The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 hecarted 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 façades 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, formidable geometrical proofs of God. Months and then years passed, in Divinity School, and the Seminary. Then he traveled among primitivecultures 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 conversions, 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