Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

In the following chapter I hope that we will progress far enough to get to see Kathrinchen without climbing up on a chair. When the time comes, she will no longer be a juicy piece of wild game, but rather a tame gentlelady. But now, Beatrice was staying away a long time.

I had the pilarière all to myself.

Lying on my back, I gazed through our latticework ceiling into the heavens above the barn. In the next cell a sailor, one who apparently hadn’t put into port for quite some time, was exerting himself strenuously. The partition shuddered, and the ropes and everything hanging on them were making obedient bows. My manuscripts rustled softly, and my shoes dangled up and down on their laces. The longer the swab next door blabbered on in a language unknown to me, seeking compensation (perhaps even more) with his saved-up pesetas for many a lonely night on the high seas, the more macabre seemed to me the ebbing and swelling of the baroque rigging above me. Moonlight seeped down through the perforated cupola and combined with the glow of the corridor shrine to form a melancholy twilight, glistening dimly in the oscillating ropework.

It is at such moments that I have made poems, the best and most beautiful ones of my lifetime, which reveal the locale of their origins only insofar as I step forth in them more naked than the divine Rhenish child three boxes away from me. These stanzas of mine mark significant beginnings, they allow certain chords to resound that might almost have given meaning to my life. But these products, too, I committed to the flames with a firm hand when it seemed to me that their time had come.

While Vigoleis, released from all earthly bonds and with strange flesh heaving all around him, thus experienced his moment of transcendence, downstairs in the taberna the Fates were spinning new threads. That is to say, the yarn was already spun at the beginning of time, and all that was necessary was to mount warp and woof on the frame so that the shuttle could start on its zigzag journey.

The two men who had arrived at this hour, which was for us still the dead of night, were Pedro, a painter, and his brother-in-law and friend Fernando.

Pedro wore the uniform of the Spanish army. He was a common soldier, not one on bribed leave, serving his time in the army with a peevish and scoffing attitude. He was an intelligent young fellow whom the curse of civilization had not yet turned into a fool. Like all men of his rank, his head was shaven bald, for the military debasement of the soul is quickly given its outer mark of Cain. If you’re being trained to shoot at your fellow human beings, what right have you to walk around with a full head of hair exposed to the omnipresent lice? “Poor guys,” said Beatrice, who had never seen a prisoner in a German barracks brig. Arsenio passed around smuggled cigarettes and poured them a vintage from his cellar, otherwise served only to the gentlemen who arrived in Rolls Royces and U-boats. Don Fernando, Beatrice told me, actually looked nice. And it was no wonder, compared to the two other good-for-nothing ragamuffins.

Here is the story: back at the barracks, Beatrice’s somnolent pupil Pablo had sounded forth the praises of this private teacher who was coaching him in English, something he was decidedly less good at than he was with telling tales out of school. Everybody knew, of course, that the Clock Tower was a cheap doss house, and Don Fernando’s comrades-in-arms began wondering about this exotic coozy who was earning extra pesetas by selling another one of her natural talents. And from England, of all places. Or was she? No doubt a prostitute who was dishing out a story to Pablo that he wasn’t supposed to pass on, even after several months — but one mustn’t look for guilt inside a shaved head. A uniformed companion of his, Pedro, also bald but bright, had been looking for a teacher, one who was good but cheap — two qualities seldom combined by Mother Nature, who isn’t exactly generous in handing out her oddments. Out here at the Tower, Mother Nature relaxed her standards somewhat, so much was clear. But was Pablo’s teacher good? She surely must be cheap, and that’s what Pedro needed because he was very poor. He was nothing more than the son of an even poorer father from a highly aristocratic family, an impoverished island dynasty with historically significant lineage. Some of the ancestors are hanging in the Prado with pleated millstone collars, their hands on their swords or at their breast. Pedro’s brother Jacobo was rumored to have become a successful painter, married to a rich American woman. They had a house in Génova, C’an Boticari, that was frequented by the art-loving foreign colony that spoke only English, which is why Pedro wanted to learn the language. Pablo had been raving about his teacher, but surely he never said where or how he was sleeping with her, since his lessons always took place at a marble table in the Tower taberna , pitifully illuminated by a lamp thickly coated with fly droppings. Don Fernando, Beatrice reported, spoke fluent English and was a much-traveled man; I must know him: he was the thin, greying fellow at the post office whom we often overheard offering consolation to English ladies concerning lost correspondence. His title there was Secretary, next in the post office hierarchy after Director, a position that was unfilled. His wife Pazzis was a sculptor, one of Pedro’s apparently numerous sisters, and there were even more brothers. A flourishing family…

In two hours a lot can get said. Beatrice gave me a report down to the last detail. I listened to her like a child at the feet of a crone telling fairy tales while rain patters against the window panes. The men in the cells were doing another kind of pattering, but this didn’t make the scene any less magical and lulling. Every once in a while Kathrinchen added a Rhenish squeal of pleasure to the Spanish drumbeat. And Beatrice talked and talked…

Don Fernando and Pazzis, who was lust for life incarnate, became our friends. I recall Pazzis as a highly talented artist on the morbid side, with a face covered by freckles. Whenever I was in her presence I felt a lump in my throat. Often it was only a dumpling that prevented me from speaking, but Beatrice said that I was in love. I knew what it meant to be in love, when your throat and your mouth tighten up simultaneously. No, it was something else. Later, Pazzis took her own life. And then I realized that I had sensed her presence as a counterpart to myself.

Don Fernando had a high-pitched voice; his manners were quite un-Spanish in studied imitation of foreigners he had observed, and he had salt-and-pepper hair that must have given Beatrice pause for a second or so. Moreover, he had a sarcastic way with his sketching pencil, which he wielded at any and all society gatherings on the island. As a marvelous complement to his eccentric personality he owned a little Fiat in which everything was loose that was supposed to be tight, and everything that was supposed to move was stuck tight, so that the car had to be pushed. The more Don Fernando kicked and swore at this vehicle, the more immoveable it became. On the other hand, as a postal official he demonstrated a gift for cosmopolitan inventiveness. He distributed gratuities to the conductors on the Génova tram line, so every day at quitting time he hitched his Fiat to the last car. Out at the terminus he was greeted by his mongrel Perna, so named after the leg that it lifted on everything in sight, including its master’s own leg. Upon arrival he asked kids to push his Fiat up to his house, the residence of artists. Don Fernando liked to have himself chauffeured around like a satrap. The next morning the kids turned the car around and set it at the top of the street, and Fernando descended noiselessly through clouds of dust to his place of work. In El Terreno he had to put another gang of kids in harness to get him across a level stretch. There, too, Fernando exercised his regal prerogatives. He employed this commuting technique for years until Pazzis finally was able to show him down to the last penny that the bribes, gratuities, and motor vehicle repair costs — the only constant and reliable aspects of owning this vehicle — were costing him more than he would spend if he took a taxi every day. If five passengers got together for a taxi ride to Génova, each one would be paying the equivalent of a single fare on the tram. So Fernando gave up his car, but then fell into a fit of melancholy. People said that he even began neglecting his postal duties — that is, if a Spanish civil servant can ever be said to “neglect” his duty. At the time when Don Fernando came to look over the educated prostitute at the Clock Tower, he still was in possession of his Fiat, which meant that he was at the height of his potency. He was of course convinced that the teacher didn’t know a word of English, but he was genuinely curious as to how she went about practicing her other profession, her Tower trade, and he wanted to find out for himself. This he confessed to us later, but he need not have.