William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Between the land and the still brilliant blue and white of the sky moved gray clouds with torn edges.

An old man with a battered guitar entered at the upper end of the coach. He had two tunes, one a vaguely recognizable pasa doble, the other a hapless La Tani, which could only be heard in his immediate vicinity, with such meticulous care did he work what strings remained. The soldier played Dinah in another key, on the trumpet, and the old man tried to accompany with his pasa doble. — Aie. . they passed him the bota, and he did not spill a drop.

Past noon, the woman asked the time, and they waited with proud patience through the grave ceremony of finding it. Then she stood to their baggage in the rack, all cloth bags and paper packages, baskets and bottles, and a silent bird in a cage. She had already sat down and opened some cheese, while the boy broke open a loaf of bread, when she glanced up to see the man across the aisle staring at all of them feverishly. She was quick to get some bread under the cheese, and with no hesitation offer, — Quiere comer?

He grimaced, and mumbled, appeared to try to smile, shaking his head. He looked eager, but nonetheless surprised, even shocked at her invitation, even her recognition, which she withdrew from him, and returned to the children, the bread, cheese, and fish.

He sat turned away staring for some time through the glass, or possibly no further than the image the dirt on the outside of the glass made fleetingly discernible, and unchanged; until eventually his own meal appeared, part by part, oranges, a banana, bread, a bottle of wine, a cucumber, an onion. Then he smoked, until the cigarette came apart between his fingers.

Toward evening, mountains far ahead posed impassability.

— Una y una dos. . dos y una tres. . the soldiers sang up ahead, La Tani, though the old man with the battered guitar was gone. — No sale la cuenta. .

The mountains turned dark, their features flattening and their shapes ahead black and two-dimensional against a sky suiíused with faint green: and suddenly the train burst out upon the open blue plateau, into a haze which still held the spent lust of the sun clinging over the barren plain of New Castile, where the train rushed forward into the approaching darkness, toward its destination, Madrid.

The haze settled on the city in the early morning conveyed that remarkable cold which they say will kill a man and not blow out a candle, motionless cold which seems to come from inside, and be diffused through the body from the very marrow of the bones. That early, the streets were desolate. Here and there old women fanned kindling fires in brazier pans, standing one foot in gutters then being swept clean. Men hosed down the streets, as they did whatever the weather; and those who passed hurried, only the glin' of eyes between the drawn beret and muffling throw of a cape. Over all this the Spanish sun hesitated, would not rise until forced by expectant activity, then with a great red flush it appeared from the haze beyond the Atocha station.

And soon enough, the streets were filled with cries, men selling brooms, or buying bottles, women selling España, Arrìba, ABC, tobacco, lottery tickets, — Dos iguales para hoy!. . Their cries rose like the sounds of people in agony. And soon enough, the blind boy was posted at the corner near the Plaza Santa Ana, with lottery tickets pinned to his coat, to pass the day there, and be taken away at night.

In a nearby alley, identified on a tiled wall as Alphonso del Gato, a spotty unshaven man with cigarette burns in the robe he had wrapped round him, stood on a narrow window balcony looking down at the figures hurrying below in carpet slippers on the cold pavement. Two members of the Guardia Civil appeared, and he retired quickly, closed his windows, and went on with his work at the mirror. On the dresser top before him, a passport was propped open with a bottle of oxalic acid, which he had used to make a few alterations in the lavender stamp-ink, and now he was trimming his tinted mustache in accord with the passport photograph. There were in fact two passports, one Swiss, and this one opened, Rumanian. He had studied the Swiss face and particulars often and regretfully, and finally given it up in favor of the other, though there were, as he knew, certain inconveniences attached to being a Rumanian. One was that he did not understand a word of the language (though somewhere, among the litter of newspapers and bottled chemicals, there was a copy of I. Al. Bratescu-Voinesti's short stories, In Tuneric si Luminå, which he carried occasionally and appeared to read in such places as customs sheds and police stations). By adding ten years to the life of Mr. Yak (whose passport, along with the Swiss one, he had been working on in New York before his sudden departure) and, with the tinted mustache and a shock of black hair, subtracting ten years from his own, he quite fit the unknown Rumanian whom he had recently become. He did, in the habit which years of application had instilled, think of himself as Mr. Yak; and any other name, or life he had borne, was almost forgotten: almost, that is, but for the one thing which had driven him to this unobtrusive retirement from his former profession, into the historical asylum of Iberia. Among the scattered periodicals, there was one particularly thumbed, creased, and soiled, a recent copy of The National Counterfeit Detector Monthly. Page one, headed The new counterfeits, was the most soiled, creased, and thumbed: "Check letter A, face plate No. 95, back plate No. 475 series 19426. . The Jackson portrait is exceptionally good. ." — How? he would murmur whenever he read it over, — How did they catch it? He would go on to read the other current reviews, "The Hamilton portrait is smutty. . Nose lines broken, right eye too narrow. . Crude reproduction on poor paper. . This is a counterfeit of average quality. . Dark expressionless eyes. ." but he always came back to the top one, and muttered — How?

All this made him quite restless, as the chaos of newspapers showed, ABC, Oggi, the Continental Daily Mail, through whose pages he sought some new challenge to erase the indignity of this recent defeat. This was the first vacation he had ever had in his life, aside from enforced recreation periods prolonged at Attica, Atlanta, and other resorts where he was familiar. He had plenty of money, the local currency that is, having sold the remaining packets of his last work to a Levantine who did business in Tangier. Still he could not relax. He was beginning to look like a remittance man, though, with some success, he tried to melt into the people around him, and look like the other men staying in this pension, dressed with spruce seediness, as they were, nervously alert, as they were, and even a plexiglas collar, as they wore. Everything was in order. Even his stomach had settled down, after its first horrendous adventures with the fare in the Pension Las Cenizas.

Still he could not relax. Small things upset him. The mustache, for instance: he was unused to wearing one permanently, and when he came into the room alone and locked the door behind him, reached up to pull it off and toss it into a drawer. And the room was cold. When he complained about it, to the dueño, or the girls in the kitchen where he went to warm his hands, they behaved as though winter had come for the first time to Madrid, and spoke of the cold in terms of a vague wonder which they managed to sustain annually until spring. There was a radiator, a cold, absurd, mocking piece of furniture in one corner, for there was very little coal anywhere in the country; and so he was at last given a brazier whose surface of gray ash remained warm to the touch for some hours. He spent a good deal of time sitting a knee on either side of it, cleaning his nails with the end tooth of a comb. He had tried to read, something more sustained than the papers, but that got nowhere. There was nothing there for him. The same for the paintings of Velasquez and Goya, Dürer, Bosch, Breughel, for he'd even been to the Prado seeking challenge, but there was nothing there for him.