“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!”