Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “Eh? of course. Why shouldn’t I be.”

  “Have we offended you, Cyprian?” Jacintha carelessly radiant.

  “Look at her,” crooned Bevis, “she’s her own Ultraviolet Catastrophe.”

  “I am offended only by certain sorts of wallpaper,” Cyprian smiled tightly.

  “We always assumed you’d be about looking for us,” Bevis said.

  Cyprian stared back, he trusted not too rudely. “Because . . .”

  “Well because you’re not one of these bloody Theign people. Are you. If you were one of his, you’d be safely back on some neutral station by now, Geneva, New York or whatever.”

  “Oh, Moistleigh. I was in the neighborhood, that’s all. Lovely to see you both.” There had been a time, and not too long ago, when this sort of thing would have promised a good week of queasiness and resentment. Instead he felt, against the face his soul would have if souls had faces, a brisk vernal equipoise, as if he were aloft, maintaining an angle of attack into the advance edges of a storm none would have seen to the end of. It surprised him, and did not surprise him.

  After picking up a modest sum at the tables, Reef drifted around Nice for a while, sitting in cafés drinking no-name wine, or in hotel bars drinking pineapple Marquises with trois-six chasers. But he couldn’t see himself pursuing the life of a flâneur forever. What he really needed to do was to go out and blow something up. Clear his mind. No sooner had this thought occurred to him than who should appear but his old Simplon Tunnel compañero Flaco, even more anarchistic and dynamite-crazy than before, which was going some.

  “Flaco! What are you doin down this neck of the woods?”

  “Was back in Mexico for a while, almost got done for a oil-refinery job, had to spend some money, get out fast. But you know who I ran into in Tampico? your brother Frank! or Pancho, is what they call him there. And he said to tell you he ‘got one of them.’ Said you would know what that means.”

  “Well, old Frank. Well damn. He didn’t mention which one?”

  “No, that was it. He had three wagonloads of go-devil squibs he wanted to sell, you know, these little oil-well torpedos, hold about a quart of nitro each? Beautiful. We were in the market for some of them, he gave us a fair price. Buen hombre, your brother.”

  “I’ll say. See him again, tell him he better be watching his ass down there.”

  “Oh I’ll see him again. Hey! everybody in Mexico will be seein everybody again, know why? ’Cause everythin there is all ready to explode! Match is lit. I’m goin back soon’s I can.”

  “Real thing, this time?”

  “¡Seguro, ése! lot of fun, too. Fun for all. You want to come along?”

  “Don’t know. Think I should?”

  “You should come. What the hell’s there to do over here?”

  Well, first thing come to mind’d be the old sorry unfinished saga, so miserably aborted in Venice, of Scarsdale Vibe, whom Reef ought to be shadowing right now in fact, looking for that big moment to present itself. But since Ruperta’s exit, Reef had been working without much information, and Vibe might not even be this side the ocean anymore. And since the chilly parting with Kit, his heart hadn’t been that much in it either, tell the truth. . . .

  “I’m staying in the old town here,” Flaco said, “down near Limpia, ship’s sailing day after tomorrow, you know that bar, L’Espagnol Clignant, you can leave a message with Gennaro.”

  “It would surely be nice, mi hijo,” said Reef. “Like some old days I can almost remember.”

  Flaco peered at him closely. “You working a job here, is that it?”

  No reason he shouldn’t confide, given what he recalled of Flaco’s inflexible hatred of all the figures of consequence yet to be assassinated, both sides of the Atlantic.

  They sat outside a café in back of the Square Garibaldi. “I try to avoid places like this,” Flaco muttered. “Just the kind of bourgeois target anarchists love to bomb.”

  “We could find someplace else.”

  “Hell, let’s trust in professional courtesy,” Flaco said, “and the laws of probability.”

  “One thing to try and keep to an honorable deal with your dead,” it seemed to Reef, “another to just go spreading death any way you can. Don’t tell me I’m infected with bourgeois values. I’ve got to where I like these cafés, all this to-and-fro of the city life—rather be out here enjoying it than worried all the time about some bomb going off—” which is of course exactly when it happened, so unexpected and so loud that for many days afterward those who survived would not be certain it had really occurred, any more than believe someone had actually desired to send such long-evolved and dearly-bought civility into this great blossoming of disintegration—a dense, prolonged shower of glass fragments, green and clear and amber and black, from windows, mirrors and drinking glasses, carafes and bottles of absinthe, wine, fruit syrups, whiskey of many ages and origins, human blood everywhere, blood arterial, venous and capillary, fragments of bone and cartilage and soft tissue, wood splinters of all sizes from the furniture, shrapnel of tin, zinc and brass, from torn ragged sheets down to the tiny nails in picture frames, nitrous fumes, fluid unfurlings of smoke too black to see through—a huge, glittering passage skyward and back again, outward and across the street and down the block, passing through the rays of a completely indifferent noontide sun, like a long heliograph message sent too fast for any but angels of destruction to read.

  Leaving these so abruptly wounded bourgeoisie, crying like children, children again, with no obligation but to look helpless and pitiable enough to move those who had the means to defend them, protectors with modern weapons and unbreakable discipline, and what was taking them so long? As they cried, they found they were able to look into one another’s eyes, as if set free from most of their needs to pretend adulthood, needs in force up until what was still only a few seconds ago.

  “Flaco, damn that wa’n’ one of you crazy sumbitches was it?” Reef looking with interest at the blood that seemed to be all over him. He managed to crawl out from under what was left of the table and grab Flaco by the shirt. “Still got your head on, all that?”

  “Worse than bein back in that tunnel,” Flaco with a big stupid grin about to start crowing like a rooster with surprise at still being alive.

  “Let’s have a look, see if . . .” But it was not very damn hopeful. There weren’t many dead, but enough. Flaco and Reef lifted away wreckage, beat out a couple of small fires, found people wounded whose bleeding could be stopped with tourniquets, one or two who’d passed into shock and had to be covered with burned and blood-smeared tablecloths for warmth, and figuring, about the time the police and a few wild dogs began to show up, that they’d done what they could, they left. An early gregaou had swept upon the coast, and when the smoke had cleared some from his head, Reef thought he could smell snow in the air.

  “Some of these bandoleros,” Flaco still grinning, “they don’t care who the hell they do this to.”

  Reef almost said, “Why?” but was suddenly dizzy and had to sit down. Everything hurt.

  “You look like shit, pendejo,” Flaco advised him.

  “That arm of yours ain’t about to win no prizes either.”

  “I don’t think I broke it?” Flaco having a look—“¡Caray!”

  “Let’s go see the knife fella,” Reef suggested. This was Professeur Pivoine, who was a sort of neighborhood couturier of flesh wounds from the frequent street encounters in the Quartier Riquier. He could take out bullets too but admitted he was less of an artist at that.

  They found the instruments sharp and sterile and the Professeur in the mood for medical knifeplay. Afterward Reef passed into one of those twilit states where it seemed his brother Kit was there, hovering a foot or two in the air and glowing in a peculiar way.

  “I’m sorry,” Reef tried to say, his voice paralyzed as if in a nightmare when the light goes away and we hear a footfall and want to say “Who’s there?” but can’t.

  “It’s
all right,” Kit said, “you didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing I wouldn’t’ve done.”

  What the fuck are you talking about? he struggled to say, I did everything wrong. I ran away from my baby son and the woman I loved. Reef knew he was crying. All he could have cried for, and he was crying over this. It was like one of those orgasms early in life, a timeless event whose power can’t be measured. He shook with it. He felt tears and snot all on his face. Kit just floated around up there by the ceiling, going “Easy, easy” and other reassuring phrases, and then after a while he began to fade.

  THOUGH THE OUTLOOK for Anarchists in a shooting revolution is never too promising, Flaco was determined to go back to Mexico. Just before he sailed, he and Reef came limping into L’Espagnol Clignant for a bon voyage drink. They had sticking-plaster and surgical stitching and black patches of dried blood all over them that caused Gennaro the bartender at least a half hour’s merriment.

  “So you just gonna stay out on that old track, try to get you a capitalist with that elephant gun,” Flaco said.

  “Ought to be you folks’s beef too, after that kid Tancredi they went and mowed down.”

  Flaco shrugged. “Maybe he should’ve known better.”

  “Pretty cold, Flaquito. Kid’s in his grave, how do you just let that go?”

  “Maybe I’m losing faith in assassinating the great and powerful anymore, maybe all it is, is just another dream they like to tease us with. Maybe all I’m lookin for these days is a nice normal shootin war with peons like me I can shoot back at. Your brother Frank at least had the sense to go after the hired guns that did the real work.”

  “But that don’t mean Vibe and them don’t deserve it.”

  “Course. But that’s retribution. Personal. Not a tactic in the bigger fight.”

  “Beyond me,” said Reef. “But I’ve still got to go after that murdering bastard.”

  “Well good luck, mi hijo. I’ll say hello to Pancho when I see him.”

  SHOULD I KNOW BETTER? she wondered.

  After weeks of torches streaming by the window, thunderstorms in the mountains, visits from the police, as if in an eternally descending current, the roar louder than crying, or speech, blood finding its voice, neither attempting to rescue the other but reaching back each one, again and again, to pull the other deeper, away from safety. Before they went down to Zengg to embark again for Venice, Vlado, as if having seen some lethal obstacle ahead, entrusted to Yashmeen a green schoolboy’s copybook manufactured in some Austrian part of the empire, with Zeugnisbüchlein printed on its front cover, which he called The Book of the Masked. Whose pages were filled with encrypted field-notes and occult scientific passages of a dangerousness one could at least appreciate, though more perhaps for what it promised than for what it presented in such impenetrable code, its sketch of a mindscape whose layers emerged one on another as from a mist, a distant country of painful complexity, an all but unmappable flow of letters and numbers that passed into and out of the guise of the other, not to mention images, from faint and spidery sketches to a full spectrum of inks and pastels, of what Vlado had been visited by under the assaults of his home wind, of what could not be paraphrased even into the strange holiness of Old Slavonic script, visions of the unsuspected, breaches in the Creation where something else had had a chance to be luminously glimpsed. Ways in which God chose to hide within the light of day, not a full list, for the list was probably endless, but chance encounters with details of God’s unseen world. Its chapters headed “To Listen to the Voices of the Dead.” “To Pass Through the Impenetrable Earth.” “To Find the Invisible Gateways.” “To Recognize the Faces of Those with the Knowledge.”

  Well, secret lore he’d been sworn never to reveal, she’d have expected that. She knew by now that in those mountains, with centuries of blood as security, such ferocious undertakings were never questioned. “But this is written down,” she couldn’t quite keep herself from objecting. “I thought it was supposed to be spoken, passed on face-to-face.”

  “Maybe it’s a fake, then,” Vlado laughed. “A forgery. For all you know we have workshops full of calligraphers and illustrators, busy as dwarves in a cavern, for even back up there in the mountains we know there are comfortable profits to be realized from the gullibility of American millionaires and their agents, who are everywhere these days with their famous satchels full of greenbacks, buying up everything they see, oil paintings, antique crockery, fragments of castles, not to mention marriage prospects and racehorses. Why not then this quaint native artifact, with its colorful yet indecipherable visions?”

  She took it anyway. Telling herself she was attracted to its humility, its ease of concealment.

  IN THEIR VISITS to Venice, they had gotten in the habit of going to the movies. They went to the Teatri Minerva and Rossini, but their favorite was the Malibran next to the Corte del Milion, traditionally said to be the site of Marco Polo’s house. They sat in the dark and watched the film shot here not long ago from a gondola by Albert Promio and his crew from Lumière of Paris. At some point the image had entered the Arsenale, in dreaming glide, down uncountable brown canalsides, among the labyrinths, the basins and gondola workshops, rope-walks, the ancient stagnant pools. She felt a tremor pass through Vlado’s body. He had leaned forward to stare, at a pitch of apprehension she had never seen, not even at invisible horsemen and gunshots in the night.

  REEF WAS BACK in Venice before he knew why. Here was where everything had gone off the rails, though coming back to it was likely to be no more useful than haunting is to a ghost. He was feeling a little desperate. The bomb at the café in Nice had lit up a whole high range like lightning at night, showing him the country ahead under a sombre and unreadable aspect. He was not sure he could prepare for everything its shadows might hold.

  He had been over on the Lido doing some practice shooting with his .450 cordite express rifle. He needed to get his eye back, to concentrate on distant targets and failing light and treacherous crosswinds. No one was there to raise the objection that he did not at this point even know where his target might be. He had found no one in Venice with any line on Scarsdale Vibe. He wandered around various fondamente at different hours of day looking for Dally Rideout, but she had disappeared. When he visited Ca’ Spongiatosta, he was turned away rather rudely by the Principessa herself and given the bum’s rush by two liveried pistolieri.

  Now, all at once, rearing out of the water in a great smoking splash of Italian profanity, came a species of Adriatic sea-monster from which two creatures in rubber suits dismounted and came trudging up the sand. Having passed by semimiraculous routes known to inland sailors since Argonauts threaded their way through the European continent, not always aboveground, Pino and Rocco were back in town with their manned torpedo, by now grown somewhat in size—returned at last to Venice, their journey eased by never in their hearts having left to begin with. On recent nights they had been observed in bars of San Marco hotels, drinking local gin fizzes known as Casanovas and arguing about association football, and after the bars closed, deep in the predawn hours, their deadly vehicle had been heard howling like a high-speed ghost up and down the canals and rii. . . . This evening they had decided to make a run over to the Lido, where next thing they knew they were hearing these enormous blasts from shore, which with the elaborate caution of the pursued they had assumed to be directed at themselves.

  Reef carefully slung the rifle on his shoulder and nodded. “Boys. Nice-lookin rig you got there.”

  “That is an elephant gun,” said Pino.

  “I heard this was elephant country. You mean it ain’t?”

  “We were going up to the hotel,” Rocco pointing at the lampless mass of the Excelsior, “and get a drink.”

  “I didn’t think they’d open till it got warmer,” said Reef.

  Rocco and Pino looked at each other. “They have stayed open all winter,” Rocco said, “they only pretended to close.”

  “There is,” Pino indicating the sand wastes aro
und them, under the chill and failing sunset, “a certain clientele.”

  Sure enough, inside the new luxury hotel the lights were blazing, corridors echoing with the undeparted, desire coalescing briefly into glimpsed figures then dissipating again, carried as if helpless before some indoor wind, across dancing floors and terraces, along shadowy colonnades, where from someplace music echoed, though the orchestra stand was unoccupied. White-coated barmen were busy mixing drinks, though nobody was at the bar.

  “There’s a storm on the way,” Rafaello greeted them. He had a purple orchid in his lapel, and knew Rocco and Pino. “You made it in here just in time.”

  Slowly the room was filling up with ragged refugees, shivering and staring. By later in the evening, it became clear that business depended now as much on the storms of winter and spring as it would in summer on warmth and clear sky.

  “And after a while,” Pino was saying, “we got attached. Gave it a name. Il Squalaccio.” Once it had a name, it seemed impossible they could ever blow it up. They took it back into the shop, rethought the design, built extensions fore and aft, new compartments, installed a bigger engine, pretty soon they had a dwarf variety of submarine.

  “Mr. Traverse?” Reef looked in the mirror and recognized Kit’s friend Yashmeen, whom he’d last seen up at Lago Maggiore in the old Chirpingdon-Groin era.

  “Hello once again.” She was there with a tall, good-looking galoot from someplace across the Adriatic. They’d been on their way back to Trieste when the storm hit and cast them upon the lee shore of Lido, though their main worry now seemed to be a motor launch they’d spotted behind them.

  “They followed us all the way from the Bacino, kept their running lights off, and if the storm hadn’t blown up, they’d have probably sunk us by now.”

  “Attenzione,” murmured Pino.

  A party of men had come in all together, some remaining by the door, others beginning to work slowly through the room, peering at faces. She turned toward Reef. “Pretend to be fascinated.”