The Borne? Well, this once exclusive boulevard was now a platform for strip-teasing blonde Valkyries. Other ladies sat beneath café parasols quaffing their beer, their loins yearning for musclebound Spanish machismo. Their male partners, meanwhile, spent their time ogling the Spanish beauties passing by in blue jeans.
In Valldemosa we visited Pedro’s little cottage studio. The new owner allowed us to examine, room by room, the palatial quarters that Don Juan Sureda had completely squandered.
There was much that we had no desire to see again. Besides Pedro, the only other old friend we met with was his brother-in-law Don Eduardo, well above 80 years of age — an impressive character.
Pedro’s true home is now his studio in an old mill, Es Molí in Sa Cabaneta, situated on untouched land a few kilometers north of Palma. It is a magical place. What you’ll find there is a well, some donkeys, a grove of cactus, a flock of pigeons. Just a year prior to our visit, our painter friend was able to afford the installation of electric lighting.
To mention only one of our excursions, we drove out to Felanitx, where everything was just as we remembered it, and we had dinner in an old taberna. We chatted with the owner, who just then was celebrating the name-day of one of his children with a grand meal, to which he immediately invited us. We had roast dove — not the kind from Brindisi but from Binisalem, and a Felanitx white. As a gesture of thanks to our host, I spoke a few words in honor of his son’s eponymous saint, invoking blessings upon all who were gathered here at the festive table. In return, we two old, odd strangers received copious heartfelt thanks in the Spanish tradition.
Pedro’s inquisitive ways had also affected his wife Catalina and his disconcertingly beautiful grown-up daughters. These two were dying to meet Vigo and Beatrice. I had a great deal to tell them, since they wanted to hear all the stories of the House of Sureda that are recorded in this book, and with which they were of course already familiar directly from us, and in particular from me, the one who has made literature out of the chronicles of their distinguished heritage. I didn’t hesitate for very long. Once having started, I wove into my narration several other grotesque episodes from our personal experience. My Spanish tongue became quite fluent once again. But I asked Pedro and his family to speak in their local dialect, the language so dear to me even though I couldn’t grasp every word. When I was posing for Pedro, he always asked me to go on palavering. I soon discovered that my constant chatter was enlivening the painter’s creative spirit. In this way, the 40 years that separated us soon vanished, and the portrait turned out to be a masterpiece.
We soon learned something about Pedro’s family history that he had never mentioned: during his parents’ artistic sojourn in England, in addition to his mother’s paintings and his father’s higgledy-piggledy collection of ticket stubs, brochures, museum catalogues, etc., two children made their appearance. So here and now, I am allowing these unborn creatures (which they had been for us all along) to join the ranks of humanity. I know nothing more about them. I forgot to ask Pedro about their fate, or even just about their lives. Perhaps they never crossed the Channel. When I experience something unusual in my life in this world, I never say to myself, “Aha! You can use that in your manuscript!”
At any rate, before we left the island I promised Pedro that I would fill in this gap in my memoirs, trusting at the same time that this would firm up the credibility of my jottings. For it is difficult enough to separate the rock-hard reality of certain of my characters from the ostensibly shameless dissimulation that can likewise be found in my account. All of it had to be written down just as someone experienced it, especially if this someone was prone to fall for other people’s prevarications. Many of the personages in my book took me and my Vigoleis for suckers. We were fooled — thereby enriching my life, by the way, and eventually that of my recollections. Poetry and Truth, ‘bizarre mystification’ and reality — I play my games with what I have actually experienced, to the despair of scholarly exegetes of the picaresque novel, those who insist upon the fictionality of my ‘Applied Recollections,’ although in the process they themselves are striding out on the path of untruth.
All this loquacity, some readers might be thinking, just for the sake of two nameless human offspring? Yes, indeed. By reason of their right to life they belong in my book, where, Lord knows, so much weirdness has been left out. Consider, if you will, that I excised a good 500 pages from a manuscript that took me exactly nine months to produce. In keeping with my penchant toward nihilism, I burned them in the coal stove in our apartment on Helmersstraat in Amsterdam: an anti-herostratic, barbaric act that caused unspoken distress for Beatrice, but one that to this day she has never held against me.
Barbaric? Perhaps. But is this the dangerous “Perhaps” to be found in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil? In case of doubt, let truth once more be told.
The Great Unknown Figure of German Literature
The surprise could not have been greater when, in the autumn of 1953, a completely unknown author mounted the German literary stage and presented a 1,000-page book. This fellow was already fifty years old, and he arrived on the scene with multifarious life experiences, accumulated in no less than five different countries. He was German, but he lived in Amsterdam. In addition to his mother tongue, he was fluent in five other languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English. Up to now, he had barely made a name for himself — other than a few poems and translations, he had published nothing at all. So it was that readers and critics were astounded to confront a work that surpassed established norms for quantity and quality. This writer hit the literary world like a meteorite — gigantic, weighty, as if hailing from some alien place.
Not everyone was prepared to welcome this intruder. But many who paid closer attention to him were enthusiastic, and have remained so. Among these was the writer Siegfried Lenz, who wrote in 1954: “There’s no disputing that this book just must be read. If ever a book deserved to be called a major event, this one is it.” A short time later, in a letter to his wife, the poet Paul Celan wrote, “I have just read a new German novel, which looks to me like a genuine work of art.” And finally, writing in Die Zeit in 1999, the best-selling Dutch author Maarten ‘t Hart exceeded all the previous hymns of praise: “For a long time I have believed that the greatest book of the current century is The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Telen.”
Given such a cascade of praise, it is all the more curious that Thelen is no longer quite visible as a writer. In fact, it is quite puzzling that as the author of one of the best books of the twentieth century, he counts among the great unknown writers of our time. In 1953, he came forth with a work that had no comparable German analogue in its linguistic virtuosity, depth of experience, and narrative variety. But the major critics in Germany were writing about very different books. In the current histories of German literature, as in the major reference works on the same subject, Thelen is mentioned, at best, in passing. But if there are important literary discoveries to be made as we look back on the last century, we must surely cite his name and that of his magnum opus: Albert Vigoleis Thelen and his Island of Second Sight.