The Island of Second Sight by Albert Vigoleis Thelen

Author:Albert Vigoleis Thelen
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction, FIC041000, FIC000000, FIC014000, General
ISBN: 9781468308044
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

For a few pages now I must leave Don Matías out of sight, but not the cause of Honduran independence, as I introduce my reader to another exiled combatant from the one-armed general’s platoon. His name, borrowed from the geography of their home country like those of all their fellow conspirators, will in my hazy memory always be associated with Reinhold Conrad Muschler’s novel Bianca Maria. This new fellow was the cobbler Ulua.

Ulua not only had two names—that was normal for an insurrectionist—but two professions. Besides being a shoemaker he was a petardist, or perhaps I should say a petardero, since in Spain the word petardista is reserved for a crook or extortionist who secretly lights fuses and blows up whole houses with his home-made bombs, the petards. Ulua was no extortionist, though one might say that he was extorting himself, which is true of any good revolutionary or blind adherent of a militant political movement. There can be no victory without idealism. But we shall go no further into that.

Ulua had fought at the side of Patuco; he had undermined many a stretch of railway and filled many a hollow bone with explosives. This was in fact his specialty: bombs made from bones. As soon as he was appointed chief fireworks expert of the Honduran national movement, Don Patuco’s fame rose as the most feared cattle rustler in Central America, a development that brought discredit to his pronunciamientos for quite a long time. Ulua needed cattle bones. He sneered at the paper bags that others, Don Alonso and his gang among them, were always glueing together. For him that was child’s play, whereas “we in the Cordilleras, we in the savannahs…”

Ulua lived in Palma in one of the dilapidated houses lining the square near the dilapidated post office and bordering the more elevated portion of the city—the square where Julietta used to dance. It took courage to risk your life clambering up four floors on rotting stairways. His wife was the daughter of Mallorquin immigrants, and it was she who advised our freedom fighter to take residence on the Golden Isle to await the Great Day. Their marriage was blessed with a son named Sacramento. While still young he began to abjure the God to whom his pious mother had dedicated him at his baptism. His name, meaning “Holy of Holies,” no longer quite fit his nature, and so he latched on to “Pablo” as an innocuous substitute since no one associated it any longer with the Prince of Apostles. He had just turned twenty, but like all of these kids with mustaches, he looked older.

Gracias a Dios took a room in Ulua’s house, thus closing the circle.

My first meeting with Ulua’s son took place of course on Jaume’s flour sacks. Pablo himself initiated our second encounter by rapping the iron fist at our front door. “Welcome, Don Pablo! Beatrice, here comes a combatant from Don Patuco’s legion. Up to now he’s only been a punctuation mark in the

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