The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition)

by William Gaddis

—But Fuller, I mean not like the other times, I mean you’ve started out other times . . .

  —I plan departin in the morning, Fuller repeated firmly, speaking to the dog. He put the gloves under his coat. —You still have your Armenium?

  —Oh yes, I mean always, he’ll always be here.

  —It remain a great pity his family cannot have him back, down in the Armenium where they reside, put him in the nice groung of his homeland where he belong to be.

  —Seven years. He’s been there, I mean, here, seven years. He was here when I bought this store, I mean the business. I write letters to his family, but they can’t send money out of Armenia to pay the rent, I mean to pay his . . . my keeping him here like this. I’m not even sure there is such a country as Armenia any more.

  —I wish some day I could aid him to return to his homeland, Fuller said, as he put out his hand. —Goodbye, he said. —I leavin you to God to watch over and proteck you. And the Armenium.

  —Goodbye Fuller, come around Thursday night if you can, there’s going to be a big . . . I mean . . . The little man had looked forward to the greatest day in his career when Fuller’s master was given over to him for the last shave and costuming, and had no doubt Fuller would see that he got the commission. It had never been discussed between them. Nevertheless it was understood. Fuller had rehearsed the scene in his own impatient imagination many times. —Goodbye Fuller, he said, disappointment in his voice. —Send me a picture postcard, Fuller.

  The black companions returned to hear their master’s voice echoing the words God damn it down the halls. Fuller was greeted with the phrase when they appeared in the doorway.

  —God damn it, Fuller. Do you know what time it is? The poodle ran up to his side, where it stood muzzling his hand. —You’re late. Where the hell have you been? That God damn undertaker’s? Fuller looked at the poodle, who was betraying him even as he stood there.

  —I stop to say somebody hello, sar, he admitted.

  —Bring in the glasses, Fuller. Then go to bed.

  —But Mister Brown I don’t mean to . . .

  —Bring in the glasses, Fuller.

  A few minutes later, Fuller entered, bearing the tray in white-gloved hands, with three glasses, two clean linen towels, and a bucket of ice. He put them on the bar across the room, behind Recktall Brown and Basil Valentine who were sitting before the fireplace. He stood fussing at the bar. Then Recktall Brown realized that he was still in the room, waiting like a hopeful shadow to be assigned some attachment in the light.

  —Before you go to bed you’d better give me that ticket, Fuller.

  —Ticket, Mister Brown?

  —Give me that ticket you bought for Utica New York.

  —Ticket please . . . Mister Brown?

  —God damn it Fuller, give me that ticket you bought this morning for Utica.

  —But Mister Brown I don’t mean to . . . Fuller was shaking.

  —Fuller!

  Fuller reached down into an inside pocket, and drew the ticket out slowly, handed it over. —Now go to bed. And no lights. Remember, no lights.

  Fuller looked, at him and then at the poodle, and turned to trudge up the stairs.

  —Crazy old nigger’s scared of the dark, Recktall Brown said. —He says he’s “visited by the most terrible creatures in the whole of history,” he laughed, tearing up the ticket to Utica. He threw the bits into the fireplace. —He thinks anywhere must be on the way to Barbados.

  —Your occult powers are rather impressive.

  —Occult? Recktall Brown grunted the word, and paused his cigar in the air between them abruptly so that its ash fell to the Aubusson carpet like a gray bird-dropping. He looked through his thick lenses and through the smoke: there were moments when Basil Valentine looked sixteen, days when he looked sixty. In profile, his face was strong and flexible; but, when he turned full face as he did now, the narrowness of his chin seemed to sap the face of that strength so impressive an instant before. Temples faintly graying, distinguished enough to be artificial (though the time was gone when anyone might have said premature, and gone the time when it was necessary to dye them so, instead now to tint them with black occasionally), he looked like an old person who looks very young, hair-ends slightly too long, he wore a perfectly fitted gray pinstripe suit, soft powder-blue Oxford-cloth shirt, and a slender black tie whose pattern, woven in the silk, was barely discernible. He raised a gold cigarette case in long fingers. Gold glittered at his cuff.

  —How did you know, that he had a ticket for Utica?

  —This morning he asks me very carefully, Mr. Brown, do they use United States of America money in a place called Utica? Recktall Brown laughed, and Basil Valentine smiled, took a cigarette from the case, and laid the case on the low table before him. There was a long inscription, worn nearly smooth, on the surface of the gold, and he ran a fingertip over it before leaving the case on the glass-covered painting, on the slender column separating the tableaux Avaritia and Invidia. He raised his eyes slightly when he lit his cigarette, to the table’s center, and blew a stream of smoke toward the underclothed Figure there with its maimed hand upraised. —You keep it too warm in here, he said finally.

  —I like it this way.

  —Not for you, not for you. I wasn’t thinking of you. The paintings, the furniture. This steam heat will warp everything you have.

  —Not before I sell them. And what the hell? Whoever buys them puts them up in steam-heated places. Recktall Brown ground an Aubusson rose under heel, turning to cross the room toward the bar. It was a small hexagonal pulpit, furnished with bottles. The carved oak leaves, and the well-pinioned figure of Christ on its face (which gave him occasion to remark, —He was innocent, and they nailed him) were stained with tricklings of gin. —Gin?

  —I’d prefer whisky. Basil Valentine did not look up from the magazine he’d drawn toward him and opened again on the table. He studied the reproduction on the two-page spread of the centerfold, and his lips moved. Then he pushed the open Collectors Quarterly away and stood abruptly, to demand: —Is he always this late? accepting the glass from the heavy hand mounting the two diamonds.

  —Nervous? Brown laughed, a sound which stopped in his throat, and sank back in a chair. —With somebody like him you can’t expect . . .

  —You’ve been quite successful in your efforts to keep me from meeting him, Basil Valentine interrupted. —One might think . . .

  —Just watch your step with him, Recktall Brown muttered from the chair he filled, and Valentine, muttering something himself, turned his back and flung his cigarette into the fireplace, and stood looking at the carved letters beneath the mantel.

  The chimney piece was a massive Elizabethan affair, ponderous like the rest of the furniture, the chairs standing out from the carpeting which stretched from wall to wall, and the two refectory tables, giving the place the look of an exclusive gentlemen’s club; but only at first glance: for Recktall Brown, owner and host, was implicit everywhere. More than one guest had been provoked to make obvious remarks on the generic likeness between the head of the wart hog, mounted high on one wall, and the portrait of the host hung across the room. And even though he had been rallied often enough over that portrait (when he had been drinking), Recktall Brown would not remove it. Instead he could pause and look at it with fond veneration. They looked, too, over his shoulder, but none could find the youth he reverenced there. Instead they saw an unformed likeness of the face turned from them, ears protruding but erect, only the hands too similar. There were other paintings, especially the Patinir on the other side of the doorway, in whose neighborhood this portrait would at best have been an intrusive presence; but there was something in the thing itself which made it absurd, though it took a moment to realize what had happened. It had been painted from a photograph (the sitter too busy to sit more than that instant of the camera’s eye) in which his hands, found in the foreground by the undiscriminating lens, were marvelously enlarged. The portrait painter, directed to copy that photo
graph faithfully and neither talented, nor paid enough, to do otherwise, had with attentive care copied the hands as they were in the picture. And pausing, passing it hundreds of times in the years since, often catching up one hand in the other before him, his hands came to resemble these in the portrait, filling out large and heavy, so apparently flaccid that they had been referred to once, and repeated by other voices in other rooms, as prehensile udders. And the diamond ring? It appeared; though none but himself knew that its double gleam had been added long after the paint of the portrait was dry.

  Year after year, the painting and the wart hog hung, avoiding each other’s eyes across the waves of pestilential heat that always filled that room.

  —Damn her! Valentine brought out, turning suddenly. —That dog, lying there, licking her . . . self, can’t you discourage these disgusting little attentions in public? He stood looking impatiently at the black shape on the roses, as though expecting some sharp defense from her owner, and when there was none, brought his eyes for a moment to the cloud of smoke rising shapeless from the chair, and the dark amorphous pools behind the thick lenses: Recktall Brown just looked at him, and he brought his narrow black-shod feet together and sat down. A moment later he was leaning forward again, studying the reproduction in Collectors Quarterly, his hands drawn up under his chin, and he appeared to kiss the gold seal ring he wore on a little finger.

  —What time is it? Brown asked abruptly.

  —After four, Basil Valentine murmured, then looked up to repeat sharply, —after four. He’s probably drunk somewhere.

  —He doesn’t do that kind of thing, going out on a drunk and getting into trouble, I already told you, he’s . . .

  —Yes, you’ve told me, you’ve told me what a . . . aren’t you fortunate! Most artists have a great lunk of a man they trail around with them, they never know what to do with him, he gets drunk, gets into trouble with the law, women, money . . . yes. Aren’t you fortunate! having a protégé with no animal self.

  Recktall Brown started to speak, but subsided. His own hands embraced in his short wide lap, the diamonds glittering uppermost, he watched Valentine trace a contour in the picture with the tip of a little finger, then reach out to push away the ashtray whose smoldering cigar was sending an even current of smoke over the hand and up the arm: Valentine blew at the smoke pettishly, and asked, —How old is he?

  —He’s about thirty-three now. He looks more my age.

  —He never goes to the showings, does he? When these paintings appear. I imagine I might have known him if he had.

  —I don’t know why not either. Brown laughed to himself, leaning forward with effort to take the cigar and throw it into the fireplace. —You’d think he’d get a kick out of them, seeing these important old maids blubbering over his pictures, these critics . . .

  —Yes . . . Their eyes met for a moment, and Basil Valentine smiled. —It’s heartbreaking to watch, isn’t it. They are all so fearfully serious. But of course that’s just what makes it all possible. The authorities are so deadly serious that it never occurs to them to doubt, they cannot wait to get ahead of one another to point out verifications. The experts . . .

  —You said you came here for business. What is it? Brown said, not listening. He took off his glasses and lowered his sharp eyes to Basil Valentine who, as though knowing him to be near sightless this way, looked into Brown’s eyes with a penetration which seemed to freeze the blue of his own.

  —I’d prefer to wait until he gets here, he said calmly. —Strictly speaking, it’s rather more than a matter of business, he went on as Brown rubbed his eyes and put his glasses on again. —It’s really quite a challenge, a piece of work that will really challenge his genius.

  Brown looked up through the thick lenses. —It damn near is genius.

  —Talent often is, if frustrated for long enough. Today, at any rate, most of what we call genius around us is simply warped talent.

  —Look, don’t waste this kind of clever talk on me. Did you come here for business? or just because you want to meet . . .

  —Of course, Valentine cut in, his voice stronger, —I am impatient to meet anyone capable of such work. Not an instant of the anxiety one always comes upon in . . . such work. To be able to move from the painstaking, meticulous strokes of Bouts to the boldness of van der Goes. Incredible! this . . . he motioned at the open reproduction, —slight uncertainty of a tremendous passion, aiming at just a fraction more than he could ever accomplish, poor fellow.

  —Who?

  —Van der Goes. He died mad, you know. Settled down in a convent, working and drinking. He believed himself eternally damned, finally ran about telling everyone about it. Such exquisite flowers he painted. And such magnificent hands, Basil Valentine added, looking at his own.

  Recktall Brown had taken out a cigar, and he opened his gold-plated penknife. —I don’t want any slips, he said, trimming the cigar. —He’s already done three by this same one, this van Gogh . . .

  —Van Gogh! . . .

  —You just said . . .

  —Good heavens, Brown! Valentine stood up, with the gold cigarette case. —My dear fellow, he could no more paint van Gogh than he could fly. Valentine laughed, walking out into the room, watching his narrow black shoes on the carpet. —But the minute another van der Goes appears they rush off to compare it with the last one he did. They’re never disappointed. You know, he added, turning away abruptly as he approached the black shape of the dog, —his work is so good it has almost been taken for forgery.

  —What do you mean by that?

  —By the lesser authorities, of course. The ones who look at paintings with twentieth-century eyes. Styles change, he mused, and stood looking up the wall behind the bar at the extensive wool tapestry hung there, originally intended to warm and decorate the bleak stone interior of some northern castle, here concealing well-heated paneling. The figures in this tapestry were engaged in some sort of hunt, or sylvan picnic, it was difficult to tell in this light. Their eyes were apparent, however, all turned in one direction, all staring at the portrait of Recktall Brown, as though arrested by its presence, and the gaze which it did not return: a flock of hard eyes, disdaining those fixed upon them now. And as though aware of their scorn, Valentine turned his back on them. —Taste changes, he went on in an irritating monotone. —Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they’re so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse that any genuine article must endure. He had walked up behind the chair where Recktall Brown sat with thick calves extended baronially toward the fireplace, and stood looking down at the back of Brown’s head and the heavy folds of flesh over the back of the collar. Nothing moved there, but for slight twitches of the cigar as it shifted among uneven teeth. Valentine ground the knuckles of one open hand in the palm of the other, and turned away. The quickness of his movements might have indicated an extreme nervousness, but for his restraint, moving away now with the disciplined motions of a diver, every turn to some purpose, though he simply walked down the room again, and came back saying, —And incidentally, you needn’t give another thought to that contretemps with the Dalner Gallery.

  —What happened?

  —You remember, about three months ago they questioned one of his pictures, the small Bouts, said it was a palpable fake? Though what made them say that I cannot imagine, unless they wanted to discredit it and bring the price down. Dalner has done that before. At any rate, last week they questioned the authenticity of a di Credi belonging to a very important person, who shall be nameless. He sued for slander, and they’re settling out of court.

  The broken weights of Recktall Brown’s laughter ascended in heavy smoke which rose to the silent spaces, and drifted toward the balcony across one end of t
he two-story room.

  —Dalner won’t say a word about these van der Goes’. These vulgar attempts at honesty prove too expensive, Valentine went on. —And as for where they come from, Dalner respects secrecy as much as we do. So long as people are afraid of being found out, you have them in the palm of your hand. And everyone is, of course. How touching . . .

  —I just got hold of . . .

  —How touching it is, when their secrets turn out to be the most pathetic commonplaces, Valentine finished from the middle of the room.

  —I just got hold of a Memling. An original.

  —Eh? How? Where?

  —An original Memling, right from Germany. A guy I know in the army there, this thing has been marked down as lost on the reparations claims.

  —You’re certain it’s genuine?

  —Their Pinakothek over there has a stack of papers on it.

  —Papers? You know how much papers mean.

  —Don’t worry, the papers on this are all right.

  —Papers are always all right, when they’re modern affidavits. Where is it now? If the experts . . .

  —The experts! Brown said, and laughed again. He did not move, nor did his unpupiled eyes betray any surprise when Valentine moved from behind him with such sudden irritation that it might have been an assault, though he went no further than to pick up his drink from the table and finish it.

  —You don’t have to tell me, of course, Valentine said. —It’s probably safe in your little private gallery behind that panel, he added, glancing beyond the refectory tables to the far end of the room as he crossed again to the bar.

  —It’s safe.

  —This remarkable room, Valentine murmured, pouring whisky and looking round. —It’s a pity, your taste, when you show any, seems to incline to German. He was looking at the polychrome figure of Saint John Baptist in a niche on the stairway, proportioned to stand on a pier of some German cathedral at considerable height, so that the head was unnaturally large and the eyes widened in what, at such closeness, amounted to a leer. The right arm, once extended in gesture of benediction, was broken off, leaving only the close-grained scar of the elbow’s wooden marrow.