William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Yaa, yaaaa. . The arm in the sling flew up in horror as he stared at his triumphant assailant, a person under three feet tall staring up at him with wide eyes, an immense red nose, and a great brush of a mustache all hung on by the empty wire glasses. With a few steps he was inside the bar where Eine kleine Taverne im Golf von Napoli was being played on the juke-box, and he ordered beer. He was suddenly very cold. He brought his hand out with a coin clenched in it, and tapped it on the bar, looking unwaveringly straight ahead, at the eyes of his image in a mirrored cabinet above the rows of bottles behind the bar. He was alone in the place, except for the bartender; and he lit his last cigarette.

The door opened again, and a man in a battered Santa Glaus suit came in, beardless and hatless, but with a well-stubbled chin. He looked jovially down the bar at Otto and then said, — Pour us something with a smile in it, Jimmy. My special. Toot sweet, Jimmy. . He winked at Otto. — And the looter the sweeter.

Unwinking, Otto turned back and put his forehead in his palm, that elbow on the bar and the coin in his slung hand, waiting. He closed his eyes for a moment.

The bartender came down empty-handed, opened the mirrored cabinet to take out a bottle of Old Heaven Hill Bourbon, and returned to the man in the battered Santa Glaus suit.

Otto sniffed, and opened his eyes. On the shelf behind the bar, well out of reach, was a donation box for a Sacred Heart Society. Mounted on it was a colored print of Christ exposing the Sacred Heart, looking, from Otto's half-open eyes, like a C.I.D. man showing his badge. Otto stared at it and muttered something to himself. He sniffed again. It was his hair burning from the cigarette between his forefingers. — Damn, he said, and then, — damnation. He put the cigarette in an ashtray at arm's length, and looked up for the bartender who was just then coming with his beer.

— Fifteen, said the bartender. He waited while Otto fumbled through pockets, and finally joined the warm coin from his slung hand with a cold one from his jacket. — We only take American money here, Jack. The bartender tossed the cold shiny two-and-one-half cent-piece back to him and waited, looking absently at Otto's cigarette smoking in the tray until Otto found a dime. Then he took the coins, picked up the cigarette, and went back up the bar.

— But. . Otto caught the word before it came out. He clenched his hand round the glass and stared straight ahead of him. And it took him a good half-minute to realize that neither the stubbled chin, nor the flattened nose, nor the bunched ears, nor the yellow eyes he stared into, were his own.

He turned and went straight back for the telephone booth. There he dialed SP 7-3100. —Hello? he said into the phone. — I want to report a case of drug-taking. Heroin. If you go to this address immediately. . What? No, I'd prefer not to give my name.

The glassed doors came closed upon him slowly, and from outside he could be seen staring through the scribbled configuration on the glass, a dedication which might, under other circumstances, have recalled Sir Walter Raleigh's cunning advance upon Queen Elizabeth, scrawling "Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall" upon a windowpane with a diamond.

The juke-box played Fliege mit mir in die Heimat. The bartender put out the cigarette half-smoked, as though it were his own. The man in the battered Santa Glaus suit stood with his back to the bar and his elbows resting on it. — That's a nice muriel, he said, looking at the wall painting, where a moose stared out over an empty lake. But the clock, though hung high in the sky where the sun might have been at high noon in the fall weather of the moose's landscape, was running withershins, as a convenience to bar patrons who could see it right in the mirror.

— I knew a guy once, he had this muriel, said the man in the battered Santa Glaus suit. — Except where it was, it was on the ceiling, he added reflectively, — And it was a dame.

"The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins. You will cause a device to be prepared, without unnecessary delay, with a motto expressing in the fewest and tersest words possible, this national recognition." — Abraham Lincoln's Treasurer, to the director of the Mint.

— I can't live with you and be a Christian, shouted the woman clinging to the edge of the dirty sink, answering the moaning from the next room, she whose ancestors had gathered at the foot of the Janiculum in ancient Rome, and sold whatever was for sale in the garlic-reeking interior of the Taverna Meritoria, that squalid inn on the Tiber bank.

— You're not a Christian, never were. And the moaning resumed.

— When are you going to stop that awful noise, she demanded, she whose ancestors strove with one another, asking, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"

— Be quiet. It's the only reason you married me. You wanted to marry a Christian, you wanted to marry a good Catholic. Well, leopards can't change their spots.

— Shut up! She turned the volume control of her hearing aid down.

Then there was silence. It lasted for a full minute, when both rooms were filled with a scream so ghastly as to stop the novice heart and breath and blood for the full eternal instant of its duration; a sound which, as the book said, once heard, can never be forgotten. The woman at the sink (she whose ancestors were kidnaped as children, to be brought up in the Faith, A.M.D.G.) clung to its slopped edge. The lines of her face were fallen, not in terror, but in weariness. Too late, she turned the volume control of her hearing aid down still further.

— How did that sound? asked her husband behind her, triumphant in the doorway. — That was an epileptic. I'm practicing. — Oh Jesus and Mary, you've only been home this time for three weeks, and you've started again.

— What's the matter with it? Saint Paul was an epileptic.

— Can't you do anything else, Frank? Are you too old to do anything else?

It was true. Mr. Sinisterra was becoming an old man. Although he had been heard to say that he resented prison years no more than Saint Augustine resented the withdrawal he had made from the world when living near Tagaste; had, indeed, embracing the words of Saint Gregory ("the Contemplative Life is greater in merit and higher than the active"), spent a fair amount of time in solitary confinement ("the hole," as it was called, a place which, though cleaner and more dry, corresponded to the in pace of the convent, where, for their own good, medieval religious were occasionally immured for life), in spite of all this, and his commendable approach, prison years had not softened him, nor prolonged his youth. Life at Atlanta was not, as his son had been told on occasion, "a long vacation for Daddy," any more than Saint Giles's retirement to the desert resembled a tour from a travel folder. Now the retirement was over once more, and with the humility of the prophet Jeremiah, who longed for the contemplative life but was rooted out to "go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem," Mr. Sinisterra had returned again to shoulder the burdens of this world.

— I'm going out for awhile, he said in the doorway, looking suspiciously at his wife's hand as it lowered from the hearing-aid control pinned at her bosom. She stared at him. — You ought to learn self-control, like those yogis, she said.

— I should learn control. I! Me!

— That's a wonderful religion they got, that voodooism.

— Hopeless, he said, turning into the other room. — I was going to get you a book, but I don't think you even could read it if I did. There he sat down before a mirror, illuminated like a theatrical dressing-room mirror. Spread before him was an array of jars, tubes, colored pencils, and hair in bits and transformations which any star might have envied. On the wall hung a crucifix, a picture of Cavalieri as Tosca, some neckties representing better schools at home and abroad, and a reminder of a papal bull of Pius IX, the Pio Nono of many happy memories, in this case the Bolla di Com-posizione of 1866, granting pardon to the felon who devotes to pious uses three per cent (3 %) of his plunder, permitting him to "keep and possess the remainder in good faith, as his own property justly earned and acquired."