The Recognitions

  Stephen had jumped to his feet. —Do you want to see . . . see one I’ve already restored?

  —But you . . . you . . . The Irish thorn-proof, the back of his head and his hands drawn back, Ludy stood flattened against the stone wall. He stayed so as though pinioned there, staring at the moving figure before him in the dim light, as the table was dragged away from the opposite wall, all the while Stephen was talking in a voice which was strangely breathless and at the same time unexcited,

  —A painting . . . a . . . a Valdés Leal, I worked a long time on it, it . . . yes there’s warmth in it, I worked a long time on it, you’ll see that. Venice, Venice . . . we all studied . . . yes Titian, you’ll understand, we all studied . . . with Titian, working out this . . . harmony, yes, it . . . you’ll understand when you see it, this . . . this picture.

  Holding to the end of the table with both hands, he stopped and stared at Ludy, who had begun to wilt against the gray wall. And when he repeated, —Yes, in a hoarse whisper, the same shock of a burning showed in his eyes, but he turned back to the table quickly, looked there uncertainly and mumbled something, grabbed up the half-loaf of bread he’d tossed there a few minutes before, and went on, looking behind the table and talking and chewing at the same time, so that his words were at once muffled and disconnected.

  Possibly if he’d been still and talked evenly, Ludy would have turned and got out the door; but now he stood against the wall, moving his lips slightly as though trying to finish the sentence which would dismiss him, bringing his hands out loose and empty to press them back against the stones immediately, then bringing them out again if only the distance of their own warmth from the wall, to complete the gesture which would allow him to escape.

  Meanwhile Stephen was muttering and he kept looking up as though he were talking to people in all parts of the small room, at one moment looking over Ludy’s shoulder and hemming him in that way, then addressing an empty corner, or the table itself, with things like, —Separateness, that’s what went wrong, you’ll understand . . . or, —Everything withholding itself from everything else . . . and the moment Ludy started to turn away the eyes caught him again and he sank his weight in Irish thorn-proof back against the gray stone wall, as the voice broke out,

  —You’ll say I should have microscopes for this . . . delicate work. Yes, egg white, egg yolk, gums, resins, oils, glue, mordants, varnish, you’ll be surprised how they’re put together just to bind the pigments. We could take X-ray pictures, infra-red, ultra-violet . . . Layers and layers of colors and oils and varnish, and the dirt! The dirt! Look at that, that picture there, look at the crackle on the surface, that’s from the wood panel expanding and contracting and the paint crackles when it gets dry. If we had a microscope with a Leitz mirror-condenser, we could turn it up to five hundred diameters, put on a counting disc and make a particle count of the pigment. Then we measure its thickness with a micrometer, put the Micro-Ibso attachment on the camera and you . . . If we had a micro-extraction apparatus we could bore holes in it too and get some nice cross sections out, put them in wax and then you slice them in half just like that with a microtome knife. And when you get that under a microscope with polarized incident light then you can really see what’s going on with a carbon arc lamp, you’ll see when we get into the high oil immersion series of lenses. You’ll see, if we can fix a microscope up with polarized light and put a particle of the pigment under it, we can see whether it’s isotropic or anisotropic, for that we use nicol prisms. Then we determine the refraction index of the particles of pigment and then, well then of course, then we know exactly . . . the dirt that collects, and one layer of varnish after another, and the dirt that collects in every little ridge and crack century after century, then we’ll know. Here’s the secret, laying transparent oils on heavy thick ones. Bosch . . . not Bosch. The transitions . . . Leonardo put on wet paint with the palm of his hand . . . dark brown underpainting all the way, and . . . that plasticity, that plasticity. And . . . and . . . if we can get a good reliable particle count, the refraction index on each particle and whether it’s isotropic or . . . when you get down to the gesso, you . . . what was it? What was it? . . . You . . . yes, the El Greco, I . . .

  —No, you . . .

  —Next.

  Ludy still stood with his back flat against the stone wall, and it was not only the eyes, each time they darted at him, which held him there, but the stifling sense, which increased every instant, that the doorway was not open, that there might be no doorway at all; and inching in fear of confirming such a possibility, his hand moved as slowly as he could let it, toward the door frame.

  —Yes, the El Greco . . . that . . . using carmine for shadows, and . . . the red and yellow ochre for the flesh . . . the flesh, the . . . hematitic . . . painters who weren’t afraid of spaces, of . . . cluttering up every space with detail everything vain and separate affirming itself for fear that . . . fear of leaving any space for transition, for forms to . . . to share each other and . . . in the Middle Ages when everything was in pieces and gilding the pieces, yes, to insure their separation for fear there was no God . . . before the Renaissance. He stopped speaking with the effort of lifting a panel from behind the table, and he rested it there, its face turned to the wall. But once he got it there he commenced to mutter again, —Everything vain, asserting itself . . . every vain detail, for fear . . . for fear . . . Then he snatched up another of the small loaves of bread in the hand that bore the ring with two diamonds, steadied the panel with his elbow and tore the loaf in half.

  Ludy’s hand had reached the door frame, and his fingers began to curl against it, pulling his whole weight in that direction of escape, when they touched cloth, and stopped.

  —Yes, do you remember, Cicero, in the Paradoxa? . . . and he gives Praxiteles no credit for doing anything more than removing the excess marble, until he reaches the real form which was there all the time. It was there all the time, and all Praxiteles did was to remove the excess marble, and here . . . here this is the . . . the one I just restored, the Valdés Leal . . .

  —Hahauuuu! . . .

  —You . . .

  —Who? . . .

  —He? He’s been standing there, Stephen said calmly, as calm as he had sounded when first intruded upon. —Didn’t you know he was standing there? Stephen asked, with the same simplicity he had shown when he was discovered at work. —You know him, don’t you?

  —Yes, he . . . he’s the janitor here, Ludy got out, staring up at the porter who filled the doorway, and with apparently no idea that his presence had provoked any more than mere notice, showed no sign of moving. He stood there a good head taller than the figure in Irish thorn-proof, and seemed to stand as massive and motionless as the walls, out of respect for the engagement he had interrupted.

  —Casa con dos puertas, mala es guardar, eh? Stephen addressed the old man easily, and pleasantly. The porter answered him in the same familiar manner, and shrugged his heavy shoulders. He lowered his head, and a smile commenced to break the lines on his face, pressing the disease scars away until they were almost out of sight in the flesh. But the smile stopped there: the lines restrained it, and the scars showed out.

  —He’s like all the old men I’ve ever known, Stephen said quietly, as the panel under his elbow came slowly face down on the table.

  Ludy stared at the square of gray sky in the wall above while they talked in Spanish, pressing his heels against the wall as though he were going to leap for it, though their voices were low and casual, and Stephen shrugged and almost smiled as he spoke, a shock which brought Ludy down full-footed on the floor, slowly, but looking at the figure standing by the table with incredulity as though he had emerged from the stone. Nonetheless Stephen’s smile stopped where the other did, unrestrained by deep lines and scars, but it stopped.

  The old man was talking, and Stephen, looking at him as though listening, said in a low tone, —He comes to watch me work sometimes . . . and got out a sharp constricted sound near a laugh as
he picked up the remaining loaf from the littered table. —He says it’s like Sigismundo in the cell. You’ve read that haven’t you?

  —No, Ludy answered helplessly, looking down at the space between the leg and the door frame as though he might try to slip through it.

  —You haven’t read about Sigismundo in the cell? “Vive Dios, que pudo ser!” . . . falling off a balcony into the sea, though there’s trouble there because Poland has no seaports. Vive Dios, que pudo ser! You haven’t read La Vida es Sueño? Here . . .

  Ludy saw a piece of bread held thrust before him. He took it and stood holding it. He could hear the old man chewing beside him. The two figures seemed to be crowding him to the wall.

  —He is a penitente, Stephen said, close upon him, —when he came out of prison. Though think! . . . for him she’s still a child, and beautiful in wax, while his face is old and broken like the ruins everywhere here, the past left where it happened. There’s a permanence of disaster here, left where we can refer to it, the towers of the Moors lie where they fell, and you’ll find people living in them, whole cities jealous of the past, enamored parodies weighed down with testimonial ruins, and they don’t come running to bury the old man, but give him the keys to the church, and he rings the bells. He says she comes to him carrying lilies that turn to flames when he takes them. You see how I trust him.

  Ludy looked down at the bread, which was crumbling in his hand. —I . . . I have to . . . go . . .

  —I have to trust him. That it comes to this, envying an old man. Why, two thousand years ago, thirty-three was old, and time to die. “A curse on youth, that age must overcome; a curse on health, that illness destroys; a curse on life, which death interrupts!” You know Buddha’s immaculate conception, and dead of an indigestion of pork? “Age, illness, death, could they be forever enchained!” I have to trust him, for we’re here together now, and penitent for rape and murder.

  —You’ve . . . killed someone? Ludy said looking up at last from the bread crumbling in his hand, to see the lines round the same dull eyes draw into the beginnings of a wince, so close he could see the clotted buds of veins broken beneath the skin of the eyelids, as the lips tried to force the wince into a smile but only become tighter and tighter as Stephen spoke, breathless but not excited, a purely physical halting of his voice, as though there were not enough breath at once to finish all that he had to tell.

  —In Africa, Algeria, the bullet went right through and broke his neck, in Sidi-bel-Abbès, I’ll tell you. J’ai le Cafard he’d got tattooed across his forehead, in the broken letters of a child’s hand . . . He paused, looking into Ludy’s face anxiously, an appealing moment, until he brought up the last of the bread and bit into it fiercely, hunched to catch the crumbs in his empty palm.

  —“Mon Légionnaire!” A ghoum, simpering up to the table where we sat, I and the poor policeman arguing if daylight time was black upon the moon. “Et toi, divine Mort, où tout rentre et s’efface, accueille tes enfants dans ton sein étoilé . . .” The poor policeman read Leconte de Lisle. And he called me romantic! for planning escape to the desert. “Shave and clean up a bit,” he says, “or I must arrest you.” No money, no papers, it’s more shameful than being naked out in the streets in daylight. But at night we talked, the girl gashed with tattoos in Djelfa, or her in Biskra wearing louis d’or at her throat and a safety pin in her ear. “The desert is well patroled, and you’re dead in four hours without water. It’s romantic! I won’t permit it. I have my duty to do. You speak of reality. No, I know these stunts,” he goes on, we were friends, understand, “hiring a camel and setting off in secret, to journey a night and a day and turn your mount loose in the desert, and lie down and wait for the dawn. ‘Affranchis-nous du temps, du nombre et de l’espace, et rends-nous le repos que la vie a troublé.’ ” Then he looks at his watch. We were friends for some time there. The blue gash down her forehead, and up the chin and the heels, three hundred francs in Sfax on a Saturday night, the gold louis d’or and the feathers and bars in the door. Or tea in Bou-Saâda, she offers it bristling there on the rug on the floor, the porches ready to fall from the fronts of the houses, and her mother stays in the room, guarantee that she’s Ouled-Naïl for the dance that shocks the French tourists, the musicians play to the wall and it jumps like something was living and jumping inside, in town, while their stripes stretch over the edge of the desert near the shells of colonists’ houses. But here where the Legion’s quartered, the black beard grows, “Défense de raser,” she tells me, “les médicastres français s’entendent,” encouraging crabs. And the guards wilt with bayonets fixed in the street. So here’s Han, in the Legion, a ghoum, coming up to our table on the walk outside the café. Le Cafard tattooed on his forehead, but wait. That’s nothing, you’ll see, when they took down his pants. He stops to spit on the road, and looks up like an animal, “You! You have come here to join us! What pleasure this is, to see you, at last, here, to join me again. Hey? . . . how fine it will be now, together. Where have you been all this time, since Koppel, remember? Do you remember? The old fool he was. And Frau Fahrtmesser, and Minchen, the pig and her daughter, remember? How happy we were! Die Jungfrau? And how young! Do you remember all that? And now! my dear friend, how fine it will be, together. At first it is hard, but I can watch out for you, hey? At first the Legion is hard, but with me, you and me, you . . . but you . . . but that’s why you’re here? to join us? to join me in . . . this? . . .” And he holds up his khaki shirt punched in a fist, standing over me. “Yes, no other reason for coming to bel-Abbès, but to . . . come in . . . with me?” So the sun had gone down, and when I drew back and said “No,” he stared for a minute. He stared, and he hissed, “And now you! We were cheated, now you . . . I will tell you both how we were cheated. They betrayed us, and now . . . I will tell you.” He spoke low, he was gathering force that might have escaped in his voice, and his shoulders climbed higher restraining, until he could say, “I hate you. I hate you very much. Do you understand how I hate you? Even then, I hated you . . . there was something missing, and I always hated you, even then, or . . . it wouldn’t be so missing.” Then he rushed at me. The bullet caught him right through, and broke his neck. Sir-reverence, the bastard was dead. And since then, I’ve been wandering. The policeman turned up his face with the toe of a boot, and then let the blue letters roll back in the dirt, and the wind blew the blond head full of dirt from the street, and since then I’ve been traveling. “Get away! You were not even here! Do you understand? Get away!” And what could I do? The policeman . . . we were friends for some time there. He stood over that thing in the dirt with his gun in his hand, and when two or three people had seen it he put it away unfired, and looked at his watch, and since then I’ve been moving. He knew. We’d talked so much together, he knew he was sending me on, and since then I’ve been voyaging, until I came here. It’s a place here to rest, to rest here, finally, a place here to rest, and the work, to start it all over again, alone . . .

  —But these things . . . don’t happen . . . I have to go.

  —But wait! Wait! I haven’t told you, when they took down his pants he’s a face tattooed on his fundament! There’s homage for a whole coven, wide eyes on the cheeks. Wait! . . . there’s a kiss he’ll remember. Ehh? And I knew it, going around with a bum like that, blue eyes . . . Wait!

  Fr. Eulalio, his eyes fixed reverently on his toes flattening in the sandals at each step, emerged first from the Capilla de los Tres with a measured tread, one which he was, however, seldom able to measure for more than ten paces. At that point, some enthusiasm usually took hold, and he inclined to break into a disciplined but irregular dance, no matter how retiring his partners proved, so they were from Outside. At this moment he even had his hands clasped, and for a parlous moment, stood stock still at the door.

  —I don’t know whose tomb it is, but we might as well go the whole hog while we’re here and take it in, said a woman, emerging.

  —Boy, that big picture was some mess wasn’t it, the
Rubins, said a fat man in a brown suit and yellow necktie, who had apparently joined them. Two cameras swung from his neck, and a light meter, all in new leather cases. —Rubins, was he a Spaniard?

  —Look at his name, Peedro Pablo, where else do you get a name like that? the woman with him answered. She was totally undistinguished, but for the ring she wore. It was gold, and large, and very modern, and suggested those articles which are advertised as “silent defenders.”

  The tall woman waited for her husband. Fr. Eulalio stood entranced with the morning’s haul. But looking up, he commenced to vibrate, as though a marvelous set of springs were concealed under his robe; and if anything was required to set them in motion, it was the sight of the figure he saw now in fleeting glimpses of Irish thorn-proof, dodging behind the Moorish columns which surrounded them. For next to introducing himself to Americans, nothing gave him greater pleasure than introducing Americans to each other, and the opportunity of introducing four to one, and that one a noted writer, —un escritor muy distinguido, muy culto . . . He almost sprang across the Moorish fountain.

  The distinguished novelist saw there was nothing for it but surrender, and tried to compose himself as he was led forth, if only for that minute of courtesy which his position demanded. He came out wiping his hands on the seat of his trousers.

  —We didn’t know you were Catholic! said the woman with the ring, delighted, extending that hand, and withdrawing it more slowly, separating her fingers and glancing down surreptitiously to see what the sticky gray matter lodged between them might be, while her husband, bobbing amid the leather cases, lost his good-natured grin as he shook hands, and retired to wipe his on the seat of his pants.