Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Don Fernando was such a sophisticated postman and civil servant that he survived the shock of learning that Pablo’s profesora was the sister-in-law of the doxy who lived in the apartment across the street from his office. Once this mutual acquaintance was established, the conversation took an easygoing, cosmopolitan course, partly in English, then in French, and again in Spanish. Don Fernando was familiar with the biography of Zwingli’s mistress. He knew Zwingli, too, but only as Don Helvecio, though he would never have guessed that the man behind the name was actually Swiss. “But listen,” said Beatrice, “this Tower here is even worse than we imagined. People get killed here!”

“People killed? What else is new? But of course, you’ve never climbed up on the chair and seen bodies lying flat in rows. That’s pretty old stuff that your two friends are dishing out.”

“No, Vigo, you don’t understand. I mean real murders! These guys aren’t at liberty to express themselves clearly. Arsenio kept pacing around the table. He didn’t trust these visitors. And the Chinaman who helps out in the kitchen isn’t just some shipboard coolie. Adeleide told me that he’s an important contact in the opium trade, and the international police are looking for him!”

“Well, they’ll have a hard time finding him. The ‘Torre’ is the best alibi for respectable people. For example, who would ever guess that we live here? As for that stuff about real murders — wouldn’t that be a great plot for a trashy novel? The title, usually the hardest part of any book, would be the easiest thing to come up with: ‘ The Clock Tower Cadaver Murders .’ How’s that?”

“Cadaver Murders?”

“Of course! I mean the corpses that get pre-slaughtered by the pious girls in their boxes with the aid of the Sixth Commandment. Then along comes a sadistic smuggler with a mask and completes the job. As for getting rid of the bodies, a piece of plotting that most writers of thrillers lose sleep over, I’ll leave that to the rats. Brehm reports about a case in which a gang of these rodents devoured alive three of young Hagenbeck’s circus elephants. When they all work at it together, they can take care of a stiff in the course of a single night. All that’s left over is a bunch of bones, and if necessary I’ll grind them up in Adeleide’s flour mill, in a chapter where the author steps forward to manipulate the plot so as to avoid the premature revelation of the culprit and to prevent the novel from ending too soon. Our horny friend Kate over there…”

“Shh! What if she’s listening?”

“She’s all finished, I made sure of that. Now she’s lying there like a pile of rotten wood on a sultry summer evening. So what do you think? Wouldn’t a great murder thriller like this one bring us some money?”

“I’m all for the theory, but the problem is how to put it into practice. What I mean is, that the rats would gobble up this manuscript, too, before the first murder takes place. But you know better than I do what purposes you have in mind for your writings.”

“Beatrice, chérie , I swear to you a sacred oath that this time…”

“No swearing! We have sworn to each other never to swear anything to each other. Have you had any sleep?”

“Did some reading.”

“Nietzsche?”

“More profound than that! The Book of Nature. It’s quite amazing when all the cells are cooperating in the work of Creation. Everything fits so nicely together, it’s enough to make a believer out of you. In any case, it’s given me a whole lot of inspiration. Two poems! A lullaby filled with sweetness, and a dirge filled with jarring hiatuses. They were all finished in my head. All I had to do was to reach for a pencil. But as you know, I never do that. The seismometer announced new temblors, even your Unkulunkulu started shaking, which it usually doesn’t do unless the boxes are filled up. Such things get dangerous if you’re on a bridge, and that’s why you should never go across in march step. And here? Wow! Blondie over there started yelling for her mother, so you can imagine what her mood is like. Now she’s quiet, but there are always aftershocks. Tell me more about those two guys downstairs.”

“Tomorrow. The painter strikes me as pretty far gone. By the way, he looks just like the ex-King of Spain. The very same face.”

“And the other guy, Don Fernando?”

“What about him?”

Hmm…, I thought. Instead of “What about him,” Beatrice could have gone on to say, “Oh, that one. Well, he’s elegant, a little crazy, in a raw-silk suit, steel-blue eyes, Basque blood, and hands like a vampire.”

Reclining now on our chaste pallet, we abandoned all further considerations to the care of the night. The moon had departed, the candles in the cells and on the pedestal of Our Lady had all gone out, and since the seismograph was inscribing its perceptions into thin air, there is nothing more to report concerning lingering tremors. If I were determined to record a single word, a single blissful moan uttered by my Kathrinchen, I would have to reach back for earlier statements or ejaculations of hers; what I would write may be true, but it wouldn’t be historical. She herself is historical. She has left traces in the Essen Registry of Vital Statistics, and she left impressions on her mattress in the Clock Tower that I shall never forget. Surely it does not behoove me to impugn her credibility in my jottings simply in order to lend contours to her figure by having her utter in a barely audible wheeze, “Man oh man, I’m all done in! Now I’ve had enough for three whole days!” (In chaste parentheses: the next day she was at it again.)

We don’t even know if the rats got what they were after, during that night when Don Pedro José María de Lourdes Juan Celerino Roman Miguel Bruno Ramón León Ignacio Luis Sureda de Montaner Bimet de Maturana y Vega Verdugo de Rousset y Lopez da Sousa y Villalonga de Alba Real del Tajo made his shaven-headed entrance into the Recollections of Vigoleis.

When Beatrice conceded her poverty award to Pedro, she was familiar with only three centimeters of his name, for otherwise she would have subtracted a few pesetas. For the longer the name of a Spanish grandee — some of them take up the entire page of a book, and I have rendered Pedro’s only in its minimal, albeit historically most significant, form — the poorer its bearer turns out to be. They seldom suffer from a dearth of ancestors. Pedro, with a lordly gesture, reduced everything to “Sureda” on his visiting card.

The English lessons took place at the home of Pedro’s parents. And it was there that Beatrice got to know the numerous clan members. “It’s a crazy place,” she said. “It would be impossible to make them all up.” Once again I was forced to restrain my novelistic curiosity. It was weeks before I was introduced to Pedro and his tribe, of which he represented a quixotic offshoot. With regard to the other members of the family, I am tempted to write that he was “the most quixotic,” but this superlative form of the adjective is not very elegant linguistically, and besides, it would imply value judgments that I prefer to avoid. In what ways, for example, was Pedro battier than his father? I shall stick with the simple term “quixotic,” which will allow me plenty of room for doing justice to this new character in his superlative deviancy as an artist and as a human being.

We frequently took advantage of La Gerstenberg’s invitation to join her for a snack in her room at the Pensión del Conde. This was, of course, the kind of “snack” offered by persons of means, and it far outpointed our usual main meal of the day in terms of nourishment.

We had to return her invitation, and thus there arrived the great day when Beatrice held her jour in the Clock Tower. Adele Gerstenberg was touched—“But children, no need for that! And for heaven’s sake, don’t go to great construction for an old lady like me.” She asked what our living quarters were like. She was curious about this ever since her Friedel told her that the estate out there was a highly romantic place, and Vigoleis himself had already planted hints in this direction. One day she almost hiked out there by herself to make a surprise visit, but her kind son was able to quash that idea. “But Friedel, why not?”