Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Her son kept the answer to himself. But now we had issued the invitation, and all that remained was for the scales to fall from her eyes.

We chose a day for our little dinner party when the mattress transactions would be at a minimum. There were in fact certain days when no one at all made use of the cells, allowing us exclusive enjoyment of the celestial premises together with the rats and the bats.

We arranged everything in the most attractive fashion. We unscrewed the chair from the wall, and our natural disorder was transformed into unnatural order. Beatrice was in charge of the change of sets. She had her own notions and experiences concerning a jour fixe . I had none. There was no such thing in my parents’ home; there, every single day was a fixed day, and that was that. In the first months of her marriage, my mother tried to arrange some such thing with the aid of her well-to-do farmer relatives, who planned to arrive at our house in their coaches drawn by heavy draft horses, dressed in stiff silks and furs and velvet. Among them was a filthy-rich hermaphroditic cousin, Aunt Molly, whose marriage turned into a tragedy — a novel in itself. But at the birthing hour, my father stuffed this tradition’s head back where it came from. If this nonsense came about, he would sue for divorce. This was a remarkable form of mutiny for a small-town couple who, on their wedding day, took a donkey ride up Dragon’s Crag on the Rhine. My father simply didn’t like any kind of “fancy stuff,” and thus he deprived me of jour experiences, leaving me to depend on my own imagination and on passages I read in books. I wondered how Madame de Staël or Bettina Brentano might arrange a reception if they lived like us in Robber Arsenio’s castle of whoredom. But Beatrice wasn’t to be deterred; she developed her own style of entertaining company. Her standard was not to be found in the palaces of the princes and captains of industry where she had been present for tricky conversation, delectable pastries, and poisoned tea.

Our sty looked less piggish once her aesthetic hand rearranged the stuff on our clotheslines in a more pleasing order, just as, when company is expected, you might place knickknacks on a highboy next to a silver swan with peacock feathers. The bidet was concealed with an Indian shawl, although it was my intention to reveal the whole truth to my fellow author La Gerstenberg, ever since we had our conversation about how, for a writer who plies his craft by hand and outside-in for hours at a time, writer’s cramp is best overcome without the aid of psychoanalysis.

We picked up our guest at her pensión and walked with her casually to our jour fixe . I carried her folding chair, which she made use of repeatedly during the journey. She didn’t like the heat; on a hot day she felt as if she had been strapped in a harness that impeded her freedom of movement. This was an oppressively hot day. The highway was veiled in clouds of dust, and the slaughterhouse was making propaganda for a vegetarian lifestyle. Adele, even more prone than Beatrice to feelings of disgust, started shivering. I told her that this was a stroke of bad luck; it didn’t smell like this all the time — the wind was blowing in from a certain range of hills and bringing certain things along with it. Surely she knew the poem “Harbingers of Spring” by her friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal, where the wind wafts through bare boulevards carrying strange things in its course. There was a similar stanza in Mörike: familiar fragrances glide ominously through the land, just as we were experiencing here. “Great poetry, chère Madame , can encompass the entire globe. No matter which poet pumps the bellows, his breath can grasp the heart of any receptive creature.”

The two ladies would have preferred to grasp their noses, but such a gesture is bad form in better society. Before our tragedian friend’s cheeks could take on a greenish tint, we were already at the entrance to the Manse. I didn’t have to announce, “Here we are!” Instead, La Gerstenberg cried out, “Oh you dear people! No, Vigoleis wasn’t exaggerating. This is a romantic place. I’m going to have to sit down.”

I placed her folding chair beneath her, and now she sat there like a field marshal surveying the battlefield, commotion all around her, aides-de-camp scurry to and fro, there is a clatter of hooves, a blaring of bugles, adjutants surround the general’s chair, ready to pass on the latest action report—“Yes, over there to the east there’s that thousand-year-old carob-bean tree. On moonlit nights you can see the dust rise up from the explosions. Our accurate catapults toss cocaine shells onto the field, and trained dogs fetch the booty. I’ve been able to reconstruct the whole strategy. We now can predict with certainty the night when the ship captain will shoot a torpedo filled with drugs onto the coast, and dozens of women will clamber over crags and crevasses to — how’s that? Those black birds? Those are ravens. There are still a few colonies of them that nest on the island; they’ll be extinct unless another war comes soon. Do they belong to the Manse? No, our robber boss hasn’t yet been so successful that the birds of the air obey him in biblical fashion. He’ll go a lot farther with his henchmen and Juan March’s gold. The ravens always feed at the burial pit over at the matadero . I’ve even observed some vultures there. Can you see any, Beatrice? They’re said to be dangerous; besides goat kids and lambs, they can carry infants off to their aeries. Arsenio shoots them down whenever he can. They hinder his work. I think they spook his dogs and prevent them from pointing properly — something like that. I’m no hunter. And see that ivy-covered projection up there on the tower? Originally, it was probably a spout for dropping hot pitch; now a lookout sits up there and counts the catapult missiles as they arrive.”

La Gerstenberg was thrilled. “But Vigoleis, why don’t you write a book about the ‘Torre’? You must write one. You must! Just the way you’re telling me about it now!”

I exchanged glances with Beatrice, which spoke mutely of the cadaver murders that took place in the Tower. “But, chère Madame , up to now you have received only an impression of the external business. What goes on inside the Manse is also worthy of being depicted, although it is less original in concept.”

“It’s wonderful how each and every stone here cries out for literary portrayal! How happy a writer must be that fate has inserted him in such a place! Now I understand a great deal, Vigo, and I’m almost tempted to say that the two of you should be grateful for your destiny. Shall we go in? I am so relieved for your sake!”

Inside the walls of our robbers’ ranch there was the usual hubbub, the kind you would find in any household with lots of kids and domestic help on any baking-hot late afternoon. The old matron was leaning on her crutch, roasting fish on a spit over a grapewood fire. Using a calabash, she dripped wine onto the roast — no easy matter since the fish, wrapped in strips of bacon, tended to fall apart. She greeted us and, employing sign language and words mumbled into her long whiskers, let us know that we were all invited to partake of the meal. Arsenio strode across the courtyard accompanied by his barking herd of smugglers’ hounds. He was wearing his blue vest with its red sash, resembling down to the very lacings of his raffia espadrillos the image of the Lord of the Island that I had sketched out for our tragedian friend. All he needed to do was clap his hands and call out “Hey, let’s have some wine and anything else you’d like!” A girl came running, and for a split-second Adeleide poked her head through the fly screen at the door. With a wave of my hand I said “No, thanks,” and explained that today Doña Beatriz was having her jour , and that this lady was a great friend of ours from the land of the waltzes that Mr. Arsenio loved so much. Immediately the Giant began jumping around in the rhythm of the Blue Danube. He started whistling the tune that drove Beatrice crazy night after night as it resounded from the red enamel bell of the cylinder gramophone. “This is so cute!” said La Gerstenberg, who usually couldn’t endure noise of any kind. “Beatrice, Vigoleis, how could I possibly have felt sorry you for even one night? When I remember how you got evicted with no money at all, and there you were, marching behind a team of loaded donkeys…”