The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (12 page)

—Look! said the Town Carpenter, waving a book from the floor. —Balloons! . . . Then he added, —Damn them, the French. Someone’s written it in the French language. He stood turning the pages, muttering, —They do that to confuse people, of course. The French covet a truth when they come upon it, you know . . . He stayed an hour or so, talking himself most of the time, a proclivity he’d developed since he started to become hard of hearing and people tired of the effort of talking to him. Now, he gave a rough précis of the
Odyssey
(Gwyon had sent him off one day with Chapman’s translation), and as though the voyage had suddenly grown too
short, had just introduced Odysseus to Prester John at Ogygia, when Janet came in with Wyatt’s supper. The Town Carpenter behaved with all the courtly grumbling of a shy hero, retiring before her, waving from the door to the boy on the bed and calling out, as though across a chasm, —And they’ve made me the sexton at the church, you know. The Reverend your father made me the sexton, over their dead bodies if you follow me . . . And he escaped with both volumes of Tissandier’s
Histoire des ballons
.

Thus the bells ringing in the morning hours were usually right on time; but after eleven in the morning they commenced to fall off a bit, for it was a good fifteen-minute walk from the Depot Tavern to the church.

Waking in this room of roses upside-down was a new experience, the dawn red from the roses of Eden (as one of those books at his bedside had it from the Talmud), after the days’ ends in his own room red from the fires of Hell. Here, after the throbbing flow of the night was broken by the first particles of light in the sky, he often pulled a blanket from the bed and crept to the window, to sit there unmoving for the full time it took until the sun itself rose, the unmeasured hours of darkness slowly shattered, rendered into a succession of particles passing separately, even as the landscape separated into tangible identities each appraising itself in a static withdrawal until everything stood out separate from the silent appraisals around it.

He passed the months of convalescence painting, and with increasing frequency broke his gaze at the window to get to work. He was most clear-headed, least feverish, in these early hours when, as unsympathetically as the daylight, his own hand could delineate the reasonable crowded conceits of separation.

Only once, going to the window before it was light, he was stopped in his tracks by the horned hulk of the old moon hung alone in the sky, and this seemed to upset him a good deal, for he shivered and tried to leave it but could not, tried to see the time on the clock but could not, listened, and heard nothing, finally there was nothing for it but to sit bound in this intimacy which refused him, waiting, until the light came at last and obliterated it.

Then, mornings just before sunrise he could hear his father’s steps on the east porch below. And though he heard the voice speaking sometimes, he never made out a word.

Wyatt missed the sound of sleighbells. On his first attempt at a long walk outside, he went down to the carriage barn and found it locked and silent.

—Yes, his . . . his time came, Gwyon said, clearing his throat and pulling at one hand with the other behind him.

—But you . . . no one told me.

—Well, we . . . you were sick, while you were sick I didn’t want to upset you.

—But, then what did you do?

—Yes, I . . . I buried him, down there, down behind the barn there.

—How did it happen, did he just . . . It’s funny, some of the things I . . . sometimes I think I remember things that are . . . that couldn’t . . . like . . . He looked up earnestly, pausing now as though he expected to be prompted, to see his father watching him with eyes which, had he known it, blazed with the same wild intensity as his own in fever. —It’s . . . sometimes it’s bewildering . . . , he faltered, looking down as Gwyon looked away, turned his back and showed his twisting hands behind him. But only for a moment. Gwyon swung round, looking very different, reassured, and tried to smile with,

—You’re well? You’re well now, almost well? Yes, it’s bewildering, bewildering . . . He changed the subject clumsily. —Like the bulls. Yes, people say they’re kept in a dark cell before they’re let into the arena, into the bright sun, to confuse them, but that . . . that . . . you should see their confidence, their grandeur when they come in, a great moment, that, when they come in, they . . . their heads up, tossing their heads when they come in . . . He paused to look up and see if he’d relaxed Wyatt’s attention, then went on enthusiastically, —It’s after that, after they stick those . . . the banderillas in the shoulders, you can hear them rattling in the bull’s shoulders, a regular dance of fury, it’s after that their legs start to cave outward, after that they just stand, bewildered, looking around . . . before the sword, the . . . they say you don’t kill with the sword but with the cape, the art of the cape . . . He relaxed himself as he spoke, moving about the room until he got near the door, talking as though in a hurry to be gone, but he paused there to finish with, —The sword, when the sword is in and the bull won’t drop, why, they use the cape then, to spin him around in a tight circle so the sword will cut him to pieces inside and drop him. His legs stiffen right out when they stab him in the brain. Do you want anything? But you’re up, you’re up now. Do you want anything? I’ll send Janet up, Gwyon finished and got out to the stairs.

When Janet arrived, Wyatt had her help him out and down the stairs, but he left her in the house when he went down the lawn with his cane. A large stone had been pushed into place against the hole in the hillside, among thorn bushes now bearing early blackberries. The place had been the kitchen midden for as long
as he could remember. In his weakness he could not move the stone from its place, for it was very great; and when he started back for the house he tripped against a row of small stakes, driven into the ground there without evident purpose. He climbed unsteadily to his feet from the blemished earth and stones and walked as quickly as he could manage back up the open lawn. There was something defiled about that place which frightened him.

From her window above, Janet watched him stagger back into the open, and was down to help him climb to the porch and in, without a word between them. He went upstairs and got to work without a pause.

Every week or so he would begin something original. It would last for a few days, but before any lines of completion had been drawn he abandoned it. Still the copies continued to perfection, that perfection to which only counterfeit can attain, reproducing every aspect of inadequacy, every blemish on Perfection in the original. He found a panel of very old wood, nearly paper-thin in places but almost of exact size, and on this he started the Seven Deadly Sins: Superbia, Ira, Luxuria, Avaritia, Invidia . . . one by one they reached completion unbroken by any blemish of originality. Secrecy was not difficult in that house, and he made his copy in secret.

His father seemed less than ever interested in what passed around him, once assured Wyatt’s illness was done. Except for the Sunday sermon, public activities in the town concerned him less than ever. Like Pliny, retiring to his Laurentine villa when Saturnalia approached, the Reverend Gwyon avoided the bleak festivities of his congregation whenever they occurred, by retiring to his study. But his disinterest was no longer a dark mantle of preoccupation. A sort of hazardous assurance had taken its place. He approached his Sunday sermons with complaisant audacity, introducing, for instance, druidical reverence for the oak tree as divinely favored because so often singled out to be struck by lightning. Through all of this, even to the sermon on the Aurora Borealis, the Dark Day of May in 1790 whose night moon turned to blood, and the great falling of stars in November 1833, as signs of the Second Advent, Aunt May might well have noted the persistent nonappearance of what she, from that same pulpit, had been shown as the body of Christ. Certainly the present members of the Use-Me Society found many of his references “unnecessary.” It did not seem quite necessary, for instance, to note that Moses had been accused of witchcraft in the Koran; that the hundred thousand converts to Christianity in the first two or three centuries in Rome were “slaves and disreputable people,” that in a town on the Nile there were ten thousand “shaggy monks” and twice that number of “god-dedicated
virgins”; that Charlemagne mass-baptized Saxons by driving them through a river being blessed upstream by his bishops, while Saint Olaf made his subjects choose between baptism and death. No soberly tolerated feast day came round, but that Reverend Gwyon managed to herald its grim observation by allusion to some pagan ceremony which sounded uncomfortably like having a good time. Still the gray faces kept peace, precarious though it might be. They had never been treated this way from the pulpit. True, many stirred with indignant discomfort after listening to the familiar story of virgin birth on December twenty-fifth, mutilation and resurrection, to find they had been attending, not Christ, but Bacchus, Osiris, Krishna, Buddha, Adonis, Marduk, Balder, Attis, Amphion, or Quetzalcoatl. They recalled the sad day the sun was darkened; but they did not remember the occasion as being the death of Julius Caesar. And many hurried home to closet themselves with their Bibles after the sermon on the Trinity, which proved to be Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva; as they did after the recital of the Immaculate Conception, where the seed entered in spiritual form, bringing forth, in virginal modesty, Romulus and Remus.

If the mild assuasive tones of the Reverend offended anywhere, it was the proprietary sense of his congregation; and with true Puritan fortitude they resisted any suggestion that their bloody sacraments might have known other voices and other rooms. They could hardly know that the Reverend’s powers of resistance were being taxed more heavily than their own, where he withstood the temptation to tell them details of the Last Supper at the Eleusinian Mysteries, the snake in the Garden of Eden, what early translators of the Bible chose to let the word ‘thigh’ stand for (where ancient Hebrews placed their hands when under oath), the symbolism of the Triune triangle and, in generative counterpart so distressing to early fathers of the Church, the origin of the Cross.

Janet did not go to church. There was no disaffection, but she seemed to have attained some unity of her own. And she was no longer found benumbed on the kitchen floor; but might interrupt any household drudgery to hurry to her room where rapturous gasps could have been heard from behind the closed door, if anyone had listened. For the most part she went about her work happily, detached, padding through the dim passages in soft slippers, and ordering the kitchen with dark-gloved hands. Occasionally she kept to her bed.

Gwyon’s interest in his son’s painting was perfunctory when it did occur, slightly distracted and puzzled as he became now for anything intruding upon him from worlds that were not his own. He only broke through this withdrawal once, when he sustained a
shock at seeing an unfinished approximation to the picture of Camilla on the living-room mantel. It was done in black on a smooth gesso ground, on strong linen, a stark likeness which left its lines of completion to the eye of the beholder. It was this quality which appeared to upset Gwyon: once he’d seen it he was constantly curious, and would stand looking away from it, and back, completing it in his own mind and then looking again as though, in the momentary absence of his stare and the force of his own plastic imagination, it might have completed itself. Still each time he returned to it, it was slightly different than he remembered, intractably thwarting the completion he had managed himself. —Why won’t you finish it? he burst out finally.

—There’s something about a . . . an unfinished piece of work, a . . . a thing like this where . . . do you see? Where perfection is still possible? Because it’s there, it’s there all the time, all the time you work trying to uncover it. Wyatt caught a hand before him and gripped it as his father’s were gripped behind the back turned to him. —Because it’s there . . . , he repeated.

Gwyon turned back to the unfinished panel muttering, —Yes, yes . . . Praxiteles . . . and his voice tailed off as he returned and stood following the line of the nose, bringing it back round the broken circle of a Byzantine hoop of gold, while behind him his hands opened and closed on nothing.

The table of the Seven Deadly Sins was unfinished. It remained unfinished for some years, when Wyatt went away to study. It was still hidden and untouched when he came home from Divinity School, where he had completed a year’s work.

Something was wrong then. His father knew it, but Reverend Gwyon by this time lived immersed in himself. He shied from talking with Wyatt about his studies. From his flushed face and his agitated manner, it seemed that one word could summon in him histories and arguments of such complexity that they might now take hours, where they had in truth taken centuries, to unravel: but he seemed at pains to dismiss them as quickly as he could, commenting directly, then obliquely, and then changing the subject entirely. —Mithras? Of course, he answered to some question of Wyatt’s. —It didn’t fail because it was bad. Mithraism almost triumphed over Christianity. It failed because it was so near good. He mumbled something, and then added, —That’s the trouble today. No mystery. Everything secularized. No mystery, no weight to anything at all . . . , and he got up and left the room, as he did often in the middle of conversation. Especially these questionings grown from Wyatt’s studies. —Pelagianism? he repeated over a plate of disintegrated white lima beans (for Wyatt seldom saw him but
at meals). —If it hadn’t been Pelagius it would have been someone else. But by now we . . . too many of us may embrace original sin ourselves to explain our own guilt, and behave . . . treat everyone else as though they were full-fledged . . . umm . . . Pelagians doing just as they please . . . He did not elaborate, but sat drumming his fingers on the mahogany dining-room table top.

—Free will . . . Wyatt commenced, but his father was not listening. In all these discussions there seemed to be decisions he had made privately, and in the effort of suppressing them could at last say nothing at all. But as the weeks passed, Wyatt pressed him more and more for encouragement in his own study for the church. Sometimes Gwyon rose to this as though it were his duty to do so. He might manage, for instance, to discourse on the intricacies of transubstantiation without dissent, or even departure from orthodoxy; but as his references mounted, and his enthusiasm grew, reaching the doctrine, which he called Aristotelian, of God retaining the ‘accidents’ of the bread and wine (in order not to shock His worshipers, he added), and embarked upon a discussion of the ‘accidents’ of reality, and the redemption of matter, he left the table abruptly to get a reference, a paper or a book from his study, and did not come back. It was all as though he had no wish to push Wyatt into the ministry, like a man whose forebears have served all their lives on wooden ships, and he the last of them to do so, who will not force his son to serve on one knowing that the last of them will go down with him. Full proof of his ministry had begun. It was beyond his hand to stop it now.