The Recognitions

MEPHISTOPHELES (
leiser
): Was gibt es denn?

WAGNER (
leiser
): Es wird ein Mensch gemacht.

 — Goethe,
Faust
II 

Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality. But the procession up the foreign hill, bounded by cypress trees, impelled by the monotone chanting of the priest and retarded by hesitations at the fourteen stations of the Cross (not to speak of the funeral carriage in which she was riding, a white horse-drawn vehicle which resembled a baroque confectionery stand), might-have ruffled the shy countenance of her soul, if it had been discernible.

The Spanish affair
was the way Reverend Gwyon referred to it afterwards: not casually, but with an air of reserved preoccupation. He had had a fondness for traveling, earlier in his life; and it was this impulse to extend his boundaries which had finally given chance the field necessary to its operation (in this case, a boat bound out for Spain), and cost the life of the woman he had married six years before.

—Buried over there with a lot of dead Catholics, was Aunt May's imprecation. Aunt May was his father's sister, a barren steadfast woman, Calvinistically faithful to the man who had been Reverend Gwyon before him. She saw her duty in any opportunity at true Christian umbrage. For the two families had more to resent than the widower's seemingly whimsical acceptance of his wife's death. They refused to forgive his not bringing Camilla's body home, for deposit in the clean Protestant soil of New England. It was their Cross, and they bore it away toward a bleak exclusive Calvary with admirable Puritan indignance. 

This is what had happened. 

In the early fall, the couple had sailed for Spain. 

—Heaven only knows what they want to do over there, among all those . . . those foreigners, was one comment. 

—A whole country full of them, too. 

—And Catholic, growled Aunt May, refusing even to repeat the name of the ship they sailed on, as though she could sense the immediate disaster it portended, and the strife that would litter the seas with broken victories everywhere, which it anticipated by twenty years. 

Nevertheless, they boarded the
Purdue Victory
and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided for against all inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God. On All Saints' Day, seven days out and half the journey accomplished, God boarded the
Purdue Victory
and acted: Camilla was stricken with acute appendicitis. 

The ship's surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string. The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally been made, with all of false economy's ingenious drear deception, of coated cardboard. After many launderings they persisted as a row of gray stumps posted along the gaping portals of his fly. Though a bouton-nière sometimes appeared through some vacancy in his shirt-front, its petals, too, proved to be of paper, and he looked like the kind of man who scrapes foam from the top of a glass of beer with the spine of a dirty pocket comb, and cleans his nails at table with the tines of his salad fork, which things, indeed, he did. He diagnosed Camilla's difficulty as indigestion, and locked himself in his cabin. That was the morning. 

In the afternoon the Captain came to fetch him, and was greeted by a scream so drawn with terror that even his doughty blood stopped. Leaving the surgeon in what was apparently an epileptic seizure, the Captain decided to attend the chore of Camilla himself; but as he strode toward the smoking saloon with the ship's operating kit under his arm, he glanced in again at the surgeon's porthole. There he saw the surgeon cross himself, and raise a glass of spirits in a cool and steady hand. 

That settled it. 

The eve of All Souls' lowered upon that sea in desolate disregard for sunset, and the surgeon appeared prodded from behind down the rolling parti-lit deck. Newly shaven, in a clean mess-boy's apron, he poised himself above the still woman to describe a phantasma- goria of crosses over his own chest, mouth, and forehead; conjured, kissed, and dismissed a cross at his calloused fingertips, and set to work. Before the mass supplications for souls in Purgatory had done rising from the lands now equidistant before and behind, he had managed to put an end to Camilla's suffering and to her life. 

The subsequent inquiry discovered that the wretch (who had spent the rest of the voyage curled in a coil of rope reading alternatively the Book of Job and the Siamese National Railway's
Guide to Bangkok
) was no surgeon at all. Mr. Sinisterra was a fugitive, traveling under what, at the time of his departure, had seemed the most logical of desperate expedients: a set of false papers he had printed himself. (He had done this work with the same artistic attention to detail that he gave to banknotes, even to using Rembrandt's formula for the wax ground on his copper plate.) He was as distressed about the whole thing as anyone. Chance had played against him, cheated him of the unobtrusive retirement he had planned from his chronic profession, into the historical asylum of Iberia. 

—
The first turn of the screw pays all debts
, he had muttered (crossing himself) in the stern of the
Purdue Victory
, where the deck shuddered underfoot as the blades of the single screw churned Boston's water beneath him; and the harbor itself, loath to let them depart, retained the sound of the ship's whistle after it had blown, to yield it only in reluctant particles after them until they moved in silence. 

Now he found himself rescued from oblivion by agents of that country not Christian enough to rest assured in the faith that he would pay fully for his sins in the next world (Dante's eye-witness account of the dropsical torments being suffered even now in Male-bolge by that pioneer Adamo da Brescia, who falsified the florin, notwithstanding), bent on seeing that he pay in this one. In the United States of America Mr. Sinisterra had been a counterfeiter. During the investigation, he tried a brief defense of his medical practice on the grounds that he had once assisted a vivisectionist in Tampa, Florida; and when this failed, he settled down to sullen grumbling about the Jews, earthly vanity, and quoted bits from Ecclesiastes, Alfonso Liguori, and Pope Pius IX, in answer to any accusatory question. Since it was not true that he had, as a distant tabloid reported, been trapped by alert Federal agents who found him substituting his own likeness for the gross features of Andrew Jackson on the American twenty-dollar note, Mr. Sinisterra paid this gratuitous slander little attention. But, like any sensitive artist caught in the toils of unsympathetic critics, he still smarted severely from the review given his work on page one of
The National Counterfeit Detector Monthly
("Nose in Jackson portrait appears bulbous due to heavy line from bridge . . ."); and soon enough thereafter, his passion for anonymity feeding upon his innate modesty amid walls of Malebolgian acclivity, he resolved upon a standard of such future excellence for his work, that jealous critics should never dare attack him as its author again. His contrition for the death which had occurred under his hand was genuine, and his penances sincere; still, he made no connection between that accident in the hands of God, and the career which lay in his own. He was soon at work on a hand-engraved steel plate, in the prison shop where license number tags were turned out. 

For the absence of a single constellation, the night sky might have been empty to the anxious eye of a Greek navigator, seeking the Pleiades, whose fall disappearance signaled the close of the seafaring season. The Pleiades had set while the Purdue Victory was still at sea, but no one sought them now, that galaxy of suns so far away that our own would rise and set unseen at such a distance: a constellation whose setting has inaugurated celebrations for those lying in graves from Aztec America to Japan, encouraging the Druids to their most solemn mystery of the reconstruction of the world, bringing to Persia the month of Mordad, and the angel of death. 

Below, like a constellation whose configured stars only hazard to describe the figure imposed upon them by the tyranny of ancient imagination, where Argo in the southern sky is seen only with an inner eye of memory not one's own, so the ship against the horizon-less sea of night left the lines which articulated its perfection to that same eye, where the most decayed and misused hulk assumed clean lines of grace beyond the disposition of its lights. "Obscure in parts and starless, as from prow / To mast, but other portions blaze with light," the
Purdue Victory
lay in the waters off Algeciras, and like Argo, who now can tell prow from stern? Vela, the sails? Carina, the keel? where she lies moored to the south celestial pole, and the end of the journey for the Golden Fleece. 

The widower debarked in a lighter that cool clear November night, with one more piece of luggage than he had had when he set out. Gwyon had refused to permit burial at sea. He faced strenuous difficulties entering the port of Spain, most of which hung about an item listed as "Importación ilegal de carnes dañadas," difficulties surmounted only by payment of a huge fee covering the fine, duties, excises, imposts, tributes, and archiepiscopal dispensation, since the cadaver was obviously heretical in origin. The cumbrous bundle was finally sealed in a box of mahogany, which he carted about the country seeking a place suitable to its interment. 

Eventually, on the rise behind the village of San Zwingli overlooking the rock-strewn plain of New Castile, Camilla Gwyon was sheltered in a walled space occupied by other rent-paying tenants, with a ceremony which would have shocked her progenitors out of their Calvinist composure, and might have startled her own Protestant self, if there had been any breath left to protest. But nothing untoward happened. The box slid into its high cove in the bóveda unrestrained by such churnings of the faithful as may have been going on around it, harassed by the introduction of this heretic guest in a land where even lepers had been burned or buried separately, for fear they communicate their disease to the dead around them. By evening her presence there was indigenous, unchallenged, among decayed floral tributes and wreaths made of beads, or of metal, among broken glass facades and rickety icons, names more ornate than her own, photographs under glass, among numerous children, and empty compartments waiting, for the moment receptacles of broken vases or a broken broom. Next to the photograph of a little cross-eyed girl in long white stockings, Camilla was left with Castile laid out at her feet, the harsh surface of its plain as indifferent to memory of what has passed upon it as the sea. 

The Reverend Gwyon was then forty-four years old. He was a man above the middle height with thin and graying hair, a full face and flushed complexion. His clothing, although of the prescribed moribund color, had a subtle bit of dash to it which had troubled his superiors from the start. His breath, as he grew older, was scented more and more freshly with caraway, those seeds often used in flavoring schnapps, and his eyes would glow one moment with intense interest in the matter at hand, and the next be staring far beyond temporal bounds. He had, by now, the look of a man who was waiting for something which had happened long before. 

As a youth in a New England college he had studied the Romance languages, mathematics, and majored in classical poetry and anthropology, a series of courses his family thought safely dismal since language was a student's proper concern, and nothing could offer a less carnal picture of the world than solid geometry. Anthropology they believed to be simply the inspection of old bones and measurement of heathen heads; and as for the classics, few suspected the liberties of Menander ("perfumed and in flowing robe, with languid step and slow . . ."). Evenings Gwyon spent closeted with Thomas Aquinas, or constructing, with Roger Bacon, formid-able geometrical proofs of God. Months and then years passed, in Divinity School, and the Seminary. Then he traveled among primi- live cultures in America. He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as "rank presumption." He recorded few con-versions, and those were usually among women, the feeble, and heathen sick and in transit between this world and another, who accepted the Paradise he offered like children enlisted on an outing to an unfamiliar amusement park. Though one battered old warrior said he would be converted only on the certainty that he would end up in the lively Hell which Gwyon described: it sounded more the place for a man; and on hearing the bloody qualifications of this zealous candidate (who offered to add his mentor's scalp to his collection as guaranty), the missionary assured him that he would. But the tall men around him would have none of his ephemeral, guilt-ridden prospects, and continued to beatify trees, tempests, and other natural prodigies. In solemn convocation, called in alarm, his superiors decided that Gwyon was too young. He was certainly too interested in what he saw about him. He was called back to the Seminary for a refresher course, and it was at that time that he developed a taste for schnapps, and started the course of mithri-datism which was to serve him so well in his later years.