The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (148 page)

He stood now, staring down at a boy poised on the balustrade of the church porch below, a boy big enough for the Boy Scouts, constricting his person to see how long a stream he could send out into the muddy plaza, where a sow and three pigs were passing in a dignified procession of domesticity. The distinguished novelist stared, to see, he was bound to admit to himself afterward, if the stream would reach, when a bird flew up against the glass square before his face, and continued to flutter there as he staggered back and almost lost his balance on the bricks of the floor. He recovered, returned the length of his room, and sat down on the bed. Notes for the magazine piece he’d begun lay on the table beside him. He saw them there and looked away. The moment of religious experience was gone again. The boy directing his stream from the very porch of the church had upset it; the bird had dispatched it.
The distinguished novelist clasped his hands between his knees, and wondered if it were a mealtime.

The room was large and, in spite of not being especially warm, a comfortable one. On a white wall to his left hung a color print of a Raphaelite Madonna; on the wall to his right, a picture of his hostess in stiff dark effigy, Nuestra Señora de la Otra Vez, the features of her deeply browned face marred and irregular from years spent underground during the Moorish ascendancy. In this picture, he could barely make out if she had a nose; he certainly could not tell if she were returning his stare, so he withdrew it and sent it elsewhere, wrinkling his nose with the sniff of impatience which had become more and more frequent the last day or so. He began to look uncomfortable.

The bed was set in an alcove. It was one of the softest he would find in the country, made up with a blanket of rich wool, and in this clandestine arrangement highly suggestive of pleasures beyond the walls, reminiscent of illustrations in Boccaccio, stimulating to every sense but the ascetic. He stood up abruptly, looking severely uncomfortable. And he was. He had come all the way from Madrid, along roads which got worse at every turn, changing his bus at almost every town for another more battered until the one he arrived in appeared to have been rolled to its destination over the mountain rocks like a barrel. That was a promising start, and it might have been difficult to know what his thoughts were as he approached the gray walls whose greatness gave way to delicacy in the gothic tracery of the spandrels over the arched doorway where he knocked. It might have been difficult, that is, had he not written some of them down before the spell was broken by the old woman who showed him to this guest room. (“Since it was well known that people from the world without seldom if ever win admittance to this almost inaccessible retreat, I felt throbbing within my breast the thrill of a deep emotion which I was powerless to describe, as I approached the soaring walls after an exhausting climb, and reached up to pull the cord of the centuries-old bell. Its gentle voice, sounding distantly just as it must have on that sunny day (snowy night &c) when Saint X (fill in) appeared at this same door, quickly summoned a lay brother of the Franciscan Order, who opened to me. He was still young, a slim yet virile figure, in the depths of whose piercing gray eyes I could read a message of patience and kindness seldom seen out in the bustling world of affairs . . .”) The old woman, who had delayed opening to him, explained it by saying that they had to be careful of beggars. Since she spoke in Spanish, which he could not understand, he acknowledged her greeting with a few words in English, mustering an
expression somewhere, he believed, between humility and beatitude. Seeing what appeared to be signs of illness rise to his face, she hurried away, and returned with a young monk who had been plaguing him ever since.

Fr. Eulalio was in his twenties, a fact which he never allowed to interfere with those exercises of gravity so necessary to his profession, which was not so much being a monk, as being a Spaniard. —Somos españoles, he would repeat with stern grandeur, —que es una de las pocas cosas serias que se puede ser en el mundo. And with these words of his, and indeed everyone’s hero, José Antonio, on his lips, he had made that historic choice between church and state because, under present conditions, there were few other choices to be made. There was not much more to it than that, each occupation alleviated somewhat the miseries which the other magnified, and, in the absence of either, took possession. It was certainly no question of fear, or bravery: a recent civil war had shown the cowl as dangerous costumery as the uniform. And, in the case of Fr. Eulalio, neither would have smothered his busy curiosity with whatever came near him, his simple ambitions, and the naive audacity which led him to consider people from the outside world, outside Spain that is, as objects of rare interest, and present himself to them as the living breathing spirit of this land they were visiting. He came from somewhere in Andalusia. He had that primeval way of becoming friends, which was to go through the possessions of any new acquaintance, busy with comment on anything he recognized, questions for what he did not. The first thing he noted among the equipment of the distinguished novelist was a handful of books, and his first question, upon attacking them, was if there was among them a copy of
Como Ganar Amigos y Vencer Todos los Otros
. He spoke broken English with enthusiastic effort. Then he saw the typewriter, and he gazed at it with an expression much like its distinguished owner tried to muster when he saw the original figure of Nuestra Señora de la Otra Vez, in the chapel. He had already rolled a cigarette and offered it to the guest, who did not smoke, so he lit it himself, spat on the bricks of the floor once or twice to indicate that they both might consider themselves at home, asked how high the buildings were in New York, how many Catholics there were in America, and the amount of an ordinary laborer’s weekly wage, when he put the cigarette out with a sandaled foot and hurried away. The distinguished novelist was just about to settle down and seek a blank spot on the wall to stare at, in an act of contemplating what he would describe as being “overcome by this overwhelming solitude” when, with a precipitant tap and a whispered, —Se puede? . . . Fr. Eulalio
burst in carrying a large volume under one of the brown arms of his robe. The older man folded one hand over the other, assumed a somber air before what he gathered would be an exposition of the history of the monastery, or the Order, or some such, so carefully did the young monk handle it, and found himself gazing at the large pages of a private scrapbook. One after another, the breathless owner turned the pages, slowly enough that each might be thoroughly perused. They were all pictures of typewriters.

Neither the gray sky, nor the darker shapes of the landscape which lay beneath and seemed to have sunk there out of mere heaviness, had changed since the distinguished novelist had looked out at them a few minutes before. He had no idea of the time, for he had let his watch stop in a gesture of submission to the “lonely abyss of eternity” on whose edge he had expected to perch here. He turned his back on the window, and pounded a heel on the floor as though testing it for hardness. After a vexatious look at the bed, that is, as a matter of fact, exactly what he was doing, and he did it again, though the second time he used less force, and brought forth a less alarming ring. For somewhere, in this vast pile, were the plank beds, or straw pallets at the very least, which he’d expected to have been led to, and laid out on, there to glimpse the world these “good monks” lived in for long enough, at any rate, to pass it on to his fellow man. He struck a brick in the floor with his heel: obviously, he owed them something.

The sound of the church’s bells reached him from outside, and he turned and struggled with the catch on the window, the gates of his heart already flung open, and its humble furnishings waiting to be flooded and swept away on the sonorous waves of those sentinels’ voices ringing out their message of faith, to . . . He pinched his finger in the catch, and muttered something.

For he was not here to be converted. Neither did he have any intention of trying to convert his fellow man, or those earnest women, at home. He was not a Roman Catholic, or any other kind, and had no idea of becoming one. He considered himself, quite free and simply, Christian. If pressed, he might have been called Protestant, simply because he was not a Catholic. He limited himself to no special denomination, subscribed to no segregated cult, but held them all in equal esteem. As his writings showed, he found his duty to his fellow man in proselytizing for those virtues which bound his fellow man’s better selves together, favoring none over another among the systems of worship he saw round him, honoring all, advancing in the name of some amorphous, and highly reasonable, Good, in the true eclectic tradition of his country, a confederate of virtue wherever he found it, and a go-between for the
postures it assumed, explaining, not man to himself, but men to each other.

All of which meant that he reached his fellow man in large numbers, as his serene face (on the dust jacket), and his royalties, showed.

The windows burst open as the last bell faded from the air, and he found himself listening to the strident raucous tones of a barrel organ, pursuing some vulgar tune through the wet village streets below. The distinguished novelist banged the windows to, could not close them tight, and retreated toward the other end of the room clearing his throat. The bed reared before him, and he spun on his heel and sat down at his writing table, to stare at the papers, the few books, and the sign hanging before his eyes. The books included, instead of a dictionary, a Thesaurus of the English language, well thumbed; a book of quotations, which stood him in the stead of a classical education; Baedeker’s
Spain and Portugal
, the most recent edition (1913); and the Holy Bible, which he inclined to leave out, and opened, in token of the sanctity of his purpose here. One of the books had some pages missing, after a sudden attack of dysentery brought on by the oil used in the cooking; and as his eye fell on it and he realized again which of the books it was, he looked up quickly, and stared at the sign on the wall, composing his embarrassment by rereading these words he could not understand:
Se ruega, por lo tanto, a nuestros visitantes la más estricta moralidad y compostura en todos sus actos y conversaciones, y se recomienda a las Sras. que en el vestido se atengan a las prescripciones de la modestia cristiana
.

He made out the last word there, and the small initial troubled him. Then that look of intent vacancy spread over his face once more. True, he would have been more startled than anything else, if the Raphaelite Virgin on the wall above had rolled her eyes (like that Virgin of Rimini, first up and down, then laterally, then in opposite directions); or if the dark featureless figure on the wall behind him had spoken, or beckoned, or reached out and knocked him to his knees. Yet in a way it was something of this order that he awaited, something less threatening, less sectarian that is, for he could hardly admit to having come, like a vulgar Greek, seeking a sign: no, it was rather some vague, exotic manifestation of some equally vague and exotic Presence, a mystery of euhemeristic proportions and, brought forth in his own prose, amenable to reason.

The bird hit the glass. He jumped, and the vacancy left his face as details of irritation crowded to fill it. The bird was fluttering at the partly opened windows, and he hurried over to try to shut them again. This time he managed it, and stood there once more
looking down. A young monk in the brown Franciscan robes was leading the bent figure of the prior of the monastery, Fr. Manomuerta, who was almost blind, across the porch toward the doors of the church. The old porter appeared briefly, dropped his shoulders and made a sign between his chin and his chest, and waited for them to pass. The prior was dressed in flowing white vestments which barely cleared the wet stones. All of which made the middle-aged man in the window above clear his throat behind the glass, and shift his weight from one well-shod foot to the other, as though caught intruding. He watched the doors close upon them with that self-conscious look which he meant to be read as respect, the look he wore when they opened drawers and showed him chasubles worked with thread of gold and studded with seed pearls, the wall where the chains of freed Christian slaves were hung, the exquisitely carved rail of the choir in the church, the superb retablo behind the main altar (which did impress him, for it was sixty feet high), the paintings of Zurbarán, an El Greco, and two or three sixteenth-century Italians in bad states of repair, in the sacristía, the marble penitent Saint Jerome by a Milanese, the tomb of a king of Navarra, the Moorish cloister, with orange trees, the gothic cloister, with boxwood. They had showed him all these things quite freely, and answered his intelligent questions readily (they, that is, through the person of a reserved man about his own age, and similarly built though the brown robe showed his prosperity to better advantage than Irish thorn-proof, and he spoke a few peremptory words of English). Even the prior, Manomuerta, who appeared and then disappeared with the silent ease of a ghost, smiled and bowed the head to him with a brief greeting. In short, he was treated on all sides (but for the forays of Fr. Eulalio) with a kindness and consideration which kept him a good arm’s length from any of the revelations he had come all this distance to explore. There was, to be sure, the language barrier, which persisted almost everywhere but for that breach made under Fr. Eulalio’s assaults, crashing through to ask the price of a suit in the United States, or after that book he so wanted,
How to Procure for Friends and Vanquishing of Everybody
.

So it went on, day after day. And now, if truth were known, he had prepared himself in advance to guard against any wiles which might be designed toward his conversion: but no one was trying to convert him at all. The meals were excellent, and this room, this bed . . . but no one seemed faintly concerned with his “spiritual side” as he called it in his fellow man: no one, in fact, even seemed to notice that he had one, however diffidently he approached. They treated him with the same gentle formality, from
the same courteous distance of gracious condescension, that he had come prepared to treat them with.