The Island of Second Sight Read online

  Just imagine the heights of achievement I might have attained had I been coddled and spoiled by a mother like the one who now confronted the despotic father with the chastised youngster. She too flailed about with whacks to the cheeks, hitting seldom but drawing forth yowls of pain nonetheless. Her swats had different emotional origins—perhaps they came from the heart—and were the practical application of some rather different principles of child-rearing. Parental division of authority is apparently an international phenomenon, and this could make it seem almost humane. In any case, compared to the dynamics of tonality and coloration in this Spanish family, my own had been totally wrong. That is why I have become what you are confronting here in these pages: not a conquistador, not a cathedral-steps beggar with the trappings of a Spanish grandee, not an open-air cobbler with more wisdom in the tip of his awl than Vigoleis has inside his skull. This is not intended as a gripe against destiny, much less against Our Beloved Creator, who surely knew what He was about when He failed to set me into His quotidian world as this Spanish brat from the maritime wagon train who, I now notice, is pissing demonstratively against the mast.

  The eating that went on in this improvised settler’s camp was prodigious. Items I didn’t even know the names for emerged from baskets and suitcases. Oil got poured on dark bread, onions and a green vegetable were diced on top. Olives, chickpeas, and small crabs were handed around, a chicken was torn apart and distributed among famished relatives. The rest of the menu was to me anonymous, at least at the time, for then I had scarcely peered beyond my mother’s saucepan—whose contents were not all that bad, though emphatically echt deutsch, and based patriotically on a certain ubiquitous tuber about which the nutritionist Moleschott, to this day unjustly maligned as a materialist, once wrote that a person fed for two weeks on nothing but the item in question would no longer be physically capable of affording its purchase. That is precisely my opinion, for I dislike intensely this mindless root-plant that has succeeded in undermining all of Western civilization. Perhaps the beetle named after it can now terminate its hegemony once and for all. “Without phosphorus there can be no thought”—I cite Moleschott once more. And without the potato? At the very least it has been able to divert my attention momentarily from an Iberian picnic based on a cuisine far beyond my ken.

  People ate differently here, talked differently, scolded differently. I would have to adapt. I realized this within the hour during which I was the wide-eyed observer of this nation’s domestic mores, as the Ciudad de Barcelona rounded the northwest coast of the island, passed the Cape of Calafiguera, and entered the Bay of Palma. Meanwhile Beatrice lent our British travel companion her ear, an ear well practiced in convenient deafness through experience with dowagers. But she didn’t pass up the sight of the island darting ever more rapidly toward us.

  With the charming, resigned pride spinsters often show in the presence of young couples, a behavior often tinged with an arrogance born of pity, our English companion departed as I stepped over to Beatrice to invite her to my al fresco theater. This would offer her better diversion, for I could read in her stern expression what was happening to her within. The farther we voyaged from her dying mother, the closer we came to her brother’s deathbed. Was he still alive? We had requested telegraphic word to Basel, or poste restante to Barcelona. But all these many days they had left us completely in the dark concerning his fate.

  By “they” I mean the officialdom at the Hotel Príncipe Alfonso in Palma de Mallorca, whose renovator, manager, and Swiss-born panjandrum Zwingli had recently become. The hotel was thus our destination, although it was clear to us that our dying relative could no longer be living there. No doubt he was in a hospital somewhere. No hotel in the world can afford to shelter a morbid case under its roof, not even if it’s the boss himself. In such instances the guests, otherwise extremely conscious of their social standing, immediately defy the rules and demand their unwritten rights: the terminal case is transported downstairs and out the delivery entrance like garbage or dirty linen, so as not to sully the people who come and go amid bowings and scrapings at the main door. Shortly before embarking at Barcelona I had wired the hotel to reserve a double room. We would find out more once we arrived.

  Our open-air circus reached the end of its program. The tents were lowered, equipment got packed, and everyone pressed to the rail so as not to miss a single episode of the exciting adventure of our harbor entry.

  For about an hour the Cathedral of Palma dominated the background, at first merely as a grandiose block of stone, golden-brown and radiant in the sunlight, the structure of its various sections still concealed by the equalizing profusion of solar brilliance. The closer we came, the more clearly we saw each architectural segment. The mathematical orderliness of the building’s profile became visible. Its Gothic heavenward thrust—I remember well this first impression—discernable as one approaches the edifice, gradually turns earthward to bind itself to the stone, indeed inside the stone, just as the verse of an Iberian mystic is seldom capable of emancipating itself fully from the word. Confined to the earthly plane, this Spanish spirit is more receptive to heaven than in the less sunny climes of Northern Europe where God is invisible, where mists drift about, and where eye and heart perceive and imagine things that lie beyond the limits of knowledge and love. Imagined as a member of our picnicking Spanish clan, Immanuel Kant would have turned out as a philosophizing tanner’s apprentice. Conversely, Saint John of the Cross, under a Teutonic sky, could never have made it past a barefoot existence as a chanting Minorite Brother. Happily for both of these gentlemen, such speculative transplantations can take root only in my world of fantasy—“And there only as withered stalks!” my reader says to himself, as he nurses his abhorrence of wild goose chases.

  The crowding on the quay side of our steamer was getting unpleasant. We too had gathered our belongings. The ship slowed down, but now the almost touchable coastline produced the optical illusion that we were gliding closer with increasing speed. The gulls now swarmed in greater numbers. Those at home on the island flew greedily towards the ship, piloting us securely into port. It was six in the morning—seven, according to my own reckoning, putting me ahead of the Spaniards in at least one respect, though only by virtue of my grandmother’s First Communion timepiece. The landing maneuver was already proceeding apace, our engines jolted at each shift of the propeller’s gears. Shouts, probably professional commands, flew back and forth; chains rattled, winches screamed in their effort; we seemed to be in the midst of burgeoning chaos. Here, as before, it struck me as odd that a habitual procedure, one that requires no close analysis of its component events and is repeated day after day, at the very same hour and with the same motions and shifting of levers—that such a procedure should confront the entire topside and below-decks crew with totally unfamiliar tasks. Our fear of a completely mechanized world will be groundless so long as man can make mistakes at his most regular daily chores. And if he swears while performing them, all is most definitely not lost. A defeated man no longer curses, for who will hear his stevedore’s prayers?

  Here in the port of Palma there were cusswords aplenty, enough to lacerate the ears of God and the Devil. Too bad I was unable to grasp the literal meaning of all the oaths, but in any event they prevented the Ciudad de Barcelona from crashing into the dock. Doubtless I would eventually be able to locate the efficacious vocables in Zwingli’s Lexicon of Invective, assuming that he was still alive or, barring that, that his estate could be placed at my disposal. For a number of years this brother-in-law of mine had been working on a multilingual Compendium maledictionum, and had already amassed copious material. In fact, my first acquaintance with him came about in connection with this foulmouthed enterprise of his. As a student in Cologne I agreed to collaborate on the German section, and in doing so I made contact, circuitously enough, through his younger brother with their sister. To this very hour I have never once felt the need to grace the latter encounter with a single item from Zwingli�
��s polyglot dictionary.

  Now the engines were silent; the deck beneath us turned rigid, almost like terra firma itself. The ship was roped to the pier and the landing plank hauled aboard. Police and Civil Guards, in their funny shiny caps with the flattened occiput so conducive to snoozes against vertical surfaces, clambered aboard to collect the passengers’ passports. Since we expected no one to meet us at the pier, we had no need of searching the waiting crowd, which meant that the excitement of disembarking was less for us than for others who were using binoculars to locate their loved ones. Our excitement had a different, more sinister urgency. Since leaving Basel we had pictured to ourselves, in long and fruitless conversations, our Mediterranean voyage with all of its ports of call. Once on land in Palma we would hail a cab and drive straight out to the Hotel Príncipe Alfonso, unless we were able to catch the hotel limousine itself. One thing was certain: it was a first-class establishment, located somewhere out of town at the seashore. That was all we knew, for Zwingli’s letters in Spanish were limited for the most part to accounts of his exploits with females. The duties and other details of his job, which had taken him unexpectedly from Rome to Mallorca, he mentioned only cryptically. When a person’s outward occupation differs from his inner ambitions—and this was the case with Zwingli—it is unimportant how he goes about fulfilling the chores. Eating bread with the sweat of one’s brow is only for those who harvest it with their left hands.

  But over there on the dock, great Scott, isn’t that…! It’s got to be, or my name…! I rubbed my eyes. But now wait just a moment! Beatrice can see better.

  “Beatrice, over there, at the right! No, farther! Yes, the guy standing next to the one in the white smock, near that handcart and the pile of baskets! Either that’s Zwingli or I’m seeing ghosts in broad daylight!”

  “Zwingli? You surely are seeing ghosts, Vigo, or somebody’s double. Yet I should think that your own ghost back in Amsterdam might suffice for a while. Must my poor, dear brother have one too? Come on, let’s watch for our luggage. Wave to a porter! They’re called mozo here. Let’s not lose time! I’m so frightened! I hope we’re not too late. This crowd is getting awful! The vulgarity of humankind is nowhere so apparent as in railroad stations and at landing piers!”

  While this dialogue was in progress the crowd on the pier had shifted, and no matter how carefully I searched among the heads, there was no longer any sign of Zwingli. Was I truly seeing phantoms? I had no time to linger on such thoughts. Each of us had about six items of luggage of various types and sizes, which I now laboriously pushed forward. Although I shouted the word mozo several times over the railing, not a single porter responded. The menials now leaping deftly over the gunwales probably took me for a miserly type. Maybe Beatrice could have better success. She had on her uppity-snooty face, the one she used in protest against the plebeian mob that now had abandoned all etiquette and was straining to get on land as quickly as possible. “If you get shoved, shove right back”: neither of us has ever really followed this exhortation, Beatrice on aesthetic grounds, I out of a predominantly fatalistic temperament. As a result we have missed trains and other vital connections in life, and when disembarking we are the very last to cross the plank—which of course lends us a certain dignity after all.

  As the pressure increased, as the rabble with its charitable Christian theology of the thrusting elbow pushed me to the tail end and headed for land, I sank deeper and deeper into my own inner world. Suddenly that nightmare once again came to the fore. The thought of Zwingli’s phantom transported me instantaneously across oceans and countries back to my little attic flat in the Nicolas Beets Straat in Amsterdam. There I had been the tenant of one Madame Perronet, a French widow who earned her bread as a landlady. For thirteen weeks I maintained lodgings, with permission to entertain guests, directly beneath her sheltering roof. A few days prior to our helter-skelter departure for Basel there occurred the most curious exploit, shocking in its total arbitrariness, and involving my very own double.

  It happened on a Saturday afternoon at about four o’clock. I was expecting Beatrice, who planned to stay overnight. Madame Perronet had gone shopping, and none of the other tenants were home. The doorbell rang. Thinking that it might be Beatrice I went to the stair to pull the long rope that opened the front door. Who knows, perhaps she had got off early from her enervating job, which consisted in educating the stubborn children of the Ix family in competition with their barbaric parents.

  “Françoise?” I heard from below, but couldn’t see anyone. I went down a few steps in order to see who had entered the narrow stairwell. In Holland, stairwells are a product of each individual homeowner demanding his own front entrance—the rear doors being common to all. They are constructed in such a way that from the top of the stairs you can never see who is at the door. I myself, blinded by the light flooding in from below, couldn’t make out who was standing in the doorframe. But I did hear a scream, and then the door slammed shut.

  I thought nothing more of it and went back to my typewriter to continue translating the final chapter of a book that I was very busy with at the time, The Bourgeois Carnival by Menno ter Braak. I had read excerpts from it in a magazine, was annoyed by its literary technique, and hadn’t understood much of it at all. Just the same I went out and bought it, because I was in basic sympathy with its romantic attitude, an effective point of departure for treating, with the one-sided device of a brilliant dialectic, the eternal conflict of mind and soul, life and death, poet and bourgeois. The adventure fascinated me all the more as it pointed in the direction of Nietzsche and, so it seemed to me at the time, Novalis. In order to make the most of this literary encounter I decided to translate the Carnival into my own language.

  The result was amazing: in eleven days I sight-read, so to speak, into the typewriter a book I thought I didn’t even understand. It meant working well into the night, and this led to friction with my landlady, for the gentleman in the next apartment complained about the clattering of my rickety typewriter. So after 10 pm I placed the contraption on my bed, erected soundproof walls of pillows and cushions around it, knelt down in front of it, and pecked away into the wee hours. During these nights of second-hand creativity I noticed that my neighbor, who ran a placement service for German housemaids, was also in the habit of—quite literally—kneeling down to his work, and that he also used his bed for support. But my fellow reproductive artist also preferred not to practice con sordino—a carnivalesque touch that greatly amused my erudite author ter Braak when he learned of the nocturnal origins of my translation.

  Beatrice arrived at the appointed time and revealed that she had been forced to give notice to the Ix family because they had refused to allow her a few weeks’ leave to look after her mother and brother. Anybody can send off telegrams, they told her. This brought about a change in our plans. We decided to leave Holland for good, a country where apparently even the heads of household were not averse to using the rear entrance.

  In the middle of the night we were roused from sleep by knocks at our door. My first thought was: the vice squad. Amsterdam has long enjoyed a reputation as an immoral city, although its nighttime constabulary cannot compare in overall charm with its counterpart in Paris. Realizing this, my lovemaking in the gigantic peasant bed Madame Perronet had one day installed in my attic room took on the qualities of a criminal act, like any form of love that treads the paths of the Lord exclusively. At the same instant—our door wasn’t locked—the landlady stepped in the room. Her behavior was strange, her dishabille signaled distress; she stood next to our bed with tears flowing down her cheeks. Then she broke down completely. I threw my coat over her shoulders and waited until she took hold of herself under Beatrice’s expert ministrations. “Oh, elle est morte!” she sobbed repeatedly, “Morte, la pauvre fille!” And then she gave us this account:

  When I came to her house looking for a rental, she had experienced sheer terror, for I was the spit and image of a ship’s officer with the East India
Line. He had been engaged to her friend, who lived a few houses down the street. A year ago he had left her, which is to say he never returned and never sent word of any kind. She, Madame, had taken such pity on her friend that on her own she initiated a search for the blackguard, but with no success. She was told that he was still with the same shipping line, but that he was now sailing exclusively in Indian waters. When I had ascended her stairs with my prognathic jaw—“un peu brutal, mais pas du tout du boxeur féroce”—she had been able to master her fright only with difficulty. For here he was, the absconded lover, in clever disguise with loden coat and soft-brim hat (my romantic-egghead getup of the period), returning to make her the confidante of his machinations. But as soon as I had come halfway upstairs she realized that it was a case of mistaken identity.

  I told her that I remembered the rather unfriendly reception she gave me, but that I ascribed it to my clumsy French. It was, she said, precisely the way I garbled her language that had put me in her favor. My mutterings had displayed such queer distortions and such totally un-Gallic sensibility that she found it charming—“et elle l’est toujours, Monsieur!” So she abandoned all suspicion of offering shelter to the double of a mangy canaille. One token of the fondness Madame henceforth felt for me was the enormous double bed in place of a single-sleeper.

  I knew that since the death of her pauvre Perronet Madame cherished only two creatures in this world: her monstrous tomcat Melchisédech and a woman friend, Trüüs, whom oddly enough I never laid eyes on—the jilted fiancée. Our first encounter had taken place on that fateful Saturday afternoon. Madame was late with her shopping, and the girl had come over. As usual, I opened the door from above, and in the semi-darkness of the stairwell Trüüs took me immediately for her lover and thought: back from India and now having a secret love affair with my best friend! Treachery! Back home she wrote a few deranged words of farewell to her parents and then turned on the gas oven. The police and the municipal health authorities were summoned to the scene. They roused Madame from her bed and took her to her friend’s house to identify the corpse. Madame testified that the probable cause of Trüüs’ suicide was the girl’s encounter with me—therefore I had better prepare myself for an interrogation. The following day an officer from Criminal Investigation actually came and looked me over. In profile and frontal view he compared my visage with a number of photographs of the sailor. The session resulted in his complete satisfaction: I had the young lady’s suicide on my conscience.