—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.
The paintings in the gilded frames were hallowed by numbers of coats of varnish, each darker than the last for the dirt collected on the one before. Thus it was difficult to tell what they depicted, but obligingly so since, for Mrs. Deigh, each one was a religious episode to which she assigned both the subject and the master’s hand it had come from. Even now, Stanley stood impertinently close to inspect a small Annunciation by Tintoretto, with the notion that he saw a dog carrying a game bird in one corner. Then the sound of busy footsteps turned him round. —That is . . . he commenced, looking up at eye-level, and it seemed a full minute before he could bring his eyes down to meet the sharp glance of the figure scuttling through the room behind him. At that instant an arm shot out and Stanley recoiled from what, he realized afterward, must have been a sign of benediction, as the cassock came up and the little figure disappeared in the swirl of a black mantle.
—Dom Sucio! . . . Mrs. Deigh called, hard on his heels. —Did Dom Sucio pass this way? she asked when she appeared.
—Something did, Stanley brought out.
—Oh dear, he’s gone again. He is so busy, she said, sagging slightly until she sat down. —He is such a dear.
—Is he a . . . a . . .
—A Dominican, and he is so kind to Us. So protective . . . and she subsided into the chair with, —Now you must tell Us more about you.
And so Stanley told her once more of his interest in music, dwelling modestly on the organ work he had composed (which, as he said, might have been a Requiem Mass had he done it three centuries ago), and reiterating his wish to visit the church at Fenestrula, and possibly . . .
—Play the organ there? But dear boy, nothing could be more simple. It was the gift of an American, and so of course they will let you play on it, an American whom We knew quite well, quite well indeed . . .
After that, Stanley could hardly keep his mind on their conversation. Everything else seemed unreal, as this one vision soared before him. His eye fixed on a gold telephone across the room, and the tooth clutched in his pocket so that it almost bit his palm, the pain disappeared from his bandaged hand, and he scarcely heard Mrs. Deigh describe how, as a girl in school studying French conversation, lunching, and the mandolin, she had known all that while that greater things lay ahead, though what they might be she’d no idea until one day, floating naked on her back in the blue waters off Portugal, she was discovered by some peasant children who took her for an apparition of the Virgin, and since then, of course, her path had been clear. In fact, it was not until he was about to leave that he even noticed her wrist watch: its four gold hands mounted a delicately contrived figure, and those pointing to III and IX were apparently stationary. The other two told the minute and the hour, and since it was just ten minutes after four when he left, he had no thought for what it might be until he came for lunch next day, and was greeted by his hostess promptly at twelve-thirty.
Stanley had hung his own crucifix, broken though it remained, on the wall over his bed in the room he had found in the Via del Babuino. It is true, every time he looked at it his own knees went weak, and when he addressed it, a sense of emptiness quivered and then surged through him, until he dropped his face on his clasped hands and with all the concentration that makes images from the past the more vivid, tried not to remember. But if he stayed so for long, on his knees beside his bed, the floor itself seemed to rise, and fall away driven on by his pounding heart where the ship’s engines echoed, his own gasps of nausea as he staggered up echoing the gasping moans of the beast he had fought all his life. He closed his eyes against the Christmas card he had seen in that uptown bedroom, and the image stood out the more vivid on this dark tapestry of memory; he opened them on the yellowed rigid thing itself, its drawn legs hard-muscled straight through the broken knees, and turning away unsteadily he resolved to get it repaired next day.
But there was always something else. First, of course, he must procure his identification booklet, guide to Rome, prayer book, and the pin to wear and identify him as a Pilgrim. He wore it on the lapel of his second-best suit (it had been his third and last, fortunately, that suffered the green-paint episode, and his best blue suit hung unfolded, unworn since his mother’s funeral). It was in this same second-best suit, pressed between mattresses during the voyage, and donned with self-conscious anticipation under a porthole suddenly filled with a static landscape instead of the sea and the sky, that he had emerged from the boat, with that shiny flattened look of sailors ashore.
Still, making the round from Saint John Lateran to the tomb of Saint Peter, the Basilica of Saint Paul, and Santa Maria Maggiore,
required for indulgences, he looked lonely. Crossing the Ponte San Angelo, where Pilgrims had already been suffocated and died in the crush, he looked lonely. Passing through the Gate of the Bells, entering the piazza before Saint Peter’s and gazing up at the Egyptian obelisk and beyond it to the Apostles on the roof, and Michelangelo’s dome, he looked lonely. His hair still stood out thickly on the back of his head, and had begun to curl near the neck. He had trimmed his mustache, but it was uneven, and he kept catching ends of it with his teeth anxiously. If anyone had stopped him and asked him what he thought of it all, he would have answered with his surprise at finding Rome so yellow . . . but no one did. One after another he visited the places he felt bound to visit, and, it is true, he often found upon returning to the Via del Babuino that he could not remember which was which, that he was not sure whether he had seen the Laocoön, though here was a familiar picture of it before him, that he even, at one point, confused the Sistine and Pauline chapels, and finally both of them with the Vatican library, where he was quite sure he had not been at all. As for the statue of Saint Peter, with its foot worn smooth by kisses, he did not mention to Mrs. Deigh that he had wiped his lips after kissing it himself. He usually reported his excursions to her, as he did one day entering to interrupt her petulant murmurs over the newspaper, —He is wearing that heavy fisherman’s ring back on his right hand again, which must mean his arthritis is better. Of course We have requested the Blessed Virgin Mary . . . She thrust the paper away, showing a new book titled Le cinque fonti sanguinose nesting in her ample lap.
—San Clemente! she repeated fervently. —But it was the upper church you visited? Yes, with its lovely ceiling. We knew Prior Mullooly so well, you know. It’s comforting to know it’s all owned by Dominicans. Poor man, martyred by being thrown into the sea with an anchor tied around his neck. But we hope you did not descend all the way? because someone (and she often spelled out words which she considered unsuitable when Hadrian was anywhere near), —someone has built a p-a-g-a-n temple right square underneath it. A smelly damp dark little stone room where they went to worship the sun. Wasn’t that stupid of them? But of course, they were all repressed, weren’t they . . .
Here and there he saw the fat woman from the boat, clutching her three-penny pamphlet on the Modern Virgin Martyr, that or some other, clicking her Machine, and though he was relieved enough when she fled at the sight of him, he wished it might be with something less than the look of terror she wore when she did so. Once he saw Father Martin, coming out through the Bronze Door, and almost hailed him. But Father Martin was at that moment joined by another priest and the two went off with their heads nodding and bowed in convocation, leaving Stanley to stare at a pale girl carrying a copy of Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread.
He might have got down to work. He should have, since the day he hoped and now could plan on for playing his composition for the first time, in the church he had dreamt of unnumbered times, lay not far off. He even tried, once or twice, to sit down at the practice keyboard and go through the copying he had done on the trip over: but a minute after Stanley had sat down to the printed keys, staring at an empty wall in the room in Via del Babuino, the whole place seemed to sway, the flat keyboard to rise under his fingers, the wall itself to be studded with rows of rivets binding its overlapping plates. The fingers of both hands drew up in frail fists, and a rash of irrelevancies crowded his mind to obscure the idea that possessed it. Sensing mistakes in the work before him, he did not find them. He did not really seek them out in fact, but might suddenly look up with some memory in his mind like that of oriental carpets made with a conscious flaw, in order not to offend the creator of Perfection by emulating his grand design.
Thus the one hollow face his memory tried to force upon him was always promptly transfigured, quickly weighed with flesh to come up the fat woman, or something enough like her, refusing him, and leaving him with his anathema on his own lips, —et eum a societate omnium Christianorum separamus . . . Or Father Martin, turning away, —et a liminibus sanctae Matris Ecclesiae in coelo, et in terra excludimus, et excommunicatum . . .
—But dear boy, you can’t want to go that Sunday, why that is the day of the canonization, this little Spanish martyr, and We have tickets . . . you can’t want to go to Fenestrula that Sunday.
—But I do, I . . . that . . . that’s the day I want to . . . to celebrate my . . . the canonization in my . . . in this way with my work, I . . . you understand, he finished abruptly with the appeal which never failed to her, for in a last resort of charity, Mrs. Deigh always “understood.” He found himself spending more time at her place in the Via Flaminia; for though with her prominent nose she did not really resemble the fat woman from the boat, whose mean features clung desperately together as though in fear of being lost in the expanse of that face, there was a fullness in Mrs. Deigh’s acceptance which counterbalanced and finally outweighed altogether the distant rejection of the fat woman.
Stanley shifted on the edge of a Queen Anne chair, and hitched his shoulders up. The scapular which Mrs. Deigh had made herself, and given him, itched under his shirt. He caught the glare of Mrs. Deigh’s wrist watch, and looked down at his own.
—Of course, dear boy, if it’s what you want, she said, and sighed. —We know how important your work is, and that is as it should be, but We had hoped . . . The chain rattled.
—Yes, I . . .
—Well then, perhaps this afternoon We shall drive together to see Cardinal Spermelli, he was acquainted at Fenestrula. If We dare leave Our Hadrian for that long a time . . . she added, and shook her head.
Hadrian was not, as Stanley vaguely suggested one day (thinking about something else) her son, but an aging bull terrier, once white, and now suffering a severe skin infection he’d got from a dye she used when she tried to make him match a yellow velours gown she often wore in public. Stanley had learned to watch his step around the place, after almost trampling the poor old fellow one day he was up and around, for though Hadrian wore a hearing aid and so certainly heard Stanley coming, he moved with that perilous assurance of old age everywhere, taking for granted that way would be made for him. Not that Stanley did not watch his step anyhow: he’d also come near enough to trampling Dom Sucio, and the look he got for that was tempered by anything but senile infirmity. It was in fact quite venomous. Now whether Dom Sucio had seen him, when he saw the little figure cavorting in a window display in the Corso Umberto costumed as one of the Nibelungs, in some sort of Wagnerian panorama got up for German and Scandinavian tourists, Stanley did not know, any better than he knew if he dared report it to Mrs. Deigh; for the little man certainly guarded his interest in her with as much jealousy as the Nibelungs showed for their treasure hoard, and he never failed to fix Stanley with a look which sent shivers down that un Siegfriedian spine, as he did now, entering.
—Dear Dom! she cried, —We are off to see Cardinal Spermelli, We think Stanley will like him and We know he will like Stanley, he always likes young boys, especially musical young boys. Stanley simply cannot wait to see his area musarithmica. Is he well?
—His what? Stanley got in.
Dom Sucio sat down on a needlepoint footstool and shook his head gravely. —White ants, he said.
—What?
—White ants, dear lady.
—But Dom Sucio . . . you told me that white ants had invaded the Vatican, the very Papal archives, but . . .
—They have eaten through the six-foot thick wall of the Cortile del Pappagallo, they have eaten a number of books and a cardinal’s ceremonial cape, and the Swiss guards have reported the spearhead of a new attack swarming across the very piazza of Saint Peter’s.
—But Cardinal Spermelli?
—He complains of a feeling of burrowing in his right leg. He has worked for so long you know, dear lady, always seated in the same chair. The chair collapsed yesterday.
—Oh! Mrs. Deigh moaned, rising, —We hope it will not be as bad as the time he had the bee in his stomach. Com
e, come dear boy, she said to Stanley, and he followed her out.
—We do wish that you would get your hair cut, dear boy, said Mrs. Deigh as they set off.
It seemed advisable, under the circumstances, that Stanley wait for her in the Automobile. She was gone for a good half-hour inside the yellow portico where they stopped, and he sat patiently licking the ragged edge of his mustache in the Automobile’s kaleidoscopic interior. At the foot of the large single seat, facing the peep-hole and oncoming traffic over the chauffeur’s shoulder, was placed what appeared to be a prie-dieu. Its petit-point seat was even worked with the initials I H S, but this, Mrs. Deigh told him, was Hadrian’s “little chair,” and it was here that Stanley sat now, as the chauffeur helped her back into the car, and they set off again for the Via Flaminia.
After she had got settled, Mrs. Deigh handed him a letter, —for Fenestrula, dear boy . . . And he could hardly thank her. But she sat staring up at the damask ceiling, clicking her teeth, so he tried to look out through one of the lighter portions of stained glass. Finally settled, with his knees drawn up under his chin, and staring as best he could through the Saint’s breechclout in the martyrdom of Saint Stephen depicted on his right, as the car slowed, and halted in traffic, he suddenly cried out and almost went through the damask roof.
—There she is! There she is! . . .
—There who is? . . . dear boy . . .
—There she is! . . . sitting at that . . . at that table at that café . . .
—Dear boy . . .
The Automobile swept on, and Stanley recovered himself somewhat.
—Nothing, I . . . someone I . . . someone I knew . . . once.
—But dear boy, you’re so pale . . . She reached forth for his hand, quivering with the letter to Fenestrula, and brought her wrist watch directly under his gaze. Vividly recalling the topsy-turvy contortion there afterward, he would also remember the time: it was just six.
The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) Page 122