Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

Just two weeks later Beatrice had saved up the money for our trip. Martersteig planned to keep us in Deyá for four days; thus, we could avoid expenses for food for an entire week by fasting totally one day before and one day after the journey. He explained to us that he lived very simply, but that we wouldn’t starve in his little mill tower. Well, we weren’t starving in our own Tower refuge, either, but in fact — no offense to the military man intended — we were looking forward to putting on a little flesh during our stay in Deyá.

We took an early train. Our leader, stiff in the joints as usual, was abnormally quiet. He dusted Beatrice’s seat with insect repellent, thereby exposing himself and me to attacks of vermin. Then he dozed off grumpily, cradled and shaken by the 3rd class coupé. By unhappy coincidence we found ourselves sitting directly above an axle. The Captain’s air cushion provided only a little comfort, and when it burst a few minutes later — it was not made for the tropics and had dried out — his mood turned sour. The thought of going home seemed to depress him. Who knows what tricks and shenanigans his enemy would have thought up in the meantime? We left Martersteig to his morose cogitations, his aching back, his increasingly ominous premonitions, and an army of fleas that went on the attack in our compartment. Beatrice was the only one who didn’t get bitten.

The trip was worth the money that we had scraped together by going hungry. We rode through several tunnels, an experience that can make any landscape, no matter how intrinsically dreary, become a series of pleasant vistas. This landscape, in its fabled luxuriance, could boast of being the most beautiful and fertile region on the whole island. Olive orchards followed upon groves of almonds, palms jutted out from orange plantations, and yet the effect was not of the tropical sort in this southern clime. Everywhere you looked you could see merry black wallowing Mallorquin pigs, exemplars of a world-famous culture of gastronomic swine-breeding, based on a diet of apricots. More than the palm trees, the Aleppo firs, the araucarias, the carobs, and the tangerines, these animals gave me a sense of being very remote from my homeland and its pale prize-winning German hogs.

Sóller is a lovely town — if you are willing to accord any meaning to the word “lovely” under the hot Spanish sun — situated at the bottom of a colorful valley. A visitor wouldn’t mind settling there in one of the white-walled cottages amid cats, orange groves, and in the little front yard mothers suckling their young with their gleaming golden breasts. The morning we arrived we didn’t get to see much of this orange-producing town, whose product can be found in gift baskets of fruit anywhere in the world. The Captain was in a rush to get home, and that meant that we had to step on it, too. He wouldn’t even let us saunter through the streets, take a peek at the Franciscan monastery, visit the market square, seek out a wayside shrine — none of all this. We had to speed home — I almost wrote “home to the Motherland”—and so we trudged along donkey paths across rocky ground, past boulders and over mounds of talus, up into the range of hills that led from Sóller to Deyá.

I am incapable of describing landscape, for the simple reason that landscape doesn’t speak to me — or to put this more modestly, it doesn’t say very much to me. For this reason I could now make good use of the pen of the Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria, who lived on this island for decades. He is the author of the definitive work on the Balearic Islands; he knew how to capture the archipelago in word and image. Copy his text? Oh, if only I could locate one or two pages of his to plagiarize so that my reader might receive at least a remote impression of how magnificent our hike was, far above the pulsating flanks of the ocean, parallel to a shoreline incised with fiords and inlets that beckoned to the blue swells of seawater. Anton Emmerich would of course immediately say, “Copied out!” And Lord knows I wouldn’t deny it, although I would never even dream of stealing from Emmerich’s own “Guide to Mallorca.” If you wish to deck yourself with borrowed plumes, you won’t wait around until a moulting sparrow sends you one of its tail feathers. With all due respect to that Colognian’s business acumen, his “Guide” was a mess. So a few dabs of color from my own personal palette should do a better job.

The Captain’s feet were shod in a pair of sealskin moccasins, prescribed for his journey to Spain by an orthopedist in Germany. In the Count’s rooming house he always wore slippers made of cat or rabbit fur, which were no doubt beneficial for his gouty extremities, but were anything but moth-proof. Up here on the donkey path he shuffled along, every once in a while emitting a groan that signaled a pause to rest on a knobby pine branch. This we did gladly, for we heroes were also tuckered out from hiking, especially me with my congenital aversion to long foot marches. It wasn’t our footgear or our feet themselves that limited our endurance up here in the hills. As a Swiss citizen Beatrice is quite used to taking miles and miles at a stretch, and with her Indian heritage she could have snuck her way all along the trail. Moreover, the balancing mechanism inside our ears remained undisturbed, unlike the aviator, whom we had to lash to a rope whenever we had to eke our way past a precipice. “It’s a case of acrophobia, Madam, and it becomes acute on donkey trails like this one. Terrible. But neither of you has ever crash-landed from 9000 feet. Down there…”

Martersteig almost audibly clapped his hand to his eyes, for “down there” was a yawning gap of about a hundred meters. To crash land down there without eligibility for a government pension? The worst way for a famous fighter pilot to get shot down, I thought, was if he did the shooting himself. But by then, we had successfully roped the airforce retiree past another steep cliff. Loose rocks tumbled down the incline into the abyss below. Our ailing, stiff-backed leader, who at any moment could plunge to the depths, thanked us with a glassy stare. “Your fatherland’s gratitude is certain”—isn’t that what the poets of his homeland were so fond of singing?

The sun, too, offered no mercy. It glared down upon us with ferocious strength in spite of the lateness of the season. Apart from a couple of brief drizzles that passed over the island, it hadn’t rained at all. The Captain, like all sufferers from gout a walking weather prognosticator, said that we could expect real rain very soon; he could feel it in his sealskin footwear. And then we would get to see what it was like when an entire island is inundated; we would learn what rainstorms can do in Spain.

After many hours of forced marching, slipping, sliding, and stumbling, we finally reached the village of Deyá, located on a mountainside in the midst of an orange grove, just as picturesque as Baedeker said it was. Martersteig came back to life. Stealthily, like a hunted game animal, he took Beatrice’s arm and whispered, “It’s down there, no, a little farther on, more to the right — no, farther still. Do you see that spruce tree standing alone? That’s it, right there. And who do you suppose lives there?”

Beatrice made no reply. Peering along a raised index finger with its bitten nail, she could focus her glance only on the landscape as a whole, not on some single house or free-standing spruce tree within it. I raised my own well-kempt index finger and said quickly, “Your enemy, Herr von Martersteig, our literary colleague Sir Robert von Ranke Graves.”

“Let’s move on, just a half hour more, and then we’ll take a rest beneath my spruce tree.”

This remark was controlled, to-the-point, and strategically significant. That’s how I imagine a ground observer communicating with his pilot: one kill. Next enemy, please.