Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Our respective jobs didn’t bring us much money, but whenever we scraped up the real and fake duros that came our starving way, they were sufficient to meet our current expenses of sending out manuscripts into the world and heating our stew over our little camp stove. Meat? Not even on Sundays, the day when even the poorest of the poor can find traces of fat in their soup. We could smell meat, but only as its fragrance wafted toward our cell from the abattoir, from the neighboring cells, or from the old crone’s barbecue spit. We were invited once a week to visit our friend, the Royal and Imperial Court Actress, to partake of a meal and reminiscences of Old Vienna. This was always a feast day for us; there was wine, good talk, Inca squawks, monkey business, and lots of handshaking and shoulder-clapping with friends and strangers. And one day — lo and behold! It wasn’t Schiller’s famous Cranes of Ibykus. It was Katie, the coal tycoon’s spouse from Essen! The rocking chairs wouldn’t stop rocking. There were shouts and laughter. “Yes, indeed, my friends! Beatrice, Vigoleis, finally I’ve got you together with a few of Vigo’s compatriots. I’ve already told them about you. Please, Friedel, you do the introductions.”

All of a sudden the big, wide world became a mere nutshell, a tiny thimble. This beautiful and imposing lady, her Rubensesque bosom covered by an expensive embroidered Mallorquin blouse, came up short when she stood facing Beatrice. And Beatrice, too, mentally shielded her eyes. Now where had the two of them met before? In Berlin, of course! No, beg your pardon, it was in Düsseldorf at the Becker Steel stockholders’ meeting. “Friedrich Wilhelm, isn’t this amazing? We meet again here on Mallorca!” Her spouse, the Herr Doktor, the steel magnate, was not sharing the thrill of this re-encounter, and so the lady felt it necessary to apologize for her slight breach of etiquette, based as it was on a total memory blackout. Her husband’s eyesight, she explained, had deteriorated since that time — when was it? Of course, 1928, when the serial murderer Kürten was loose in Graf Adolf Park — the mention of this notorious fellow with the bloodstained jacket helped to patch over an embarrassing moment. “He’s overworked,” the lady added, and La Gerstenberg, once again rocking in her chair, whispered to Vigo as he bent down to listen, “Nervous breakdown”—a diagnosis that I discreetly passed on to Beatrice. Whereupon all of us assumed a mien of great seriousness, as is appropriate in the presence of a fellow human being gone to rack and ruin. Only the Inca cockatoo refused to respect this minute of silence; he squawked forth his unchaste battle cry, and in so doing was, of course, very close to the truth at hand. Mr. Heavy Metal took off his thick spectacles and wiped them ceremoniously on his jacket lining, although when he put them back on, he couldn’t see any better. He had aristocratic hands, probably as a result of his ailments. He was also markedly taciturn, and to cap his misery, he seemed to have picked up a flea somewhere, for every once in a while he secretly scratched himself under his belt, the place to where the little animals love to migrate; they feel sheltered in the warm space between clothing and skin.

We took our seats around the self-portrait of the illustrious Sureda father-in-law. The robust Rhine maiden sat opposite me, and her silken blouse caused me to become just as tongue-tied as the gentleman from Essen. My inner world, too, had now increasingly shrunk — not to a nutshell, but to right-hand Cell No. 2 in the Clock Tower, and I was straining to accustom myself to the sight of the fully dressed woman. So that’s what you look like, you steamy nympho, when you’ve had your fill and then stride forth out of the sin bin to return to the myopic glances of your mucked-up Freddy Boy and give him some line about “going shopping,” while your almocrebe once more licks his chops at the thought of the beauty spot so magically located on your left breast. Has your honorable husband ever noticed it? I’ll bet it’s not listed in your passport under “identifying marks.”

“Vigoleis, you’re so quiet today. Is anything wrong? Poems? Creative block?” inquired Madame Gerstenberg, for whom my silence was particularly odd, since I was the one who usually was expected to take center stage with my story-telling.

“No, neither the one nor the other, and most certainly not the third thing, either. I’m still enough of a mime to be able to conceal such afflictions from other people. Otherwise I could never step out in public.”

“Was there another flood out there where you live?” asked Friedrich. I replied that maritime conditions at the Torre del Reloj were still favorable — sometimes low tide, sometimes…

“The Clock Tower!” shouted the magnate’s wife, and turned as white as her now-clothed body. Her features collapsed and her eyes turned hollow, but she quickly regained control and continued in a joking vein, “Oh, ‘Torre del Reloj’! Back home we call it a church steeple, and that’s probably what it is. But now, speaking of clocks, a glance at my watch (a costly object set with diamonds, which she never wore in bed — her johns would have a taste for such items, too) tells me that we’re going to have to leave. My husband is expecting a call from Germany. Darling?”

“Well,” said the tragedian as heavy industry made its hasty departure. “What would Herr Doktor do without the ministrations of his little lady?”

“And what would Frau Doktor do without Spanish subsidies in the Clock Tower,” added — not Vigoleis, who could have verified this brown-on-white, but Friedrich Ginsterberg, La Gerstenberg’s sassy, savvy son.

“Now Friedel! Do you have to spill the beans all the time? Besides, speaking in asides isn’t the fashion any more, except perhaps in cheap melodrama.”

“It’s just possible, Mama, that this is a cheap melodrama,” replied her son, who knew the score. With that he had the last word. Bowing in all directions, he went his own way, a way that was to lead him without delay or hesitation to many similar towers, and before very long to the Alicante cemetery.

The telephone message from the homeland, the one the Frau Doktor remembered so suddenly on the basis of my prompting, appeared to have thrown her ailing spouse completely for a loop. The industrial couple sent a note to La Gerstenberg, saying that an urgent family matter required that they return for a time to Germany, and then they boarded the next steamer for Málaga. The mild climate and the famous medicinal wines will have put Friedrich Wilhelm back on his feet, and Katie no doubt also found in Málaga what she was in need of.

I wonder whether they are still living — he with countless professional entries and titles in “Who’s Who?” and she, nameless and identifiable only by a beauty mark on her left breast? We shall meet up with her again, once again denuded, but not in her own nakedness.

The tycoon couple ought to have stayed on to hear Adele Gerstenberg read from her play, but as the insatiably curious Friedel had found out, they were already floating somewhere on the Mediterranean. Thus the audience was confined to the persons originally selected: Baron von Martersteig, Beatrice, Vigoleis, Mr. Emmerich, the optician, and Friedel, his mommy’s son.

The author read aloud for two whole hours, with a brief intermission for seltzer water between Acts Two and Three. We had been told that she intended to read only a few scenes; no one was prepared to hear the entire drama. The historical model is a familiar one: the chaste Queen Elizabeth, a miracle of moral righteousness in her own time, managed a “Clock Tower” outside the city gates, where almocrebe s and bullfighters likewise derived their entertainment. To be sure, this cost Essex his head. I can’t recall whether La Gerstenberg lent this hackneyed material a specifically Spanish flavor; I am myself too poorly schooled in history to tell, and even less curious about necrophilia. In any case, the effect of her reading was overwhelming. But to say this, is not to apply a value judgment to the literary qualities of her play. A talented elocutionist can transform the kitschiest doggerel into veritable pearls of poetry, and send immortal literature into the trash bin.