A few steps higher and Beatrice, together with her mediumistic faculties, also vanished. One more step and I saw no more of my own self! Only my heart, pounding wildly from the fright, assured me that I hadn’t vaporized or turned into one of Gustav Meyrink’s spooks. I didn’t have a mirror handy to see if I was already wearing the mask of death — the “Hippocratic aspect,” as the physicians so delightfully call it.
This spectral intermezzo lasted but a few seconds. I then heard a noise, an everyday, earthbound sound, like a key being turned in a lock. A door was pushed open, and light entered the stairwell — faint, but sufficient to return us all to the real world. I had overestimated the sleeping woman’s spell-weaving powers.
The man with the many-colored cummerbund lugged our baggage once more. When everything was in the apartment, he stood waiting. Zwingli reached into his pants pocket — apparently a very deep one, bottomless even, for his hand got completely lost inside it, made a few twisting motions, and then failed to resurface. My own pocket was not so cavernous, but rather well stocked with pesetas. I gave our Little Helper a handful, and this gesture transposed him out of his fairy-tale existence into his native sphere of plodding corporeality. He took the money, grinned, and disappeared. I stepped into the room. There I was, where “she” lived, aground on the shoals of somebody else’s love affair.
Beatrice sat down on a chair and lit a cigarette. Zwingli closed the door. I leaned against the wall. It was just like being back in Cologne-Poll, and yet very, very different.
The street where our limousine let us out was called the Calle de la Soledad. Soledad means solitude, loneliness, or emptiness, but it can also signify longing, homesickness, mourning, or grief. It is an important concept in Iberian mysticism. On Vigoleis’ Spanish sojourn this street was his first anchorage. It wouldn’t remain so for long. The seabed wouldn’t hold. His ship of life was soon adrift again, and, unfamiliar with the depths in these strange waters, he soon got beached once again.
III
As the hoop fits the barrel-stave, as the gold band seals a marriage, in just the same way inbreeding relates to an island: in each instance something holds something else together. With animals, humans, and intellectual affairs, inbreeding can bring about superior achievements never approximated by a genetic mix. As examples, we might list the bloodlines of famous horses, the generations of Egyptian pharaohs, the writings of Christian mystics, or, since we are speaking of islands, the population of the Dutch island of Marken, which for decades has been on display in proud local costume to tourists and other visitors. The first time I spent a week among such isolated folk, all of whom are related only to each other, I felt very much like an outsider, which of course I was. During that entire visit I wandered about in shame of my mainland chromosomes. I had nothing whatsoever to offer the natives except my money. Deliberate inbreeding provides proof that chauvinism can go hand in hand with calculated cupidity.
Because Mallorca is an island, we could observe the same phenomenon here, though as time went on I became more interested in its gradations of light than in its people. Its light? Perhaps my reader is taken aback by this remark, for one hardly ever hears about the inbreeding of light. What I mean to suggest is the peculiar phasing of illumination generated here by the varying degrees of shade. On this island there takes place a constant shifting and melding of types of shade: human shadows copulate, so to speak, with the shadows and penumbrae of man-made objects and clouds, to yield the ever-changing mystery of Mallorcan light. Hundreds of artists from the world over, on seeing this kaleidoscope for the first time, have not believed their eyes. Some very few have succeeded in fixing the experience on canvas. Prominent among these happy few is a Japanese painter who lived on the island for many years, and who refused to leave until the Civil War forced him off. His name in translation means “Three Little Clouds.” In person he was just as gossamer as his name implies, and his paintings breathed the transparent ether of the island itself. As he once told me, this atmospheric transparency was so unique that not even the luminary marvels of his own homeland could bring forth what I liked to call the inbreeding of light — a phrase that, incidentally, he found amusing.
“Cloudless days: over 170 per year; rainy days: no more than 70; fog: 4 or 5 days.” That’s what the travel brochures say, and I have altered nothing from personal experience, which like all appearances can be deceptive. There, in raw numbers, is the set of climatological preconditions for the miraculous merger of sky and earth whose charm at any given moment overshadows — if I may be allowed such a jarring reversal of metaphor — attractions that Nature normally takes centuries to bring forth elsewhere.
A trace of this magical illumination was also visible in the vestibule of the house occupied by the individual we were now visiting. I have chosen the word “individual” deliberately, with the pejorative connotations it carries with it. By calling her a “bitch,” Zwingli had already degraded — or perhaps upgraded — the character of his female companion to that of a mere “individual,” especially if we consider what he said about her bedtime talents. Presumably we would soon find out what kind of bitchery he actually was referring to. Was “bitch” a term of endearment? Or did it designate a common street sister? Did he mean to suggest a woman of slovenly habits? Should we already start turning up our noses?
As I have mentioned, there was a handful of that magical light in her apartment vestibule, and at one and the same time it put me in a mood of both reverence and suspicion. Why were the occupants of this house so parsimonious with the celestial gift of light? Wallpaper, which might be subject to fading, was nowhere to be seen. Instead the walls were whitewashed, a type of finish I associated with root cellars and livestock barns. But my very brief sojourn on this island had already taught me that my personal yardstick was ripe for the kindling pile. I would have to acclimate myself to new standards in the same way as I would have to get used to this odd indoors apportionment of daylight.
Was I bothered by the darkness, Zwingli inquired. Surely I wouldn’t want it any darker, he said, and if it got any brighter, we would truly be in for it. Had I never heard of flies? One inch more of sunlight and we could be eaten alive!
Flies! So that was it! The perennial plague of the sunny climes, a foretaste of which we had experienced on shipboard! Flies abhor the very darkness that engenders them in swarms. More than most other species, they are lovers of light, the joy of the sunlit world, the very embodiment of the ecstasy of creatureliness. With their cosmopolitan inclinations and their trillions of progeny, they constitute a fine symbol for a faith in the future that puts to shame those of us humans who are inclined to piety. And yet humans don’t like them, particularly when they appear en masse. But humans in numbers raised to this power don’t appeal to their fellow humans either, to judge from the waves of genocide that we have been witness to. Give us a single human being, and things can work out just fine. Give us a million, and we make the sign of the cross and plot their annihilation. Give us a single buzzing fly on a melancholy summer afternoon, alone with a book of poetry in our private study — who would think of harming it as it flits around a central point not unlike our own spiritual core, the point we can only postulate and never locate with certainty? But let flies appear in multiples, and the swatter will swat and the blood will spurt. Man is to his fellow man a demon. To the fly he is a snapping dog.
By banishing sunlight, the woman of this house had also banished insects. The window shutters with their fixed blinds, called persianas, let in only the tiniest sprinkles of daylight. Surely that had something to do also with love. As we all know, love shuns the light. Only red light matches its confused inner urges. It stimulates the biochemical processes required for it to find its way out of platonic abstraction back to passion — though little lamps are in reality rarely necessary. In this context I have always been puzzled by the fact that the lowest color on the solar spectrum was selected as the STOP signal in modern traffic. Otherwise, where red lights emit their alluring gleam, life goes on at its most hectic pace. But this matter is far more complex than simple optical semantics. It is an existential problem, one that Jean Paul Sartre might one day solve for us from the exalted precincts of Paris. Red can, of course, also signify “danger,” and thus I should be less eager to claim for the color an exclusively erotic meaning.