The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (31 page)

—La limpia, a child cried at Otto, pointing to his shoes, and then lost interest. Those shoes were perfect. The white linen suit had got becomingly crumpled on the trip down, and in this blazing light the gray tinge from the ashes did not show, clearly the definition of cultivated diffidence. He had a French book, labeled
Adolphe
, in a side pocket which he carried when he traveled and
appeared to read in public places. As he started toward the dock with a boy who came barely to his waist carrying his bags, the sun cast his shadow striding with vain certainty before him.

Beside the boat, he took the change from his pocket to count. There were a few coins of the republic which he was leaving, mixed in with E Pluribus Unum dimes and quarters, odd-looking shiny coins (he had made certain to put aside new ones) which he would drop on New York bars, by mistake. He felt a hand touch his arm, and turned to see a black face of sudden age which held no beauty for him.

—Una limosnita, por el amor de Dios . . . The face had tufts of hair at chin and lips, so separately white that they looked to have been stuck there a moment before. Otto looked at his coins. The shiny two-and-one-half-cent piece looked like a dime. He felt that the beggar would make the same mistake, or think that he had made it unwittingly. He gave the lesser coin into the old hand and turned away. —Dios se lo pague, said the voice, in beneficent threat.

The luggage and its carrier disposed of, Otto walked through the town, into the wide open plaza of cement benches and palm trees. In the center was a dry fountain, and children who would seem to have nothing to laugh at laughed at nothing. They quieted for a moment when the priest passed. He was a long black-skirted affair with magenta buttons from throat to feet, five magenta buttons on each cuff. Around the largest part of him came a wide sash of glorious purple. His round black hat carried a purple corded band. He made no sign, marching toward the cathedral.

The broken face of that old building was covered with the sun. It was difficult to believe that it had ever been new, actually been built stone by stone under the surface of the plaster. The saints, some armless and headless, waited in still niches smoothed and quietened by the rain. The towers hung heavy with silent bells. But in places the plaster had come away, showing the walis built brick by brick, separated by lines of mortar laid by men’s hands. Just inside the door waited a Virgin; the priest went in not glancing at her, passed her with proprietary certainty. When he was gone the children forgot him and remembered themselves. The birds, forgetting nothing and remembering nothing, dashed the benches with spots of white.

Otto walked more rapidly, for fear of one of them catching his linen, and was suddenly brought up face to face with a girl beside the waterless fountain. The darkness which she wore about her gave her an air of richness, her skin a color never burned by one sun; and in an evanescent instant he loved her. Recovering, he was as suddenly embarrassed, and got round her through the plaza.

Around the weight of the cathedral, the town looked transitory, brightly colored and haphazard, as though without that weight it might disintegrate, to wander off and be lost in the green hills.

The white boat slipped away from the pier, away from the black and brown and tan upturned faces, the hands extended for a last tossed coin and those few raised in farewell. The water was shallow and clear green. Slowly the heat of land fell away, and two people stood, a distance apart, at the boat-deck rail, watching the buildings lose their form and become smears of color, the palms lose their majesty and fade into the heavy green of the countryside. The harbor was still, nothing could be seen to move, and its sounds and cries were lost: there was only the throbbing of the boat, moving with certainty out upon water which became deeper and deeper blue. Otto, walking up to the bow, was taking the sun of this lost country with him.

He took a case out of his pocket, opened it, and caught his quivering lower lip with his teeth as a jarring of the boat hit his hand against the rail and sent the gold-rimmed dark glasses down into the white water. He stood clutching the emptied case tightly, looking over the bow to where it tore that water open, as though there must be some way of recovery.

—Too bad, said a cheerful voice beside him, a fiercely sun-pinkened American. —Looked like a nice pair of glasses. Otto closed the case and put it into his pocket. —Why don’t you throw the case in too? asked his witness.

—I can use it for something, Otto said, surly, defensive.

—Carry pills in? said the traveler, and laughed again. —Hot as hell, isn’t it. It’ll cool down when we get out a ways.

—Possibly, said Otto, and walked aft.

The mirror in his cabin was smaller than he would have liked, framed in wood covered with thick green paint. He looked at his luggage. It was all there, with Wan ted-on-Voyage tags tied to the handles. Then he thought to look at his fingernails. Not as a man does, the fingers turned in upon the palms, but like a lady, at the back of the extended hand so that she may admire the slim beauty of her fingers. Otto admired the taut dark figure of his hand, forgot to look at the nails and had to look back again (fingers turned in upon the palm). He was immediately troubled about covering that fine hand with a bandage. Still, injury might have been to the wrist: in which case the white gauze would go splendidly across the base of his hand, set off the dark length of the fingers like a lady’s evening glove. He made certain that he had two extra packages of Emu which he would offer (preferably to ladies), casually indifferent
to their choking fumes. He considered unpacking, but there was no hurry. The sling he had fashioned was in the top of the small suitcase. There would be time that evening to try it again, to decide where the bandage would go, where the wound was.

The sun moved down toward the sea, its redness heightened in hurry to be gone, moving as though pursued. The land was far behind, a soft haze behind the slowly curving wake of the boat, a white wake already floating with garbage where white birds dove and lifted themselves away. Otto saw none of this. He had started to post the Italian print on his wall (
Lady of the Junipers
), thought of Jesse’s words, shrank, put it out of mind. He thought of his wallet, and pressed the bulge under his coat with his wrist. His hair, like his nails, was grown just the right length. The mustache, sparse and golden, the same. He tightened the knot in his tie and pulled down the skirt of his jacket. With the smoke from a fresh cigarette he blew a perfect circle against the hard surface of the mirror, where it clung growing larger and thinner around this image of his importunate face.

Up the coast of the New World the ship bearing ten million bananas ground out its course, every minute the waste heaving brokenly around it more brilliant as the moon rose off the starboard bow and moved into the sky with effortless guile, unashamed of the stigmata blemishing the face she showed from the frozen fogs of the Grand Banks to the jungles of Brazil, where along the Rio Branco they knew her for a girl who loved her brother the sun; and the sun, suspicious, trapped her in her evil passion by drawing a blackened hand across her face, leaving the marks which betrayed her, and betray her still.

America is the country of young men.

—Emerson

—Nothing, said Maude Munk.

—Nothing? Amy Munk repeated.

—Nothing, she confirmed, dropping ice cubes into a glass. —The same things. They ask the same questions they’ve been asking for three years.
Was
I conscious after the accident, and if I wasn’t how could I have reported it all to the police, and did I have pains in my back
then
, and if I did why don’t the hospital records show it. Then my doctor and their doctor argue, and my lawyer and their lawyer argue, and the cab driver who was driving the cab I was in lives in Detroit now. I wish you’d put your shoes away somewhere when you take them off.

—Well I could tell them your personality’s changed. And you never used to drink before that accident. It used to upset you because I drank.

—It still does, Arny. Terribly. And you don’t have pains, like I do. Today I even asked the judge, Would you have two operations and wear a spinal brace if you were malingering?

—Maude look, you’re spilling your drink, he said, righting the glass which tipped toward him in her forgotten hand. The radio offered cocktail music,
When Buddha Smiles
.

—What is it? Are you tired? Arny? . . . Oh, I just wish you got tired doing something you liked.

—You don’t make a living doing things you like.

—But selling . . . and year after year . . . and . . . things like last week.

—Maude.

—Does your father know about that? Or does he just pretend he doesn’t know, and he’s glad you’ve sold another order, playing cards in a hotel room where they send naked women in for your out-of-town
buyers. And all the time your father’s such a fine dignified old man. Why if my Daddy ever . . .

—Maude.

—Anyhow, my Daddy was a man.

—What do you mean by that? Just because I have a rupture . . .

—I don’t mean your old rupture. It’s just that . . . She looked at him a moment longer, got up and freshened her drink, and turned the dial on the radio. Finally she asked, —What are you reading? Arny? You’re not even reading, are you.

—Maude.

—As though you were all alone. Sometimes I come into the room and you’re sitting here with a book open, but you’re not reading. You’re just sitting looking at the page, but you’re not reading? Are you lonely?

—that looks better, smells better, tastes better, and is better, said a young man’s voice on the radio.

—But how can you be lonely?
I
’m here.

—the next number on our program, the Academic Festival Overture, by Tschaikovsky.

—Arny, have you filled out the papers?

—What papers?

—
The
papers, what other papers. For the Red Heart Adoption Center.

—It’s the Sacred Heart. Red Heart’s a dog food.

—Well anyway, have you?

—Yes Maude.

—And can we go up and get it in the morning?

—We may have to wait.

—How long?

—Maude, please don’t have another drink.

—A little brand-new one, Arny. It will make everything different between us again, won’t it? for you? I mean for me, it will make us more like we used to be, won’t it?

—Is dinner ready?

—Do you want chutney?

—Chutney?

—With the curry.

—Yes.

—Then you’ll have to go out and get it. There isn’t any.

—Never mind then.

—But I want chutney.

—I’ll wait while you go out and get it. The walk might do you good, he added, looking up at his wife’s eyes, wandering past him wed to nothing. —There’s someone at the door.

—Oh Herschel, I forgot, Herschel called and you can’t get him off the telephone until you make some kind of date with him, he said he’d stop in . . .

—Are you going to answer the door?

—Herschel! . . . Arny, it’s Herschel, and . . . he has a girl with him!

Outside the door stood a young lady adjusting a garter. Her companion watched. —Anyhow, come in, said Maude. Herschel waited until the garter was taken care of, the stocking smoothed over the knee, the skirt over the thigh. Then he said:

—Baby! looking up to see Maude for the first time, and he offered both his hands. Herschel was tall, and had always been handsome. He had been the handsomest boy in his home town, and the only one in that part of Ohio to own dinner clothes. His picture, in dinner clothes, still stood in the photographer’s window on Front Street where, faded and fly-specked, it continued to exact a certain prestige, for it was some years since he’d been home. —I brought along a little two-legged friend, he said. —Arny and Maude, I want you to meet . . .

—Adeline, the blonde supplied.

—Adeline.

—How do you do, I’m sure, said Adeline.

—Baby is your name really Adeline? I had a nurse named Adeline, a black one, big West Indian black Adeline. One day under the apple tree I bit her right square . . .

—Herschel! . . . your head is brachycephalic, Maude said from where she’d gone to pour drinks, whisky with water (she’d heard soda was bad for the stomach lining). —It’s the coming shape in heads.

—Aren’t you kind, baby. No one’s ever told me
that
before.

—Maude.

—Arny, it’s true. Head shapes are very important. Arny thinks I’m silly, reading books about heads, that book there. Do you see the picture it’s open to? That’s a good domestic. That’s why I want to look at the babies first, we don’t want one that will be a domestic. On the next page there’s one kind of sticking out in the back, that’s the Intellectual. And the kind of big square one is a Leader of Men. We’re going to have a baby, she said pausing on her way to the kitchen for more water. Adeline stopped her drink halfway to her lips and looked at the other woman’s figure curiously. —Tomorrow morning. Adeline looked downright insulted.

—Oh God, baby, again? Herschel sank back in his chair.

—No, this time we’re really going to get there, aren’t we Arny?
Tomorrow morning at nine. Oh, did you want a drink? I didn’t know you wanted one, Arny.

—I shouldn’t tell this, baby, but if you’re shopping for a bargain . . .

Maude cried out from the kitchen. —Oh . . . a cockroach. I hate New York, no matter where you live, you have them. The people downstairs have them, they chase them up here and then I chase them back down, up and down the drain.

—Why don’t you use D.D.T.?

—It’s no good, it just makes them hysterical, Maude said, coming in with water. —They run around screaming.

—Cockroaches?

—Well you can’t really hear them, but you can tell that’s what they’re doing, that’s what you do when you’re hysterical.

—Baby . . .

—Yes, tomorrow morning at nine. Have you finished that already, Arny?

—If you’re not in a wild rush, Herschel said slyly, —I know someone who might help you. Someone who’s going to have one. I mean really have one. Not just yet, though.