Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  We passed a city that like Richmond had chinaberry trees in the yards of wooden houses hung with wistaria at the eaves, women with shears and baskets standing in the yards. I saw a girl with a lamp standing at a window, an old Negro shuffling to the music of a banjo, a mule wearing a straw hat.

  Joyce sat at a kitchen table in the first compartment to the right, a dingy room, as you entered the fourth wagon-lit counting from the locomotive and tender. His eyes enlarged by his glasses seemed to be goldfish swimming back and forth in a globe. There was a sink behind him, a bit of soap by the faucet, a window with lace half-curtains yellowed with the years. Tacked to the green tongue-and-groove wall was a Sacred Heart in mauve, rose, and gilt, a postcard photograph of a bathing beauty of the eighties, one hand on the bun of her hair, the other with fingers spread level with her dimpled knee, and a neatly clipped newspaper headline: A United Ireland and Trieste Belongs to Italy Says Mayor Curley at Fete.

  He was talking about Orpheus preaching to the animals.

  — The wild harp had chimed, I heard him say, and the elk had come with regal tread, superb under the tree of his antlers, a druid look in his eye.

  He described Orpheus on a red cow of the Ashanti, Eurydice beneath him underground making her way through the roots of trees.

  Apollinaire stuffed shag into a small clay pipe and lit it with an Italian match from a scarlet box bearing in an oval wreathed with scrolled olive and wheat a portrait of King Umberto. He tapped his knee as he smoked. He batted his eyes. King Umberto looked like Velasquez’s Rey Filipe.

  — My wife, Joyce says, keeps looking for Galway in Paris. We move every six weeks.

  There came to Orpheus a red mouse with her brood, chewing a leaf of thoroughwax, a yawning leopard, a pair of coyotes walking on their toes.

  Joyce’s fingers were crowded with rings, the blob of magnified eye sloshed in its lens, he spoke of the sidhe turning alder leaves the whole of a night on the ground until they all faced downward toward China. Of creation he said we had no idea because of the fineness of the stitch. The ear of a flea, scales on the wing of a moth, peripheral nerves of the sea hare, great God! beside the anatomy of a grasshopper Chartres is a kind of mudpie and all the grand pictures in their frames in the Louvre the tracks of a hen.

  Our train was going down the boulevard Montparnasse, which was in Barcelona.

  — How a woman beats a batter for a cake, Joyce was saying, is how the king’s horses, white and from Galway, champing in their foam and thundering against rock like the January Atlantic, maul the sward, the dust, the sty, the garden. Energy is in the race, handed down from cave to public house. Ibsen kept a mirror in his hat to comb his mane by, your Norse earl eyed his blue tooth in a glass he’d given the pelts of forty squirrels for in Byzantium, glory to Freya.

  Apollinaire was showing his passport to a guard who had come by with the conductor. They whispered, head to head, the conductor and the guard. Apollinaire took his hat from the rack and put it on. It sat high on the bandage.

  — Je ne suis pas Balzac, he said.

  We passed the yellow roofs and red warehouses of Brindisium.

  — Ni Michel Larionoff.

  — Whale fish, Joyce was saying, listen from the sea, porpoises, frilly jellyfish, walrusses, whelks and barnacles. Owl listens from the olive, ringdove from the apple. And to all he says: Il n’y a que l’hommequi est immonde.

  Somewhere on the train lay the Lion of Judah, Ras Taffari, the son of Ras Makonnen. His spearmen had charged the armored cars of the Italian Corpo d’Armata Africano leaping and baring their teeth.

  His leopards had a car to themselves.

  When we rounded a long curve I could see that our locomotive bore the Imperial Standard of Ethiopia: a crowned lion bearing a bannered cross within a pentad of Magen Davids on three stripes green, yellow, and red. There was writing on it in Coptic.

  We passed the ravaged and eroded hills of the Dalmatian coast, combed with gullies like stains on an ancient wall. There was none of us who looked at the desolation of these hills without thinking of the wastes of the Danakil, the red rock valleys of Edom, the black sand marches of Beny Taámir.

  From time to time we could hear from the car that bore Haile Selassie the long notes of some primitive horn and the hard clang of a bell.

  Moths quivered on the dusty panes, Mamestras, Eucalypteras, Antiblemmas. And O! the gardens we could see beyond walls and fences. Outside Barcelona, as in a dream, we saw La Belle Jardinière herself, with her doves and wasps, her sure signs in full view among the flowers: her bennu tall on its blue legs, her crown of butterflies, her buckle of red jasper, her lovely hair. She was busy beside a sycamore, pulling water out in threads.

  — Rue Vavin! Apollinaire said quite clearly, as if to the car at large. It was there that La Laurencin set out for Spain with a bird on her hat, an ear of wheat in her teeth. As her train pulled out of the Gare St. Lazare, taking her and Otto van Waetjen to the shorescapes of Boudin at Deauville, where we all boarded this train, where we were all of us near the umbrellas of Proust, the Great War began. They burnt the library at Louvain. What in the name of God could humanity be if man is an example of it?

  Deftly she drew the crystal water from the sycamore, deftly. Her helper, perhaps her lord, wore a mantle of leaves and a mask that made his head that of Thoth, beaked, with fixed and painted eyes.

  We were in Genoa, on tracks that belonged to trolleys. Walls as long and fortresslike as those of Peking were stuck all over up to a height with posters depicting corsets, Cinzano, Mussolini, shoe wax, the Fascist ax, boys and girls marching to Giovanezza! Giovanezza! Trees showed their topmost branches above these long gray walls, and many of us must have tried to imagine the secluded gardens with statues and belvederes which they enclosed.

  He lay with his hands folded over his sword, the Conquering Lion, somewhere on the train. Four spearmen in scarlet capes stood barefoot around him, two at his head, two at his feet. A priest in a golden hat read constantly from a book. If only one could hear the words, they described Saaba on an ivory chair, on cushions deep as a bath, a woman with a bright mind and red blood. They described Shulaman in his cedar house beyond the stone desert it takes forty years to cross. The priest’s words were as bees in an orchard, as bells in a holy city. He read aloud in a melodious drone of saints, dragons, underworlds, forests with eyes in every leaf, Mariamne, Italian airplanes.

  — An unweeded garden, Joyce was saying, is all an inspired poet rode rickrack the river to usher to us. Her wick is all ears, the lady in the garden. There is an adder in the girl of her eye, dew on the lashes, and an apple in the mirror of the dew. Does anybody on this buggering train know the name of the engineer?

  — King’s Counsel Jones, cried James Johnson Sweeney.

  He had pushed his way between federales of the Guardia Civil, Ethiopian infantrymen in tunics and pith helmets, quilted sergeants of the Kwomintang.

  I thought of the engineer Elrod Singbell, who used to take the mile-long descending curve of Stump House Mountain in the Blue Ridge playing Amazing Grace on the whistle. I remembered the sharp sweet perfume of chinaberry blossoms in earliest spring.

  Joyce spoke of an Orpheus in yellow dancing through bamboo, followed by cheetahs, macaws, canaries, tigers. And an Orpheus in the canyons at the bottom of the sea leading a gelatin of hydras, fylfot starfish, six-eyed medusas, feather-boa sealillies, comb-jelly cydippidas, scarlet crabs, and gleaming mackerel as old as the moon.

  — Noé, Apollinaire said in a brown study.

  — Mice whisker to whisker, Joyce said, white-shanked quaggas trotting presto presto e delicatamente, cackling pullets, grave hogs, whistling tapirs.

  La Belle Jardinière. We saw her selling flowers in Madrid, corn marigolds, holy thistles, great silver knapweed, and white wild campions. In Odessa she pranced in a turn of sparrows. She was in the azaleas when we went through Atlanta, shaking fire from her wrists.

  — Would that be the castellum, Joyce said, where th
e graaf put his twin sons together with a commentary on the Babylonian Talmud in a kerker dark as the ka of Osiris until a certain lady in jackboots and eyepatch found her way to them by lightning a squally night she had put the Peahen into the cove above Engelanker and kidnapped them tweeling as they were sweetening Yehonathan and Dawidh a sugarplum’s midge from Luther into the wind and stars but not before twisting her heel by the doorpost and wetting the premises?

  — Shepherds! Apollinaire cried to the car, startling us all. We had no shepherds at Ypres. We have no shepherds now.

  We were crossing the gardens of Normandy, coming back to Deauville.

  Somewhere on the train, behind us, before us, Haile Selassie lay on his bier, his open eyes looking up through the roof of his imperial car to the double star Gamma in Triangulum, twin suns, the one orange, the other green.

  Ithaka

  THERE WAS, as Ezra Pound remarked, a mouse in the tree. We sat under the pergola di trattoria above San Pantaleone in Sant’ Ambrogio di Rapallo. His panama on the table, his stick across his lap, Pound leaned back in his chair. In the congenial mat of vine and fig above him there was, as he said, a mouse.

  — So there is, Miss Rudge said. What eyes you have, Ezra.

  We had been moving Pound’s and Miss Rudge’s effects from a dependenza in an olive grove above Rapallo to the little house that Miss Rudge had lived in before the war and only now had managed to regain. The heavier pieces had gone on the day before. We loaded our Renault named Hephaistiskos with crockery, Max Ernst’s Blue, the photograph of the Schifanoia freschi Yeats writes about in A Vision, books, and baskets of household linen.

  Pound’s cot would not fit into the car and I carried it on my head along the salita.

  Then we drove down to the harbor, to meet Massimo for a swim. We changed in a cameretta di spiaggia that belonged to Massimo’s family, Pound into bathing drawers of some black clerical cloth that sheathed him from chest to knee, so that alongside our piccole mutandine he seemed to be the nineteenth century, bearded, doctoral, and titled, going swimming with the twentieth. A fierce pink scar, obviously the incision of an operation, curved across the old man’s lower back.

  — He’s going out much too far! Miss Rudge called to me once we were in the water.

  She sat under a fetching floppy hat on the terrace of the beach house. It was a while before I saw that she was genuinely anxious.

  — Do tell him to come in closer!

  I swam out and signaled Steve.

  — You and Massimo, I said, swim around the old boy in circles. Don’t let him out of your sight.

  We had taken the measure of his stubbornness in the last few days. It was phenomenal. He strode ahead of us all up the salita, swung himself onto the yacht like a sailor, walked the streets of Rapallo as soldierly as a major general on parade.

  They swam around him like dolphins. Miss Rudge kept hailing me back to the pier.

  — He won’t listen to us, I said. He keeps swimming farther out. I’ve told the boys not to leave him for a second.

  — Tell him to come back!

  I didn’t want to say I might as well command the Mediterranean to turn to lemonade for all the good it would do, so I raised my eyebrows and looked hopeless. She nodded her understanding but insisted again that I make the attempt.

  Meanwhile he was well out into the offing, going great guns, straight out, flanked by Steve and Massimo. I had the awful feeling that their presence merely egged him on.

  And at lunch he had been stubborner. We went to a place he had eaten in for years. The waiters made on over him. The proprietor came and shook hands. But when it came to giving an order, Pound fell into his silence. Miss Rudge cajoled. The waiters understood. We kept up a screen of talk to fill in for the silence after the repeated question as to what Pound would fancy for lunch. He would neither say, nor answer yes or no to suggestions.

  — Well, then, Miss Rudge said cheerfully, you do without your lunch, don’t you, Ezra?

  He was anguished, terrified, caught. Then we all became helplessly silent. His head sank deeper between his shoulders. His tongue moved across his lips. He spoke in a plaintive whisper.

  — Gnocchi, he said.

  When I first knew him, years before, at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, he was not yet the immensely old man that I would eventually have to remember, old as Titian, old as Walter Savage Landor, glaring and silent, standing in gondolas in Venice like some ineffably old Chinese court poet in exile, flowing in cape and wide poet’s hat along the red walls of the Giudecca.

  But in those days his beard and hair were already white. He wore an editor’s eyeshade, giving him the air of a man who had just come off a tennis court. He had come instead from a cell. He would have letters from Marianne Moore in a string bag, letters from Tom Eliot, Kumrad Cummings, Achilles Fang, together with a battered and much-scribbled copy of The Cantos, and food for the squirrels, who knew him, and ventured close, their necks long with hope, their tails making rolling whisks.

  And in those days he talked.

  — Billy Yeats, he closed his eyes to say, is most decidedly not buried under bare Ben Bulben’s head, did you know?

  We did not know. He gave us a look that implied that we did not know anything.

  — The story goes this way. WBY was parked temporarily beside Aubrey Beardsley in the cemetery for Prots at Roquebrune, up above Mentone, in which place there resided a certain exile from the old sod, her name escapes me if I ever knew it. When, therefore, the only naval vessel ever to leave Hibernian territorial waters, a destroyer which I think constitutes the entire Irish Navy, made its way after the war to reclaim Willy’s mortal remains, it was met by whatever French protocol and then by the lady exile, who asked the commander if he had an extra drop on board of the real whisky a mere taste of which would make up for centuries of longing for the peat fires in the shebeens, and for the Liffey swans.

  — Most naturally he did. Moreover, the captain and crew accepted the lively lady’s invitation to her quarters somewhere up the hill between Mentone and Roquebrune, bringing along with them a case of the specified booze.

  — Dawn, I believe, found them draining the last bottles. The full litany of Irish martyrs and poets had been toasted at this festum hilarilissimum, Lady Circe had danced the fling, the Charleston, and a fandango native to the Connemara tinkers, and the honor guard that was to dig up Willy and bring him with military pomp down the old Roman tesselated steps, presumably with pibrachs squealing and the drum rolling solemnly and without cease, and a flag displaying the shamrock and harp whipping nobly in the breeze, were distributed about the lair of the lady like so many ragdolls spilt from a basket.

  — Well, and well, some deputation of frog officials turned up, the press had wetted its pencils, and there was nothing for it but that the gallant crew shake a leg, exhume Billy Yeats, and mount the distinguished coffin on the prow of the destroyer, where, flanked by handsome Irish guardsmen, it would sail to old Ireland to rest forever, or at least until Resurrection Day, in Drumcliffe churchyard.

  — They did, shall we imagine, the best they could. If the ceremony lacked steadiness, nothing untoward happened until they had the stiff in the jollyboat headed across the bay. The French Navy boomed a salute and the local filarmonica tootled an Irish tune, and well out in the offing but far short of the Irish Navy, the jollyboat, Willy Yeats, and the convivial crew capsized.

  — They sank.

  — The French, well, the French were étonnés, and made haste to fish them out.

  — But they couldn’t find Willy. The Irish were beyond trying, having been drowned two ways, as it were, and the frogs shrugged their shoulders.

  — Never mind, they decided. The coffin of state into which they were to put Billy was on board, so they simply moved it up to the prow, hoisted the flag, rolled the drum, and steamed away.

  — Billy being still there, at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

  Mischief had da
nced in his eyes. He tied a peanut to a string and dangled it at arm’s length. A squirrel ventured toward it, hop a bit, run a bit, stood, and got the peanut loose.

  — It’s all in knowing how to tie the knot, he had said.

  And now the awful silence had found him. Aside from the word gnocchi and the observation that there was a mouse in the tree, he had said nothing all day.

  The evening was coming on cool and sweet. Our meal was set out on a long table. Pound sat at the head, Steve and I along one side facing Olga Rudge and Massimo. The conversation was about certain experimental film makers, in whom Massimo was interested, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Gregory Markopoulas, Smith, Bailie, Anger. Pound plucked the back of a hand already raw. Suddenly he looked up, glared, and spoke.

  — There is a magpie in China, he said, can turn a hedgehog over and do it in.

  His rusted hand lifted his wine to his frizzled beard but he did not sip.

  Massimo shot a glance my way.

  — Where in the world did you learn that, Ezra? Miss Rudge asked.

  He put his wine back on the table. He sighed. One hand clawed at the knuckles of the other.

  — I found it, he said, in Gile’s dictionary.

  Miss Rudge smiled at me.

  — We’ve been reading your Archilochos. Ezra says that you drew the decorations as well.

  The conversation changed over to translation. I tried an anecdote about Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and his stout refusal to believe that Sappho was anything but a sound wife and mother of good family.

  — Wilamowitz! Miss Rudge said. He was the handsomest man in Europe in his day.

  — There’s a restaurant down in Rapallo, Pound said, where Nietzsche inscribed the guest book. The padrone knew who he was and asked him to write his name. They still show it. It says: Beware the beefsteak.