The Recognitions (137 page)

only thing they could do. In the Saint Gotthard Pass, it was the only thing they could do. —Rudy has the sweetest flowered toilet bowl, but he lent it to someone before we found this place on the Quai d'Orsay, and they just won't give it back. They're growing something in it, and we want to use it. Across the river, up Montmartre, that hill whose name had been so many times ransomed since Saint Denis showed up carrying his head, an immense lopsided Negro in epaulettes guarded a bar where a heaving hunchback played an accordion like a beast lovemaking, a girl heaved as though about to be sick, and her girl friend said enticingly to a lone stranger, —She dancing, wonderful dancer. You dance? —No. —You pay me drink? —No. —You ingliss? —No. —You swiss? —No. —You jermn? —No. —You hollandais? —No. —You dance? —No. —You pay me drink? The hunchback would go on heaving over his accordion, the girl over the bar, the huge doorman at the door, but they would not see Arny again, stumbling in from his hotel in Rochechouart with his shirt on inside out and the hem of his coat pinned up, for even Henry's Hotel was no longer standing: the day had been a sunny one, and Arny, finishing a bottle about breakfast time, put it empty in the windowsill and sat down to try to write a letter. —Dear Maude, I am just trying to figure things out ... it commenced, and got no further, for he was soon asleep over it, his head down on his folded arms. The sunlight filled the room, and the wallpaper looked like it was going to descend and devour him. Still he slept. The sun caught the bottle, which drew its light and heat to a sharp point on the bedclothes. Arny woke to find himself engulfed in smoke. Before he could stand, it was flames. He got to the window, where there was a sign pasted, possibly by some jester: On est prié de n'ouvrir pas ce fenêtre parce que le façade de I'hôtel lui compter pour se supporter . . . Arny did not read French, even when it was written by an American. With some effort he opened the window, smoke billowed out, and the facade of Henry's Hotel collapsed. In the more fashionable part of town below, tourists continued to stroll the Grands Boulevards, marveling at French cooking, côte de veau, côte de pore, entrecôte, biftec, bistek, pommes frites, pommes frites. The two small-headed youths had brought their young ladies back to the right bank for supper, and they advanced up the Boulevard des Capucines like the horses in a chariot quadriga, stallions on the outside. —Why don't you go up ahead, Charley, see if one of them will approach you, pretend you're not with us, go ahead, I want to see how she does it ... None did. They came on, spavined stiff with formality, spaved and gelded, to a small restaurant whose small sign said, Son menu Touristique 400 francs, You Speack English. —Hors d'oeuvres veryay pertoo, puis boeuf a la sale anglaise. —Comment, m'sr? —Boeuf à la sale anglaise. —Comment? —Ici, damn it ... He pointed to the menu and repeated. —Ahh oui, boeuf salé à 1'anglaise, oui m'sr . . . —That's what I said, damn it, I mean Christ, he added when the waitress was gone, —they can't even understand their own language. But on most hands the French were still being taken at their own evaluation. They were still regarded as the most sensitive connoisseurs of alcohol. Barbaric Americans, the barbaric English, drank to get drunk; but the French, with cultivated tastes and civilized sensibilities, drank down six billion bottles of wine that year merely to reward their refined palates: so refined, that a vast government subsidy, and a lobby capable of overthrowing cabinets, guaranteed one drink-shop for every ninety inhabitants; so cultivated, that ten per cent of the family budget went on it, the taste initiated before a child could walk, and death at nineteen months of D.T.s (cockeyed on pernod) incidental; so civilized, that one of every twenty-five dead Frenchmen had made the last leap through alcoholism. They were still regarded as the arbiters of fine art, and Commissioner Clot of the Sureté Nationale could prove it by pointing to the walls of his office which were festooned with evidence: the best modern French painters brought such high prices, changed hands so freely, were so much easier to copy and, most ingratiatingly, had no histories, that no one need bother producing "old masters." Deluged as he was even now with the work of someone who was buying originals, making and selling (perfect) copies, and selling the originals later elsewhere, Commissioner Clot remained confident of his prey: "If forgers would content themselves with one single forgery, they would get away with it nearly every time . . ." To the end, the world's most exemplary models of free men (as their vigorous succession of governments, and singular adroitness of tax evasion, witnessed); of thrift and provident husbandry (with three or four billion dollars' worth of the world's gold dead and interred in back yards); of sophisticated modernity (one had only to dial Odéon 8400 to get the time, the dissection of the latest minute scarcely understandable but, badly worn as it was, recorded by a famous French comedian); and still the favored child of the Church . . . —Well she says she got athlete's foot in one of the baths at Lourdes, said someone entering the Louvre; as an Italian coming out observed, to no one, that the sculptures of Michelangelo he had just seen inside were placed —coll' arte ben conosciuta di tradi- mento francese. Back on the left bank, the philosopher on the terrace of the Flore had been superseded by a blond woman with a fake concen- tration camp number tattooed on her left arm, who was supervising a discussion on Suffering. To one side, a chess game progressed with difficulty, for there was argument as to which tall piece was the king, which queen. An American who had been motoring in North Africa said, —Don't laugh, it isn't funny. We hit one. There are about thirty-five a day in Casablanca, they just don't understand machines. It cost me thirty-two thousand francs to get my car fixed, I should have hit him square. They even found his teeth in the muffler. One end of the Deux Magots was honoring a painter who had been discovered by an American fashion magazine: until 1916, he had painted nothing but bottles. His artistic revolution came in 1930. He discovered white. Max had left the Royale. —How does he make it, does he work somewhere? —He lives out in a suburb called Banlieu, Hannah said, —he paints pictures for a well-known painter who signs them and sells them as originals. —But they are originals . . . Twelve Arab children sold peanuts from the tops of baskets and hashish from the bottom. Someone said there was a town in France called Condom. Many of the young men wore beards. —I never did understand Italian money while I was there, it was like confetti, rarther expensive confetti . . . Hannah said she had to go to work. She read her poems aloud in a local cave, naked. —I'm studying art here on the GI bill, one of the beards said, —I've found a school where all you have to do is register. Someone recited the Malachi prophecy concerning the Papacy. —There are only seven more to go, counting this one. —Do you think Paris is worth a Mass? someone asked, clutching a book titled Les cinq fontaines ensanglantées. —Nostradamus predicts it will last until 3420. AD that is. On the terrace of the Reine Blanche, the blond boy said, —Next week he's promised to take me to Paris . . . —But baby, this is Paris. Rudy and Frank had left, to return to their new flat overlooking the Pont d'léna with some of their gay party, all of whom stopped in the foyer to admire the large painting which had been a wedding present from a well-known artist. It portrayed a tall man standing, and a youth reclining at his feet, gazing up at what, upon close inspection, proved to be no more than a tear in the tall man's trousers. Then one of the guests started to open the drapes at the long windows, and was stayed immediately from it. —Because Rudy just looked and looked for months for a place just like this, overlooking the water, and the very first night we were here, standing right here in this very spot looking out at the lights and the Seine, a girl went out on the bridge and took her shoes off and jumped, right before our eyes, and that's just ruined the view ever since for both of us ... Then Frank was excused to write a letter home to Ohio, while the rest sat down to friandises served on modern Finnish glassware, to light cigarettes from match books stamped Rudy and Frank, and talk of Copenhagen. —Dear Mummy, Frank wrote, in the bedroom, —I know you will understand why I want to be with him always, Mummy. I know you will understand when I tell you that I love him the way you loved Daddy . . . —"Time is a limp . . ." Hannah read under the pavement, her words rising despumated on the smoke and desultory commingling of languages, —emmerdant . . . —les americains, alors . . . while the city might seem to try to sleep out this great gap of time, asking, —Hast thou affections? —Yes, gracious madam. —Indeed! —Not in deed, madam . . . yet ha\e 1 fierce affections, and think what Venus did with Mars . . . The thirty-third person leaped from the Eiffel Tower (though unofficial figures had it nearer a hundred), this time from the 348-1001 second platform, and after a twenty-year investigation the Friends of Cleopatra found that the remains in her grave, in the library garden of the Louvre, were not that queen at all, but the body of an Arab soldier killed in a Paris cafe brawl, and the mummy, looking like a tight bundle of rags, gone to a mass grave eighty years before, and all joy of the worm. —Et toute nue . . . quelle envahisseuse! —"Time is a limp . . ." she commenced again. Behind the clattering bastion of saucers, the aging image of the wigless father of her country read on, and someone said she could sit like that all night, because she wore a Policeman's Friend. Someone on the terrace of the Deux Magots said a balloon race had begun that afternoon in the Bois. Someone read the message on a card from a friend touring the Holy Land, —I've just visited the Wailing Wall, and had a good cry. In the men's toilet downstairs, someone scrawled Vive le Pape over the urinal. America My contrey tears a dee Sweat land a liberty of D.I.C. Landwert ar fater dye Land of thy pildrem bride From every mountain sides Every dumb breed wrote a student at the Essex County Boys Vocational and Technical High School in Newark, New Jersey. The 00th person leaped from the Empire State Building in New York. In San Francisco, seven strands of barbed wire were strung at the jumping-off place on the Golden Gate Bridge, which one hundred and fifty people had chosen as a point of departure from this world since the bridge was opened in 1937. In Moscow, Pravda announced that Hawaiian guitar music had been banned in Russia. Was the long winter really done? and "the fireside, the slippers and the waiting bed" no longer there to "protect the depressed person from himself . . . This line of retreat recedes as the day grows longer," the World Health Organization reported, finding, in these verdant expressions of springtime's acceleration, "the never-ending daylight difficult to bear, . . . and the glorious sun becomes a curse." Any city that calls herself modern anticipates all her children's needs, even to erecting something high for them to jump from: the Eiffel Tower went up more than half a century ago; but everywhere the rural population must make shift to civilize itself with what it has. In southwestern France, within the neighborhood of Landes, forty-eight hours in the Easter holidays saw a woman hung in a farm barn, two men in a forest, one into a river, and another into the sea, while Deauville was already preparing to celebrate Pentecost, some seven weeks hence, by issuing five-hundred-thousand-franc chips in the casino, for the first time. "Plage a allengas to are flag," wrote the New Jersey high-school student, hardpressed by his progressive education: "i plegance to are flag of the united states of American / An to the republican for region stands / One machone in the viguable / witch libryt an justest for all" . . . Libryt and justest, Los Angeles police confiscated a hydraulic press, dies, and the plastic rubber compound with which the three arrested men were counterfeiting poker chips, to be cashed in the gambling palaces across the line in Las Vegas. In the viguable, the machone's customs agents were importuning a Hollywood movie producer for duties on a "Study by Candlelight" by Vincent van Gogh. The purchaser said it was an "original" and therefore should enter the machone duty-free, witch libryt an justest guaranteed to any genuine work of art no matter how valuable; but the guardians of the viguable demanded a healthy cut (10 per cent) of the purchase price ($50,000.00), enforcing the tariff this sweat land levels on an "imitation or copy" whose entrance threatens the livelihood of the inspiration even now ringing from every mountain sides. Lovers of beautiful things were thick as thieves. Some of the six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of paintings stolen from a cathedral in Bardstown, Kentucky (including a Descent of the Holy Ghost by Jan van Eyck), were found in the trunk of a car in Chicago. Far across the sea, the axiom that aesthetic value is not enhanced by ownership was once more disproven: a caretaker of the Victoria and Albert Museum had in twenty-three years taken home nineteen hundred and sixty objets d'art hidden in his trouser-leg. Spring came everywhere, as though for the first time. And for the first time, civilized use was found for the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, where a native son hurled himself effectively down the slope of two-ton blocks. In South America, with seventeen dead and 4,990 in need of medical attention after Rio de Janeiro's pre-Lenten festivities, Holy Week itself moved toward a comparatively peaceful close. Three hundred lepers were reported marching on the capital city of Colombia from their colony at Rio Agua de Dios. Nine Pilgrims were trampled to death, and twenty-five injured, jamming the gates of the Shrine of Chalma in Mexico. A Baptist minister in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, burned two copies of a new revised version of the Bible because it substituted the words young woman for virgin, and a Lutheran minister said they were both wrong: the word should be maiden. In Chicago there was a crime every 12.5 minutes. Some chickens exploded in a town near Hanover, Germany (they had eaten carbide dropped by British troops on maneuver and drunk water). The Sheik of Kuwait asked that posters portraying the Venus de Milo not be shown in his domain, not prudish about her undraped bosom, but because
Islamic law punishes the thief by chopping a hand off. The right arm of Saint Francis Xavier arrived in Japan by air. In Moscow, Pravda asked, Where has Noah's Ark disappeared? In Hungary's capital, the newspaper Esti Budapest complained that children were not being taught to read and write in the state welfare schools: a painful confession, in the face of the strides being made in progressive education by her most redoubtable political antagonist, so far off, in the New World, where that intrepid young patriot at the Essex County Boys Vocational and Technical High School in Newark, New Jersey, soared to new heights of enthusiasm when asked to write his country's national anthem, . . . the Stears Sbangle baner. Oho see can you sing by the doon ter lee rise Who's so brightly prepaid as the twiylight least evening. Who saw stars and bright strip threw the merilla file Where the ram what we watch where so ganley strening And the rock that red clar bom boosting in air Gave thru thu'r the nite that are flage was stild their Oo sake of that stear sparkle baner yet quake Over the home of the free and the land of the grave. + In a corridor outside a private room in the Z— hospital in Budapest, two doctors talked. —Napok óta nem aludt. —Hetek óta. —Seconal, Lurninal, Somnadex, mindent megprobáltunk. Meg amerikai szereket kényszerüsegükben. —And you still do not sleep? said the man in the trenchcoat, inside. —No. —Your voice is clear, not strong perhaps but clear. He stood with his plump hands clasped behind him, looking out the window, his back to the figure on the bed. When he turned, the round flare of the trenchcoat's skirt broke unevenly in front with the weight of the pistol in the pocket. —And the eyes are clear, he went on, —not strong perhaps, but clear. —Yes, the eyes, the voice . . . my mind is clear, everything is clear but if I, cannot sleep? Everything is clear, my mind has never been more clear, do you hear me? My mind has never worked faster or ... or more clearly, but this . . . this . . . without sleep, thinking, thinking, but none of it ... without sleep? —They say it cannot last very much longer, the man in the trench-coat said, and shrugged his shoulders slightly. The corners of his lips twitched, but otherwise his expression did not change at all. There was no pillow on the bed, and the head lay back, the chin thrust upward and the whole profile sharp and hard in its features. The hands lay separate on the counterpane. —Nincsen oka . . . the words of one of the doctors drifted in. —Yes, there's no reason, it isn't reasonable that . . . there's no reason, no reason! he brought out gasping, the watery blue eyes still on the white ceiling, a vein at the temple showing itself in throbbing. —Someone laughed, he gasped after another moment, —the Hapsburg lip, yes! We did our work there, you did didn't you? You did meet Martin, in Rome? —On the street "in broad daylight." It was the work of a moment, the man in the trenchcoat shrugged again, rounding out the circle of his skirt as he lifted the weight in the pocket, coming closer to the bed. —How loose the ring is on your finger, he said. —You will lose it. —Don't . . . touch me, don't . . . don't be so close! He looked down for a moment longer at the face almost full before him, the strength in the profile gone, drained out through the narrow chin. Then he returned to the window murmuring, —A pretty thing, the ring, the gold. And your family crest, in America? —My family crest in America is ... hahhgh, my family crest, eh? Eh, my dear fellow? Remember? remember saying "Thank God there was the gold to forge"? —You should not try to laugh so, said the man at the window. —Eh? eh? my family crest in America, eh? Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit nos nequiores . . . eh? We cannot insure against inherent vice. No, damn it, I'll have it through, this time. You see? You see how clear . . . how clear my mind is? But still with no reason . . . no reason, it can't ... t ... He had struggled to raise his head; and then he cried out rigid with terror, gripping the neatly folded counterpane at his chin. —There! there! take it ... His voice abruptly regained peremptory control, but he spoke the three words as one, —Take-it-away . . . take-it-away . . . The man in the trenchcoat stood over him. —But . . . what? All he saw was a delicate coil of hair on the white sheet drawn quivering up to the chin, and idly he reached to remove it. —Yes yes that, take it away take it away ... With his other hand the man in the trenchcoat signaled the figures in the door, where a doctor spoke to the priest who had just entered, —Nincsen oka nem aludni . . . —What is it, what is that smell, oil? oil? what is it, where is it? —Of course it has not been easy, but we have arranged that a priest comes to see you. —Yes, yes here, here he is, yes but no reason, it can't . . . no! no! —Nézzen rá, nézzen a szemére ... — ... indulgeat tibi Dominus . . . —Do you remember? Aut castus . . . Martin? Martin? damn it, damn you, do you remember! Aut castus sit aut . . . aut . . . yes, sit aut pereat, you see? how clear my mind is? Aut castus . . . you see? —Nincsen oka, nincsen oka, nincsen oka ... — ... deliquisti per oculos . . . —Martin! Martin! Damn it! Damn you! You see, how clear . . . do you remember? Be pure or perish, aut . . . aut pereat, do you see? —Quidquid deliquisti per manus . . . — . . . et pereat! do you see? On a caned veranda, Fuller blew a slow cloud of cigar smoke at the rising sun. From this bungalow, situated at an extreme end of what had recently become the Pilot Project, he could see the sun both rise and set, and greeted both occasions in this same manner. But finally the sun was full in the sky, and still the usual figures did not appear, the pale young man with an arm in a sling who set his helpers a slow pace, approaching —with the vitameen pills and the littel wite boxes ... in the morning; and at evening ap- pearing once more, to accumulate from one after another of the bungalows, the specimens, —a peculiar thing to go about collectin, still he conduct it all very proper and decorous. Seem I recall the face of this young mahn so put upon with the littel wite boxes. Once I have a mahn in my eye, I do not forget him. For a commotion had arisen, at daybreak, in the heart of the Pilot Project, where Doctor Fell rushed to the bungalow of his assistant. —I knew it! I knew it! And I warned you, didn't I? Warn you not to trust that . . . that tattooed ... I won't say it, but didn't I? Warn you? And now he's gone, he's stolen all your money and gone. He did follow us here, he followed you here, just to steal your money. Yes, didn't I warn you? Thousands of dollars, wasn't it, didn't I warn you? What are you smiling about? Are you all right? Gordon? Gordon! Are you all right? Now you'll have to start all over again. I knew it. He knew you had trouble in the dark, didn't he, that tattooed . . . idiot, he knew it didn't he, that's how he took advantage of you, and now he's gone and stolen all your money. What are you going to do? There's nothing you can do. What are you going to do now? You'll have to start all over again. Gordon! . . . what is it? what are you smiling . . . Gordon! stop it, you can't tear off your bandages like that, you can't . . . you poor . . , Sit down! stop laughing! stop . . . tearing off your bandages, stop . . . think! You can . . . you must . . . start all over again. There was a soft wind from the south, and the bells ringing a morning Angelus sounded all the way up the coast from Bridgetown. It was near noon in Rome, where peace had come, if nowhere else the night before, to the rooftops of the Vatican, with the death of the black tomcat belonging to the Cardinal librarian and archivist, and the gray mouser owned by a Monsignor Gentleman-in-waiting to the Pope. Newspapers reported that they had struggled for preeminence for some time, and their bodies were found "still locked in mortal combat" in the Belvedere Courtyard seventy feet below. Rounding a corner into the Via Umiltà, Stanley looked a good deal more frail than he had in some years. He even glanced up nervously himself whenever he saw a reflection, for the haircut, his last concession to Mrs. Deigh, seemed to take pounds, and a year or two, from his appearance. Nonetheless, a new quality of intensity showed in his face; and if it was the despair and conquest which had raged through him in the events of the past few days, or simply the haircut, he himself might not have said immediately. But possibly the very possessed way in which he now spoke of his work, especially that part to be played so soon at Fenestrula, betrayed the depths 95°