Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Every day at the butcher shop I reported the newest training triumph of my pet pinscher, and I reached the point of having him begin to talk — at the time there was only one other talking dog in Amsterdam — when a stupid grocery clerk entered the discussion and killed my dog Mickey dead right in the middle of the shop. This guy was eating all the scraps himself, she shouted, the stakkerd !

She had the laughing crowd of customers on her side. Stakkerd means imp, bum, loafer, tramp, and moocher. But before I could investigate mentally the word’s etymology backwards from the Old Norse and then up through the centuries to Vigoleis, on through the incarnate essence of all of the term’s nuances and into the very blush of my cheeks, I found myself standing out on the street with my ounce of flesh, betrayed by a maiden — just as, months later, Beatrice was caught holding a spoon by Doña María. Her dog was also named Vigoleis, which is further proof of his unique brand of double identity. I pulled the brim of my floppy hat far down over my brow, hunched up the collar of my loden coat, and snuck away like a culprit. That was the end of my peppered adventures with the frying pan. In total humiliation I reached for the potato, and came to despise it even more ardently. I avoided the scene of my abasement, although by rights I ought to have avoided my own self. I kept a discreet distance from the butcher shop. I behaved like Zwingli, or rather — keeping things as close as possible to the first person — I conducted myself as the Vigoleis of my own self will have to behave in the following chapter. Everything has already existed, says Uriel da Costa.

The Ph.D. wanted to obtain a fellowship for me from the same Catholic organization that was financing his existence, but I would have to declare adherence to the Creed. As tempting as his offer was, I preferred to remain faithful to my pinscher: for every Sunday Mass, days and days of living it up.

I also maintained my fidelity to Dutch literature, whose rich corpus of verse makes up for its almost total dearth of “great” prose. I discovered Henny Marsman, bought his books of verse and poems by other writers — you can buy little books by scrimping on food, one of the fine advantages of poetry. This entire harvest was now hanging on the ropes in our cloister cell, although at the time I had no idea that our adventures in the Clock Tower would one day be the very thing that started my friendship with Marsman, the great carnivore who loved solitude, but only if there was a butcher shop nearby. In my biography of Marsman I intend to relate how, in a restaurant located in the shadow of the Goetheanum in Dornach, and featuring a life-size photographic likeness of Rudolf Steiner with his theosophic gaze, the entire clientele of anthroposophers turned to stone as Marsman, speaking through Beatrice as interpreter, asked the waitress to bring him a bloody rib roast. Pace Uriel da Costa, such a thing had never existed before. We had to leave the premises, and in Arlesheim “At the Sign of the Ox” we finally were served what we were dying for. No one there raised an eyebrow, no one raised a scolding finger, no one pointed to a likeness of Steiner, and no one declared with the voice of an avenging bouncer/angel, “Rudolf Steiner says…”

With all due respect to anthroposophy, its Founder never listened with sufficient intensity to emerge from the Seven Regions of his spiritual realm to pass into the Eighth Region: our “Clock Tower,” where I can survive on little nourishment, just as I did on Nicolas Beets Straat in Amsterdam, and where I make literature and then destroy whatever the Tooth of God has not already destroyed. Slauerhoff’s novel The Forbidden Empire made such a strong impression on me that I inquired about the copyright, and began translating it during the hours that Beatrice spent in the city giving language lessons. Of course I never succeeded in finding a publisher for this novel on the life of Camões, although I spent a pretty penny on postage for this manuscript. In addition, there were my intermittent poetic blood-lettings, my satirical stanzas, my dark-hued ballads: all of these got hung on the ropes, where they could dry out like slabs of Swiss smoked ham. The rats sniffed at them, but not because of the poetry they contained — I can’t boast of any such success. Scraps of food and edible provisions also hung alongside them on our lines, which I stretched loosely enough to prevent the beasts from dancing along them. I placed insurmountable obstacles, made from tin cans, at strategic points where the ropes crossed each other. This infuriated the pestilential horde, but they devised a way to get around it. They chose a subterfuge that must have involved insight and ratiocination: standing on top of the partitions, they gnawed the ropes. One night whole portions of the contraption collapsed. We two slumbering human beings were victims of the disaster, and everything in the cell went higgledy-piggledy. It was like a replay of the scene at Pilar’s on the night of our eviction. Not a single rope that held only literature had been touched! Since I still considered myself more intelligent than the most brazen smarty-ass among the rats at Arsenio’s whorehouse, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. Putting index finger to temple, I thought, “Wire!” On my tramp-like wanderings I never found pieces of wire long enough to create a network entirely of metal. So I made do with lengths of wire as end-pieces for attaching the ropes, and slipped the necks of bottles over them. Now show me a rat that will dare to step out on this tightrope! Beaming with pride I displayed my new brainstorm to Beatrice. A gnaw-proof hanging library! But I was jolted back to sober reality when my woman remarked laconically that, while she never wished to interfere with my technical experiments, she had never quite understood why I hadn’t thought of using wire in the first place. My hopes that one day during my lifetime an English lord would offer to purchase one of my teeth to fashion a ring from it — a story they tell about Isaac Newton — were immediately dashed. Worse yet, it would be like pulling every last one of my own teeth to become master of this murky, misty realm of the shades. I had no profit from Beatrice’s retroactively obvious solutions.

Our heroic couple was not lacking in diligence and ambition. Beatrice gave language lessons inside and outside of the notorious Manse, while Vigoleis led his less lucrative, sedentary literary life in our thinking room. Occasionally, the kids peeked through the partition to observe his production of world literature, and the big kids often arrived with their even bigger playmates to engage in their bumping, groaning business next door. This was just as much a part of the daily routine as the braying of the donkeys or a courtyard conversation with Arsenio. Every once in a while the Maiden from the Lower Rhine sounded forth with her silvery peals of joy. One day, when I perceived these blissful yelps issuing forth from the neighboring box and felt a waning of the literary inspiration descending upon me through the webwork above — our bidetto wasn’t yielding anything more than hollow, tinny trotting sounds anyway — I decided to step up on our chair and take a peek into the next-door cubicle. What met my eyes was a vision of the purest splendor; reaching my glance from the bedstead in all its glowing, shimmering clarity, the sight penetrated all the gloomy regions of my heart. Yet moments of mystical vision are like all moments: they don’t last. This one was over in a trice: all at once a shoe came whizzing at me, and I had to crawl back into my private underworld. The almocrebe who was her companion of the moment had aimed poorly. His missile struck the barn wall, loosening a centuries-old film of dust, caromed off, and did considerable damage inside my sty, though not the kind of damage that this off-duty teamster had in mind: he had aimed at my head. My airy archive was set in motion. Ropes snapped, and it was hours before I could re-arrange everything in its proper order. During this repair job, I of course had to keep my skull below partition level, for otherwise it would have been sudden death. Next door, Katie had a giggling fit, thus deriving a bonus of pleasure from the situation. What was I thinking of, violating the unwritten regulations of a whorehouse? The Spaniards are the most chaste people I know. A professional Spanish prostitute — perhaps I have said this already, but in any case I’ll mention it soon again — feels mortally insulted if a painter asks her to pose as his model.