The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (141 page)

—Do you want it?

—What?

—This ring, this diamond ring? It’s yours. It’s yours now, if you want it.

Mr. Yák snatched his arm away and almost lost his balance. He looked helpless for a moment, and then managed to say, —No, no I . . . I didn’t ever want it off you . . . He looked away from the hand there, to several places before his eye stopped at the extended feet between them, where the shawl had come off again, and there he bent down to pull it together. —We can get down to work now, he said from the shaking floor, —and then, when you have your work everything is . . . He was trying to knot the ends of the shawl, but it kept coming undone. He heard his own voice speaking with the tone of another, —And then all the love you’ve hoarded all your life, for your work . . . listen . . . His hands were shaking, and he could not make the ends meet to knot. —Have you got a knife, so I could cut this thing and tie it? Still he did not look up, aware that the figure was standing over him steadily on the shifting floor, and the square hand held a penknife before him. He reached up for it, raising his eyes at the same time. —Listen, he said, —listen, did you . . . really kill? . . . did you really kill somebody?

The train jolted, and he lost his balance on the floor. —Look out! Look out for her!

They were in Madrid.

In the railway station, what they wanted to do, according to Mr. Yák, who was moving and muttering like an old man talking to himself, they didn’t want to be in any big hurry, and they didn’t need to act suspicious pretending they were having an easy time with their charge, —because if people think you’re having any trouble then they don’t bother you, they try to look the other way. Except here, he added, annoyed, looking round the station. —They’re better in New York that way, here somebody’s just liable to try to help you out, that’s because they’re used to old people here, in New York they pretend they don’t know there’s such a thing . . . and he went on muttering, in time with his shuffling steps, when his words were no longer distinguishable.

Near the luggage check-room, they paused and Mr. Yák said,
—Wait here, I’ll get a cab. We can’t carry this all over town like this. His eyes darted about as he spoke, and then he muttered, —All these cops, these Guardia Civil . . . and he hurried away.

He was in more of a hurry, his eyes still jumping from one black patent-leather tricorn to another as he avoided the Guardia Civil, when he returned. He was in such a hurry, in fact, that he went right past the woebegone couple standing against the wall near the luggage room. A moment later he returned, looking more harassed, glanced up, away, and stopped dead. He turned his head slowly, to see the patient shawl-wrapped figure standing right where he had left her, but now she was waited upon, at a respectful distance, by a creature not much taller, apparently not much younger, and despite his activity, in an inferior state of repair. The numbered metal tag on his dirty cap shone like a diadem in the battered crown of this martyr to unkemptness, and identified him as one of that villainous horde who, for a nominal fee, will spare no effort in making the first moments of the traveler’s arrival in these capitals a faithful foretaste of the worst possibilities for helplessness, confusion, misery, anger, blasphemy, and acute hatred, that may lie ahead. A single tooth appeared and fled from sight in the midst of the dirty field of stubble on his chin, pursuing words which leaped out the more exhilarated by Mr. Yák’s incredulous approach. He had a strap for binding the handles of bags together, and this he waved in the air, spurred on, and still held to his proper distance, by the stiff reserve of the figure he was regaling.

Braving the threat of the flail, Mr. Yák stepped between them, put a dutifully protecting, and steadying, arm round the shawled shoulders, and with something near his last bit of energy turned to face his opponent who, far from being daunted, was carried to new heights of clamor by this doubling of his audience, and did not stop until he gasped for breath. It turned out that the Señorito who had stationed him here had, upon leaving, instructed him to talk to her, —la vieja . . . and he indicated the silent shawled figure with his strap, should anyone approach. And the Señorito had gone? —Sí Señor. Where had he gone? —Yo no se, Señor, yo, mira Usted . . . That riot of gestures proclaiming a triumphantly total lack of responsibility for the vagaries of others commenced again; and it was some time, and with some effort, that Mr. Yák learned the police were on the lookout for someone, —Un extranjero, entiende, un norteamericano, sabe Usted . . . —Per ché? —Claro, mira Usted, un norteamericano . . . —Por qué? Mr. Yák demanded, gripping the shoulder he supported, mumbling, —Why? . . . what . . . ? . . . for murder? —Claro que sí, Señor, un falsificador, m’entiende? Un norteamericano, sabe Usted, un falsificador . . .

—Falsi-ficador . . . Mr. Yák mumbled, repeating it, —but . . .

—Sí Señor, mira Usted . . .

It turned out that the Señorito had asked the same question, and fled directly he got this same answer, leaving this mozo behind, to chat with her, —con la vieja . . . all of which the mozo had accepted, apparently, without it ever occurring to him to wonder about the Señorito, and his sudden flight, any more than it might occur to him to question the Señor whom he was serving at this moment, so used was he to the transient rewards of blind loyalty, and a life sustained by a blind faith in the innate depravity of human nature. And now he stood, wadding the first five-peseta note he had seen for some time into the depths of the only whole part of his pants, while he held out his other hand for another, leering at Mr. Yák from a face which only the heritage of centuries of ignorance could redeem, for there was enough guile in it to rule an empire.

It was like a night at the fall of the year, a chill borne on the air in light rain, out where the mozo installed the elderly couple in a taxicab, which looked, and set off, like something the age of all three of them and the driver together, a Renault fitted with a charcoal burner, whose few undefiled surfaces might still maintain, in strong daylight, that they had once been painted red. Heaving and shuddering, this intrepid equipage passed the wet palace gardens and the palace itself, picked up speed and careened past the Opera, toward the center of the capital, that storied arena the Puerta del Sol, once a gate of the city opened on the rising sun.

In spite of his weariness, Mr. Yák managed to introduce his guest into the Pensión Las Cenizas unnoticed, down the dim passages and to his own room, which he locked and hurried to tap on the door down the hall, though he could see from the frosted glass panel it was dark. Past ten o’clock, he went to the dining room, dipped two spoonfuls of the garlic soup taking his usual care to avoid the sodden chunks of old bread afloat there, though he needn’t have bothered for he didn’t eat the soup, but just looked at it until it was taken away and four dead fish, gripping their tails in their burnt jaws, appeared, and he got no further than breaking one of the warped spines with his fork. The woman beside him was busy with her napkin, or crossing herself, it was difficult to tell which, and he looked away, crossing himself surreptitiously a moment later, for he’d forgot when he sat down, the first time since he could remember. And then a new guest entered, looked uncertainly about, and was seated at the empty place across the table. He was a stout man, and he filled his bowl with the garlic soup,
whose thin surface reflected in orange-colored globules, and set immediately to eat. Mr. Yák looked up, to his left where a mirror on the sideboard had so often reflected the vivacious decorum of blond hair and the blue angora sweater that it was empty now as though it could contain no other. Then his eyes came down to the nursing mother, half his age, and he stared at her full breast. The man across the table finished his soup, sat back, and the sounds from inside him, like huffy pigeons in the open, brought Mr. Yák round, and to his feet. Without repeating his usual courtesy to the diners left behind, he hurried out, down the chill corridors, past his own door, to the dark panels beyond, and he opened that door without knocking, and reached above him until he caught the string on the light.

It was not the bright bare bulb he was accustomed to in his own room, but dimmed with the translucent paper wrapper from a coñac bottle. Atop the armoire there was a small forest of bottles, transparently green with emptiness. Its long mirror endlessly reflected one smaller, across the room over a single-spigot washstand, where a glass stood corroded with unfinished coñac whose smell hung in the room, rose to the molding of plaster garlands round the high white ceiling. Above the silvered bed (—a regular whorehouse bed, he’d called it himself once), the Andalusian maiden coquetted over her balcony and the shoulder of him in the guitar’s embrace, hung at length across a faded vertical space where Jesús del Gran Poder had made way for her. Then noticing the cold radiator he remembered he’d meant to ask the dueño to put a brazier in here. He stepped from the carpet, a piece gray-blue and orange cut by the yard laid here on the uneven lengths of flooring, to a wicker table where a wicker chair with a red and black Indian-style cushion was drawn up, an empty coffee bowl and a stump of bread before it, and stepping, his foot rolled on something, and he stooped to pick up a .32 cartridge. It lay in the palm of his hand, the rim of the case cut in for use in an automatic pistol, and he weighed it there with a confused expression on his face, an expression which he snorted away as he pocketed the cartridge and returned to the table. A half page from a book lay beside the stump of bread, torn from Calderón’s
La Vida es Sueño
, and it was torn evenly along the line, “El delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido . . .” and this too he seemed to weigh in his hand, before he put it back by the stump of bread, and a crumpled one-peseta note on the wicker table, pausing, as though he heard something, that voice, and —Oh yes, was it? the greatest sin of man, being born? hehehehe . . . and then that broken laughter. —No, because there’s more to do, more work, more work if it’s true that even the gods themselves,
can’t recall their gifts. Because there’s a moment, traveling. Quiere comer? they offered, shelter. Coming up to Madrid, it’s a destination, Madrid. You can tell by the name. Quiere comer? Everyone used to offer shelter to travelers, who knows it might be a god in disguise. The whole family there, eating, the whole . . . all the family . . . Quiere comer . . . ? No, no I’m smoking, there’s still so much work that’s necessary, I’m smoking, I’m alone because, not hungry, because if it’s true, then the love had to be hoarded for the work, locked up, there, there! is there a moment? traveling when, love and necessity become the same thing?

Then his eye caught the Swiss passport, thrown open on the floor.

—Aïe no, que no lo come, there, no don’t eat that . . . son para la niña . . . tell me, for the love of Christ now will you leave me alone?

The outside shutters were almost closed on the narrow balcony, but sounds came up from Alphonso del Gato, the sound of voices and a barrel organ somewhere in the lame joy of some indistinguishable tune, through the shutters and the imposition of joy in the red-figured drapes that hung there motionless. Before him the mirrors, from the one tall and narrow mounted in the armoire to the small square one over the one-spigot washstand, and back, embraced one another’s images, as the rain took up against the shutters, and reached the glass, and he stood there, chilled, his memory frantic for something precious left out in the rain, or a window left open, the rain pounding in, in the dark, engulfing a consciousness alert now in all the sudden perspicacity of terror, deepening round it so that it seems to have been falling all the time: sounds came from a great distance, a strange city, in a foreign land, and the sense he’d just been put down here this instant, alone, and for the first time, engulfed in the sense of something lost. He spun around on his feet, to confront who had come in the door behind him, but he saw no one there. He stood, off balance but still for a moment, and then he moved sidling toward the door, as though she were waiting for him to get out before she could enter, and once at the door he left like a crowd leaving, and the door open behind him.

—Vaya Usted con Dios . . . y que no haya novedad, Jacinta said opening the front door and wishing him off, and Mr. Yák repeated that phrase as he came out to the wet street, to crowd out other things from his mind. Novedad? . . . novelty, newness, change . . . That you go with God, and have no . . . novedad. He hurried down back streets, and then out past the Cortes, to the Palace Hotel, to leave a reassuring note for Mr. Kuvetli, saying
that he had located what Mr. Kuvetli sought, and for a reasonable sum could see to its turning up within a few days; but he had forgotten his passport and was unable to remember his full name, though he did know the initial to his Christian name was J, and so he signed it J. Yák, and returned quickly to the streets.

The streets were thronged with people wherever he turned, crowds parading with such animation that one might at first think some major holiday, or grand catastrophe, had brought them out. He found himself approaching the Plaza Tirso de Molina, saw a blond boy pass on the arm of a man and someone said, —Los turistas, sí . . . pero los marecones . . . He bought some raisins from a cart, an unidentified flower for his buttonhole, and stopped in at Chispero’s for coffee, glancing round him all this time but without much hope in his eyes of seeing anyone he knew. From the stage in the hall beyond the bar he could hear heels pounding, where Adelita Beltrán sang
La Sebastiana
, and he found himself mumbling along with the words, —Aunque tiene siete colchones . . . as he returned to the street, more nervous each minute at putting off his return to the pensión, and his work. —Un falsificador? he muttered, bumping people in the Calle de Atocha, —even though he has seven mattresses, la Sebastiana can’t sleep . . . ? How . . . ?

—Adiós . . .

—Dios . . .

People passed in the wet recommending each other to God, instead of God to each other.