It wasn’t only the little burros that held my attention here in the mid-city. I was registering everything. Each and every step provided me with material for the travel articles I was going to write for a Dutch newspaper. I had already peered into a few courtyards, making mental note of them for special visits later. Then I discovered a merchant who, besides the usual rubbish, was selling devotional wares. His hottest item was a self-illuminating crucifix for one peseta, unmistakably “Made In Germany.” If you peeped through a pinhole in a cardboard box, you saw Our Savior surrounded by rays of light. The inventor of this phosphorescent masterpiece, a carpenter’s apprentice from Saxony, had become a millionaire in just a few short years. Next to the peddler of sacred images, a commercial scribe had set up his table. A girl was dictating to him — presumably a love letter, and what a shame that I couldn’t understand a word.
“Beatrice, come over here and make yourself useful. I am consumed with curiosity as to what that child is getting the old man’s pen to write for her. What do you mean, indiscreet? There are a whole lot of other people standing around and listening. It’s a public institution here. But what’s going on? What’s the rush? That bed’s not going to run away!”
Zwingli had dashed off on the double, Pilar likewise and, locked arm in arm with her, Beatrice perforce also. Then all three made a sudden turn — eyes right, for’rd march! Whereupon the trio disappeared into a murky passageway. I had all I could do to keep up with them. The narrow pavement was cool underfoot. By stretching out my arms, I could touch the houses on both sides. These houses seemed to be leaning toward each other — that’s how very tall they were, and that’s how very black the strip of daylight was that closed off our view of the sky like a shutter.
I stopped and took a breather in the shade. And then I lapsed into one of those alleyway reveries that befall me whenever I enter such a narrow urban defile. This has happened to me ever since I made the acquaintance, some thirty years ago or more, with the writings of the German arch-lampoonist and “autocogitator” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Among his aphorisms concering the human countenance I once found a passage that amuses me even today: “In Hannover I once took up lodgings in a flat whose window opened out on a narrow street that connected two broad thoroughfares. It was pleasing to observe how people’s faces changed expression as soon as they entered this lane, where they thought they would be unobserved. One fellow would take a pee, another would adjust his stockings, still another would laugh to himself, and yet another would shake his head. Girls would break into a smile as they reflected on the previous night, and would rearrange their underthings preparatory to further conquests on the adjacent avenue.”
It goes without saying that I did not recall this passage quite as literally as I have quoted it here. But I remember clearly drawing a mental comparison between the typical connecting passageway in a typical German town and this Spanish metropolitan chasm that snuffed out one’s eyesight completely, blinding one even to the shafts of intense light that held shut each of its entrances.
But of course, I mused, Pilar has to make a habilimental adjustment of the kind that requires women to enter a dark doorway or step behind a lamppost. “Don’t look!” cries the purely symbolic lamppost when approached by a woman, who then executes the classic motions of lifting and shifting, perhaps displaying for a split second certain visible attributes that otherwise, were it not for the presence of the chaste lamppost, might cause a minor traffic snarl. I am one of those men who dutifully avert their glances whenever a lamppost forces citydwellers into strict observance of their puny morality. This is an embarrassing vestige of my careful upbringing, the worst imaginable training for the struggle of real life. It was so wrongheaded, and in its wrongheadedness so ineradicable, that it pursued me over and across the Pyrenees as far as — well, as far as Africa, if we grant any credence at all to the theories of those ethnological savants who draw Europe’s southern border at the aforementioned mountain range (probably because they know so little about Europe and nothing at all about Africa, which they refer to as “Europe’s subconscious”).
And thus my childhood superego followed me across the sea all the way to this island, where it was totally out of place. It pursued me right into this confined and confining alleyway, where at this moment María del Pilar — and in spite of the murk and the gloom Vigoleis shut his eyes, just like a newly-ordained curate hearing a young female confess her transgressions against the Sixth Commandment. At precisely the right moment, however, the neophyte priest suddenly loses his resolve, interrupts his pious thumb-twiddling, and peeks through the screen. Vigoleis, too, was unable to resist earthly temptation. He now peered toward the place where a shapely hand was about to raise a skirt and a lissome leg would — but instead he sees both legs, still very much covered, tripping along ahead of him. In fact, to all appearances they have never stopped tripping along. Not a sign, my dear Herr Lichtenberg, of garter adjustment, not a trace of indecent activity of any kind. It remained to speculate whether my dear friend Pilar was having any thoughts of the previous night, or of the coming night. Was she smiling? My only view of her was from behind. And how she did dash onward! All three of them were playing the disappearing act, that was the only word for it. Good heavens, what can possibly be the matter? They shot around another corner and were swallowed up by the next street. Gone in a trice was my quasi-literary reverie, my semi-erotic noonday fantasy and canyon meditation.
After running through the alley and out into the light, I spotted my quickstepping relatives well ahead of me, so I immediately took up the pursuit. Giving both elbows to fellow pedestrians on the way, I finally got to within a few paces of the trio, only to notice Zwingli taking another right-angled turn, this time disappearing into a store. Pilar, whose regal stride we earlier had occasion to marvel at, sped in after him, with Beatrice, manifesting an air of resolute dignity, not far behind. Willing or not, I followed them in.
The establishment was a furniture emporium, with a selection ranging from potty chairs to bridal beds to caskets — in short, every single item of its kind that might be required by a creature that has descended from the comfort of the treetops to join the civilized world. “So that’s it,” I thought as I entered. My brother-in-law is actually going to have his measurements taken for a mummy-case! You see, I was still preoccupied subconsciously with the image of Zwingli as a terminal patient. But I soon located the fugitive trio in the sleepware department — of course, that’s what we came downtown for. We were looking for a bed, the biggest bed we could find, one that would at once satisfy one’s craving for individual identity, plus the requirements of conjugality. One yard’s width for each of us — to me that seemed about the proper democratic dimension for a life of mutual happiness.
We were soon discussing this subject of size with a salesman who, as I could tell by his tape measure and the accompanying gestures, was proposing that each of us sacrifice several inches of our individual liberty. Since I lacked command of the language, my own doctrine of dimensions got nowhere. No one made eloquent pleas for its validity, least of all Beatrice. Back in the Middle Ages, when kings shared bedsteads with their vassals, I might have deemed such parsimony appropriate. Each partner, the furniture mogul was explaining, should be willing to forgo a full twelve inches of space — this would redound to the benefit of nuptial harmony. Pilar contributed expertise in her rapid, euphonious voice. Zwingli flashed his horned pinky and, to conclude the negotiations, I flashed my money. The entire parley had taken up no more than half an hour. But it was too long a time considering what we ended up with. It was not a bed of the sort I was used to, not one of those on which, in my Lower Rhenish homeland, babies get conceived and born, or upon which I myself, Vigoleis, first saw the light of the world. I have in mind my ancestors’ gargantuan slumber-chests, which permitted their lovemaking, like everything else in their lives, to be a truly earthbound enterprise. What we purchased here was, instead, the equivalent of an army cot, a frame with wire springs and four metal feet that you screwed up to the desired height. I squatted down to indicate the proper distance from the floor, announcing to all and sundry that this contrivance, which more sophisticated personages might designate a “couch,” would be just right for sitting on.