The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (49 page)

—It’s a study. The next picture, the next . . . painting I’m going to do, this . . . little . . .

—You . . .

—I . . .

She had both arms around his shoulders; and the breath denied by the form before them came the more quickly. He straightened up
and stood, straightened her to her feet and turned away from her. —That’s all, he said. —We’ll stop for today, very much the way he always said it. He took the soiled thing down from the easel. —I have to work on this, he said, approaching the large finished painting which stood on the floor almost between them. —Can you help me lift it up.

She stood staring at him, as though to stop his motions with the seizure of her eyes.

—Esme?

She lifted the other end of the thing, and they raised it. He picked up the knife again.

Kinder- und Hausmärchen
lay at her feet, one of half a dozen books in the place. —How beautiful she is, no longer me, Esme said, looking at the prolonged figure in the painting, —for she is dead.

Over the emphatic drawing and the underpainting, translucent colors were fixed in intimate detail upon the established forms, colors added separately, unmixed on the palette, layer upon layer, constructed from within as necessity disposed these faces emptied in this perfect moment of the transient violence of life.

Round the closed eyes of the Virgin, where she looked now, the highlights were not opaque colors on the surface, but from the light underpainting tinted with ultramarine.

—Dead before death was defamed, she said, —as it is by those who die around us now, dying absurdly, for no reason, in embarrassment that the secret, the dirty secret kept so long, is being exposed, and they cannot help it, cannot hide it longer, nor pretend as they have spent their life in doing, that it does not exist. Yes, the blue, the beautiful blue of Her mantle there. How abashed they are to leave us, making up excuses and apologies with every last breath, so ashamed are we to die alone. How shocking it will be to see the day come again, out where they are, where the law does not permit him to sell lilies.

She moved away, to pull on a dress, and a coat, and treading on the length of blue cloth she approached him again from behind, where he stood in the strong light with the knife, and raised it to the face laid with closed eyes near the top of the composition.

—Before death was dishonored, she said, watching his hand move, —as you are dishonoring it now.

He continued to work. For some minutes there was no sound but the scratching of his blade. Then he turned round, raising his eyebrows in a mild surprise at the empty room, drawing his nostrils at the delicate scent which had returned and remained (for the brief pungence of the Venice turpentine had penetrated and was gone), as affirmative of recognition as the sight of blood, as the blood gushing
on every Friday from the stigmata of Francesca de Serrone, blood with the odor of violets.

On the door, locked and bolted, she pinned a sign:
Do Not Disturb Me I Am Working Esme
. What worse thing could have happened, than had happened that morning. She had hidden the needle, the good silver (No. 22) needle with the glass syringe, in the black metal box on the wall over the sink. Who would think of looking there? Who, but a man in uniform. He entered carrying a flashlight, to walk past her and open the black box there on the wall over the sink without hesitating. He turned his light into the box, wrote something on a pad, then took the needle out and handed it to her. —You shouldn’t put things in here, ma’am. It’s liable to interfere with the meter. He saluted her hand-to-cap and went away.

She sat with a piece of white paper before her, the penholder’s end in her mouth like a child told to write a letter home, being watched writing it, the letter to be read by her familiar jailer before it is mailed home. Over the paper she followed the course of an ant, pursuing its frantic flight with the scrupulously cruel point of the pen, leaving behind a trail of black crossing and recrossing until the ant escaped to the rust-colored arm of her chair.

How were they all so certain? calling her “Esme”: they knew she was
Esme
when she did not know, who she was or who Esme, if both were the same, every moment, when they were there, or when she was alone, both she. But she could not deny that they were right, for who would be making that denial? and if
who
could not be
no one
, it must be Esme. She thought now of undressing; and the thought was too much to bear, to undress alone, and stand there naked alone; with nothing, even shadows in this bare room, to cover her.

Across the bottom of the page where the terror of the ant was drawn she wrote,
An ant going home who does not live anywhere
.

Worse had been two nights before: asked her age, earlier, she had told it: twenty-nine. (That was the way she did, adding a year to this slow number when May appeared, and passed, taking another year with it.) Then alone at night, she had thought of the indelible year of her birth, subtracted it from this year whose number she shared with everyone, and come out with thirty. A year missing? She turned on the light, and covered three pages with numbers: the year, and her age opposite; and then the year and the month and her age; then the year, the month, her age, and where she had been and what doing. Still a year lacked, unaccounted for. And when she put down the year of her daughter’s birth and worked toward it from the past and the present,
it
was the year missing. Was her
daughter unborn? Whence was the year missing? from her life? or from time? Unsolved, it became a part in that world where she lay alone, unasleep at night, her limbs cold and her feet almost blue (though the room was not cold) she saw before she turned out the light: moving none of her body (thinking about other things) and then with abrupt horror remembered her body which she could not feel, all awareness gone from her legs. Was one resting against the other? or alone? The slightest move would tell, were they there? would have told immediately, if she had moved immediately this doubt came. But not having turned a foot, nor thrown back a hand in that instant of doubt the doubt grew, deepened and she in it engulfed in paralytic terror, unable to see in that darkness whether those limbs had melted into an amorphous mass, or into nothing; unable to turn on the light, without moving, then she would try to think of something else, and move unconsciously; but she was unable to deceive herself so, unable to move until some extreme of her moved itself in exhaustion.

Esme stared at a fresh page of paper. Her face, more and more forgotten as effort worked through her, took a sulking look: one of fear, remembering now a sculpture of her head and bust made once by a student who did not know that, when the plaster dried, it would shrink one-tenth the size he had modeled it, so that he made the cord tight which supported the neck, and when it dried they found death’s excellent likeness of her head pendent, swinging gently with the door they had opened upon it. She hated herself for the fear which rose and choked her at that instant: the same terror that came at other times when, almost asleep, she woke suddenly with a deep breath of life, and the certainty that she had not been breathing, had recovered herself with her breath at the last instant of living possible: and then hating herself for her direct thankfulness at recovery, she who never wanted to recover.

She wrote slowly, with no effort apparent but as from memory, in confident trust as poetry is written,

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic

orders? And even if one of them suddenly

pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his

stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing

but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,

and why we adore it so is because it serenely

disdains to destroy us. Each single angel . . .

Then a knock sounded on her door, and drew her cold limbs abruptly in to her, startled and afraid.

PART II

A thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains forever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day; whereas in fact we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.

—Thomas De Quincey

Mr. Pivner stepped out of his office building, to the street. He moved warily, for not long before he had almost been knocked down by a cab. The December sky was gray, and the air dissolved in rain. To the south, however, lay a small portion almost rectangular in shape and extravagantly blue. It was banded by an arrogant streak of purple. He walked into the street without disturbing himself to verify the color of the sky, exposing his face and the pinched knot in his necktie to the rain which he could hear drumming on the brim of his hat. At three o’clock in the afternoon Eddie Zefnic, the office boy who daily during summer observed Mr. Pivner’s wilting collar with the greeting, —Hot enough for you Mister Pivner? stopped to brood beside one of the long office windows. He stared out on the city until Mr. Pivner reached that critical point in his signature, the capital “P,” which he liked to make a figure of dashing individuality even on order forms. As the pen touched paper, —It’s a real winter day out all right Mister Pivner, interrupted. He looked up, startled, botching the initial miserably. In other parts of the world, as unreal as New York was inevitable, the sky may have been sporting snow, sleet, cumulus clouds and thunderheads, the consoling pattern of a mackerel sky, or only itself, tenanted by a sun in the vastness of even blue so immense that it would seem darkness had never existed. But when
Mr. Pivner returned to his signature, the sky was settled for him. It was a lowering but safely remote, dull and unconscious gray.

Consequently there was no reason for him to stand idly in the wet, looking about and questioning the sky, when he came out of that office building. Little good would it have done him had he bothered. Tons of concrete and other opaque building materials stood between him and that impudent portion of blue.

In the fragment of sky which the buildings permitted above him flags were being lowered. For the full day they had floated, as much as the rain would allow, heraldic devices of marvelous power, far more impressive than a fiery cross, or the six balls of the Medici. A great bell signaled a telephone company which was omnipotent. Three strokes of white lightning on a blue ground hailed an electric company which controlled the allegiances of an office force equal to the medieval duchy of Mantua. The whole scene was lit by electricity, escaping statically in incandescent bulbs and, in splendidly colored fluidity adding a note of metaphysical (Bergsonian) hilarity to the air of well-curbed excitement, in tubes of glass cleverly contorted to spell out cacophonous syllables of words from a coined language, and names spawned in the estaminets of Antwerp. Any natural light which fell in from the sky, pale in impotence, was charitably neglected; but that sky, as has been noted, was a safe distance away.

Beneath these failing banners, these crippled ensigns depressing earthward under their own sodden weight, Mr. Pivner “walked through the streets, head covered but bowed. Marvelous constructions passed him: a blackened truck with blackened men and pails hanging from every projection, dragging a cart bellied with open fire under a tub of molten asphalt, came almost over his feet. He barely glanced at it. The names AJAX and HERCULES borne in gold thundered by at an arm’s reach, but Mr. Pivner did not appear to read. He stepped back, respectful as all ages of the expedition of heroes.

He had made this trip, a distance never measured in miles but in minutes, hundreds of times. Fortunately he had formed it as habit, for he accomplished it without thinking for a moment of where he was going, leaving his mind emptily cordial to the reflections of vacancy in the faces which stared with the same incurious anxiety at his own. If he had not rehearsed the trip many times, he might more easily have found himself among the flaming piles of rubble on a nearby city dump, which was a comparable distance away, far easier to reach, and whose central incineration plant had won a prize in functional architecture only ten years before.

Over and under the ground he hurried toward the place where
he lived. No fragment of time nor space anywhere was wasted, every instant and every cubic centimeter crowded crushing outward upon the next with the concentrated activity of a continent spending itself upon a rock island, made a world to itself where no present existed. Each minute and each cubic inch was hurled against that which would follow, measured in terms of it, dictating a future as inevitable as the past, coined upon eight million counterfeits who moved with the plumbing weight of lead coated with the frenzied hope of quicksilver, protecting at every pass the cherished falsity of their milled edges against the threat of hardness in their neighbors as they were rung together, fallen from the Hand they feared but could no longer name, upon the pitiless table stretching all about them, tumbling there in all the desperate variety of which counterfeit is capable, from the perfect alloy recast under weight to the thudding heaviness of lead, and the thinly coated brittle terror of glass.

The subway stopped under a river. It stayed there for minutes, while the occupants looked at one another, surreptitiously, appraising the company with whom they were trapped to meet disaster. One or two, not alone, started explanations for the delay, —Lines wet . . . —Somebody probly jumped . . . and stopped speaking, embarrassed at the sounds of their own voices. It stayed there for minutes, as though to iterate to their consciousness that they were unprotected, unknown, that they did not exist singly but only in aggregate, material for headlines. Mr. Pivner stared at an advertisement which, like 90 per cent of the advertisements he read, had no possible application in his life. He had no sewer; but with glazed attention he read, “Look, darling, he found my necklace,” spoken by a lady, of the Roto-Rooter Service man, who offered to come “to Razor Kleen that clogged sewer . . . No charge if we fail . . .” The subway stayed there for long enough to send one woman (who looked foreign, they said later at dinner tables) into hysterics, moaning that her head was swelling, tugging the tight hatband away from it and running down the car to thrust her head into people’s faces, couldn’t they see it was swelling? And they withdrew, abashed at this articulation of their own terror. Then the subway started and flashed its way into rock.