The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

by Guy Davenport

  Through the birches, behind Anders, Quark on a silver wolf loping.

  Kim and I, Anders said. Kim looked out, blond hair over his eyes. He crawled out monkey-nimble. A hug from Anders.

  RIVER

  The divestment of Franklin in the meadow by the river. Mariana flourished a toy trumpet. The grasses, Hugo said, go from Tolland Man’s gruel of flaxseed and goosegrass to Roman porridge, which was linseed roasted with barley and coriander, pounded in a mortar, salted, boiled, and served in a bowl to Horace dining with Virgil. Columella fancied it, and Pliny mentions the toothsomeness of rustic Tuscan porridge on a winter morning. Meadow with goats to gaze at as he ate. Like us, said Mariana, bleating and folding Franklin’s togs. There were Iron Age grape pips at Donja Dolina. Bet they ate frogs, too, Mariana said, and green lizards. People upstream in a boat, Franklin said. Voices carry over water. Master Sigurjonsson and Pascal without a stitch. Ho, said Mariana. Pascal I mean, Franklin said, climbing Hugo to stand on his shoulders. Hr. Ess has on a cap, wristwatch, and little triangle underpants like Hugo’s. Swim out, Hugo said, and climb aboard.

  OLD MIRRORS FLECKED AND TARNISHED

  On a long walk that took him near the Nordkalksten seawall and warehouses, Hugo had seen the Bicycle Rider hefting his bike up the stone steps, swinging onto it in the road. Their eyes met, with no recognition in the Rider’s, though he was already a day student at NFS Grundtvig but not yet someone Hugo had tried to be friendly toward. His jeans were unzipped, the pod of his dingy briefs pouching through. His eyes had been dead, as when Hugo had last seen them in the police morgue.

  ASTERS AND ZINNIAS

  Papa in a folding hammock chair by his hollyhocks, straw boater over his eyes. Hugo’s theology, he said, is of course his need to undo me. Not by cracking my head on a dusty road in Greece, but as an intelligent child takes its toys apart to see what makes them go. Ridiculous, but there you are. Papa, Hugo said, I know what makes you go. And the machinery is too fine for my fingers. I hope I’m something like. Peas in a pod, Mariana said, if you know what to look for. You have the same sense of house, of space, of time. You eat alike. I didn’t know how to take a walk until Hugo annexed me. Or how a room can be the whole world. It’s awful, Franklin said, but it’s fun. Tell me, Pastor Tvemunding said from under his hat, holding out an arm to invite Franklin over. Franklin came, got hugged, and climbed astride. Papa, Hugo said, keeps his hat over his eyes so as not to look at Franklin snake naked. How modern I’m willing to be, Papa said, is, I see, still a matter for doubt. Notice everything, Franklin said. Know where everything comes from, a hundred years back.

  ANEMONE

  Matter, the physicists seem to be saying, was not stuff before creation: critical tensions in nothingness, the universal vacuum, became so energetic that they exploded. Critical tensions? Papa asked. Force, said Hugo. The only thing the physicists can reach back to is a great force present in all matter and space. Well then, Papa said, scattering leaves with his stick, there’s God. As they see Him. If, Hugo said, man in God’s image was Adam, God in man’s image was Yeshua. If matter was not stuff before creation, then God can be a pattern of energy rather than an oxygen breather and processor of carbohydrates. That we are in His image then means that He is and we are animations of the same energy system. Except, perhaps, His anima occupies the whole sea of neutrinos that is boundless but limited, and we each occupy bodies only, energy systems that are bounded but limitless, exchanging love and conversation, procreating both bodies and minds. God’s procreation is continuous, ours occasional. Yeshua is an occasional aspect of a continuity.

  BREAKFAST

  Franklin. Hair carrot and brass. Irides seagreen, pupils hyacinth. Pathfinder brogans, collapsed socks. Lots of practical irony and cautious reticence, the hippety-hop who invented electricity. Love me some geography, he says to the mush bowl, because a map is a jigsaw puzzle. What I like is where the driblet islands make a trail at the south poke of things, left behind, all on a drift to the west. And to the north, crumbly islands. Love islands. Show him the inland island in France, bounded by four rivers. Plains islands bounded by mountains. A country, then, he opines, is a lot of people pretending they’re an island, because they all speak the same language. Well, sometimes. Or because they have a common interest, like the Swiss. There is no place without time, no time without place. So, says Franklin, knuckling his nose, you can’t say where without saying when. The Mediterranean when it had seals in it. Holland before tulips. Everything wanders, he says. Land, people, animals, trees.

  OUT FROM JOPPA

  Two ways, Hugo said, and Papa cocked his head to listen. Like John, as in eleven Matthaeus, neither eating nor drinking, and the opinion of the public is that you are owned and operated by a devil, or like Yeshua, eating and drinking, and the people say here’s a glutton and a drunkard, the friend of tax collectors and sinners. And, Papa said, that’s yet another logion where the sign of Jonas is the pivot. The vine is to be judged by its gourd.

  DOVE

  By wholeness of being.

  FIG

  Neutrino here, Hugo said, our Franklin, is as yet all luck. Whenever the angel rings the silver run in a sound of trumpets, he thrusts his Sickle in, the wheat topples in a golden rush, the chaff dances in the air, and the harvest song is the only one his red tongue knows morning noon and night. Whereas those of us who shave and pay taxes always seem to get in line at the post office behind an Oriental trying to mail a live chicken to Sri Lanka. Look at McTaggart the English master. He loses his car habitually in the parking lot. That his disciples in Transcendental Meditation and Buddhist raising of the consciousness are all feebleminded hankerers who will clot around any mountebank he does not notice. He walks across flower beds puffing the beauties of nature to one of his morons. He was the only one of the faculty the Bicycle Rider esteemed and thought a bright teacher. To blow like a dead leaf in the wind, irresponsible, irresponsive. Which beautiful teaching, Mariana said, laid the Bicycle Rider out on the slab at the police morgue.

  MONKEYS AND PARROTS

  If, Mariana read to Franklin lying on the carpet and rolling a soccer ball inchmeal from crotch to chin, the forest were darker it did not seem to be more silent. They could hear a kind of buzzing in the treetops, a vague noise coming from the branches. Looking upwards, the three men could see indistinctly something like a great platform stretched out some forty meters above the ground. There must be at that height a tremendous entanglement of branches without any cranny through which the daylight could pierce. A thatched roof would not have been more lightproof. This explained the darkness that prevailed beneath the trees. Where they had camped that night the nature of the ground had changed greatly. No more intermingled branches or brambles, no more of those thorns that had kept them from leaving the footpath. A scanty grass, like a prairie that neither rain nor spring ever watered. The trees, at intervals from seven to ten meters, resembled pillars supporting some colossal edifice, and their branches must cover an area of several thousand hectares. There were masses of African sycamores whose trunks were formed of a number of stems firmly united toward the ground, bob bobs. Baobabs, Hugo said from his desk, a majestic great gray-green tree that huddles its trunks like celery. Bob bobs, read Mariana, recognizable by the gourdlike shape of their bole, with a circumference of seven to ten meters and surmounted by an enormous mass of hanging branches. There were silk cotton trees with their trunks opening into a series of hollows big enough for a man to hide in. Mahogany trees with trunks a meter and a half in diameter from which might have been excavated dugout canoes from five to seven meters long. Ho, Hugo said, Zuntz on the centurion with Jules Verne from across the room has filled me with lovingkindness, especially as Monsieur Verne’s expositor has had her hand inside her knickers from the beginning of the chapter. Can I help it if I’m a sweet person? she said. When, Franklin said, twirling the soccer ball on his chin, I get to my peter, it jumps. See? Chin to peter, peter to chin. Phenomenal! Hugo said. I’ll bet if you went to
the baker’s, by way of the kiosk for an evening paper, you might find a half dozen strawberry-jam cakes with custard topping that we can have with coffee, which I’ll make, as Mariana is not going to be able to see straight after our expression, or expressions, of mutual esteem.

  BLUE SUMMER SKY

  Hugo under his oak at the meadow’s edge saw the oval shadow of the hot-air balloon sliding toward him before he looked up and saw the balloon itself, a gaudy upside-down pear shape the oiled silk of which was zoned in bands: the equatorial one was a rusty persimmon, a Mongol color, and around it were the figures of the zodiac copied from the mosaic floor of Bet Alpha Synagogue in Byzantine Israel, archaic but supple of line. The band above was bells and pomegranates in orange and blue, the one below was egg-and-dart Hellenistic. The basket was of wicker and belonged to the protomachine age, for a propeller that seemed to be made of four cricket bats was turned by a fanbelt connected to a brass cylinder leaking steam vapor. There was a wooden rudder, and levers at the taffrail. Three ten-year-old boys were the crew, as happy as grigs at their work bringing the balloon down right in front of Hugo, who stood and gaped, at a loss to account for anything he was seeing. The boys were dressed in nautical Scandinavian togs, with long scarves around their necks, as if the air from which they’d descended was very cold. One boy manipulated a lever that seemed to bring the balloon down, another braked the propeller, which stopped spinning and rolled to a lazy halt. Puffs of vapor smoked from the cylinder. The boys’ bright grins were for the joy of surprising Hugo, for the joy of being aeronauts in a balloon on a fine summer day, and for the joy of being messengers, which they said they were, talking all at once. Who in the name of God are you? Hugo asked. Where have you come from? My name is Tumble, and my friends are Quark and Buckeye. Where we come from we’re not to say, and we’re messengers. Bringing a message, Quark said helpfully. The coordinates are right, Buckeye said, consulting a length of paper between two rollers. Oak tree, meadow, island, Denmark. Hugo Tvemunding by way of worldly name. Shapes alphabet into words about the Company. Yeryüzü kendi kendine bir toprak. Buckeye! Tumble said sweetly, you’re off band: that’s Turkish. Sorry, said Buckeye, I was about to blush anyway, this part of the printout about shepherd to the young, a good son, and superb lover in both flesh and spirit, tam avidus quam taurus in a different hand in the margin, the dispatcher I suppose. Nesuprantamas disonansas tarp, oops! sor-ree. Anyway, you’re the right soul. Yes, said Tumble, and here’s the message. Road auspicious. Though young, act like a man. Be steadfast, patient, and silent.

  Why? Hugo asked. About what?

  That, smiled Quark, we are not free to say.

  BOUNDARY

  There is only one sense: touch. The sun, by way of caroming off a mellow brick wall with lonely afternoon light on it, firm plump pair of breasts with delectable nipples, a page of Homer, touches the eyes. Eating is touch carried to the utmost. Vibrant air touches the ear. Smell is so many particles from aromatic things. The world is a mush of matter rather than the separateness we ascribe to things. Franklin in his Wolf Cub cricket cap, blue shirt with yellow kerchief, little blue pants, tall ribbed socks, and red sneakers listened to Hugo in Eagle Scout khakis with solemn attention. Boys named Abel and Bruno had got out of him, moments before the powwow, that he has no father, that his sister Mariana is the bedmate of Scoutmaster Tvemunding, that he has only been camping with Hugo and Mariana, that he is poor, that Hugo makes love to Mariana lots and lots, and that his uniform is so new it has little squares of paper in all the pockets with an inspector’s number, to accompany complaint of manufacturing defect. As to other questions, Franklin had offered to bloody Bruno’s nose for him. Knots, naming of tent parts and tools, cards with animal tracks, cards with flowers and weeds, and here was Scoutmaster Tvemunding, who taught Latin, Greek, and gym at NFS Grundtvig and Sunday School at Treenigheden, talking about everything being touch. Eugenius, he said, front and forward. Theodor, front and forward. Face each other, tall and straight, shoulders back. Theodor, cup your hands. Eugenius is going to give you something, out of his wild imagination, and you are going to feel it, in your wild imagination, and describe it, how it feels. A frog! Eugenius said. Well, said Theodor, I had a frog in my hands just the other day, and a snake, and a hedgehog, so I’m not up a creek. A frog looks damp but is dry, looks flabby but is hard. It twitches, trying to jump away, but can be still, probably because it’s scared. I’d be scared. It’s cool. Its throat pulses.

  ZUM ZIELE FÜHRT DICH DIESE BAHN

  Theodor, Hugo said, didn’t know the dative of accommodation from a rat’s ass and has been stricken with amnesia in the matter of ablative absolutes, Frits and Asgar bloodied each other in a fight back of the gym, nasty little beasts, the stupidly inconsiderate grounds trolls ran a power mower just outside the windows for half of Greek, and around three Ulrich gave me a frantic signal in gym to come quick. Golo and Abel were, for reasons best known to themselves, having a little conviviality outside study hall, where they were supposed to be, playing push and pull with each other’s pizzles while gazing into each other’s big soulful eyes I suppose, fine by me and nobody could care less though they have rooms and showers and woods and meadows in which to welcome puberty until they’re cross-eyed and gasping for breath, but why waste the ten minutes before study hall, and then Aakjaer Minor, who grabs people and goes cataleptic, happens along and pins them both. Ulrich was the first to notice this predicament, and knowing that McTaggart had study hall and would be stomping along crabwise at any moment, and would bore everybody for days with the psychology of it all, had the diplomatic genius to push all three into the broom closet and sprint for the gym. We nipped back. McTaggart was bleating about combining study with transcendental meditation, so we could craftily open the broom closet and walk the interlocked three down the hall, one walking backward and zipping himself up, the other sideways, and both carrying the clinging Aakjaer with my and Ulrich’s help, God laughing at us all fit to kill. We disentangled the mass in my office. Abel, who had not managed to get his britches up with his arms pinned to his sides, stood there in pretty outrage. What in hell does it mean? he begged of me.

  Mariana, listening with wide eyes, had deshoed and unsocked Hugo as he talked in the chair where he had flopped and sagged, tugged his trousers off, and was unbuttoning his shirt when a banging on the door announced Franklin in full Cub Scout fig. O Lord, Hugo sighed, I was forgetting that tonight’s the little bastards in yellow and blue, with beanies. Hi, said Franklin. Things look real interesting. Hugo, Mariana said, has had a trying day, and has taken a full ten minutes to get over it.

  ZWECK

  In pipestem trews snug of cleft, flat Dutch cap, thickwove jersey, Norfolk jacket, hobnailed brogues, and Finnish scarf with an archaic pattern of reindeer and runes worked into its weave, Tumble climbed from the basket of the steam balloon, bounced from his jump, and cued Quark and Buckeye, poised with flute and glockenspiel, to give him a tune. Master Erastus, he sang, stomping with seesawing shoulders and chiming smile, Equuleus quagga! Likes, said Quark in recitative over the catch, clover bluegrass dill, spring onions oats and hay. Kin to, said Buckeye, lowering his flute, Eohippus Five Toes, silver wolves, red deer on Rum, dandelions, and Ertha when she’s broody. Maybe, said Quark, depressing the declinator, which seeped vapor, but the mykla puts them in with asses burros zebras and horses of the good old Hwang Ho Valley, don’t it? Yuss, said Tumble, but Buckeye means chord. Spartan spadgers, springbokker, leapers and runners. So hold fast, wait long, and don’t speak. No, not to anybody.

  ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

  Even though we can never see the head that sang, with its deer’s eyes staring at infinity, we have the strong torso from whose animal grace we can imagine the hot summer clarity of its gaze. If the gone head is still not there, in light, why then does the proud chest disturb your looking, or the sweet shift of the hips, slight as a smile, that takes our eyes down the cunning body, to its cluster of seeds? Otherwise this stone would stand se
nseless under the polished slope of its shoulders, without its wild balance, and would not be as rich with light as the sky with stars. The world sees you, too. You must change your life.

  AN EVENT ALSO HAPPENS WHERE IT IS KNOWN

  Out past the warehouses and quays on Nordkalksten is a seawall of gray stone. A catwalk at its base, a bicycle path along the top, with iron rail. Harbor, river, barges. Here one could see old men fishing, sailors sleeping off a terrible drunk, and sunbathers spread against the slant of the wall. Boys in dingy bargain-basement briefs, boys impudently naked.

  UNDER

  We distinguish this seventh stratum by stringers of the stone that readily melts in fire of the second order. Beneath this is another ashy rock, light in weight and five foot thick. Next comes a lighter stratum the colors of ash and a foot thick. Beneath this lies the eleventh stratum, dark and like the seventh, two foot through. Below the last is a twelfth stratum, soft and of a whitish color, two foot thick. The weight of this sits on the thirteenth stratum, ashy and a foot thick, whose weight in turn is supported by a fourteenth stratum of black color. There follows this another black stratum half a foot thick, which is again followed by a sixteenth stratum still blacker in color, whose thickness is also the same. Beneath this, and last of all, lies the cupriferous stratum, black colored and schistose, in which there sometimes glitter scales of gold-colored pyrites in very thin sheets, which, as I have said elsewhere, often take the forms of various living things.

  HOLLYHOCKS ALONG A GARDEN WALL

  I’m wonderfully delighted, Pastor Tvemunding said to Mariana, that you and Hugo are friends. He has always been a friendly boy. He used to toddle off behind the postman, and grieve that he could not stay longer than to hand over the mail and exchange comments on the weather. He made friends with the girl who delivered butter and eggs. He fell in love with all his schoolmates. He is indeed, Mariana said, a very loving person. His loving nature, Pastor Tvemunding said, causes him grief from time to time. You know about the student whom he calls the Bicycle Rider?