Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “NOW BUT WHAT ABOUT that old Dahlia,” said Reef later, when she’d gone back to Ca’ Spongiatosta, “time comes to get out of town in a hurry, how you fixin to handle that?”

  “Don’t think she’ll miss me all that much.”

  Reef smiled back with the patented tightlip look which had served him faithfully across so many gaming tables. The burden of which was “Oh, go on ahead ’th whatever you had in mind, just don’t blame me later on,” being useful for throwing other players into paralyses of doubt, as well as making him look like a compassionate opponent who worried that he might win too much of the others’ rent or baby-food money.

  Grasping invisible reins and making get-on-with-it motions, Kit finally said, “What?”

  “I’ll tell you a story someday. Maybe.”

  IN THE UNRELENTING DRIZZLE, some five or six carabinieri were arranged strategically along the fondamenta, preventing people from crossing the bridge to the Palazzo. Greatcoat collars turned up against the chill. No telling how long they would have to be posted here. Under the aspect of a painting not hanging on any recognized wall, titled Failure. Kit and Reef slunk by, trying to be part of the imprimatura. Along the pavement opposite, figures in black, bent as if against some wind of fatality, moved in a viscid streaming, beneath black umbrellas in fitful undulation, each step a struggle, all traffic fragmented into private missions of desire. . . . Isolated from consequences as the middle of the night.

  Electric lights in the windows, torches carried to and fro by servants, the flames continually beaten at by the wind. A heavy interior susurrance, inflected by ancient stone, issuing out onto the rio along with a small string orchestra playing arrangements of Strauss Jr., Luigi Denza, and hometown luminary Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari.

  Kit caught sight of Dally in the Principessa’s borrowed gown and a dark silk paletot, her incendiary hair done up in an ostrich-plume aigrette dyed indigo, sweeping in the gate and up the marble steps to the piano nobile, and for a heartbeat and a half just forgot where he was and what he was supposed to be doing here.

  Scarsdale Vibe arrived in a private gondola and mirrored by Foley Walker stepped on to the fondamenta. There was the unmistakable snap of a gunshot.

  Sudden as a storm out on the Lagoon, bodyguards in black were rising up from everywhere, long-annealed teppisti newly arrived in town from strikebreaking duties in Rome and the factories of the North, armed, silent, masked, and on the move.

  “Christ, it’s an army,” Reef muttered. “Where’d they come from?”

  And here right in the middle of it came this skinny kid in a borrowed suit, shirt-collar too big, immediately read as out of place and therefore in disguise and therefore a threat. “It’s that Tancredi kid, what’n the hell’s he doing here?”

  “Oh no,” Kit said. “This ain’t good.”

  There was no way to get to him, he was inside the black funeral train, already rolling, of his terrible intention.

  “Via, via!” they were kind enough to warn him off, but he kept approaching. He was doing the one thing authority cannot abide, will never allow to pass, he was refusing to do as he was told. What was the object he held in his hand, carefully, as if it might explode at the slightest jar? “His hands were empty,” Pugliese said later, “nobody found a weapon.”

  Mascaregna shook his head, disconsolate. “He said he had an infernal machine, which would bring down Vibe and, some distant day, the order Vibe expresses most completely and hatefully. This was his precious instrument of destruction. It gave off a light and heat Tancredi alone could sense, it blinded him, it burned fiercely in his hands, like the glowing coal in the Buddhist parable, he could not let it go. If Vibe was an acquirer of art, then here was Tancredi’s creation, his offering, the masterwork he thought would change any who beheld it, even this corrupted American millionaire, blind him to the life he had been inhabiting, bring him to a different kind of seeing. No one gave him a chance to say, “Here it is, here is a bounded and finite volume of God’s absence, here is all you need to stand before and truly see, and you will know Hell.”

  Flame stabbed out of the muzzles of brand-new Glisentis, shots echoed off the water and the stone walls, tremendous, ripping apart the silence. Tancredi’s limbs had flown open, as if he were preparing to embrace as much as he could of what the world had just been reduced to—the first rounds contracted him to a remnant, bowing down as if before some perverse nobility, around and behind him rising the ancient splendor of the Palazzo, as he slipped and fell in his own blood and passed into a void in the day where bells were silent, the city he both loved and resented taken away, no longer his to transfigure.

  At first it seemed they might only be prodding at the remains with their boot-tips—to be expected of professionals, after all, just making sure the subject didn’t suddenly come to life again. But this grew less tentative, and soon the assassini were delivering brutal kicks, as forcefully as they could, shouting insults till the fondamenta sounded like a jailyard, while Scarsdale Vibe all but danced up and down in delighted approval, loudly offering procedural advice.

  “Make sure you damage the face, fellows. Batti! batti la faccia, yes? Destroy it. Give the little shitass’s Mamma something to cry about.” When his voice was too hoarse to go on, he approached and looked down for a while on the torn corpse in its bath of public light, feeling blessed at having witnessed firsthand this victory over Anarchist terror. Foley, for whom it had once been the vernacular of daily life in a Union regiment, stood by and didn’t comment.

  Rising fog had begun to mix with the slow dissipation of gunsmoke. A party of rats, having taken immediate interest, had emerged from the canal. Out of consideration for any late-arriving guests, one of the gunmen, using the boy’s hat, was trying to sluice away some of the blood from the pavement with hatfuls of canal water.

  Vibe stood at the highest point of the little bridge without speaking, back turned, a solid black silhouette, head and cloak, held waiting in an unmistakable tension seeming not to grow in size so much as, oddly, to take on mass, to become rectified into an iron impregnability. For an instant, before he made his deliberate way back into the shelter of the lighted and melodious palazzo, he turned and stared straight at Kit, leaving no doubt that he recognized him, and even with the falling night, the foschia and the guttering torchlight, Kit could see enough of the triumphant smirk on the man’s face. You pathetic little pikers, he might have been chuckling, who—what—did you think you were up against?

  “ACCORDING TO THE POLICE, Anarchists specialize, Foley, did you know that? The Italian ones usually go after royalty. Empress Elisabeth, King Umberto, so forth.”

  “Guess that makes you American royalty,” quipped Foley.

  “King Scarsdale. Yes. Has a lilt to it.”

  They were up in the grand dining room at the Bauer-Grünwald eating roast tenderloin of lamb and guzzling Pommery. The room was busy with eaters whose supply of cash far exceeded any degree of hunger they could remember or imagine. Waiters conversed in undertones which only just managed to be polite, in which the word cazzo occurred often. Chandeliers, whose crystalline arrangements were set to exquisitely fine clearances, shivered and chimed as if able to sense each negligible settling of the building into the primeval Venetian ooze beneath.

  Later Scarsdale was astonished to see Foley out carousing on the embankment, whirling round and round with not one but three young women, accompanied by some local maniac with an accordion. From time to time, firecrackers went off as well.

  “Foley, what in heaven’s name?”

  “Dancin that tarantella,” Foley replied, out of breath.

  “Why?”

  “Celebrating. Just happy that they didn’t get you.”

  If Scarsdale heard an emphasis on “they” he gave no indication.

  “WHERE’N THE HELL’D all ’em pistoleros come from?” Reef had been repeating, like a sort of prayer in time of defeat.

  “They were hired for the evening,” Dally said. “And there
’d have been no way to buy them off, not with what your Mr. Vibe was paying them.”

  “Why didn’t somebody say something?” Reef more annoyed than plaintive.

  “I did—you just didn’t want to hear about it. Everybody else in these calli knew.”

  “We figured there’d be extra hands,” Kit said, “just not so many. Dumb luck we got away, we could look at it like that.”

  “That kid sure didn’t get anyplace,” Reef scowling at his brother. “Sorry, Dahlia.”

  She was shaken, more than she was willing to let on. It seemed years she’d been dropping by to see Tancredi and his paintings. She was aware in almost a neural way of all the creation that would not happen now, the regret and horror at what she had almost been a part of, and worst of all the shameful, shameful relief at still being alive. They might never have become lovers, but shouldn’t they have been allowed some time to find out? He was a virtuous kid, like all these fucking artists, too much so for the world, even the seen world they were trying to redeem one little rectangle of canvas at a time.

  “I should’ve seen it coming,” Dally said. “Somebody shopped him. This miserable town, a thousand years of ratting to the law.”

  “I could at least have said be careful,” Kit mumbled.

  “Listen, children,” Reef throwing things in a valise, “when they invent the time machine, we’ll buy tickets, hop in, come back to last night, and all shall be made jake. Meantime the old sidewinder has took his charmed life someplace else, and no telling when we’ll get another shot. If ever. I sure don’t know how the hell long we’re supposed to keep doin this.” He went out the door, and they heard him on the stairs.

  “Well I’m just as glad it didn’t happen,” she said quietly. “One dead is one too many.” Looked up at Kit and the silent term was clear in her face—one dead, one about to head off into exile.

  Kit paused in his efforts at disguise, mostly to do with combing shoe polish into his hair. “I do keep my promises, Dahlia.”

  She nodded, kept nodding, figured there was plenty of time later to get around to crying.

  “You know if there was any way I could stay—”

  “There isn’t. You don’t need my permission.”

  “Vibe saw me there, at the scene. If he didn’t already figure it out, he has now, and there’s none of them who’ll just let it be anymore.”

  “That case you’d best get going, don’t end up the same way.”

  Though Kit had never made much sense of Venice, it almost seemed normal compared to what he was headed into. Dally recognized the condition. “Here they say bagonghi, the way it feels when you go staggering around all over the place like a circus clown.” He went to sleep and woke with the single operatic image of Vibe turning to stare him mercilessly in the face, having known all along exactly where he’d been stationed across the little canal, while all around them day-wage assassins revealed themselves, as if Time’s own prætorians had risen up to defend it. The rose-dyed smile, the smile of a pope in a painting, framed in a face that didn’t customarily smile, one you’d prefer never to see, for it meant trouble on the tracks.

  It was probably also the undeniable moment, if one had to be singled out, of Kit’s exclusion from what had been spoken of at Yale as a “future”—from any routes to success or even bourgeois comfort that were Scarsdale Vibe’s to control. Kit was not sure how much he’d ever wanted that, but now there wasn’t even the choice. Yashmeen’s stranniki had delivered themselves entirely into the service of God and the Mysterious Death, but as far as Kit could see, this journey ahead of him was not for God, not for Yashmeen, who was the love of somebody’s life no doubt, just not Kit’s, nor any longer even for the cause of Vectorism—maybe nothing more than the simple preservation through flight of his increasingly worthless ass.

  THEY MIGHT HAVE imagined some effortless departure into a golden fog, but as it turned out, the brothers did not part on what you’d call affectionate terms. As if the gunplay at the Palazzo had been catching up with Reef or something, he’d now cranked himself into a grim mood.

  “You don’t have to come wave good-bye at the depot, fact it’s better you don’t, ’cause I won’t be wavin back anyway.”

  “Something on your mind Reef?”

  Reef shrugged. “You never wanted in on that deal. You dragged your feet all the way. Well it’s over now and so long, kid.”

  “You’re blaming me for what happened?”

  “You sure wa’n’ no help.”

  Kit’s fingers began to ache, and he peered back at his brother, hoping he’d heard wrong.

  “Your fairy godfather’s still out there drinkin Champagne and pissin on Pa’s memory. And there’s nothin you can say anymore, ’cause you don’t know nothin.” Reef turned and went glaring away, shoulders hunched, up onto the Ponte degli Scalzi, soon absorbed into a mobility of hundreds of separate futures, whose destiny could not be told in any but a statistical way. And that was that.

  OFF ON THE night steamer for Trieste, the lights through the fog apt to slide off into spectral effects, billowing like cloaks flourished by sleepless masqueraders, Giudecca invisible . . . likewise the shrouded Stromboli and the other Italian warships at anchor . . . the calls of the gondolieri taking on in the foschia a queer anxiety, the leather sides of trunks and valises wet and shining in the electric glare . . . Dally kept disappearing, with Kit each time expecting her not to be there when the view cleared again. Lighters and traghetti, carrying travelers, baggage, and cargo, crowded the little fetch, each vessel a waterborne stage for high-intensity theatricals, passionate practical advice from all directions, trunks handed up in the vaporous scurry, always just about to topple comically, with their owners, into the canal. Musicians in twos and threes were playing all along the Zattere, some from the King’s Band, picking up a few extra soldi. Everything in minor modality.

  Nobody would have come to see Kit off, his brother was on the rails again, already miles out of town, and now Dally thought of it, what in blazes was she doing here saying good-bye—nothing better to do? What could sentimental embraces at the water’s edge mean to this jasper anyway?

  Around them travelers drank wine out of cheap Murano souvenirs, clapped shoulders, brushed away leaf and petal debris from last-minute bouquets, argued over who had failed to pack what. . . . Dally was supposed to be past the melancholy of departure, no longer held by its gravity, yet, as if she could see the entire darkened reach of what lay ahead, she wanted now to step close, embrace him, this boy, for as long as it took to establish some twofold self, renounce the somber fate he seemed so sure of. He was gazing at her as if having just glimpsed the simple longitude of what he was about to do, as if desiring to come into some shelter, though maybe not her idea of it . . . so, like terms on each side canceling, they only stood there, curtains of Venetian mist between them, among the steam-sirens and clamoring boatmen, and both young people understood a profound opening of distinction between those who would be here, exactly here day after tomorrow to witness the next gathering before passage, and those stepping off the night precipice of this journey, who would never be here, never exactly here, again.

  Dearest Father,

  I write in uncertainty as to whether you shall ever read this—so, paradoxically, in a kind of faith, now made perhaps more urgent by doubts which have arisen concerning those to whose care you entrusted me, so long ago.

  I believe that the T.W.I.T. no longer act in my interest—that my continued safety is now of little consequence to them, if not indeed a positive obstacle to plans of their own kept entirely hidden from me. We are at present in Switzerland, and due to entrain in a day or two for Buda-Pesth, where, unless my “gifts of prophecy” have deserted me, danger and perhaps sorrow await.

  The unexpressed term, as ever, remains Shambhala—though you, who have long and honourably served within its sphere of influence, may find it easy to dismiss the anxieties of one who knows it only at second (let us say, third) hand. Yet, like tho
se religious charlatans who claim direct inter-course with God, there are an increasing number at the T.W.I.T. who presume a similar intimacy with the Hidden City, and who, more disturbingly, cannot separate it from the secular politics of present-day Europe.

  History has flowed in to surround us all, and I am left adrift without certainty, only conjectures. At Göttingen, for a while, after the revolution in Russia, I was perceived as useful by at least one group of heretical Bolshevist refugees. The recent understanding between England and Russia has seemingly enhanced my value to the British War and Foreign Offices. As for what use I still may be to the T.W.I.T., only they can say—but will not. It is as if I possessed, without my knowledge, some key to an encrypted message of great moment, which others are locked in struggle to come into control of.

  Those in whose company I travel but among whom, I fear, I am no longer counted, once presented themselves as seekers after a kind of transcendence. . . . I believed, for many years—too many—that I might someday learn the way. Now that they have forfeited my trust, I must look elsewhere. . . . For what mission have I here, in this perilous segment of space-time, if not somehow to transcend it, and the tragic hour into which it is passing?