V.

by Thomas Pynchon

  Stencil, returning to the lodging-house, walked into a loud argument between Paola and Profane.

  “So go,” he was yelling. Something crashed against the door.

  “Don’t try to make up my mind for me,” she yelled back. Stencil opened the door warily, peered around and was hit in the face with a pillow. Shades were drawn and Stencil saw only blurred figures: Profane still ducking out of the way, Paola’s arm in follow-through.

  “What the hell.”

  Profane, crouching like a toad, flapped a newspaper at him. “My old ship is in.” All Stencil could see were the whites of his eyes. Paola was crying.

  “Ah.” Stencil dived for the bed. Profane had been sleeping on the floor. Let them use that, thought spiteful Stencil; snuffled, and drifted off to sleep.

  At length it occurred to him to talk with the old priest, Father Avalanche, who according to Maijstral had been here since 1919.

  The moment he entered the church he knew he’d lost again. The old priest knelt at the communion rail: white hair above a black cassock. Too old.

  Later, in the priest’s house:

  “God lets some of us wait, in queer backwaters,” said Father Avalanche. “Do you know how long it’s been since I have shriven a murderer? At the time of the Ghallis Tower murder last year I had hopes . . .” He maundered thus, taking Stencil by an unwilling hand, and began to charge aimless about thickets of memory. Stencil tried to point them toward the June Disturbances.

  “Oh I was only a young lad then, full of myth. The Knights, you know. One cannot come to Valletta without knowing about the Knights. I still believe—” chuckling—“as I believed then, that they roam the streets after sunset. Somewhere. And I had only served as padre—in the actual fighting—long enough to have illusions left about Avalanche as crusading Knight. But then to compare the Malta that was, in 1919, to their Malta. . . . You’d have to talk, I suppose, to my predecessor here, Father Fairing. He went to America. Though the poor old man, wherever he is, must be dead by now.”

  Politely as he could Stencil took leave of the old priest, plunged into the sunlight and began to walk. There was too much adrenaline, contracting the smooth muscle, deepening his breathing, quickening his pulse. “Stencil must walk,” he said to the street: “walk.”

  Foolish Stencil: he was out of condition. He returned to his pied-à-terre long after midnight, hardly able to stand. The room was empty.

  “Clinches it,” he muttered. If it were the same Fairing. Even if it were not, could it matter? A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsciously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.” It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved on it each time, placing emphasis on different words—“events seem”; “seem to be ordered”; “ominous logic”—pronouncing them differently, changing the “tone of voice” from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic. He found paper and pencil and began to write the sentence in varying hands and type faces. Profane lurched in on him thus.

  “Paola’s back with her husband,” said Profane and collapsed on the bed. “She’ll go back to the States.”

  “Someone,” Stencil muttered, “is out of it, then.” Profane groaned and pulled blankets around him. “Look here,” said Stencil. “Now, you’re sick.” He crossed to Profane, felt his forehead. “High fever. Stencil must get a doctor. What the hell were you doing out at this hour anyway.”

  “No.” Profane flopped over, fished under the bed in his ditty bag. “APC’s. I’ll sweat it out.”

  Neither spoke for a while but Stencil was too distraught to hold anything in. “Profane,” he said.

  “Tell Paola’s father. I’m only along for the ride.”

  Stencil began to pace. Laughed: “Stencil doesn’t think he believes him any longer.” Profane rolled over laboriously and blinked at him.

  “V.’s is a country of coincidence, ruled by a ministry of myth. Whose emissaries haunt this century’s streets. Porcépic, Mondaugen, Stencil père, this Maijstral, Stencil fils. Could any of them create a coincidence? Only Providence creates. If the coincidences are real then Stencil has never encountered history at all, but something far more appalling.

  “Stencil came on Father Fairing’s name once, apparently by accident. Today he came on it again, by what only could have been design.”

  “I wonder,” said Profane, “if that was the same Father Fairing . . .”

  Stencil froze, the booze jittering in his glass. While Profane, dreamy, went on to tell of his nights with the Alligator Patrol, and how he’d hunted one pinto beast through Fairing’s Parish; cornered and killed it in a chamber lit by some frightening radiance.

  Carefully Stencil finished the whiskey, cleaned out the glass with a handkerchief, set the glass on the table. He put on his overcoat.

  “You going out for a doctor,” Profane said into the pillow.

  “Of sorts,” Stencil said.

  An hour later he was at Maijstral’s.

  “Don’t wake her,” Maijstral said. “Poor child. I’d never seen her cry.”

  “Nor have you seen Stencil cry,” said Stencil, “but you may. Ex-priest. He has a soul possessed by the devil sleeping in his bed.”

  “Profane?” In an attempt at good humor: “We must get to Father A., he’s a frustrated exorcist, always complaining about the lack of excitement.”

  “Aren’t you a frustrated exorcist?”

  Maijstral frowned. “That’s another Maijstral.”

  “She possesses him,” Stencil whispered. “V.”

  “You are as sick.”

  “Please.”

  Maijstral opened the window and stepped out on the balcony. Valletta by nightlight looked totally uninhabited. “No,” Maijstral said, “you wouldn’t get what you wanted. What—if it were your world—would be necessary. One would have to exorcise the city, the island, every ship’s crew on that Mediterranean. The continents, the world. Or the Western part,” as an afterthought. “We are Western men.”

  Stencil shrank at the cold air moving in through the window.

  “I’m not a priest. Don’t try appealing to someone you’ve only known in a written confession. We do not walk ganged, Stencil, all our separate selves, like Siamese quintuplets or more. God knows how many Stencils have chased V. about the world.”

  “Fairing,” Stencil croaked, “in whose Parish Stencil was shot, preceded your Father Avalanche.”

  “I could have told you. Told you the name.”

  “But.”

  “Saw no advantage in making things worse.”

  Stencil’s eyes narrowed. Maijstral turned, caught him looking cagy.

  “Yes, yes. Thirteen of us rule the world in secret.”

  “Stencil went out of his way to bring Profane here. He should have been more careful; he wasn’t. Is it really his own extermination he’s after?”

  Maijstral turned smiling to him. Gestured behind his back at the ramparts of Valletta. “Ask her,” he whispered. “Ask the rock.”

  III

  Two days later Maijstral arrived at the lodging-house to find Profane lying dead drunk and slaunchwise on the bed. Afternoon sun illuminated a swathe of face in which every hair of a week’s growth showed up separate and distinct. Profane’s mouth was open, he was snoring and drooling and apparently enjoying himself.

  Maijstral gave Profane’s forehead the back of his hand: fine. The fever had broken. But where was Stencil? No sooner asked than Maijstral saw the note. A cubist moth, alit forever on the gross heap of Profane’s beer belly.

  A shipfitter named Aquilina has intelligence of one Mme. Viola, oneiromancer and hypnotist, who passed through Valletta in 1944. The glass eye went with her. Cassar
’s girl lied. V. used it for an hypnotic aid. Her destination, Stockholm. As is Stencil’s. It will do for the frayed end of another clue. Dispose as you will of Profane. Stencil has no further need for any of you. Sahha.

  Maijstral looked around for booze. Profane had finished everything in the house.

  “Swine.”

  Profane woke. “Wha.”

  Maijstral read him the note. Profane rolled out of bed and crawled to the window.

  “What day is it.” After a while: “Paola’s gone too?”

  “Last night.”

  “Leaving me. Well. How do you dispose of me.”

  “Lend you a fiver, to begin with.”

  “Lend,” roared Profane. “You ought to know better.”

  “I’ll be back,” said Maijstral.

  That night Profane shaved, bathed, donned suede jacket, Levi’s and big cowboy hat and went a-roving down Kingsway, looking for amusement. He found it in the form of one Brenda Wigglesworth, an American WASP who attended Beaver College and owned, she said, seventy-two pairs of Bermuda shorts, half of which she had brought over to Europe back around June at the beginning of a Grand Tour which had then held high promise. High she had remained all the way across the Atlantic; high as the boat deck and mostly on sloe gin fizzes. The various lifeboats of this most underelict passage east were shared by a purser (summer job) from the academic flatlands of Jersey who gave her an orange and black toy tiger, a pregnancy scare (hers only) and a promise to meet her in Amsterdam, somewhere behind the Five Flies. He’d not come: she came to herself—or at least to the inviolable Puritan she’d show up as come marriage and the Good Life, someday soon now—in a bar’s parking lot near a canal, filled with a hundred black bicycles: her junkyard, her own locust season. Skeletons, carapaces, no matter: her inside too was her outside and on she went, streak-blond, far-from-frail Brenda, along the Rhine, up and down the soft slopes of the wine districts, into the Tyrol and out into Tuscany, all in a rented Morris whose fuel pump clicked random and loud in times of stress; as did her camera, as did her heart.

  Valletta was the end of another season and all her friends were long sailed back to the States. She was nearly out of money. Profane couldn’t help her. She found him fascinating.

  So over sloe gin fizzes for her which took tiny sweet bites out of Maijstral’s five-pound note, and beer for Benny, they talked of how it was they had come this far and where they would go after Valletta, and it seemed there were Beaver and the Street for them separately to return to; and both agreed this was nowhere, but some of us do go nowhere and can con ourselves into believing it to be somewhere: it is a kind of talent and objections to it are rare but even at that captious.

  That night between them they established at least that the world was screwed up. English Marines, Commandos and sailors who came by—going nowhere also—helped them believe it. Profane saw no Scaffold sailors and decided that since some of them must be cleanliving enough to stay away from the Gut, the Scaffold too had left. It made him sadder: as if all his homes were temporary and even they, inanimate, still wandering as he: for motion is relative, and hadn’t he, now, really stood there still on the sea like a schlemihl Redeemer while that enormous malingering city and its one livable inner space and one unconnable (therefore hi-valu) girl had all slid away from him over a great horizon’s curve comprising, from this vantage, at once, at least one century’s worth of wavelets?

  “Don’t be sad.”

  “Brenda, we’re all sad.”

  “Benny, we are.” She laughed, raucous, having a low tolerance for sloe gin.

  They went back to his place and she must have left him sometime during the night, in the dark. Profane was a heavy sleeper. He awoke alone in bed to the sound of forenoon traffic. Maijstral sat on the table, observing a plaid knee sock, the kind worn with Bermuda shorts, which was draped over the electric lamp hanging from the center of the ceiling.

  “I have brought wine,” said Maijstral.

  “Good enough.”

  They went out to a café for breakfast, about two. “I have no intention of supporting you indefinitely,” Maijstral said.

  “I should get a job. Any road work in Malta?”

  “They are building a grade intersection—an underground tunnel—at Porte-des-Bombes. They also need men to plant trees along the roads.”

  “Road work and sewer work is all I know.”

  “Sewers? There’s a new pumping station going up at Marsa.”

  “They hire aliens?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Possibly, then.”

  That evening Brenda wore paisley shorts and black socks. “I write poetry,” she announced. They were at her place, a modest hotel near the great lift.

  “Oh,” said Profane.

  “I am the twentieth century,” she read. Profane rolled away and stared at the pattern in the rug.

  “I am the ragtime and the tango; sans-serif, clean geometry. I am the virgin’s-hair whip and the cunningly detailed shackles of decadent passion. I am every lonely railway station in every capital of Europe. I am the Street, the fanciless buildings of government; the café-dansant, the clockwork figure, the jazz saxophone; the touristlady’s hairpiece, the fairy’s rubber breasts, the traveling clock which always tells the wrong time and chimes in different keys. I am the dead palm tree, the Negro’s dancing pumps, the dried fountain after tourist season. I am all the appurtenances of night.”

  “That sounds about right,” said Profane.

  “I don’t know.” She made a paper airplane out of the poem and sailed it across the room on strata of her own exhaled smoke. “It’s a phony college-girl poem. Things I’ve read for courses. Does it sound right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve done so much more. Boys do.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve had all these fabulous experiences. I wish mine would show me something.”

  “Why.”

  “The experience, the experience. Haven’t you learned?”

  Profane didn’t have to think long. “No,” he said, “offhand I’d say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing.”

  They were quiet for a while. She said: “Let’s take a walk.”

  Later, out in the street, near the sea steps she inexplicably took his hand and began to run. The buildings in this part of Valletta, eleven years after war’s end, had not been rebuilt. The street, however, was level and clear. Hand in hand with Brenda whom he’d met yesterday, Profane ran down the street. Presently, sudden and in silence, all illumination in Valletta, houselight and streetlight, was extinguished. Profane and Brenda continued to run through the abruptly absolute night, momentum alone carrying them toward the edge of Malta, and the Mediterranean beyond.

  epilogue

  1919

  V

  I

  Winter. The green xebec whose figurehead was Astarte, goddess of sexual love, tacked slowly into the Grand Harbour. Yellow bastions, Moorish-looking city, rainy sky. What more on first glance? In his youth no one of those score or so other cities had ever shown old Stencil much in the way of Romance. But now as if making up for lost time his mind seemed to’ve gone rainy as the sky.

  He kept near the stern, rained on, bird-frame wrapped in oilskin, sheltering his pipe’s match from the wind. Overhead for a while hung Fort St. Angelo, dirty yellow and wrapped in a quiet not of this earth. Abeam gradually came HMS Egmont, a few seamen on her decks like blue-and-white dolls shivering for the Harbour wind though it was June, holystoning to work off this morning’s chill. His cheeks hollowed and flattened as the xebec seemed to describe a complete circle and Grandmaster La Vallette’s dream whirled away for Fort St. Elmo and the Mediterranean, which in their turn spun past into Ricasoli, Vittoriosa, the Dockyard. Mehemet the master swore at his helmsman, Astarte now leaned f
rom the xebec’s bowsprit toward the city as if it were male and asleep and she, inanimate figurehead, a succubus preparing to ravish. Mehemet approached him. “Mara lives in a strange house,” said Stencil. Wind flapped one whitening forelock, rooted halfway back on his scalp. He said it for the city, not for Mehemet; but the master understood.

  “Whenever we came to Malta,” he said in some Levantine tongue, “I got the feeling. As if a great hush were on this sea and the island its heart. As if I’d come back to something my own heart needs as deeply as a heart can.” He lit a cigarette from Stencil’s pipe. “But it is a deception. She’s an inconstant city. Be wary of her.”

  One hulking boy stood on the quay to receive their lines. He and Mehemet exchanged salaam aleikums. A pillar of cloud stood to the north behind Marsamuscetto, looking solid and about to topple, to crush the city. Mehemet wandered about kicking the crew. One by one they drifted below decks and began hauling the cargo topside: a few live goats, some sacks of sugar, dried tarragon from Sicily, salted pilchards in barrels, from Greece.

  Stencil had his gear collected. The rain descended more quickly. He opened a great umbrella and stood under it watching the Dockyard country. Well, what am I waiting for, he wondered. The crew had retired below decks all sullen. Mehemet came squishing across the deck. “Fortune,” he said.

  “An inconstant goddess.” The pier hand who’d taken their lines now sat on a piling, facing the water, hunched up like a bedraggled sea bird. “Island of sunshine?” Stencil laughed. His pipe was still lit. Among white fumes then he and Mehemet made farewell. He teetered across a single plank to shore, balancing a ditty bag on one shoulder, the umbrella looking like a tightrope-walker’s parasol. Indeed, he thought. What safety, after all, on this shore. Ashore anywhere?