The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (16 page)

Someone said, —But you’ve been over here so
long
, to an American in a hotel room who was showing his continental savoir faire by urinating in the sink. He said, —I wanted to marry her, but you know, she’s tied to her environment. Someone said, —I never knew him very well, he’s of the Negro persuasion. On the left bank, someone had just left his wife and taken up the guitar. It was at home in bed. —I dress it in her bathrobe every night, he said. Someone else suggested using a duck, putting its head in a drawer and jamming the drawer shut at the critical moment. A young gentleman was treating his friends to shoeshines for the seventh time that hour. He was drunk. The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France. At that table someone said, —This stuff doesn’t affect me at all. But don’t you notice that the sky is getting closer? —Of course I love art, that’s why I’m in Paris, a girl said. The boy with her said, —Je mon foo, that’s French for . . . —Putas, putas, putas, muttered the man in the sharkskin suit. Someone said, —My hands are full, would you mind getting some matches out of my pocket? . . . here, my trouser pocket. Someone said, —Do you like it here? Someone else said, —In the morning she didn’t want to, so I put it under her arm while she was grinding the coffee. A man in an opaque brown monocle said, —Gzhzhzhzhzt . . . hu . . . and fell off his chair. Someone told the joke about Carruthers and his horse.

On the quai, the man kissed his girl and returned to his more delicate preoccupation. Along the Rue de Montmartre stubby hands lifted glasses of red wine. These were the people, slipping, sliding, perishing: they had triumphed once in revolution, and celebrated the Mass in public parody; installing the Goddess of Reason with great celebration, she proved, when unveiled, to be a dancing girl with whom many had extensive acquaintance. The People, of whom one of their officers, Captain de Mun, said —“Galilean, thou hast conquered!” Ah, for them no mercy; they are not the people, they are hell itself! . . . But they knew what they wanted: Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . evaded the decorous façades decreed by their elders, or betters, and gathered in public interiors of carnivorous art nouveau.

In Père Lachaise an American woman bought a plot so that she might be buried near . . . who was it? Byron? Baudelaire? In the Place Vendôme another transatlantic visitor overturned a stolen taxicab at Napoleon’s feet, was jailed, fined, and made much of by his friends. In Notre Dame du Flottement a millionairess from Maine married her colored chauffeur and was made much of by his friends. On the terrace of the Dôme, beset behind the clattering bastion of her own Sainte Chapelle, the young George Washington read with silently moving lips, broke wind pensively and looked around to see if she had attracted notice. On the Boulevard de la Madeleine a girl walking alone, swinging her purse, paused to glance in at the feet showing below the shield of the pissoir, and waited to accost their owner. Someone, looking above, cried out, —What’s that? What is it? —The balloons. The balloons have gone up. In the washroom of the Café de la Régence, someone scrawled
Vive le roi
over the sink.

To one side, a man read the
Tribune
. To the other,
Al Misri
. —Votre journal, m’sieur, the waiter called, waving
Die Fleischflaute
, —votre journal . . .

And the shadow he cast behind him as he turned away fell back seven centuries, to embrace the dissolute youth of Raymond Lully, and infatuation with the beautiful Ambrosia de Castello, which she discouraged; and if she seemed to succumb at last, offering to bare her breasts in return for a poem he had written to their glory, it was to show him, as he approached in that rapture of which only flesh is capable, a bosom eaten away by cancer: he turned away to his conversion, to his death years later stoned in North Africa, and to his celebration as a scholar, a poet, a missionary, a mystic, and one of the foremost figures in the history of alchemy.

First of all, then, he is evil, in the judgment of God, who will not inquire what is advantageous to himself. For how can anyone love another, if he does not love himself? . . . In order, therefore, that there might be a distinction between those who choose good and those who choose evil, God has concealed that which is profitable to men.

—Peter, in the Clementine
Recognitions

—Wyatt . . . let’s get married before we know too much about each other.

That was unlike Esther.

She liked to get things out in the open, find why they
happened
. Still, like other women in love, salvation was her original purpose, redemption her eventual privilege; and, like most women, she could not wait to see him thoroughly damned first, before she stepped in, believing, perhaps as they do, that if he were saved now he would never need to be redeemed. There was a historical genuineness about Esther, which somehow persisted in spite of her conscious use of it. In her large bones there was implicit the temporal history of a past, and a future very much like it. There was size to her. She had the power of making her own mistakes appear as the work of some supramundane agency, possibly one of those often vulgarly confused with fate, which had here elected her capable of bringing forth some example which the world awaited. Principal among these (and no less a mistake, somewhere, which she must live out as though it were her own) was being a woman. She worked very hard to understand all this; and having come to be severely intellectual, probing the past with masculine ruthlessness, she became an accomplice of those very circumstances which Reason later accused of being unnecessary, and in the name of free will, by which she meant conscious desire, managed to prolong a past built upon them, refurbished, renewed, and repeated. With great diligence, and that talent of single purpose with which her sex pursue something unattainable
in the same fashion they pursue something which is, her search for Reason was always interrupted by reasons. Things happened for reasons; and so, in her proposal it may have been simply her feminine logic insuring a succession of happenings which reasonably might never have happened at all. Or being a woman, and the woman she was, her proposal may have been an infinite moment of that femininity which is one of humanity’s few approximations to beauty, asking no justification and needing none to act in a moment of certainty with nothing to fear, one day to be recalled in a fearful moment threatened by certainty.

Left hand; right hand: they moved over her with equal assurance. Undistinguished here they raised her flesh, and Esther rose to reconcile them, to provide common ground where each might know what the other was doing.

A year later, they had been married for almost a year; which was unlike Wyatt. He had become increasingly reluctant wherever decisions were concerned; and the more he knew, the less inclined to commit himself. Not that this was an exceptional state: whole systems of philosophy have been erected upon it. On the other hand, the more he refused to commit himself, the more submerged, and the more insistent from those depths, became the necessity to do so: a plight which has formed the cornerstone for whole schools of psychology. So it may be that his decision to marry simply made one decision the less that he must eventually face; or it is equally possible that his decision to marry was indecision crystallized, insofar as he was not deciding against it.

Knowing that extraordinary capacity for jealous hatred which men so often have for a woman’s past, Esther was in a way grateful that he never asked her about hers. Still, she did not disown it, though much as she wanted to go everywhere she had never been, she as fervently never wanted to revisit any scene in that past, a frantic concatenation whose victim she remained, projecting her future upon it in all the defiant resentment of free will, in a world where she had been victimized by every turn of the die since her father had first cast it. Where Esther’s mind had gone since, her thighs had followed with errant and back-breaking sincerity, in civilized correspondence to that primordial cannibal rite performed by sober comrades who eat their victims in order to impart to themselves the powers with which those victims had, as enemies, threatened to overcome them. (It is not simply hunger: those driven by hunger alone have been heard to remark afterward, —I should have preferred pork.)

Not hunger? One of the more fastidious comments risen in her past had sported the phrase
vagina dentata
. Still it was not hunger, but
an insatiability which took this hanger as its course, seeking, in its clear demand, to absorb the properties which had been withheld from her; and finding, in its temporary satisfaction, and the subsequent pain of withdrawal, insatiability. Year after year the emancipated animus of free will labored its spinneret, spun out this viscous fluid of causality which had rapidly hardened into strands fatal as those of the tarantula’s silk-lined burrow here in the sandy soil of native hope. She did not question it; no more than the trap door which the tarantula leaves open at the top, or the victims who tumble in, affirming her woman’s part in deep despair over their common lot, expressed in a resentment of men for the success of their casual fortunes where her devouring continued, but not for love.

At no time was Esther unprepared for those attempts which the lives around her made to rise to tragedy; though by the time they managed it, they had escaped it, and through their ascendance she had come rather to see herself as the conglomerate tragic figure, since it was she who was always left. It confirmed something. Esther had spent little time with women. She seemed to find in their problems only weak and distorted plagiarisms of the monstrous image of her own. Thus it seemed very odd to many who knew her that she should choose a woman analyst. It became a very deep attachment, so long before any completion of her analysis that it was evident to both of them who had the upper hand. When Esther met Wyatt, she asked if she should marry, and was forbidden. She demanded, and was pled with. She married, and her analyst was a suicide. It was a way things had of working out for Esther. It confirmed something.

Call him louder! Call him louder!
Trumpets sounded, and the roll of drums.

—And why you like Handel, Esther said quietly after their argument, or to continue it. She had a cold, which broke her voice low with apparent emotion.

—Handel?

Is not His voice like a hammer . . . ?

—Mozart . . . She coughed.

Like a hammer that breaketh the stone

She swallowed. There was a magazine open in her hands, as there was a book in his; but she was watching him, to see if the intent strain in his face were for his reading, or tense suspension waiting, borne upon the chords of music, for the next sound of constriction and release in her throat. He did not move. Her throat drew tighter, its strictures embraced, and she swallowed with difficulty. At that, as though it were a signal of release from restraint, a hand rose
to hide the intent corner of his profile. —And
Tosca!
 . . . she murmured, as her throat bound up again, and she swallowed quickly. He did not move. The book was a large one, but she could not make out its title. It might have been anything; just as his tension must be for her presence, since he appeared to read everything with the same casual concentration. When she interrupted, there was no way of knowing whether he was looking up from Diogenes Laërtius or
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
. She might be breaking a thread in Berkeley’s
New Theory of Vision
, joining a rain of falling objects from the supercelestial geography of Charles Fort, or only echoing a voice in some cheap paper novel like
Les Damnés de la Terre
. Mendelssohn’s
Elijah
continued from the radio. She swallowed. Immediately, he cleared his throat, a vicarious measure which left her unrelieved. If she asked, he might look up with, —Fort says, “By the damned, I mean the excluded” . . . but she would have to ask, —Excluded from what? —“By prostitution, I seem to mean usefulness . . .”

She studied him now as though he might not be reading at all, but peeping at her through fingers of the hand shielding his eye. She cleared her throat. There was no way, as
Elijah
came to a close, to reopen their discussion: unless the next composition should be something by Beethoven or Mozart. If the radio voice should announce, Mozart’s Symphony Number 37, Köchel Listing 444 . . . He turned a page. Since their discussions seldom lasted long, she often carried them on in her own mind, reconsidering now (and certain she saw the glint of his eye between his fingers) her thralldom to the perfection of Mozart, work of genius without an instant of hesitation or struggle, genius to which argument opposed the heroic struggle constantly rending the music of Beethoven, struggle never resolved and triumphed until the end. —Genius in itself is essentially uninteresting. —But the work of genius . . . —It’s difficult to share in perfection. —You, to share? she’d commenced; but that was all. He was reading. She swallowed, and caught the glitter of an eye.
Elijah
was finished. Still in her mind, “By prostitution, I seem to mean usefulness,” Esther said:

—What are you reading?

—Eh? His surprise was a look (she would think of it one day, remembering, or trying to remember) indigenous to his face, either that immediate anticipatory surprise, reflecting sudden foretaste of something past (as when she asked him when he’d been in Spain: —I? I’ve never been in Spain); or it was this look he had now, the surprise of one intruded upon. And year after year as their marriage went on, the first came less and the other more often, until one day, remembering him, or trying to remember, it would be this one
which would come to her, this face of confusion, of one intruded upon, an anxious look. He said, —Nothing.

—Nothing? You can’t read nothing.

—It’s a book on mummies.