren’t prejudiced? The whole thing looked extremely risky.

Suddenly I was very tired. Beatrice, sitting next to me, was also very tired, and Zwingli, facing us on a fold-out seat, seemed likewise very tired. Here, in back, no one said anything. We couldn’t hear the lively conversation going on between chauffeur and palefrenier up front. The automobile dated from the days of class warfare; a glass partition separated servants from those being served. There was a speaking slot, but it was stuffed with a purple velvet cushion, making the separation near-total — feudal, one might say. In half an hour, I said to myself, we’ll be there and things will get democratic again. A pity, though, for I have certain aristocratic proclivities. I admit that I enjoyed that inside window just a bit, smutty though it was. Was this, Vigoleis, the first rung on the chicken-ladder of your new life?