The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (155 page)

—Listen! there’s a moment, traveling . . .

—But I . . .

—Offered shelter, there they were, all the family at dinner . . .

—Usually working on something . . .

—But she didn’t wear her breasts around to be chewed by strangers, when she said . . .

—Without . . . reproach . . .

—her daughter . . .

—What? Ludy came down upon him, —You said, you have a daughter somewhere? . . .

At that he came round so quickly in the path that Ludy startled off it and the instant his foot went into the deep grass a commotion burst there. Another step back, Ludy stumbled and fell, and the bird which had fluttered up was caught in Stephen’s hand above him, where it beat its wings frantically.

—A daughter, yes.

—I’ve cut myself, Ludy said from the ground.

—Yes, Stephen laughed suddenly over him, holding the bird, looking down, where a streak formed on Ludy’s hand.

—But I’m bleeding . . . don’t, why are you laughing?

—Yes, who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him . . . ? Stephen stood there looking down, and he covered the bird in his hand with the hand mounting the diamonds. —But you can’t quiet it, you can’t comfort it, it would die of fright.

—It frightened me, so close . . .

—See, how it’s made . . .

—No, no . . . from far off, flying, yes, they’re beautiful . . . Ludy struggled up on his elbows. —But no, not this close, like that, they make my blood run cold . . . He looked at the faint streak on his hand and repeated, —I’m bleeding . . .

Stephen burst into laughter again, more loudly, standing there with the bird. —Yes, yes, who would have thought, the old man . . . he laughed more loudly, at the slight and so faintly colored streak, —to have had so much blood in him! . . .

—But what is it . . . no, Ludy shuddered on the ground and unable to rise while the bird was held over him there.

—A daughter, yes! and born out of, not love but borne out of
love, when it happened, the bearing, the present reshaped the past. And the suitor? Oh Christ! not slaying the suitors, no never, but to supersede where they failed, lie down where they left. Where they lost their best moments, and went on, to confess them in repetition somewhere else without living them through where they happened, trying to reshape the future without daring to reshape the past. Oh the lives! that are lost in confession . . .

—I’m bleeding . . .

—To run back looking for every one of them? every one of them, no, it’s too easy, Penelope spinning a web somewhere, and tearing it out at night, and waiting? or to marry someone else’s mistake, to atone for one of your own somewhere else, dull and dead the day it begins. You’d see, listen, listen, listen here if the prospect of sin, draws us on but the sin is only boring and dead the moment it happens, it’s only the living it through that redeems it.

—Where are you going?

—I’ve an early start, I’ve come this far. Hear the bells! the old man, ringing me on.

—But the bird . . . ?

—There are stories, I could tell you about Saint Dominic plucking alive the sparrow that interrupted his preaching . . .

—Just take it away, just, and let me get up, I’m bleeding.

—I told you, there was, a moment in travel when love and necessity become the same thing. And now, if the gods themselves cannot recall their gifts, we must live them through, and redeem them.

Stephen had knelt slowly beside the older man down on his back in the path who had retreated as best he could, shifting his weight away elbow to elbow, still prone with the bird’s brittle torment so close, bursting out, —But why are you doing this to me?

—Doing? what. You asked me, where am I going?

—But I’m bleeding.

—Listen, whoever started a journey, without the return in the front of his mind? The bird fluttered there in the austere hand almost closed on it. Stephen watched it with calm, as he spoke only instants of intensity in his voice showed hardening lines stand out on the hand, which the man on the ground watched, the hand’s shape broken only by the darting beaked head of the bird while from above Stephen watched its soft fluttering mantle, and his hand only a shape to contain it. —If it leads back into the wind blowing in off the desert, there’s Biskra. Or Nalut, and the crescent moon hung in the sky there, it’s all mine, I remember. When something you hadn’t planned happens, where you hadn’t planned it to happen . . . from north the Atlas stands up out of the earth, at sundown all of it looks like the world after the Deluge, then the darkness
comes in. There’s no horizon to separate fires on the mountainside from the low stars in the sky. The only way you know, a man passes between you if it’s fires there, you’ve that moment’s witness of goat hair passing between you it wasn’t a star.

—Please . . . said the man on the ground, making movement to rise, but his own eyes pinioned him on that bird, —don’t . . . you’ll kill it holding it, that tight? And as he watched, Stephen’s hand closed, only enough to stand out its tendons, and a whisper as tense.

—Yes yes yet should I kill thee? with, much cherishing?

And as the bird stilled in his hand, Stephen looked down, before him, at the old man on the ground. —What was it? he asked.

—But what, was what . . .

—Yes, something you wanted to ask me? Oh, remember? varé tava soskei me puchelas . . . much I wondered . . . but no. Stephen smiled down at him.

—Nothing, but . . . nothing, you see I I’ve been writing something here but I it’s it concerns an experience of a an a religious nature and the prayers, I wanted something from the service but the Latin . . . of course I studied Latin, I went through Vergil but hearing it, since I’m not Catholic, the Latin, I wanted something to, sort of round things off? And that old man, the prior? at the end of the service? whatever . . .

—From the service?

—But Latin . . .

—That ex-Manichee bishop of Hippo . . .

—Oh? is that the old man? the prior?

—Do you have a pencil? Then write this. Dilige et quod vis fac.

Stephen rose slowly above him, standing, watching the pencil move.

—e . t . . qu . o . d . . v . i . s . . fac, and what does it mean? I studied Vergil but I’ve forgotten . . .

—Love, and do what you want to.

—What . . . ?

Stephen stood, looking down at him.

—What? is that part of the service?

The bird was still warm in his hand. He opened it, and the bird moved against his fingers, as he stood looking down.

—I can look it up later. Dilige . . . The man on the ground moved up on his elbows.

—Yes, much I pondered, why you came here to ask me those questions, Stephen laughed above him, stepping away. He opened his hand. The bird struck it and went free. —Hear . . . ? Bells sounded, far down the hill there. —Goodbye.

—You’re going? The man on the ground raised himself from his elbows, staring at the slight streak of his blood.

—Yes, they’re waiting, Stephen said to him. —They’re waiting for me now, they . . . With his own eye, in the dawn, he caught the sparkle of the diamonds. —Her earrings, he said, —that’s where these are for. Did I tell you?

Stephen’s throat caught, looking down at the figure on the ground struggling to get up. —Yes . . . His eyes blurred on the figure older each instant of looking down at that struggle, and the hand where the blood lost all saturation. —Goodbye, hear? the bells, the old man ringing me on. Now at last, to live deliberately.

—But . . .

—What!

—You and I . . .

—No, there’s no more you and I, Stephen said withdrawing uphill slowly, empty-handed.

—But we . . . all the things you’ve said, we . . . the work, the work you were, working on . . . ?

—The work will know its own reason, Stephen said farther away, and farther, —Hear . . . ? Yes, we’ll simplify. Hear? . . .

—But . . .

—The old man, ringing me on.

The man in Irish thorn-proof did look a good deal older, by the time he’d picked himself up and got back to his room behind the walls. He meant to wash immediately he returned, but came in fumbling in a pocket with a wad of paper, which he brought out, saw there in his own hand,
Dilige et quod vis fac
, which he took out only long enough to annotate, “What mean?” and would, before his stay was out, find, as an unheartening curiosity, and drop on the floor (since there was no wastebasket).

He had left his windows opened, and the bird was sitting on one of the framed pictures when he came in, and closed the door behind him.

But he had already paused to make his notation, “What mean?” before he saw it, when it fluttered across the room to the other picture, and though he tried frantically to chase it toward the front, toward the windows and out, it fluttered the more frantically from one picture to the other, and back across the room and back, as he passed the mirror himself in both directions, where he might have glimpsed the face of a man having, or about to have, or at the very least valiantly fighting off, a religious experience.

—Notices posted in brothels, Rue de l’Aqueduct, Oran

Stanley was sprayed with green paint and had a finger broken on his first day in Rome. It happened when the band of Pilgrims he accompanied visiting the Basilica of Saint John Lateran was mistaken by alert police for a demonstration by a notorious political group, and set upon with as much ardor as the Saracens showed mauling those early Pilgrims to the Holy Land. Lonely, already tired before he started, unnerved by that violence, nettled to the extreme even by such small things as his constant re-encounters with the trundling, enamel-nailed, clicking (keeping tabs on Mystery!) fat woman, when he overheard mention of the Via Flaminia he remembered overhearing it named once before, lurking lonely in hospital corridors as he lurked now in Rome. He sought Mrs. Deigh, and reached her with less trouble than he might have expected. She sent the Automobile for him immediately.

Like other monuments of antiquity in the Eternal City, the Daimler stood at an impressive height, and moved, when it did so, with all of the dignity possible under such vulgar circumstances as locomotion. Stanley sat up front with the chauffeur; and though they rolled imperiously past streets and buildings which he’d crossed the ocean to see, he spent most of the ride gazing over his shoulder into the empty interior behind him, and the single seat there. Eventually, Mrs. Deigh might well insist that she’d got the car straight from the Vatican garage after the ascent of Benedict XV to a landscape where he would have no use for it (for, as an eminent Spaniard supplies, mortal man must triumph over distance and delay because
his vital time is limited: among the immortals, motorcars are meaningless). But she was generally the first to admit responsibility for installing the stained glass windows herself.

Once arrived, the silent chauffeur let Stanley in, rang a bell, and left him standing quite forlorn beside a piece of bronze statuary. But only for a moment. A blond figure in organdy and white fox swept up, extended a muscular arm which, on a man, might have been called brawny, froze Stanley with what, man or woman, was most certainly a wink, and was gone. Stanley wilted against the bronze, and dropped the hand he had held out in greeting. Then he straightened up and pretended to be inspecting the voluptuous nineteenth-century triumph of Judith over Holofernes, as he heard footsteps in the hall behind him.

—So this is Stanley! . . . and he’s already admiring our Donatello . . . he heard, and turned. —It’s his Salome . . . but then you knew that, of course. Are you all right, dear boy?

Mrs. Deigh was a stout woman. She wore a knee-length fur cape, a green summer cocktail dress with a scalloped hem, what appeared to be gold paper stars pasted on it, and décolletage which exposed a neckline of woolen underwear. She advanced with a distinct rattling sound, held Stanley’s hand in hers, and led him inside where, amidst deep red hangings, marble surfaces, heavily ornate gold frames enclosing obscure squares and rectangles, and more Victorian bronze, she sat him down to tell his story.

Encouraged by such exclamations as, —We are so grateful that He sent you straight to Us! . . . Stanley told haltingly of the circumstances of his voyage, though he did not get round to mentioning that he had accomplished it any other wise than alone.

—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 Dom 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 crêche 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.