Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

La Gerstenberg wondered out loud whether what we had just heard was more than just a pastime for an officer of the air force who had force-landed. “Vigoleis, now you say something!”

“Dear Madame Gerstenberg,” I began, in an attempt to defend my literary colleague, “Martersteig’s style is, as you say, ‘nice.’ You took the word right out of my mouth, but coming from my mouth, it would have meant something different. I would have added, ‘Very nice, indeed, when observed with the eyes of a writer whom you have outpointed, Captain, with your own style. Many people know how to write, but very few have anything to say. You cannot write, but damn it all, you have everything in the world to say.’ The book is superb. Whoever reads it will be rid of any notions about making war. Our neo-Clausewitz will have one thing in common with the New Testament: it will never find its way into a soldier’s musette bag. Yet I fear that hardly a week afer it is published, our friend Martersteig will be the victim of an assassination. Those guys will search him out in his lodgings in Deyá and string him up in the nearest olive tree. He’ll lose his spinal pension, but his royalties for the book will outdo what he could ever squeeze out of Hindenburg.”

How much should I charge him per page? What was the going wage on the island for such secretarial drudgery?

Meanwhile, it was too late in the day for financial negotiations with the author. Strengthened in body and spirit, we made our way homeward — yes, homeward to the Clock Tower, where we now actually felt at home, cosmopolitans that we were. When you come to think of it, if you subtract the naked joy from a house of joy, what you’re left with isn’t necessarily naked misery.

As we hiked out from the city, Beatrice asked me what I really thought of the Captain’s “so-called writing.” She thought that his style was frightful, and the rest insignificant. Bitter thoughts of a failed soldier, one who curses the troops but is offended if you don’t address him with his military rank. I agreed with her on this point, and remarked that the Captain hadn’t yet tossed his medal Pour le Mérite on the dung heap. “Nobody will read that stuff,” Beatrice went on. “It’s just so meaningless.” And then she added, this time in French, that she had been wrong about my taste.

If you’re holding hands as you stride toward a Clock Tower, if you know that just an hour later you’ll have night all around you, if the aroma of the slaughterhouse is coursing over the fields, and rats are scuttling across your path, if the mute stars are skewered on the dull firmament of nothingness like the fearful many-faceted eye of the Creator — then you don’t tell lies.

And so I said, “Beatrice, chérie , if I can persuade that aviator to fork over fifty centimos for each page of monkey fiction, then I won’t care the gratings of his own green cheese what kind of style this stupid Prussian writes. With his style, he isn’t paying much honor to the officer class he once belonged to. The real Clausewitz, Moltke, Gneisenau — those were first-rate classical stylists, models for anyone who wants to learn how to write good German. It’s just that the things they wrote down on paper don’t interest anybody any more. They don’t interest me; they don’t interest anybody anywhere. What Martersteig has to say will still be meaningful tomorrow. And if you’ll permit me to turn prophetic, it will be meaningful as long as there’s a place called Germany with German soldiers that are all monkeys, from the privates right up through the sergeants and the field marshals. Tomorrow I’m going to start negotiating with him about typing his novel. The author will provide paper and ribbons. I’ll provide the machine and the triple-spacing from my own resources, and…”—lifting my gaze to the stars, although Beatrice didn’t notice—“if my name ain’t Vigoleis, for the first time ever, world-class literature will get written on my Diamant. I hope that Vic van Vriesland will forgive me, and ter Braak and Slauerhoff, too, and all the lesser writers who have constantly been helping me to run away from myself. I’d even do it for 30 centimos, even for a single real, but the Captain doesn’t need to know this.”

Beatrice didn’t need to know that I would do this job for a perra gorda , that is, 10 measly centimos. For a 500-page manuscript, you can figure it out yourself: that would amount to two months’ rent in cash. We would be rid of that worry until year’s end, even considering that Pablo was no longer falling asleep under Beatrice’s pedagogy. It was already close to the end of October.

And so in our nocturnal conversation on the way home, I ended up lying after all, although I meant it only to conceal my real thoughts. But there was no concealing them from the many-faceted, starry eye above us. Now it was that eye’s turn to make a move on the chessboard of our destiny. We were playing black, and we lost.

Negotiating with the writer was a long process. My hopeful suggestion of 50 centimos met with decisive rejection. No, he couldn’t pay me that much. 250 pesetas? Did I realize that a sum that large meant a whole month of hostility from Graves? And, if he might be permitted to inquire, was I crazy? So I started haggling and underbid myself by 10. No! Not the gratings! Another 10. This would still force him to take up a beggar’s staff; not a pretty state of affairs, since, as an officer, he was used to leaning on his ceremonial saber. Besides, it was his enemy who was constantly forcing him to live beyond his means. In the long run, he simply could not afford commuting back and forth to the Count’s redoubt; he rejected the idea of responding, and, in any case, this accursed Tommy was in the stronger position. So in his guts he was pondering final departure from the island to move to Ibiza or Alicante. Should he decide to make the move, and although it was painful even to consider it, he would sell all his belongings, and he had a commode, a “chest” as we might prefer to call it, a masterpiece of cabinetry that he would gladly offer as compensation for my typing. “Madame, dear Madame Beatrice, what a blessing it is that you came along today! You see, your Vigoleis — I like him. He’s a fine man, but he’s not a very practical man. Please, no objections, let’s call a spade a spade. With his metaphysical twists and turns he’s placing obstacles on the path to his own well-being. If you ask me, and I beg your pardon, you will both end up in a barrel.”

“We’re already there, Herr Hauptmann ! But now that you have sounded this alarm, permit me to inquire: how far does a Vigoleis have to drop before he’s eligible for a hero’s pension?”

Herr von Martersteig gave me a pitying glance through his monocle, and then continued speaking in his elegant way to Beatrice,

“… and that is why we must be very careful, for Don Vigo might well choose to type out my manuscript for no wage at all, and of that I would not approve!” The Captain made a dismissive gesture that included his fur-slippered feet, which were still a part of his militarily unfit body, though only barely recognizable as such.

He would hate to part with this chest of drawers, a Martersteig heirloom that he had arranged to be sent down from Magdeburg for reasons of nostalgic ambience. He was, he said, a man who clung to the proper environment; he was still unable to get used to Spain. This chest was a piece of the homeland. Vigoleis may go ahead and smile — lucky is the man who can carry his homeland around with him in a little suitcase. He was in need of very special kinds of homey surroundings. Was I able to empathize with that, he asked?

I was indeed. I knew that there are some writers who can write only when they hear a tomcat purring on their laps, one that every now and then will lift its tail to wipe the drops of creative sweat from their brows. Other writers are in need of a woman instead of a cat, a woman who under certain circumstances can relieve them of creative agony along with the sweat. Josef Roth got along with strong liquor; Hemingway takes a complicated bath-cum-massage when he is working. For his struggles with the demons of creativity, Teixeira de Pascoaes requires a few dozen pencil-thin sticks made of precious wood and with little gold feathers at their ends, which he places like over-sized toothpicks in a special quiver. Dante had his Beatrice, and Vigoleis no less. François Villon kept his divine lamp lit by means of highway robbery. Was the Clausewitz of the 20th century likewise using this hunk of antique German furniture, yanking forth from it the energy to animate his four-legged army recruits in a campaign to purge the German nation of its mission to redeem the world?