William Gaddis - The Recognitions

Back on the left bank, the philosopher on the terrace of the Flore had been superseded by a blond woman with a fake concen- tration camp number tattooed on her left arm, who was supervising a discussion on Suffering. To one side, a chess game progressed with difficulty, for there was argument as to which tall piece was the king, which queen. An American who had been motoring in North Africa said, — Don't laugh, it isn't funny. We hit one. There are about thirty-five a day in Casablanca, they just don't understand machines. It cost me thirty-two thousand francs to get my car fixed, I should have hit him square. They even found his teeth in the muffler.

One end of the Deux Magots was honoring a painter who had been discovered by an American fashion magazine: until 1916, he had painted nothing but bottles. His artistic revolution came in 1930. He discovered white.

Max had left the Royale. — How does he make it, does he work somewhere? — He lives out in a suburb called Banlieu, Hannah said, — he paints pictures for a well-known painter who signs them and sells them as originals. — But they are originals. . Twelve Arab children sold peanuts from the tops of baskets and hashish from the bottom. Someone said there was a town in France called Condom. Many of the young men wore beards. — I never did understand Italian money while I was there, it was like confetti, rarther expensive confetti. . Hannah said she had to go to work. She read her poems aloud in a local cave, naked. — I'm studying art here on the GI bill, one of the beards said, — I've found a school where all you have to do is register. Someone recited the Malachi prophecy concerning the Papacy. — There are only seven more to go, counting this one. — Do you think Paris is worth a Mass? someone asked, clutching a book titled Les cinq fontaines ensanglantées. —Nostradamus predicts it will last until 3420. AD that is.

On the terrace of the Reine Blanche, the blond boy said, — Next week he's promised to take me to Paris. . — But baby, this is Paris. Rudy and Frank had left, to return to their new flat overlooking the Pont d'léna with some of their gay party, all of whom stopped in the foyer to admire the large painting which had been a wedding present from a well-known artist. It portrayed a tall man standing, and a youth reclining at his feet, gazing up at what, upon close inspection, proved to be no more than a tear in the tall man's trousers. Then one of the guests started to open the drapes at the long windows, and was stayed immediately from it. — Because Rudy just looked and looked for months for a place just like this, overlooking the water, and the very first night we were here, standing right here in this very spot looking out at the lights and the Seine, a girl went out on the bridge and took her shoes off and jumped, right before our eyes, and that's just ruined the view ever since for both of us… Then Frank was excused to write a letter home to Ohio, while the rest sat down to friandises served on modern Finnish glassware, to light cigarettes from match books stamped Rudy and Frank, and talk of Copenhagen. — Dear Mummy, Frank wrote, in the bedroom, — I know you will understand why I want to be with him always, Mummy. I know you will understand when I tell you that I love him the way you loved Daddy. .

— "Time is a limp. ." Hannah read under the pavement, her words rising despumated on the smoke and desultory commingling of languages, — emmerdant. . — les americains, alors. . while the city might seem to try to sleep out this great gap of time, asking, — Hast thou affections? — Yes, gracious madam. — Indeed! — Not in deed, madam. . yet ha\e 1 fierce affections, and think what Venus did with Mars. . The thirty-third person leaped from the Eiffel Tower (though unofficial figures had it nearer a hundred), this time from the 348-1001 second platform, and after a twenty-year investigation the Friends of Cleopatra found that the remains in her grave, in the library garden of the Louvre, were not that queen at all, but the body of an Arab soldier killed in a Paris cafe brawl, and the mummy, looking like a tight bundle of rags, gone to a mass grave eighty years before, and all joy of the worm. — Et toute nue. . quelle envahisseuse! — "Time is a limp. ." she commenced again.

Behind the clattering bastion of saucers, the aging image of the wigless father of her country read on, and someone said she could sit like that all night, because she wore a Policeman's Friend. Someone on the terrace of the Deux Magots said a balloon race had begun that afternoon in the Bois. Someone read the message on a card from a friend touring the Holy Land, — I've just visited the Wailing Wall, and had a good cry. In the men's toilet downstairs, someone scrawled Vive le Pape over the urinal.

America

My contrey tears a dee Sweat land a liberty of D.I.C.

Landwert ar fater dye Land of thy pildrem bride From every mountain sides Every dumb breed wrote a student at the Essex

County Boys Vocational and Technical High School in Newark, New Jersey.

The 00th person leaped from the Empire State Building in New York.

In San Francisco, seven strands of barbed wire were strung at the jumping-off place on the Golden Gate Bridge, which one hundred and fifty people had chosen as a point of departure from this world since the bridge was opened in 1937.

In Moscow, Pravda announced that Hawaiian guitar music had been banned in Russia.

Was the long winter really done? and "the fireside, the slippers and the waiting bed" no longer there to "protect the depressed person from himself. . This line of retreat recedes as the day grows longer," the World Health Organization reported, finding, in these verdant expressions of springtime's acceleration, "the never-ending daylight difficult to bear, . and the glorious sun becomes a curse."

Any city that calls herself modern anticipates all her children's needs, even to erecting something high for them to jump from: the Eiffel Tower went up more than half a century ago; but everywhere the rural population must make shift to civilize itself with what it has. In southwestern France, within the neighborhood of Landes, forty-eight hours in the Easter holidays saw a woman hung in a farm barn, two men in a forest, one into a river, and another into the sea, while Deauville was already preparing to celebrate Pentecost, some seven weeks hence, by issuing five-hundred-thousand-franc chips in the casino, for the first time.

"Plage a allengas to are flag," wrote the New Jersey high-school student, hardpressed by his progressive education: "i plegance to are flag of the united states of American / An to the republican for region stands / One machone in the viguable / witch libryt an justest for all". .

Libryt and justest, Los Angeles police confiscated a hydraulic press, dies, and the plastic rubber compound with which the three arrested men were counterfeiting poker chips, to be cashed in the gambling palaces across the line in Las Vegas.

In the viguable, the machone's customs agents were importuning a Hollywood movie producer for duties on a "Study by Candlelight" by Vincent van Gogh. The purchaser said it was an "original" and therefore should enter the machone duty-free, witch libryt an justest guaranteed to any genuine work of art no matter how valuable; but the guardians of the viguable demanded a healthy cut (10 per cent) of the purchase price ($50,000.00), enforcing the tariff this sweat land levels on an "imitation or copy" whose entrance threatens the livelihood of the inspiration even now ringing from every mountain sides.

Lovers of beautiful things were thick as thieves. Some of the six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of paintings stolen from a cathedral in Bardstown, Kentucky (including a Descent of