Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“House search,” said Beatrice as I squeezed my way into her boudoir. “You had just left when I woke up to the sound of a shot. That’s when I noticed that I’d fallen asleep and you weren’t here. And then you should have seen the spectacle, the uproar — I was crying, shouting, swearing, much worse than that business back then with Béla Kun. I thought that…”

“… that Vigo had gone and shot himself. Cross your heart, who else around here would be interested in shooting off guns?”

“I know you’re afraid of guns. I didn’t have time to think anything. There was your note, and all of a sudden they started banging on the wall, and I thought all the trunks would come crashing down. Adeleide ran in crying and said nothing was going to happen to us, we should just stay inside, and if I understood her correctly, they were looking for smugglers, and her husband was under suspicion, but he was innocent. That’s all she said, because then a carabinero took her out and asked me for a chair. That’s all I know. But Vigo, I beg you. I can’t stay here any longer. We’ve got to leave. I’d rather die in the gutter!”

That’s easier said than done in a country where the gutters are filled with contented bums. I don’t even think that there is a single country where you can die in a gutter. That’s just a figure of speech.

That night we didn’t get any sleep. Instead, we felt a marvelous lightness. We seemed to have sprouted wings, and our ears resounded with shivering, rushing tones. If you need a musical comparison for this, Beatrice would be the one to consult. But that’s not really necessary, because these organ-like sonorities came to us not from the upper vaults of our basilica but from our own abdomens. To put it more delicately: the singing arose from the hunger in our blood.

As the meager dawn approached, we dozed off into a semi-slumber that lasted perhaps a second or two, perhaps an hour. But then we heard a noise at the walls of our cell. The rats!

But it wasn’t the rats, nor was it an armed battalion. First we saw a little hand reach over the partition, shadowless, like the hand of a dead child. We had no time to cower in fright, though, because the fingers of this hand clearly bent over the top of the wall to get a purchase on it. And then a second hand appeared, grabbing the partition. And finally a little curly head. Only one creature in the Tower had such a head of curls, and that was little Rosario. She peered into our cell.

What she saw appeared not to satisfy her. Far back in her little throat she made a sound like the bleating of a new-born lamb. The others in this soprano choir were apparently standing downstairs in the corridor. The one peeking in on us said, “They’re still not doing it!” The little rubberneck slid down from her perch and the mob of kids dispersed giggling.

Oh, my dear children, how I would like to have done you the favor of doing what we weren’t doing! For doing it would have meant living not only in a different skin, but in an entirely different flesh, not the martyred flesh we could barely sustain with a few drops of water, dragging ourselves past the stations of the cross muttering “Lord, have mercy on us” and fingering the beads of our agonizing rosary. No one was having mercy on our heroes. But what do you kids know about what’s really going on in your father’s house? What’s really going on, 30 times from door to door — kids, go play somewhere else.

Beatrice glanced squarely at me. “ C’est ça ?”

“What else?”

Except for the usual wailing of the wind and the everyday hubbub on the premises — the barking dogs, the squealing piglets, the braying donkeys, the clucking poultry — all was quiet at the Tower. I stepped outside our door.

Arsenio was strutting around prouder than usual, issuing orders. When he saw me he gave me a conspiratorial wink and called out a few words, as if in rapid summation of the previous night’s adventures. Those cops had better go back into training if they think they can catch him — if indeed there was anything to catch here in his personal domain.

At noontime we lay down again, Beatrice on the bed, I on the floor, each of us in the drowsy shadows of our hunger. Then I suddenly heard voices. There was commotion. More and more people had arrived at our cloister, door after door was being opened, the partitions shook. I heard Adeleide’s voice. Children were screaming like crazy.

Adeleide was scurrying around in the corridor. At the far end on a small wall pedestal was a statue of the Madonna, the altar in this House of Love, with candles that, when lit, surrounded Our Gracious Lady with a halo of natural light. I peeked through the door. The hostelry matron was arranging flowers and greenery in gilded vases. A palm frond, beautifully woven in on itself, rose up behind Our Lady to the heights, which in this place were, of course, eternity itself. Was it Corpus Christi? I remembered this feast day very well. On the street in front of our house we put up an altar. We kids had to collect rushes and swamp grass to strew on the path of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Corpus Christi: a moveable feast — but this late in the year? The Catholic Church seemed to follow a different sequence of events in Spain; the faith was different here, the relationship of believers to the Almighty was different. But this was mid-September.

“Friday,” said Beatrice, “the day the Lord died. You remember it only as the meatless day of the week. In Spain it means a lot more. In some southern countries they still ring the bells of dread the evening before. In Fiesole I was always touched by that custom.”

“Bells of dread? Up in Süchteln we had no such thing, and”—I spoke in an aside—“no mantraps with perpetual May altars, either.”

On this day we finessed our walk to the post office. The word “suicide” didn’t enter our whispered conversations, although we both kept it in mind and sensed it in each other even as we insisted on boiling our daily ration of water. Then we both retired to our separate pallets. We couldn’t share the cot any more, since the straps no longer held. Stretched out on my back, protected against the hard floor by cushions made of pieces of clothing, I began dreaming. But of what? I simply can’t remember. But we both recall, with the absolute certainty that comes of preserving “vaguely” in one’s memory an agony survived in the past, that we felt as if we had temporarily yielded up all of our earthly weight. To be sure, we were unable to fly, but could probably do so soon if we didn’t lose our patience and kept on fasting diligently. If Rilke, who loved to reside in palaces and perambulate arm in arm with white princesses, could say that poverty is a great inner glow, then perhaps he was thinking of the starvation that goes along with poverty, which can in fact become an inner source of light. As with the birds of the air, your bones get hollow and turn into fluorescent tubes. As we know, asceticism is partly based on the desire to release man’s higher nature by means of self-denial and abstinence. Stripping ourselves in this fashion at the Giant Arsenio’s cloister, we never reached the point where we felt so far elevated above the needs of the day as to require his services no longer. Nor was our condition of drowsy bliss so enticing that we ever wished to repeat the experience at a later time by voluntary exercises in fasting.

“More! More!”—but in Spanish, with its long vowel aaa : “ Más! Más! ”—that’s how the word hammered rhythmically into my semi-slumber. I saw hands reaching toward me, all the cathedral beggars were crowding in on me, an army officer joined in the mob, half of me was myself, the other half Don Vigoleis, the Catholic German. But then I underwent a further cleavage, and I became the adulterous captain of the East Indian freighter. I saw long rows of animals passing by, large jungle ants being led to the slaughterhouse carrying burning candles, it was like a religious procession, and it smelled of flesh and incense. It smelled of women. I heard piercing shouts, a tongue of flame shot up, I was surrounded by monks’ cloaks, there was no lack of people wearing sanbenitos , a naked female was there (ascetics are famous for their wild dreams) I was being crowded and pushed, in one hand a dagger, in the other a gleaming receptacle. I felt a painful sweetness on my tongue, then I was split from head to toe. My tongue broke apart, I heard the tinkling of a key ring, and again and again: más and más and más … I tried to rise. Then I screamed and woke up.