The Recognitions

  Then his eye caught the Swiss passport, thrown open on the floor.

  —Aïe no, que no lo come, there, no don’t eat that . . . son para la niña . . . tell me, for the love of Christ now will you leave me alone?

  The outside shutters were almost closed on the narrow balcony, but sounds came up from Alphonso del Gato, the sound of voices and a barrel organ somewhere in the lame joy of some indistinguishable tune, through the shutters and the imposition of joy in the red-figured drapes that hung there motionless. Before him the mirrors, from the one tall and narrow mounted in the armoire to the small square one over the one-spigot washstand, and back, embraced one another’s images, as the rain took up against the shutters, and reached the glass, and he stood there, chilled, his memory frantic for something precious left out in the rain, or a window left open, the rain pounding in, in the dark, engulfing a consciousness alert now in all the sudden perspicacity of terror, deepening round it so that it seems to have been falling all the time: sounds came from a great distance, a strange city, in a foreign land, and the sense he’d just been put down here this instant, alone, and for the first time, engulfed in the sense of something lost. He spun around on his feet, to confront who had come in the door behind him, but he saw no one there. He stood, off balance but still for a moment, and then he moved sidling toward the door, as though she were waiting for him to get out before she could enter, and once at the door he left like a crowd leaving, and the door open behind him.

  —Vaya Usted con Dios . . . y que no haya novedad, Jacinta said opening the front door and wishing him off, and Mr. Yák repeated that phrase as he came out to the wet street, to crowd out other things from his mind. Novedad? . . . novelty, newness, change . . . That you go with God, and have no . . . novedad. He hurried down back streets, and then out past the Cortes, to the Palace Hotel, to leave a reassuring note for Mr. Kuvetli, saying that he had located what Mr. Kuvetli sought, and for a reasonable sum could see to its turning up within a few days; but he had forgotten his passport and was unable to remember his full name, though he did know the initial to his Christian name was J, and so he signed it J. Yák, and returned quickly to the streets.

  The streets were thronged with people wherever he turned, crowds parading with such animation that one might at first think some major holiday, or grand catastrophe, had brought them out. He found himself approaching the Plaza Tirso de Molina, saw a blond boy pass on the arm of a man and someone said, —Los turistas, sí . . . pero los marecones . . . He bought some raisins from a cart, an unidentified flower for his buttonhole, and stopped in at Chispero’s for coffee, glancing round him all this time but without much hope in his eyes of seeing anyone he knew. From the stage in the hall beyond the bar he could hear heels pounding, where Adelita Beltrán sang La Sebastiana, and he found himself mumbling along with the words, —Aunque tiene siete colchones . . . as he returned to the street, more nervous each minute at putting off his return to the pensión, and his work. —Un falsificador? he muttered, bumping people in the Calle de Atocha, —even though he has seven mattresses, la Sebastiana can’t sleep . . . ? How . . . ?

  —Adiós . . .

  —Dios . . .

  People passed in the wet recommending each other to God, instead of God to each other.

  —Y que no haya novedad . . . he repeated to himself, approaching the Plaza Santa Ana, and glanced down in the shaft of light from the Villa Rosa. It was the remnant of a rose in his buttonhole. He brought his hands up before him to clap for the sereno, and they hung there, as he did, standing unsteadily, overwhelmed in the chill rain at being engulfed in Spain’s time, and that like his guest awaiting him upstairs he would never leave it.

  —Adiós . . .

  — . . . ?

  Pastora stood in the doorway of the Villa Rosa, the strap on her high-heeled sandal still broken, the cerise blouse pulled and protruding from her skirt where the zipper was broken. —Buenas noche, Señor, she repeated timidly, her coarse black hair standing out round her face, and her lip drawn back from her large teeth no longer in the snarl he remembered, though it was the same expression but now pathetically defiant, waiting, alone, staring at him and waiting. He moved his arms with a quick shrug of his shoulders, and clapped for the sereno who came stumbling up with the keys and the usual observation on his job, —The worse I do my work the more people clap for me . . . and the street door came open.

  —Adiós . . . Pastora repeated, desolately, without a look from him as he entered and climbed the stairs, muttering against the hollow sound of his feet on them. Jacinta let him in, and he hurried down the dark passages to his own room, still muttering something about the work, the work.

  He pulled on the light and stared at the figure laid out on the uneven parquet of the floor. —Why would I have said . . . a thing like that? he mumbled, motionless, —The love hoarded all your life . . . for the work, and his lips still moved silently over that last word as he locked the door behind him, and continued to move, repeating it, until he saw them moving in the mirror where he went to pull off his hair, tug at the mustache, and startle when it failed to come off. He turned away from the glass to remove the plexiglas collar, though the gold and purple cord remained strung at his throat, and he crossed himself when his eyes fell on Jesús del Gran Poder hung upright over a faded length on the wall, forming a cross so. —All this, he muttered, and drew his hand across his chin. —Y que no haya novedad . . .

  Then he snorted with impatience. A light came in his eyes, as he picked up the penknife and knelt at the left flank of the figure laid on the floor. As he commenced to work the light became brighter, until his eyes shone as though alive with sparks. Sounds still rose from below, the measured clatter of heels and palms, a voice in a constricted wail, from the Villa Rosa, and still he worked.

  Then the blade stopped: the heart, was it? or the brain?

  Until at last the only sounds were from the ends of the empty alley below, where the tapping sticks of two blind people approached each other in the darkness, that, and the scraping edge of the penknife, as the hag of the moon, the dark winnower, rose in its last quarter.

  IV

  If the sun and moon should doubt,

  They’d immediately go out.

  —Blake

  —Blessed Mary went a-walking . . .

  The prow of the ship lifted from a swell, remained suspended and then dropped into the trough that followed. Everything shook.

  —Over Jordan river . . .

  —Please, don’t sing that, Stanley interrupted. —Not here, not right now anyhow. Clinging to the rail, he looked uncomfortably over his shoulder, where Father Martin paced the deck reciting the appointed section of his breviary. She stopped, and gazed silently out to sea. Stanley looked at her face, the only one which (next to Father Martin when he was engaged in such supramundane past-times as the one occupying him now) had preserved its equanimity throughout the voyage thus far.

  It was not proving an easy crossing: several times Stanley himself had felt the saliva mounting in the back of his mouth, and tried to put his mind on something sublime and far away, or at least extracorporeal; but sounds and signs of adjacent suffering usually recalled him to the immanent prospect of his own, and he swallowed with great effort. He did so now. Behind him, beyond Father Martin’s path, a mound of human misery heaved in a deck chair, clutching a small machine which clicked at regular intervals. It was a woman who had several times made the flat reasonable demand that the captain halt the ship. She was one of the Pilgrims; and as such, firmly convinced that the sea was aroused specifically for her and her fellows, whom she was ready to inform, at one moment, that infernal hands were responsible, working from anfractuous residencies far below to hinder them on their pious mission, and at other moments quite prepared to accuse the very Deity this voyage was designed to placate. In that case, He was certainly intent upon making it as memorably uncomfortable an excursion as any those medieval pilgrims enjoyed, setting off from Venice in the most deplorabl
e conditions that could be arranged, which, for their times, is saying a good deal. Right now, the sky was blue and brilliantly clear, permitting a moment of hope, until the ship rolled and the boiling sea was raised before her eyes, which she closed forthwith and tried to dwell on the felicitous snarl of misconceptions which she had, over many devout years, managed to accumulate about her destination. They were not, after all, going to Jerusalem, and once landed did not run the risk of being stoned by Saracens, or offered for sale such articles of commerce as the bodies of the Holy Innocents. Neither the prospect of getting hold of a shred of the True Cross, nor a casket containing the tears of the Virgin, nor even the toenail parings of some venerable ecclesiastic, all opportunities of which their earliest forebears had taken full advantage, drew them forth: but rather the reward of indulgences. That, and the spectacle of the canonization of the little Spanish martyr, whose reputation a number of these Pilgrims, and this woman foremost among them, were importunately trying to enhance by seeking her intervention in this present misfortune.

  It is true, there were others on board prey to less disciplined superstitions who agreed that this plight might well be a visitation on the Pilgrims, and were inclined to be quite rude about being so freely included. The Swede was one of these. Dressed in a becoming wrapper, he lay indoors sucking a lemon, and brushing aside objections. —But Anna, baby . . . —No, don’t argue with me now, it’s those hideous vulgar Pilgrims. —But baby the reason you’re coming is to join the Church yourself . . . —You know very well why I’m coming, because the only way I can possibly get hold of little Giono is to adopt him, and I have to be a Catholic parent or they won’t give him to me. —Don’t you want to come out in the fresh air for a little? . . . you’ll feel just tons better. —I can’t go out in this. The Swede held up a pink satin hem. —Baby why did you give all your clothes to those stowaways? . . .

  And among the lower echelons of the crew, those encountered mopping passages and lavatory decks, there appeared paper hats of crackled gilt and blemished colors, remnants of an exhausted carnival at some lost latitude whose banter still rode on smells and stains below the surface.

  —Isn’t there any more Dramamine? The tall woman raised her head from the pillow, seeing her husband enter. Then she lay back. —Poor Huki-lau, she’s biting her nails again . . . breaking off her analysis . . .

  And on deck, from the mound stacked heaving in a deck chair against the bulkhead, the clicks continued at somewhat irregular intervals. Almost gone inside her hand was the Machine, a “Recording Rosary,” with the button under her thumb to be pressed each time she reached the Gloria, and an arrow (“Keep tabs on Mystery!” the ad had said) which pointed to the next bead to be prayed.

  —Why do you keep singing that? Stanley broke out, seizing her wrist at the rail. Then he loosed his hold and apologized for startling her so; and a moment later a cry escaped him, and he lunged. Beneath him a book washed up on a crest, was gone, and reappeared in the white foam. He stared at that invitation to mortal sin being borne away by the sea, and then raised his face to the sea itself, as though to try to bring it all into his vision, and he said something like that to her, something about its immensity. He looked at her. She was looking at the sea. And then she said, but not to him,

  —For some fishes the sea is a great big sky.

  Stanley clung beside her. Then he turned, —Where are you going?

  —For a walk.

  —Yes, but . . . all right, but you’re not going up to see . . . up to First Class?

  —And see the Cold Man? She smiled to him; and Stanley lowered his eyes from hers. Who the “Cold Man” was he did not know, had no idea but of a tall figure he had seen, and then only at night, standing at the rail above, the left sleeve of a Chesterfield coat tucked empty in the pocket, the face motionless, obscured under the rim of a black hat. For Stanley was still pursuing the course he had set himself, asking no intrusive questions, making no demands upon her willingness which was, every moment she was near him, so candid in its expectation, so attentive to his wishes, as in the only renders he exacted of her, the devotions she secured with such care, and practiced with such grace.

  Everything was going exceedingly well.

  And her eagerness to learn the preparations he had set himself to teach her was sometimes pathetically touching, and sometimes it frightened him: touching, delicately absurd for there was no mockery in her when, for instance, she affirmed the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin with that of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as the only historical parallel she knew; frightening, when she brought from nowhere the image of Saint Simeon Stylites standing a year on one foot and addressing the worms which an assistant replaced in his putrefying flesh, —Eat what God has given you . . . Or her frank familiarity with the career of Saint Mary of Egypt: seventeen years of prostitution in Alexandria, talents put to good use when she was converted and paid her boat passage to Jerusalem so, all expiated by wandering unwashed in the woods for the next half-century. Or how she might ever have known of the seventeenth-century Sicilian girl Ana Raguza, who called herself the Bride of Christ and could, so she said, actually smell out sinners. Or that the right foot of Santa Teresa de Jesús is venerated at Santa Maria della Scala in Rome. Or that the pus of Saint John of the Cross smelled strongly of Madonna lilies.

  Things seemed to be going exceedingly well, better than Stanley would have imagined had he paused at the beginning of this undertaking to consider the practical difficulties it would so surely involve. Her passage, for instance: he was prepared to pay it, but no one had asked him to. And though he was relieved at the apparent lack of curiosity on the part of the other passengers, it had commenced to trouble him. No one, not even Father Martin, had asked her name; and though the fat woman had, at one point, risen in a gesture of myopic kindliness to include him in her own generation, asking if the “charming young creature” were his daughter, she had as quickly relapsed, clutching a shiny-surfaced paper book stamped with the Nihil obstat and Imprimatur, and entitled A Day With the Pope, and entirely forgotten that such a question, or any provocation for it, had ever entered her busy head. Licking her finger to turn each page of pictures, she visioned herself trundling in Vatican corridors, in the Court of San Damaso, and who can say where else? when she looked up to the boiling surface of the sea rising before her, and reached for a paper bag beside her deck chair.

  Nevertheless, it was working out. Though Stanley, left alone below with his stack of palimpsests, and the clean scores onto which he was copying, made more mistakes than he had ever before, some of them maddening, copying the same bar twice; some strange, for here and there he found himself inserting grace notes which broke the admirably stern transitions, slipping in cadenzas which had nothing to do with anything, and, just this morning, writing in a throbbing bass which, as he realized when he stopped, was the steady vibration of the engines.

  He could not get her out of his mind. When they were together, her smile, or often when she did not know he was looking the empty sadness of her face, forced him to lower his eyes, and fumble for something to handle, or something to say; and he usually found that tooth in his pocket, as he did now, and said nothing.

  At all events, nothing had gone wrong yet. Even below, where they were at close quarters when they were together, being with her in illuminated silence or in prayer proved, in fact, less difficult than he had pictured, never having known temptation as it is usually succumbed to. And even at rising, or her going to bed, he found no temptation to touch her, or to tell her she was beautiful, though the warm brush of an elbow shocked him sometimes. But directly he was alone, it was all entirely different.

  Directly he was alone, he was assailed by her simulacra, in all states of acute sorrow, or smiling, of complete abstraction or painful animation, of dress and undress, as he had seen her these last few days: directly he was alone, the images came to mock everything he had seen. Her sadness became shrieking grief, and her animation riotous, immodest in dress
and licentious in nakedness, many-limbed as some wild avatar of the Hindu cosmology assaulting the days he spent copying his work on clean scores, and the nights he passed alone in his chair where, instantly the lights went out, everything was transformed, and the body he had seen a moment before with no more surprise than its simple lines and modest unself-conscious movement permitted, rose up on him full-breasted and vaunting the belly, limbs undistinguishable until he was brought down between them and stifled in moist collapse.

  He woke in the morning exhausted, straightening his damp disarranged clothes, and there she lay, cool and unconsciously breathing and often uncovered; and when that was the case he covered her when he stood, no more allured to try her with his hand than he might have been a flesh-tone on canvas, and went out without washing, and up without even a pause on deck for the air of day, straight to breakfast. For there was that: he found himself with a great appetite, and sometimes he went to two sittings.