Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“You were shouting so loud,” said Beatrice as she bent down over me from the bed to wipe the sweat from my face. “What kind of a disgusting dream was that? I woke you up. I should have just tickled you behind the ear so I wouldn’t scare you. I’ve been wide awake for a long time. I know where we are. Can you hear me? I need some cotton to stuff in my ears, otherwise I’ll go crazy. This is Inferno itself!”

The space above me seemed to be staggering in faint illumination. Beams of light were drifting off into the infinity of the sky. The bats, whose nocturnal dogfights had kept the fluttering insects at bay, threw ghostly shadows, like monstrous little dragons. And now there began a hullabaloo of bumping and humping, moaning and groaning, cursing and slamming from twenty-nine cells along the corridor. Women screamed as if they were being roasted alive, and the words they stammered forth in their transports of lust only barely exceeded the illiterate minimum of their devout carnality: Ay Jesús, ay Jesús, Santa María, ay Jesús, María, José , followed by a seething machine-gun rat-a-tat of lust from 29 different locations at once: “ Más! Más! Más! ”

C’était ça, évidemment !

Our booth shook. They had finally arrived — the much maligned journeymen — but instead of bringing their Wanderlust with them, they brought only their lust, and each one a woman. The debauchery screamed to the high heavens as in the days of Sodom and Gomorra, but no Hand of God appeared to smite the sinful multitude. The ridgepole bearing the brunt of these waves of depravity sat firmly on the walls of the Manse. How that Inca bird would have swung around on his trapeze and shouted his porra and puta ! Every once in a while one of the cells ceased to oscillate, only to have another one redouble its rate of vibration. A third cell began to sound like the drawn-out moan of a conch-shell horn. Then came something like a fanfare, then somebody whacked a bass drum, and somewhere underneath all this, you could discern a vox humana . Was someone getting beaten up?

The bats were already hanging in the feeble light of the roofbeams when this orchestral performance came to an end. The cacophony of creation gradually gave way to sounds from outdoors, one instrument after another went silent. Here and there one more note, a straggler from the sea of salaciousness, proof that some guy had finished playing a march for his chosen Madonna. Out on the courtyard a jackass was braying loudly.

And yet silence did not reign among the nuns and the monks. Some dreadful snoring had started up, an ear-splitting form of snoring interrupted occasionally by a curse or the sound of a kick.

Beatrice sat on the bed like a corpse — cold, pale, bolt upright, with wads of cotton protruding from both ears. Her whole body was trembling. I rose up from the uncomfortable position I had spent hours in, stretched out my legs, took the chair down from the wall and stepped up on it. I wanted to survey the scene, take in the view across the partitions into the temple to make sure it had survived this primeval night. At the end of a thunderstorm or a flood, people like to set out and view the damage, the news of which, depending on its severity, will get passed from mouth to mouth for generations to come. I am unable to enter into this chronicle what I saw in the neighboring cells; at best I might describe it in a privately-printed pamphlet that in any case would be immediately confiscated by the censors. I was touched — nay, I was deeply moved — by what I espied at the far end of the corridor. The little shrine to Our Lady was smothered in garlands of flowers, waxen votive offerings hung down on strings from the narrow pedestal, dozens of votive candles had burned all the way down into their glass holders, leaving only a single tiny flame, flickering ever so dimly in the upward breeze, as a devotional gesture to the Mother of God. Here in this devout Tower of the Hours, the breezes always went upwards. The wick floated in a little golden puddle of oil in a many-colored glass receptacle, casting prismatic daubs of colored light on the doll-like figure of María of the Pillar, Our Blessed Lady of Love, who had survived the entire past night of libidinous activity. She knew that the candles were not lit to banish the darkness, but to express joy and gratitude for Her humane regard for the lot of humankind, as well as to invoke Her blessing on what many consider to be a sin. She is familiar with any bearing of any cross, with any human destiny, any transgression. You can approach Her with any concern, even with the concerns of the Clock Tower. In Spain, the saints are not just static images of grace; in this country God has not been disqualified and made to follow the whims of theologians; no professor raps His knuckles in objection to philologically questionable passages in his posthumous writings. No one trains Him like a canary. He moves about freely, and is as well off as God in France — the One I know too little about. The fact that His Mother was given such a place of honor in this stable of lust displayed the Spanish national soul more clearly to me than any profound treatise ever could. I had, to be sure, read widely in the writings of Santa Teresa, and that ought to have sufficed to justify the Blessed Virgin’s presence in Arsenio’s scurrilous cloister.

Around noontime Beatrice said softly but firmly, “Come on, get ready. We’re going to the water.”

That’s what she said: “to the water.” Not…to the movies, or to the Café Alhambra, or to the Cathedral. But she also said that I was to get ready — and that meant, no doubt, get ready for the worst. And so I finally started shaving.

The past night was simply too much for her. This much I could understand, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, with over-meticulous care I set to removing my stubble. This has nothing to do with class-conscious suicidal customs as practiced by dueling fraternity students, or army officers who dress up for the event in a dark suit and top hat. I was cleaning my face because I hadn’t done it in two whole days. I have never been free of vanity as far as my outward appearance is concerned. I’m not the roguish type who always checks himself in the mirror, not by a long shot. But I like my shoes polished, and the creases of my trousers mustn’t be allowed to flatten out. If I were a smoker, Beatrice’s suggestion would have prompted me to light up a cigarette.

This particular day remains branded in our memory as an unusually hot one, a true dog day, even though the eponymous star no longer prevailed in the sky. Thus my depiction of our passage to the place of self-destruction cannot do without copious drops of sweat and thick clouds of dust. Did we take a final look at our possessions— adieu , my little bidetto , my faithful little typewriter, my poetic oeuvre; farewell, slipper and collar button, badger-hair brush and brassière, Indian dress and Unkulunkulu (this was Beatrice’s umbrella, about which more later), so long to all of you; shall we never see you again? I locked our cell door with the key, something we never did before. But when you intend to stay away forever, you take certain precautions.

The Clock Tower cook, a girl of a certain age named Bet-María, with iron bones and a bosom that extended under both arms, greeted us effusively, pointing upwards where a shimmering haze concealed the azure sky, and intoned words that I shall never forget: “What a glorious day! May the Lord bestow upon us just as much sunlight tomorrow, and may the Purest, the Most Blessed, the Immaculately Conceived Mother of God grant us her gracious intercession”—and she pointed to the citadel of lust from which we were about to depart forever.