The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition)

by William Gaddis

  On the couch, Basil Valentine rested a hand on his forehead, and moved it gently. —You are feverish, he said. He got up to turn on a soft light near the windows, and returned to the couch. —Just lie still, he said. —A little cognac . . . there . . .

  —Yes, you see . . . ? You see?

  —Don’t try to talk now for a minute. And close your eyes. Basil Valentine held the hot squared sides of the skull between his hands, and rested his thumbs softly on the eyelids. —There’s no need to say a word. You’re safe here.

  —You see, if . . . I became the one who could do more than I could.

  Valentine moved his fingertips gently against the temples throbbing beneath them. He shifted slightly; and loosened his dressing gown. —And the one you left behind? he whispered, —the one you lost?

  —Yes, yes, came the answer in a whisper. —Yes, I miss him . . .

  Valentine lowered his face slightly, out of the light from over the back of the couch; and both his hands moved against the skull. —We’re safe here, he said.

  The telephone rang. Basil Valentine’s hands drew together for an instant, pressing the skull between them. He raised his hands, and the eyes remained closed.

  He got over to the telephone quickly, glanced back round the corner of the door, and picked it up, talking in a low voice, facing the wall directly before him, his eyes lowered. —Yes, it’s all right, he said, —but . . . this telephone? Of course it may, no private telephone is safe . . . Meg van az informacio ami kell, itt vannak a papirok. Eh . . . ? nem most, hivjon holnap reggel . . .

  At that he hangs up, and stands for a moment with his weight resting on the instrument. Then in to wash his hands, where his face and the one in the glass exchange confirmation at the speed of light, as palms abrade knuckles and thumbs fret cuticles under warm water.

  He walks back slowly, registering resolution in his steps, watching them placed before him in a path between there and the windows, does not raise his head until he stands looking out, movement compassed by the soft lamp in a black leap on the ceiling. —Even down among them, he says, —the stupid, thick-handed people, is there any one of them who doesn’t know him, who has not suffered the indignity of his stare, and heard the mockery of his laughter, this other self, who can do more, who always escapes, but . . . now you are here, my dear fellow, and we . . . Basil Valentine pauses, to seat half his weight on the window shelf. —Would you be surprised, if I told you about myself, as much about myself as I know about you? Why I know that I hate them, where you wish you could love them. Direct in his view, ascendant in lights, the Empire State Building rears its stiff glans fourteen hundred seventy-two feet above the street. —There is their shrine, their notion of magnificence, their damned Hercules of Lysippus that Fabius brought back to Rome from Tarentum, not because it was art, but because it was big. S P Q R, they all admired it for the same reason, the people, whose idea of necessity is paying the gas bill, the masses who as their radios assure them, are under no obligation. Under no obligation whatsoever, but to stretch out their thick clumsy hands, breaking, demanding, defiling everything they touch.

  Though his tone remains calm, he raises his hand to his temple and finds the vein standing out there, suppresses with two fingertips the life pulsating through it, and lowers his hand to his knee rearing half his weight in the window.

  —We live in Rome, he says, turning his face to the room again, —Caligula’s Rome, with a new circus of vulgar bestialized suffering in the newspapers every morning. The masses, the fetid masses, he says, bringing all his weight to his feet. —How can they even suspect a self who can do more, when they live under absolutely no obligation. There are so few beautiful things in the world, Basil Valentine says, taking a step toward the back of the couch, where it is quiet, where he has not yet raised his eyes, —that they must be protected. He stands looking down, to say the few more words, as though they were simply that, appended, when all this time he has been making toward, —The pity which none shall have who demands it. I called your work calumny once, so it was. But the face of Christ in your van der Goes, no one could call that a lie. And now, he says, advancing again, —here you are, and I shall teach you, I shall teach you the only secret worth knowing, the secret the gods teach, the secret that Wotan taught to his son . . . His hand reaches for the gold cigarette case and finds the pocket empty. When he looks up he notices first not the empty couch, but the empty pedestal where the gold bull stood: the egg is still there, unbroken.

  Then Basil Valentine put a hand to his throat, as though to stem the rising nausea; and he leaned forward, still with the hand to his throat, the hard rings shifting on nothing in a rise and a fall between a thumb and a finger, swallowing, while the shadow on another wall and clear because unobserved, figures a steady hand pouring cognac.

  A swallow of the stuff crystal-bound in his hand, and he clears his throat with abrupt loudness. —Of course the Athens of Socrates was a phenomenon, he says, glancing at the couch he passes, —the most civilized thing that has ever happened on earth, while the rabble of the Roman Republic, he goes on, nearing the windows, —Rome, you know . . .

  Three stars in his belt, Orion lay out of sight beyond tons of opaque building material now dissolved in darkness, serving only to support fixed points of light, the solid firmament of early Jews where stars were nailed lest they fall; beyond, the flight of seven doves Orion hunts, out of sight.

  Look darling he found my necklace

  (The capacity of this bus

  The new Wonder Gems Developed in the laboratory

  (Please do not speak to driver while bus is in motion

  More brilliant than diamonds

  (Expectorating in or from this omnibus is a punishable offense

  (Step down to open doors

  Above hung the cliff that Alexander climbed in India, the cliff studded with diamonds, hung with chains of red gold, five hundred steps to the house of the sun, to paradise.

  Though Sir John Mandeville (in his Travels, among the earliest and most heroic of plagiaries in the French) confessed, “Of Paradise I cannot speak properly, for I was not there”: what matter? Here above, the concrete cliffs had disappeared, only their lights studding darkness which posed as space and postured firmament.

  —John!

  —You? . . . bumping into you again on the street like this? But I have to hurry, I have to get a train.

  —Yes, a train, a train.

  Lights flashed past, their beams tangled in darkness to confirm it.

  —Are you all right? What’s that you’re carrying? is it real gold? Where are you going?

  Through the world of night, lost souls clutching guidebooks follow the sun through subterranean passage gloom, corridors dark and dangerous: so the king built his tomb deep in earth, and alone wanders the darkness of death there through twenty-four thousand square feet of passages and halls, stairs, chambers, and pits. So Egypt.

  —Back.

  Red in the west as it set, because of the fires of hell says the Talmud: red in the east from the roses of Eden.

  —Back where?

  —Can we stop for a minute? a glass of brandy?

  —I have to make this train.

  —Gentlemen . . .

  Few anywhere disagreed, but that the sun and the moon and the planets issued from a hole in the east, descended into one in the west and returned, by night, through a subterranean passage.

  —Gentlemen, I have a religion too. I’m a drunkard.

  Raging up and down the sky like a beast in a cage, says the Talmud, and unable to escape, enclosed in the firmament, the gates of its entrance and exit only at opposite ends.

  —All right, yes, a train. Wait.

  —Gentlemen . . .

  —Hurry . . .

  Down: down went Tammuz (slain by the boar’s tusk), entering at Babylon, the center of the earth, for there was the lid-stone to the lower world.

  Thus the Assyrians invoked the bull who guarded the gates: O great bull, O very g
reat bull, which stampest high, which openest access to the interior . . .

  Please show your ticket at gate

  —Leaving on track seven

  Their death pursuing its descent, the Piute Indians followed the sun to that hole where it crawled in at the end of the earth, creeping constricted to earth’s center, there to sleep out the night, and to waken and creep on to the eastern portal. The sun emerges, eating the stars its children as it rises, its only nourishment; and those on earth at the dawn see only its brilliant belly, distended with stars.

  This ticket is your receipt and baggage check. Please keep it with you until you reach destination.

  May the bull of good fortune, the genius of good fortune, the guardian of the footsteps of my majesty, the giver of joy to my heart, forever watch over it! Never more may its care cease.

  (So reads the inscription of Esar-Haddon, whose father, the murdered Sennacherib, had destroyed Babylon; and he, the son, returned to restore the sacred city, to rebuild the temple of Baal, and refurbish its gods.)

  Thrown open, the gates on the eastern face of the temple meet the dawn as the golden tips of the obelisks burn, and the red rim appears from the underworld. Those on earth prostrate before it, and the gates close upon Baal, Who has entered His Temple.

  III

  It was a man, sure, that was hang’d up here;

  A youth, as I remember: I cut him down.

  If it should prove my son now after all—

  Say you? say you?—Light!

  —Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

  Above the trees, the weathercock atop the church steeple caught the sun, poised there above the town like a cock of fire rising from its own ashes.

  Few witnessed this inviolate miracle, for reverence here subscribed to roofs: worship was, as childhood had noted, an affair of defensive indecent enclosure, and few indeed the eyes raised on high unless assured the protective embrace of beams. As a matter of fact few eyes were ever raised at all, but rather lowered in consecrated embarrassment, finally closed in severe chagrin as the voice intoned, —The Lord’s mercy is from everlasting to everlasting unto those that fear Him.

  When the eyes opened it was to stare at the back of the neck of another similarly occupied; and if the eyes were raised no further, the voices were: O God be-neath Thy guid-ing hand Our ex-iled fa-thers crossed the sea, they sang under that roof which rose to the level of the treetops outside, mounting New England gothic toward the white spire alerted by the weathercock which caught his eye, as he climbed the hill toward the Post Road. But even he, when he reached it, walked with his eyes lowered up the silent nave.

  On either hand, the visages of the houses watched him pass, self-contained façades indifferent to his presence, but watching still, guarded, as he passed immediately before the panes and fanlights; and when with seven more steps he escaped their line of vision, they did not turn in indecorous curiosity but continued to stare out straight ahead. Unconcealed by walls, or coy behind hedges, sober-mouthed some of them with columns Ionic and Doric (with never the cheer of Corinthian), these miens of narrow clapboard and eighteenth-century brick looked upon the passer-by without deviation or interruption, with stares neither crooked nor circuitous, the lineal stare of propriety.

  (Beyond, there were, to be sure, occasional cupolas, sportive relics of nineteenth-century profligacy.)

  He passed the Civil War monument which thirty years before had spiked the sky, and stood now dwarfed in deference to greater wars. (And the resolute iron cannon at its foot was replaced by a mobile 75, albeit crippled by loss of one of its wheels.)

  As he reached the transept, the spire behind him burned at its tip with the light of the sun, and from it the bell labored the early hour. Beyond the lucent spire the sky was patched with small clouds which did not move, no more than the ragged-edged patches of snow, reflecting here that celestial course of the sun which he trod on earth.

  Past the highway’s curve (and the arrow there, pointing the wrong way to delude barbarians), the mile from the railway station, and he had not paused; nor so much as raised his eyes but once when they were raised by the transfiguration of the gold cock in the sun. Mirabile dictu: another blue day. What a narrow chin in his hand, when he raises his hand there, then taps two fingers on his lips and looks over the shoulder quickly. Bells, from far down the nave there. —God of our fa-thers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung bat-tle line (fingers stifle the lips) hymn no 383. Singing way, over the shoulder elders from preference heard no music, alarm it was for it set something living in them, and would that their children believe no such thing existed, to hang their heels on the air. But they heard, they heard and what’s more without humility and nor lightened nor lost set instanter to compose, whipped their children to practice as they’d been done for discovery. The bell again. Again. Adeste —ad esse fidelis: hymn no 223 larynges distended A,M,D,G, infra dig dominocus: Oh for a Faith that Will Not Shrink.

  Demons the motes in a sunbean, said Blessed Reichelm (though serious statisticians precisely populated hell’s habitant host at 1,758,064,176): the Saxons driven through a river blessed upstream by bishops (kept their sword-arms dry). Blessed Leo X, could nicht anders, the 95 Thæces stuck to the door, in the beginning this end:

  Town founded 1666 annus mirabilis Oh gosh Oh gee h-Holy Cowrist w-We got a big job ahead of us interdenominational infra supra sub threw the inkpot: Nunnery lecture, illustrated, Pagan ceremony, robed priests, Nuns, high altar, &c. A wail from the tomb. See girl in dungeon. Uncle Sam to the rescue. Public invited. Collection 50¢ leadeth us not into temptation.

  Surprise! to be kissed on the cheek so. After all that time. There, over the shoulder describe necessity without touching me. Abscondam faciem meam white Christ the fugitive. Consider me with my nose gone, knock on wood, —or ask Helen for a piece, she found it: rub it, Aladdin, Constantine, Nicodemus blown back by the wind from the river m-Mthrfckr et considerabo novissima eorum (sic)

  The birth of a nation. Let in the light Open the nunneries And save the girls. Free lemonade, Mineral water, Shower baths Coming! to Haggard’s Gospel Tent A drama of eighteen live people This is a clean high-class lecture exposing the whole Roman Catholic Religion from the Confession Box to the Nunneries, High Priests, Mother Superior, Altar Boy, Six Nuns, Holy Altar, Holy Candles, Holy Water, Holy Gods Just as it looks in Catholic Churches everywhere. With the mother giving her daughter to the church for a supposed more holy life, daughter taking the Carmelite nun vow (Black Veil) buried alive, thrown into a dungeon and how are they to be rescued

  He stopped to cough, and courteously caught the cough away from the air in his open palm and walked on again. Courteous, to this flood of unspeakable hyperduliacs, and why? to be rescued and wear a stinking merkin for a beard? If she is only a woman (but a good cigar is a smoke) with Eve caught by the furbelow, Hae cunni (the oldest catch we know): Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, praebeat ille nates (I seem to mean usefulness), but Thisbe’s gray eye on Alfonso Liguori —There is no mysticism without Mary. Stabat Mater shrouded in the decent obscurity of a learned language, fœmina si furtum faciet mihi virque puerque: dolorosa while Origenal sin wields the blade. Carnelevarium (the heart came out very late) reveling in lavish polymastia (Zwei Brüste wohnen, ach! in meiner Seele) now, in Martinmas, Saint Martin’s given or only Lent to SS Pelagia & Mary of Egypt, thence to Thaïs, Kundry, Salome, and even Saint Irene; Costanza (Ds ac Redemptor, S.J.), Valeria Messalina, Marozia in the garden, in the Garden, Messalina in the gardens of Lucullus hic jaceted age 26 years, Thrawn Janet’s black man gone down the garden wall, and the men et ardet: Anaxagoras pre-empted in contemptu Christianae fidei; Lucretius (dead of an overdose of love philter) preempted, —Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta. I.e., exhomologesis (c. 218) by Calixtus I. Pelagic miles distant, on the Rock, resident Barbary apes pelt stones at the local Y.M.C.A. In Spain Ignatius’ militant limp and Xavier 4′6″ exhomolojesuis abhor the shedding of blood, and the
Inquisitor De Arbues describes Love ex hac Petri cathedrâ without raising a Welt. Amor perfectissimus explaining what is dark by what is darker still: Who then was the gentleman? (I mean the excluded.) Not Philo, De Exsecrationibus! not Philo, certainly not Aristobulus busy-handed Alexandrine Jew to prove plagiarism: Pythagoras Socrates Plato Homer & Hesiod, all plagiarized from Moses, one and all. Pues díme Sigismundo, dí: El delito mayor del hombre es haber nacido. Calixtus, then, after all? Politicking, No, no, don’t listen to them 1870! Nono the winner: infallible (what is that racket?). The College of Cardinals turns to look. —It’s Arkansas, crying Non placet.