The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  Gwyon bounded out of bed in sudden alarm, his feet on the cold tile woke him to himself in Madrid and he stood shivering with life, and the sense of being engulfed in Spain’s time, that, like her, he would never leave. He dressed with his usual care but more quickly, drank down a glass of coñac, and went out. The rain was over, When the huge gates were opened he walked into the formal winter wastes of the Retiro Park, waiting for the late sunrise, menaced on every hand by the motionless figures of monarchs.

  In that undawned light the solid granite benches were commensurably sized and wrought to appear as the unburied caskets of children. Behind them the trees stood leafless, waiting for life but as yet coldly exposed in their differences, waiting formally arranged, like the moment of silence when one enters a party of people abruptly turned, holding their glasses at attention, a party of people all the wrong size. There, balanced upon pedestals, thrusting their own weight against the weight of time never yielded to nor beaten off but absorbed in the chipped vacancies, the weathering, the negligent unbending of white stone, waited figures of the unlaid past.

  Gwyon fingered the stick under his arm, extended it, struck at a leaf which he missed. He looked again. Like his family they waited; and he stood in every moment of his blood’s expenditure a stranger among them, and guilty at the life in him, for like these figures of stone, each block furrowed away from the other so that the legs were an entity, the cuirassed torso another, the head another, his family had surrounded him in a cold disjointed disapproval of life. As the statues bore the currents of the seasons his family had lived with rock-like negligence for time’s passage, lives conceived in guilt and perpetuated in refusal. They had expected the same of him.

  Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string round his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family’s tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence.

  —Lost: one golden hour, set with sixty diamond minutes . . . Quoted in an oft-quoted sermon of his father’s. Anything pleasurable could be counted upon to be, if not categorically evil, then worse, a waste of time. Sentimental virtues had long been rooted out of their systems. They did not regard the poor as necessarily God’s friends. Poor in spirit was quite another thing. Hard work was the expression of gratitude He wanted, and, as things are arranged, money might be expected to accrue as incidental testimonial. (So came the money in Gwyon’s family: since he disapproved of table delicacies, an earlier Gwyon had set up an oatmeal factory and done quite well. Since his descendants disapproved of almost everything else except compound interest, the fortune had grown near immodest proportions, only now being whittled down to size.)

  Gwyon had married Camilla the year after his father’s death. Everything was in order at the wedding except for an abrupt end to the wedding march on a triumphal high note. Miss Ardythe, who had attacked the organ regularly since a defrauding of her maidenhood at the turn of the century, had dropped stone dead at the keyboard with her sharp chin on a high D. Then there was also Aunt May’s disapproval of Camilla’s father, the Town Carpenter, who was said to have Indian blood, and had a riotous time at the wedding. Aunt May preferred to exclude him from her scheme, since he had been baptized in Christian reason and his salvation was his own affair, unlike a harried group of Laplanders who were even then being pursued by representatives of one of the Societies through which she extended her Good works. Those heathen were a safe distance away, not likely to be found rolling down Summer Street at unseemly hours, singing unchristian songs.

  Camilla had borne Gwyon a son and gone, virginal, to earth: virginal in the sight of man, at any rate. The white funeral carriage of San Zwingli was ordained for infants and maidens. For the tainted and corrupt there was a ponderous black vehicle which Gwyon had turned his back on the moment he saw it. —She would never ride in that, he murmured in English, speaking not to San Zwingli’s priest who stood beside him, but as though to someone inside himself. And before they closed that casket for the last time, Gwyon had stopped them, to reach in and remove Camilla’s earrings, heavy Byzantine hoops of gold which had contrasted the fine bones of her face all these last years of her life. In the first week of his marriage, a friend, an archaeologist whom he had not seen since, had shown them to Camilla, and noting the delicate pricks in her ears (done with needle and cork years before), said laughing, —You may have them if you can wear them . . . , not knowing Camilla, not knowing she would run from the room clutching the gold hoops, and surprised (though Gwyon was not) when she burst in again with wild luster in her eyes, wearing the gold earrings, blood all over them.

  Now, with a few delicate lies and promise of a carboy of holy water from a notorious northern font, he secured the white carriage to bear her up the hill, renovated like that remontant goddess who annually clambered forth from the pool with her virginity renewed. In that perennial innocence, —If there had only been time . . . He could hear her voice in this wistful complaint all of her life. —If only there were time . . . , she would have asked him for instructions. —What shall I do, in a Purgatory? . . . where they all speak Spanish? I’ve never been in any kind of Purgatory before, and no one . . . I’m not afraid, you know I’m not afraid but . . . if you’ll only tell me what I should do . . .

  Gwyon struck vaguely at the woman’s profile on the stone shield of Don Felipe V, who stood above him casting back from the concave surface of a noseless face the motionless cold fallen from the white peaks of the. Sierra de Guadarrama to the north, down upon the city. —El aire de Madrid es tan sutil, que mata a un hombre y no apaga a un candil, he had read somewhere, and that deadly cold seemed to come not from outside but to diffuse itself through his body from the marrow in his bones. False dawn past, the sun prepared the sky for its appearance, and there, a shred of perfection abandoned unsuspecting at the earth’s rim, lay the curve of the old moon, before the blaze which would rise behind it to extinguish the cold quiet of its reign.

  A feeling of liberation came over Reverend Gwyon. Whether it was release from something, or into something, he could not tell. He felt that a decision had been made somewhere beyond his own consciousness: that he must follow its bent now, and discover its import later. There would be time.

  There would be time: just as the sun sped up over the margin of the earth in the miracle of its appearance and then, assured in its accomplishment, climbed slowly into day.

  Reverend Gwyon packed his things and moved slowly about the peninsula. He saw people and relics, motion and collapse, the accumulation of time in walls, the toppled gateways, mosaics in monochrome exposure brought to colors of Roman life when a pail of water was dashed over them, the broken faces of cathedrals where time had not gone by but been amassed, and they stood not as witnesses to its destruction but held it preserved. Walking in cities, he was pursued by the cries of peddlers, men buying bottles, selling brooms, their cries the sounds of men in agony. He was pursued down streets by the desperate hope of happiness in the broken tunes of barrel organs, and he stopped to watch children’s games on the pavements, seeking there, as he sought in the cast of roofs, the delineations of stairs, passages, bedrooms, and kitchens left on walls still erect where the attached building had fallen, or the shadow of a chair-back on the repetitious tiling of a floor, indications of persistent pattern, and significant form. He visited cathedrals, the disemboweled mosque at Córdoba, the mighty pile at Granada, and that frantic Gothic demonstration at Burgos where Christ shown firmly nailed was once said to be fashioned from a stuffed human skin, but since had been passed as buffalo hide, a scarcer commodity, reminiscent, in his humor, of the mermaid composed from a monkey and a codfish. He collected things, each of a holy intention in isolation, but pagan in the variety of his choice. H
e even got to a bullfight when the season opened.

  In all this, he encountered few people who knew San Zwingli. Those who had heard of it recalled the only event which had distinguished that town in a century’s current of events. Twelve years before, an eleven-year-old girl had been brutally assaulted on her way home from her first communion. She died a few days later. The man who had done it was found to be infected with a disease which he believed such intercourse with a virgin could cure, and since everything about her appearance confirmed her probable virginity, he stalked the little cross-eyed bride to this simple curative end. He was in prison.

  San Zwingli appeared suddenly, at a curve in the railway, a town built of rocks against rock, streets pouring down between houses like beds of unused rivers, with the houses littered like boulders carelessly against each other along a mountain stream. Swallows dove and swept with appalling certainty at the tower of the church, and the air was filled with their morning cries, with the sound of water running and the braying of burros, and the distant voices of people. Gwyon had climbed to the pines behind the town, pausing to breathe and smell the delicious freshness of manure, to realize how his senses had fallen into disuse under the abuses of cities. The day deepened weightlessly, a feast day, crowds wandering through the streets, groups singing and playing, in one a boy with half an arm supporting a broken anis bottle played scratching accompaniment on that corrugated glass surface.

  He rarely smoked, but he sat with a cigar after dinner, charging its exhaled smoke with the quickening breath of coñac, as he spoke with Señor Hermoso. Hermoso about Spain and the giant Antaeus, whose strength was invincible as long as he stayed on earth, and Hercules, discovering this, lifted him up and crushed him in the air. —Spain . . . , Gwyon said, —the self-continence, and still I have a sense of ownership here, but even now . . . to outsiders, it seems to return their love at the moment, but once outside they find themselves shut out forever, their emptiness facing a void, a ragged surface that refuses to admit . . . there, Spain is still on the earth and we, in our country, we are being crushed in the air . . .

  —What we are most in need of here, said Señor Hermoso, who had been listening politely, —is of course a patron saint of our own. Perhaps you note the lack during your visit? Perhaps our kind priest drew it to your attention . . . ? Señor Hermoso taught foreign languages, or would have, if anyone had found such preposterous instruments necessary, and he ran an approximation to a drugstore. His face was round, its limp flabby quality belied by an exquisite mustache and penetrating eyes. The part in his hair cut clean separation from the back of his neck through his widow’s peak. —But such a thing costs money, so much money you know, he went on, raising his voice above the strident chords of a barrel organ which had stopped before their café. —Such sums of money that perhaps only someone of your position could understand? Too much, perhaps, it is to say, for these poor and ignorant people who need the blessed care of a patron saint so much . . . He paused, sniffed his coffee with forlorn expectation, but Gwyon did not interrupt. —Then I feel certain, like these people who are so good, perhaps our Little Girl (here he referred to that unfortunate child done in twelve years since) —was sent us for this purpose. The Lord does not err, true? Verily, as your Bible says, true? Verily, she was a saint, a little saint among us. Asking nothing for herself, living on the simplest fare, beans and rice, she . . . Señor Hermoso stopped, as though he might have lost his place in a speech carefully prepared and memorized beforehand. —Though, perhaps that was because she was so poor . . . ? he went on, reasoning helplessly, trying to recover his lines.

  Gwyon tossed his cigar out to the street, where it was caught before it touched the ground. He mumbled something about Antaeus and straightened up, but Señor Hermoso took hold of his sleeve. —I remember so well, Señor Hermoso persisted, —you know, she would not use an unclean word. “My tongue will be the first part of me to touch the Host . . .” que fervorosa luna de miel para esta pequeña esposa de Jesús! . . . when she is so cruelly struck down by all that is base in man . . .

  Gwyon got out to the steps which led down to the plaza. The streets were thronged, sparsely and dimly lit. —But there are ways, true? he left Señor Hermoso saying. —Our Lord points to us the right one? Many thousands of pesetas, millions of lire, he whispered, clasping his plump hands, forsaken, as Gwyon went down the steps. —There are ways . . .

  In the streets below, Gwyon was hailed by sundry extremes of his wife’s wardrobe, worn with sportive and occasionally necessitous disregard for original design. Her favorite long flowered evening skirt passed on three distinctly different little girls. Then one woman appeared wearing three of her dresses, each a pattern of holes, what remained of one supplying the lack in the others. Her green cloche hat, her Fifth Avenue hat looking as though it had been slept in and eaten out of, was jammed at a warlike angle on the head of the local match-seller. After the feast celebrated that morning, most of the paraphernalia had been put away, since the holy oils, holy water, and fly-specked holy wafers were kept under lock and key for fear they be stolen and used in sorcery.

  But other holy appliances were kept handy, for a rousing ceremony to speed the foreign visitor who rested up on the hill. Reliquaries were opened, censers swung in dangerous arcs, beads fingered and psalters thumbed, water scattered, bells clattered, tapers lit, candles burned and gutted, Latin jumbled and coughed in monody. In this perfectly ordered chaos, over the black waves rising and falling in genuflection, the tide of sound ebbing and flooding, Gwyon was told that it was, really, a pity (lástima) that there was no patron saint to defend their rights and advance their cause by direct intervention. The new tambourines, though slightly out of place, were used to brilliant effect: their clamor enhanced the spirit of impatience in which, presumably, the wistful laboring shade of Camilla Gwyon waited to be sprung to the gate of Paradise.

  They never forgave him for not bringing the body home. And Gwyon thought it wiser, or at least less complicating, never to brief the families on the extravagant disposition that had been made of the soul. —It certainly would have weighed a lot less, said Aunt May (speaking of the body), —than all this rubbish he brought back. The rubbish included a number of un-Protestant relics soon to darken the parsonage, among them a tailless monkey (it was a Barbary ape from Gibraltar, being held in quarantine) which the distracted woman had not yet seen.

  Wyatt was four years old when his father returned alone from Spain, a small disgruntled person with sand-colored hair, hazel eyes which burned into green on angry occasion, and hands constantly busy, clutching and opening on nothing, breaking something, or picking his nose. He was in celebrant spirits that spring day, and observed the solemn homecoming by emptying the pot on which he meditated for an hour or so each morning into a floor register. Aunt May was there a moment later. She gave him a hard slap on the bottom, realized her mistake, and pondered with some bitterness the end of this Christian family while she washed her hands. She had just come from the father, who had told her about the impatient piece of luggage waiting in quarantine. Leaving his room brusquely, to take this revelation away and try to fit it into the hectic tangram of recent events, she had hardly reached the newel at the stairhead when she heard a crash. She returned to find the Reverend swaying unsteadily among the breakage of a Bennington ware pitcher, a peculiarly ugly thing of which she’d been very fond. The Reverend, who’d been about to change, now trying to pull his trousers back up, said something about the roll of a ship, and losing his balance when the chiffonier failed to move over and support him. If her sniff was meant simply to express disdain, a sharp attentive look came to her face as she repeated it, and she was about to speak when, from below decks, rose the hilarious sound of metal being banged against metal. Down the wide golden-oak front staircase vaulted Aunt May, traveling at a great rate but retaining the glasses clamped to her nose, thus her dignity.

  —It’s certainly reached the furnace by this time, she said when the child’s father appea
red, drying her hands on an old dishcloth. —You can smell it all over the house, she added in unnecessary comment to heighten the effect, and turned on Wyatt with, —Why did you do such a nasty thing? He stood looking behind her, at the picture of his mother on the mantel, a photograph made before Camilla was married. Aunt May gripped his small-boned shoulder in her hand and shook him. She was his Christian mentor. It was she who had washed his mouth out with laundry soap after the rabbit episode. —Do you enjoy the sme-ll? she went on, drawing the word out so that it seemed laden with odor itself.

  —You’d better go to your room, said his father, in a voice stern only with effort, for this sudden demand for discipline was confusing.

  —To his room! said the woman, as though she would lop off a hand as a lesson. —Why that boy . . .

  —Go to your room, Wyatt. Reverend Gwyon was stern now, but for her, not the child; and Aunt May swept out of the room to write a hurried note rescinding a tea invitation to the ladies of the Use-Me Society. The father and son faced one another across the stark declivity of their different heights, the man staring wordless at this incarnation of something he had imagined long before, in a different life; the child staring beyond at his virgin mother.

  Gwyon recovered himself, but before he could speak the sound which was not yet a word in his throat Wyatt had turned away and walked slowly up the stairs to his room, to a chair beside a closed window where he sat looking out upon the unfulfilled landscape of the spring, picking his nose, and seeming not to breathe.

  Beyond the roof of the carriage barn, clouds conspired over Mount Lamentation. He looked there with open unblinking eyes as though in that direction lay the hopeless future which already existed, of which he was already fully aware, to which he was conclusively committed. His shoulders were drawn in, as though confirmed in the habit of being cold.