Fr. Eulalio was in his twenties, a fact which he never allowed to interfere with those exercises of gravity so necessary to his profession, which was not so much being a monk, as being a Spaniard. —Somos españoles, he would repeat with stern grandeur, —que es una de las pocas cosas serias que se puede ser en el mundo. And with these words of his, and indeed everyone’s hero, José Antonio, on his lips, he had made that historic choice between church and state because, under present conditions, there were few other choices to be made. There was not much more to it than that, each occupation alleviated somewhat the miseries which the other magnified, and, in the absence of either, took possession. It was certainly no question of fear, or bravery: a recent civil war had shown the cowl as dangerous costumery as the uniform. And, in the case of Fr. Eulalio, neither would have smothered his busy curiosity with whatever came near him, his simple ambitions, and the naive audacity which led him to consider people from the outside world, outside Spain that is, as objects of rare interest, and present himself to them as the living breathing spirit of this land they were visiting. He came from somewhere in Andalusia. He had that primeval way of becoming friends, which was to go through the possessions of any new acquaintance, busy with comment on anything he recognized, questions for what he did not. The first thing he noted among the equipment of the distinguished novelist was a handful of books, and his first question, upon attacking them, was if there was among them a copy of Como Ganar Amigos y Vencer Todos los Otros. He spoke broken English with enthusiastic effort. Then he saw the typewriter, and he gazed at it with an expression much like its distinguished owner tried to muster when he saw the original figure of Nuestra Señora de la Otra Vez, in the chapel. He had already rolled a cigarette and offered it to the guest, who did not smoke, so he lit it himself, spat on the bricks of the floor once or twice to indicate that they both might consider themselves at home, asked how high the buildings were in New York, how many Catholics there were in America, and the amount of an ordinary laborer’s weekly wage, when he put the cigarette out with a sandaled foot and hurried away. The distinguished novelist was just about to settle down and seek a blank spot on the wall to stare at, in an act of contemplating what he would describe as being “overcome by this overwhelming solitude” when, with a precipitant tap and a whispered, —Se puede? . . . Fr. Eulalio burst in carrying a large volume under one of the brown arms of his robe. The older man folded one hand over the other, assumed a somber air before what he gathered would be an exposition of the history of the monastery, or the Order, or some such, so carefully did the young monk handle it, and found himself gazing at the large pages of a private scrapbook. One after another, the breathless owner turned the pages, slowly enough that each might be thoroughly perused. They were all pictures of typewriters.
Neither the gray sky, nor the darker shapes of the landscape which lay beneath and seemed to have sunk there out of mere heaviness, had changed since the distinguished novelist had looked out at them a few minutes before. He had no idea of the time, for he had let his watch stop in a gesture of submission to the “lonely abyss of eternity” on whose edge he had expected to perch here. He turned his back on the window, and pounded a heel on the floor as though testing it for hardness. After a vexatious look at the bed, that is, as a matter of fact, exactly what he was doing, and he did it again, though the second time he used less force, and brought forth a less alarming ring. For somewhere, in this vast pile, were the plank beds, or straw pallets at the very least, which he’d expected to have been led to, and laid out on, there to glimpse the world these “good monks” lived in for long enough, at any rate, to pass it on to his fellow man. He struck a brick in the floor with his heel: obviously, he owed them something.
The sound of the church’s bells reached him from outside, and he turned and struggled with the catch on the window, the gates of his heart already flung open, and its humble furnishings waiting to be flooded and swept away on the sonorous waves of those sentinels’ voices ringing out their message of faith, to . . . He pinched his finger in the catch, and muttered something.
For he was not here to be converted. Neither did he have any intention of trying to convert his fellow man, or those earnest women, at home. He was not a Roman Catholic, or any other kind, and had no idea of becoming one. He considered himself, quite free and simply, Christian. If pressed, he might have been called Protestant, simply because he was not a Catholic. He limited himself to no special denomination, subscribed to no segregated cult, but held them all in equal esteem. As his writings showed, he found his duty to his fellow man in proselytizing for those virtues which bound his fellow man’s better selves together, favoring none over another among the systems of worship he saw round him, honoring all, advancing in the name of some amorphous, and highly reasonable, Good, in the true eclectic tradition of his country, a confederate of virtue wherever he found it, and a go-between for the postures it assumed, explaining, not man to himself, but men to each other.
All of which meant that he reached his fellow man in large numbers, as his serene face (on the dust jacket), and his royalties, showed.
The windows burst open as the last bell faded from the air, and he found himself listening to the strident raucous tones of a barrel organ, pursuing some vulgar tune through the wet village streets below. The distinguished novelist banged the windows to, could not close them tight, and retreated toward the other end of the room clearing his throat. The bed reared before him, and he spun on his heel and sat down at his writing table, to stare at the papers, the few books, and the sign hanging before his eyes. The books included, instead of a dictionary, a Thesaurus of the English language, well thumbed; a book of quotations, which stood him in the stead of a classical education; Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal, the most recent edition (1913); and the Holy Bible, which he inclined to leave out, and opened, in token of the sanctity of his purpose here. One of the books had some pages missing, after a sudden attack of dysentery brought on by the oil used in the cooking; and as his eye fell on it and he realized again which of the books it was, he looked up quickly, and stared at the sign on the wall, composing his embarrassment by rereading these words he could not understand: Se ruega, por lo tanto, a nuestros visitantes la más estricta moralidad y compostura en todos sus actos y conversaciones, y se recomienda a las Sras. que en el vestido se atengan a las prescripciones de la modestia cristiana.
He made out the last word there, and the small initial troubled him. Then that look of intent vacancy spread over his face once more. True, he would have been more startled than anything else, if the Raphaelite Virgin on the wall above had rolled her eyes (like that Virgin of Rimini, first up and down, then laterally, then in opposite directions); or if the dark featureless figure on the wall behind him had spoken, or beckoned, or reached out and knocked him to his knees. Yet in a way it was something of this order that he awaited, something less threatening, less sectarian that is, for he could hardly admit to having come, like a vulgar Greek, seeking a sign: no, it was rather some vague, exotic manifestation of some equally vague and exotic Presence, a mystery of euhemeristic proportions and, brought forth in his own prose, amenable to reason.
The bird hit the glass. He jumped, and the vacancy left his face as details of irritation crowded to fill it. The bird was fluttering at the partly opened windows, and he hurried over to try to shut them again. This time he managed it, and stood there once more looking down. A young monk in the brown Franciscan robes was leading the bent figure of the prior of the monastery, Fr. Manomuerta, who was almost blind, across the porch toward the doors of the church. The old porter appeared briefly, dropped his shoulders and made a sign between his chin and his chest, and waited for them to pass. The prior was dressed in flowing white vestments which barely cleared the wet stones. All of which made the middle-aged man in the window above clear his throat behind the glass, and shift his weight from one well-shod foot to the other, as though caught intruding. He watched the doors close upon them with that self-
conscious look which he meant to be read as respect, the look he wore when they opened drawers and showed him chasubles worked with thread of gold and studded with seed pearls, the wall where the chains of freed Christian slaves were hung, the exquisitely carved rail of the choir in the church, the superb retablo behind the main altar (which did impress him, for it was sixty feet high), the paintings of Zurbarán, an El Greco, and two or three sixteenth-century Italians in bad states of repair, in the sacristía, the marble penitent Saint Jerome by a Milanese, the tomb of a king of Navarra, the Moorish cloister, with orange trees, the gothic cloister, with boxwood. They had showed him all these things quite freely, and answered his intelligent questions readily (they, that is, through the person of a reserved man about his own age, and similarly built though the brown robe showed his prosperity to better advantage than Irish thorn-proof, and he spoke a few peremptory words of English). Even the prior, Manomuerta, who appeared and then disappeared with the silent ease of a ghost, smiled and bowed the head to him with a brief greeting. In short, he was treated on all sides (but for the forays of Fr. Eulalio) with a kindness and consideration which kept him a good arm’s length from any of the revelations he had come all this distance to explore. There was, to be sure, the language barrier, which persisted almost everywhere but for that breach made under Fr. Eulalio’s assaults, crashing through to ask the price of a suit in the United States, or after that book he so wanted, How to Procure for Friends and Vanquishing of Everybody.
So it went on, day after day. And now, if truth were known, he had prepared himself in advance to guard against any wiles which might be designed toward his conversion: but no one was trying to convert him at all. The meals were excellent, and this room, this bed . . . but no one seemed faintly concerned with his “spiritual side” as he called it in his fellow man: no one, in fact, even seemed to notice that he had one, however diffidently he approached. They treated him with the same gentle formality, from the same courteous distance of gracious condescension, that he had come prepared to treat them with.
He stood still at the window, staring through his own faint image in the glass. It is true, he did enjoy novel burning twinges on odd parts of his body at night in that bed, which might be a manifestation of some sort, though he suspected the coffee (for he did of course abstain from wine at table). In the same bed, he had developed a sort of dream, though it seemed he was but half asleep when it occurred to him: he was walking somewhere unremarkable when suddenly he tripped, or almost put a foot off something, or into something, and drew his foot back with a violent start, which woke him. That was all. And that too might be the coffee, for he did not smoke.
If he had, he would certainly have lit a cigarette now, as the sight of a soiled limousine parked up the street and almost filling it, clouded his face with the memory of the girls from the American Embassy in Madrid who had rolled up the day before. They got quite a kick out of the place, they said, and offered him American cigarettes which they were going to give to the Embassy chauffeur anyhow, if no one else wanted them. They left right after lunch, but their chatter and blank interchangeable images stayed behind well after dinner. —Well why are you in Spain? . . . if you don’t especially like it? the distinguished novelist asked, once recognized and trapped. —A job’s a job. —And you wish you were back in the States? —That’s all we ever talk about, going home, but a job’s a job.
His eyes followed the only moving thing in sight now, the slight unsteady figure of a man who had come out of the bar across the plaza, and was approaching the walls. He moved with uncertainties in his gait, hesitations before mud puddles as though unsure which way to take round them, though at that he often did not stop until he’d already got a foot into the water. There was none of the swaying vacillation of drunkenness, but a nervous combination of insistence and uncertainty.
Then the plaza was still, and he raised his eyes to the profiles of the mountains where the clouds had lifted, exposing the same gray sky at the horizon as the one stretched above. The distinguished novelist turned resolutely back to his writing table, sat down, sniffed, and wrote, “High in the brilliant sunshine of the Sierra de G—, weary and footsore after climbing the bridle path from the peaceful which wends wending its way ever upward from the peaceful valley town of Logrosán (?) into the forbidding landscape of Estremadura . . .”
A knock sounded at the door, and —Se puede? in a hoarse whisper.
—Fra Elālio? . . . he gasped.
The door came open enough to permit the old woman to show herself pointing down her throat with her thumb, as though there were something lodged there. —Café, she whispered, sounding as though there were, and disappeared back into the dim tortuous passage leading to his apartment. He got up, put on a black necktie, let the ends of his mouth, and his eyes, sink, and set out. But in the door he stopped to look back, as though afraid of missing something. He had, after all, been here, waiting, for three days.
—Oh my God! . . .
—Whmmp?
—She wet on that . . . whatever you call it. Bad doggie! Bad sacrilegious doggie! . . .
—This would make a nice place to throw a party, said the tall woman’s husband, pausing to look round him, as the poodle strained in the harnesses encumbering it at both ends, and pulled her toward the boxwood hedge.
—Parties, my God! . . . don’t start that. What did we come all the way over here for? I hope I never see another party. She jerked the dog away from a gothic column, and added, —All you’ve been talking about is drinking ever since we landed.
—Well all you’ve talked about is eating.
—I have not, I’m dieting and you know it. What else can you do in this country but diet?
—Well, when you don’t talk about eating, you talk about not eating. It’s just as bad. He stood gazing round the gothic arches of the cloister. —Anyway, he murmured, —the food’s usually better in these places than in a lot of the hotels.
—I still don’t see why you wanted to get here at the crack of dawn.
—You would if you were paying for the car. And there wasn’t any dawn, as far as that goes. Look at it. It might as well be . . . cocktail time.
—See? . . . there you go. They ambled on in silence, until she pointed with a scarlet-tipped finger, —Look at those old chains hanging up there, they save anything they can get their hands on. And look! . . .
—What?
—That man, isn’t it . . . in the tweed suit, did you see him? I know I’ve seen his picture on book jackets.
—Yes, him. I saw him. Might have known you’d find him hanging around a place like this.
—I’ve heard things about him, that he was . . . Is he?
—What.
—That way?
—I don’t know. He hasn’t touched a woman since his third wife left him.
—He’s gone, I guess he didn’t see us. What do you think he’s doing here? I’ve heard things about life in monasteries.
—He hasn’t got that much imagination. He’s probably writing another book.
—He’s written fifty of them. If he had anything to say you’d think he would have said it by now. Why do they keep publishing them?
—Because he keeps writing them. And it costs a publisher more to lay off than it does to keep his presses running, so they feed anything in. A morose note of reminiscence had crept into his voice.
—Now come on, the tall woman said, taking his arm in five scarlet nails, —we’re going to forget all about all that. She looked round for something to comment on, and her eyes fell on the dog. —Don’t you think she should wear her belt when she comes into a monastery?
He laughed, or moaned, it was difficult to tell.
—Just the same, I saw a bad goat out in the street give Huki-lau a very suggestive look.
But her husband was not beside her. He had stopped to gaze back on the cloister.
—What are you thinking about now, turning into a monk, for God’s sake?
He turned to
follow her obediently, and mumbled when he reached her side, —Oh sure. A monk. I’d just as soon be dead.
The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) Page 116
