William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Neither the gray sky, nor the darker shapes of the landscape which lay beneath and seemed to have sunk there out of mere heaviness, had changed since the distinguished novelist had looked out at them a few minutes before. He had no idea of the time, for he had let his watch stop in a gesture of submission to the "lonely abyss of eternity" on whose edge he had expected to perch here. He turned his back on the window, and pounded a heel on the floor as though testing it for hardness. After a vexatious look at the bed, that is, as a matter of fact, exactly what he was doing, and he did it again, though the second time he used less force, and brought forth a less alarming ring. For somewhere, in this vast pile, were the plank beds, or straw pallets at the very least, which he'd expected to have been led to, and laid out on, there to glimpse the world these "good monks" lived in for long enough, at any rate, to pass it on to his fellow man. He struck a brick in the floor with his heel: obviously, he owed them something.

The sound of the church's bells reached him from outside, and he turned and struggled with the catch on the window, the gates of his heart already flung open, and its humble furnishings waiting to be flooded and swept away on the sonorous waves of those sentinels' voices ringing out their message of faith, to… He pinched his finger in the catch, and muttered something.

For he was not here to be converted. Neither did he have any intention of trying to convert his fellow man, or those earnest women, at home. He was not a Roman Catholic, or any other kind, and had no idea of becoming one. He considered himself, quite free and simply, Christian. If pressed, he might have been called Protestant, simply because he was not a Catholic. He limited himself to no special denomination, subscribed to no segregated cult, but held them all in equal esteem. As his writings showed, he found his duty to his fellow man in proselytizing for those virtues which bound his fellow man's better selves together, favoring none over another among the systems of worship he saw round him, honoring all, advancing in the name of some amorphous, and highly reasonable, Good, in the true eclectic tradition of his country, a confederate of virtue wherever he found it, and a go-between for the postures it assumed, explaining, not man to himself, but men to each other.

All of which meant that he reached his fellow man in large numbers, as his serene face (on the dust jacket), and his royalties, showed.

The windows burst open as the last bell faded from the air, and he found himself listening to the strident raucous tones of a barrel organ, pursuing some vulgar tune through the wet village streets below. The distinguished novelist banged the windows to, could not close them tight, and retreated toward the other end of the room clearing his throat. The bed reared before him, and he spun on his heel and sat down at his writing table, to stare at the papers, the few books, and the sign hanging before his eyes. The books included, instead of a dictionary, a Thesaurus of the English language, well thumbed; a book of quotations, which stood him in the stead of a classical education; Baedeker's Spain and Portugal, the most recent edition (1913); and the Holy Bible, which he inclined to leave out, and opened, in token of the sanctity of his purpose here. One of the books had some pages missing, after a sudden attack of dysentery brought on by the oil used in the cooking; and as his eye fell on it and he realized again which of the books it was, he looked up quickly, and stared at the sign on the wall, composing his embarrassment by rereading these words he could not understand: Se ruega, par lo tanto, a nuestros visitantes la mas estricta moralidad y compostura en todos sus actos y conversaciones, y se recomíenda a las Sras. que en el vestido se atengan a las pre-scripciones de la modestia cristiana.

He made out the last word there, arid the small initial troubled him. Then that look of intent vacancy spread over his face once more. True, he would have been more startled than anything else, if the Raphaelite Virgin on the wall above had rolled her eyes (like that Virgin of Rimini, first up and down, then laterally, then in opposite directions); or if the dark featureless figure on the wall behind him had spoken, or beckoned, or reached out and knocked him to his knees. Yet in a way it was something of this order that he awaited, something less threatening, less sectarian that is, for he could hardly admit to having come, like a vulgar Greek, seeking a sign: no, it was rather some vague, exotic manifestation of some equally vague and exotic Presence, a mystery of euhemeristic proportions and, brought forth in his own prose, amenable to reason.

The bird hit the glass. He jumped, and the vacancy left his face as details of irritation crowded to fill it. The bird was fluttering at the partly opened windows, and he hurried over to try to shut them again. This time he managed it, and stood there once more looking down. A young monk in the brown Franciscan robes was leading the bent íigure of the prior of the monastery, Fr. Mano-muerta, who was almost blind, across the porch toward the doors of the church. The old porter appeared briefly, dropped his shoulders and made a sign between his chin and his chest, and waited for them to pass. The prior was dressed in flowing white vestments which barely cleared the wet stones. All of which made the middle-aged man in the window above clear his throat behind the glass, and shift his weight from one well-shod foot to the other, as though caught intruding. He watched the doors close upon them with that self-conscious look which he meant to be read as respect, the look he wore when they opened drawers and showed him chasubles worked with thread of gold and studded with seed pearls, the wall where the chains of freed Christian slaves were hung, the exquisitely carved rail of the choir in the church, the superb retablo behind the main altar (which did impress him, for it was sixty feet high), the paintings of Zurbarán, an El Greco, and two or three sixteenth-century Italians in bad states of repair, in the sacristía, the marble penitent Saint Jerome by a Milanese, the tomb of a king of Navarra, the Moorish cloister, with orange trees, the gothic cloister, with boxwood. They had showed him all these things quite freely, and answered his intelligent questions readily (they, that is, through the person of a reserved man about his own age, and similarly built though the brown robe showed his prosperity to better advantage than Irish thorn-proof, and he spoke a few peremptory words of English). Even the prior, Manomuerta, who appeared and then disappeared with the silent ease of a ghost, smiled and bowed the head to him with a brief greeting. In short, he was treated on all sides (but for the forays of Fr. Eulalío) with a kindness and consideration which kept him a good arm's length from any of the revelations he had come all this distance to explore. There was, to be sure, the language barrier, which persisted almost everywhere but for that breach made under Fr. Eulalio's assaults, crashing through to ask the price of a suit in the United States, or after that book he so wanted, How to Procure for Friends and Vanquishing of Everybody.

So it went on, day after day. And now, if truth were known, he had prepared himself in advance to guard against any wiles which might be designed toward his conversion: but no one was trying to convert him at all. The meals were excellent, and this room, this bed. . but no one seemed faintly concerned with his "spiritual side" as he called it in his fellow man: no one, in fact, even seemed to notice that he had one, however diffidently he approached. They treated him with the same gentle formality, from the same courteous distance of gracious condescension, that he had come prepared to treat them with.