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.