Albert Thelen - The Island of Second Sight

His calculations worked out to the minute. After the announced interval, we were sitting, bathed in sweat, on the wall that surrounded the old house where the Captain had set up his command post. This is where he conjured up his imaginary army of Barbary apes, where he entertained his imaginary ephebes, his imaginary enemies, and his imaginary hatred of Germany, capable all the while of mustering as weapons for the great battle only his damaged spine, his knotty gout, and his worries about his pension. But we mustn’t forget that his arsenal also included his wooden ancestral shrine, which had gone before us like the Star of Bethlehem during our entire miserable cross-country trek, and which each of us imagined as sharing in equal parts: Beatrice for her underclothes, Vigoleis for his sacred cache of poetry. He imagined the key to the secret compartment as made of pure gold — the Nürnberg master surely would not have been content with anything less.

“Welcome, my dear guests,” said the Captain, as he opened the tower door with a creaky key.

The entrada was cool — more than that, it was ice cold. Whitewashed like all of the rooms in the house, it was completely bare except for a small jewel box set in a wall niche. A large spider with its notorious hairy legs (its bite can be fatal to man or horse, the encyclopedia says) was crawling back into its lair between wall and ceiling beams. Our host flipped a wall switch. No electricity.

The heart of a pessimist really starts pumping when everything goes wrong, especially in the presence of witnesses. “Madam, Don Vigo, you can see for yourself. Try the switch. No light! Do you need any more naked proof of my enemy’s wickedness? Robert von Ranke Graves wishes us to sit here in darkness! His spies will have reported our arrival to him. He wants to humiliate me in front of you, but — I have some candles!” This sounded triumphant. O death, where is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory now? Robert von Ranke, where is thy poetic imagination? Joachim has some candle stubs! In a soldier’s musette bag such things can be more important than a field marshal’s mace.

While we recovered from the agonies of our journey — our host opened up chaises longues in the shade of his spruce, or was it a palm tree? — Martersteig busied himself in his kitchen. On the way to his house he had purchased three good-sized sardines, and now he was roasting them on the grill. The smell penetrated everything around us, including ourselves — right down to the marrow. Nothing stinks worse than sardines as they slowly roast to a crisp; it is a fiery purgatory for all the slime of the primeval world. Science is still trying to figure out why the sardine, next to the earthworm the cleanest animal in existence, stinks so much, whereas a pig that has wallowed in mud all its life has such a sweet fragrance on the spit. “He should put his kitchen on the roof,” said Beatrice, and then she was silent. She had turned green, and I wasn’t feeling any better. But the snack did us good, and then we fell into a deep sleep. Afterwards, we went into the village. It was late in the afternoon when the shadows were getting long.

To cite Baedeker further, since I’m unable to do any better, Deyá is simply a fantastic place, unique, highly attractive and truly rewarding. I can’t quote any more, because I have just found out to my amazement that my 1929 Baedeker covers the village with exactly three-quarters of a line! Be that as it may, later guidebooks put the artistic activity in Deyá in the same category as Worpswede and Ascona. I don’t know Worpswede, but Ascona offers more naked flesh, more bedroom scandals, and less artistic activity than Deyá had at the time, when some world-famous painters were still living there. It also sheltered a few writers of note, a few philosophers, the odd vegetarian, a Rumanian soothsayer, and an Italian coloratura soprano whose ornamentations had long since broken off, so that she now exercised her God-given talent only on bright moonlit nights while sitting alone on a stone near her house; a dozen sculptors, a portrait photographer much in demand, a Russian. Graves lived at one end of the village, Martersteig at the other end. In between were the domiciles of international artists, some living there with their fame, others with their failures, their envy, their hatred, and their gossip. And then, of course, there were the indigenous citizens of Deyá, who for a long time now hadn’t been able to figure out just what they were still doing there on their mountainside strewn with orange trees. Many of them readily posed for painters— qué remedio ? What else is there to do?

But now, did a famous writer like Graves truly feel the need to torture an un-famous writer like Martersteig? Lay traps for him? Drive him out of house and village?

Robert Graves was already famous by this time. His Goodbye to All That had a reputation as one the best British war books. It had appeared in German with the title Strich drunter (“That’s it, period!”). Like Joachim von Martersteig, Graves was an officer in the Wilhelminian War and served in France, the country that Martersteig still hated more than any other. But one day each of them said, “That’s it, period!”

Their soldiering days were over, their colorful uniforms in tatters, and depression overcame both the victor and the vanquished. Omne animal post coitum triste, praeter gallum qui cantat , says Aristotle: after the sexual act every animal is sad, except for the rooster, which crows. Or perhaps it sings, like our two writers from hostile camps. They devoted themselves to literature, Graves in a fashion that you can read about in any history of literature, Martersteig in a manner that the world has yet to discover. His image as a fighter pilot was already yellowing in the pages of the illustrated magazines. To display the new Martersteig to the world, the Clausewitzian Martersteig, it would be necessary for the canny Vigoleis to type clear copy from his “Monkey Army” manuscript. Each of these literary competitors could boast of a German particle of nobility in his name, and both had selected Deyá as the scene of their pacifistic post-partum labor. And now comes the almost incomprehensible state of affairs: despite the similarity of their background, neither of them would have anything to do with the other. They avoided each other. Graves gave the crippled Prussian veteran the complete silent treatment, as if he didn’t even exist. On one occasion the Englishman apparently tried to walk right through the man from Germany, just as you read about in the Bible and in ghost stories. Yet since the Captain, in spite of his spiritualized old-Prussian sense of duty, was not made of pure spirit, it came to bumpings and shovings on the public street of the village, and it’s irrelevant which of them won the skirmish. Anyone who knows Graves or has given a cursory look at his picture in Penguin Books, can confirm what I know first-hand: the poet-officer beat up the officer-poet mercilessly. He knocked him out. He roasted him like a young herring and then, once again, as in the title of his book: “ Goodbye to All That !”

Martersteig gave us a melancholy report of this affront, this provocation, this insult that he fell victim to. But judging from what I heard, it seemed to me that the Martersteigs had fallen victim to a great deal more than this. “He’s making things up,” said Beatrice, who came to dislike him more and more. I, too, had my doubts about the public scrimmage. Certain events may have taken place solely within our friend’s concussed cranium; later conversations with Graves confirmed these doubts, although the British all-around man never came forth with the whole truth. For Martersteig, Graves was apparently what horny dream images were for the pious hermits in the Desert of Chalcis. If a naked woman appeared in a dream to a stylite when he dozed off after his meal of locusts, we can have no religio-historical doubt at all that 99 % of the saints tumbled off their pillars in a fit of repressed sexuality. Saint Jerome experienced things like that, and reported them convincingly. And he never even climbed up a pillar. Herr von Martersteig, predestined to crash-land, fell to earth with every step he took.