Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Doña María, alerted by the noisy argument and informed in a few words as to its nature, immediately offered to have her own wardrobe transferred to our room. But her suggestion came too late; I had peered too far down into the cesspool of a capitalist soul, and it made my flesh creep. If ever I were to fulfill my life’s dream, would I act in similar fashion, haggling over a few pieces of wood? Doña María had no recourse but her own nerves, which now conveniently collapsed. Her cicisbeo caught her as she fell, and hotel personnel rushed in from their listening post behind the door. Smelling salts, emetics, expert hands helped loosen the stays over her bosom. We departed. In this place there was nothing left for us to do.

Upstairs in her little room, Mary Snow snapped shut her English textbooks. She liked Beatrice as Doña Beatriz, but not as profesora . But was the profesora now satisfied with her Don Vigoleis? The way he gave it to “those people”? Not yielding an inch in their categorical demand?

We were on our way back home, out in an open field but surrounded by the stench of the slaughterhouse, a reminder that all is transitory, animal life as well as wooden clothes chests. Suddenly Beatrice acted up like a little puppy. She embraced and kissed Vigoleis, her armorless knight. He had really stuck it to those people!

What else did you expect? What do you suppose those people thought about where we were coming from? Foreign trash — or doesn’t the word gentuza mean the common mob? They have only themselves to blame for this fiasco. There will be no opening-day tomorrow. “The damage will be in the thousands, and what does a wardrobe like that cost?” Although they were still the disgraced lodgers at a whorehouse, Vigoleis and Beatrice were finally on top of things again.

Mary Snow was a cute child, but not a dancing dervish like Julietta, who in a similar situation would have dashed off to the cathedral to force the Virgin into approving of her nifty new dress. Niëves had as yet no such compensatory concerns.

The hotel was not consecrated. As a result of unforeseen technical difficulties, the inaugural ceremonies were postponed indefinitely. Vigoleis needs only to brandish his lance, and already his enemies’ weapons split apart.

We had to pay for this paupers’ pride of ours, but never for one second did we regret our stupid little prank. We are idealists. If amid the perfidious vicissitudes of fate suddenly a wooden cabinet is transformed into a divinity, we shall worship it to the point of utter renunciation. The first result of our fearless stand was three days of total fasting.

Herr Emmerich congratulated us. He had heard rumors that we had landed splendid jobs. The charm of any rumor consists in the fact that everything about it can be either true or false; there is always “something” in it that corresponds to reality. When I reported to him that we had told those people to go stuff their jobs, he wondered whether we had received the money from Berlin and were about to go waltzing through Spain on donkeyback. The titillating news of Vigoleis’ latest quixotic caper spread like wildfire. There was a shaking of heads, viz.: the heads of Gerstenberg and Ginsterberg, Antonio, the noble anarchists, Captain von Martersteig, and the gangboss Arsenio, who renewed his prowling around with silver duro in hand. We were considered heroes.

I have never owned a wardrobe. That’s because, since the mystical moment in question, I have always refused to forfeit any portion of myself for the sake of four boards, be they for holding clothing or for housing my eternally unclothed person.

At this point I must not conceal the fact that a few months later Doña María begged us to excuse the boorish behavior of her business manager Don Felipe, and that she asked whether Doña Beatriz would be willing to resume lessons in her home. In the meantime Mary Snow had gone through two other English teachers, and she wanted Beatrice back.

Beatrice agreed. My dress suit was put back in mothballs, and we continued our daily grind at the Clock Tower.

One day was like any other, and what reason was there to expect that tomorrow would be any different? Every day was a day in a cramped cloister, with cramped food in a cramped room on a cramped bed, constantly gazing up at eternal goals, at the musty rafters and the beams of starlight that seeped through the spaces between nuns and monks above the motley wreck of earthly love.

We had strapped ourselves early onto our cot, and were harkening to the waves of lust that reached our ears from the neighboring cells, the ebb and flow of human passion, the now familiar play of the nearby surf.

Untrained though I was in things musical, my ear perceived what sounded to me like a wave of atonal sonority coming from two, or at most three, pigsties down the hall from us. She must be lying there now in her shimmering white Rubensesque plumpness, the mannish Kathrinchen, giving her groaning self to some dark-skinned bull — how fortunate for her that her lawyer husband’s nerves were still in a shambles! As long as that’s the case, she can get off on her own and live it up royally. There’s no lethargic Freddy around to tell her, “Not tonight, honey,” because tomorrow there’s this all-important conference, and after tomorrow’s conference, he’s so used up that it’s still no use. You’ve found just the place here at the Clock Tower. There are no conferences here except those that take place at night à deux in narrow cubicles, and the conference partners are of the prize-stallion kind. They may arrive with the faintly acidulous smell of a cow-barn, but you are long since sick and tired of your Friedrich Wilhelm’s fragrance of baby soap. To be sure, you must take precautions that your conference partners don’t present you with a certain kind of gift; the Essen coal-and-steel community would notice right away that your kid came not from your own local master-miner, but from a Spanish sapper.

Just as I was mentally sneaking over into the white-hot next-door cell and was about to suggest that the blond child of the Lower Rhine ask the Tower madam for some stain remover, there was a knocking at our wall. Adeleide had a message for Beatrice: there were two gentlemen waiting in the tavern who wanted to speak with her on an urgent matter. “At this time of night?” Were they out of their minds? No, one of them was a soldier, a buddy of her son’s. The other one, in civilian clothes, she didn’t know.

What do they want with me, asked Beatrice as she donned her albornoz . When I replied that it was obvious what they wanted, she said that, first of all, I should be ashamed of myself, and, secondly, they wouldn’t arrive as a pair, and, thirdly, one of them was a comrade of her English pupil.

Arriving in a brothel as a pair — back in Cologne I had done just that on my mother’s arm. And as far as shame was concerned, here in this accursed red-light joint, there wasn’t a single corner free for the satisfaction of such moral exigencies. But Beatrice didn’t listen to my compunctions. She walked the length of the corridor down to the eternal altar to the month of May, and located the secret door that led directly into the fonda . At night it was impossible to get her to go out alone to the rat nests.

From the cell where the Valkyrie was being anointed by some Iberian sailor or almocrebe , there again arose the familiar voice: “You over there, are you arguing again? Do you ever do anything else? You don’t have to come to the Tower for that. You can do that back home!”

Before I could launch a reply over the partition, I was interrupted by a muffled scream of pleasure. In Spain, the jus primae noctis is a plural concept. In this case, a certain kind of erotic stopper was preventing our Menapic Katharina from giving full effervescent cry to her ecstasy. I am already calling her “our” Katharina, long before we have made her vertical, fully dressed acquaintance at the side of her burned-out spouse. Needless to say, we shall refrain from revealing to the latter person what we know all too well about the former. We will wink at each other now and then, and here in the Clock Tower winking will convey a message something like this: what we see there curving up under a hand-knit blouse from Casa Bonet for 100 pesetas is something that we have already viewed in its pristine, divine, paradisiacal, untouched state, gleaming with dewy freshness. That is, we could say we have viewed it in this state if we make the effort to erase from our thoughts an insatiable Spanish pig and his grubby hands — which we truly must do if we wish the word “untouched” to have any but second-hand connotations.