Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

He arrived in a good mood and with lots of gesticulation. Right away he inquired whether it was nice out there in Grinzing, but he was visibly taken aback by his mother’s dusty appearance. “Begging your pardon, Maman, but you were determined to go out and visit the Tower.”

“It’s not what you’re thinking, my son. That’s not what bowled me over out there. I am familiar with vice in all its manifestations. But that these people have to live like that, and that they haven’t done away with each other — that’s what truly got to me.”

After a short time we were joined by the fellow from Cologne, and later still by Captain von Martersteig, who was back in town with his air of suffering and his complaints about new outrages committed by his enemy Robert von Ranke Graves. And then came one of Friedel’s friends, one whom we hadn’t met before: a professional Czech or Polish optician. Tout Mallorque , Adele told us, gazed at the world through his spectacles. She gradually regained her composure, and she became almost merry when her son, no longer than a minute later, started bickering with the retired aviator.

Before we took leave of each other, we agreed on a date for a return visit to the actress. A jour is, after all, a jour . As far as I was concerned, this was a stylish way of arranging things. She promised to read us a few scenes from her play, and yes, she would expect Martersteig to attend if he happened to be in Palma. That is one more reason, he replied, to stay in the city. And when, she asked, would Vigoleis give her the pleasure of reading from his own works?

“After you, Herr von Martersteig! First the regular troops, then the home guard. After the capitulation of your Monkey Army, my Cadaver Murders in the Clock Tower!”

Don Fernando summoned me to the post office secretariat so that he could give me a few tips about how to make sure we could receive, without undue delay, more than half of the items that arrived in our name. That was a decent proposal, and I agreed to it — by return mail, so to speak. Don Fernando knew his way around all the various postal departments; he knew all the tricks practiced by his employees and all the holes in the floor of the crumbling post office building. The proverb O chão não tem buracos —the floor has no holes in it — which the Portuguese like to cite when they can’t find something that has fallen to the floor — was not applicable to the main post office barracks in Palma de Mallorca. There the floor had real holes in it, though perhaps it wasn’t the floor that we would have to search to locate them. As General Secretary, Don Fernando exercised oversight over these leaks within his official quarters.

I was led to his office down a rickety staircase. He greeted me with effusive congratulations for having arrived without breaking my neck, and was obviously impressed by my daredevil balancing skills. Then we descended farther through dark hallways, stumbling over canvas bags and stepping into mounds of paper — the packing room, said Don Fernando, where lots of mail got left unsorted. It just couldn’t be helped. That was the first hole in the floor. The second hole, a more dangerous one, was one of the colleagues, a professional postal clerk in a blue smock, the most feared postage-stamp thief in all Mallorca, as ineradicable as quack grass or mildew. In the normal course of things, a postal employee will concentrate equally on sender and addressee; this blue-smocked fellow had eyes only for return addresses. Stamps that were missing from his collection, or that he needed for swapping, he loosened from the envelopes using his own method, and they disappeared. If the loosening technique didn’t work properly, he would take a pair of sewing scissors and simply cut away the stamps. Letters or packages that got seriously damaged, he threw away. Over time, he established for himself a proprietary privilege that the post office administration was unable to deny him. After all, he represented a lesser evil amid the egregious large-scale inefficiency of the Spanish postal service, a state of affairs that corresponded exactly with the country’s illiteracy rate, as Don Fernando was able to show me on the basis of statistical studies.

I was introduced to the stamp thief. This is not the place to set forth a description of the ideal type of the philatelist. I shall mention only this man’s beard, which actually wasn’t a beard at all and wasn’t meant to be one: it was ten-day stubble. It served him perfectly; he kept it that way so as to take the postage stamps from their soaking and hang them on his facial bush, where they dried off and eventually fell away. More than once I observed him with stamps in his beard that got stuck in the whiskers. Like all robbers, he was a friendly guy, but woe to me if… He knew me and was interested in my dealings with the Netherlands, but he immediately complained that I wasn’t getting much mail from there any more; couldn’t I do something to improve the situation? Holland had just issued a new series, and he was missing a few items. In the presence of Don Fernando we made a gentleman’s agreement. I promised with a handshake to show him all the postal items addressed to me, and to let him keep the stamps. I rented a postal box, an apartado , which made it easier to keep our deal. Not that I would ever be tempted to break it: I am a collector of nothing at all, not even experiences, and thus not even money. But I can imagine that a serious collector must live constantly on the edge of crime. What seems so attractive about this activity is the prospect of cheating — either cheating the other guy or getting cheated oneself. There is always this tension: is that pot genuine? Did Van Gogh paint that bridge himself? Is this bone fragment truly from Saint Kunibert’s tibia? Is this iron nail really from Christ’s cross? I have enough to contend with regarding my own authenticity. Incidentally, my Mallorquin drybeard friend ended up paying dearly. Shortly after the Civil War broke out he was eliminated, as the current phrase would have it, by another stamp collector from whom he had been stealing for years. One of the most praiseworthy aspects of all civil wars is that they develop their own drumhead justice to handle such internal matters, thus relieving the juntas of much superfluous work.

In numerical terms I can report that on the basis of my agreement with the postal clerk, seldom more than 36 % of our mail got lost in the shuffle.

It was Menno ter Braak who drew my attention to the writer Slauerhoff. I came upon Albert Helman by myself, whose stories impressed me greatly. His pseudonym concealed a Surinamese writer about whom it was rumored that at age seventeen he was still climbing trees in the jungle — no doubt an exaggeration, but he couldn’t yet be badly spoiled by our civilization. I wanted to reach him concerning the German copyright to his jungle novel The Quiet Plantation , and one day in the university library in Amsterdam I took a seat next to a young man who was obviously translating something in a book. It was The Quiet Plantation . At the time, I was struggling with Menno ter Braak, the West Indian’s recalcitrant, trouble-making antipode, and his Bourgeois Carnival . My new library acquaintance and I got talking. He was a brand-new German Ph.D., and he was in fact translating Helman’s book into German. Probably, he said, we would be at loggerheads about my own intellectual barbarian ter Braak. This Dr. NN was a reticent, well-read philologist, the recipient of a Catholic stipend that allowed him to purchase books and sufficient amounts of food — an ideal situation for a literary person, whereas I was living on garbage like a stray dog. But this I must now explain. I worked a lot, but got almost no pay. Moreover, I am a voracious carnivore, one whom the vicissitudes of life have often coerced into becoming an abject omnivore. I refuse to let this get me down, but I am filled with remorse by my awareness that Nature can turn certain creatures into bad dogs. To be sure, the Miracle of Creation exhibits worse cases of corruption than a meat-craving Vigoleis with his seven meatless days each week. I found out that a butcher in my neighborhood sold scraps for dogs at ten cents an ounce. I became a daily customer of his. It’s for my Doberman, I told him, a smart, sweet, huggable animal if there ever was one, trained to the nines, a good watchdog, virtually quivering with pedigree. The butcher and his regular customers couldn’t wait to see this canine miracle. It was not readily noticeable that I myself was the dog in question, for I performed my metamorphosis inside my rented room, where I prepared these somewhat questionable delicacies using rare Indian spices that cost much more than I could afford. The other little doggie had none. But in his state of non-existence, he was actually better off than his master.