William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— Only to the cold man.

— Well you. . you ought to be more careful, you can't just go talking to people.

— That is what he said, when he heard her singing.

— Who?

— The Cold Man.

At the foot of a staircase leading to First Class, Stanley saw Father Martin descending, and let go her arm. Then as abruptly he took it again, up high where there was some sleeve, and came on resolute, slowing his step and so hers, for the greeting, the introduction, the explanations: but Father Martin passed, looking him straight in the face, without a word, without a shade of recognition, the medieval lines of his face standing out livid as though he had seen a ghost.

Off Ambrose Light, there was some commotion. The ship almost ran down a rowboat in which a Chinaman, equipped with three New Jersey road maps, was setting out confidently for home, and had already got this far from the land into which he had been smuggled so many years before.

But Stanley didn't hear of the incident until a day or so later. Down a passage before him, she commenced singing, her voice very low,

— Blessed Mary went a-walking. . Over Jordan river. .

— Where did you learn that? he demanded.

— The song you taught her?

— But I… I never taught you that.

— Stephen met her, fell a-talking. .

— Who is this. . cold man? he interrupted her again.

— The Cold Man, and he carries his arm like the boy did.

— Like. . what do you mean, in a sling?

— In a black one.

Inside, Stanley stood looking vacantly at The Story of Barbara Ubrick. Then he took her bundle from the chair where he intended to sleep.

— Blessed Mary went a-walking. .

— Come… he said, knelt now beside the bed where the yellowed crucifix was already hung, already muttering the Pater noster qui es in coelis he intended to teach her, the metal deck cutting his knees. The engines sounded in a constantly renewed heave forth, as her knee where she stood beside him, brought her weight against his arm, and away, and against him the more heavily as the prow far ahead shuddered into a trough, into twenty fathoms of water, and without a word he drew her down.

Spain is a land to flee across. Every town, and every capital, is a destination; and the names which ring with refuge to the fugitive mount with finality to him traveling relentlessly unpursued, setting destinations one after another whose reasons for being so cease upon arrival, and he must move on, to provide that interim of purpose with which each new destination endows the journey however short, and search each pause with reasons anxiously mistaken drawing nearer, with each destination, to the last.

Trains do not depart: they set out, and move at a pace to enhance the landscape, and aggrandize the land they traverse, laboring their courses with the effort of journeys never before made, straining the attention on sufferance of minutes passed separately until concentration is exhausted, and no other pace conceivable. The very distances become greater, through landscape irreplaceable by the exhausted fancy, unaltered by the most resourceful imagination, impossible at last any other land, oppressed by any other sky.

Five miles behind lay Gibraltar, crouching across the bay from Algeciras heavy-buttocked and dumb, the hulk of an animal in immense malformity with lights stacked glittering at its base like suppliant candles round a monstrous idol.

This time of the year, the levanter blew in its chill from the east, shrouding the rock and bringing dampness and an overcast to the sky. Algeciras showed no light but what was left over from day, and when even that was gone dull glows appeared at last in the narrow cobbled streets leading up to the plaza where trees bore oranges among benches tiled orange and white and blue round a dry fountain. There, when the one-arm church sounded the flat planng of its bell, and the dim lights of the plaza, burning an hour or two now in lusterless illumination of the quiet, failed and went out, that quiet proved not what it had seemed, not an immanent thing at all, but imposition: back down those narrow streets the town seethed behind shuttered casements with music and the violence of voices in strained extremes, driven on frenzied patterns of clapped hands, broken by the disciplined clatter of castanets. Cafe Pinero was betrayed almost two blocks off by the strident crash of the girl's heels on the frail wooden stage. A mute idiot winced in the single door where an unshaven man in a lambskin jacket and dirty white turban pushed him aside to enter, and leave him standing spent in masturbatory gestures for the dancer beyond the round tabletops and coffee cups, turning when she was done, twisted, with a whine, away from the glasses and smoke, frantically hopeless back to the narrow street, drawn by the heels of a passer-by loud on the stones going down the hill unsteadily, with a pause of distress to brush a spot of moonlight off the sleeve, pursued once more by the wail, — sangre negro en mi corazón. . down, toward the bay again and a hotel whose high-ceilinged rooms drown the transient overnight among sunken ribs of ponderous furniture, to surface him rapidly with dawn among tiles of differing intent, exaggerated on rising, distorted in mismatching deep and then not as reflections underwater, bold below as a public lavatory, consumed on shallowing in Moorish intricacy as light separates the louvers and the train sets out before sunrise for Madrid.

It enters upon the surface of an inland sea, so that land is, as empty and apparently trackless and vast, harboring briefly in indistinguishable ports along a course charted over barren swells, past trees as alien here as things afloat, and the apparitions of isolated ruins condemned like the specter-ships of the sea to sail forever unable to make port.

It was cold, and one of the soldiers sitting by the broken window in the old second-class coach bundled up a coat and stuffed it into the opening. The seat they had taken was broken too, and every time one of them fixed it, it collapsed again, until they stacked two wooden suitcases under it. Then one of them passed round a leather wine skin, and another brought out a trumpet. He played Dinah twice, and each time left out the line, — change her mind about me… as the train paused at a village, and went on among stripped cork trees. A vendor came down the aisle with a tray of peanuts and inedible-looking confections. He was stopped by a handsome boy about twelve years old, who paid for three peanuts with a ten-centimo piece delivered with some difficulty from a deep pocket. The boy had a black corner stitched on his lapel. He gave a peanut to each of the younger children, both girls, and offered the third to his mother, who watched him all this time, her own grave eyes excited and shining with a strained surprise which the children reflected, when they looked at her, and all four were caught in the silence of being left alone which none of them tried to dispel with feigned pleasantry or false cheer. But they asked him the time often enough, to provoke the solemn exercise of taking out the watch whose face he studied with such sober attention that years mounted upon his own; and the woman, turning her eyes with something fierce and proud in them from the boy, stared for a rude moment at the man sitting alone across the aisle who was looking at them all with an expression which was not a frown but had happened as an abrupt breaking of his features, until that instant apparently cast for good as they were but even now, in this new constriction, renewing an impression of permanence, as molten metals suddenly spilled harden instantly in unpredictable patterns of breakage. She did stare, with the face of someone looking at a wound, until discountenanced, and when she turned away held a hand to her temples. She was not more than thirty, and in black*. Now the train was moving so slowly that every stripped cork tree drawn past stood out in nakedness, writhing the red agony of its-flayed trunk toward the waste of heaven.