The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (94 page)

Another door banged.

—O.K., sailor. Be a sport. Get the hell out of here.

He heard that; and heard the scuff of shoes on the tile floor; and listening, heard nothing.

Out in the street, he paused as two men came toward him from one direction, a woman from the other. She walked slowly, looking at him in apparently careless interest, a look of appraisal.

—Pardon me, he said. She stopped. —Are you . . . are you . . .

—Trying to make a pick-up? she asked him.

—Yes maybe but it isn’t that bad, it isn’t that crude, it isn’t just for that, it’s that maybe you can . . . that I need . . .

The man in the checked suit stopped, stayed by Mr. Sinisterra’s hand.

Otto stopped swaying, stayed by the woman’s hand on his wrist. —Come along with me, she said. He started to withdraw his hand, to take her arm, and he felt his wrist caught in a chain. —But what’s this? I . . . I mean you . . .

She gave the nippers a slight twist, and repeated, —Come along with me.

—I knew it, said Mr. Sinisterra, standing behind a refuse can.

—A cop?

—It sticks out all over her.

—It sure does. She’s got a front like a cash register. We’re screwed. If he has any of the queer on him we’re really screwed. What are you going to do?

—Be quiet.

—Where you going?

—I’m going to church.

—What the hell are you going to church for?

—To confess.

—To confess
this?
to tell them . . . why Jeez what’s the matter with you, them priests have a pipeline right into the cops . . .

—Be quiet. You think I’m a half-wit? I’m going to confess a
sin
.

—What sin, for Christ sake?

—Pride, said Mr. Sinisterra, removing the mustache from his lip, and putting it into his pocket. —And to burn a candle.

—For who you’re goin to burn a candle, said the man in the checked suit, stepping back to look at his companion, his simple face falling into one of the few expressions it afforded, complete bafflement.

—For Johnny the Gent, said Mr. Sinisterra, walking on. —He had humility.

The music was the
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
, threading into the lobby as though seeking a listener, for the bar was empty.

It came forth as though lunging from a coil hidden beyond the portières, trailing and lunging, as though these notes reaching the lobby now had been audible in the bar moments before; and, sitting in the bar, one might have followed the single course of the thing from behind, to behold it rearing over its prey.

Then it struck. Mr. Pivner stirred, started, woke in alarm, to recover all that he could in this unfamiliar chair, his newspaper, which had slipped to the floor as he read, ZOO ESCAPES INCREASE, HUNT MADMAN Police believe that they are on the trail of the man, apparently insane, who broke into the Bird House at Central Park Zoo last week in an attempt to turn loose the specimens on display there. Theft was discounted as the motive. The lunatic, described as a tall Negro of uncertain age, was seen by Bertha Hebble, a cleaning woman, as she passed . . .

—I beg your pardon sir, the young gentleman who you were waiting for has not come in yet. It is getting quite late, and . . .

—I must get home. I must get home, but I want to write a note, said Mr. Pivner, standing. He went to the desk, and the music lurked as he wrote. Then he put on his hat, which he had been
carrying, and turned toward the revolving door, which the manager set in motion, and said —Good night, as the music towered in ambuscade’s tense imitation of silence.

Sticking from an ashcan halfway down the block he saw a cane. He looked about him quickly, to establish his loneliness in fact; and when the four notes struck in finale he was beyond reach, moving slowly, escaping again in unconscious defiance of something which he did not understand, affirming with each step an existence still less comprehended, so crowded were its details, so clamorous of worth, until heeded, and then speechless as the night itself.

“Des gens passent. On a des yeux. On les voit.”

The sky was perfectly clear. It was a rare, explicit clarity, to sanction revelation. People looked up; finding nothing, they rescued their senses from exile, and looked down again.

Behind the bars which kept children out of their cages, the two polar bears moved continuously without touching each other, the male in an endless circuit, down to the front where he half reared, dropped and returned to his mate who stood swinging her head back and forth, timekeeper for their incarceration, clocking it out with this massive furred pendulum. —He’s doin that every time I come here, swingin his neck, a little girl complained, straining at the outside bars. A little boy asked, —What’s their
names?
The female turned toward the rock cave, exposing the people to the filth of her unformulated rear. A young Negro stood and stared. A fat man in a yellow and brown necktie aimed his light meter, and stepped back to adjust an expensive camera.

—You thought I’d gone to Lapland, didn’t you.

—My dear fellow, I hadn’t the faintest notion where you’d gone, Basil Valentine said without turning from the bears’ cage. His voice sounded strained and a little weary. He was wearing a double-breasted gray coat, slightly fitted, fully buttoned, a gray hat with a rolled brim, gray gloves, and his tie was striped black and dark red. The polar bear approached looking him over, reared at the bars, sex apparent wobbling among fur drawn into spines by the water, and retired, gone green up about the neck. —But you do look rather better this morning, Valentine added, as though needing the makeshift of this observation to turn around, and look. —Where’ve you been?

—I? In a Turkish bath. Good God but it’s cold.

—If you would put on an overcoat when you come out . . .

—What difference would that make, it would still be cold wouldn’t it?

—You know, Valentine went on, as they came out of the arcade, —when I look down to your feet, I’m almost surprised to see them there, on the ground. I half expect empty trouser-cuffs blowing in the wind.

—Yes. I hate the cold.

—Shall we go down and buy you an overcoat? To see you hunched up, with your hands in your pockets . . .

—An overcoat? No but listen, there’s something. There’s something. I went to the bank this morning, for some money. I went to get some money out, and they told me there’s only a few hundred dollars. Why, there should be . . . there should be . . .

Basil Valentine pursed his lips, not as though coming forth to the subject at hand, but shifting from one preoccupation to another. —You’ve never known what sort of hand Brown kept on that account, have you.

—Why no, I . . . He put money in, and I took it out.

—And you haven’t seen him . . . recently. Since your . . . the spree you went on?

—I interrupted his murder . . . but there. I’d just escaped my own.

—What do you mean? Valentine asked impatiently.

—Never mind. I won’t try to explain it. Situations are fragile.

—Come now . . . what happened? Basil Valentine demanded, walking on with his head lowered as they approached steps leading down. He spoke no more loudly than he might have done asserting some demand upon himself, and as impatiently, knowing the question but finding it necessary to hear it in words, as though the answer, cogent as the query, were bound to follow upon it, —and enough of this foolishness, he added.

—No. No, I’m not joking. Who can tell what happened? Why, we have movement and surprise, movement and surprise and recognition, over and over again but . . . who knows what happened? What happened when Carnot was stabbed? Why, the fellow climbed into the carriage and stuck a knife in his belly, and no one would ever have known it if he hadn’t stopped to shout, “Vive l’anarchie.” All of our situations are so fragile, you see? If I meet you, by surprise? in a doorway? or come by invitation, for cocktails? or by carefully prearranged accident? Even that. No matter, you’ll see. They’re extremely fragile. And all this . . . all this . . .

A hand was waved before Basil Valentine where he paused to take off his gloves at the top of the steps. All this had been going on for some minutes, and Valentine was obviously annoyed. Indeed he did know of the anarchist Caserio’s absurd blunder after assassinating the president of France, half a century ago, an image which
assailed him now with all the vivid insistence of those irrelevant details which crowd a memory being probed for some calamity so alarming, or so disgraceful, that memory does not want to surrender it to consciousness until leavened by time, when the enormity of the deed may be appreciated at a distance, and, from this distance, dismissed. Basil Valentine got his gloves off, and stood looking at his hands for a moment there at the top of the steps as though recovering what the gloves had concealed, and verifying the left hand folded over the right with the glitter of the gold seal ring in the sun. Then, with the gray gloves clasped behind him, he descended.

—Did you see the moon last night?

—I can’t say I noticed it, Valentine answered, looking quite old; though in profile his face maintained its look of strength, even heightened now by the severe preoccupation which his voice reflected.

—Yes, in its last quarter. The horned moon.

They had walked down near the seal pool in the center, where a child of about eighteen months stood blocking their way, gazing up at Basil Valentine who paused again to take out a package of Virginia cigarettes. The child was hatless, wet-nosed, and dripping steadily from the breech.

—Here, here . . . Valentine burst out, looking up. —I shouldn’t touch it if 1 were you. He offered a distracting cigarette.

—Touch her! But she’s lovely! And the rose . . . ?

—You never know what they may have in their hair, and I shouldn’t like to think where she got the flower. It’s ruined, let her eat it, and come away. Valentine turned without looking back at the dripping figure, twisted to watch his retreat, chewing rose-petal. His effort to appear agreeable was being riddled by these thrusts, and he heard now beside him,

—Did you ever read the Grimm Brothers? the
Froschkönig?
No, never mind. Listen, those fragments? you have them? you still have them safe?

He stopped, to light their cigarettes. —I haven’t forgiven you for running off with that cigarette case, you know. Where is it?

—I didn’t ask you . . . that? that? Why, it’s probably in Ethiopia by now. The three Indies. And the bull? Well damn it, I brought you back a griffin’s egg, a much scarcer commodity, I found it in a secluded shrine in . . .

—You haven’t yet told me where you’ve been. Hunched over his cigarette, Basil Valentine looked through its smoke without taking it from his lips; and they stood there motionless as plants, Valentine in epinastic curve as the expression on his face unfolded to
immediacy, and bent him down over the growth from the lower surfaces before him. —You still hope to expose these fakes then, do you? he said calmly. The stem before him was uprooted.

—That’s why I came back! I . . .

—Back? Valentine straightened up. —You went home, did you? he said, and seemed to appreciate the confusion this remark brought to the downcast face beside him as they walked on: it was at moments like this, absorbed in satisfaction, gleaned surreptitiously in a steady look from the corner of narrowed eyes, that Basil Valentine added ten, or even twice that many years to the face he showed to others. Even so, his silence evoked nothing as they walked toward the lion house, no response but an uneven cadence in the footsteps beside him, and he finally questioned, —That cut on your cheek? what is it?

—I fell in the snow, killing wrens. There. But this . . .

—You’re done with that drunken inspiration for the priesthood, at any rate? . . . Eh? Tell me, what happened.

—What happened! What happened to Huss? John Huss, enticed by a salvoconducto up to Constance, where three bishops sat on his case, and he was burned . . .

—Anyone who hints that the Antichrist is to be found in Rome, my dear fellow, Valentine interrupted patiently, —and denies Peter as head of the Church . . .

—Burned and his ashes thrown into the Rhine, fishing for men, O sancta simplicitas! . . . yes, I’ve been off to see good old King Wenceslaus, there, and . . . my sainted mother! the women’s voices . . . do you remember the Boyg? Why, I was almost pulled into the priesthood.

—And wasn’t that why you went?

—And if it was! if it was! My sainted mother? . . . it’s as though I’d left before she named me. Do you remember that story the poet tells? “I lay this destiny upon him, that he shall never have a name until he receives one from me” . . . never mind. The women’s voices, and even that one, I left with her kiss on my cheek, see the scar? . . . there without so much as a talitha cumi I left that wise virgin.

—And now? The look from the corners of Valentine’s eyes was the same concentrated appraisal of a few steps before. —The last time we talked . . .

—Yes, we talked about Shabbetai Zebi, didn’t we. It’s a way of getting acquainted, discussing the failings of mutual friends. A messiah? At Smyrna a letter from God falls out of heaven to confirm him. He’s flogged and imprisoned. He denies he’s the messiah, while the Jews outside are breaking their neck to free him, fasting, jumping
naked into rivers, remember? They say he’s never slept with a woman, though God knows he’s been married for years. Before the Sultan, he denies it again, he’s given the choice of death or Islam. Damnation! Sirius the Dog Star, the bright star of Yemen, Al-Shira . . . what was it? a sun itself where it rises with the color of ruby, then sapphire, emerald, amethyst, and then the most brilliant diamond . . . damn it, listen. In that immaculate place of yours, you . . . yes, immaculate, a thing like that would show up. It would show up immediately, a package like that wrapped up in old newspaper.

—You’re still bent on this . . . suicide? Valentine asked, drawing on his cigarette, lowering his hand to take it from his lips. It stuck to his lips, and the coal burned his fingers as they slipped over it. The cigarette dropped to the ground, his lower lip trembled for that instant at losing control of it, his right hand came up clenched and behind him his left hand dropped a glove. —But here, he snapped, —will you walk up beside me where I can talk to you, instead of . . .