Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

There were innumerable stories circulating about the owner of the “Banca March.” But then things quieted down for a few years while the man lived in exile, until at the beginning of the Civil War his name started to be mentioned again. After our own escape from the island, when we were living in Basel at the end of 1936, in conversation one day with Dr. Hartmann, the foreign-news editor of the Baseler Nachrichten , I ventured the opinion that Franco would never win the war, not even with help from Hitler and Mussolini, because these two potentates had only their own interests in mind and would drop His Excellency the Caudillo just as soon as they had achieved their particular ends. Dr. Hartmann and I were having a meal at an Italian restaurant. He ordered more wine, we drank a lot, and he became more and more pensive. His ruddy face featured a pair of very intelligent eyes behind thick spectacles. These eyes of his sparkled, but otherwise he looked dead. I thought to myself, he’s drunk. But no, he was just sad. Like many bachelors, he was a good-hearted fellow, and loose talk just wasn’t his way. I continued gushing about the possibilities in Spain, but then he said it was already too late. Franco was going to win. His newspaper had just received a dispatch from Rome that Juan March had arrived at the Vatican to negotiate support for Franco with the Pope. Did that mean that gold would start flowing from the combined sources? “No doubt about it,” said Hartmann, taking another doleful swallow. Tipsy though he was, he saw all the connections, and soon things started working out precisely as he had prophesied. A few days later the Concordat was no longer kept secret; it was in all the newspapers. Any church with universal ambitions must be willing to walk over corpses if it wants to avoid having to dig its own grave. That is the bitter truth, but it’s also how progress works. It causes weeping only in those who get to feel it. We were weeping too.

At around this time Don Pío Baroja, one of my favorite writers, found refuge in Basel, where he lived in the house, in the shirt, in the trousers, and in the slippers of the oddly totalizing writer Dominik Müller, and ate his heart out with homesickness for Spain. The only element of his clothing that didn’t originate in Müller’s costume shop was the beret on his head. Don Pío was a very special kind of anarchist, so special that he had enemies in all political camps in his fatherland, all of whom wanted to shoot him, even in the attics of the country’s two embassies in Paris. So he fled to Basel’s Water Tower area, where Dr. Müller did for this Spanish refugee what we refused to have the Führer do for us: he offered him a pair of pants. Pío Baroja accepted. Herr Müller published an interview with this, the greatest Spanish novelist of his time. People who read it and who knew Baroja said to themselves, “There goes another one — Baroja on Franco’s side!” It gave us a shock, too, and we sought out this Basque writer. He was, thank heavens, still the same. His Swiss host had played an evil game with the refugee’s world fame. I lacked the courage to alert Don Pío to the scam that was going on. He was himself unable to read the words his friend had put in his mouth. Baroja immediately confirmed Dr. Hartmann’s dark suspicions, and even without the aid of wine he added, more gloomily still, that he felt forced to surrender. He was old, sick, and exhausted, and without Spain he couldn’t go on living. This vagabond genius, this desperado and anarchizing romantic, whose life’s work already filled more than eighty volumes, was suffering from the same illness as had befallen his Basque compatriot Unamuno: Spain. Gallows-birds like Juan March, whose biography no one could have written better than Don Pío as part of his series of little-known adventure books, seem able to keep this disease under control. The finest products of the country are the ones who are repeatedly ruined by it — not only in Iberia, although that is where the affliction causes a dramatic level of desperation only possible in the somber shadow of the Man of La Mancha.

Arsenio was not a murderer and not a millionaire, but he was what one might call well off. He could have bought up all the volumes of poetry in the world without becoming one penny poorer. Juan March was the crowned king of the island, Arsenio the uncrowned one. The gang used a submarine, a decommissioned craft of German manufacture, steered by a genuine German captain whom we once met in the Tower, where he always was given a princely welcome. If he happened to arrive without a sailor’s bride, Adeleide regularly lent him accommodations in the Big One’s commodious four-poster. This fleet lieutenant spoke fluent Spanish, but on one occasion, when something took him by surprise, he betrayed his Teutonic origins by exclaiming, “ Au Backe !” I immediately replied with, “ Mein Zahn !” and the introduction was complete. Whenever this dashing pirate turned up at the Tower, a certain excitement pervaded the premises. One week later Arsenio actually told us that we shouldn’t be scared if we started hearing guns going off at night. The carabineros had gone nuts and couldn’t be persuaded that he, Arsenio, didn’t have something to do with Juan March’s band of smugglers. “Opium?”—“White slavery?” The chieftain slapped his thighs and left me standing alone. In the following night we heard gunshots. There was a hellish to-do, a clattering of hooves, women screaming (but not in the boxes), dogs barking, and flares shooting up in the sky. Vigoleis and Beatrice were unharmed. Antonio’s connections with the police were reliable, and, in any case, we had such a reputation as bohemians that we could have walked the depths of Hell unscathed, like angels on a guided tour. Arsenio and his two older sons were taken into custody, and that evening the English lesson in the fonda was canceled. But the three rogues wandered home the very next day — lack of evidence. So Arsenio blew his loud horn: wine, octopus, pavo real, turrón , with the lady and gentleman from Box I as guests of honor. For once, Beatrice didn’t need to enter the little hotel with tin can in hand; this time her dog was given the juiciest morsels right from the spit. But we drew up short of drinking to companionship and brotherhood. We stuck with the formal titles Señor Arsenio, Señora Adeleide, Doña Beatriz, and Don Vigoleis. A toast to you and to us!

Years later when visiting friends we were told a highly romantic story. Half an hour outside of the city there was a mysterious site called “The Clock Tower”—not exactly a finca —a set of old buildings with a stumpy tower. This place was the subject of the weirdest rumors. The owner was said to be an accomplice of Juan March, a flashy cowboy type who ran a brothel as a front, sold wine, had a fonda on the premises, and also rented out mules — an altogether shady operation. Well, for a period of time a German-Swiss couple lived there and maintained contacts in foreign countries. They spoke many languages. Drug dealers. International criminals. Search warrants. But they suddenly disappeared without a trace. Juan March probably put them to work somewhere else — either that, or they took their loot and decided to go live someplace else under fictitious names. Think of all the riffraff that washes up on the shores of this island!

Hearing this tale we were overcome with fear and trembling. To be sure, we had heard of Juan March and his moles; why, you could almost find them in any Baedeker. But we knew no details. Surely the Germans were behind the whole thing, this time with a U-boat and its swaggering captain — what a scoop for one of the Berlin magazines! We should try to get the captain’s name, because names are what sell magazines, even if they’re the wrong names. No, “von Borck” was definitely not this guy’s name — and I almost let the cat out of the bag. It wasn’t “Kraschutzki,” either, as some denizens of the German colony thought it might be. Kraschutzki was the navy captain who claimed to have started the sailors’ mutiny in Kiel. He was living peacefully in Cala Ratjada weaving straw or breeding chickens, but in any case not shooting off torpedos full of opium.