The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (132 page)

—And wasn’t that an interesting young man that came to visit you tonight! Why, I think I could turn into a Buddhist myself with him to talk to me. The Four Noble Truths! and the Eightfold Noble Path! Why, life
is
suffering, isn’t it . . . you just try to lie still now. The nurse finished tidying up the bed and went out of this private room, where the patient had just been moved, mumbling, as she passed a ward, —But to say suffering is caused by
desire
?. . . and that story he told about Bishop . . . Whutley? . . . which she repeated to the nurse in the drug room, —And so this Bishop says to the man praying there in front of this little wheel, who are you praying to and what are you praying for my good man? and the man says, I’m not praying to anybody and I’m not praying for nothing . . .

But that nurse shrugged her shoulders too, handed over the prescribed Pantopon, and went back to straightening the gay handkerchief pinned to her blouse, and untangling the plain gold cross whose chain had got caught on a button.

The night nurse paused on her return to reprimand a shapeless figure huddled half out of bed in the dark to receive this confidence from a low-tuned radio, —Another case of homicide. And so for really top-notch entertainment, listen in . . .

—All right now Mister Jenner, tomorrow’s another day. And she carried her cheer, and the drug and a clean glass back to the private room. She turned on a bright light and started to speak, but the whistle of a boat, very near on the river, startled her, and she waited, pouring water into the clean glass on the night table, beside the flowers.

—Isn’t this the nicest plant! she said, and her patient turned: until that moment the anthurium had really looked rather obscene.

About the only person whom the blasts of the whistle did not intimidate into silence was Arny: it brought him round just enough to raise his head, and speak for the first time in two hours. He said it was getting late, and he thought he should call his wife. But he did not speak distinctly, and the blasts of departure drowned out every other sound.

He was part of a gay throng on a promenade deck, where someone fluttered up to ask, —Where’s Rwu-dy?

—Baby you’ll find
that
one in the bridal suite. A
lone
.

The whistle blasted them into silence again. Arny alerted, and spoke.

Up above, the tall woman said, —My God, what do you suppose we’ve got next door
this
trip . . . will you listen to that? . . . pouring-on party?

Her husband put down his glass and stared at the passenger list for First Class. —Two United States Senators, he said finally, and got his glass back.

Aft, as near as he, could get to his wife and the two with her who had come down to see him off, Don Bildow waved again and straightened up. His wife cried something out to him. He waved. It was past midnight.

—If you can’t be good, be careful, she repeated. He waved. Then, —Oh! Oh! Oh! Look! . . . he forgot and left his Methyltestosterone tablets, he won’t be able to do anything without them. Look, he left his Methyltestosterone tablets . . .

He waved. With the other hand he held on his plastic glasses. The wind stirred his brown and yellow necktie. From down below, he looked like he was being abducted.

The whistle blasted again.

—Baby you were sweet to come see us off but you’d better get back on sho-wer . . . we’re going to
sail
.

—But I’m coming
twoo
.

Lines were cast off, and the ship, as large as a country town, commenced a grotesque rearward motion, now as though embarrassed at its size, like a football player backing out of a doll house. Finally, faced in the right direction by six tugboats, it recovered its dignity in imperious puffs of smoke and a shrill blast of steam that lowered enough to sound, to penetrate chasms ashore and be rendered back in particles, each one more faint, as though the island were loath to let it go.

Well below the water line, Stanley opened his door and looked into the passage. —It’s all right, he said, —come on out.

Other Pilgrims were already apparent, and Stanley had, a few minutes before, met a priest whom he liked immediately, a man with a plump face which carried joviality easily, but could instantly recover a medieval sternness which, one realized, was there all the time. His name was Father Martin, and he accounted for the large number of Pilgrims, some of whom he was shepherding toward the impending Canonization ceremonies in Rome, which Stanley forth-with hoped, somehow, to attend. They had quite a chat in that minute or two.

—Come . . . he said again, and took her arm. —Don’t you have any coat? You didn’t bring any coat at all?

She looked at him and shook her head, her eyes impossibly large it seemed to him as his own widened. Then as though aware of the warmth of her elbow in his hand, he took her hand which was cold and led her up to an open deck.

She’d brought no luggage, only a sort of bundle, and what was
tied up in it he had no idea, except for a paper book tied on the outside. It was labeled
The Story of Barbara Ubrick
. There was a picture on the cover captioned,
Smothering a baby
. And below,
Why nunneries are within high walls, barred windows and bolted doors
.

—But . . . where did you get this?

She had looked at him with these wide eyes, instantly frightened at his wrath but with no challenge, no question but that it must be justified. —An-selm, she answered him; at that he’d looked away quickly, put the thing back, its cover turned down, and stood looking away unable to confront the sad hope that had suffused her empty face for that one moment, and the bright pleasure her eyes had almost dared over this thing they were to share, that he had brought her to.

She hardly spoke, except when he spoke to her and even then, only if he addressed a question, which she would answer very slowly, deliberate and brief. Though once she had burst out with, —Then do Pilgrims need a pass-port too? Or I shall wear a cockleshell, and he will know me and he will know me well . . . Which disarmed Stanley: what could she know of Santiago de Compostela? or when with the same light about to break in her eyes, waiting only his confirmation, she had asked whether it were true, Did the mice eat Saint Gertrude’s heart? —For she is patron saint of them . . .

As now, he took his hand from her and stood, staring at the lights of the Jersey shore, unable to believe that this was New York, and he was leaving it; and as dreadfully convinced that it was.

Even now the name Anselm threw him into a whirl, the more so now if what they had said a few evenings before, what Hannah had said and they had accepted, if it were true: and if it were true then everything else was true.

With one hand in his pocket he clutched the gauze-and-newspaper-wrapped tooth, as Anselm’s dream, —I dreamt about you last night . . . I’m sure it was you . . . and the tooth almost came through to bite into his palm. At that the other hand came up in reflex to take her arm, and missed, though her arm did not move at all there on the rail: missed only so that his knuckles rubbed her bare arm and she turned that anticipating vacant beauty upon him, her eyes unblinking though the wind was rising and came round the upper decks full upon them now, as she waited, awaited his temper: and Anselm persisted, the more strongly, on the floor, ritu quadrupedis, —Succubus . . .

The daring instant of a smile on her face provoked him, —Aren’t you cold? Until he asked her she might have been anywhere; now with his prompting question the smile and, if it had been warmth,
left her. She shook, three times or four, sharply as though to atone for a multitude of slight shivers.

He looked away, not toward the shore, or where the shore might be, but up forward; and saw only a man on the deck above leaning at the rail, a man in a Chesterfield with the collar up, a black Homburg hat and a long face which seemed to empty through the triangular chin, that, and a glint of gold, at the cuff was it? a finger?

—Don’t you want to come in?

After a moment he left her there, and with a shudder of cold went below himself. Roll and go, the motion of the ship was becoming familiar and inevitable to hundreds of people, the sole reciprocation that bound them together.

Already through the Narrows and into the Lower Bay, past Sandy Hook, and into ten fathoms of water when Stanley realized that it was some time since he’d left her out on deck, and hurried up stairs and passages again with an anxious look on his face.

She was not where he’d left her. But he was confused enough with the unfamiliarity of it all to be uncertain that this was where he’d left her, where he stood at the rail and started to call out, at the moment a wave hit the side and threw up spray, and knocked his voice right back into him. He swung round and looked at the water, terrified.

He heard her call him; and he looked still more alarmed.

She was up on the deck above, and waved to him. He saw her there with great relief, finally, and saw a shadow that had been standing near her turn and disappear in the dark. When she came down, he could not scold her for the fright she’d given him, and so he reprimanded her, —You shouldn’t go up there, that’s First Class . . . and he pulled the door open with more effort than he would have thought necessary.

—Was there somebody up there with you? . . . were you talking to somebody?

—Only to the cold man.

—Well you . . . you ought to be more careful, you can’t just go talking to people.

—That is what he said, when he heard her singing.

—Who?

—The Cold Man.

At the foot of a staircase leading to First Class, Stanley saw Father Martin descending, and let go her arm. Then as abruptly he took it again, up high where there was some sleeve, and came on resolute, slowing his step and so hers, for the greeting, the introduction, the explanations: but Father Martin passed, looking him straight in the face, without a word, without a shade of recognition, the
medieval lines of his face standing out livid as though he had seen a ghost.

Off Ambrose Light, there was some commotion. The ship almost ran down a rowboat in which a Chinaman, equipped with three New Jersey road maps, was setting out confidently for home, and had already got this far from the land into which he had been smuggled so many years before.

But Stanley didn’t hear of the incident until a day or so later. Down a passage before him, she commenced singing, her voice very low,

—Blessed Mary went a-walking . . . Over Jordan river . . .

—Where did you learn that? he demanded.

—The song you taught her?

—But I . . . I never taught you that.

—Stephen met her, fell a-talking . . .

—Who is this . . . cold man? he interrupted her again.

—The Cold Man, and he carries his arm like the boy did.

—Like . . . what do you mean, in a sling?

—In a black one.

Inside, Stanley stood looking vacantly at
The Story of Barbara Ubrick
. Then he took her bundle from the chair where he intended to sleep.

—Blessed Mary went a-walking . . .

—Come . . . he said, knelt now beside the bed where the yellowed crucifix was already hung, already muttering the
Pater noster qui es in coelis
he intended to teach her, the metal deck cutting his knees. The engines sounded in a constantly renewed heave forth, as her knee where she stood beside him, brought her weight against his arm, and away, and against him the more heavily as the prow far ahead shuddered into a trough, into twenty fathoms of water, and without a word he drew her down.

¡Así por la calle pasa quien debe amor!

—Lope de Vega,
Amar sin saber a quién

Spain is a land to flee across. Every town, and every capital, is a destination; and the names which ring with refuge to the fugitive mount with finality to him traveling relentlessly unpursued, setting destinations one after another whose reasons for being so cease upon arrival, and he must move on, to provide that interim of purpose with which each new destination endows the journey however short, and search each pause with reasons anxiously mistaken drawing nearer, with each destination, to the last.

Trains do not depart: they set out, and move at a pace to enhance the landscape, and aggrandize the land they traverse, laboring their courses with the effort of journeys never before made, straining the attention on sufferance of minutes passed separately until concentration is exhausted, and no other pace conceivable. The very distances become greater, through landscape irreplaceable by the exhausted fancy, unaltered by the most resourceful imagination, impossible at last any other land, oppressed by any other sky.

Five miles behind lay Gibraltar, crouching across the bay from Algeciras heavy-buttocked and dumb, the hulk of an animal in immense malformity with lights stacked glittering at its base like suppliant candles round a monstrous idol.

This time of the year, the levanter blew in its chill from the east, shrouding the rock and bringing dampness and an overcast to the sky. Algeciras showed no light but what was left over from day, and when even that was gone dull glows appeared at last in the narrow cobbled streets leading up to the plaza where trees bore oranges among benches tiled orange and white and blue round a dry fountain. There, when the one-arm church sounded the flat planng of
its bell, and the dim lights of the plaza, burning an hour or two now in lusterless illumination of the quiet, failed and went out, that quiet proved not what it had seemed, not an immanent thing at all, but imposition: back down those narrow streets the town seethed behind shuttered casements with music and the violence of voices in strained extremes, driven on frenzied patterns of clapped hands, broken by the disciplined clatter of castanets. Café Pinero was betrayed almost two blocks off by the strident crash of the girl’s heels on the frail wooden stage. A mute idiot winced in the single door where an unshaven man in a lambskin jacket and dirty white turban pushed him aside to enter, and leave him standing spent in masturbatory gestures for the dancer beyond the round tabletops and coffee cups, turning when she was done, twisted, with a whine, away from the glasses and smoke, frantically hopeless back to the narrow street, drawn by the heels of a passer-by loud on the stones going down the hill unsteadily, with a pause of distress to brush a spot of moonlight off the sleeve, pursued once more by the wail, —sangre negro en mi corazón . . . down, toward the bay again and a hotel whose high-ceilinged rooms drown the transient overnight among sunken ribs of ponderous furniture, to surface him rapidly with dawn among tiles of differing intent, exaggerated on rising, distorted in mismatching deep and then not as reflections underwater, bold below as a public lavatory, consumed on shallowing in Moorish intricacy as light separates the louvers and the train sets out before sunrise for Madrid.