The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (163 page)

—Rudy has the sweetest flowered toilet bowl, but he lent it to someone before we found this place on the Quai d’Orsay, and they just won’t give it back. They’re growing something in it, and we want to
use
it.

Across the river, up Montmartre, that hill whose name had been so many times ransomed since Saint Denis showed up carrying his head, an immense lopsided Negro in epaulettes guarded a bar where a heaving hunchback played an accordion like a beast lovemaking, a girl heaved as though about to be sick, and her girl friend said enticingly to a lone stranger, —She dancing, wonderful dancer. You dance? —No. —You pay me drink? —No. —You ingliss? —No. —You swiss? —No. —You jermn? —No. —You hollandais? —No. —You dance? —No. —You pay me drink? The hunchback would go on heaving over his accordion, the girl over the bar, the huge doorman at the door, but they would not see Arny again, stumbling in from his hotel in Rochechouart with his shirt on inside out and the hem of his coat pinned up, for even Henry’s Hotel was no longer standing: the day had been a sunny one, and Arny, finishing a bottle about breakfast time, put it empty in the windowsill and sat down to try to write a letter. —Dear Maude, I am just trying to figure things out . . . it commenced, and got no further, for he was soon asleep over it, his head down on his folded arms. The sunlight filled the room, and the wallpaper looked like it was going to descend and devour him. Still he slept. The sun caught the bottle, which drew its light and heat to a sharp point on the bedclothes. Arny woke to find himself engulfed in smoke. Before he could stand, it was flames. He got to the window, where there was a sign pasted, possibly by some jester:
On est prié de n’ouvrir pas ce fenêtre parce que le façade de l’hôtel lui compter pour se supporter
 . . . Arny did not read French, even when it was written by an American. With some effort he opened the window, smoke billowed out, and the façade of Henry’s Hotel collapsed.

In the more fashionable part of town below, tourists continued to stroll the Grands Boulevards, marveling at French cooking, côte de veau, côte de porc, entrecôte, biftec, bistek, pommes frites, pommes frites. The two small-headed youths had brought their young ladies back to the right bank for supper, and they advanced up the Boulevard des Capucines like the horses in a chariot quadriga, stallions on the outside. —Why don’t you go up ahead, Charley, see if one of
them
will approach you, pretend you’re not with us, go ahead, I want to see how she does it . . . None did. They came on, spavined stiff with formality, spaved and gelded, to a small restaurant whose small sign said,
Son menu Touristique 400 francs, You
Speack English
. —Hors d’oeuvres veryay pertoo, puis boeuf à la sale anglaise. —Comment, m’sr? —Boeuf à la sale anglaise. —Com
ment?
—Ici, damn it . . . He pointed to the menu and repeated. —Ahh oui, boeuf salé à l’anglaise, oui m’sr . . . —That’s what I said, damn it, I mean Christ, he added when the waitress was gone, —they can’t even understand their own language.

But on most hands the French were still being taken at their own evaluation. They were still regarded as the most sensitive connoisseurs of alcohol. Barbaric Americans, the barbaric English, drank to get drunk; but the French, with cultivated tastes and civilized sensibilities, drank down six billion bottles of wine that year merely to reward their refined palates: so refined, that a vast government subsidy, and a lobby capable of overthrowing cabinets, guaranteed one drink-shop for every ninety inhabitants; so cultivated, that ten per cent of the family budget went on it, the taste initiated before a child could walk, and death at nineteen months of D.T.s (cockeyed on pernod) incidental; so civilized, that one of every twenty-five dead Frenchmen had made the last leap through alcoholism.

They were still regarded as the arbiters of fine art, and Commissioner Clot of the Sureté Nationale could prove it by pointing to the walls of his office which were festooned with evidence: the best modern French painters brought such high prices, changed hands so freely, were so much easier to copy and, most ingratiatingly, had no histories, that no one need bother producing “old masters.” Deluged as he was even now with the work of someone who was buying originals, making and selling (perfect) copies, and selling the originals later elsewhere, Commissioner Clot remained confident of his prey: “If forgers would content themselves with one single forgery, they would get away with it nearly every time . . .”

To the end, the world’s most exemplary models of free men (as their vigorous succession of governments, and singular adroitness of tax evasion, witnessed); of thrift and provident husbandry (with three or four billion dollars’ worth of the world’s gold dead and interred in back yards); of sophisticated modernity (one had only to dial Odéon 8400 to get the time, the dissection of the latest minute scarcely understandable but, badly worn as it was, recorded by a famous French comedian); and still the favored child of the Church . . .

—Well
she
says she got athlete’s foot in one of the baths at Lourdes, said someone entering the Louvre; as an Italian coming out observed, to no one, that the sculptures of Michelangelo he had just seen inside were placed —coll’ arte ben conosciuta di tradimento francese.

Back on the left bank, the philosopher on the terrace of the Flore had been superseded by a blond woman with a fake concentration
camp number tattooed on her left arm, who was supervising a discussion on Suffering. To one side, a chess game progressed with difficulty, for there was argument as to which tall piece was the king, which queen. An American who had been motoring in North Africa said, —Don’t laugh, it isn’t funny. We hit one. There are about thirty-five a day in Casablanca, they just don’t understand machines. It cost me thirty-two thousand francs to get my car fixed, I should have hit him square. They even found his teeth in the muffler.

One end of the Deux Magots was honoring a painter who had been discovered by an American fashion magazine: until 1916, he had painted nothing but bottles. His artistic revolution came in 1930. He discovered white.

Max had left the Royale. —How does he make it, does he work somewhere? —He lives out in a suburb called Banlieu, Hannah said, —he paints pictures for a well-known painter who signs them and sells them as originals. —But they are originals . . . Twelve Arab children sold peanuts from the tops of baskets and hashish from the bottom. Someone said there was a town in France called Condom. Many of the young men wore beards. —I never did understand Italian money while I was there, it was like confetti, rarther expensive confetti . . . Hannah said she had to go to work. She read her poems aloud in a local cave, naked. —I’m studying art here on the GI bill, one of the beards said, —I’ve found a school where all you have to do is register. Someone recited the Malachi prophecy concerning the Papacy. —There are only seven more to go, counting this one. —Do you think Paris is worth a Mass? someone asked, clutching a book titled
Les cinq fontaines ensanglantées
. —Nostradamus predicts it will last until 3420. AD that is.

On the terrace of the Reine Blanche, the blond boy said, —Next week he’s promised to take me to Paris . . . —But baby, this
is
Paris. Rudy and Frank had left, to return to their new flat overlooking the Pont d’léna with some of their gay party, all of whom stopped in the foyer to admire the large painting which had been a wedding present from a well-known artist. It portrayed a tall man standing, and a youth reclining at his feet, gazing up at what, upon close inspection, proved to be no more than a tear in the tall man’s trousers. Then one of the guests started to open the drapes at the long windows, and was stayed immediately from it. —Because Rudy just looked and looked for months for a place just like this, overlooking the water, and the very first night we were here, standing right here in this very spot looking out at the lights and the Seine, a girl went out on the bridge and took her shoes off and jumped, right before our eyes, and that’s just ruined the view ever since for both of us . . . Then Frank was excused to write a letter home to
Ohio, while the rest sat down to friandises served on modern Finnish glassware, to light cigarettes from match books stamped
Rudy and Frank
, and talk of Copenhagen. —Dear Mummy, Frank wrote, in the bedroom, —I know you will understand why I want to be with him always, Mummy. I know you will understand when I tell you that I love him the way you loved Daddy . . .

—“Time is a limp . . .” Hannah read under the pavement, her words rising despumated on the smoke and desultory commingling of languages, —emmerdant . . . —les americains, alors . . . while the city might seem to try to sleep out this great gap of time, asking, —Hast thou affections? —Yes, gracious madam. —Indeed! —Not in deed, madam . . . yet have I fierce affections, and think what Venus did with Mars . . . The thirty-third person leaped from the Eiffel Tower (though unofficial figures had it nearer a hundred), this time from the 348-foot second platform, and after a twenty-year investigation the Friends of Cleopatra found that the remains in her grave, in the library garden of the Louvre, were not that queen at all, but the body of an Arab soldier killed in a Paris café brawl, and the mummy, looking like a tight bundle of rags, gone to a mass grave eighty years before, and all joy of the worm. —Et toute nue . . . quelle envahisseuse! —“Time is a limp . . .” she commenced again.

Behind the clattering bastion of saucers, the aging image of the wigless father of her country read on, and someone said she could sit like that all night, because she wore a Policeman’s Friend. Someone on the terrace of the Deux Magots said a balloon race had begun that afternoon in the Bois. Someone read the message on a card from a friend touring the Holy Land, —I’ve just visited the Wailing Wall, and had a good cry. In the men’s toilet downstairs, someone scrawled
Vive le Pape
over the urinal.

wrote a student at the Essex County Boys Vocational and Technical High School in Newark, New Jersey.

The 00th person leaped from the Empire State Building in New York.

In San Francisco, seven strands of barbed wire were strung at
the jumping-off place on the Golden Gate Bridge, which one hundred and fifty people had chosen as a point of departure from this world since the bridge was opened in 1937.

In Moscow,
Pravda
announced that Hawaiian guitar music had been banned in Russia.

Was the long winter really done? and “the fireside, the slippers and the waiting bed” no longer there to “protect the depressed person from himself . . . This line of retreat recedes as the day grows longer,” the World Health Organization reported, finding, in these verdant expressions of springtime’s acceleration, “the never-ending daylight difficult to bear, . . . and the glorious sun becomes a curse.”

Any city that calls herself modern anticipates all her children’s needs, even to erecting something high for them to jump from: the Eiffel Tower went up more than half a century ago; but everywhere the rural population must make shift to civilize itself with what it has. In southwestern France, within the neighborhood of Landes, forty-eight hours in the Easter holidays saw a woman hung in a farm barn, two men in a forest, one into a river, and another into the sea, while Deauville was already preparing to celebrate Pentecost, some seven weeks hence, by issuing five-hundred-thousand-franc chips in the casino, for the first time.

“Plage a allengas to are flag,” wrote the New Jersey high-school student, hardpressed by his progressive education: “i plegance to are flag of the united states of American / An to the republican for region stands / One machone in the viguable / witch libryt an justest for all” . . .

Libryt and justest, Los Angeles police confiscated a hydraulic press, dies, and the plastic rubber compound with which the three arrested men were counterfeiting poker chips, to be cashed in the gambling palaces across the line in Las Vegas.

In the viguable, the machone’s customs agents were importuning a Hollywood movie producer for duties on a “Study by Candlelight” by Vincent van Gogh. The purchaser said it was an “original” and therefore should enter the machone duty-free, witch libryt an justest guaranteed to any genuine work of art no matter how valuable; but the guardians of the viguable demanded a healthy cut (10 per cent) of the purchase price (
50,000.00), enforcing the tariff this sweat land levels on an “imitation or copy” whose entrance threatens the livelihood of the inspiration even now ringing from every mountain sides.

Lovers of beautiful things were thick as thieves. Some of the six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of paintings stolen from a cathedral in Bardstown, Kentucky (including a
Descent of the Holy Ghost
by Jan van Eyck), were found in the trunk of a car
in Chicago. Far across the sea, the axiom that aesthetic value is not enhanced by ownership was once more disproven: a caretaker of the Victoria and Albert Museum had in twenty-three years taken home nineteen hundred and sixty objets d’art hidden in his trouser-leg.