Da Vinci's Bicycle

by Guy Davenport

  — Do you love Jesu? she asked.

  — One does not write in this terrible age. We do not make chairs, we make money. We do not make shoes, we make money. They sniff it, banker and shopkeeper alike, as gallants used to inhale the perfume of a mistress’s handkerchief. They goggle when they see it, they are willing and eager to throw boys into the spew of machine guns and fogs of cyanide gas, they are abustle to marry their daughters to toothless bankers, to halitosic financiers with hernias the size of a baby’s head. Francs, yen, shillings, pesos, kronen, dollars, lire, money is the beauty of the world. They suck shekels and play with themselves.

  — Jesu would not like that, she said mournfully.

  — After all, I said, what a beautiful thing it is, not to be, but to have been a genius.

  The dancer had collapsed across the way, was weeping and was being consoled by his sister.

  — Does God come to you in the night, she asked, with a lamp and a puppy for you to hold?

  — God, I said, is the opposite of Rodin.

  — The eyes of God are as beautiful as a cow’s.

  — Everything else has gone wrong, but not money. Everything, everything is spoiled, halved, rotted, robbed of grace and splendor. Our cities are vanishing from the face of the earth. Big chunks of nothing are taking up the space once occupied by houses and palaces.

  — You are very serious, she said.

  — Money precludes mercy.

  — Did you have money and lose it? Jesu would not mind that.

  — I have always been poorer than the poor.

  Attendants had come to take the man Fomich back to his cell. He was saying terrible things about man’s sexuality, so that the woman beside me stopped her ears. I could hear something about the hot haunches of goats and wild girls in Arcadia kissing something and something mad with music.

  If I could talk again with Olympia, she would tell me. She would know.

  IS IT NOT preposterous that a shoe would go the journey of a foot?

  AND ON A fine English day in the high Victorian year 1868, the year of the first bicycle race and the Trades Union Congress at Manchester, of The Moonstone and The Ring and the Book and of the siege of Magdala, four men gathered at Ashley House in London, a house leafy with Virginia creeper, its interior harmoniously dark and bright, like an English forest, dark with corners and doors and halls, with mahogany and teak and drapes as red as cherries, bright with windows, Indian brass, and lamps like moons, Lord Lindsay pollskepped with the hatchels of a cassowary, Lord Adare whose face looked like a silver teapot, and the galliard Captain Wynne.

  They stood Englishly around a bandy-legged Scot with a thrummy beard. His name was Home. Daniel Douglas Home.

  — Tack a wheen heed, he said, throwing back his neck and arms as if throttled by an angel from above.

  In contempt of gravity, then, he raised his left leg and his right, and lay out flat on the empty air.

  — Stap my vitals! swore Captain Wynne. The bugger’s floating!

  Lord Lindsay held up Lord Adare, Lord Adare Lord Lindsay.

  — Meet me, gasped the horizontal Scot, in the tither room.

  With a hunch to get started, he slid forward before their paralyzed gaze, jerking a whit on the first slide, and then floated smoothly, silently out the window.

  A distant chime of church bells: which no one heard.

  — I think I shall cat, said Lord Lindsay.

  — I have peed myself, said Lord Adare.

  The feet of D. D. Home appeared in the next window: he had turned right. His sturdy Glaswegian trousers next, his plaid waistcoat, his arms hanging down slightly, fingers spread, his heroic Adam’s apple, eyes staring upward.

  His shadow three stories below flowed over rose bushes, over rolled grass as level as water, a sundial, the body of a gardener who had looked up, commended his soul to God, and passed out.

  Lords and captain bestirred themselves, dashed into each other, and ran down the hall on uncooperative legs. Only the door to a room on the other side of the house was open, and into this they stumbled, breathing like rabbits. Adare screamed as he saw Home entering the window feet first, calm as a corpse.

  Midroom he hung in the air, chuckling.

  Then he tilted downward and stood as proud as Punch.

  — Bewitched, by the Lord! said Captain Wynne. We are all bewitched.

  Lord Lindsay’s hair had turned white.

  Yet all three signed depositions that they had witnessed a human Scot float out the window of Ashley House and in again from the other side.

  Home died soon after.

  — And now, I said to Herr Rufzeichen, how shall we ever know otherwise?

  — Englishmen, said Rufzeichen, of all people! Sort of thing that goes on every day in India, I believe?

  AT THE BENJAMENTA INSTITUTE I was like a cuckoo in a nest of wrens. I had failed at just about everything and the other students of the art of butlering had failed only predestination, and even that wasn’t certain, for we were told daily that Joseph was a butler in Egypt and Daniel one in Babylon. Their slain and risen god was Dick Whittington. The rotten stockings they darned in the evenings were Whittington’s, their cold beds were Whittington’s, their slivers of soap, their piecemeal and unmatching shoe laces, their red ears and round shoulders.

  A feature of failure is having to do over again what the successful sailed through once. My adolescence has been waiting for me when my feet hit the floor every morning these seventy years. My God, what a prospect! An education, a job, a wife, daughters to admire, sons to counsel, vacations at Ostend, retirement, grandchildren, banquets in my honor, statesmen and a mountain of flowers at my funeral, my sepulcher listed in the tourist guide to the cemetery.

  And in middle age I was enrolled in a school for butlers.

  The dormitory was upstairs, a long room with too many beds too close together. It was neither military in its effect nor schoolish, neither neat nor messy. It was a picture of despair and of making do.

  I remember it all as a dream in which confusion had seeped into the grain of reality. I remember yellow-haired Hans, and defeated Töffel, of the bitten fingernails and wetted bed, the clever Kraus and his intolerable and boring cynicism, the flippant and windy Fuchs who cried under the covers at night. We all led secret lives in full view of each other.

  Herr and Frau Benjamenta, accomplished frauds, came and went like attendants in a hospital. All day we heard homilies and half-finished sentences from retired Gymnasium teachers and had lessons in ironing trousers and setting tables. We heard Scripture at dawn and before bedtime. Of all this I made my novel Jakob von Gunten, a new kind of book, and except for a few of the essays I wrote for newspapers, essays written with Olympia’s full gaze upon my back, the best thing that I leave the world. Mann stole it, and Kafka stole it, and Hesse stole it, and were talked about. I have been invisible all my life.

  I have heard that Kafka mentioned me in the cafés of Prague. I dare say.

  You cannot know, O Leser, how long it is possible to sit on the side of a bed staring at the floor.

  DOKTOR ZWIEBEL looked me dead in the eye. He had the nose of Urbino. Somewhere, deep in his ancestry, back before time began to tick in seconds, when all the earth was a forest of ferns growing in Lake Tchad, there had been a rhinoceros.

  — Tell me, Herr Weisel, he began.

  — Walser, said I.

  — Just so, said Doktor Zwiebel, looking down at the folder before him. Tell me, Herr Walser, you have never I see been married?

  — Never, said I, but almost.

  I sighed, the doctor sighed.

  — How do you mean, almost? Remember that anything you tell me goes no further than my files. You are free, indeed I urge you, to tell me all.

  — Fräulein Mermet, I said. There was a Fräulein Mermet. I fell in love with her. She regarded me kindly.

  — Pfring! Pfring! sang the telephone on the desk.

  — Ja? Zwiebel hier. Seasick? Promethazine hydrochloride
and dextroamphetamine sulfate in a little lemon juice. Yes, that is correct. I will look in later. Goodbye. That was the duty officer. She says a patient who thinks he is Napoleon has run into rough weather off Alexandria. Do you know, Herr Weisel . . .

  — Walser.

  — . . . that an alarming number of attendants at sanatoria end up as patients? You may know Aufwartender Futter, with a remarkably long head and three moles in a line across his forehead? Just so! He was a patient here for some months, paranoid schizophrenic, thought that everybody in Switzerland was turning into money. He convinced his ward attendant of it, who announced to me one day that he wanted to be put in the bank so as to be drawing interest. Futter thought this was so funny that he emerged from his fantasy, and the two exchanged places, Futter having been fired from his job on the Exchange. Excellent arrangement. Now where were we? You were telling me about your wife, I believe.

  — But I didn’t marry her.

  — Didn’t marry who? If she was your wife . . .

  — I was about to answer your question, Herr Doktor. You had asked how I was almost married. There was a Fräulein Mermet. I loved her and I believed that she loved me. We wrote many letters to each other. We spent Sunday afternoons in the park. She would fall against my arm laughing for no reason at all. Macaroons . . .

  — How many brothers and sisters have you, Herr Weisel?

  — Two sisters, Fanny and Lisa, four brothers, Ernst, Hermann, Oskar, and Karl, who is the noted painter and illustrator. He lives in Berlin.

  — Your last position seems to have been that of Archivist for the Canton of Bern. Why, may I ask, did you leave?

  — I resigned.

  — You did not find the pay sufficient or the work congenial?

  — We had a difference of opinion as to whether Guinea is in Africa or South America. My superior said I had insulted him. I tied his shoelaces together when he was asleep at his desk one afternoon.

  Doktor Zwiebel made a note and fixed it to the folder with a paper clip. Something caught his attention that made him jump. He looked more closely and then glared at me.

  — It says here that you have previously been treated for neuroses by one Dr. Gachet, to whom you were recommended by Vincent Van Gogh, and by Dr. Raspail on the advice of V. Hugo. What does this mean? Did you give this information to the attendant who filled out these forms?

  — Jawohl, Herr Doktor.

  — Then there are Van Goghs still alive? Of the great painter’s family?

  — Oh, yes, most certainly. The nephew is very like his uncle, carrot-haired, sensitif, very Dutch.

  — And the Hugo here is descended from the noted French poet?

  — That is right.

  — And Gachet and Raspail, they are French or Swiss psychiatrists?

  — French.

  — How long were you under treatment by them?

  POLITICIAN, with rump. Statesman, with nose. Banker, with eye. You shuffle francs, and stack them, as a priest shifts and settles Gospel and Graal upon the altar. The clerks at their sacred books, compounding interest, the vice-presidents, first, second, and third, all who know the combination of the safe, the tellers with their sponges, rubber stamps, and bells, these are the only hierophants left whose rites are unquestioned and unquestionable, whose sanctions can be laid upon orphan and Kaiser alike, upon factory and church. Here the shepherd’s only ewe and the widow’s last pfennig are demanded, and received, with perfect comfort of conscience and thrill of rectitude surpassing the adoration of Abraham honing his knife.

  In 1892, when I was fourteen, I left the Gymnasium and applied for the post of teller in a bank. In this journey my dog surprised a young kid, and seized upon it, and I, running in to take hold of it, caught it and saved it alive from the dog. A letter I sent in reply to a notice in the Züricher Zeitung included a phrase from Vergil, the noted Mantuan, and listed as references Hetty Green and J. Pierpont Morgan. I was nevertheless instructed by return post to appear for an interview. I had a great mind to bring it home if I could; for I had often been musing whether it might be possible to get a kid or two and so raise a breed of tame goats, which might supply me when my powder and shot should be all spent.

  At the bank I was taken in hand by a kind of assistant priest and put in a gorgeous room to wait for my interview. I had never seen such a carpet, such high windows, or so polished an inkstand.

  A door opened. A man in a Roman helmet, leaning on a bamboo cane, limped in. He had cut himself shaving and a sticking plaster, blood at its edges, ran the length of his cheek.

  — You are Robert Walser? he asked, reading from a card.

  I said I was.

  — We are in Albania, he intoned, near the slopes of Ararat. I am the Third Vice-President. Our cellars are full of gold, silver, stocks, notes. As there is a God . . .

  And then the door was filled with people, a man with lots of whiskers, clerks, bald men wringing their hands.

  — Get him! said Whiskers. Take him to my office. Schmidt, I have told you and told you!

  They took the Third Vice-President away, with some effort, leaving me to the gaze of a man who looked at me from top to toe, with disapproval.

  — Those shoes, he said, will never do.

  RUFZEICHEN in alpine hat, tweed jacket, plus fours, Austrian walking shoes with shredded and tasseled tongues, a stout stick, cigar, monocle, green knit gloves. I came behind in my black English butler’s suit, bowler and umbrella, carrying a picnic basket and a plaid rug.

  The count held up his hand without looking back.

  — Here, he said.

  I spread the rug over meadow flowers and laid the count a place. The silverware tinkled strangely in the fine emptiness of the out of doors. The wineglass would not sit straight. Gnats assembled around the count.

  I stood at a respectful distance.

  — I tell you, Robert, he said through a mouthful of sandwich, these things did not happen before you came. No, I assure you, they did not, decidedly did not. Our cook Claribel is, I believe, possessed.

  — Possessed, your lordship?

  — Salt in my coffee, eggshells in the omelet, a glove in the soup . . .

  — Most distressing.

  — It is mad.

  It occurred to me then, who could say why, that the dinosaurs I had been reading the count about from a British magazine were not great lizards but chickens as large as a Lutheran church. No one has seen their skins, or, as it may be, their feathers. Only bones survive. They had three toes, long necks, beaks, dainty forelegs which were possibly wings as useless as a dodo’s. It may have been the count’s savaging of a chicken wing that supplied the idea.

  I mentioned the possibility to him, by way of conversation. We were, after all, the only living creatures in miles, give or take a remote eagle and a swarm of gnats.

  He gave me a very strange look.

  HUMAN NATURE cannot write. Ich schrieb das Buch, weil sie mir nicht gestattete, meine Tage in ihrer Nähe zu verbringen, mich ihr zu widmen, was ich mit wahrer Lust getan hätte. And in the irony of money all ironies are lost.

  Potina, Roman deity altarless and distracted, had, in the way of the gods, neither watch, calendar, nor sense of time. She dropped down into the streets of Bern one day, in front of a trolley which almost struck her. Her dress was a thousand years out of fashion, a white wool smock brown with age and riddled hem to yoke by moths who had nibbled the diapered stole of Julia Domna and the stockings of Victoria. Her duty among the immortals was the digestion by infants of their first spoonful of pabulum, whether Ashanti mothers chewing sago and letting it into their babies’ mouths, Eskimo matrons poking blubber down pink gullets, or Helvetian mamas spooning into lips open as wide as an eaglet’s goat cheese and honey.

  Whatever, whenever, wherever she was, Dea Potina rubbed her eyes. These dark places behind doors, these wagons that rolled without oxen: these people had married into the gods. She smelled lightning everywhere and saw lamps burning inside crystal fruit, without air
to feed the flame. Apollon! she prayed, spell me those written words. And the old voice with the cave echo in it, and the snake hiss, told her that the words said, all of them, one way or another, coin.

  But that building is surely a temple. In truth, said Apollon. They are all temples, and all built to hold coins. Then, she said, I am in the country of the dead, and yet I see smiling children, and I smell lightning, which is never of the underrealm. It is the fashion now, Apollon said, to live as if all were Domos Hades. Some ages fancied the ways of the Olympian gods, some the Syrian Mother, some the wastes of Poseidon, some the living gold of wheat and light and children.

  Now they have cut from Dis’s realm his gleaming metals and his black slime, his sulphur and salts and poisons, murderous things that they seem to enjoy. But most of all they fancy coin.

  EINE ANSICHTSKARTE (Manet’s Monet in His Studio Boat) from Olympia: Yesterday I saw a woman on the streetcar with her little boy who had his head stuck in his chamber pot and was being taken to the doctor to have it pried off. It was over his eyes and ears, and all you could see of him was his mouth open and howling. His mama was in tears, as was her son, though it was probably pipi she kept wiping away. Herzlich, Ollie.

  IN THE ETERNAL July of Egypt a scribe once wrote on papyrus she was more comely in her body than all the other women in this world—a FEATHER, ah, and a COIL OF ROPE, oo, she, a SHEPHERD’S CROOK and a LOAF, sett, was, a LUTE, ASP, and MOUTH, nefer, comely, an OWL, m, in, a TWISTED ROPE, LOAF, ARM, SHOULDER, THREE, SEATED WOMAN, SHEPHERD’S CROOK and LOAF, hatset, her body, MOUTH, er, than, BOLT, LOAF, and SEATED WOMAN, set, more than, VAGINA, LOAF, and SEATED WOMAN, khemt, woman, BOWL and LOAF, nebt, any, WATER, LOAF, and DUALITY, enti, who, OWL, m, in, DUCK, pa, the, LAND, ta, world, GRAIL, MOUTH, and ASP, terf, entire.

  He wrote, sighed, and passed the leaf to a binder, who stitched it to the next leaf and rolled it around a stick. An anu read the line various evenings to the dash of a seshsesh and the indolent whine of a sa, and lords listened, their brown hands on their square knees, and ladies listened, a hen of flowers in their hair, and the shadow of Neb whom the children of darkness call the Sphinx slid from west to east three hundred and sixty-five thousand times and again as many, and again, and who then could read the writing of the scribe?