The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (124 page)

Still, a number of gray petrous visages continued to appear, drawn on by a habit which they called duty, and perhaps, though none would have admitted it, a sort of perilous curiosity roused by this young man who invoked flesh and deity alike in whistling tones which bounced off their northern souls like shiny stones scaled over still water. As for those whistling punctuations, they were first credited to some electrical distemper in the public address system, for there was now a microphone mounted on the pulpit through which “Dick” managed to convey, if not severe awe, moments of anxiety, and if not wonder, moments of acute embarrassment; if he could not tender mystery, he could arouse curiosity, rewarded with ceremony if not ritual, inspiring, if not hope, then sincere desire, if not faith, allegiance, if not charity, tolerance.

In keeping with the general spirit of refurbishing (for even the arrow at the entrance to town had been changed to point the real direction of the imminent curve, a kindness to strangers though it caused some confusion at first for the natives), the weathercock atop the spire had been exchanged for a cross, and “Dick” ministered wearing a pallium (he called it a “surplice”). All this, what elders were left him bore very well; and he was quite popular among the young people. They asked him weighty questions: one young lady, whether he would approve her reading a current novel, entitled
SENSATION
(it was one of those books called “bitter satire” by those who think life better than they find it, and “inadequate” by those who find it a good deal worse than they had thought); and he did not say no. (He was waiting, and would in vain, for it to appear condensed in the
Reader’s Digest
.) It was the same girl who had asked him earlier if a passage she showed him from Katherine Mansfield were sacrilegious: something which mentioned the soul being “set before its Maker, hatless, disheveled and gay, with its spirit unbroken . . .” And though this was a sensation which had certainly never occurred to him, “Dick” indulged it in what he, with Saint Peter, regarded as the “weaker vessel.”

In spite of all “Dick” had done to brighten things up, the parsonage held a sense of bereavement about it. His heels clicking on the floors (for he wore metal taps, to save leather so he said) echoed sharply and came back to him in creaks in the woodwork. And he found himself, when he should have been busy culling a sermon, standing instead at the window of the dark downstairs room which he never used, staring through evergreen branches at a distant shrouded hill; or, as he sat quietly going through letters, or the church’s business, bent forth from his chair, listening, staring at nothing, listening to and then for, creaking sounds from other parts of the house. And one afternoon in the bright upstairs room he had
chosen for his study, he dozed off, in the midst of considering plans to co-operate in a large (interdenominational) campaign to dispatch airborne Bibles, via hundreds of free-floating balloons, to a part of the world where they were, presumably, desired. He awoke at dusk sitting bolt upright, startled by silence, looked around where nothing moved, unable even hours later to shake from his head (which he literally tried to do) the sound of a child crying, which he thought he had heard.

He had already considered removing, to a neat white house only two doors from the church itself, nearer “the center of things.”

That happened before the winter was fairly out, soon after the death of his predecessor, whom “Dick,” being of a responsible nature, followed to the crematorium with that somberly vacant mien composed for such occasions with as much care, and similar in result, to the face the lid is closed upon once it has been drained of any suggestion of death, life, or familiarity. For the ashes, however, he had no idea what to do with them but leave them behind, until a fortunate incident occurred when he went to the cascaded books in the closet, seeking material for a memorial sermon. He settled down to what he would refer to as “these quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore”; and though startled at the outset to discover the cavity cut in
The Dark Night of the Soul
, and about to lay that pleasantly scented curio aside, a paper fell from it which proved to be his predecessor’s last will and testament. In that, he found the request that “the remains be laid to rest” (that phrase was “Dick’s”) with those of “the wife of the deceased” (so was that). It was fortunate in more than one way, for it gave “Dick” occasion to congratulate himself on his procrastination in another matter, which he could now call “foresight.” In a kitchen closet he had come upon a large package of food staples, loosely tied in already-addressed wrapping paper, which he’d meant to send off and generously pay the postage himself. The operation which followed was a rather hurried one, for this red-blooded young man had an instinctively healthy distaste for death. Remembering the sturdy oatmeal boxes in the upstairs closet, he got one, transferred the ashes from the delicate urn in which they’d been delivered, and clamped the round top in tight, noting as he did so that it carried the family name stamped in the tin. This he put into the parcel already bound for Spain, sent it off (by ordinary ship post, since he was paying the charges himself), and only when he sat down to write the covering letter did he realize that he’d forgot to take the name of the monastery where it was bound. In an almanac, he found a prominent monastery located at Montserrat, and so he addressed his letter, in cordial English (on a church letterhead) there, considering that if it
were not quite the right one, things would be straightened up at that end, where they were, after all, all Spanish, and after all, all Catholic.

Before Sunday came by, he’d spent time thumbing through Tertullian and Origen, Sozomen and Zosimus, and the evidence in the
Avesta
, noting down marked passages, all of which would serve as batteries for exposition, but the text itself of course, must come from the Bible. He sat back in a deep chair and smoked his way through a small cigar.

It was in this inert position, and with no change in his expression at all (as a matter of fact he had finished the cigar and was picking his nose), that “Dick” was inspired to take his text from I Corinthians, “the foolishness of God . . .” what was it? “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” He got up mumbling —“Unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness . . .” looking for the familiar gold-lettered black spine, —“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise . . .” His blank look gradually focused as his lips, pursuing “Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men . . .” slowed and went dead. There, on the maple table, lay one of seventeen and a half million copies of the latest issue of the
Reader’s Digest
, in which he became so engrossed, that he took it to bed with him.

—And don’t you know, said one of the Ladies, going on from shaking “Dick’s” hand out into the sunshine of the newly graveled drive before the church, —I even felt that it was a little impertinent . . .

For the sermon was not a great success. In spite of “Dick’s” earnest and refreshing manner, and the trouble he had gone to, combing through the marked passages in the books jumbled in the closet, to make Mithraism sound unattractive, several people felt as that Lady did.

Nevertheless, on this particularly fine morning it would have been difficult to harbor any sense but one of well-being. “Dick” was, this morning, behaving with even more than his usual bonhomie, even showing some cordiality to the sexton of whom he did not wholly approve, for it was known that the small modest man, formerly the station master, liked his daily glass of beer, could, in fact, sit over it an entire afternoon below-stairs: a comforting figure to many in the community for all his small beer, not likely, on his small stipend, to be found rolling lopsided down Summer Street at odd hours of the night, singing unchristian songs.

If “Dick’s” bonhomie was, as it appeared to be, exaggerated after
service, it was because with his penetrating insight he had sensed something wrong, about halfway through his sermon, a restlessness which commenced with his passage from I Corinthians, and seemed to rise especially among the older faces, as he went on into the contents of the “quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore,” doing his best to show Mithraism in its “true” light, and its most recent propagator, if not demented, certainly misled. Supported by the battery of purloined mercenaries, Justin Martyr and Tertullian, Origen, Arnobius, Firmicus Maternus, Augustine Bishop of Hippo, Paul of Nola . . . “Dick” could hardly fail in his unnecessary cause. Reading from the ex-Manichee Hippian bishop, he had reached this point when he noticed lips moving here and there, as though minds were already wandering: —“For evil spirits invent for themselves certain counterfeit representations of high degree, that by this means they may deceive the followers of Christ . . .”

—But don’t you know . . . as one of the Use-Me Ladies said later, —there was something . . . She sniffed. —Something . . .

For “Dick” had brought to the pulpit all of the notes he had made; and this panegyric upon Julian written by Himerius, was among them. Antagonistic as it might be to the original Corinthian epigraph, he found it in time to change his course and, that abruptly, come in on still water with the wind at his back, for he did read it very well:

“He by his virtue dispelled the darkness which forbade the uplifting of the hands to the Sun, and as though from the cheerless life of an underworld he gained a vision of the heavens, when he raised shrines to the gods and established divine rites that were strange to the city, and consecrated therein the mysteries of the heavenly deities. And far and wide he bestowed no trifling grants of healing, as the sick in body are revived by human skill, but unlimited gifts of health. For with a human nature akin to the Sun he could not fail to shine and illuminate the way to a better life.”

Soon after that day, the new minister moved down to the neat white house “nearer the center of things.”

From his back yard, partly tilled as a garden, Mount Lamentation still reared in the distance, and more distant when it withdrew, shrouding itself in time of storm. He seldom looked toward the old parsonage, unless at evening watching birds gather and compose their course toward that eminence already dark, where a tree had fallen through into an upstairs window and leaned there so, where so many curious things had turned up, and would turn up, even, in some digging after the carriage barn was leveled when it threatened
to collapse, to a small skeleton, and don’t you know the story gained ground, that this was the son? though some thought they remembered him grown older, bigger than this evidence, as time passed and no one ever saw him again, the story remained, with the parsonage to witness, a place with a sense of bereavement about it, though no one has come or gone in a long time.

PART III

“There are many Manii at Aricia.”

In patiently prolonged collision with the sea (to such an untropical degree of frankness that a concrete length of seawall is necessary to separate them), and then retreating up the hills, lies the Central American port of Tibieza de Dios. Shiploads of iron beds, houses of broken bannisters whose paint is unable to tell to the querulous eye of the foreigner (for no native would question) what was its original color, indeed has forgotten itself, the streetlights bare electric bulbs strung on wires, it has the transient air of a ragged carnival never dismantled. The population is largely black. It is governed by descendants of Spain who live on the central plateau, given work by an American fruit company whose white employees live between ten strands of barbed wire and the sea, and its modesty and sophistication are at once satisfied in acres of brilliant calico provided by the Tibieza Trading Company, a family of seventeen Chinese, all male, and all different shapes, whose veranda card game never ends.

Traffic often consists only in the gay orange garbage carts, passengered by black vultures who ride rocking in mistrust on top, or follow running, half in flight, behind. In the postprandial heat of midday no human inhabitants may be seen at all (except for the card players) and passers-by in the streets hardly nod acquaintance, for they are dogs, vultures, and occasional horses moving with easy poise, looking neither right nor left, as though on their way to appointments as casually futile as the tides. When the afternoon rain is over, black stirrings begin again, and the natives appear in such states of disintegration that a bit of string knotted round the wrist or neck seems to indicate that even these parts would be lost unless tied on.

Drift in suspension, the only sounds were the dry bird-calls of old men selling peanuts, —
Mani
 . . . 
mani
 . . . that and the sea. Now, after three days of rain, it was brown, green further out, and the
horizon a hard line of blue against the gray sky. The steel braces of the pier were rusted to ankle thinness at the water line, and the sea crashed in around it against the seawall with merciless finality, piling its fullness into reckless weights of water and hurling that in, tirelessly. At first sight, that seawall looked ridiculous, a pitiful barrier which the sea could easily swarm over to obliterate this frail town. But again the water was abruptly smashed into whiteness and hurled back upon itself.

Otto, though as yet he did not know it, was on his way to Tibieza.

At that moment his airplane sat like a great sow on the field at New Orleans, bulging from end to end and barely containing the weight of its long belly from the ground. Otto was an even color of yellow. This was interrupted in his clean-shaven face by the two ghastly pits of his eyes, staring out in exhausted possession. His hands, both free and one noticeably whiter, both shook. He had imagined, at other times, himself outwitting scores of the finest minds of international detective forces, casually committing deeds of stupefying audacity, of inhuman daring . . . (just then, as a uniformed porter passed, his hand shook so raising a cigarette to his lips that he rested it on his knee, and turned again to stare at the book he held propped against the chair arm).