The Island of Second Sight Read online

  This Doppelgänger syndrome, cleared of all the humbug associated with it ever since Samuel Johnson, this thing that had already afflicted me inside my sleeping bag—now it was after me once again at the pier in Palma, triggered by Beatrice’s remark about the phantom double, as we approached the landing platform inch by inch. Again I saw myself on the dead girl’s album pages, held to my view by a policeman: Vigoleis with the rank of an officer of the Royal Dutch Merchant Marine, with gold epaulets and chevrons and tam-o’-shanter. Even my own mother would have recognized her prodigal son, delighted that he achieved such success—not, to be sure, as a devout parish priest (bearing the bishop’s crook beneath his cassock, in keeping with our family tradition), but as a fully respectable, seaworthy subaltern. What mother likes to show around a son who, far from having made anything of himself, chucks the products of his hard work into a coal stove? As a sailor he would travel the seven seas—earthbound, to be sure, and lacking any claim on a pension in Eternity—but not a bad alternative at that. Ah, dear Mother, my breast was too narrow for the clergy, and not tough enough for the merchant marine. A few verses, that’s all that has entered it, and a few sparse hairs, that’s all to be found upon it. And anyway, Mother would never have approved of a tattoo with the symbols of the cardinal virtues, not to mention a purplish one of a naked woman… My Spanish comrades-in-dreams up on the bridge of the Ciudad de Barcelona were doubtless more suave; they also looked more arrogant than us palefaces. They fit exactly the image I had, ever since reading pirate stories in my youth, of the occupation I should have trained for. But because I was neither a Spanish nor a Dutch seaman I had cost a human being her life—that is Vigoleisian logic, which gets less and less convincing as I apply my fantasy to playing tricks on the laws of ratiocination.

  “Vigo! Olá! Vigoleis! Vigo!”

  I had lost sight of Beatrice, and found her again only after hearing my name called. The voice was coming from the pier, and we both looked simultaneously towards the spot where again we heard, “Vigoleis! Olá! Vigo! Vigolo!”

  Far back in a crowd of people stood our moribund Zwingli, or perhaps someone who thought he was or was pretending to be Zwingli—I must be careful not to breathe life into a spirit that has no such claim. But that fellow over there, incidentally a filthy chap, can’t be the Zwingli I remember from Cologne and a polite visit in my parental home, the urbane, sophisticated interpreter for the travel agencies of Kuoni and Cook. And yet, and yet…!

  “Beatrice, if that guy over there isn’t your brother Zwingli, then I’ll…”

  Well? What did I intend to do? For the life of me I can’t remember. Something quite drastic, though, of that I am certain, for all of a sudden I was absolutely convinced that this man… and then I only had time to lift up Beatrice, who had collapsed on a suitcase. I too was devastated—not by Zwingli’s resurrection from the dead, but by the fact that a woman with the most variegated travel experiences imaginable, some of them approaching the uncanny, was sitting there on a piece of luggage like a classic heap of misery. Beatrice was acquainted with a world I knew only in novels. She had served as female companion to the wives of millionaires, women who regarded the marriage bed as a trampoline built for leaps into adulterous pleasures that in turn led to poisonings and inheritance swindles. It baffled me totally that she should now behave like this. Of course, the leave-taking from her mother in the Basel hospital had been awful. Not until the telegram arrived later announcing her passing did she dare to tell me, and then with a depth of sorrow unusual for her, about her last hour at the bedside—and even then she told me nothing new. Meanwhile came our trip, one she was inwardly not at all prepared for, toward yet another separation from a loved one. Her family was disintegrating member by member. Her father died of typhus in the Argentinian pampas. Mother and children returned to Europe, the embalmed corpse lodged in the hold of the selfsame freighter. Later came her life at the side of her beloved Vigoleis, who constantly kept her in a state of febrile anxiety ever since their days in Sacred Cologne, where she once pulled him out of the waves of Father Rhine. In a sudden relapse the irrepressibly cheerful nihilist tried to drown himself, willfully breaking his contract as an easily replaceable stage extra in the Lord’s Great World Theater. Strictly speaking, I had committed no such misdemeanor, except in the form of theological rhetoric after the fact. For I stand firmly in the midst of Creation like one of Frederick the Great’s corporals, thoroughly hazed until he learns to stand at attention. But with a difference: Vigoleis has learned to endure better than those historical automatons.

  “Smelling salts!” my reader will be thinking, “Why doesn’t the idiot hold some carbonate of ammonium under his lady’s nose?” Kind reader, for the moment I’m willing to overlook that “idiot” business, but smelling salts is truly a mistake. It’s not in my pocket calendar under “First Aid in Cases of Personal Misfortune,” so I never carry any with me. Furthermore, you must realize that Beatrice would have politely taken the bottle out of my hand and thrown it into the Bay of Palma.

  You don’t know her well enough yet. She is a modern woman with feather cut and plucked eyebrows, and we ought to show some understanding toward her mild attack of enfeeblement. What is more, with her sense of courtesy, which at times assumes comical proportions and which in reality masks contempt (you’ll find this out soon enough), she would beg our pardon for the incident if she sensed that at this moment in her life—which has now turned into a moment in my book—anyone might be trying to stop her from feeling anything like simple fatigue.

  “Yes, I’m all right. It’ll pass as soon as I can get some hot food in my stomach. Let’s go on land, the crowd is gone.”

  A porter finally picked up our bags. Unsummoned, like one of Cologne’s Little Magic Helpers, he lugged everything onto the pier, where that man Zwingli reappeared, shouting commands in resounding Spanish and reinforcing them with authoritative gestures of the outstretched little finger of his right hand. Things happened quickly, and then brother and sister stood facing each other.

  It was the Year of Our Lord 1931—owing to the downfall of the monarchy a notable year in Spanish history, and owing to his own downfall into the world of Don Quixote an equally memorable year in the history of our friend Vigoleis. Moreover, it was August the First, a day on which a gleam enters the eyes of Swiss citizens the world over, a day on which they take special pride in their status as offspring of their wee homeland. Here were two such offspring, but there was no flag-raising, no blowing of the alpenhorn, nor was even a little hanky lifted to eye—surprising enough when we consider the bizarre reverse entombment that had just taken place.

  Vigoleis took a deep breath. He sucked his lungs full of salt-spiced Mallorcan maritime air. For five years he will have the privilege of breathing it, until a finis operis will lead him to new adventures in other latitudes and altitudes of body and soul. Adelante! Onward!

  II

  Brother and sister stood face to face, but I didn’t have to step aside respectfully and pretend I was busy with our luggage. Nor is my reader required to look up from the page to avoid disturbing an emotional exchange between two persons celebrating a grotesque reunion at the edge of the grave. What kind of angel had pushed aside the stone?

  “Salut, Bé! Salut, Vigo! How wonderful of you to come! When I didn’t see you at first in the mob that inundates our island every day, I thought you probably got swallowed up in the Barrio Chino in Barcelona. More people disappear there every year than the police are willing to admit. Did you have a good trip, Bé, in the company of your hermit escort?”

  We hadn’t seen each other for four years, Zwingli and I. But now we exchanged greetings as if just yesterday we had been in Zwingli’s flat in Gravedigger Firnich’s house in Cologne-Poll, indexing curses in our lexicon file or philosophizing about Dostoevsky, my young culture-vulture friend’s favorite author.

  “But Zwingli, what’s happened to you? You look just terrible! And what was that telegram all about, the one that
said you were dying? How’s Mother, have you heard? Any word from Basel?”

  “Bice, my dear little sister, sorrelina, there you go again, taking me literally,” Zwingli replied in a very soothing Italian dialect—Tuscan, as I later found out. Brother and sister, both of them having a gift for languages, always conversed in polyglot fashion without transitions—a fact that impressed me no end, monolingual naïf that I still was at the time. Once in a while, out of patronizing respect for me, the linguist of the book-lined study, Zwingli would deign to speak German. He, of course, had absolutely fluent command of my language, though not without the rolling rrr’s and the gargling noises that were, to quote my dear poet-friend Albert Talhoff (who, as a Swiss himself, ought to know), part of his gravelly Alpine heritage.

  “You always take me so literally, Beatrice, Bice, Bé. Think of me as a page in scripture, where the meaning is something else again! My dying is of the spiritual kind, or to be more specific, it’s psychic in nature. The bitch is totally uneducated. She can’t even read or write.”

  I pricked up my ears. What “bitch”? Aha, wouldn’t you know, the cause of his horrifying decline was a woman. Beatrice said nothing. She was pale; I noticed a twitching in the corners of her mouth, which always lie in the shadow of a few whiskers, an unmistakable mark of her race. She had pushed forward her lower lip—this meant that she was registering concern. Zwingli would have to be careful not to overdo.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. In bed…,” Zwingli went on without pause like someone following the One True Path. “In bed she’s superb, a first-class revelation as in the Book of Genesis. But otherwise? That’s why I asked you to come. We’ll take care of everything, so everybody gets what’s coming to him. You’ll get a concert grand. Music is what I miss most down here. And Vigo will get a comfy study he can crawl into. See, I’ve got everything all figured out. My dear sister, let me embrace you!”

  Now I was truly frightened. In my opinion Zwingli’s brotherly heart, though at times a trifle expansive, was as true as freshly mined gold. Yet at the moment, the outer casing thereof lacked that certain degree of cleanliness that might prompt Beatrice to take it to her own. She abhors dirt; she avoids it wherever and whenever possible. Would she now allow her brother…?

  But before any sibling contact could occur we heard a voice: “Don Helvecio!”

  Zwingli, appearing to respond to this name, dropped the arms he had raised for the embrace and turned toward a man now approaching him. He was wearing blue denim trousers, a motley waistband, and an even louder ascot tie. The two of them had a brief conference, and of course I couldn’t understand a word.

  Don Helvecio? Did I hear this right? Was that the name used for my brother-in-law? Suddenly the thought occurred to me that I was once again the victim of some satanic mystification. With a quick glance in my direction, Beatrice, too, let it be known that something was amiss here. Was her sudden reticence an instinctual reaction against this usurper of brotherly attention? Here is an explanation, based on later experience: on this island everybody without exception gave Zwingli the sobriquet “Swiss,” a generic term used popularly in Germany for cowherds and in Vatican City for doormen and bodyguards. That is the origin of the appellative “Helvecio,” to which was added the “Don,” commonly used for persons of higher social standing. The name “Zwingli” can be pronounced only with difficulty by those of the Spanish tongue. Permit me to add here the anticipatory remark that I myself was later referred to, though of course not personally addressed as, the alemán católico, the “Catholic German.” This was a doubly erroneous title. For if by católico people meant “universal,” then I fit the description neither spatially nor temporally. As for the other meaning, the capitalized one, “Papist”…that I swear I have never been.

  Once again Zwingli lifted the little finger of his right hand as he gave instructions. And now I saw, at the extreme end of the digit in question, the instrument of his power over the elves on this island. It was the nail, a good seven-eighths of an inch long, with the black underside polish indicative of ill-grooming, and bent upward ever so slightly at the end. A piece of scrimshaw of this kind, protected from breakage at night by a silver thimble, guards its owner against all forms of menial work. By the same token it qualifies its possessor for a high standard of idleness, Thus it is a mark of class, and as such not to be scoffed at. Even so, Zwingli’s nail was less manicured than I have ever seen on any bum.

  It was astonishing to observe the effects of a little horn like this whenever fingers with worn-down nails came in its vicinity. Here at quayside, hands quickly got busy loading our bags in an automobile that immediately drove away with a roar and a cloud of smelly exhaust. Again Zwingli held his nail aloft, commanding a gigantic Hispano-Suiza to drive up. A man in yellow coveralls opened the door. The chauffeur, dressed in white livery and white cap, did not so much as glance at us. Doubtless he noticed that we were the last passengers to disembark, and so we were now his distinguished customers, with time and money to spare. He knew the score. We got in.

  “Just look at you!” Beatrice felt forced to say when reunited with Zwingli—Beatrice, who seldom criticizes anyone at all, knowing that most people are hardly worthy of such notice or such well-meant remarks. She must love her brother very much—either that, or he actually looked more fearsome than I have been able to describe. How did he look? Well, let’s put this brother-in-law of mine under good, close, unprejudiced scrutiny.

  When I first caught sight of him near the end of Chapter I, I took recourse to the euphemism “filthy chap” to describe his appearance. And Beatrice, far from greeting him with a kiss or even with a jubilant cry of “I’m glad to see you’re alive!”—Beatrice, in a reflex action, had told him he looked wasted. Now, no matter how I might try to begin a closer analysis of his appearance, I feel constrained to state: from head to toe, or in reverse direction from the soles of his feet to the tips of his pitch-black tresses (which hadn’t seen a barber’s shears for months), Zwingli was all that this embarrassing little word says and connotes: he was filthy, he was a wreck, he had gone utterly and totally to the dogs and all the other lower species, visibly and probably inwardly as well. But for the moment, let us observe only the external Zwingli. Just how seriously the inner Zwingli was affected by degenerative processes—that will become sufficiently clear in the course of my narrative.

  A quirk of the blood, measurable not by standards of individual countries, but from continent to continent, had also given Zwingli’s physiognomy a distinctiveness that cannot easily be assigned to any specific racial or geographic origin. Viewed from the point of view of ethnography, his was a kind of Latin passepartout countenance, one that could stamp him as an Italian in Italy, as a Spaniard in Spain, but by no means as a Federated Swiss in his homeland canton. Possessing a well-nigh phenomenal talent for adapting mentally to the ways of the country he was living in at any given time, he was capable of such amazing feats of mimicry as to make him on Spanish soil into a thoroughly genuine Spaniard—so much so that it became necessary to check his true nationality by looking at his passport. Accordingly, the “bitch” always considered him as a “passage-paid” Swiss, a Swiss on paper only. Like a Spaniard’s, his beard had a bluish shimmer when unshaven—and unshaven he had been for several days, leading us to believe that he intended to let his whiskers grow like an aborigine or, as we would say nowadays, like an existentialist, which amounts to the same thing. At fault in this regard was presumably the strumpet, the “bitch.” And how do we know? Maybe she wanted something more on her Helvecio to tug on above the sheets as well. Why not? A woman’s sense of play is mysterious. A man’s is even stranger, especially if he comes under the spell of a hellcat like this one, who isn’t satisfied with a single ball of yarn.

  I mentioned above that Zwingli held a leading managerial position at a large hotel on the island, the Príncipe Alfonso, an establishment that, following the deposition of the XIIIth monarch bearing that name, now called itself, by dint of a li
ttle democratic ruse, the “Principal Alfonso.” Inspired by the centuries-old liberal traditions of his homeland, Zwingli himself had come up with this gimmick. A high position in hotel management—it’s obvious what that entails: shiny black pumps and black textiles, pinstripe trousers, a swallowtail or buttockless jacket, a shirt with starched front and starched cuffs (minus the little curly doodads worn by ancient schoolteachers who still pull their shirts on over their head). Cravat: a discreet grey modulating into silver, with little black dots, pure silk if possible (purchased at Grieder’s Silks in Zurich, of course). Thus caparisoned, and assuming that certain other minimum qualifications have been met, our hôtelier stands greeting his guests with a smile, ready to serve the haut monde from all over the world. His courteous bows mustn’t reach so low as to appear servile; for mere physical tasks, rank-and-file minions exist in abundance. As a symbol of social peerage he wears a carnation in his buttonhole. With true experts in this field, not even the touchy question of tipping can cause the blossom to wilt.