William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— 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?

— v-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 1'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, ga/ing 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 I 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 1 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.