The Island of Second Sight Read online

  Copyright

  This edition first published in paperback in the United States in 2013 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],or write us at the above address.

  First published in German 1953 by Drukkerij G. J. Thieme in Nijmegen, Amsterdam and then by Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Dusseldorf.

  This first English language edition published in 2010 by Galileo Publishers, Cambridge, in association with Isabelle Weiss.

  Copyright © 1953 by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

  English translation copyright © 2010 by Donald O. White

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0804-4

  umbrarum hic locus est, somni, noctisque soporae

  Vergil, Aeneid

  for Beatrice

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Notice to the Reader

  Prologue

  Book One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Book Two

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Book Three

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Book Four

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Epilogue

  NOTICE TO THE READER

  All the people in this book are alive or were at one time. Yet they appear here, the author included, in dual cognizance of their personality, and therefore they can be held responsible neither for their actions nor for any assumptions that might arise in the reader’s mind. Just as my ego-deprived characters appear subject to greater or lesser degrees of personal disjuncture, similarly the sequence of events has undergone chronological rearrangements that can even involve the obliteration of all sense of time.

  In case of doubt, let truth be told.

  PROLOGUE

  It would mean commencing this chronicle fictitiously if I were to try now, twenty years after the event, to ascertain which wily fiend plagued me more sorely during that nocturnal ocean voyage: the man-eating common flea inside the sleeping bag I borrowed from a sailor, or the horrendous nightmare that whisked me back to the Nicolas Beets Straat in Amsterdam, where the grave had just closed over a young woman whose cause of death I, her renegade lover’s double, had somehow become.

  What an intriguing, macabre beginning for a book, one might say. Perhaps, but for the moment this faint flash of lightning off in the distance is all we shall discern. Insofar as I, the author, have any say in the matter, I can safely predict that over the long haul, events here will not turn out to be all that terrifying—except at the unpredictable finish, when bombs start exploding and when hatred, night, and fear—in short, when the arsenal of the Spanish Civil War gets deployed. “Farewell my brothers, aim for my breast!”

  Within this breast of mine, as if by a miracle of Santa María del Pilar, my own and my tragelaph Vigoleis’ heart keeps on pumping constantly and undauntedly, now as on that summer’s day when I arose at dawn from my nautical pallet, rid myself of vermin, a shaggy blanket, and anxious dreams, and shook myself like a poodle emerging from the surf. Our travel companions, who like us had sought refuge in the mephitic cabins from the sudden onset of evening chill, also came alive and were topside on the lookout. Those of Spanish tongue arrived noisily and very much at home on the heaving deck; while I and my ilk stepped forth cautiously with pursed lips, as if groping for a taste of this new world.

  Resembling me most closely in this hesitant exploit was Beatrice, who herewith makes her rather unceremonious entrance in my book, and who will not depart from it until the very last page. But she will have to get accustomed to the role I have plotted out for her: as a character in my chronicle. Come to think of it, mustn’t I, too? Awkward throughout a life I have never yet got used to, wearing maladjustment like a mark on my brow, a mortal whose wounds can be fingered by anyone and everyone—will I be any more resourceful as the “hero” of a book? It may seem odd that I have borne with me a by no means unremarkable set of events for twenty years without committing them to the literary pickle-jar. Admittedly my origins are anything but distinguished; what is more, my life is strewn with multiple failures. Still, neither these facts nor fear of the printed page has kept me, up to now, from prancing out on the belletristic tightrope. Whereas Vigoleis occasionally helps me muddle through, Beatrice has constantly had to bear her own cross. That is why I am dedicating my book to her.

  Experienced as she was on bigger oceans than the Mediterranean, familiar with foreign languages, schooled for years in contact with various classes and races, her soul divided by Inca blood and thus at once closer to, and at an extreme remove from, the Latin way of life—nonetheless Beatrice seemed just as bewildered as I was when I got up the courage to approach the women’s cabins on the ship’s gospel side. Beset by fleas and separated by sex—that is how we sailed under Spanish flag and sky toward our Island.

  Dreams and mini-fauna had also tormented Beatrice, and while her slumber-time imaginings no doubt differed from mine, the itches she felt were my itches too. Death had likewise entered her sleep, waiting to ambush her mother, whom we had been obliged to leave to her fate in Basel, now blind and the victim of rapid physical and mental deterioration.

  Two telegrams, received a few days apart, had brought disorder, not to say chaos, into our life in Amsterdam. The first wire came from Basel, summoning Beatrice to the bedside of her fading mother. The second originated in Palma on the island of Mallorca, and its message was as desperate as it was ultimate: “Am dying. Zwingli”—the name answered to by Beatrice’s youngest brother. So now we had to minister to him also. At such a fork in the road, a fond heart finds it difficult to choose the right direction. After consulting with the doctors we decided to leave her mother in the care of her other brother, whose occupation kept him in Switzerland in any case.

  With this decision our insular destiny was sealed.

  BOOK ONE

  Praise be to Heaven and all the Saints

  for bestowing upon us finally an
Adventure

  that shall yield us Profit!

  Don Quixote de la Mancha

  Puta la madre, puta la hija,

  Puta la manta que las cobija.

  Old Spanish Proverb

  Everyone receives his inner sense

  of North and South at birth.

  Whether an external polarity comes with it

  is not terribly important.

  Jean Paul

  I

  Round about us the grey veils of night were lifting as we stepped upon the afterdeck, disheveled and weary from lack of sleep, lightly shivering in the breeze that was now sweeping in from the horizon to reveal the gorgeous spectacle of the approaching steep coastline of Mallorca. On the previous evening a smudging of the heavens had obscured a spectacle lauded in every travel guide: the fabled Monserrat Range sinking into the sea. Now we were being abundantly compensated, and I in particular, for as a rule I take little enjoyment in landscape or the supposed marvels of nature. It is only fitting that the world should display before me now and then, by means of its laterna magica, one of its exemplary picture postcards, for my standpoint is that of a person who can never regard his existence as a little pleasure trip in tweeds and parasol. I am not a parvenu; I have no idea from whence or by what means I might have socially “arrived.” But there at the ship’s rail, standing next to Beatrice, I was your typical conceited snob who has already witnessed, a thousand times more gorgeous and sublime, the scene that was greeting us. During my lifetime I had in reality seen next to nothing. A few trips in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Holland, and Switzerland—that was the sum of it. And yet that would have remained more than sufficient had I not constantly focused my gaze inward upon my own inner landscape. To be sure, the scenery there offers few memorable vistas to compare with the Loreley Cliff, the tulip fields at Lisse, the Hradchin, or a glacier-eroded escarpment near Lucerne with on-site explanatory lecture by Professor Heim. In view of my own inner glacial escarpment even the most garrulous cicerone would stand there in utter silence, since all there is to see is a slag-heap, one that could never on this earth become the site of an Escorial.

  Beatrice’s thrill was intense and undivided. No comparisons with the sights she had witnessed on earlier extensive journeys could diminish the joy she felt here at each new emanation of color, at a gull snatching up a bit of bread in screeching mid-plunge, at the gamboling of porpoises, or even at our ship’s wake, expanding as it neared the horizon where it became one with an upward drift of light. But just as I am completely unmusical, Beatrice, in keeping with her musical sensibility, is incapable of expressing such experiences with a pen. Otherwise I would ask her right here and now to insert a description of our sunrise, one that would do justice to the excitement she felt at the time, since one reader or another might well be grateful for just such a passage. It would indeed be fitting, even more so when one considers that each passenger must have regarded as unique an event that, given the proper meteorological conditions, takes place each and every morning with a punctuality guaranteed by the captain’s chronometer. Be that as it may, the sight transported Beatrice repeatedly into audible rapture—a truly astonishing acknowledgment of Mother Nature’s accomplishments by a person who is otherwise so reticent. There are places in the world where The Mother of Us All salves her conscience—a faculty peculiar to Her alone and hardly to be called maternal—by showing off beautiful things that in other places She keeps carefully concealed. A sunrise, for example, at 39º45’16”N and 2º8’28”E could reward me for 365 consecutive solar eclipses in the poor section of Amsterdam’s Derde Helmersstraat—assuming that the rising of that celestial body meant anything to me at all. As far as I am concerned the sun can stay below sea level to all eternity, so long as I can scrape up enough money to stoke my coal stove and put some oil in my lamp.

  A superabundance of verbiage, I’ll grant you, to avoid describing a Mediterranean fiat lux that in the meantime has achieved sufficient completeness, midst radiations, irradiations, and transradiations, for it to be said with confidence: “It is Day!” Even the stick-in-beds are now awake and have scrambled up on deck. Topside is now teeming with passengers, shouts go back and forth, and many a mouth goes silently agape, the words of amazement simply defying vocal expression. Such is the most childlike way of reacting to a feature of the world around us, and thus probably the most godlike way as well. We simply lack the courage to react in this manner every time, for an open mouth is considered poor form. Those lacking such courage start describing the scene out loud—without a trace of silent veneration. A host of languages vie with one another, but to my ear Spanish seems to prevail, no doubt because it is still foreign to me. British and American, which I had already learned to distinguish, join the chorus celebrating this Feast of Light, and then German.

  The latter was spoken by a quaint young couple next to us, trying with forced casualness to conceal a state of affairs that normally shies from illumination, especially in a setting such as the present one, which had the rapidly ascending solar orb showering light upon us all in majestic abundance. These two, as yet quite ill at ease amidst their obvious bliss, probably hadn’t reckoned on the parasites that held sway below-decks. He called her Lissy, and she called him Heiner. Today, provided that they are still among the living, they are doubtless regaling each other with “Elisabeth” and “Heinrich.” They were unable to hold my attention any longer than it is taking me to commemorate them here. I’m doing it only for the sake of my cosmopolitan canvas, onto which I shall now quickly daub an oldish British lady who struck up a conversation with Beatrice, and who was ecstatic at hearing her native-born touristic clichés meet with Beatrice’s relaxed, polite attention. She was about to “do” the island—yes, alone, and with her floppy cotton stockings and her unshaven chin it’s hard to imagine her finding a partner who would ever be willing to add more than conversational “yesses” and “nos” to her life—neither externally (her pension was apparently meager) nor inwardly, where despite her wrinkly smile there was a musty air of petty complacency. Yet never fear: the British are never and nowhere alone, so long as their Empire accompanies them like the proliferating heads on a tapeworm. Since the moment in question I have met many more of these spinsters. They are ageless. Like the English sparrows they are bound to no single place, and they will outlive the era of their arch-enemy, the nylon stocking.

  Just as in the compartment of the train that brought us from Port-Bou to Barcelona, here too on shipboard the Spaniards had the big say, though what they were saying escaped my comprehension—and more’s the pity, for by nature I am inquisitive. Inordinately shy and a stay-at-home possessed of Sitzfleisch in quantities enviable even among brothers, enabling me to become the long-distance translator that I am to this very day, I have made virtue out of necessity: whenever I am forced to enter the company of other people, something positive usually happens to me. Never enough, mind you, to suppress my congenital aversion to contact with the external world, but just enough to catch me up, as in a safety net, in my tumble from solitude. Afterwards I waver like a stand-up doll, until I come to rest in the company of my own sheltered self.

  Coils of rope, cardboard boxes, battered steamer trunks, wooden crates and wicker-encased jugs—anything that could serve as a seat had been commandeered like a kind of wagon train by a very numerous Spanish family. This was their house and home, as if they had been preparing for a voyage of weeks rather than ten hours by the clock. The kids were brattish. The womenfolk, varying in age and in any imaginable contest outdoing each other in feminine charm, yakked and griped with tireless verbal energy. One man in particular, to all appearances father and brother, grandfather, brother-in-law, and uncle—in a word the entire clan in one and the same person, dominated the group by reason of physical stature and an authoritative mien that extended to all the four winds.

  This was a spectacle more fascinating to me than the wordless matrimonial urges of the young German couple forced out of their fleabag, or the cha
tty desperation exuded by our English spinster friend—not to mention sun and seascape. As in a provincial theater, I had before me a scene from Spanish domestic life; all I had to do was take my place in standing-room. One thing I noticed right away: all these goings-on were utterly different from anything I had experienced in my parents’ home—this joy and anger at the open hearth, louder, freer, more unbuttoned in every respect. If my own father had only been like this man, who with instinctive nonchalance and amazing aim dispensed ringing hand-slaps around the entire circle of his loved ones, without once making the ridiculous impression our Northern bullies always do. Our native variety of father lacks the Quixotic realization that a swipe on the mouth, even one that lands on target, is a swipe into the void.

  As he went about dispensing justice in such casual fashion, our Spanish chieftain squirted red wine down his gullet from a very special kind of squeeze bottle, the porrón—about which more in a moment. Suddenly a young male offspring, clearly demonstrating little respect for the older generation and hence hardly destined for a long life, shoved the pater familias from behind, in the process diverting the stream of wine in its trajectory. With exemplary aplomb the paternal gorge parried the thrust, catching a portion of the flow as a toad tongues a fly. The remainder sprayed out into the audience, precisely to my standing-room location. Vociferous huzzahs greeted the foreigner’s crimson baptism. Having observed the patriarch’s astounding agility in the handling of discoloring liquids, it was mysterious to me how his shiny black suit had received all of its thousand disfiguring stains. I was of course as yet unfamiliar with the Spaniards’ maxim about not letting oneself be the victim of one’s own wardrobe (no hay que ser víctima de su traje), though I was later to observe its appropriateness with respect to the jacket, vest, and trousers worn by a limping character to be encountered soon enough in this chronicle of mine.