Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

“‘Torre del Reloj’!” Now we’ll see whether the place is as notorious as Zwingli claims it to be.

“‘Torre del Reloj’? Good, very good! You have to stand up like a man!” And we arrived in the twinkling of an eye.

Things were hopping at our house of joy. A second-hand dealer had set up a booth for the candy and gift articles adored by girls who would never think of selling themselves for money. Arsenio had thought of everything; anyone who appreciates the human soul will want to take care of the human body as well. We, on our part, were happy to be back home. Unnoticed, we made our way up the open-air stairway into our cell, where we were greeted by a surprising new development. Our sleeping quarters was the scene of a furious paper-cutting fracas. Had we been invaded by vandals? Jagged scraps of paper lay all about the room; the floor, the bed, the trunks — everything in sight was covered with torn fragments of paper. The rats had been at work. My traveling salesman’s leather case, the one that I used as a purgatory for my sinful attempts at poetic utterance prior to consigning them to the fires of Hell, had been selected by the rodents as a prime target for their intercessive activity. With their special expertise, but oddly misled by their instincts to assume the actual expiration of the man who was now opening the cell door, they had attacked the posthumous literary works of Vigoleis. “If any man’s work shall be burned,” says the poet Paul of Tarsus, “he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” This obscure passage, often debated and still not translated into comprehensible language as it will have emerged from the mouth of the Apostle, occurred to me later when I was involved with Pascoaes’ God’s Poet , as pertaining to the condition I found myself in when my work was destroyed, but I myself was saved yet condemned to outlive my own work — the worst thing that can befall a writer. And to think that I was consigned to this destiny not by a jury of my peers, but by the denizens of a bordello.

“Our cheese! Our cheese!” Beatrice shouted, and all at once she was alive again. A light had dawned upon her; the theory of the subconscious triumphed for once over Vigoleis, who has a low opinion of such chimeras. Porto Pí and Port-Bou — what possible connection can exist between the two in the muddy regions of the human soul? With an archetypical cheese? “Cheese?”

“Yes, in Port-Bou! Don’t you remember, our Emmentaler?”

Of course. I had forgotten. As far as I was concerned, it had simply dropped out of sight, that wedge of cheese I stashed away at the Spanish border in order to mislead — though not, mind you, deceive — the Spanish customs officials by wrapping it in my poems and placing it underneath my prose, inside the traveling salesman’s satchel. But then came Zwingli limping out of his grave; Pilar pursued me with her wormy apple, all the joints of our existence came cracking apart, domestic scenes, eviction — let the reader count up all the events that might have caused us to forget, in the throes of starvation, that we had a sample of the most famous cheese in the world in our private luggage. It was an open-and-shut case of instinctive repression. A race that can commit such a lapse can never endure. “But Beatrice, chérie , I can see nothing in any way tragic in this event. There you are, looking as though you were going to tear your hair out. Leave your hair alone. Instead, consider the following: the Old Testament days are over and done with. Those good old times when God could have spoken to me in my sleep, ‘Vigoleis, arise, take up thy salesman’s valise, rip apart thy poetic oeuvre, bring forth the cheese, eat thereof and offer a morsel thereof to thy helpmate that she might eat thereof, and be of good cheer in this house of iniquity.’ God is not with us, Beatrice, in spite of the fact that as a German citizen I can lay a certain claim to the contrary.”

“You’re making fun of me. You’re mind is clouding over.”

“Not at all. I have never seen things as clearly as right at this moment. Just you wait, Heaven has certain things in mind for me. The rats took advantage of our godforsaken absence to murder me as a literary personality — that is significant, and cheese is inspirational not only for rats. At this very moment in Germany, people are assembling an entire philosophy based on cheesy ideas. Weissenberg…”

“Oh stop your quarreling, you over there! Life is so grand, and the Spaniards — do they ever know how to be alive! You have to get used to it, though, so quickly from one day to the next. If my husband knew that I am lying here, he’d have another breakdown. As far as he knows, I’m just on a trip. And do you know what? He’s right about that…”

We were dumbfounded. This voice, speaking with an unmistakable Lower-Rhenish accent and in drowsy, languid intonation, was coming from the cell next to ours, the one I had peeked into that very morning. It was the voice of the transparent, hyper-erotic subject of my secret, privately-printed essay, now lending expression to the after-spasms in her loins, in the language of my homeland between the rivers Nette and Niers. I have never felt homesick; I am at home anywhere and everywhere, even in a house of joy whose joys I do not share. Such an attitude presumes a vigorous inner life and a large measure of disgust with the outside world; one must avoid perversion and cultivate introversion, but above all, one must not cling to one’s own shadow. Yet I’ll confess that I was not untouched by the thought that only a single leap over the partition separated me from my dear fatherland, although I could not have brought about this repatriation without a serving of the General’s Dish.

Beatrice and I continued our discussion in whispers. Using our camp stove, she cooked a stringy panade with ingredients supplied by her Swiss compatriot Maggi. Looking back, it seems to me a comical turn of events that both of us, having survived such a dire ordeal, got a whiff of our respective homelands while sitting at the very center of a hellish foreign world that had almost been our undoing. In silence we spooned the soup from our bowls. Then I took the candle and approached the shrine of Our Lady of the Pillar, where the eternal flame was still lit. In anticipation of the coming night, many fresh candles had been placed at the little altar — big ones and little ones, white, yellow, and many-colored ones, each according to special need and affordability.

I love candles. I always have several on my writing desk, and keep them lit even in daytime in order to relish the secrets of the flame. As to why on that particular occasion I made an offering of candlelight, I am no longer able to say. Perhaps I did it out of a superstitious belief that bad things could happen to us if we persisted in being the cause of no sound at all emerging from one of the cells, if our abstinence were to transform one of the boxes, the rest of which would soon be resounding like organ pipes up into the rafters, into the source of a mute pedal point — a kind of tuba mirum spargens sonum . By neglecting to join in the concert we would be depriving the music of the special sound that, according to our friend the organist Mosén Juan María Tomás, is the touchstone for all composers. In my home town, on the Feast of Corpus Christi a Jewish family we knew regularly assembled a votive window at their house using items borrowed from pious Catholic neighbors, in order to avoid a conspicuous gap in the row of festively decorated houses. This is exactly what we did in the Clock Tower, and it spoke for a sense of communal spirit in the midst of the diaspora.

With a tender, loving gesture Vigoleis placed his Beatrice on the cot. Then he took up a palm frond, swept up his posthumous papers into a pile, and lay down upon it.