The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (25 page)

—It’s this crazy Calvinistic secrecy, sin . . .

—Esther it isn’t the secrecy, the darkness everywhere, so much as the lateness. I mean I get used to myself at night, it takes that long sometimes. The first thing in the morning I feel sort of undefined, but by midnight you’ve done all the things you have to do, I mean all the things like meeting people and, you know, and paying bills, and by night those things are done because by then there’s nothing you can do about them if they aren’t done, so there you are alone and you have the things that matter, after the whole day you can sort of take everything that’s happened and go over it alone. I mean I’m never really sure who I am until night, he added.

—Alone! She moved, enough that he loosed his grasp.

—That sort of funny smell, he said, standing uncertainly, then he took a step inside, as though he had left her of his own will, saw a piece of paper on the floor and picked it up, as though it were that he was after all the time. —And I mean things like this, he said holding it up, —these sort of magical diagrams and characters and things he makes . . .

—That, she said looking at it, —it’s just a study in perspective.

—Yes, but, when you look in there, don’t you think of things like . . .

—It’s nothing, it’s just a study in perspective. The little
x
is the vanishing point.

—Yes but, I mean today we were talking about alchemy, and the mysteries that, about the redemption of matter, and that it wasn’t just making gold, trying to make real gold, but that matter . . . Matter, he said matter was a luxury, was our great luxury, and that matter, I mean redemption . . .

She swung him round. —Redemption!

—Esther . . . She had her arms round his neck. He held her, at the waist, so quickly that he withdrew his thumb which had touched her breast and stood with hands paralyzed, not daring to return it. —That sort of funny smell, he murmured after a moment.

—Lavender, she said to him. Then she asked, —And you too, you want to be alone?

He looked at her face which was very close, perhaps too close to appreciate the slight raising of his eyebrow, and the complementary urbanity of his faint smile. —It’s rather difficult to shed our human
nature, he said. She broke away from him, and stood in the center of the room looking at him. —Esther, what’s the matter?

—That too, you got that from him too! Didn’t you?

—Well, I . . . sort of, I mean . . .

—What. Go on.

—Well we were talking about a philosopher, Otto said helplessly, —Pyrrho, about Pyrrho of Elis, who said that one state was as good as another, and one day his students found him treed by a dog and they taunted him, and he said that, It’s difficult to shed our human nature.

She let him finish, and then said, —You don’t have to repeat all these things to impress me, Otto, I’ve heard them all, from him.

—But . . .

—About Flemish painting, and stringency of suffering, that God cares as much about a moment as he does for an hour, I’ve heard it all from him. She paused, looking Otto over, and then said, —Do you know what he asked me once? when we first met you?

—What? Otto asked, coming toward her.

—He asked me if I thought you could be homosexual.

Otto stopped. —But . . . what? What did he . . . and what did you say?

—I said I didn’t know, you might be.

—But Esther, why should he, I mean you, you didn’t, did you think that? I mean why would you ever think . . . He stopped, before her, beside the couch.

—You never tried to kiss me, she said.

—But I, he . . . I mean Esther, Esther. I love you, Esther. With that, Otto commenced a silence which he broke himself minutes later. —Esther, we can’t, I mean not . . . suppose he should come in?

She drew her head back, resting it on the arm of the sofa, and looked at him. —Suppose he should? she said.

Late that night, Gordon stood poised in the doorway of a summer cottage, about to speak. (As a matter of fact, Gordon had been holding that screen door open for about a week now, laboring, as one hand shaped the air, to reduce Priscilla with some painful profundity.) Suddenly, in a rush of typewriter keys, he spoke. Gordon: Suffering, my dear Priscilla, is a petty luxury of mediocre people. You will find happiness a far more noble, and infinitely more refined state. Priscilla sobbed, and someone poùnded on the floor from below, warning Gordon that he had said enough. There was, however, little chance of Gordon’s going on tonight. At a stroke, Gordon had recovered his former assurance, and his former height. He had acquired a few new habits (could, for instance, put
away a pint of brandy without showing it) but, for all urbane intents and purposes, his profundities were to be spoken with that withering detestable cleverness of old, delivered with his former ease, as he dressed with his former elegance. What was more: Gordon had discovered Art.

The screen door
slammed
closed behind him; and Otto got up to look in the mirror. Then his expression changed, as he took his eyes from its reflection, and he hurriedly picked up a pencil and scribbled, Gd crs as mch fr mmnt as fr hr—wht mean?

Zosimus, Albertus Magnus, Geber, Bernhardus Trevisanus, Basilius Valentinus, Raymond Lully, Khalid ben Yezid, Hermes Trismegistus, have they been transcended by our achievement? For today (at a cost of
10,000 an ounce) it is possible to transmute base metal into gold.

The alchemist, for Otto, was likely an unsophisticated man of a certain age assisting in a smelly hallucination over an open fire, tampering with the provenience of absolutes, as Bernard of Trèves and an unnamed Franciscan are pictured seeking the universal dissolvent in the fifteenth century with a mixture of mercury, salt, molten lead, and human excrement. Otto was young enough to find answers before he had even managed to form the questions; nevertheless, if anyone had stopped him just then as he hurried up Madison Avenue, and asked what he was thinking about, Otto (to whom thought was a series of free-swimming images which dove and surfaced occasionally near to one another) would have said, —Alchemy! without hesitation. True, like everyone else, he had never seen a copy of the
Chemā
, that book in which the fallen angels wrote out the secrets of their arts which they had taught to the women they married. As embarrassed by the mention of Christ as he was charmed by the image of gold, the only thing which kept him from dismissing alchemy as the blundering parent of modern chemistry (for a pair of plastic eyeglasses, or a white shirt made from coal-tar derivatives, were obviously more remarkable, and certainly more useful, than anything Bernhardus Trevisanus turned up) was this very image of gold. Coined or in heavy bars, or exquisite dust, it came into his mind, to be fashioned in that busy workshop in less time than it takes to tell (for it was more an assembly line than a manufactory) into cuff links, cigarette cases, and other mass-produced artifacts of the world he lived in, mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having. Gone to earth alone, as lonely as they had been in life, were the accidents of Bernard and his Franciscan fellow; and gone to earth Michael Majer, who had seen in gold the
image of the sun, spun in the earth by its countless revolutions, then, when the sun might yet be taken for the image of God.

All this may have been in the way of progressive revelation, that doctrine which finds man incapable of receiving Truth all of a lump, but offers it to him only in a series of distorted fragments, any one of which, standing by itself, might be disproven by someone unable to admit that he is, eventually, after the same thing. Thus the good Dominican Albertus Magnus said he had tested gold made by the alchemists, and found it unable to withstand seven exposures to fire; chronicling their incredible history, he did not leave the hardly less extraordinary paths of his own, but contributed a book on the care of child-bearing mothers, no less careful here, than there, to abjure accident (for his concern was not the suffering or possible death of the woman, but keeping the child alive long enough for baptism). But with the age of enlightenment those lonely men were left far behind, to haggle in darkness over the beams which they had caught, and clung to with such suffocating desire.

Anti-histamine, streptomycin, penicillin and 606: few may question but that Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (“better known as Paracelsus”) was right. It was Paracelsus who emerged from the fifteenth century (castrated by a hog, so they said, in his childhood) to proclaim that the object of alchemy was not at all the transmutation of base metals into gold, but the preparation of medicines, thus opening the way for the hospitalized perpetuation of accident which we triumphally prolong enlarge upon, finance, respect, and enjoy today. 3:3′-diamino-4-4′-dihydroxyarsenobenzine dihydrochloride, writes Doctor Ehrlich (after 605 tries), thereby dismissing the notion that syphilis might be a visitation upon that pleasure which, in its perennial variety, had until now afforded the gratification of which only sin is capable. For unlike progressive revelation, the enlightenment of total materialism burst with such vigor that there were hardly enough hands to pick up the pieces. Even Paracelsus was left behind (dead of injuries received in a drunken brawl); and once chemistry had established itself as true and legitimate son and heir, alchemy was turned out like a drunken parent, to stagger away, babbling phantasies to fewer and fewer ears, to less and less impressive derelicts of loneliness, while the child grew up serious, dignified, and eminently pleased with its own limitations, to indulge that parental memory with no doubt but that it had found what the old fool and his cronies were after all the time.

It was with some effort, then, that Otto took his eyes from the gold cube in the Madison Avenue window, a cube capable, at
the flick of a thumb, of producing a flame, not, perhaps, the
ignis noster
of the alchemists, but a flame quite competent to light a cigarette. He looked at his stainless steel wrist watch, and hurried on. He was used to having engagements, which were always matters of fixed hours or half-hours, indicated, as he hurried to meet them, by this watch; thus he glanced at it now, as though it might confirm an engagement which he did not have. He forgot to notice the time, looked again, and almost bumped Esther who was coming out of the doorway. It was mid-afternoon.

—Otto!

—Are you just going out?

—Yes, but I’ll be back in an hour or so. Do you want to wait?

—Is he up there?

—He’s asleep. He didn’t come in till about dawn.

—Is . . . I mean is everything all right?

—Yes, it is. I guess it is. Here, take the key and go on up, you can slip in without waking him. I have to run.

Otto had got in and closed the door quietly behind him before he heard anything; even then, he could hardly distinguish words. He stood uncomfortably looking round, toward the half opened door of the studio and away from it. —Like the eyes in the petals of the flower Saint Lucy holds in that Ferrara painting . . . he heard, quite clearly, and looked at his watch. He looked up again at the half-open door. —Like the swollen owl . . . watching Saint Jerome . . .

Otto turned to leave but had hardly taken a step when the door to the studio banged behind him. —This damned hole in the wall, he heard, and turned.

—Oh, I just . . . I mean I just . . .

—I didn’t hear you come in.

—I’m sorry, I mean . . . I just sort of came in.

—I’m . . . I was just on my way out. For a walk, going for a walk.

—It . . . well I mean I was just out, and I mean it looks like it’s going to rain.

—Yes. Well you . . . you stay and read, if you like. There are some . . . books here, he said, gesturing. —Here. You read French, don’t you?

—Why . . . why yes, Otto said, —of course, I . . .

—Here. Take this. Keep it. Read it. He picked up, as though from nowhere, a small book whose spine was doubly split, the thin leather facing, torn around the edges from the cardboard, of olive green almost entirely covered with gold stamping of scrolls and fleurs-de-lis.

—
Adolphe
, Otto read, on the cover. —I don’t think I . . .

—It’s a novel, he said, —it’s a good novel. You read it.

—Well thank you, I . . .

—I’ll . . . get on with my walk now.

—Do you mind it I come along? Otto asked.

He had not looked surprised when he saw Otto; but he did now. He stood, his hands at his sides, opening and closing on nothing.

—I . . . I mean I wouldn’t want to . . . well, you know, I . . . Otto put
Adolphe
into his jacket pocket as he spoke. —I . . .

—Well, let’s get on then.

As they walked toward the park, Otto said, —You look tired.

—Tired?

Otto turned to look at him, as though this response invited him to do so, or permitted it, since he had, for two blocks, been looking from the corner of his eye, awaiting some change in the face beside him, though even now, as the single syllable left its lips, it relapsed into the expression of intent vacancy which it had not lost, even in the interruption of surprise, a peremptory confusion which had seemed, for that instant, to empty it even further.