The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (145 page)

—Why?

Stanley recovered the step he had taken forward, back. He saw streaks glistening on her face, but not tears. They were streaks from the anointed face she had thrown herself upon. And throwing both hands before him Stanley burst out, —But why did you . . . who was he? . . . how did you know who he was?

—He was? . . . she repeated, and —Oh, he was. She put fingers to
her forehead and lowered her eyes, and then let her hand go down to an ear and stop at the empty lobe. —For he knows who I am, though he had so little to share . . . so precious little. And did you never know him? she asked, raising her face to Stanley, —his eyes, not the eyes of a lover, no, never but once. He brought lilies when selling them was against the law. Against the law? . . . to sell lilies? Still touching the lobe of her ear, she was looking away from him now, and went on, her voice low, —Not a lover, not looking to find what was there but for what he could put there, and so selfishly take it away. But he didn’t! He didn’t! He didn’t! she cried, and she threw herself on Stanley.

He fell back against the door, and his arms raised, prepared of their own accord to fight, for he was not, found themselves supporting her, sobbing in weak broken cries which were caught up in desperate gasps for breath. But even these sounds so close that his own chest shook with them seemed far away as he dragged her across the steel plates, staggering, catching his foot on a riveted seam, and ready to smash his head on the floor before her weight could pull him down on the bed with her distant sobs, for the sound of his own heart engulfed them both, the steel room shuddered with its pounding, a half-measure and then a full one, and both of them shut inside it, locked in the riveted steel enclosure, a heart in motion with no direction.

—Let me out! she screamed, and he pushed her, catching himself on the sharp corner of a metal bureau as she fell back on the bed, the port side rising behind him, and she hit her head against the rivet row, and the crucifix fell and stabbed her shoulder.

It was the crucifix Stanley recovered first, and he stood there with it in his trembling hand staring at the drawn yellowed legs, rigid, hard-muscled straight to the toes, and then, the chest raised stiffly motionless, the chin thrust up and the unseeing eyes wide open. He had stopped breathing. The trembling crucifix lowered from his fixed gaze and he was staring at her, only a blur before him.

Her head lay over on one shoulder, lolling gently against the steel behind her, eyes closed, and she whimpered. Faint streaks and blotches had begun to show on her pale face, and Stanley bent over her. He started to talk loudly as his heart took up again with the engines and the whole thing of metal angles straining against each other enclosed overtook him, —Listen, listen . . . listen to me . . . He dropped the crucifix beside her and took her shoulders. Her head fell forward. —Listen to me . . . He laid her back on the bed, got her legs up, and then pulled the crucifix out from under her and put it over beside her head. He stared at her still face for a moment, then got up and got a glass of water. He looked for a towel,
found none, and so he dipped his fingers in and drew them over her forehead, saying now, —Listen, you can’t have . . . I didn’t mean . . . you can’t have hurt yourself, you . . . listen . . .

She opened her eyes staring straight at him, and said finally, —Will you always keep me here?

—No, no, I . . . because even I, I can’t stand . . .

—Will we go to him now?

—Yes, I . . . no, you . . . now, now you have to rest for a minute for a little while. Now we, listen, both of us have to . . . where did I . . . Where did you put that . . . that rosary I gave you, that . . . those silvery beads I gave you, where are they? . . . because we . . .

She just stared at him. Stanley got up and started looking frantically round. In a pocket, a hand as frantic as his eyes found the tooth, and two sticky pills clinging to its wrapping.

The rosary was Italian, of silver filigree beads, with a filigree cross at the end of it. He saw it in a heap on the bureau where he’d just come from, and brought it back to her, going down on one knee beside her. —Listen, now we both . . . after what we’ve both . . . listen, the Angelic Salutation. The An-gel-ic, Salu-tation, do you remember it? Ave . . . listen, repeat it with me. Take this . . . He thrust the rosary beads into her hands, still on her belly. —Ave Maria . . .

Her torn dress was pulled to the tip of her breast, which lay still as though she were not breathing. The beads lay over her motionless fingers with their colorless nails. She stared at him.

She stared at him through four repetitions, her breast just as still, the beads unmoved by her fingers and their colorless nails, the streaks on her face reddening. Then she burst into laughter.

The port side came down with a shudder; and Stanley went back on his heels: he’d never heard such a sound, thrown down on him from every side from the metal walls. All he could say was, —No! . . . No! . . . until he did manage to get hold of the crucifix. —No, now . . . now listen, you . . . Him who . . . He who . . . whose love was so great . . . whose love for us was so great that He gave up His life . . . He . . . He . . .

—He! . . . she cried out, —then take me to him!

—No, I mean, not him, I mean . . . here. Stanley thrust the crucifix into her hands raised before her, the beads in a heap in her lap. For the moment his hand held it, his fingers trembled on the rigid yellow figure. The new significance his own body had given it made him dizzy, and he swallowed with the effort sea-sickness cost him.

She was staring at it too. Her eyes shone brilliantly, and she
gripped it with great excitement. Stanley stood up before her. He watched her, waiting for her to confirm him in some transfiguration of faith, what, he did not know. She raised her eyes. They were glittering from her hollow face.

—This h-horrid thing, she said, and threw it at him.

Stanley reached automatically to catch it, but the instant his fingers touched it, they stiffened and it fell.

—Your terrible little man with nails in him, she cried, —your muttering and your muttering, and that . . . terrible thing. She stood up. —For love? For love? Oh never, never, never. I know whose love must save me as I must be for love. And you cannot keep me from him. You cannot keep me from him. You cannot, nor Him dead with nails in, not for love.

There was a knock on the door, and before Stanley could open it or hold it closed, there was the fat woman filling the doorway. —My dear boy, my book, I lost it and I must have lost it here. My book about our little Spanish saint?

She stared at Stanley and beyond him. Stanley found the yellow three-penny pamphlet on the floor, and got it.

—But I won’t take it if you’re reading it, the fat woman said, standing curiously still in the rocking doorway. —The lovely child! . . . preferring death to sin. I liked the part . . .

—Here, take it! Stanley said.

—I liked the part like where she’s getting ready, for First Communion? “Take care of your tongue,” the priest told her, “for it’s the first part of you to touch the body of Our Lord . . .”

The fat woman stood there, filling the doorway. She had a small mouth, lips lined with a coral shade, which she pursed impatiently. She stood there, curiously still.

The rosary flew through the air.

—Go fuck yourself!

Stanley turned his head slowly. He saw no features, only livid red streaks. The silver filigree beads rolled all over the floor. He leaned over to pick up the crucifix.

—You are possessed, said the fat woman. Stanley brought his head up slowly before her, as he recovered the crucifix, afraid of the expression on the coral lips, afraid the fat woman would knock him down in an attack on the figure behind him, whom she’d just judged: but the fat woman was looking straight at him. She watched what he was doing, and as he stood, fixed her small eyes on his. The coral lips continued to twist silently. Then she turned from the doorway and went up the passage, the yellow three-penny pamphlet in the hand with the two mean pearls.

Stanley bolted the door, and turned his back against it. The cross
he held was whole, but the figure mounted there was broken across the knees, and the chin was gone. He laid it face down on the bureau and turned with a hand in his pocket, where he felt the tooth and the two pills stuck to its wrapping.

Then he was grappling with her again. At one point they were thrown a hand or two apart, and Stanley looked up to the mirror in the cabinet door for reassurance, but he saw only himself. The ship heeled over, the door swung gently to, and the mirror embraced them both again but he did not see, for at the moment he was forced to renew the struggle, with the single mirror image before his eyes.

Her strength gave out suddenly; and he finally managed to get her to take the two sleeping pills, thinking, as the second one disappeared, that he might have kept it for himself. Then he started to pick up the filigree silver beads. He found the Portiuncula card torn in half, and paused, piecing it together, but his shaking hands could not make the edges meet. He gave that up and laid it with the crucifix, stared for a full minute at the bed, and the silent figure he saw there, then looked wildly about as though indeed himself seeking a briar patch. He shuddered as though with cold, and went back to hunting the beads.

Each time he reached for one it rolled away from his hand, as he concluded a Gloria Patri on the last. Mumbling Aves in between, each time he caught one he renewed the devotion with a Paternoster, recovering, after sixteen centuries, the pebbles which the hermit Paul threw away to keep count of his daily three hundred prayers.

The stem broke a path in the water as the ship ground its way into the night, and the sea washed well below the nineteenth-century monogram on the side, a more intricate device than the cross painted at the load line on those Pilgrim Galleys carrying devotees on their quest for relics, to Jerusalem for stones from Saint Anne’s church, for pregnant women, reeds for women in labor from Saint Catherine’s fountain at Sinai, and for barren women, roses from Jericho.

Asleep in the chair, Stanley had a bad dream, the worse for its dreadful familiarity, though, waking in the dark, he could not remember what it was. But at hand he heard twisting, turning, moaning —Yes, if there is time yes, oh yes . . . Oh yes . . .

Stanley found himself perspiring freely. His clothes were damp and his drawers almost wet, still he did not dare turn on the light, fearing its confirmation of everything he imagined the darkness to hold in abeyance as he pulled a coat round him and shivered, listening,
to her sounds, and the pounding of his own heart driving them forward toward Gibraltar and the inland sea, as hearts have driven them down through centuries, from the ones peering into the cave at Bethlehem where the bodies of the Holy Innocents were hurled (and more than willing, upon turning round, to pay a hundred ducats for the knife-slashed body of a still-born Saracen child), to their descendents gathered at the burning of a celebrated poisoner of Paris, the Marchioness of Brinvilliers, her gifts thus solemnized at the stake, and her ashes sought as preservative against witchcraft.

Dawn broke, in the full glory of the dawn at sea. Some white birds had appeared. They hung behind the aftermast, breaking now and then to come down to the water for a look at anything thrown over the side. The rising sun found Stanley running damp and disheveled down a starboard deck. He paused at a ladder, hung on its wet railing to get breath, and then buttoned himself up in a number of places. He looked slightly surprised at the sun, as though it were an intruder, and might be a helpful one; but soon gave that up and carried on. His mustache looked like something he had fallen into, and his hair stood out in a heavy tangle behind. A waiter from the Tourist Class dining room stood to the rail out of his way, apparently taking for granted that Stanley was being pursued. But Stanley slid straight up to him, making a grab for him with one hand, waving the other,

—Have you seen her? Have you seen her?

—Ma signorino, che . . .

But Stanley was off again; and the waiter stood there at the rail for a good half-minute looking in the direction Stanley had come from, with the unhealthy expectancy of someone who has seen a number of American moving pictures.

Stanley covered a good part of the ship. At one point he almost made the chart room. At another he skidded into a tall white-haired man in a blanket robe and straw slippers, with the same question.

—Heving a bit of a run, eh? Good thing, better for you then all the ductors . . . good heavens. Ghood heavens! . . .

Stanley caromed off the rail, made another ladder, and was up it. In the ship’s hospital he found the bed which had been a center of activity the night before, empty. Though Stanley could hardly know it, waking as he had, alone and moist, to jump up and spill those silver filigree beads all over the floor again, she hadn’t got much head start on him, and perhaps as little idea, he did realize when he found her still running, of where she was going as he had.

And —Dead! she said when he did find her, and caught her wrist to hold her back.

Up the deck, now a covered one and near the water line, a group of silent men surrounded a long canvas sack, where Father Martin presided, a book in one hand, raising the other at the regular somnambulistic intervals of ritual.

—Dead! . . . and that damned black andro-gyne. He did it.

—But now you . . . now you . . . now . . .

—You know, you saw him, too, apply the poison, and the envenomed words . . .

—Now now now . . .

—No! . . . don’t hold me here . . .

—Some Spaniard’s all it is, I heard him talk. I heard the Viaticum last night and heard him talking Spanish.

—Let me go!

Upwind on the deck, none of them heard her cry out, none of them turned at any rate; and holding her, Stanley finally realized that she was making no effort to escape him.

With a sign, Father Martin was still, and the other figures took up his motion, as slow and as careful, they slid the weighted canvas bundle over the side.