The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (86 page)

The pig, stamped upon the coins of Eleusis when she coined her first autonomous money in the fourth century
B
.
C
., the pig of purification, adorned the necktie which Mr. Sinisterra chose, and turned to the mirror to knot it about his neck with a manner of great tradition born. —It’s a great disappointment when he don’t appreciate our tradition, he said. —Our family wasn’t just nobody in Salerno, every secret we have has been handed down from father to son for generations. Do you think he cares? My father was proud of me. He turned to put on his suit coat, flicking at its lapels, and buttoning it before the mirror. His chest filled as he looked at himself there.

Behind him lay the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and the magnanimous grant of Constantine, though that emperor was some five centuries dead when the spirit of his generosity prevailed through forgers in Rome, to bequeath all of western Europe to the Papacy. Behind him lay decrees, land grants, and wills, whose art of composition became a regular branch of the monastic industry, busy as those monks in the Middle Ages were keeping a-kindle the light of knowledge which they had helped to extinguish everywhere else. Behind lay Polycrates, who minted gold-coated lead coins in his own kingdom of Samos; and Solon, who decreed death for such originality in his. Canute severed guilty hands; and England, escaping his empire and succumbing to the Normans not much later, removed not only hands but eyes, a lily flower of punishment gilded with castration which solved nothing, for even in the reign of Edward III it was found necessary to draw and quarter a number of talented ecclesiastics.

Historians, anxious to rescue some semblance of a system from the chaos of the past, point out that since the dawn of civilization, the center of civilization has moved westward: from Polycrates’ Asian island and Solon’s Athens to Constantine’s Roman Empire nine centuries later, on to Charlemagne’s Frankish labyrinth, ever onward to Canute the Dane at the millennium, across the Channel to the fourteenth-century England of Edward III it came, gathered its breath there (while word of renascence breathed behind in Italy) for three centuries, readying for the leap across the sea to shores of a New World, where early settlers (having thrown off that yoke of tyrannical ignorance, religious persecution) promoted a culture founded in pure reason, and introduced their civilized art to the
Indians, forging wampum of porcelain and bone. They prospered. Hard work was the only expression of gratitude their deity exacted and money might be expected to accrue as testimonial; though Pennsylvania decreed the pillory, with the ears nailed to it and cut off, and a complement of thirty-nine lashes and a fine, these dedicated beings did not quail. But like so many of the mystic contrivances devised by priesthoods which slip, slide, and perish in lay hands, this too became a cottage industry: tradesmen, barbers, and barkeeps issued money, keeping up as best they could with the thousand different banks who were doing the same thing. Before the war which was fought to preserve the Union, a third of the paper money in circulation was counterfeit, and another third the issue of what were generously termed “irresponsible” banks. Meanwhile inspectors went from one bank to another, following the security bullion which was obligingly moved from the bank they had just inspected to the one where they next arrived; and the importunate public, demanding the same assurance, was satisfied with boxes rattling broken glass. Merchants kept “counterfeit detectors” under their counters, and every bill offered them in payment was checked against this list of all counterfeits in circulation, and notes rendered worthless by the disappearance of the evanescent banks which had issued them.

Mr. Sinisterra kept his copy of Bicknall’s
Counterfeit Detector
for 1839 as a professional curiosity, much as a noted surgeon may exhibit a copy of Galen’s
Anatomy
. And just as the noted cardiac surgeon may admire Galen’s discovery that the arteries contain blood (and not air, as four centuries of the Alexandrian school had taught), but still smile patronizingly at his theory that the septum of the heart was pierced by imperceptible foramina (allowing passage of the blood from the right into the left ventricle); so Mr. Sinisterra mused over the ingenious devices of the century before him in Bicknall’s, which listed 20 issues of money on fictitious banks, 43 banks whose notes were worthless, 54 banks which were bankrupt, 254 banks whose notes were counterfeited, and 1395 varieties of counterfeit notes in circulation. Thus he was becomingly proud of his tradition, which he had brought to the land of opportunity to exercise in the early part of the century, when the proportion of Italians to immigrants from less imaginative lands was about five to one: he whose consecration had helped to raise New York to its present reputation for being the greatest modern center of counterfeiting money of every currency in the world.

He crossed himself before the mirror, turned down his collar, and let his gaze rest upon the Siam National Railway’s
Guide to Bangkok
, noting, as he did, that he must pick up a copy of Baedeker’s
Spain
. He allowed himself a moment to dream, saw himself voyaging (for the Eternal City, in a Holy Year, lay before him) like those early pilgrims to the Holy Land, Lententide in Rome, Holy Week at Compostella while their families were left starving at home, where they eventually returned decked with cockleshells to recount their adventures, and receive the applause and reverent congratulations of their lesser neighbors who had cravenly remained at home to work for their living.

Into his pocket he thrust the
Theologia Moralis;
and, on second thought, a small sandy mustache with spirit gum stuck to it. He picked up the package of bills, and paused to gaze for a moment into the fearless eyes of Andrew Jackson before he folded the paper closed upon them, and secured it with two elastic bands. How could Jackson, fighting in the Battle of Hanging Rock at the age of thirteen, know that a hundred seventy-odd years later a man would be laboring over his portrait with the exquisite care of love Mr. Sinisterra showed for those eyes, those lips, that shag of hair? that more than a century later his rousing battle with wealth, and the Bank of the United States, would be taken up, if on slightly different grounds, by one so covetous of anonymity as this man who stood thrusting two hundred and fifty vignettes of the seventh President into his pocket now?

His wife did not turn around when he entered behind her, muttering —Seventy-two eighty-eight-hundredths of an inch apart! That’s no work for a bum. He stopped, and said in a hoarse whisper, —Do you hear me? Still she did not turn. He raised his voice with the same question. Then he advanced upon her. She jumped, and let out a cry, clinging to the sink with one hand, fumbling at her bosom with the other. —You haven’t heard a thing I’ve said all this time. You turned it off, didn’t you? Didn’t you! With that, he tore the hearing aid from her dress, and threw it on the floor. —There! he said, and stamped on it. —Now you don’t have to listen to me.

She only stared at him, at his eyes pin-pointed, bearing blindness, through those dusty lenses. She shook her head, looking at his light reversible coat. —It’s cold out, Frank.

—I know it, he said. —I won’t be long.

—It’s cold out, Frank. Here, you ought to take this around your neck. She went over to a chair, and picked up a green scarf which her son had thrown there. —Wear this. Probably it ain’t his anyway.

Mr. Sinisterra stood while she put the scarf round his neck. —I’m sorry, he said, —but when you don’t pay attention to me . . . Stupidity, I just cannot stand stupidity. She shook her head; and
he left her there, stooping over to pick up the broken snarl of wire and plastic case at her feet. With that in her hand, she closed the door to his room which he had left open behind him, murmuring, —The smell . . . the smell gets everywhere, though no one heard her; and she could not be certain that she heard herself, echoing over Sheol.

hello.

Mr. Pivner gazed at a full-page advertisement in his newspaper . . . You can say “hello” to a man as you pass him on the street. But you can’t sell him anything.

Mr. Pivner’s reading embraced tangible things. He had not gone to college (but rather something which called itself a business school: he had studied “accounting”). True, even if he had, he might never have read Democritus, the sire of materialism (judged insane by his neighbors, true, those rare Abderites, who summoned Hippocrates to cure him). Mr. Pivner’s attention rarely came upon things at first hand in any case. He preferred those mummifactory presentations called “digests,” which reassured him about his own opinions before he knew what they were. Had he read Democritus, he might have discovered, in philosophy’s first collection of ethical precepts, among portents of atheism, and the vision of his own soul composed of round, smooth, especially mobile atoms, that it is the unexpected which occurs.

Since life itself tried vigorously to teach him this, however, it was this knowledge that he resisted most successfully. In his reading (a serious pursuit, whether advertising or the Old Testament) he chose, not the disquieting road to serenity, but the serenely narrow path to eventual and total derangement. Nirvana? what sense could he make of a lifetime spent striving toward a goal where nothing was? what satisfaction with Buddhism even when it had reached its tangible (idolatrous) form, to sit in a vase-domed temple turning a prayer wheel before a gilded statue, muttering, —
Life is suffering

What sense in the Buddhists? They who affirm.

What sense in the Gainas? They who say
Perhaps

As far from the Prince of Kapilavastu (who brought hope that the chain of twenty-four lakhs of birth in the soul’s migration might be severed), as he was from the Nazarene (who, agreeing with the Buddha that life was a sore thing, virility even worse, threatened resurrection), Mr. Pivner sat staring through rimless glasses at a kindly book-jacket face which returned his amorphous gaze. He was preparing to meet his son, to win him as a friend, and influence him as a person.

As Odysseus had Mentor, Jesus John the Baptist, Cesare Borgia
Machiavelli, Faust Mephistopheles, Descartes Father Dinet, Schopenhauer’s dog Schopenhauer, and Schiller his drawerful of rotten apples, Mr. Pivner had Dale Carnegie: he and four million other individuals, that is; among whom none dared suspect that (
perhaps
) Salome’s mother was right.

Did Damon try to sell insurance to Phintias?

It is true, Mr. Pivner, sitting under his three-way reading lamp (turned to its highest brilliance), did not plan to sell insurance, nor even a half-million yards of upholstery fabrics (aggregate value
1,600,000) to the youth he planned to meet that evening, nor glean a Packard car from him in return for applying the “principles of appreciation” as the Connecticut attorney did on page 101. He had taken this most worn of his books from the shelf because it inspired in him what he believed to be confidence. As he read there (underscored), “Let me repeat: the principles taught in this book will work only when they come from the heart. I am not advocating a bag of tricks. I am talking about a new way of life.” That was the wonderful thing about this book (“Regard this as a working handbook on human relations; and whenever you are confronted with some specific problem . . .”): if at first its approach seemed fraught with guile, subterfuge, duplicity, sophistry, and insidious artifice, that feeling soon disappeared, and one had . . . “Ah yes, you are attempting a new way of life.”

True, Mr. Pivner might have read Descartes; and, with tutelage, understood from that energetic fellow, well educated in Jesuit acrobatics (cogitans, ergo sum-ing), that everything not one’s self was an
IT
, and to be treated so. But Descartes, retiring from life to settle down and prove his own existence, was as ephemeral as some Roger Bacon settling down to construct geometrical proofs of God: for Mr. Pivner, a potential buyer (on page 95) who was head of the Hotel Greeters of America (and president of the International Greeters too!) was far more real.

True, he might have read the New Testament, and worked out a similar synthesis of Christly conduct and Cartesian method to Machiavellian ends; but how much more direct was this book in his narrow lap: for it was not a book of thought, or thoughts, or ideas, but an
action
book. It left no doubt but that money may be expected to accrue as testimonial to the only friendships worth the having, and, eventually, the only ones possible.

“I am talking about a real smile” (Mr. Pivner read), “a heartwarming smile, a smile that comes from within, the kind of smile that will bring a good price in the market place.” An
action
book; and herein lay the admirable quality of this work: it decreed virtue not for virtue’s sake (as weary Stoics had it); nor courtesy for courtesy
(an attribute of human dignity, as civilized culture would have it); nor love for love (as Christ had it); nor a faith which is its own explanation and its own justification (as any faith has it); but all of these excellences oriented toward the market place. Here was no promise of anything so absurd as a void where nothing was, nor so delusive as a chimerical kingdom of heaven: in short, it reconciled those virtues he had been taught as a child to the motives and practices of the man, the elixir which exchanged the things worth being for the things worth having.