William Gaddis: The Recognitions

He had entered a Franciscan monastery as a guest, in a cathartic measure which almost purged him of his life.

The Real Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de la Otra Vez had been finished in the fourteenth century by an order since extinguished. Its sense of guilt was so great, and measures of atonement so stringent, that those who came through alive were a source of embarrassment to lax groups of religious who coddled themselves with occasional food and sleep. When the great monastery was finished, with turreted walls, parapets, crenelations, machicolations, bartizans, a harrowing variety of domes and spires in staggering Romanesque, Byzantine effulgence, and Gothic run riot in mullioned windows, window tracings, and an immense rose window whose foliations were so elaborate that it was never furnished with glass, the brothers were brought forth and tried for heresy. Homoiousian, or Homoousian, that was the question. It had been settled one thousand years before when, at Nicæa, the fate of the Christian church hung on a diphthong: Homoousian, meaning of one substance. The brothers in faraway Estremadura had missed the Nicæan Creed, busy out of doors as they were, or up to their eyes in cold water, and they had never heard of Arius. They chose Homoiousian, of like substance, as a happier word than its tubular alternative (no one gave them a chance at Heteroousian), and were forthwith put into quiet dungeons which proved such havens of self-indulgence, unfurnished with any means of vexing the natural processes, that they died of very shame, unable even to summon such pornographic phantasms as had kept Saint Anthony rattling in the desert (for to tell the truth none of these excellent fellows knew for certain what a woman looked like, and each could, without divinely inspired effort, banish that image enhanced by centuries of currency among them, in which She watched All with inflamed eyes fixed in the substantial antennae on Her chest). Their citadel passed from one group to another, until accommodating Franciscans accepted it to store their humble accumulation of generations of chanty. These moved in, encumbered by pearl-encrusted robes, crowns too heavy for the human brow with the weight of precious stones, and white linen for the table service.

They had used the place well. Here, Brother Ambrosio had been put under an iron pot (he was still there) for refusing to go out and beg for his brethren. There was the spot where Abbot Shekinah (a convert) had set up his remarkable still. There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured. He was surnamed Epiclantos, 'weeping so much,' and the quicklime he had been rubbing into his eyes was put back into the garden where it belonged. And there, in the granary, was the place where an abbot, a bishop, and a bumblebee. but there are miracles of such wondrous proportions that they must be kept, guarded from ears so wanting in grace that disbelief blooms into ridicule.

They got on well enough, even with the Holy See, the slight difficulties which arose in the seventeenth century being quite understandable, for who could foresee what homely practice would next be denounced as a vice by the triple-tiered Italian in the Vatican. The Brothers were severely censured for encouraging geophagous inclinations among the local nobility, whose ladies they had inspirited with a craving for the taste of the local earth, as seasoning, or a dish in itself: it was, after all, Spanish earth. But the commotion died. The ladies were seduced by salt (it was Spanish salt, from Cadiz), and peace settled for two more centuries, broken only by occasional dousings of the church altar with flying milk by peasants who chose this fashion of delivering their tithes, or monks knocked senseless by flying stones when they were noticed beyond the walls.

No one had ever got round to installing central heating, or any other kind. In summer, no one thought of it; in winter the good Brothers were immobilized, stagnating round heavily clothed tables with braziers underneath which toasted their sandaled feet, warmed them as far as the privities, and left them, a good part of the time, little better than paraplegics. The winter Reverend Gwyon appeared was a particularly harsh one in Estremadura. He was admitted as a curiosity, for few had ever seen a living Protestante, let alone one of their caudillos. But for Fr. Manomuerta, the organist, their guest might have been invited elsewhere: had not the confessor to the young king recently declared that to eat with a Protestante was to nominate one's self for excommunication? not vitando, perhaps, but at the least implying the consequence of working for a living. Curiosity prevailed. And at Christmas, Fr. Manomuerta reported to his fraternity that he had witnessed (through the large keyhole) their heretic guest administer the Eucharist to himself in his room, a ceremony crude and lonely compared to their own. — He is a good man, Fr. Manomuerta told the others, — there is some of Christ in him. But a few of those others wanted Gwyon castigated for defiling their rite, and even those who did not credit him with an actual Black Mass felt there was no telling how much damage might have been done simply by his tampering. Fr. Manomuerta understood some of the English language and assured them no such thing had happened, but for those whose suspicions were not allayed, reward seemed imminent some days later.

Gwyon had impressed his hosts with his capacity for their red wine, inclined to sit drinking it down long after they had finished eating, wiped their silver on their linen napkins and hidden it, and padded away. But he finally succumbed to a bronchial condition which threatened to become pneumonia and give him opportunity to pay the highest of Protestant tributes to Holy Church by dying on the good Brothers' hands. In a small room whose window lay in the countenance of the church facade overlooking the town's muddy central plaza, he developed a delirium which recalled the legends of the venerated Eulalio Epiclantos to some, to others (better read) the demoniacal persecution of Saint Jean Vianney, the Cure d'Ars, whose presbytery was in a continual state of siege, demons throwing platters and smashing water jugs, drumming on tables, laughing fiendishly and even, one night, setting fire to the curtains round the cure's bed. Gwyon himself was a big man. It was considered wise to leave him alone during these visitations.

So he lay alone one evening, perspiring in spite of the cold, almost asleep to be wakened suddenly by the hand of his wife, on his shoulder as she used to wake him. He struggled up from the alcoved bed, across the room to the window where a cold light silently echoed passage. There was the moon, reaching a still arm behind him, to the bed where he had lain. He stood there unsteady in the cold, mumbling syllables which almost resolved into her name, as though he could recall, and summon back, a time before death entered the world, before accident, before magic, and before magic despaired, to become religion.

Clouds blew low over the town, shreds of dirty gray, threatening, like evil assembled in a hurry, disdained by the moon they could not obliterate.

Next day the Brothers, in apprehensive charity, loaded Gwyon onto a mule, and after conducting him as far as the floor of the valley, Fr. Manomuerta Godsped him with benediction and the exhortation to return. Following a horrendous journey, Gwyon was delivered to the best hotel in the country, where he was left to recover.

At night, his was the only opened window in Madrid. Around him less than a million people closed outside shutters, sashes, inside shutters and curtains, hid behind locked and bolted doors themselves in congruent shapes of unconsciousness from the laden night as it passed. Through that open window he was wakened by lightning, and not to the lightning itself but the sudden absence of it, when the flash had wakened him to an eternal instant of half-consciousness and left him fully awake, chilled, alone and astonished at the sudden darkness where all had been light a moment before, chilled so thoroughly that the consciousness of it seemed to extend to every faintly seen object in the room, chilled with dread as the rain pounding against the sill pounded into his consciousness as though to engulf and drown it. — Did I close the study window?. The door to the carriage barn? Anything. did I leave anything out in the rain? Polly?… a doll he had had forty years before, mistress of a house under the birch trees in the afternoon sun, and those trees now, supple in the gale of wind charged inexhaustibly with water and darkness, the rest mud: the sense of something lost.