The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  His bathing drawers were a mistake. The logic of nudism was to be nude, but nude and naked were different conditions. Michelangelo’s David was nude and the lean scouts in Náš Skautík were nude in or out of their short khaki pants, but the old fart over there with wings of hair out from his ears and pregnant with a volley ball, with spindle legs and wrinkled knees, is naked.

  They were twins, the boys who crossed the path in front of him, or cousins or brothers very close in age, two young Swedes who, God knows, may be Swedenborgians, more likely Lutherans, perhaps Baptists of some sect with pure morals, sonorous hymns sung to fiddles and concertinas, and sermons three hours long in a wooden church through the windows of which you could see birches and cedars and snow. But now they were Castor and Pollux in an Austrian meadow.

  Later, when he was going to the lodge to mail his letter to Max, they crossed his way again, naked as ancient Greeks at Elis, healthy as dogs, honey brown from the sun, their hair the color of meal, their large eyes blue.

  Next day, the pink evangelist lying in the meadow reading two bibles at once bade Kafka good day and asked his opinion of prophecy.

  His books were under an umbrella stuck in the meadow. He himself, pink as coral, was undergoing heliotherapy on a Navajo blanket.

  —Here in First Samuel, he said. A company of prophets coming down with a psaltery, a pipe, and a harp, an event itself prophesied.

  —My opinion would be an ignorant one.

  The two Swedish boys, Jonathan and David, came side by side from the path in the pine wood. They walked like people holding hands, shoulder to shoulder, in step.

  A company of prophets from the bare rock of a high place came down, dancing stately forward, with a raised knee and a straight knee, with a gliding step and a stomp, in time to a tabret, exalted by the chime of a harp and the trill of a flute, prophesying. Is Saul also among the prophets?

  —Everyone, Kafka smiled, seems to have a message for me, as if I’d fallen among prophets.

  —A word to the wise, said the evangelist. The Lord knows his own.

  The noises outside his cabin at night were probably messages, but not for him: field mice passing on to field mice the advance of the summer according to the stars and the latest news of the Balkan wars. He had gone out in the deep of night, to lean wholly naked against his door, for the liberty of it. He had never had a door, nor the freedom to stand like Adam in moonlight.

  But moonlight, Dr. Schlaf said in his lecture, is bad for you, along with wearing modern clothes, eating fruit, and thinking pessimistically. He had been an officer, in what army he did not specify, and had the refined manners of an insane aristocrat, speaking delicately with his fingertips together, with moist eyes open wide. He had published several works, which Kafka as an educated man would find interesting.

  —You will know how to weigh my words and draw your own conclusions.

  The day began with calisthenics in a group, with a phonograph playing marches to keep time to. The exercises were from Etienne-Jules Marey’s manual for the French army, as modified by Swedish gymnasts for civilian health and beauty.

  Adolf Just, the director of the Jungborn Spa for Naturtherapie had invented the Nudist Crawl whereby they went on all fours in a wide circle. The Swedish boys moved like elegant greyhounds.

  Here in the countryside, ankle-deep in nameless meadow flowers, metaphysics and jurisprudence were as outcast as Adam and Eve from their paradise in Eden. God did not destroy that garden. He put us out of it. It is still where it was, going to seed for lack of care, or flourishing under divine husbandry. Or waiting in the orange groves of Palestine for agronomists like Ottla.

  Max found in a book that the American follower of Jakob Boehme Ralph Waldo Emerson had gone blind and lame in some theological yeshiva of the Protestants and sought to restore his health by becoming a common farm laborer, weeding turnips and hoeing rows of maize. On this farm he met a fellow worker named Tarbox, of the Methodist sect. Theology was their constant topic. Herr Emerson was wondering one day if indeed God ever pays the least attention to our prayers.

  —Yes He does, said Farmer Tarbox, and our trouble is that He answers them all.

  It was a strategy of the sacred to appear in disguise, like Tobias’s angel, a prosperous kinsman. The most biblical thing they were doing at the spa was working on the model farm like Pastor Emerson. They pitched hay onto a wagon behind the angels with scythes. On ladders out of Flemish painting they picked cherries. The first evening after pitching hay he read the Book of Ruth. There was a bible in every cabin.

  To read in an Austrian meadow texts written in the desert was a kind of miracle. The thirtieth year after Hilkiah the priest found the book of the law in the house of the sanctuary, at midnight, after the setting of the moon, in the days of Josiah the king.

  —To care for the body, the evangelist said, wiping his brow with a blue handkerchief, to live cleanly here in this pure air, soaking in the vital influences of the sun, is to move toward an awakening of the soul from doubt and sloth. Here, take this pamphlet, The Prodigal Son, and this one, Bought, or No longer Mine: For Unbelieving Believers.

  Kafka mentioned, quietly, the inner light, his conscience.

  —And this one, Why Can’t the Educated Man Believe in the Bible?

  The Swedish godlings strolled up, stopping at a safe distance, to listen. Their long foreskins puckered at the tip. Their pubic hair was a tawny orange. Their rumps were dimpled just back of the hip, as if to indicate that their long legs were well socketed. They were as comely, slender, and graceful as deer. They were like Asahel in Samuel, as swift of foot as the wild gazelle. Like the young David they were ruddy and had beautiful eyes.

  —There is no prospect of grace for me, Kafka said.

  He could not match the evangelist’s staring sincerity, and lowered his eyes.

  A thin old man with white hair and a red nose joined them, offering a remark from time to time, perhaps in Chaldean.

  —Are you a Mormon? The evangelist asked. A Theosophist? But as a lawyer from Prague you are a Darwinian, aren’t you?

  Again Kafka pleaded the inviolable inwardness of the heart.

  —Is Darwin among the prophets?

  The old man, after coughing and wiping his lips, made another remark in Chaldean.

  Castor and Pollux smiled as sweetly as angels.

  He dreamed that his fellow nudists all annihilated each other. It was a battle of the naked against the naked, as in Mantegna. They kicked and drove swift blows with their fists. It started when they formed into two groups, joking and then taunting. A stalwart fellow took command of his group and shouted at the other.

  —Lustron and Kastron!

  —Ach! Lustron and Kastron?

  —Exactly!

  And then the brawl began, like fanatics in Goya. When it was over, there was nothing of them left. The vast meadow was empty.

  Kafka woke, wondering.

  Could the household god see his dreams? What would Dr. Freud say? What in the world do lustron and kastron mean?

  The habit he had fallen into of seeing the well-built Swedish boys as Castor and Pollux, disregarding that their minds were a vegetation of ignorance, superstition, folklore, archaic fears, provincial opinions, and Lutheran piety, and that any conversation he might have with them would be about automobiles and Jesus, had something to do with the dream.

  Latin endings rather than Greek would make the words into castrum, a castle, and lustrum, a cleansing. Pollux, pollutum, a defiling. Clean and filthy: antitheses. When antithetical particles in the atomic theory collide, they annihilate each other.

  Castor and Pollux could not exist simultaneously. One could live only when the other was dead, a swap made by loving brothers.

  In the botanical garden at Jena by the elephant ear, in his charcoal coat with the blue collar, Friedrich Schlegel said that a fragment should be complete in itself, like a porcupine.

  To Castor and Pollux, next they bowed to him in passing, and while
they were smiling in their innocent nudity, I am a lawyer, he might remark, and I have a sister who is an agronomist. This would probably sound like I am a judge but I have a little brother who spins tops.

  And Castor would inquire of Pollux, What are an agronomist? The sun-browned fingers of a classical hand would scratch around in hair the color of meal. Blue eyes would puzzle themselves closed.

  —She makes trees grow. She plans to emigrate to Palestine and grow oranges and apricots. Sinai apples. Golden green oranges.

  Pollux would look at Castor, Castor at Pollux.

  Opposites do not cooperate. They annihilate each other.

  It was next day, while talking with Herr Guido von Gillshausen, the retired captain who writes poetry and music, that he learned that the beautiful Swedish boys were named Jeremias and Barnabas. They had bowed as they passed, and the captain had spoken to them by name. Fine specimens, were they not?

  In the evening Kafka was invited to a rifle meet by Dr. Schlaf and a Berlin hairdresser. The broad plain sloping up to the Bugberg was bordered by very old lindens and cut across by a railroad. The shooting was from a platform. Peasants near the targets kept score in a ledger. While the shooting cracked, fifers with women’s handkerchiefs down their backs played sprightly airs. They wore medieval smocks. The rifles were ancient muzzle-loaders.

  A band arrived, playing a colorful march, and regimental banners from the time of Napoleon were paraded past, with excited applause from both the villagers and the patients at the spa. Then a drum-and-fife corps caused even greater excitement. Meanwhile, the firing went on, with shouts of bull’s-eyes. In the awfullest bombardments in the American Civil War the bands had continued to play waltzes and polkas.

  When the shooting was over, they all marched away to the band, at the dying of the day under banked storm clouds, the Champion Shot at the head of the procession in a top hat and with a scarlet sash wound around his frock coat.

  Jeremias and Barnabas had not come to the rifle meet. Perhaps they were determined to remain mother-naked for their stay at the spa. At home in Sweden did they wear large-sleeved pleated shirts and tight knee-pants, flat Protestant black hats and tasseled hobnail shoes?

  Had they a language other than Swedish? The spa was the lower slopes of the Tower of Babel. Herr Just did his best with nouns and their equivalents, along with a wild irresponsibility of verbs. A family all with crossed eyes could not understand dinner or supper or evening meal but, ja ja, they wanted something to eat. A woman in a large straw hat told him all about Prague, where she had never been. It was discovered that he, the man in the bathing trunks, bought strawberry sodas for girls, from serious six-year-olds to giggling and brazen sixteen-year-olds, none of whom had either conversation or gratitude.

  One evening his matches could not be found when he returned to his cabin. He borrowed a match from the cabin down the lane and by its light looked under his table. He found his water glass there. The lamp was under the bed, and when he’d lit it he saw that his chamber pot was on a ledge over the closet door, his matches were on the windowsill, his sandals were tucked behind the mirror. His inkwell and wet washcloth were under the blanket on the bed. Austrian humor.

  The household god was nowhere to be seen.

  —Beeswax? He called. Come out, the pranksters are gone.

  He put the lamp on the bedside table and opened his Education sentimentale. If he were at home his mother would say he was simultaneously ruining his eyes and wasting oil.

  His cabin by lamplight was as congenial and private a place as he had ever longed for.

  Light in a copse of small trees, softened by leaves, could not be suspected of having come from the raging furnace of the sun. And why is the hospitality of the one inhabited planet so consistently inadequate? The terror of God and his angels has grown remote over the years, but like the sun it is still there, raging.

  At Goethe’s house with Max he had remembered that when Eckermann paid his first visit he was thoroughly and silently inspected inside the door by the poet’s pretty grandsons Walter and Wolfgang. Then they flew clattering and tumbling to tell Grossvater that a stranger had come in from the street. Messengers.

  The white geese by the pond were the German soul.

  The angels who came to Sodom were two. The message they brought is unrecorded. They only said that they preferred to spend the night in the street. They were antithetical beings annihilating a city. Like long-legged Jeremias and Barnabas they had perhaps forgotten the message they had so carefully memorized, or lost it on the way, having set out like children, elbows high and hair flopping in their eyes, feet flying, and come to a meadow where it would be jolly to pick flowers, or a river to skip pebbles on.

  How long had the book of the law been lost when Hilkiah the priest found it in the house of the sanctuary, at midnight, after the setting of the moon, in the days of Josiah the king?

  —Beeswax, where are you?

  How peaceful, the night. He would learn next day, from sly comments he was meant to overhear, that it was the girls for whom he bought strawberry sodas who disarranged his cabin.

  —I am here, Beeswax said, in your shoe.

  —What are the crickets saying?

  —Some are saying yes and some are saying no. Their language has only those two words.

  From empty castle to empty castle the messengers are flying, backtracking to find a lost shoe, stopping to pick berries, asking cows and sparrows the way from here to there, happy and proud in their importance.

  THE AEROPLANES AT BRESCIA

  Kafka stood on the seawall at Riva under the early September sky. But for his high-button shoes and flaring coat, his easy stance had an athletic clarity. He walked with the limberness of a racing cyclist. Otto Brod, with whom he had spent the morning discussing moving pictures and strolling along the shore under the voluble pines and yellow villas of the Via Ponale, lit a cigar and suggested a light beer before lunch. A wash of sweet air from the lake rattled a circle of pigeons, who flapped up into a shuttle of gulls. A fisherman in a blue apron reclined on the harbor steps smoking a small pipe. On a staff over a perfectly square building rippled the Austrian flag with its black, two-headed eagle. An old man knotting cords in a net strung between poles watched them with the open concern of the Italians. A soft bell rang in the hills.

  —Good idea, said Kafka. It will get the taste of Dallago out of our mouths.

  His eyes, when they could be seen under the broad brim of a black fedora, seemed abnormally large. To the natural swarthiness of his square face, rough of bone, Italy had already added, Otto noticed, a rose tint.

  The ora, the south wind blowing up from Sirmione, had begun to scuff the dark blue of the lake. The old Venetian fort between the Città Riva and the railway station seemed to Kafka to be an intrusion into the Euclidean plainness of the houses of Riva. It reminded him of the schloss at Meran that had disturbed him not only for being vacant and blind in its casements but also because of the suspicion that it would inevitably return in his most anxious dreams. Even without his intuition of the mute claim of this empty castle to stay in his mind as a presence neither welcome nor explicable, it was always terrifying to know that there were things in the world empty of all significance and yet persisted, like heavy books of the law which mankind in a stubborn reluctance would not destroy and yet would not obey. The castle at Riva, the Rocca, the Rock, was a barracks housing the new conscripts, but the castle at Meran, the Brunnenburg, was a great shell. Suddenly he heard a telephone ringing in its high rooms, and made himself think instead of the morning at the Bagni della Madonnina and of Otto’s polite but equivocal replies to Dallago the poet who had apologized by rote man’s oneness with nature. What a fool, Otto had said later, on their walk.

  The cubes of Riva, white and exact, were an architecture, Kafka remarked, the opposite of the lobes and tendrils of Prague. And there was truth in the light of Riva that was, as a poet might say, the opposite of the half-truths of the cut-glass sunlight of Pragu
e, which had no fire in it, no absolute transparency. Instead of tall slabs of squared light in just proportions, Prague had weather of a dark and glittering richness.

  Otto replied that the light here was pure and empty, creating a freedom among objects. The very shadows were incised. It is an older world, he added, and yet one to which the new architecture is returning. Concrete is but the Mediterranean mud house again, and glass walls a new yearning to see light sliced as in the openness of the Aegean landscape. The newest style, he said, is always in love with the oldest of which we are aware. The next Wiedergeburt will come from the engineers.

  Max Brod, whom they had left writing at the pensione, was already at the café, and was holding above his head a newspaper for them to see.

  —They are going to fly at Brescia! he shouted, and a waiter who might have been bringing a selzer to the Tsar of Bulgaria, so grave was his progress, looked with uninterrupted dignity over his shoulder at Max, who to him was but a Czech and probably a Jew, stamping his feet and rattling La Sentinella Bresciana in the air.

  —Aeroplanes! Blériot! Cobianchi! Die Brüder Wright!

  —Due bionde, piacere, Otto said to the waiter, who was relieved that the Czech’s friends did not flap their arms and dance on the terrace.

  —Incredible, Otto said. Absolutely incredible luck.

  Kafka laughed outright, for Max was as of the moment as he a brooding postponer, and their friendship had always been a contest between the impulses of Max and the circumspect deliberation of Franz. It was a comedy that popped up everywhere between them. They had been in Riva a day, Max had spent a month convincing Franz that he must come to Riva on his vacation, and here was Max dashing them off on the second morning. But, as he quickly said, he could not question the call of the flying machines, which none of them had seen. They were well worth giving up the sweet quiet of Riva.