The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (13 page)

Something was wrong. The summer fell away to fall, and Wyatt packed to leave. In the increasing amount of time he had spent painting, a plan formed of its own accord, so spontaneous of generation that he went on unaware of it, and it might seem only by chance that he did not stray from the confines of its design. He had called less and less frequently upon his father for encouragement toward the ministry, and Gwyon appeared to appreciate that, to become more relaxed, leading their conversations off in the direction of the past, the monastery in Estremadura, and Fr. Manomuerta to whom he still wrote, and sent packages of food; or the town of San Zwingli, the barrel organs in the streets, and the still uncanonized patron saint; the only bullfight he had ever seen: —And you don’t kill with the sword, but with the cape, the art of the cape . . . , he said following his son up the stairs, to the sewing room where Wyatt was packing.

The room was littered with sketches, studies, diagrams and unfinished canvases. A large panel stood face to the wall, and Wyatt, who’d entered first, suddenly backed up against it and stood there
staring at the floor as though overcome by an idea, something he had known all along, but only now dared bring to consciousness.

—What is it, what did you bring me up to show me? Gwyon asked, looking over the litter. —Some painting, is it, you’ve done? Finished? At that he took a step toward the large panel, and Wyatt threw out his arms as though to protect it. —Eh? Gwyon stopped. —What is it? What’s the matter? Didn’t you have something to show me?

—Yes, yes, but I . . . I did, but . . . here. Wyatt’s eyes had been darting about the floor, then he stooped abruptly and snatched up a paper. —Yes, here, he said holding it out, —you see, this . . . this is what I’ve been . . . doing. He held the paper out, his face in a blank expression which fused into desperate appeal as he looked up at his father.

—This? All these lines? Gwyon said, taking it.

—Yes, it’s studies in perspective.

—I see, all these lines, coming together here at one point.

—Yes, Wyatt mumbled, backing away toward the panel again. —The vanishing point. That’s called the vanishing point. He was staring wide-eyed at his father, but he withdrew his eyes quickly when Gwyon looked up, and waited there, shaking throughout his frame, until his father left the room. Even then he did not move, but waited until the heavy footfalls sounded to the bottom of the stairs. Then he swung round to the panel, pulled it out from the wall, and looked at this finished copy of the Bosch painting with a new expression on his face.

At supper that evening, each of them tended his plate with more than the usual shy pretense to interest, nervously alert to one another, but silent until Gwyon called Janet in to open a bottle of wine. He seemed prepared to sit over that dark oloroso sherry all evening, starting sentences and leaving them unfinished, looking up at his son with the evasiveness of a conspirator, one, that is, involved in a conspiracy to which no one has confessed. For an instant their unblinking eyes locked with one another, then Gwyon turned away, and started to recount the brave deceit of the old Italian grandee, the Conte di Brescia, looking, as he spoke, at the table top of the Seven Deadly Sins under the far window, without a shadow on his features to suggest that he knew he was looking at an imposture, or hint at the memory of the meticulous and molding pictures he had found buried wrapped in newspapers behind the carriage barn, that evening of Midsummer Day years before.

When the bells struck noon next day, at about quarter past the hour, Janet followed Wyatt’s departure as far as the front door, where her blessings engulfed him in a farewell bath of blood, the
Precious Blood which seemed forever now upon her lips, —O Blood ineffable, burning burning blood which I have shed and bathed in with my Beloved . . . and that door closed.

The luggage had gone to the station, where Wyatt and his father arrived and stood in the dust without speaking. The sky was a deep gray-blue, banded with the colors of rust seen under water. Gwyon looked nervously about to speak several times, towering over his son, fingers twitching in the pocket of his black waistcoat. Finally he blurted out, —Do you have that painting? Wyatt looked overcome, guilt reddened his face until his father interrupted his choking attempt to speak. —The . . . her picture, the picture of your mother that you . . . that you won’t finish.

—That, yes, yes I have it, in that crate, that flat crate there, Wyatt brought out breathless, trying to indicate the crate with casual innocence. —It’s there, with . . . you know, a lot of other pictures.

—You must finish it, you must try to finish it, Gwyon told him, —finish it, or she will be with you, he paused, looking at his son’s face where so few traces betrayed his own, come under self-dominance so long before. —Or she will be with you always, Gwyon said suddenly withdrawing his fingers from the waistcoat pocket, drawing out those two large studded Byzantine hoops of gold. —Here, he held them out. —These were hers, these . . . were hers.

Wyatt accepted them, hidden, large as they were, in his hand. He started to speak, but his father, looking away from him toward the east, made a sound, and they were both caught, as a swimmer on the surface is caught by that cold current whose suddenness snares him in cramps and sends him in dumb surprise to the bottom.

The sun showed their motionless shadows on the rough wood platform. Then the sun was obscured by a cloud, and the shadows disappeared. When the sun came out again the shadows were gone.

Days passed, then weeks, and Gwyon, restlessly leaving his study to pace those dim passages, the mirrors in the cruz-con-espejos clenching at him as he emerged, to pause beyond and confront Olalla silently, or listen for the creaking from the sharp angles of woodwork around him, muttering, —And he took my razor! He took my razor! . . . And then, when he’d received the letter, —The final perseverance of . . . yes, perspective, the vanishing point . . . , before he’d even opened it. He gazed at the unfamiliar postage stamps, made out the postmark, München, and finally took it out with him, to read on a walk in the clear air of that season. He walked out, toward the abandoned bridge works, seen by no one, this man born on the yellow day in Boston when the volcano Krakatao had erupted on the other side of the earth and night came
everywhere with a red sunset, only now in age approaching maturity, waiting, like Manto, while time circled him, to make full proof of his ministry.

The New England evening had taken on the chill of finished day, the chill of reality which follows sunset. All Saints’ approached, and All Souls’, when in France there would be picnics in the cemeteries, and in Spain they would be out to place chrysanthemums on the graves, against beaded wreaths and the ornate names of the dead, where Camilla’s name stood out in cold vigilance, waiting.

—Guilt? he murmured, walking with the letter unfolded in his hand. —Because of guilt, my son cannot study for the ministry. Guilt . . . good God! are You hiding somewhere under this welter of fear, this chaos of blood and mutilation, these terrors of weak minds . . . A feeling of guilt, dear Heaven what other kind of Christian ministers do you send us? or have there ever been? The fool! . . . and I thought I could spare him. Perhaps, if he knew the truth . . . An abrupt shudder broke through his whole frame, and he stood as though he had been pierced, the shock of the past in that woman’s voice perhaps, —Pagan indeed! . . . and his faltering withdrawal, —Set foot inside myself . . . ? He sniffed, as though to clear his head of vaporous memories risen from some chill sanctuary deep in the basilica of the past; and squared his shoulders as he had coming forth from that subterranean Mithraeum under the church of Saint Clement of Rome. And suddenly he sought the empty sky for the sun.

But the sudden cooling of the air, and this letter, had startled the old man into the present, from which he turned and trudged back in a lucidity of memory against which he was defenseless. The memories became facts, including him unsparingly in their traffic but shut him unmercifully out from intrusion, left him walking slowly and impotent among their hard thrusts. The shrill cry of Heracles, echoed down from the house on two voices; and the dark-stained faces of the mirrors mounted in the cross. His discovery upon her corpse’s head that Aunt May had worn a transformation, hidden from him those last years of her life with the care of Blessed Clara. That plain casket gone deep in earth, while the other stood a man’s height above the earth, anticipating dehiscence, ready to shell in falling: Camilla, and her death of which he never spoke, the white carriage mounting the rock-studded road, its course marked by the stations of the Cross and droppings of animals still too fresh to be picked up for fuel, toward the cypress trees. That desolate Eucharist on Christmas Day at Nuestra Señora de la Otra Vez: the accidents of reality, Christ made of buffalo hide, or was it human skin? in the cathedral at Burgos. The bewilderment of the
bulls, the port, and Columbus surrounded by lions. Then the trees of Tuscany in spired erection, the apologetic decay of the Conte di Brescia, the marble porch at Lucca so beautiful that no one ever stopped to look at it; and the image; and the words of William Rufus, to Bishop Gundulf of Rochester, —
By the Holy Face of Lucca, God shall never have me good for all the evil that He hath wrought upon me!

Tearing his eyes from the empty place in the sky where the sun had set, he stopped stumbling back by years and ran, vaulted through centuries. The letter he had torn in pieces lay on the moving air for an instant, was caught, spread up over the ground and blew away from him like a handful of white birds startled into the sky.

Très curieux, vos maîtres anciens. Seulement les plus beaux, ce sont les faux.

—Paul Eudel,
Trucs et truqueurs

On the terrace of the Dôme sat a person who looked like the young George Washington without his wig (at about the time he dared the Ohio country). She read, with silently moving lips, from a book before her. She was drinking a bilious-colored liquid from a globular goblet; and every twenty or so pages would call to the waiter, in perfect French, —Un Ricard . . . , and add one to the pile of one-franc saucers before her. —Voilà ma propre Sainte Chapelle, she would have said of that rising tower (the sentence prepared in her mind) if anyone had encouraged conversation by sitting down at her table. No one did. She read on. Anyone could have seen it was
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she was reading, if any had looked. None did. Finally an unshaven youth bowed slightly, as with pain, murmured something in American, and paused with a dirty hand on the back of a chair at her table. —J’vous en prie, she said, lucid, lowering
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, waiting for him to sit down before she went on. —Mursi, he muttered, and dragged the chair to another table.

Paris lay by like a promise accomplished: age had not withered her, nor custom staled her infinite vulgarity.

Nearby, a man exhibited two fingers, one dressed as a man, one as a woman, performing on a table top. Three drunken young Englishmen were singing
The Teddy Bears’ Picnic
. Three dirty children from Morocco were selling peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. Someone said that there was going to be a balloon ascension that very afternoon, in the Bois. Someone else said that Karl Marx’s bones were buried at Highgate. Someone said, —I’m actually going to be analyzed. Psychoanalyzed. A boy with a beard, in a state of black corduroy (
corde du roi
) unkemptness which had taken as long as the beard to evolve, said, —I’ve got to show these pictures, I’ve got to sell some of them, but
how can I have people coming up there with him there? He’s dying. I can’t put him out on the street, dying like that . . . even in Paris. A girl said that she had just taken a villa right outside Paris, a place called Saint Forget. —Of course it’s a hideous place, and Ah had to pay a feaful sum to get the tiasome French family that was there out of it, but it’s such a sweet little old address to get mail at. Another girl said, —My conçerage has been returning all my mail marked ankonoo just because I oney gave her ten francs poorbwar. People who would soon be seen in New York reading French books were seen here reading Italian. Someone said, in slurred (blasé) French, —Un café au lait.

Over this grandstand disposal of promise the waiters stared with a distance of glazed indulgence which all collected under it admired, as they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of haute couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one’s stay. Marvelous to wide eyes, pricked ears, and minds of that erectile quality betraying naive qualms of transatlantic origin (alert here under hair imitative long-grown, uncombed, on the male, curtly shorn on the girls) was this spectacle of culture fully realized. They regarded as the height of excellence that nothing remained to be done, no tree to be planted nor building torn down (they had not visited Le Bourget; found the wreckage up behind the Hôtel de Ville picturesque), no tree too low nor building too high (those telescoping lampposts on the Pont du Carrousel), no bud of possibility which had not opened in the permanent bloom of artificial flowers, no room for that growth which is the abiding flower of humility.

“A mon très aimé frère Lazarus, ce que vous me mandez de Petrus l’apostre de notre doux Jesus . . . ,” wrote Mary Magdalen. “Notre fils Césarion va bien . . . ,” wrote Cleopatra to Julius Caesar. There was a letter from Alexander the Great to Aristotle (“Mon ami . . .”); from Lazarus to Saint Peter (concerning Druids); from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius; Judas’s confession (to Mary Magdalen); a passport signed by Vercingetorix; notes from Alcibiades, Pericles, and a letter to Pascal (on gravitation) from Newton, who was nineteen when Pascal died. But M. Chasles, eminent mathematician of the late nineteenth century, paid 140,000 francs for this collection of autographs, for he believed them genuine: they were, after all, written in French. So the Virgin appeared to Maximin and Mélanie at La Salette, identified Herself by speaking to them in French which they did not understand, broke into their local
patois for long enough to put across Her confidences, and then returned to Her native language for farewell: any wonder that transatlantic visitors approached it with qualms? murmured in tones spawned in forests, on the plains in unrestricted liberty, from the immensity of mountains, the cramped measure of their respect, approached in reverence the bier where every shade of the corpse was protected from living profanation by the pallbearers of the Académie Française.