—Now look . . . he said. —Look . . .
—He even said once, that the saints were counterfeits of Christ, and that Christ was a counterfeit of God.
—Now look, where is he? I mean does he still have that studio? that place on Horatio Street.
—Perhaps he does, or he does not. She does not see him any more.
—I want to see him, I . . . but you, look can I see you later? at home.
—If you want to.
—Will he be there?
—She does not see him any more.
—I mean Chaby, will he be at your house?
—If he wants to be.
—But he . . . I mean damn it he’s always there, he . . . what’s he doing there anyhow?
—Now he is there doing bad things to himself with the needle.
—Look when will you be home?
After a long pause, when they’d reached a corner and she stopped there, under the streetlight, she said, —She does not know, she must take a long walk with the chemical in her stomach that is not there, and then she must go to the doctor.
—But the . . . I have to meet my father in a little while, but look, I want to see you. I mean, I have to talk to you, it seems like months since I’ve seen you, and you . . . and I still love you, even if . . .
He broke off, and gave her wrist which he still held such a quick tug that the book fell to the ground. He got it quickly, and came up with, —Because I’ve believed nothing, or I thought I didn’t believe in anything and maybe I’ve been pretending I didn’t believe in anything, but only tried to use my head and figure things out and . . . because that’s the way everybody seems to have to be now, because you can’t trust . . . and you . . . and now . . . and then when I found you, I found you really didn’t, you really didn’t believe in anything and you have to, you have to . . . he finished breathlessly and reached for her wrist again but she withdrew it and he stood with his free hand quivering on the air between them. Then he took a deliberate breath, deeply, and spent it all saying, —Do you love me?
—If there were time, she answered him looking him full in the face.
—Or . . . or . . . he started to falter again, raising his hand to the razor cut on his cheek and pressing his fingers there when he found it. —It’s like . . . he commenced again, lowering his voice, and his hand, and he caught her wrist this time, —It’s as though when you lose someone . . . lose contact with someone you love, then you lose contact with everything, with everyone else, and nobody . . . and nothing is real any more . . .
She stared at him, patient now in his grasp which loosened slightly as his voice ran out; though he found enough of it left to repeat, —Or things won’t work. Then he drew breath again and stood looking at her under the streetlamp. She had relaxed in his hold; even taken half a step closer to him, and he studied her face in the light from above them, as it seemed a faint and expectant, and a receptive, anxiety spread over it; while his own slackened slowly over the cheekbones, and the excitement drained from his eyes as he marshaled his senses. He loosed her wrist, and lowered his hand, and stood before her as he had stood on the dock before the glare of that white fruit boat; and as he had counted out change for the beggar in whose face he saw no beauty, so suddenly had it come upon him, he computed his emotions, reckoning how much he could spare, and how much retain for himself. —You can depend on me, he said to her.
She withdrew; and there, like small coins slipping through his fingers, he began to lose what he had balanced and accounted with such practiced care, having given the two-and-one-half cent piece, which looked like a dime. He whispered her name hoarsely, and raised his arm to put it round her.
—Don’t.
—But I . . .
—Leave her alone.
The safety pin came undone, the sling dropped as he put both arms around her, and his hand opened, everything spilled. But she made no move, no effort to move, she stood and waited with her head drawn down as far as she could do. Then he closed his hands, looking beyond her, so quickly gathering up all that he had almost lost.
—You’ll be all right alone? he said to her.
—Now she will.
Otto stooped and picked up the sling. —I’ll see you later on, he said. Half a block apart, he turned and looked back, to see her walking away from him.
Balloons, a watch, a poopoo cushion, textile paints and stencils, a gold-finished silk-tasseled watch-case compact, Your portrait in oil (a genuine original oil painting) from favorite snapshot, 4 1/2 × 5 1/2 inch canvas, decorative wooden easel and palette free; a dusty imitation ink-blot; a dusty imitation dog spiral; a talking doll; Blessed Mother, Infant of Prague and Saint Joseph, 24K gold-plated, in pocket-identification case, 25¢; Venus de Milo with a clock in her belly; a sewing kit (resembles quality bone china) figurine; a Christmas card with 180-page genuine Bible postage-stamp size attached; a ventriloquist’s dummy; a false face, mounted on another false face; all these, as well as many more durable, beautiful, useful, inspiring things lay stretched before Otto’s gaze where he stopped to pin up the sling. The pin was gone. He knotted it, unsteadily stealthy with both hands, and felt for his wallet before he put his hand into his trouser pocket, for it was shaking. People passed in both directions. One bumped him below, and cried,
—Yaa, yaaaa . . . The arm in the sling flew up in horror as he stared at his triumphant assailant, a person under three feet tall staring up at him with wide eyes, an immense red nose, and a great brush of a mustache all hung on by the empty wire glasses. With a few steps he was inside the bar where Eine kleine Taverne im Golf von Napoli was being played on the juke-box, and he ordered beer. He was suddenly very cold. He brought his hand out with a coin clenched in it, and tapped it on the bar, looking unwaveringly straight ahead, at the eyes of his image in a mirrored cabinet above the rows of bottles behind the bar. He was alone in the place, except for the bartender; and he lit his last cigarette.
The door opened again, and a man in a battered Santa Claus suit came in, beardless and hatless, but with a well-stubbled chin. He looked jovially down the bar at Otto and then said, —Pour us something with a smile in it, Jimmy. My special. Toot sweet, Jimmy . . . He winked at Otto. —And the tooter the sweeter.
Unwinking, Otto turned back and put his forehead in his palm, that elbow on the bar and the coin in his slung hand, waiting. He closed his eyes for a moment.
The bartender came down empty-handed, opened the mirrored cabinet to take out a bottle of Old Heaven Hill Bourbon, and returned to the man in the battered Santa Claus suit.
Otto sniffed, and opened his eyes. On the shelf behind the bar, well out of reach, was a donation box for a Sacred Heart Society. Mounted on it was a colored print of Christ exposing the Sacred Heart, looking, from Otto’s half-open eyes, like a C.I.D. man showing his badge. Otto stared at it and muttered something to himself. He sniffed again. It was his hair burning from the cigarette between his forefingers. —Damn, he said, and then, —damnation. He put the cigarette in an ashtray at arm’s length, and looked up for the bartender who was just then coming with his beer.
—Fifteen, said the bartender. He waited while Otto fumbled through pockets, and finally joined the warm coin from his slung hand with a cold one from his jacket. —We only take American money here, Jack. The bartender tossed the cold shiny two-and-one-half cent piece back to him and waited, looking absently at Otto’s cigarette smoking in the tray until Otto found a dime. Then he took the coins, picked up the cigarette, and went back up the bar.
—But . . . Otto caught the word before it came out. He clenched his hand round the glass and stared straight ahead of him. And it took him a good half-minute to realize that neither the stubbled chin, nor the flattened nose, nor the bunched ears, nor the yellow eyes he stared into, were his own.
He turned and went straight back for the telephone booth. There he dialed SP 7-3100. —Hello? he said into the phone. —I want to report a case of drug-taking. Heroin. If you go to this address immediatel
y . . . What? No, I’d prefer not to give my name.
The glassed doors came closed upon him slowly, and from outside he could be seen staring through the scribbled configuration on the glass, a dedication which might, under other circumstances, have recalled Sir Walter Raleigh’s cunning advance upon Queen Elizabeth, scrawling “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall” upon a windowpane with a diamond.
The juke-box played Fliege mit mir in die Heimat. The bartender put out the cigarette half-smoked, as though it were his own. The man in the battered Santa Claus suit stood with his back to the bar and his elbows resting on it. —That’s a nice muriel, he said, looking at the wall painting, where a moose stared out over an empty lake. But the clock, though hung high in the sky where the sun might have been at high noon in the fall weather of the moose’s landscape, was running withershins, as a convenience to bar patrons who could see it right in the mirror.
—I knew a guy once, he had this muriel, said the man in the battered Santa Claus suit. —Except where it was, it was on the ceiling, he added reflectively, —And it was a dame.
V
“The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins. You will cause a device to be prepared, without unnecessary delay, with a motto expressing in the fewest and tersest words possible, this national recognition.”
—Abraham Lincoln’s Treasurer, to the director of the Mint.
—I can’t live with you and be a Christian, shouted the woman clinging to the edge of the dirty sink, answering the moaning from the next room, she whose ancestors had gathered at the foot of the Janiculum in ancient Rome, and sold whatever was for sale in the garlic-reeking interior of the Taverna Meritoria, that squalid inn on the Tiber bank.
—You’re not a Christian, never were. And the moaning resumed.
—When are you going to stop that awful noise, she demanded, she whose ancestors strove with one another, asking, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
—Be quiet. It’s the only reason you married me. You wanted to marry a Christian, you wanted to marry a good Catholic. Well, leopards can’t change their spots.
—Shut up! She turned the volume control of her hearing aid down.
Then there was silence. It lasted for a full minute, when both rooms were filled with a scream so ghastly as to stop the novice heart and breath and blood for the full eternal instant of its duration; a sound which, as the book said, once heard, can never be forgotten. The woman at the sink (she whose ancestors were kidnaped as children, to be brought up in the Faith, A.M.D.G.) clung to its slopped edge. The lines of her face were fallen, not in terror, but in weariness. Too late, she turned the volume control of her hearing aid down still further.
—How did that sound? asked her husband behind her, triumphant in the doorway. —That was an epileptic. I’m practicing.
—Oh Jesus and Mary, you’ve only been home this time for three weeks, and you’ve started again.
—What’s the matter with it? Saint Paul was an epileptic.
—Can’t you do anything else, Frank? Are you too old to do anything else?
It was true. Mr. Sinisterra was becoming an old man. Although he had been heard to say that he resented prison years no more than Saint Augustine resented the withdrawal he had made from the world when living near Tagaste; had, indeed, embracing the words of Saint Gregory (“the Contemplative Life is greater in merit and higher than the active”), spent a fair amount of time in solitary confinement (“the hole,” as it was called, a place which, though cleaner and more dry, corresponded to the in pace of the convent, where, for their own good, medieval religious were occasionally immured for life), in spite of all this, and his commendable approach, prison years had not softened him, nor prolonged his youth. Life at Atlanta was not, as his son had been told on occasion, “a long vacation for Daddy,” any more than Saint Giles’s retirement to the desert resembled a tour from a travel folder. Now the retirement was over once more, and with the humility of the prophet Jeremiah, who longed for the contemplative life but was rooted out to “go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem,” Mr. Sinisterra had returned again to shoulder the burdens of this world.
—I’m going out for awhile, he said in the doorway, looking suspiciously at his wife’s hand as it lowered from the hearing-aid control pinned at her bosom. She stared at him. —You ought to learn self-control, like those yogis, she said.
—I should learn control. I! Me!
—That’s a wonderful religion they got, that voodooism.
—Hopeless, he said, turning into the other room. —I was going to get you a book, but I don’t think you even could read it if I did. There he sat down before a mirror, illuminated like a theatrical dressing-room mirror. Spread before him was an array of jars, tubes, colored pencils, and hair in bits and transformations which any star might have envied. On the wall hung a crucifix, a picture of Cavalieri as Tosca, some neckties representing better schools at home and abroad, and a reminder of a papal bull of Pius IX, the Pio Nono of many happy memories, in this case the Bolla di Composizione of 1866, granting pardon to the felon who devotes to pious uses three per cent (3%) of his plunder, permitting him to “keep and possess the remainder in good faith, as his own property justly earned and acquired.”
On the table at his elbow, among bottles of aqua regia, alcohol, benzine, nitric acid, something known in the trade as “dragon’s blood,” a pair of shears, some beeswax, some resin, some mastic, some amber, some steel plates, and some oil of lavender whose springtime fragrance pervaded the room, lay two exotic passports, and a copy of the Theologia Moralis of Alfonso Liguori, on top of Bicknall’s Counterfeit Detector for 1839. He had opened a large bottle of a solution of potassium permanganate, and sat now carefully daubing his face and neck with this brilliant purple, throwing the silver medal which hung at his throat over his shoulder.
—Thank God he took down his washing anyhow, he heard her mutter.
—What do you mean my washing? What washing?
—Them twenty-dollar bills you had hanging all over the place to dry.
—If you smeared any! He turned a face, which was minute by minute blooming with the flush of youth, threateningly to the doorway. —That’s just the way they picked up the greatest artist that there ever was, he went on, returning to the mirror. —Jim the Penman, he drew every bill by hand, for twenty years he was a success. And what happens? Some dumb grocery clerk smudges one of them with a wet hand. When he was tried, you know what the defense was? He was an artist. Any of his work was worth more as a work of art than what the government was shoving. An artist, a real artist.
—Don’t you worry, I didn’t smear any of your worthless paper. Worthless, worthless paper, she muttered at the sink.
—Worthless! he cried. —Do you know how hard I worked on that? Do you know where I got the paper to print them? What do you think it was, old newspaper? Well it wasn’t, there was two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of paper hanging up there. Do you think I’d do a cheap job after the work it was to make those plates? Did I ever do a cheap job? Worthless paper! That was two hundred and fifty one-dollar bills, bleached to print the twenties on. It took me almost eight years to make those plates, he added.
—That was a nice way to spend your time in prison, God knows.
—That’s right, those are hand-engraved steel plates, you don’t see them any more. None of your cheap photo-engraving. He started to fold a packet in brown paper, but appeared unable to resist taking out a bill, which he turned over in his hand murmuring, —You don’t see work like this any more, as he looked into the challenging face of the seventh President. Under the packet lay the current issue of the monthly National Counterfeit Detector, where reviews of his work had not appeared in many years: in this work, anonymity advanced with worth, just as it did in the vignettes on the currency itself. The Father of His Country was crumpled, folded, and offered in the most piking and meretricious traffic millions of times a day, infinitely better known and wor
se treated than McKinley and Cleveland, far more readily summoned than the five thousand times remote Madison, still less than kin, ten thousand times removed, with Salmon P. Chase, if more than kind with him in coveting supreme office, a recognition never granted to that Secretary of the Treasury under Abraham Lincoln, who made the five hands down without even getting a haircut.
—You don’t see work like this any more, he repeated. —Everything’s cheap, everybody does things the quick cheap way. This is one of the only crafts left. Look at the eyes, there’s none of that dead quality you see in a cheap job. Look at the sensitive lips, he murmured laying the bill back with the others. —I don’t waste my time like a lot of people I know.
—Don’t talk to me about wasting time, she came back at him. —If you had the kind of pains like I do. Go out and catch cancer yourself, and see how smart you are then.
—Cancer! Indigestion, that’s what you’ve got.
—And another thing I want to talk to you about before you get yourself all made up like a circus clown. Where are you going anyway? she demanded, appearing in the doorway as he opened a bottle of eserine and took out an eyedropper.
—I’m going to make a meet, he answered shortly.
—To make a meat. That’s nice.
He filled the eyedropper and turned to her with exaggerated patience. —I’m going out to meet a passer, to hand this stuff over to him. It’s all arranged and paid for.
—Such nice friends you got. Socially I should meet them.
—You should meet them! I don’t even know him myself, I don’t want to know him, I don’t want him to know me. They’re the ones who get picked up first. If he doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know where he got the stuff, he can’t talk. It’s always trouble with the middleman and the passers that get you pulled in. I don’t even have any middleman. Everything’s middlemen. Everything’s cheap work and middlemen wherever you look. They’re the ones who take the profit. Thirty dollars a hundred while I get eight. After the way I work? Look at those three plates, that’s hand-engraved on steel, they’ll never wear out like these zinc plates in a cheap photoengraving job. He tilted his head back and raised the dropper. —This guy I’m going to meet, he’s going to identify me by I’m almost blind with my glasses . . . She watched a drop of eserine fall into his left eye, while he went on, —Do you think I can take chances? How many men do you think there are in this country who can pick up engraving tools and do what I can do? There’s hardly half a dozen, and they can hardly come near me. Even them, they either work for the government or they’re in jail. And do you think nobody knows who I am? The minute they spot a piece of this stuff, they’ve got it under a microscope. They’ve got work of mine they picked up thirty years ago, and they can compare it. They’re not dumb, with a microscope in their hand, the Secret Service, they can find the smallest resemblance, even after thirty years they can see my own hand in there, a little of myself, it’s always there, a little always sticks no matter what I do.
The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) Page 66
