William Gaddis - The Recognitions

He picked up the Daily Mail, and under "Teddington's Good Win," read again of a distant hockey game. He read again of the visit of four rare (Bewick's) swans at Penns Pond, Richmond Park. He read again of betting law reforms; and a seven-year-old girl killed by a shotgun blast. Under "Today's Arrangements" of an organ recital by Mr. W. J. Tubbs at Holy Trinity, Marylebone; a meeting of the Victoria Young Conservatives, the Johnson Society of London, the Friends of Uruguay Society. There was nothing there for him, and he threw the paper down, but with no alternative, than to pick up another.

A minute later, his brows knitted over an open page. He sat forward, and Digarne quivered in his hands. He looked up from it, and stared abstracted for a full minute at an Andalusian love scene on the wall, then back at the page, his sharp darting eyes glittering with excitement. Pictured in the paper was a face beaming malevolence over a black beard, identified as Señor Kuvetli, a prominent Egyptologist stopping in the capital in the course of his work, which now centered about a search for the lost mummy of a young princess, possibly to be found somewhere in Spain, brought here as a talisman by a retreating band of Gypsies centuries before.

He laid the paper aside and commenced to pace the floor. Then he sat down over the brazier and commenced to clean his nails. The residue from this task dropped on the surface of gray ash, where it sank and burned with a slight puff and a noxious odor which rose to him until suddenly, as though inspired by some divine flatus, he leaped to his feet, and in a matter of minutes was shaved, dressed, and generally caparisoned for the streets.

Before he left his room, however, he took time for a quick look in Baedeker's Spain and Portugal, which he had in two volumes, the original having split into two, and then went to seek the dueño in the dim halls of the pension, after giving the shock of black hair a toss with his broken comb. As he stooped to lock the door, Marga came hurrying down the dark passage, bumped him, and with a flash of her eyes, blond hair, and a blue angora sweater, begged his pardon and was gone inside her own door.

Now there are some women, of retiring nature and modest comportment, who if seen, say, wearing a fur-trimmed cloth coat, are remembered after as having been dressed in the simple cloth coat of whatever color it may have been; and there are others, seen in that same coat, who are recalled sheathed luxuriously and entirely in the fur, and Marga was one of these latter. She was a guest here, and though she had never importuned this exotic neighbor of hers, now adjusting his hair in the dark passage, the mere fact of his avowed origin made him interesting, and she was always exceedingly bright with him, as she was with others there who knew more of her private habits than Mr. Yak might be expected to, keeping to himself as he did quite strictly, but for the dining room, and speaking only when spoken to, in a flow of Spanish which was difficult to follow, was in fact a stiffened Italian from which he pruned the luxurious curls and Neapolitan tendrils as he went along, though as far as that goes neither Marga nor the dueño had ever been to Italy, and neither had ever seen a living Rumanian in their lives.

As for this one she'd just left behind in the chill corridor, he was quite spry this morning, now following a girl laden with two chamber pots toward the kitchen, where two other girls sat picking over a pile of lentils on the metal table top, and the one he had followed went on next door to empty her charges, and rinse them in the bathtub.

He found the dueño there too, in checked carpet slippers, soon had the information he wanted, and left down the linoleum, banging the heavy door so that its bell jangled, moving with a sprightly vigor which might have been surprising even in one of the age he appeared now, the shock ot black hair dancing over his forehead as he hastened toward the Estación del Norte, where he was in time to catch the morning express to Segovia, along whose route his destination lay not far distant.

San Zwingli appeared suddenly, at a curve in the railway, a town built of rocks against rock, streets pouring down between houses like the beds of unused rivers, and the houses littered one against another like boulders along mountain streams. Swallows dove and swept with appalling certainty at the tower of the church, as the morning visitor climbed the hill toward the town, touching now and then at his mustache, as though to make certain it was on straight. He walked with a briskness, and a light in his eye seldom seen today but in asylums and occasional pulpits, the look of a man with a purpose.

With this spring in his step he was soon up behind the town, where the sound of running water nearby, the braying of burros and the desultory tinkling of bells, and the distant voices of people below reached him where he paused to sniff, and then stood still inhaling the pines above him and the delicious freshness of cow manure, like a man rediscovering senses long forgotten under the abuses of cities. Then he was off again, and when he reached the road bounded by cypress trees, he hardly paused to cross himself at the first station he encountered as he hurried up the hill toward the white walls of the cemetery.

The forecourt, as he entered, was flooded with a riot of flamenco music from the radio in the house of the resident watchman, to one side there and almost hidden behind the unfurled hilarity of the week's wash. Nonetheless he could hear voices beyond the next gate, where a small stone crucifixion drew his eye as he approached and went through, with a quick glance up at it and a stab, more a parabola than a cross over his chest, for the figure carved in what appeared at that moment full abandon to a dance which the music accompanied. Within, the bóvedas mounted on both sides, three, four, five vaults high, decorated with bead flowers and metal wreaths, icons and wilted nosegays, broken glass protecting photographs, and all of them numbered, with names, and ages caught up in infancy and childhood, many between fourteen and twenty, and few to sixty. Straight ahead stood a separate mausoleum, a cross atop it, surrounded by a chain and four corner columns mounting stone faces, the girl, the woman, the hag, and the skull.

— Ausculta. .

— Mira señor. . aïee. .

The argument going on in two languages would hardly have made sense in one, and the newcomer arrived to enter with what sounded like a third, for one of the men was the watchman whom he'd come to see. The other was a feverish-eyed man whom he studied sharply for fear, as he confessed later, that he might be a Rumanian, since the language he spoke sounded as if it might have been anything. (It proved to be Late Latin, being garlanded with whatever tendrils and sprays came to hand.) Both were waving their arms at the bóveda beside them, where an unmarked vault and one containing nothing but the wet end of a broom stood side by side.

— My father doesn't make mistakes! the feverish-eyed man suddenly burst out.

— Ah. . speaks English?

— Yes, I… you, who are you? Listen, do you speak. . can you talk to him? My mother's in there, and I… he tells me. . Here, you talk to him. Here she is, I've written her name down, here, he went on rapidly, and handed a rumpled card to the shock-haired man, who stared at it. — Yes, yes, there that's her name, she. . What's the matter, can't you read it?

— This. . this is your mother's name?

— Yes, can't you see? And she…

— But. . what's she doing here? How'd she get in here? The card quivered, and became damp in his hand. He reached up as though he were going to smooth back the shock of black hair, but his raised hand dropped and he crossed himself as he handed the card back, and crossed himself again.