Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

We received more mail; the world hadn’t forgotten us. A letter from my father, a delight for the eyes in his meticulous handwriting. How I would love to have penmanship like his — I could use it to earn my bread. What he wrote was just as candid as his calligraphy: It wasn’t clear to him what I was doing with my life down here. My reports were ambiguous; between the lines they showed an image of me that he wasn’t familiar with. How were things going in Spain? Mother was getting worried. And then a final line bringing the letter to its climax. As with any good writer, the sentence stood there on the page and suddenly opened up vistas across the passage of time, causing the reader to place his hand on his heart. The weather was getting cool, and they had just mailed me a duck, the best of this year’s backyard brood, and Guten Appetit ! I looked at the date on the letter. My shock of pleasure was followed immediately by the discomfort known to any skeptic familiar with the decompositional tendencies of all organic matter.

More mail arrived on this day. But first I must dispose of this duck, and that will mean setting the clock ahead. Two weeks later I received from customs a notice that a package had arrived from Germany, import duty due. To be opened in the presence of a customs official. It was the duck.

There was a certain odor, said the official, polite as the Spaniards always are when things truly begin to stink. Yes, it was the pestilence itself that I now proceeded to open up in the presence of authority. The packaging was first-rate: impregnated paper. I had to unwrap several layers until the backyard bird began to seep. The official nodded, and I replaced the wrappings over what was to have whetted our appetite. The fee was waived. Outside the city gates I heaved the roast into a field. Why didn’t I drown it right away in the harbor? My relatives had meant well, but as unclear as their notions about my welfare were, their ideas about the Spanish climate were completely false. Beatrice calculated that the bird would have got us past starvation, but would duck and Emmentaler go well together? Things would have gone much better if we had left Zwingli’s bills unpaid. My father was right: never get mixed up in strangers’ business. One’s own business is strange enough.

The second letter was from a writer, and presented us with another canard . Vic had written it, Mijnheer van Vriesland, author of a novel about departure from the world in three days. My father’s bird had a greenish tint, but the bird Vic sent me was decidedly blue. The Berlin film company was broke, the glamorous star had completely disappeared, and he was unable to send an advance on the contract since he was himself depending on an advance from his publisher. But my letter! He found it delightful. It was worth more than a whole movie, this story about the trollop Pilar, I should try to market it. In any case, he had made copies of my epistle, and it was now circulating among the literati (the litter-rats?), some of whom had asked him for my address. Thus I shouldn’t be surprised if I got asked to produce sequels.

And so my picaresque plea for help had not yielded us any cold cash from the writer van Vriesland, who today, as president of the Dutch and vice-president of the International PEN Club, has achieved the world fame that our abortive movie never gave him. Nevertheless, it was on the basis of my Pilariade, composed on a rusty bidet, that I did obtain something of no little importance: my friendship with the poet Marsman, whose verse I knew and carried around with me together with my volume of Trakl.

The third letter we received on this day likewise had to do with ducks, or rather with a duckling: The proprietress of a small hotel in the center of Palma asked Beatrice to come for a visit. She had a young daughter who must be taught to chatter in English.

Our suicide lay behind us, as if it had never taken place. The 4000 Dutch guilders for our departure from the world were sequestered in Berlin by dint of legal injunction, nor were we in a financial position to depart from the island to begin a new life in Toledo, where both of us wanted to go. We would have to wait things out on Mallorca and, worse, in the Clock Tower. So now, Vigoleis, get to work! Develop a new style! Combine the spatial visions of a van de Velde and a Gropius, with the Old Testament insight that life can be tolerable among depraved nomads, provided one has a tent to sleep in. Make a virtue out of necessity! Make a comfy home out of a flophouse!

Vigo took all this to heart. He began to get ideas, and the chips began to fly.

Beatrice got to work, too. That is to say, she got dressed up and went begging to the hotel where the duckling lived. The world was truly upside-down. The duckling’s mother, a very prim lady, was named Doña María.

The girl’s name was María de las Niëves, Mary of the Snows. And it was she who brought about the miracle that early Christian legend associates with this cognomen: it snowed in mid-summer, or, translated into our insular situation of the moment, money fell into our heroes’ laps. Beatrice went to the hotel three times a week to hammer English vocables into this pleasant, but not very talented, daughter of a rich widow. The lessons took place in combination with a merienda , a snack — a matter of course, since the teacher lived far out of town, and a hotel kitchen never shuts down. This meant that Beatrice could regularly deliver sample delicacies in a can to her Vigoleis out at the cloister, where the shameless pauper gobbled up the crumbs from the tables of the rich like a flesh-and-blood vegetarian sneaking his Sunday chicken dinner behind closed doors. Once, while engaged in this work of marital mercy, Beatrice got caught with spoon in hand. Her boss confronted her (“What, secrets?”). Did she have a dog? There was enough garbage in the kitchen. All she had to do was notify the sous-chef. As we know Beatrice, she did not reply directly, “Begging your pardon, Madam, my dog’s name is Vigoleis.” Instead, blushing for mendacious shame right down to her liver, she employed circumlocution: the food was for her husband; we were living outside of town in a rooming house, but “full pension” did not describe the actual state of affairs. The landlady had fallen ill — that’s a detail I would have added. Doña María didn’t understand completely, but she understood enough to start railing about Mallorquins and their shameless exploitation of foreigners. From now on, at each English lesson Doña Beatriz would be given a picnic basket for her spouse, whom she should ask to come along sometime soon. With thanks for this generosity, Beatrice promised to put me on display.

It is not my intention to accompany this language teacher on her forays to the hotel, much less to guide my reader along into the little room where Mary Snow struggled with a new tongue that she had to learn for her future career as owner of the present hotel, and of a brand new mammoth hotel already under construction. She had a hard time learning, and thus there would be no end of our hiking back and forth again and again, three times a week, from our suburban villa into the city. The Civil War would have already lit its fuses and sent its thugs after us. Any progress we made would reveal the hollowness at its core, and Mary Snow would still be agonizing over the irregular verbs. We actually did make some progress. We buckled down. With blind obsessiveness, we eked our way out of the Stone Age and entered an era that brought us custom-fit shoes and a tailor-cut suit, a thousand books on our shelves, and this and that other item that one wishes for when one is beyond wishing.

During all this time, Vigoleis rigged up our homequarters. Rusty nails, stolen boards, a discarded wheel spoke, our ropes, a hunk of corrugated metal — with millions, anybody can build anything; God created the world out of nothing. Here, everything underwent an organic evolution, following the miraculous purposefulness of Nature — here and there a dead end that Beatrice would point to and ask, “What’s that for?” It was like a good book, about which critics might say: not one superfluous word.