Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  Cassirer turned and shook hands, gauntlet to gauntlet. I returned his toothy, Rooseveltian smile, though butterflies swarmed in my stomach, and a kitten tried to catch its tail.

  Cassirer, able soul, adjusted blocks in tackle. Pink and violet clouds sank past us.

  The balloon, O gorgeous memory, was as gaily painted as a Greek krater. An equatorial band paraded the signs of the zodiac around it. Red lozenges and green asterisks wreathed the top and neck. Ribbons streamed from the nacelle. The first ballast of sand was pouring down on the earth with the untroubled spill of an hourglass. Our shadow flowed over a red tile roof, a barn, three Holstein cows, a railroad track.

  There was a dust of ice in the February wind into which we rose swinging like a pendulum.

  When the perspective cube swaps its front plane for its back, have we not seen Einstein’s Relativitätstheorie with our own eyes? Or do we see the cube this way with one skill of the brain and that way with another? The left of the brain, where intuitions leap like lightning, controls the dextrous right hand, logic, speech, our sense of space. The right of the brain, where reason stands alert, controls the awkward left hand, suspicion, primal fear, our sense of time.

  — Thus, Cassirer continued with a shout, the animal man is a chiasmus of complementary and contradictory functions.

  This conversation had been going on for days. People used to talk to each other, back then, as I now talk to myself. But you are there, ich bitte tausendmal um Verzeihung! Can you hear, in this wind, the F-dur Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft anf den Lande? I can. Cassirer kept up a conversation as it bobbed into his head, while descending from a train, at a urinal, in his hip bath, from outside my bedroom door in the middle of the night.

  — Our minds combine the hysteria of a monkey, he said, with the level intellect of an English explorer.

  I cupped my ear to hear in the emptiness of the wind.

  — Irrational faith, he said while upending a sack of sand, holds faithless reason above the waves.

  I looked down at the plats of fields, villages, and roads. I felt the weight of my body drain away. My fingers clutching the wicker of the gondola were as strengthless as worms.

  — You are white, he shouted.

  — Vertigo, I shouted back.

  — Now you are green.

  — Das Schwindelgefühl!

  — Brandywine? he offered, handing me a chill flask.

  Ach, das Jungsein! Now that I have passed through them, I know that there are no middle years. I have gone from adolescence to old age. There is a photograph of me as a goggled aeronaut. I looked like an acrobat from the époque bleue et rose of that charming rascal Picasso. If only der Graf Rufzeichen could have seen me then! It would have been a shock worth arranging to confront the adlig old horse’s behind with his melancholy butler at such an altitude.

  Lisa would have screamed, and Herr Benjamenta of the Institute would have frowned his frown, rumpling the wrinkles of a vegetable marrow into his pedagogical brow.

  Knolls, canals, fields, farms, slid below us. We were like Zeus in the Ilias when he surveys the earth from the mare’s milk drinkers beyond the Oxus to the convivial herdsmen of Ethiopia.

  — Altdorfer! Cassirer shouted. Dürer! Is this not, mein geliebt Walser, the view of beroofed and steepled Northern Europe you see from Brueghel’s Tower of Babel? The splendor of it! Look at that haystack, that windmill, that Schloss. You can see greenhouses. Have you ever been taken so by the paralleleity of light?

  We saw red and gold circus wagons on the turnpike, followed by elephants, each holding the tail of the next with its trunk.

  Did Nietzsche go up in a balloon? After Nietzsche, as the wag said, there had to be Walser. Did Buonaparte? I tried to feel like each in turn, to lounge like Nietzsche, blind and postured, with some lines of Empedokles for Fräulein Lou, to pout my corporation like the Empereur, pocket my fingers in my weskit, and think Caesar.

  But, O Himmel, it was Count Rufzeichen I wanted as a ravaged and outraged witness to my Ballonfahrt. It was as an orphan under his roof that I came nearest to belonging anywhere at all, except here, perhaps. Perhaps.

  I arrived at his estate sneezing and ruffled a wild blustery day that had reddened my ears and rolled my stovepipe hat before me. Why Benjamenta had specified a stovepipe hat for going off to one’s first position will be known only at the opening of the seals. To catch my hat I abandoned my cardboard suitcase to the mercy of the rain, which went for its seams. In the hat was my diploma, signed and sealed, from Herr Benjamenta’s Institute for Butlers, Footmen, and Gentlemen’s Gentlemen. My umbrella was the sort Droschkenkutscher saw their fares safely to shelter with, copious enough to keep dry a lady in bombazeen, bustle, and extensive fichu even if she were escorted by an ukrainischer Befehlshaber in court dress. The wind played kite with it.

  My hat had hopped, leaving rings of its blacking on the gleaming wet of the flagstones. My umbrella tugged and swiveled, jerked and pushed. I ran one way for the suitcase, another for the stovepipe hat. Were anyone looking from the stately mansion, it was the grandfather of all umbrellas on two legs tiptoeing like a gryllus after a skating hat across a sheet of shining water they would see.

  The cook Claribel had seen, and would allude to it thereafter as a sight that gave her pause.

  Unsettled as my affiliation with the morose Count Rufzeichen had been, it was a masonic sodality compared with my and Claribel’s crosscurrent encounters. Our disasters had been born in the stars.

  It was she who met me at the door, challenge and hoot in her hen’s eyes.

  — Is this, I shouted over the wind, Schloss Dambrau?

  To this she made no reply.

  — I am Monsieur Robert, I said, the new butler.

  She studied me and the weather, trying to decide which was the greater affront to remark upon.

  — As you can see, she finally said, there is no butler here to answer the door. A cook, the which I am, can make her own meals, but a butler, like the new one you are, ja? cannot answer himself knocking at the door, fast nie.

  I agreed to all of this.

  — Would you guess I am Silesian? she next offered. Frau Claribel you may address me as. Why the last butler had to leave is not for one of my sex and respectability to say, I’m sure. What were you doing running in a crouch all over the drive? Furl your umbrella. Come in out of the wind, come in out of the rain.

  I marched to my quarters, past a cast-iron Siegfried in the foyer, preceded by Frau Claribel with the mounted, cockaded Hessians, royal drum rolls, and jouncing flag of Haydn’s Symphonie militaire, which came all adenoidal violins and tinny brass from a gramophone beyond a wall.

  — Der Graf is very cultivated, she said of the music. He has tone, as you will see, Herr Robehr.

  I approved of the Lakedaimonian bed in my room. And of the antique table where I was to spend so many hours by my candle, warming my stiff hands at a brazier. All my rooms have been like this, cramped cells for saint or criminal. Or patient. The chamberpot was decorated with a sepia and pink view of Vesuvius.

  O Claribel, Claribel. No memory of her can elude for long our first contretemps. That is too bookish a word. Our wreck.

  It was only the third day after my installment, just when the Count and I were blocking out the routine that would lead, from the very beginning, to my eventual banishment to a room above the Temperance Society of Biel for eight years, while archdukes died with bombs in their laps, ten million men were slaughtered, six million maimed, and all the money in the world five times over was borrowed at compound interest from banks. Solemn, hushed, sacred banks.

  On my way in haste down the carpeted hall to answer the Count’s bell, I would prance into a cakewalk, strutting with backward tail feather and forward toe. I would hunch my elbows into my side, as if to the sass of a cornet in a jazz band I would tip a straw hat to the house. And just before the library door I would do the war dance of Crazy Horse. Then, with a shudder to transform myself into a
graduate of the Benjamenta Institute, I would turn the knob with one hand, smooth my hair with the other, and enter a supercilious butler deferential and cool.

  — You rang, Herr Graf?

  The old geezer would have to swivel around in his chair, an effect I could get by pausing at the periphery of his vision, a nice adjustment between being wholly out of sight and the full view of an indecorous frontal address.

  — I rang, by Jove, didn’t I? I wonder why.

  — I could not say, Sir.

  — Strange.

  — You rang, Sir, unless by some inadvertence your hand jerked the bell cord, either out of force of habit, or prematurely, before the desire that would have prompted the call had formed itself coherently in your mind.

  Count Rufzeichen thought this over.

  — You heard the bell, did you, there in the recess?

  — Positively, Sir.

  — Didn’t imagine it, I suppose, what?

  — No, Sir.

  — I’m damned, the Count said, gazing at his feet. Go away and let me think why I called you.

  — If, Sir, you would jot down on a pad the reason for my summons, you would not forget it before my arrival.

  — Get out!

  — Very good, Sir.

  We played such scenes throughout the day. I had just had some such mumpery with him before the first entanglement with Claribel’s withered luck.

  She, barefoot for scrubbing the stone steps down to her domain, had forked a lid off the stove onto the floor to pop on a stick of firewood, and as the best piece in the box was longish, Claribel stepped back the better to fit it in, putting a foot both naked and wet on the hot lid, and cried out for Jesus to damn it for a bugger and a shit britches.

  I, meanwhile, coming belowstairs and hastening to see what her howl was about, stepped on the cake of soap riding there on the steps in a wash of suds. My foot slid out and up in a kick so thorough that I missed by a minim marking the ceiling with a soapy footprint.

  My other foot, dancing for balance, dashed the bucket of water forward toward the hopping Claribel, where its long spill hissed when it flowed around the lid at about the same time that I, soaring as if from a catapult, rammed her in a collision that knocked us breathless and upside-down through the kitchen door and into a dogcart drawn by a goat which was backed up to the steps for a convenient unloading of cowflop to mulch the rhododendrons.

  Startled, the goat bleated and bolted, taking us through the kitchen garden, across the drive, into and out of the roses, around the well, by the stables, and as far as the chicken run, where a yellow wheel, unused to such velocities and textures of terrain, parted from the axle and went on its own to roll past backing pigs, a cat who mounted a tree at its coming, a cow who swallowed her cud, and after some delirious circles, wobbled and lay among the wasps and winey apples in the orchard.

  Claribel and I, tilted out by the departure of the wheel, sat leg over leg in the compost of manure, Claribel screaming, I silent.

  THIS WAY. The bracken is very fine a little farther on. Trajectory is all. I was born on Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday the year the bicycle suddenly became popular all over the world, the seventh of eight. My father ran a toy shop in which you could also buy hair oil, boot blacking, and china eggs. My mother died when I was sixteen, after two years of believing that she was a porcupine that had been crowned the queen of Bulgaria, the first sign that I was to end up here.

  My brother Ernst, grown enough to be teaching school while I was still in rompers, began to think that he was being hunted by malevolent marksmen. Schizophrenia. He died in 1916, Hermann, a geographer in Bern, in 1919. Fanny and Lisa are well placed, Oskar works with money. Karl is the success in the family. God knows how he can stomach Berlin.

  I was at Waldau before I came here, into the silence. And before that—look at the rabbit standing on its hind legs!—I was variously a student, a bank clerk, an actor, a poet, a sign painter, a soldier—I have seen those white butterflies as thick as snow over clover—an insurance salesman, a waiter, a vendor of puppets, a bill sticker, a janitor, a traveling salesman for a manufacturer of prosthetic limbs, a novelist, a butler, an archivist for the canton of Bern, and a distributor of temperance tracts. I’ve always belonged decidedly to the tribe of Whittington, but of course the bells rang when I couldn’t hear them, and when a cat was to be invested I had none. Franklin was of the tribe, and Lipton the British merchant, and Mungo Park, and Lincoln and Shakespeare. I got as far as being a servant. Diogenes and Aesop were slaves.

  Freedom is a choice of prisons. One life, one death. We are an animal that has been told too much, we could have done with far less. The way up and the way down are indeed the same, and Heraklit had been wiser to add that rising is an upward fall.

  I often put myself to sleep by wondering if there could be a mountain road so steep and yet so zigzag of surface that in seeming to go down an incline one is actually going up?

  How do they put themselves to sleep, Mann of the field marshal’s face and Hesse with his gurus and Himalayan Sunday Schools? Imagine being interested like Hesse in the Hindu mind! Once in Berlin I talked to an Indian from Calcutta or Poona or Cooch. Chitter chitter, he said. Mann is also interested in these little brown monkey men with women’s hands.

  — What is the meaning of life? the little Hindu asked me for an opener.

  I had the distinct impression that he was switching his tail and flouncing his cheek ruff. Soon he would be searching for lice in my hair.

  — You do not know! In the west you are materialistic, rational, scientific. You listen too much to the mind, too little to the soul. You are children in spirit. You have not karma.

  We stood nose to nose, toe to toe.

  — You have not deep wisdom from meditation a long time reaching back to ages already old when Pletto and Aristettle were babbies in arms.

  — Indeed not, I said.

  — You admit! the Hindu squealed, showing a gold tooth and a black. Of course you admit for you know it is true ancient Indian wisdom is universal transcendental thought as studied by Toolstoy in Russia, yes, H. B. Stove and Thorough in United States.

  He chittered on, something about God and man being like a mother cat with a kitten in her teeth and man and God being like a monkey and its infant holding on, and something about emptying the mind when what I wanted to empty was my bladder.

  O glide of eye and sizzle of tongue! And Rathenau found me a job in German Samoa. And he was shot, like a mad dog, because, as his assassin Oberleutnant Kern explained, he was the finest man of our age, combining all that is most valuable of thought, honor, and spirit, and I couldn’t bear it. I told this to the doctor here, in an unguarded moment, and he asked me why I was obsessed by such violence. Cruelty, I replied, is sentimentality carried to its logical conclusion.

  — Ah! he said.

  The psychiatric ah.

  — We can never talk, I said, for all my ideas are symptoms for you to diagnose. Your science is suspicion dressed in a tacky dignity.

  — Herr Walser, Herr Walser! You promised me you would not be hostile.

  They are interested in nothing, these doctors. They walk in their sleep, looking with the curiosity of cows at those of us who are awake even in our dreams.

  A moth slept flat on my wall. I watched its feelers, speckled feathers as remote from my world as I from the stars, sheepsilver wings eyed with apricot and flecked with tin. It had dashed at the bulb of my lamp. Its fury was like a banker’s after money. And now it was weary and utterly still. Did it dream? The Englander Haldane had written of its enzymes without killing a single moth, and wore bedbugs in a celluloid pod on his leg to drink his blood.

  It is in Das Evangelium the brother of rust and thieves. Surely its sleep is like that of fish, an alert sloth.

  Now it has fluttered onto the map above my desk, an old woodcut map from a book, the river Euphrates running up through it in a dark fullness of rich veins, the Garden of Eden below, the stout mountains o
f Armenia sprinkled along the top, a great tower and swallow-tailed pennon to mark Babylon, trees as formal as pine cones at the terrestrial paradise, with Adam and Eve as naked as light bulbs except for Akkadian skirts of tobacco sheaves, Greek and Hebrew names among Latin like flowers among leaves, a lion to the northwest sitting in Armenia and bigger than a mountain, a beast rich in horns and hair stepping west from the Caspian Sea, a route pompous with Alexander’s cities, brick walls and fig groves of Scripture, Caiphat up from the Gulf of Persia, which Sindbad gazed upon and where bdellium is to be had, Bahrim Insula a pearl fishery, Eden with its four rivers green and as straight as canals, a grove of cypress that was felled to build the Ark, purple Mousal, Babylon a city of brick and a hundred temples to gods with wings like aeroplanes, with Picassoid eyes and Leonardonian beards, Ur of the Chaldees with its porched and gabled house of Abraham, Noah’s city Chome Thamanon, Omar’s Island, with mosque, the Naarda of Ptolemy where is a famous school of the Jews, Ararat’s cone, Colchis with its fleece of gold, Phasis the country of pheasants, Cappadocia, Assyria, Damascus under an umbrella of date palms.

  And then I saw that the moth was inside the light bulb.

  BECAUSE, I said when asked why I am here, the world was in defiance of its own laws.

  At the foot of Herr Rufzeichen’s grand stairs stood a cast-iron Siegfried braced with a boar-sticker and buckler outsinging a surge of Wagnerian wind that tilted his horns, butted his beard, and froze his knees. Did he have to be dusted? Thoroughly, thoroughly. Beyond him, in steep gloom, rose the stairs in a curve of crimson and oak.

  On a stepladder, flipping the face of iron Siegfried with a turkey duster, I, remembering that if you stare through a window into a snowfall the room will rise and the snow stand still, as when down front close to a theater curtain, the audience sinks grandly, to trumpets, discovering below a red Tannhäuser kneeling beside an embroidered Venus singing Zu viel, Zu viel, O dass ich nun erwachte! saw Count Rufzeichen gliding from the library with his nose in a book and Claribel the cook backing toward him, the mock orange in her arms. The precision with which they would collide was inevitable and perverse.