The Island of Second Sight
by
Albert Vigoleis Thelen
umbrarum hic locus est, somni, noctisque soporae
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!
Puta la madre, puta la hija,
Puta la manta que las cobija.
Everyone receives his inner sense of North and South at birth.
Whether an external polarity comes with it is not terribly important.
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.