There was loud applause, honestly proffered and well deserved. Dr. Sureda Blanes thanked the speaker in the name of Lullian Science and all of its devotees in attendance, for the great German philosopher’s brilliant impromptu discourse on such an extraordinary subject. An exhaustive discourse, he went on, again speaking for all those present. Surely there was nothing to add to the Count’s explanations — or perhaps there was? If not, then if the audience so desired, we could proceed to the general discussion, for Conde de Keyserling would surely give us the pleasure of taking up some of the more obscure points… Hermann nodded, mais naturellement—just ask away! Darmstadt was ready to provide all the answers.
No one budged. Someone had turned the electric fan back on, and it blew the pearl fisher’s beard out toward the audience. His green tie glistened, the palms swayed. The gentlemen at the green table were also swaying, and Harry too, who looked as if he wanted to say something. A few words of thanks? He stood up, and the custom tailoring of his Bauzá suit presented a distingué contrast to his would-be schoolmate’s pink shirt. The latter gestured to him as if to say, “Well, I’ll let you speak a few nice words, Harry, but keep it brief. If the audience likes what you say, we’ll take that as a recommendation for a repeat performance sometime, and then we can take off and enjoy a bottle together. I’ve got it all prepared.”
Harry did express his thanks — oh yes, indeed. His old friend, he said, had made some interesting points concerning the proposed topic. But — a thousand pardons — although Count Keyserling certainly had profound things to say about the subject at hand, he hadn’t truly plumbed the depths — a thousand pardons. Would he be permitted to add a few comments of his own? He had made some notes. Ten minutes, and no more?
There was commotion in the hall, commotion at the green table, commotion beneath the pink shirt. Don Francisco spoke up: “Go ahead, Señor Conde!” There were echoes of “Go ahead!” from the audience in many languages. Then Hermann, circus M.C. and clown in one and the same person, said, “Fine!” and clapped his hands smartly. No one followed his example, so now Harry, his head bent ever so slightly forward, commenced his act of revenge on the louche impostor and his phony story about their schooldays together. One by one, Harry hauled up to the surface all of Hermann’s deep-sea monsters, luminescent animals, medusas, and jellyfish, and burst them apart. When the aquarium was totally empty, Hermann was done for, stripped down to his dawn-colored shirt. The one Count had no need to administer the coup de grâce to the other Count. The entire audience took over this task. They gave Conde Harry de Kessler a thunderous ovation, a tribute that Conde de Keyserling couldn’t out-clap with his gigantic paws. As a self-defined Sage, he clearly knew when the jig was up.
Count Kessler looked over to our corner of the hall. We waved to him. He gestured his thanks. Afterwards he told us that he felt so ashamed on our account that he was worrying how he could possibly set things aright. He succeeded admirably.
Hermann retreated to his hotel suite and, all alone, drank up the chilled bottles, all six of them. Then he summoned Don Helvecio to his room and discussed with him his departure. He wasn’t interested in a return engagement at Formentor. He had urgent commitments in Barcelona, Madrid, Salamanca…
The local newspapers took notice of the Príncipe event. Who was this Count Kessler, the man whose age, compendious knowledge, and cleverness had so astonishingly outpointed the famous, popular, hispanophile Count Keyserling? He was reported to be a foreign guest on the island, and a renowned personage on all the continents. But why had Mallorca not heard of him before? It was said that he was composing his memoirs, and the hope was that they would be published in Spanish, too.
During the following days Count Kessler was inundated with letters of invitation: conferencias here, conferencias there, requests for pre-publication copies of his memoirs and for copies of his Notes on Mexico. Kessler rejected all of them. It was not his intention, he said, to claim the spotlight. He had simply wished to give the insistent Hermann a lesson. Hermann, for his part, cursed the day when he shared his platonic schooldays with Harry.
Harry once again submerged into his days of imperial glory. Hermann, after a return to the Spanish mainland, enjoyed continued acrobatic success as the prophet of an Iberian Hellas.
I was not aware that the German publisher Samuel Fischer was known to his friends as “Sami.” And thus at first I couldn’t understand why Count Kessler was so upset at reading this man’s obituary, or that he, who even in exile observed all the forms of etiquette, came knocking at our door late in the evening — a type of behavior that we could have expected only from Herr Silberstern.
“Sami is dead. May I come in?” To judge by the newspapers that we found in our corridor, it must have been a night between Saturday and Sunday. Kessler made no attempt to take his shoes off. He was in distress, and kept saying how horrible it was that Sami was dead. Not until he added, leaning against the bookcase in our bible-paper room, that Sami’s successor would no doubt turn out to be his coffin nail, did I realize that the person he was mourning was none other than the famous S. Fischer. There would be trouble, he told us. All their wonderful collaboration on the literary journal Pan was now over with, all the leisure he, Kessler, needed for the later volumes of his memoirs. Then he wandered off in recollections of the post-Bismarck years: the heyday of Naturalist drama: Gerhart Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, all the great European writers that Sami had assembled from near and far: Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Georg Brandes.
Conversing further on, he eventually focused on an episode to be recounted in the final volume of his memoirs, which he intended to finish with his flight from Germany. It was a scene that took place in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. He was involved in negotiations in a private room with personages whose names I have of course forgotten. A waiter arrives and says, “Gentlemen, the Reichstag is on fire!” Someone grabs Kessler’s arm and whispers to him that it is high time that he pack his bags and escape to England or France. Kessler doesn’t even take the time to return to his apartment on Köthener Strasse, the rooms designed and decorated by Henry van de Velde. Instead, he takes the very next train to Paris. His head was on the list of those to be liquidated when the Nazis faked a Communist assassination attempt against the Führer. Kessler had a copy of that list, given to him by friends of his at the German embassy in London.
That business about Sami Fischer’s successor as Harry’s “coffin nail” made a big impression on me, since I was thinking that a writer of such universal renown as Count Kessler must be immune to the vagaries and chicaneries of any publisher, especially his own publisher. Today I know that an author must consider himself fortunate if his publisher doesn’t send him, along with a publishing contract, a finished coffin — one that would probably be a few sizes too small. It’s a lucky thing for the future of literature that most writers feel so sheltered from death that even in sight of the proverbial four boards, they continue to compose their own epitaphs.
Count Kessler left the island in the spring of 1936. His health was ruined; he was spitting blood, and he looked terrible. Before he departed, in Barcelona and in the Galerías Costa in Palma he arranged exhibitions of highly acclaimed works from his Cranach Press.