Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

It was eight o’clock, an hour when the sun has already spread its warm blanket over everything. Old Sol also poked his rays inside our automobile, which ought to have been inching along like the vehicle for the bereaved family in a funeral cortege. Our threefold mood was decidedly funereal: black window curtains and a bit of black crepe, and we would be participating in a first-class interment — except, of course, for the missing corpse. Our corpse was alive, and so the Hispano-Suiza could go full out without showing any disrespect. We were driving at hair-raising speed. We saw next to nothing of all the fascinating Spanish sights whizzing past us right and left. Too bad — I’d like to have made note of this and that for letters to our friends. After three minutes — it can’t possibly have been any longer — it suddenly turned dark in our car. On both sides of us, house walls edged in dangerously close to our fenders. I started worrying about scratches and scrapes when we jerked to a halt. Beatrice and I lurched forward. We would have gone head-first through the medieval partition if our chariot hadn’t been a deluxe model with ample room inside for passenger safety. At any rate, this method of stopping seemed anything but luxurious. Maybe the hotel lacked an auto ramp to its front entrance. We would soon find out.

“ Nous voilà !” said Zwingli as he rapped on the partition. He was probably stopping for an errand. Our door flew open.

Beatrice didn’t move. Thinking that the siblings should be settling everything between themselves, I resolved to be even more hesitant to initiate action than I normally am. So I, too, remained silent, leaning back in a concave section of upholstery that innumerable well-heeled hotel guests had pre-shaped for my traveling comfort. I love broken-in furniture. It welcomes the sitter with deep-seated hospitality.

Zwingli’s magic nail, brandished often as an open-sesame, wouldn’t work when it came to our hearts — as he himself realized. So to explain his “ voilà ” he added: “This is where she lives. We have a whole floor up there.” After a pause, he went on, “It’s just so goddam early! She’s still asleep,” and he scratched his head in confusion. This released a shower of dandruff. We could have covered an entire Christmas tree with the shiny flakes, and if we added a few candles, we might have had a pleasant family reunion after all. Ah, Beatrice, you poor sister of a brother you love so much!

A bunch of ragged kids squeezed together to form an honor guard as the gentleman and his lady emerged from the limousine to follow their host through the entry. So narrow was the street that the open door of our automobile stuck halfway into this gateway. The perfect way to arrive in rainy weather!

The vestibule, where our baggage was standing in a pile, was cleared of the gang of inquisitive twerps by a few kicks administered in decidedly unceremonious fashion by our host. Our motley porter sat next to the baggage pile rolling a cigarette with his left hand, an art Zwingli had also mastered: no more use of bodily appendages in the carrying on of life than is absolutely necessary. Now, however, neither this kind of dexterity nor his magic nail could lift him out of the funk that seemed to envelop him. He was no longer the sovereign Don Helvecio whose marvelous scepter made the Little Helpers dance down at the harbor. As we followed him up the stairs, he gradually got smaller and less imposing, until finally he disappeared altogether. He had simply taken a powder. To describe such events, the occult sciences speak of the phenomenon of dematerialization. It is reported to happen even less frequently than the appearance of ghosts. With the connivance of the appropriate visible agencies, you can conjure up invisible ones. But to make a man of flesh and blood simply vanish into thin air, a man I have been following up a flight of stairs, that is a very sublime form of sorcery, one that must involve the Devil himself. The Devil? Wasn’t it more reasonable to suspect the “bitch,” who, equipped with parapsychological powers, may have effected Zwingli’s abduction to Nada just as she had brought on his metamorphosis from elegant young swain to shabby, smelly harbor rat? And if this Zwingli was in actuality only Zwingli’s double, then we were dealing with a case of compound levitation — Something scientists like Driesch or Dessoir ought to look into.

A few steps higher and Beatrice, together with her mediumistic faculties, also vanished. One more step and I saw no more of my own self! Only my heart, pounding wildly from the fright, assured me that I hadn’t vaporized or turned into one of Gustav Meyrink’s spooks. I didn’t have a mirror handy to see if I was already wearing the mask of death — the “Hippocratic aspect,” as the physicians so delightfully call it.

This spectral intermezzo lasted but a few seconds. I then heard a noise, an everyday, earthbound sound, like a key being turned in a lock. A door was pushed open, and light entered the stairwell — faint, but sufficient to return us all to the real world. I had overestimated the sleeping woman’s spell-weaving powers.

The man with the many-colored cummerbund lugged our baggage once more. When everything was in the apartment, he stood waiting. Zwingli reached into his pants pocket — apparently a very deep one, bottomless even, for his hand got completely lost inside it, made a few twisting motions, and then failed to resurface. My own pocket was not so cavernous, but rather well stocked with pesetas. I gave our Little Helper a handful, and this gesture transposed him out of his fairy-tale existence into his native sphere of plodding corporeality. He took the money, grinned, and disappeared. I stepped into the room. There I was, where “she” lived, aground on the shoals of somebody else’s love affair.

Beatrice sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette. Zwingli closed the door. I leaned against the wall. It was just like being back in Cologne-Poll, and yet very, very different.

The street where our limousine let us out was called the Calle de la Soledad. Soledad means solitude, loneliness, or emptiness, but it can also signify longing, homesickness, mourning, or grief. It is an important concept in Iberian mysticism. On Vigoleis’ Spanish sojourn this street was his first anchorage. It wouldn’t remain so for long. The seabed wouldn’t hold. His ship of life was soon adrift again, and, unfamiliar with the depths in these strange waters, he soon got beached once again.

As the hoop fits the barrel-stave, as the gold band seals a marriage, in just the same way inbreeding relates to an island: in each instance something holds something else together. With animals, humans, and intellectual affairs, inbreeding can bring about superior achievements never approximated by a genetic mix. As examples, we might list the bloodlines of famous horses, the generations of Egyptian pharaohs, the writings of Christian mystics, or, since we are speaking of islands, the population of the Dutch island of Marken, which for decades has been on display in proud local costume to tourists and other visitors. The first time I spent a week among such isolated folk, all of whom are related only to each other, I felt very much like an outsider, which of course I was. During that entire visit I wandered about in shame of my mainland chromosomes. I had nothing whatsoever to offer the natives except my money. Deliberate inbreeding provides proof that chauvinism can go hand in hand with calculated cupidity.

Because Mallorca is an island, we could observe the same phenomenon here, though as time went on I became more interested in its gradations of light than in its people. Its light? Perhaps my reader is taken aback by this remark, for one hardly ever hears about the inbreeding of light. What I mean to suggest is the peculiar phasing of illumination generated here by the varying degrees of shade. On this island there takes place a constant shifting and melding of types of shade: human shadows copulate, so to speak, with the shadows and penumbrae of man-made objects and clouds, to yield the ever-changing mystery of Mallorcan light. Hundreds of artists from the world over, on seeing this kaleidoscope for the first time, have not believed their eyes. Some very few have succeeded in fixing the experience on canvas. Prominent among these happy few is a Japanese painter who lived on the island for many years, and who refused to leave until the Civil War forced him off. His name in translation means “Three Little Clouds.” In person he was just as gossamer as his name implies, and his paintings breathed the transparent ether of the island itself. As he once told me, this atmospheric transparency was so unique that not even the luminary marvels of his own homeland could bring forth what I liked to call the inbreeding of light — a phrase that, incidentally, he found amusing.