Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Our heads were swimming. This would mean a real room, real food, a real bed, bath, running water, hot and cold. Don Felipe explained quite clearly: our room would be on the top floor, our bath would be a stand-up shower, and at the beginning our salary would be more like pocket money. Do you accept?

By now I had myself completely under control. It was important now to avoid a misstep; we must remain cool in the face of this cool calculator who was putting us to the test. One false move, a premature leap from the plank, and the miracle would disappear like Arsenio’s rat cluster. Furrow your brow, visibly tighten your concentration on an invisible goal: in half a year, nine months or so as hotel receptionists, we would have enough money for two burros , and could wander through all of Spain writing travelogues from the donkey perspective. I had it all worked out. How much do you suppose a beast like that costs?

Perhaps, said Don Vigo, we might be willing to reach an agreement. In three of four days we would let him know. We would have to think things over, make some arrangements in literary affairs, send a few telegrams. Above all, a certain film company in Berlin would have to be informed that a commissioned script would not arrive as soon as expected, but — Don Felipe could surely understand that if I were to make such a change of profession, I would be doing so with the hope of collecting material for new novels. Studying the people who frequent a hotel is always a lucrative enterprise for writers — but on second thought I shouldn’t have said this, considering Vicki Baum, Ernst Zahn, and such people with dual professions. Afterwards, out on the street, Beatrice said that Don Felipe hadn’t noticed. Doing Palma’s night life with pilarizing British gentlemen — there’s a novel in itself.

Our homeward trip was like walking on air. We would be finished with our Tower Period and its tin cans, its bidet, whores, gangs of rats, weekly police raids, and monthly corridas on 29 mattresses. We would switch residences to a part of town where the broads — in this case the ladies — were taught to waltz without recourse to a little shrine and candles. — “Did you notice, Beatrice, how important it seemed to Felipe that I’m a Catholic? He didn’t care that I don’t practice any more. He doesn’t either. He said that’s part of being a Spaniard. They’re a Catholic country.” My baptismal certificate and my dress suit, two pieces of equipment from my homeland, were now clearing my path to a glorious future. I would casually pocket all the generous tips. I would consent to sleeping with a pickled old lady if she promised to make me her sole heir, as happened around the same time with a young Swiss elevator operator in the Grand Hotel… With such thoughts in mind, we passed through the moonlit peristyle of our cloister, whose first right-hand cell we would soon no longer be desecrating with our sublime asceticism.

On this particular evening, Mary Snow was the only one who had no cause for turning mental somersaults. She would have to continue cramming English verbs and learning etiquette. Up to now she was lacking all the attributes of a grande dame ; the child was still in sticky diapers.

If all else fails, become an innkeeper; in between, do some literature. And if that, too, comes to naught, you can put your hair shirt back on.

The three days we requested as a pretense to mull things over seemed never to end, but I filled them with purposeful activity. I practiced being Major Domo at my hotel. I made polite bows in all directions, gracefully accepted bows from others, and made the appropriate remarks in the languages I would be expected to use the most frequently. Beatrice, who was doing our laundry on a stone at the water trough, was my most cherished customer, a guest of many years’ standing who wouldn’t flee the scene if I made some mistake. On the contrary, this guest was so much a part of the household that she could offer corrections of my behavior and my grammar. While there was much to be corrected in the latter respect, my deportment as a receptionist left nothing to be desired. The Tower kids stood around and had the greatest time watching us. They thought I was playing theater with Doña Beatriz when, with professional expertise, I conducted her through the gauntlet of house rats, roof rats, and nomad rats, up the outside staircase, down the darkened corridor, and into our pen, as if she were the spouse of a celebrated writer and I were guiding her with the proper decorum to the room reserved for her famous husband. “But of course, Madam, we shall be happy to shorten the table legs! I shall take the measurements right away, and we shall be glad to allow room for the gentleman’s knees — I understand perfectly, intellectuals have certain quirks… Noise? No reason for concern, Madam, everything here is soundproof, double doors, cork floors, partitions with horsehair lining, and up above, if you would be so kind as to see for yourself, there is a clear view to eternity itself — a little extra perquisite for creative guests. This innovation is unique to our establishment. Word is getting around, and once writers have experienced our roofless ambience, they refuse to seek out accommodations at any hostelry but ours.”

“And that can down there? It’s disgusting!”

“Oh, the one for vermin on the floor? It will be removed. Our manageress ought to have been more observant, but of course, she can’t be everywhere at once…”

Doña María and Don Felipe were happy when we gave them our decision. There was much to discuss. The proprietors considered it most important to plan an elaborate opening-day ceremony. It should be an event worthy to be entered in the house annals. We were asked our opinion, we made suggestions, I came forth with some daring ideas that delighted Don Felipe’s ears. An invitation should go out to the German philosopher Conde de Keyserling, and we could ask him to deliver an inaugural address. Would he come? And how he would come! But it would require a great deal of wine.

Don Felipe made notes, he calculated, crossed out some things and added others, and was not without ideas of his own. But he asked me in passing if I had ever organized such a celebration before. I couldn’t reveal to him that it was Zwingli’s ice-cream bar premiere that was serving as my model. I hid behind the fact that any writer must at any given moment make things up out of whole cloth, even an opening-day celebration, if one of the characters in his novel suddenly decides to start up a hotel — which of course the next-best floozy could sabotage in the twinkling of an eye.

Invitations were sent out. Advertisements in all the newspapers announced the day and hour of the inauguration ceremony, Saturday at 5:00 pm. On the list of invitees we noticed the name of Don Helvecio. Just wait till that guy sees me in my monkey suit from my parents’ silver wedding, and his sister playing with a big key ring and a grand piano! Too bad that we were still on the warpath with him — but were we? We had been driven apart by special circumstances. As soon as Pilar gave Zwingli his walking papers so she could return to the streets, everything would be as it was back in Cologne-Poll with Gravedigger Firnich.

I composed an inaugural speech for Don Felipe, one that in my opinion downplayed intellectual aspirations in favor of the man’s cosmopolitan ambitions as an entrepreneur, yet without eschewing artistic aspects altogether. My idea was that an innkeeper can become anything he wants to, and so to the pair of burros Beatrice and I were fantasizing about, I added a third beast of burden, a sturdy mule. Don Felipe liked the speech, but felt constrained to excise or correct certain details and add certain others. The result was a Vigoleis castratus for the hotel’s middlebrow, but lucrative, clientele. I was more fortunate with my text for an advertising brochure. Employing a romantic palette, I presented an image of the Golden Isle so authentic that not even a museum curator could distinguish original from reproduction. Don Felipe, in particular, didn’t notice how I had violated certain details of geography. There was no need to cite my Swiss brother-in-law, the professional hôtelier , in learned footnotes; it was all my own work, inspired by the hygienic Pegasus in our Tower cell, and by my ardent desire to lure the richest people in the world into the “Hotel Majorica.” If I perchance lavished excessive praise on this or that feature of the island, I could always moderate this later as chef de réception and impresario. After all, few people are capable of reading an advertising prospectus correctly, and fewer still know how to compare a text with reality. Hotel advertising is essentially the same as party politics; it’s not the platform that matters, but the slogans. From day to passing day, I, Vigoleis, felt more and more in control of the promising situation. Finally I had produced some writing that would go out into the world without my having to go without food to come up with the postage, and without the risk of having my text returned to the sender like a rejected manuscript. This text would end up in other people’s wastepaper baskets.