The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —Yeah what do you smoke those lousy things for? Why don’t you smoke American cigarettes? He knocked one of Otto’s clean socks from the corner of the table into the cuspidor with his elbow, and watched suspiciously while Otto got up and went behind him to retrieve it.

  —What are you doin anyhow? Jesse asked. Then he said, —You’re a religious bastid ain’t you.

  —Not exactly, why do you say . . .

  —That. That’s a religious picture ain’t it?

  —Why no, that’s just a print of a painting, an Italian Renaissance . . .

  —Looks like some friggin madonna, said Jesse, mistrustful, and looked back at Otto. Then he spat into the cuspidor. —Give me a cigarette, he said.

  —All I’ve got are these, said Otto. He held forth a packet of Emu, locally manufactured.

  —What do you smoke these lousy things for? Why don’t you smoke American cigarettes? Jesse spat again, on the floor. Otto pushed the cuspidor nearer with his bare foot. —I didn’t get any on me, did I? Jesse looked down at his chest, where a ship struggled through a mat of hair. Toward each brown nipple a bluebird dipped. On one shoulder, a peacock; on the other, a palm-tree seascape. The arms wore anchors, a tombstone with MOTHER on a scroll, and a dagger. The gallery swelled as he watched it. —That’s pretty good, hunh? What do you think of that, hunh? He turned his head to one shoulder and then the other, admiring the rippling art there. Then he looked Otto over.

  Otto lit a cigarette. It was too late to get up and put on a pair of trousers.

  —Why don’t you get out and build yourself up a little? Jesse Franks returned to his own splendor. —That’s a real man, hunh?

  —Yes, it’s just . . .

  —Hunh? What do you think of that, hunh? Then he looked at the scribbled papers sticking to his forearm on the table. —What’s all this crap?

  —That’s my play.

  —That’s your play, hunh? There, he said, getting a handful of the papers and pushing them to Otto, —read me your play.

  —Well I . . . this act isn’t . . .

  —Read me your play.

  —“Gordon: Wit, my dear Priscilla, is the vulgar currency of wisdom.

  “Priscilla: But darling, no one could accuse you of being vulgar. Though to tell the truth, there are moments when I feel absolutely suffocated by witty people.

  “Gordon: You are surrounded by people who take a half-truth deliberately misunderstood to be one of the privileges of wit.” It’s not quite . . . I mean this act is . . .

  —Read another act.

  —“Priscilla: You know I love you, Gordon. Do you fear it?

  “Gordon: Any rational person fears romance, my dear Priscilla.

  “Priscilla: And so you will not marry me, because I love you.

  “Gordon: Romantic love, my dear, romantic love. The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality, and few ideals survive. Marriage demands of romantic love that it become a reality, and when an ideal becomes a reality it ceases to be an ideal. Someone has certainly commented on the seedy couple Dante and Beatrice would have made after twenty years of badly cooked meals. As for the Divine Comedy, it’s safe to say that the Purgatorio would have been written, though perhaps a rather less poetic version. But Heaven and Hell rejuvenated, I think not, my dear. There is a bit of verse somewhere on this topic concerning Petrarch and his Laura, but I cannot recall it. But even Virginia, you may remember, preferred drowning before the eyes of her lover to marrying him. Paul at least had the pleasure of seeing her drown nude, but she knew what she was doing. A wise girl, Virginia.

  “Priscilla: But then, what you’re saying is . . .”

  —What the hell is he saying?

  —Well, Gordon is saying that love, I mean romantic love . . .

  —That’s all they do, talk?

  —Well, it’s a play, and I mean . . .

  —When does he slip it to her?

  —Well on the stage you can’t very well . . .

  —So they get married?

  —Well no, I mean not really, but they . . .

  —But he’s been slipping it to her anyway, hunh?

  —Well he . . . I mean . . .

  —Who’s Gordon, anyway?

  —Well he’s the hero of the play.

  —The hero? He don’t sound like much of a hero. Why don’t you write about Jesse?

  —Well I . . .

  —You want something to write about? O.K., take this down. Gordon was the kind of guy that walked into . . . shouldered his way into a bar. He came in and got what he wanted. If anybody wanted to make trouble . . . no. He was a nice guy, but if anybody wanted to make trouble . . . you got that?

  —Yes, Otto said with a pencil.

  —If anybody was looking for trouble . . . no, that don’t sound so good. Leave that out. He watched Otto’s pencil to be sure it was marking out. —O.K. now start with this. I was around in Chilano Bay in Colombia with no money of the country, see? I had some money, I had about a hundred dollars, but no money of the country, see? But I have to have a little to get around the country. I was on a boat with a contraband cargo. So I run into a chuleta. You know what a chuleta is?

  —No, I . . .

  —Then you’re not so smart, are you. Just because you went to college. It’s a money-changer, a guy who changes money and takes some out for himself. O.K. So a cayuga come out to the ship, wanting to buy her cargo. But no sell. Worth too much see? You got that?

  —Yes I . . .

  —O.K. now where was I?

  —A cayuga came out to the ship . . .

  —Yeah. So this guy is only wearing a pair of dungarees, tight-fitting, see? He’s well-built, wearing a pair of tight-fitting dungarees. You got that?

  —Yes.

  —How do you say it?

  —He was a well-built fellow wearing tight-fitting dungarees.

  —O.K. So he goes into town and finds a girl in a bar. She wants to go into bed with him. But he can’t take no chances on account of that cargo. The police, see? The girl visits him at his house, but he can’t take no chances. So he tells her, take it easy . . . Jesse stopped and looked at Otto. —You’re goin to get paid for this and I ain’t goin to get nothin.

  —I’ve never sold anything yet, Otto said.

  —Yeah. Well you can sell this, see. This is what people like to read about. Where was I? O.K. So she wants to stay, but he wants everything he has in his mind for shark-fishing. Chilano Bay, that’s the place for shark-fishing. So he dives for sharks. The white ones and the nigger sharks. Those are the black ones. They don’t kill the white ones, but he’ll do it, see? He’s not scared. He’ll dive for any shark. Period.

  Otto waited.

  —How’s that? asked the author.

  —Well it isn’t quite a story yet . . .

  —What do you mean it isn’t a story. You think I don’t know what a story is? This is what people like to read about, realism, real men doing something, not a lot of crap in fancy trimmings. You get me?

  —Yes I . . .

  —You’re goin to get paid for it and I ain’t goin to get nothin. Jesse returned to admiring his chest.

  Otto stood up and walked over to the bed. He scratched his arm, to give his hand something to do.

  —Yeah, you’re pretty, all right. Where’d you get hands like that? They aren’t men’s hands.

  —They just grew, Otto started to reason, —like yours did . . .

  —Like mine! Jesse made a fist, as Otto sat down again. —Yeah, you got to wise up to yourself, see? Jesse approached with the flat bottle in the palm of his hand, and stopped, swaying over him. He made the motion of smashing the bottle in Otto’s face, then stood laughing.

  —I have to. go to bed, Jesse.

  —Yeah, you have to go to bed. Look, rabbit, I’m looking for a shack-job, see?

  Otto sat still.

  —Get me?

  —I get you.

  Jesse stood swaying for a moment. Then he said, —I got t
o go dump my bowels.

  —Well, I’m going to bed, said Otto. He stood, stretched as though at ease, yawned a feigned yawn. Jocularly, man-to-man, he said, —Good night, Jesse. I don’t want to seem to throw you out, but . . .

  —Throw me out! Why rabbit you couldn’t throw me . . . you just try, if you want me to kick you from one end of this room to the other. Throw me out, rabbit, that’s a good one . . . said Jesse, out the door carrying the bottle, leaving the dirty glass.

  The plantation outside was quiet, the jungle held at distance by thousands of pert green erections rearing on the stalks of the banana plants. There were no poisonous snakes, no poisoned darts. Few years before, within every discouraged native memory, they had managed in primitive content selling a consistently inferior grade of sisal, hands of green bananas, and occasional loads of hardwood to ships which came in leisurely to trade. Then an American fruit company arrived, tired of buying thousands of hands of bananas, set on hundreds of thousands of stems. The Company replaced the shaky wharf in the port with two firm piers, cleared and planted a tremendous plantation; and while waiting for their own trees to mature offered eight dollars a stem to local growers, since the Company ships were ready to call regularly. The natives gathered bananas in frenzied luxuriance, and planted thousands more. Then the Company’s crop started to ripen. The price dropped to three dollars. The Company’s bananas were cut and loaded, filling the Company ships to capacity. The Company ships were the only ones to call, since the Company owned the two new piers which the people had been so proud of at first. The local banana market disappeared. It simply ceased to exist. Ships passing the coast sailed through the smell of the fruit rotting on the trees miles out to sea. (It was now said that a plywood company in West Virginia was planning new and similar benefits for these fortunate people, so recently pushed to the vanguard of progress, their standard of living raised so marvelously high that none of them could reach it.)

  The single bare bulb swung on its cord so slightly that shadows on the floor moved with the faint reciprocity of breathing, inhaling and exhaling in swell and recession the bare boards over which Otto trod in silence picking up a shirt, then a necktie, seemed to breathe the silence of that sullen night before the rains.

  The walls were white painted board. There was a metal bed with a discolored mattress on it, a metal chest of drawers with the mirror, table with two chairs, a long shelf and cuspidor. The room was high-ceilinged, with vents around the top to let what moving air there was circulate. It was through those vents that the strident crack . . . crack-crack of his typewriter had first roused his neighbors against him, and after his first interview with Jesse he had settled to write his play in longhand, and transcribe it on the typewriter in the Company office on days when he was not working.

  The mirror had a frame which looked like brown wood, but it was metal painted to appear so. This was because of the termites, which work so industriously in the tropics. A fifty-year-old Funk 8c Wagnall’s dictionary the size of a suitcase standing on a rickety table in the telegraph office down in the port was eaten through by them, hardly a whole word remained. But this mirror frame retained its patina. It might as well have been a picture frame, by now it had enclosed his image so often that it would seem it could not accommodate anyone else. He looked out the window, and saw on the ground only his own shadow. Jesse’s light had gone out. He returned to the mirror.

  He was now wearing a white linen suit which Brooks Brothers, who kept his measurements two thousand miles away, had sent him. He was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt of off-white Egyptian cotton, and a gray silk hound’s-tooth pattern (Brooks Brothers) tie. One thing more. With a casual over-the-shoulder glance into the mirror he turned and walked across the floor, took a Canadian cigarette from the table and lit it, his mirrored reflection intent upon him. He smiled at himself in the mirror. He raised an eyebrow. Better. He moistened his lips, and curled the upper one. Better still. The smile, which had shown his face obsequious, was gone. He must remember this arrangement: left eyebrow raised, eyelids slightly drawn, lips moistened, parted, down at corners. This was the expression for New York.

  Having recovered himself, he flicked his cigarette into the darkness beyond the open window, and glanced again at the shreds on his upper lip which would be a mustache by the time he left the job. Then with a sursum corda on his lips in farewell to the image abandoned in the mirror, he undressed again and lay down on his sweated mattress. Before he was asleep, it had begun to rain.

  The specially prepared matches lit easily, but cigarettes fell apart between the fingers. Weeks went by with mortal slowness, parade of heat, insects, water, paper work, stupidity aggressive and fearful, and the scribbling on the play. Weeds grew luxuriously. The only way that Otto was certain that time was passing was the frequency with which he had to pare his nails. His shoes, left under the bed, turned green.

  Red flowers drooped at the end of long stalks, then dropped revealing the fruit in infant impotence. Week by week the fruit grew larger, pointed outward, then upward, and was cut in the full erectile vigor of youth.

  Then it was over, early that year; and the minute the wet season was done it was forgotten. Near the horizon the haze appeared and the sun, part in and part out, rose warped out of shape like a drunken memory of sunrise. Black ashes hung over the plantation houses from a fire some distance away. Next door, from a radio, Enesco’s Third Rumanian Rhapsody was being played on a harmonica. Otto counted his money.

  The months of waiting were over, the months of non-entity. Saint Paul would have us redeem time; but if present and past are both present in time future, and that future contained in time past, there is no redemption but one. This one Otto now pressed with his wrist to be certain that it had not disappeared while he was dressing, leisurely, like a tired Colonial on the stage of a West End theater, for he had returned his wallet to his inside breast pocket. The man with the kewpie doll tattooed on the inside of his forearm (signed up for two years) said, —Two years isn’t long, not if you say it real fast. For those nomads who sold the time of their lives, time was either money being made or money being spent, and life a cycle of living and unliving, as the sailor’s life loses the beginning, middle, and end of the voyage from port to destination and becomes repetition of sea and ashore, of slumber and violence. The hours of work were hours of vacant existence, but the minutes were pennies, and in each dollar was held captive the hour gone for it: here time was held in thrall, to be spent at a man’s wish. So as misers keep years bound up in mattresses and old tin boxes, wrapped in newspaper, sewn into linings (and ashore they sing —What shall we do with a drunken sailor?), he came forth with months in his pocket, and himself to dictate their expenditure.

  —I wouldn’t reach up my ass for the whole city of New York, said the man with the kewpie doll tattooed on his forearm, who stood before a mirror in the communal lavatory eating cold chili out of a can. He ate before the mirror so that he could see where his mouth was, for he had been drinking for three days. He was not working because of the burn on his back, which he said he had got when someone took a chicken out of a boiling pot and threw it at him, in a brothel down in the port. The wound on his back was not the shape of a chicken. It had been painted with a purple solution, a great island the shape of Australia the first day, now contracted to the proportions of New Zealand, the stroke of Tasmania out to sea for the doctor’s hand was not a steady one.

  —That’s where I live, Otto said. He enjoyed coming into this lavatory, because the mirrors all in a row over the wash basins gave the pleasant illusion of passing one’s self at many windows. —That sounds like quite a revolution they’re having, Otto said washing his hands at the next basin.

  —Them bastids don’t know how to have a revolution, said the other, turning with such Anglo-Saxon indignance that the orange chili ran down his chin. —You know what I’d do if I was up there. All you got to do is get them dumb cops on their motorcycles, and string a good piece of piano wire across t
he road, then get down at the end of the road and take a couple of shots at them. They come after you on their motorcycles and zing zing zing there go their heads just like that. All you need, a good piece of piano wire. They don’t know how to have a revolution. They’re afraid somebody’ll get killed. If I was up there . . .

  —I’ve got to go pack, Otto said. —Have you seen Jesse?

  —What do you want to see that dumb son of a bitch for?

  —I’m leaving. I just wanted to tell him goodbye.

  —You goin somewhere?

  —New York. I told you. I’m going home.

  —New York! What do you want to go there for? I wouldn’t reach . . . But he was busy eating.

  Otto had suddenly remembered his manuscript, the manuscript of his play. He was certain he had not packed it, for he had kept it out to look at until the minute before departure. It was nowhere in his room. All he found was a newspaper, in which he had been looking up sailings from nearby ports (knowing all the time that he would take the Company boat), found only a want ad for a male Chihuahua sought for breeding purposes. This paper he threw across the room, and with a cigarette in his fist like a smoking weapon he strode out, down the porch toward the shanty where the cleaning women settled about this time of day.

  —Quién limpian mi cuarto mañana? he asked when he arrived, getting out in one breath the question it had taken him the distance of his walk to phrase in mistranslation.

  An ancient timid hand went up among the women. —Yo, answered its owner, letting it drop. One by one they got to their feet before him.

  —Hay visto una manuscripta aquí? Otto had made up the word manuscripta. One of the triumphs of his stay was his successful evasion of learning more than some thirty mispronounced words of the language.

  —Qué dijo?

  —La manuscripta de mi playa, said Otto forcefully. He knew that by adding a he could translate any English noun satisfactorily. The ladies were vastly confused. He turned from the doorway and set off toward his building. They followed.

  —Qué dijo de playa? asked one, drawn on by the mystery of a man looking for a beach. None tried to answer her. They tramped up the dirt in silence. Inside his room Otto turned on the woman who had admitted to cleaning it. —El está para la máquina, he said pointing to the typewriter. —Esta mañana.