Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  — Ezra, Miss Rudge said, taking a bottle from her purse, it’s time for your pill.

  His face fell. She handed him a small tablet.

  — Take it with your wine. Right now, so I’ll know if you’ve had it.

  Pound closed his hand around the pill, tight.

  — Please, Ezra. What will these young men think? They adore you. They’ll remember these days as long as they live. Do you want them to remember that you refused to take your medicine?

  She did not say that Massimo’s father was Pound’s doctor, and that there would be criticism from another quarter if he didn’t take his pill.

  Massimo asked about Jack Smith. Pound talked about a profile of Natalie Clifford Barney that some artist had made with a single hair pasted onto paper. He had found it among his plundered possessions after returning to Italy.

  — But it had come unstuck in places and didn’t look like her anymore.

  — Ezra, have you taken your pill?

  He glared at her.

  We talked about Sartre’s Les Mots, which Pound had said he was reading.

  — The very beginning is like a page of Flaubert, I said.

  — Perhaps, Pound said.

  We talked about William Carlos Williams, the Biennale, Greece, Hugh Kenner (such an entertaining raconteur, Miss Rudge said), words (Ezra has been trying to remember the Spanish for romance), scholars (It’s their wives who are such a trial), Tino Trova, John Cournos, photographers from Life who had run wires all over the apartment in Venice until the furniture looked like the Laocoon, the olive crop, Michael Ventris.

  — Ezra, you really must take your pill.

  His fist tightened.

  It was fully night, and we had had a long day. I asked to be allowed to pay for the meal.

  — Never, said Miss Rudge.

  No waiter was in sight and I got up to go in search of one.

  — No, Miss Rudge said. This is our treat.

  She was up and away into the trattoria before I could see any sign of a waiter.

  As soon as she was out of sight, Pound uncurled his fist and popped the pill into his mouth, washing it down with a swallow of wine.

  — Time to hit the hay, he said.

  Miss Rudge returned with the padrone and his wife. There were handshakes and farewells.

  — Ezra, have you taken your pill?

  He did not answer. He glared at us all. Both his hands were obviously empty.

  We exchanged knowing glances, Massimo, Steve, and I. Miss Rudge graciously did not ask us if he had taken his pill. We did not offer to say that he had. It was a trying moment.

  We drove them to the house where Miss Rudge had lived twenty years before, to which she was now returning. We said our goodbyes in a room where Pound’s cot was neatly made with an American Indian blanket. The pillowcase was of unbleached linen. Ernst’s Blue stood against the wall.

  — Addio! he used to say. Now, anguish in his eyes, he said nothing at all.

  The Invention of Photography in Toledo

  BITUMEN OF JUDEA dissolves in oil of lavender in greater or lesser densities of saturation according to its exposure to light, and thus Joseph Nicéphore Niepce in the year of Thomas Jefferson’s death photographed his barnyard at Chalon-sur-Saône. Hours of light streaming through a pinhole onto pewter soaked asphalt into lavender in mechanical imitation of light focussed on a retina by the lens of an eye.

  The result, turned right side up, was pure de Chirico.

  Light, from a source so remote that its presence on a French farm is as alien as a plum tree blossoming upon the inert slag of the moon, projects a rhomboid of shadow, a cone of light. A wall. A barn. Geese walking back and forth across the barnyard erased themselves during the long exposure.

  Foco Betún y Espliego, the historian of photography, spends several pages sorting out the claims of Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel and Nicéphore Niepce to the invention of photography and decides that the issue cannot be resolved without more evidence. Herschel, the discoverer of The George Star which Fourier the philosopher and Joel Barlow, in his unfinished epic on the Erie Canal, called the planet Herschel, and which is now known as Uranus.

  A small town safe in its whereabouts, Titus Livy said of Toledo. It sits on a promontory at a convergence of rivers.

  Has not a silver cornet band strutted down its streets in shakos and scarlet sashes, playing with brio and a kind of melancholy elation Santa Ana’s Retreat from Buena Vista? Swan Creek flows through its downtown into the blue Maumee, which flows into Lake Erie. It bore the name of Port Lawrence until Marcus Fulvius Nobilor erected the fasces and eagles of the SPQR in 193. Originally a part of Michigan until Andrew Jackson gave his nod to Ohio’s claim, the fierce violet of its stormy skies inspired El Greco to paint his famous view of the city. It was in Toledo that the Visigoths joined the church and made Spain Catholic. And in 1897 Samuel L. (Golden Rule) Jones was elected mayor on the Independent ticket. Its incredible sunsets began to appear in late Roman eclogues.

  When the summer is green with grasshoppers and yellow with wasps, the shining Tagus slips under its arched bridges around the three sides of Toledo. The house where photography was invented sits on a Roman base, its walls are Celtiberian, its windows Arab, but its rooms, for all their Moorish tiles, holy cards, and paralytic furniture from the age of Lope and the hidalgos, are bravely modern.

  Édouard Manet visited this house on his trip to Spain during which he almost starved owing to an inability to force a bite of Spanish cooking upon his Parisian palate. In fact, he called onto the field of honor a man who asked for a second helping of a dish that he found particularly revolting. Manet assumed that the man was offering him a deliberate insult.

  A radio that looks like a French cake with dials comes on at dusk when the powerhouse sends a thrill of electricity through all the wires of the city and small orange bulbs light up in pink glass shades and the radio sizzles The March of the Toreadors, a talk by a priest on the oneness of our spiritual and political duties, a lecture by a Major Domo of Opus Dei on the plague of heresies that besets the French, and a piano recital by Joaquin Turina, playing furiously into a microphone in Madrid that looks like a Turkish medal worn only by field marshals who can claim collateral descent from the Prophet.

  There is a room off to the side of the house where photography was invented where you can look into a microscope and see cheesemites doing the act of nature if you are lucky. Some are of the opinion that this imperils one’s soul, and others, more enlightened, maintain that it is educational.

  — It is so French, you will hear.

  — It is Darwinian, you will also hear.

  — The Pope has given his blessing to photography. A maiden can send her photograph to her swain and thus spare herself the indecency of a personal encounter. You can go to the photographer’s studio and choose a picture that most resembles your son who has gone to the front and have a likeness to put on his grave when the government sends his body home on the railway.

  El Caudillo has sat for his portrait many times.

  All the world loves a big gleaming jelly.

  Napoleon as he was consummating his marriage to Joséphine was bitten in the butt by her faithful dog at, as he liked to relate to intimate friends, the worst possible moment. Real life, said Remy de Gourmont, makes miserable literature, and even Balzac would not have known what to do with such an unmanageable a detail. It is simply appalling. But real life is all that photography has.

  Betún y Espliego in the course of compiling his monumental history of photography sifted through thousands and thousands of tintypes and daguerreotypes to find the patterns of attention and curiosity into which this new art fell. He reproduces in his work a photograph of a man standing on a Berlin sidewalk with Einstein. Einstein didn’t know the man from Adam’s off ox. The man had stopped Einstein and asked permission to be photographed beside him on a Berlin sidewalk.

  — It is, Einstein conceded, a simple enough request.

 
A photograph of Lenin reading Iskra at a Zürich café accidentally includes over to the left James and Nora Joyce haggling with a taxi driver about the fare. A Philadelphia photographer made several plates of paleolithic horse fossils at the Museum of Natural History. In one of the pictures two gentlemen stand in the background, spectators at the museum. One wears a top hat and looks with neurotic intelligence at the camera. He is Edgar Allan Poe. The other gentleman is cross-eyed and wears a beret. God knows who he is.

  Betún y Espliego, at the time of his degree from the Sorbonne, explained in a lecture that for the first time in the history of art the accidental became the controlling iconography of a representation of the world.

  There are no photographs of Van Gogh as a grown man except of the back of his head. This image occurs in a photograph of a man of some importance now forgotten. But we can identify the figure with its back to the camera as Van Gogh.

  There is a photograph of the ten-year-old Vincent. Picasso says that there is a strong resemblance to Rimbaud. A classmate of Vincent’s who survived to a great age remembers his hundred freckles across the cheeks and nose, and that the color of his curly hair was bright carrot. Note, says Betún y Espliego, how the accuracy of the photograph had in this instance to be supplemented by an old man’s memory.

  When the photograph was invented in Toledo the Indians came into town and sat for their portraits. It was the only interesting thing the white man had come up with in all these years.

  A photograph of Socrates and his circle would simply look like an ugly old man with bushy eyebrows and the lips of a frog. The homespun texture of his wrinkled tunic would probably be the most eloquent part of the photograph, as the eyes would undoubtedly be lost in shadow. Which of the gangling, olive-skinned young Greeks around him is Plato? The one with pimples and sticky ringlets across his forehead? Which is Xenophon? Who is the woman stabbing a hex of two fingers at the camera?

  Skepticism has no power whatever over the veracity of a photograph. It is fact and is accepted by all minds as evidence. The Soviets have gone through all their photographs of the revolution and erased Trotsky. They have put Stalin at Lenin’s side even when he was a hundred miles away eating borshch. Since the invention of the photograph we have ceased to dream in color.

  On the door of the house in Toledo where photography was invented La Sociedad de la Historia Fotográfica placed a brass plate in 1934. Betún y Espliego made a speech. Ohio, he said, is a paradise on this earth. He alluded to the blue Susquehanna, to the sweet villages where, as Sarmiento said in his Viajes, there is more material progress and more culture than in all of Chile and Argentina combined.

  An exhibit of photography in historical perspective was mounted that year in the Louvre. The spectators saw photographs of Ibsen walking in the frescade of a Milanese garden, his hands behind his back, Corsican gypsies around a campfire, Orville Wright shaking hands with Wilbur Wright before they flipped a quarter to see who would make the world’s first guided flight in a craft heavier than air, Sir Marc Aurel Stein on the Great Wall of China, Jesse James playing a Jew’s harp, T. E. Lawrence entering Damascus under the banners of Allah, The Empress Eugenia saying her prayers, Carnot and the Shah of Persia going aloft in a balloon, La Duse reclined on a wicker chaise, Ugo Ojetti and his mama, ladies of fashion kneeling in the street as the Host passes (the Sicilian brass band looking strange beside priests in embroidered robes), Neapolitan convicts going down long stone stairs, emigrants filing through a Roman arch on their way to the boat train and Ellis Island, Allenby making a Turkish band play The Crescent of Islam Moves Like a Scythe Across the Infidel into a telephone held by a Sergeant Major of the Royal Welsh Dragoons, Queen Victoria extending a finger to an Irish member of Parliament.

  In 1912 Betún y Espliego abandoned his history of photography to devote his life to getting a clear picture of the Loch Ness Monster. The last photograph we have from his hand is a group portrait of the Royal Scots Greys posed with His Imperial Majesty Nikolai II, Colonel of the Regiment. It is an early example of color photography, and the Tsar’s face is rusty orange, his beard kelp green. All the hues of the plaids are wrong, and the Elders of Edinburgh therefore refused to allow the picture to be exhibited in the Castle, though George V looked at it privately, and the Metropolitan of Moscow and Neva had one framed in silver and rubies for the high altar of SS. Boris and Gleb.

  Betún y Espliego suffered awful loneliness in his vigil on the gray shores of Loch Ness. The bagpipes ruined his kidneys, the porridge his stomach. The religion of the locals seemed to be some revolting kind of speculative philosophy.

  His wife Lucinda came to the edge of Scotland and shouted over the wall that he was to come home immediately to Madrid. Franco and the Falangistas were at the gates of Barcelona. Their children wept the large part of the time. She had not heard a string quartet in six months. Was this place, she shouted louder, the land of the Moors?

  Wasps the meanwhile built several phalansteries in a china cabinet and the three corners of a ceiling in the house where photography was invented in Toledo. Young wasps practiced clapfling and flip around the twenty-watt bulb of the electric light, and the queen of the colony droned in courtly splendor above the radio, the sound of which she took to be a fine summer storm.

  There was no darker moment, a voice said from the radio, than when man fixed images of grandmothers and wars on paper with nitrate of silver, the pylons of Luxor and herds of buffalo, no profounder undoing of the spirit, so that the Spanish people must now see the savages of utmost Africa in all their immodesty, Protestant women in dresses that leave bare their ankles and elbows for all the world to see, zeppelins blooming into a cloud of fire, battlefields, refrigerators, and bicycles, leaving the unseen and invisible realities of devotion and meditation in that realm of the mind where the sleep of reason breeds monsters.

  A little boy whose hair was a gorse of snarled rust and whose eyes were as blue as an October sky snuck one day as close as he dared to the caravan where Foco Betún y Espliego lived on constant lookout for the Loch Ness Monster. It was a morning when Betún had set up his camera on a tump of daisies and was under the black cloth, the sensitized plate ready in his hand, peering out through the lens at the waste waters that lay as still as a sodden carpet under a desolation of clouds.

  — Och, said the bairn from a distance, ye’re nae a ceevilized mon t’ be sae enthralled by that trippid bonnet.

  For response there was a swarthy hand waving him away from under the cloth.

  — Rest ye easy, said the boy. I wadna coom closer for a great jool.

  One day the boy brought the free-kirk minister, who had heard of photography, a French and frivolous art. He shouted his opinion that it would come to nothing. On another, he brought the laird of the manor and his two daughters. He charged a farthing a head for the service. Their parasols and curls danced in the wind, and the laird pronounced Betún an idiot.

  — It’s the munster lurks in the loch he’s sae still aboot, the bairn explained to the laird.

  On a spring day in 1913 the monster, Nessiteras rhombopteryx, a plesiosaurus with lots of teeth, saw Betún as clearly as his Jurassic vision allowed, an insect with five feet, black wings, and one large eye that caught the sun with a fierce flash. As a detail of the Out There, Betún held little interest, and until he came into the Here he would not eat him.

  Betún’s photograph shows a long wet nose and lifted lip, an expressionless reptilian eye, and a gleaming flipper. It was published in La Prensa upside down and in the London Times with a transposed caption identifying it as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arriving in Sarajevo for a visit of state.

  The Antiquities of Elis

  ON THE MOUNTAIN road from Olympia to Elis you come to the ruins of Pylos. White dust, which the traveler to Greece must learn to endure, had covered my mule and my baggage, the beard and eyebrows of Pyttalos my guide, and the copper hair of Lykas my courier. It was late summer, the crickets trilled all day, there was a bronze tone in
the green of the Elean forests, and Pyttalos, whose face was more wrinkled than any I had even seen, said in his offhanded way that we were in a place known to be bad for werewolves. I took him literally at first, Greeks are apt to say anything, and then I saw he was making some allusion to Lykas, whose name of course means wolf. I looked to Lykas for an explanation, or for the joke, but he was grinning as always, as good-natured as a dog.

  — What do the werewolves do? I asked.

  — Eat lambs, Pyttalos said. Flatten girls and wives.

  I shook dust from my sleeves, observed the varieties of nettle, star flower, asphodel, and briar, and said that Lykas hadn’t bitten us yet.

  Pyttalos looked surprised. He put up well with my foreign ways and astounding ignorance, though I had overheard him explaining my importance, and hence his, at Olympia. I was, he said, taking Hellas down in a book, so that the Roumeli and Calabriani could know its shrines and holy places. I asked as many questions as a philosopher, he elucidated, but was not so womanish or thick in the head.

  — Not Lykas, Kyrie. Werewolves. Lykas is I should think a Bear brother, and says his prayers to Apollo Wheat Mouse, and still goes to the equinoxes with his mama. You have to belong to the Lady to get on the road you go off of into the wolf spell.

  Lykas picked up a flint and shied it at a lizard.

  — I’ve been to the Artemis service, he said. With my sister.

  — Pylos, Pyttalos said, pointing.

  The ruins of a wall ran in and out of wild olive across a white riverbed, the Ladon when the winter rains make it into a river again.

  — Two rivers, Pyttalos explained. Over to the left is the Peneios. The Ladon comes into it just where the old town used to be.

  I was told in Elis that this Pylos was named for its founder Pylon Klesonides, that Herakles destroyed it, that the Eleans rebuilt it, but that it never amounted to anything, and has been abandoned for a century or more. They also remarked that it is the Pylos of Homer. They could be right, for the river Alph flows through Elis, and there is no such river among the Pylians on the coast across from Sphakteria, and no one has ever heard of a Pylos in Arkadia.