William Gaddis - The Recognitions

— But you did land all right. At Genoa?

— Well yes except. .

— What, dear boy?

— Nothing. A man got off at Genoa, and they found a… in one of his suitcases they found a body all chopped up.

Mrs. Deigh gasped, and drew back with more rattling and a distinct clank.

— He said it was only. . only some Holy Innocents.

— And was it? she demanded, sitting forward noisily, with interest.

— No, it was… he confessed it was only his best friend.

— Oh! said Mrs. Deigh, with relief and a slight sigh of disappointment. Then there was a distant sound of breakage. Mrs. Deigh looked pained.

— Oh, dear Doni Sucio!. . she murmured, as Stanley went on, in answer to her questions about his work, to tell of his interest in music, and mention his ambitions for Fenestrula.

— But did. . then has your daughter written to you?. . about me?

— Oh no, dear boy! No! She never writes to me, we don't correspond.

— But she. . you know she. .

— She's all right, we know the Lord is watching over her in His own way. Mrs. Deigh smiled a smile which seemed to settle her into the chair, and the brow of a lavish mother-of-pearl crucifix climbed from her bosom. It was finally evident that most of the rattling about her came from the long chain, supporting something like a large egg pendulant when she walked, and nestling somewhere in her lap, as it did now, when she sat. Like a Russian Easter Egg, this Thing had a tiny window in one end fitted with a magnifying pane but, viewing, instead of a creche or a landscape, one saw only a highly enlarged shred of Something: last year, it had been a splinter of the True Cross (which, as Paulinus attested, gave off fragments without itself ever diminishing); more recently, a splinter of Saint Anthony's femur. There was a faint oriental look about her eyes, as though the skin might have been drawn back and tightened, which heightened her quelled expression with its sense that some enthusiasm might burst forth there, but for fear of cracking the extraordinary likeness to the face beneath, which she had managed to create with make-up. She always appeared cheerful, excepting devout moments when a soulful vacancy spread over her face, or moments of concern, when other features mounted anxiously toward the prominent nose, as they did now at a sound of moaning from somewhere. She excused herself saying, — Poor Hadrian, he needs Us… and got off in a clatter, leaving Stanley to clutch the tooth he'd found in his pocket and look about the room.

The paintings in the gilded frames were hallowed by numbers of coats of varnish, each darker than the last for the dirt collected on the one before. Thus it was difficult to tell what they depicted, but obligingly so since, for Mrs. Deigh, each one was a religious episode to which she assigned both the subject and the master's hand it had come from. Even now, Stanley stood impertinently close to inspect a small Annunciation by Tintoretto, with the notion that he saw a dog carrying a game bird in one corner. Then the sound of busy footsteps turned him round. — That is… he commenced, looking up at eye-level, and it seemed a full minute before he could bring his eyes down to meet the sharp glance of the figure scuttling through the room behind him. At that instant an arm shot out and Stanley recoiled from what, he realized afterward, must have been a sign of benediction, as the cassock came up and the little figure disappeared in the swirl oí a black mantle. — Dom Sucio!. , Mrs. Deigh called, hard on his heels. — Did Dom Sucio pass this way? she asked when she appeared.

— Something did, Stanley brought out.

— Oh dear, he's gone again. He is so busy, she said, sagging slightly until she sat down. — He is such a dear.

— Is he a… a…

— A Dominican, and he is so kind to Us. So protective. . and she subsided into the chair with, — Now you must tell Us more about you.

And so Stanley told her once more of his interest in music, dwelling modestly on the organ work he had composed (which, as he said, might have been a Requiem Mass had he done it three centuries ago), and reiterating his wish to visit the church at Fenestrula, and possibly. .

— Play the organ there? But dear boy, nothing could be more simple. It was the gift of an American, and so of course they will let you play on it, an American whom We knew quite well, quite well indeed. .

After that, Stanley could hardly keep his mind on their conversation. Everything else seemed unreal, as this one vision soared before him. His eye fixed on a gold telephone across the room, and the tooth clutched in his pocket so that it almost bit his palm, the pain disappeared from his bandaged hand, and he scarcely heard Mrs. Deigh describe how, as a girl in school studying French conversation, lunching, and the mandolin, she had known all that while that greater things lay ahead, though what they might be she'd no idea until one day, floating naked on her back in the blue waters off Portugal, she was discovered by some peasant children who took her for an apparition of the Virgin, and since then, of course, her path had been clear. In fact, it was not until he was about to leave that he even noticed her wrist watch: its four gold hands mounted a delicately contrived figure, and those pointing to III and IX were apparently stationary. The other two told the minute and the hour, and since it was just ten minutes after four when he left, he had no thought for what it might be until he came for lunch next day, and was greeted by his hostess promptly at twelve-thirty.

Stanley had hung his own crucifix, broken though it remained, on the wall over his bed in the room he had found in the Via del Babuino. It is true, every time he looked at it his own knees went weak, and when he addressed it, a sense of emptiness quivered and then surged through him, until he dropped his face on his clasped hands and with all the concentration that makes images from the past the more vivid, tried not to remember. But if he stayed so for long, on his knees beside his bed, the floor itself seemed to rise, and fall away driven on by his pounding heart where the ship's engines echoed, his own gasps of nausea as he staggered up echoing the gasping moans of the beast he had fought all his life. He closed his eyes against the Christmas card he had seen in that uptown bedroom, and the image stood out the more vivid on this dark tapestry of memory; he opened them on the yellowed rigid thing itself, its drawn legs hard-muscled straight through the broken knees, and turning away unsteadily he resolved to get it repaired next day.

But there was always something else. First, of course, he must procure his identification booklet, guide to Rome, prayer book, and the pin to wear and identify him as a Pilgrim. He wore it on the lapel of his second-best suit (it had been his third and last, fortunately, that suffered the green-paint episode, and his best blue suit hung unfolded, unworn since his mother's funeral). It was in this same second-best suit, pressed between mattresses during the voyage, and donned with self-conscious anticipation under a porthole suddenly filled with a static landscape instead of the sea and the sky, that he had emerged from the boat, with that shiny flattened look of sailors ashore.

Still, making the round from Saint John Lateran to the tomb of Saint Peter, the Basilica of Saint Paul, and Santa Maria Maggiore, required for indulgences, he looked lonely. Crossing the Ponte San Angelo, where Pilgrims had already been suffocated and died in the crush, he looked lonely. Passing through the Gate of the Bells, entering the piazza before Saint Peter's and gazing up at the Egyptian obelisk and beyond it to the Apostles on the roof, and Michelangelo's dome, he looked lonely. His hair still stood out thickly on the back of his head, and had begun to curl near the neck. He had trimmed his mustache, but it was uneven, and he kept catching ends of it with his teeth anxiously. If anyone had stopped him and asked him what he thought of it all, he would have answered with his surprise at finding Rome so yellow. . but no one did. One after another he visited the places he felt bound to visit, and, it is true, he often found upon returning to the Via del Babuino that he could not remember which was which, that he was not sure whether he had seen the Laocoön, though here was a familiar picture of it before him, that he even, at one point, confused the Sistine and Pauline chapels, and finally both of them with the Vatican library, where he was quite sure he had not been at all. As for the statue of Saint Peter, with its foot worn smooth by kisses, he did not mention to Mrs. Deigh that he had wiped his lips after kissing it himself. He usually reported his excursions to her, as he did one day entering to interrupt her petulant murmurs over the newspaper, — He is wearing that heavy fisherman's ring back on his right hand again, which must mean his arthritis is better. Of course We have requested the Blessed Virgin Mary. . She thrust the paper away, showing a new book titled Le. cinque fonti sanguinose nesting in her ample lap.