Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  FROM THE GIBBET we three walked down Market Street to that maze of brick courts and dark passageways nigh the cattlepens behind which we came to Potter’s Field, as forsaken and cheerless a place as you will find on the island. A stubborn bramble choked the corners of its low wall, and its meadow grass, matted now and dank with rain, needed a thorough coursing of sickle and rake.

  — Over there, Barbet nodded toward a red roof showing above an orchard, is the Frenchman Béasse’s house. Come and look over the wall. Like as not we’ll see Tommy Didder.

  — And who is he? Monsieur Hugo said from the lappets of his greatcoat.

  — His gardner, as was. And his hangman.

  — Béasse, I explained, goes back twenty year or so, an officer in the campaigns in the Peninsula.

  — With my father, Monsieur Hugo said. You say that he was hanged? Here?

  — Well, Barbet said, he killed his own child, a bastard he had by his cook, and tried to hide the little body over there in that orchard. The state of the cook had been noticed, and its change, and with no tyke in evidence, our suspicions were aroused. The gardner Didder found it himself. They’d run a stick right through it, from mouth to fundament, a sight so pitiful the crowner shouted at the jury that their duty was to get Béasse into an eternity of hell fire as fast as they could return a verdict of Guilty. He was taken through the streets, and the soldiers made way for people to spit on him.

  — The times have changed, I said. The feeling was never so fierce among the people when Miss Saujon’s body was found with her throat cut from ear to ear, and all the evidence showed that Tapner had doubtless done it.

  — Doubtless?

  — O, no doubt, Mister Hugo, Barbet said. They were seeing each other in a sinful way. Moral degeneracy in one respect leads to any other. Tapner had the Devil in him. God knows what caused him to cut the poor woman’s throat. But cut it he did. They found his shirt as bloody as a butcher’s.

  We’d reached the wall, and looked over. The garden was all mulched and under beds of hay. Didder was nowhere in sight.

  — He has his memories, Barbet said. He had to accuse, and to hang the man he was gardner to. If ever a man felt the sharpness of a judgment, it was Béasse. The bailly, you see, was his best friend. They were like brothers here on the island. His ears took the sentence of hanging from the mouth of the man he loved most. Their eyes never once met in the courtroom. And Didder, his gardner, hanged him. I can show you his trap, as well as Tapner’s. We make a new one every time. I have them in a shed at the jail.

  — No, Monsieur Hugo said, but I’ll see Tapner’s grave, if you’ll show it to me.

  Stones no bigger than bricks marked the plots in that dreary, wet ground, and they were smothered in grass all a gnarl. We got the sexton, who had been opening a grave for a pauper, to help us with the finding.

  — He was buried in his own clothes, Barbet said, which by our law are his. In London, you know, all the effects of the condemned belong to the hangman. But he has to provide a shroud. You wouldn’t put even the damned indecent into their graves.

  The day was thickening with fog. Tapner’s stone was shiny with mist when we found it. The sexton pushed down the grass with his boot so that we could read the begrudging JCT 1854 cut on it with a degree of neatness.

  — Did you bury Tapner? Monsieur Hugo asked the sexton.

  — Beg pardon, Sir?

  The brogue had raddled him. I put the question myself.

  — This booger here? Yiss. Him what was a fornicator and never did a stroke of work in his life. Sat on a stool in a room with a stove. Two given to falling in fits, the stable lad and a girl from the Eldridge farm, came to touch the corpse. If it’s took off their affliction nobody has thought to tell me.

  Monsieur stooped and broke off a blade of grass from Tapner’s grave and put it in the pages of a tablet he had in his pocket. Barbet looked at him as if he were a prize fool if ever one set foot on Guernsey.

  — Are you satisfied, then, Mister Hugo? he asked. This damp is getting into my bones and my feet are starting to perish.

  A silence. I had my thoughts, confused as they were, but I would remember that moment later, when there was a sort of fellowship among us there at Tapner’s grave, little as any of us understood anything of each other. I remembered it when he wrote yet more letters, this time to America, to demand of those stout and troubled people that they not hang the man John Brown. I remembered it when his daughter followed the English soldier to Newfoundland and sent back the lie that she was his wife.

  — And now, Mister Hugo, Barbet said as a pleasantry that did not sound like one, are you quite satisfied?

  — I am told, he said, that your minister Monsieur Palmerston wears all the time white gloves.

  He held his hands, as freckled and wrinkled as his face, out in the raw air, for us to see.

  — I do not.

  Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier

  I

  Here, chittering down the boulevard Raspail in her automobile, is Miss Gertrude Stein of Alleghany, Pennsylvania, a town she has no memory of at all and which no longer exists, and of Oakland, California, where as she will tell you, there is no there there.

  She has delivered babies in Baltimore tenements, dissected cadavers at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, and studied philosophy and psychology under William James at Harvard. She has cut her hair short to look like a Roman emperor and to be modern.

  She has cut her hair short because behind her back Hemingway talked about her immigrant coiffure and steerage clothes and because Picasso had painted her portrait with her elbows on her knees in allusion to Degas’ Mary Cassatt sitting that way.

  And what was there to do after that but to cut one’s hair, to end that chrysalis time. So many beginnings all her life made Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein. She walked from the Luxembourg Gardens to the butte Montmarte to sit for Picasso and to be modern.

  She has flown in an airplane since then and with her foot on the gas like Wilbur Wright flying at Le Mans and her Printemps scarf fluttering behind her like Blériot’s crossing the Sleeve, the Friedmann, the Clichy, the Raspail were hers, all hers.

  She is driving home from reading The Katzenjammer Kids to Pablo. And The Toonerville Trolley and Krazy Kat. Genius is as wide as from here to yonder. Long ago, William James said in a lecture, the earth was thought to be an animal as yes it is.

  Its skin is water, air, and rock. It is the horse, the wheel, and the wagon all in one. A single intelligence permeates its every part, from the waves of the ocean of light to the still hardnesss of coal and diamond deep down in the inmost dark.

  In Professor James the nineteenth century had its great whoopee, saw all as the lyric prospect of a curve which we were about to take at full speed, but mistaking the wild synclitic headlong for propinquity to an ideal, we let the fire die in the engine.

  And after dinner the Vanderbilts had the servants bring in baskets of Nymphenburg china which they smashed against the wall, cup by beautiful cup, for the fun of it. We let the fire die in the engine. Marguerites the meanwhile bloomed at Les Eyzies de Tayac.

  II

  And Elizabeth Gourley Flynn in shirtsleeves marched with the striking silk workers in Paterson. Between quiet and glory the usurers gobbling with three chins were spreading their immondices of bank money which is not money, no it is not money.

  It is not the sou in the concierge’s fist nor the honest buck in the farmer’s. Between Picasso’s mandolin and pipe and Le Figaro bright on a tabletop they forced their muck of credit and interest, the business of business, not of things.

  What could Rockefeller or Morgan care that the only time in history the command Beh-TELLion! Lee ye doon! was given was to the 96th Picton’s Gordon Highlanders at Quatre Bras when Wellington drove a charge of cavalry over their heads.

  Alice in her ribbons! Alice in a kilt! C’était magnifique et c’etait la guerre. And down went the bagpipes missing never a skirl, and down went the black banners touchin
g never a blade of Belgian grass and red coats and sabres flew over their heads.

  The horses streamed over their heads even though they were advancing with bayonets en frise. Lord, what porridgy comments must have sizzled all burr and crack on what by fook the daff and thringing Sassenach duke thought the hoor’s piss he was doing.

  Here she honked her klaxon at a moustached and top-hatted old type crossing the Raspail like a snail on glue, who cried out Espèce de pignouf! Depuis la Révolution les rues sont au peuple! Whereupon she honked back at him Shave and a haircut, two bits.

  And Wellington’s cavalry flowed like so many Nijinskys over Wellington’s Highland Infantry and that was the glory that was fading from the world and all for money that is not money and Alice was waiting for her at home on the rue de Fleurus, next left.

  Wasps fly backwards in figure eights from their paper nests memorizing with complex eye and simple brain the map of colors and fragrances by which they can know their way home again, in lefthand light that bounces through righthand light, crisscross.

  The queen when she has chosen a site for a nest flies in wider eights than the cursory and efficiently warped ovals of scouts out to forage or the wiggly eights of trepidous adolescents on their timid first flight out from their hexagons shy but singing.

  III

  Ogo in his stringbean bonnet dances under the Sahara moon. That is not a sugarcane whistle we think he is playing. It’s his squeaky little voice so high, so high. He alone of all the creatures God made has no twin, none to trot by, none to nuzzle.

  None that he can mount, now that time’s begun. The mud houses of Ogol in the rocky scrub country of the great Niger bend crowd their brown cubes under tall baobabs and cool acacias. Walls facing the trembling light of the Sahara are the color of pale biscuit.

  The shadowed walls are the strong bister of red cattle. The square towers of the granaries rise higher than the houses. Ogotemmêli, the Dogon metaphysician, sits in his chicken yard, blind, telling of Ogo and Amma, his hands clasped behind his head.

  He wears the oblong tabard of brown burlap which old men might wear in the freedom of the house. His grizzled beard is trimmed neat and close. He is teaching the clever frangi the history of the world, by command of the Hogon of Ogol.

  He teaches him the structure and meaning of the world. The man Griaule, the frangi, who comes every year in his aliplani, sits before him. He makes marks along thin blue lines on pressed white pulpwood fiber finer than linen, putting a mark for every word.

  Ogotemmêli touches the silver stylus with which Griaule makes the marks, runs his fingers over the thin leaves where the marks are put. The Hogon had decided: tell the white man who for fifteen years has come to Ogol asking, asking, tell him everything.

  He already knows many things, the rites, the sacrifices, the order of the families, the great days. But never yet have they told him the inmost things, for fear that he would not understand. It was Ogotemmêli at the council who thought that he might understand.

  He is like a ten-year-old child, but he is uncommonly bright, he had said to the Hogon. Might he not understand the system and the harmonies if they were explained to him slowly and carefully, as one instructs a boy? Besides, he gives our words to others.

  The Hogon spoke with the Hogon of their brother people in the valley, who spoke with Hogons over near the sea, up and down the river, until it was decided that the white man was to know. So Ogotemmêli lights his pipe. Good thoughts come from tobacco.

  IV

  In the beginning, he said, there existed God and nothing. God, Amma, was rolled up in himself like an egg. He was amma talu gunnu, a tight knot of being. Nothing else was. Only Amma. He was a collarbone made of four collarbones and he was round.

  You have heard the Dogon say: the four collarbones of Amma are rolled up together like a ball. Amma is the Hogon of order, the great spendthrift of being. He squanders all, generosity unlimited, and arranges what he squanders into an order, the world.

  Amma plus one is fourteen. Say Amma and you have said space. For Amma to squander he needed space. He is space itself and only needed to move himself outward, to swell himself out, like light from the sun, like wind from the mountains, like thunder.

  Three days after Picasso learned the word moose he was pronouncing it muse. It has a nose the likes of which you see on critics but the horns they have still verdaduramente the glory of God in them from the week of creation, a beast part hill, part tree.

  You love all that’s primeval, Gertrude says, while I love all that’s newer than tomorrow. What is cubism but tilting our vision, ceasing to pretend that we see with our heads in a clamp? Each eye sees, that is Cézanne’s lesson, eyes move in looking, that is yours.

  Matisse began to include the edges especially of women as they are seen a little more to the left than you would see if the right is there and a little more to the right than you would see if the left is here, a primitive and intelligent way of looking.

  And then with Spanish generosity Pablo gives us more tilt of head everywhere, even in the middle of things, like Mercator’s map. She has told him with an earnestness that makes him whinny that if he were to fly he would see that the world is a cubist painting.

  In an aeroplane? Braque and I wanted to build one, can you imagine? But only for a little while. We liked the shape, the circles of the wheels so balanced with the lines of the body. But no, Jertrude old girl, you’ll never get me up in one of those things.

  An alcool framboise at the Closerie: the laughter of Apollinaire and Picasso, tears running down their cheeks, and Gertrude’s cackle right along with them, pounding each other’s backs, was there anything like it? One sees a lot of gypsies, the waiter said.

  V

  Of Diktynna not even the waff of a talus as she slips behind a sycamore, nor the rax of her talbots as they up and pad sprag after the crash of her toggery. Her cats, though, his cats are here, tabby and pied, get of the friends of the enemy of silver.

  He lies under a slant stone bearing at its corners parabola, hyperbola, circle, ellipse. Bones, buttons, dust of flesh. High the jugal line would jut, and mortal holes gape where once there had been the iambus of his wink, a dust of flowers sifted through his ribs.

  The fluid tongue is now trash. The bones of his thin fingers lie crossed over the immortally integral crocket of pubic hair, inert with silicon, gray and zinziber, mingled now with the rubble and pollen of his landlady’s hydrangeas and Charles Gide’s last roses.

  La série distribue les harmonies, the stone reads. Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées. Elm leaves lie crisp and stricken upon the lettering. A porcelain wreath of some antiquity shares the moss and lichen that are claiming the slab.

  ICI SONT DEPOSES LES RESTES

  DE

  CHARLES FOURIER

  NE A BESANCON LE 7 AVRIL 1772

  MORT A PARIS LE 10 OCTOBRE 1837

  The series distributes the harmonies. Linnaeus died when he was six, Buffon when he was sixteen, Cuvier was his contemporary. Swedenborg died the week before he was born. All searched out the harmonies, the affinities, the kinship of the orders of nature.

  All of nature is series and pivot, like Pythagoras’ numbers, like the transmutations of light. Give me a sparrow, he said, a leaf, a fish, a wasp, an ox, and I will show you the harmony of its place in its chord, the phrase, the movement, the concerto, the all.

  The morning before we went to Fourier’s grave we watched President Giscard-d’Estaing walk from his inaugural up the Champs Elysées to the Arc, republican, pedestrian, affable. There was no La Marseillaise, no parade. Hatless he strode along alone.

  But if it had been the month of Floréal in the Year 120, first pentatone of the Harmony, the sillima trees a water of hsiao chung and chinkled pyrite, we might have seen a scout of the Hordes and two little girls in Romany finery dancing with a ginger bear.

  VI

  The air rich with the peculiarly Parisian aroma of roasting chestnuts, quagga dropping
s, and baskets of marigolds, two little girls in Romany finery shimmy down the Elysées behind their elder brother tapping a timbrel above his head as he strides.

  He twirls it high and brings it down with a clash and a hoodah! against the naked brown of his thigh. An elder recommends to his gaffers over their wine that they eye the nisser and the kobold, outriders as they read the emblems of the Chrysanthemum Horde.

  They and the Goldenrods are of the Phalanstery Nora Joyce, them skirts as dazzled in the tuck and ruff as a margery prater all the colors of pepper from Floréal to Vendémiaire, Paraguay green, English blue, and a red to grace the boot of a Manchu khan.

  Chilimindra and Gazella the girls, Crispin the brother, Strummel Jark the bear. Police of the Gardens and Corporals of Fine Tone salute as they pass, children all, clad by tribe, or naked except for the boondoggle of their clan and their doggy dignity.

  Farther back, coming through the Arc, bouncing to drums, a zebra patrol enters the Elysées with a fanfare of E-flat trumpets. The colors out front are those of the XXI Hungarian Typhoons, Company Marie Laurencin, Magyar reds and pinks.

  The guidons jig from under the arch, Phalanx Petulengro, Apollinaire, Souza Andrade, Marcel Griaule, Max de Bégouën. Chilimindra, Gazella, and Crispin, ten, eleven, and twelve, are champion makers of fudge, masters of zebras, of cobbling and of knots.