The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  Otto took the newspaper from Max and laid it out on the table.

  —Brescia is just at the other end of the lake, Max explained. We can take the steamboat to Salò, and get a local from there. It’s three days off, but we’ll want to be there at least the day before, as Mitteleuropa will have arrived in droves, with their cousins and their aunts. I’ve written the Committee there in the second paragraph. Naturally there is a Committee.

  —By all means, Franz said, a Committee.

  At its head, in gilt chairs, sat Dottore Civetta, Dottore Corvo, and Mangiafoco himself.

  —I told them that we are journalists from Prague, and that we require accommodations.

  In the last analysis, Kafka sighed, all things are miracles.

  There was a steamboat the next morning. They boarded it and marvelled at the antiquity of its machinery and the garishness of its paint.

  Only six years ago, Max had told them the evening before at the café, under a sky much higher than the skies of Bohemia and with stars twice the size of those of Prague, two Americans had chosen the most plausible combination of elements from a confusion of theories and constructed a machine that flew. The flight lasted twelve seconds only, and scarely five people were there to see it.

  By a fat wheatfield under the largest of skies an intricate geometry of wires and neat oblongs of stretched canvas sat like the death ship of a pharaoh. It looked like a loom mounted on a sled. It was as elegantly laced, strutted, and poised as the time machine of H. George Wells. Its motor popped, its two screw propellers whirred, bending the lush American weeds to the ground. Fieldmice scurried to their burrows in the corn. Coyotes’ ears went up and their yellow eyes brightened.

  Were they like the Goncourts, inseparable brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright? Or were they like Otto and Max, twins in deference and simple brotherhood but essentially very different men? They were from Ohio, nimble as Indians, but whether Democrats, Socialists, or Republicans Otto could not say.

  The editors of the American papers, taken up with duelling and oratory, paid no attention at all to their flight. The strange machine flew and flew before any word of it appeared. Icarus and Daedalus had flown above peasants who did not look up from their bowl of lentils and above fishermen who were looking the other way.

  The Brothers Wright were the sons of a bishop, but, as Otto explained, the sons of an American bishop. His church was one of dissenters separated from dissenters, a congregation with a white wooden church on a knoll above a brown river, the Susquehanna perhaps. One could not imagine the dreams of Americans.

  If one flew over this community in an aeroplane or drifted over it in a balloon, there would be school children below planting a tree. Buffalo and horses grazed in grass so green it was said to be blue. The earth itself was black. The houses, but one story high, were set in flower gardens. One might see the good Bishop Wright reading his Bible at a window, or a senator driving his automobile along a road.

  The young Orville and Wilbur had constructed mechanical bats, Otto said, after the designs of Sir George Cayley and Penaud. For America was the land where the learning of Europe was so much speculation to be tested on an anvil. They read Octave Chanute’s Flying Machines; they built kites. The kite was their beginning, not the bird. That was da Vinci’s radical error. The kite had come from China centuries ago. It had passed through the hands of Benjamin Franklin, who caught electricity for the magician Edison, who, it was said, was soon to visit Prague. Men such as Otto Lilienthal had mounted kites and rode the wind and died like Icarus. The Wrights knew all these things. They read Samuel Pierpont Langley; they studied the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. That was the way of Americans. They took theories as pelicans swallowed fish, pragmatically, and boldly made realities out of ideas.

  But the morning’s paper, which had come up to Riva on the steamboat, reported that the Wrights might fly in Berlin rather than at Brescia. It hinted of a rivalry between them and the American Curtiss, whose improvements on the flying machine were in many ways far in advance of theirs.

  Villages on the lakeshore were stacked, house above house, as in a canvas of Cézanne, from the waterfront to the hilltops, where the church was the highest of all, ringing its bell. In the old city at Prague under the wall he had felt among the alchemists’ kitchens and the tiny shops of the smiths in the old ghetto the alien wonderment he felt in Italy, as if an incantation had been recited and the charm had worked. Had not one of the gulls at Riva spoken a line of Latin?

  The lake was as vast as the sea.

  Otto, who wore a cap and belted jacket, did turns around the richly obstructed deck of the trembling steamboat. Max and Franz sat on a folded travelling rug by the wheelhouse. Otto and Max, it occurred to Kafka, might seem like two princes from an Art Nouveau poster for a Russian opera to those who did not know them. This was illusion, for they were modern men, wholly of the new age. Max was twenty-five, he had his degree, a position, and had published a novel last year, the Schloss Nornepygge. Was this why the desolate Castle Brunnenburg in the wild Camonica hills hung in his memory like a ghost?

  They seemed not to feel the emptiness of the lake at noon. They had their inwardnesses, how deeply they had never let him see, inviolably private as they were, as all men were.

  Otto had been born into the new world, conversant with numbers and their enviable harmonies and with the curiously hollow thought of Ernst Mach and Avenarius, whose minds were like those of the Milesians and Ephesians of antiquity, bright as an ax, elemental as leaves, and as plain as a box. This new thought was naked and innocent; the world would wound it in time. And Max, too, had his visions in this wild innocence. A suburb of Jaffa had just a few months ago been named Tel Aviv, and Zionists were said to be speaking Hebrew there. Max dreamed of a Jewish state, irrigated, green, electrical, wise.

  The destiny of our century was born in the lonely monotony of schoolrooms. Italian schoolrooms were doubtless the same as those of Prague and Amsterdam and Ohio. The late afternoon sun fell into them after the pupils had gone home, spinning tops and throwing jacks on the way. A map of Calabria and Sicily hung on a wall, as polychrome as Leoncavallo, as lyric in its citron gaiety as the chart of the elements which hung beside it was abstract and Russian. Sticks of yellow and white chalk lay in their troughs, and the geometry drawn by them was still on the blackboard, evident, tragic, and abandoned. The windows, against which a wasp rose and fell, testing all afternoon the hardness of their dusty lucidity, were as desolate and grandly melancholy as barn doors looking on the North Sea in October. Here Otto heard of the valence of carbon, here Max saw bright daggers drawn from a bleeding Caesar, here Franz dreamed of the Great Wall of China.

  Did men know anything at all? Man was man’s teacher. Anyone could see the circle in that.

  Tolstoy was at Yásnaya Polyána, eighty and bearded and in peasant dress, out walking, no doubt, in those thin birch groves under a white sky where the sense of the north is a sharp and distant quiet, an intuition shared with the wolf and the owl of the emptiness of the earth.

  Somewhere in the unimaginable vastness of America Mark Twain smoked a Havana cigar and cocked his head at the new automobiles three abreast on roads hacked through red forests of maple. His dog was asleep at his feet. Perhaps William Howard Taft called him on the telephone from time to time to tell a joke.

  A sailboat passed, an ancient bearded hunter at its tiller.

  Franz Kafka, jackdaw. Despair, like the crane’s hunch on Kierkegaard’s lilting back, went along on one’s voyages. His degree in jurisprudence was scarcely three years old, he was rapidly, as Herr Canello assured him, becoming an expert in workingmen’s compensation insurance, and the literary cafés of Prague to which he did not go were open to him, both the Expressionist and those devoted to the zithers and roses of Rilke.

  Had not Uncle Alfred, who had been awarded so many medals, his mother’s elder brother Alfred Löwy, risen to be manager general of the Spanish railways? The Spanish railways! And Uncle Jos
eph was in the Congo, bending over a ledger to be sure, but he could look up and there was the jungle. But then Uncle Rudolf was a bookkeeper at a brewery, and Uncle Siegfried a country doctor. And his cousin Bruno was editing Krasnopolski.

  There were odysseys in which the Sirens are silent.

  Without paper, he conceived stories the intricacy and strangeness of which might have earned a nod of approval from Dickens, the Pentateuch and Tolstoy of England. Before paper, his imagination withdrew like a snail whose horns had been touched. If the inward time of the mind could be externalized and lived in, its aqueducts and Samarkands and oxen within walls which the Roman legions had never found, he would be a teller of parables, graceless perhaps, especially at first, but he would learn from more experienced parablists and from experience. He would wear a shawl of archaic needlework, would know the law, the real law of unvitiated tradition, and herbs, and the histories of families and their migrations, to which stock of tales he might add his own, if fate hardened his sight. He would tell of mice, like Babrius, and of a man climbing a mountain, like Bunyan. He would tell of the ships of the dead, and of the Chinese, the Jews of the other half of the world, and of their wall.

  —What silence! said Max.

  —I was listening to the Sirens, said Franz.

  From Salò they went by train, along with many hampers of garlic and a cock that crowed all the way, to Brescia.

  The station was very night. Kafka wondered that the people milling outside didn’t have lanterns. The train as it slid into Brescia was like a horse dashing through the poultry market in Prague, throwing cage after cage of chickens into a panic as it passed. Every passenger was out of his seat before the train hissed to a halt. An Austrian fell out of a window. A woman asked if anyone saw her brother-in-law outside, a gentleman and courier to the Papal court. A hat passed from hand to hand overhead. People getting off stuck in the doors with people getting on. They promised each other not to get lost, and suddenly they were outside the train. Otto emerged backwards, Kafka sideways, and Max frontwards, with his necktie across his face.

  Panels of light carved in the blackness of the station disclosed vistas of Brescia the color of honey, almonds, and salmon. Red smokestacks rose above turreted palaces. There were green shutters everywhere.

  Now that they were in Italy proper, Kafka’s high-button shoes and black fedora which had been so smartly contemporary in Prague, his new frockcoat with its pinched waist and flaring skirts, seemed inappropriately sober, as if he had come to plead a case at law rather than to see the air show at Montechiari. The land of Pinocchio, he reminded himself, and, rubbing his hands together and blinking in the generous light of the street, he remarked to Otto and Max that here they were in the country of Leonardo da Vinci.

  A hat sat on the sidewalk. A cane carried in the crook of an arm hooked a cane carried in the crook of a arm. Each pulled the other out and both fell together. Everything seemed to be the grand moment of an opera about the arrival of the barbarians in Rome.

  Max through some quickness that was beyond Otto and Franz, who stood together more stunned than merely hesitant to decide the direction in which they ought to move, had already bought a newspaper. Under a headline in stout poster type the whole significance of their journey was proclaimed in prose which, as Max remarked, wore a waxed moustache. Papers in Italy were not read in coffee houses but on the sidewalks, the pages smacked with the backs of hands, the felicities of the paragraphs read aloud to total strangers.

  —Here in Brescia, Max read to them once they had found a table at a caffé on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, we have a multitude the likes of which we have never seen before, no, not even at the great automobile races. There are visitors from Venice, Liguria, the Piedmont, Tuscany, Rome, and even Naples. Our piazze swarm with distinguished men from France, England, and America. Our hotels are filled, as well as every available spare room and corner of private residences, for which the rates rise daily and magnificently. There are scarcely means enough to transport the hordes to the circuito aero. The restaurant at the aerodrome can easily offer superb fare to two thousand people, but more than two thousand must certainly bring disaster.

  Here Franz whistled an air of Rossini.

  —The militia, Max read on, has already been called to keep order at the lunch counters. At the humbler refreshment stands some fifty thousand people press daily all day long. Thus La Sentinella Bresciana for the ninth of September 1909.

  They took a fiacre to the Committee, hoping that it would not fall to pieces under them before they arrived. The driver, who for some reason was radiantly happy, seemed to turn alternately left and right at every corner. Once they went up a street which they were certain they had seen before. The Committee was in a palace. Gendarmes in white gloves rattled their long swords and directed them to concierges in gray smocks who pointed to the heads of stairs where there were officials in celluloid collars who directed them to enormous rooms where other officials, bowing slightly, gave them frail sheets of paper on which they wrote their names and addresses and occupations. Max proudly listed himself as novelist and critic, Kafka wickedly wrote journalist, and Otto, humming to himself, engineer.

  Pinocchio clattering down a hall with a gendarme hard on his heels was lost to sight when Kafka stuck his head around a door to see.

  In a green room into which they were summoned their papers were spread out on a desk from which a bald official in a fuchsia tie welcomed them in the name of the Società Aerea d’ltalia. He found the name of an albergo in a notebook and Max copied it down.

  Pinocchio had just cleared a corner when they came outside, and a gendarme hopped awhile, and pulled his moustaches awhile, before giving full chase.

  The landlord of the inn, when they got there, was a copy of the functionary of the Committee, except that he did not affect a tie. His fingers wiggled beside his face as he talked, spit flew from his lips. He rubbed his elbows, bowed from the waist, and put their money, which he knew that as men of the world and of affairs they wished to pay in advance, in some recess under his coat tails.

  By asking each other in all seriousness they discovered that their room was the dirtiest that any of them had ever seen. Moreover, there was a large round hole in the middle of the floor, through which they could see card players in the room below, and through which, Max observed, Sparafucile would later climb.

  Light lay flat and ancient upon the colonnade of the old forum. In the temple of Hercules, now green-shuttered and rusty with lichen, there was a winged Nike writing upon a shield.

  The squares and streets of Brescia were pages from a book on perspective. One might write a novel in which every line met in a single room, an empty room in an empty building in an empty novel. Random figures could not be avoided. Perspective drawings placed gratuitous figures in empty piazze or mounting long steps, faceless men with canes, women with baskets, Gypsies with dogs.

  What endurance there was in the long Italian afternoons! In Prague the city stirred about against the evening. Lamps came on in windows. Smoke rose from chimneys. Bells chimed. In Italy eyes hollowed in the faces of statues, windows darkened, shadows moved across squares and slid up the walls of buildings. The night was a mistake, it was fate, sbaglio e fato antico la notte. Da Vinci had put water in globes to magnify the light of his lamps, like Edison with his mirrors. And the Italians did not sleep at night. They slept in the afternoon, they were abed half the morning. At night they talked. They went up and down stairs. They ran in the street, like Pinocchio trying his legs.

  The old Tarocchi lay on marble tables, the tray of cups beside a stone jug as Roman as a bust of Cinna. And the Elementi Analitici of Tully Levi-Cività lay beside them with unquestionable propriety. Here was a country where Zeno’s motion could be understood. Italy’s monotonous sameness was like the frames of a film that moved with the slowness of sleep, so that accident and order were equally impossible. The shape of a glass and the speech of an anarchist were both decided upon millennia ago, and
emerged daily, with all other Italic gestures, from a rhythm generated in the ovens and olive presses of Etruria.

  In Vienna, in Berlin, the new smelled of frivolity and the old of decay, lacking the Italian continuity of things. A poster on a wall as old as the Gracchi announced in pepper greens and summer yellows a comedy with the curious title Elettricità Sessuale, and the old woman beside it in her black shawl and with a basket of onions might easily step into the gondola of the dirigible Leonardo da Vinci, which was expected to arrive at any moment from Milan, piloted by the engineer Enrico Forlanini, and sail off to market, gossiping about the priest’s nephew Rinaldo, who, she had just learned at the baker’s, was now the mayor of Nebraska.

  A galantuomo in pomade and cream shoes cleaned his ears with the nail of his little finger while they dined across from him on sausages and peppers. After coffee and cigars they went to bed with a soldierly indifference. Max said that they must agree among them to remember the hole in the floor, through which they could now see a great red pizza being quartered with a knife that, as Kafka observed, was surely a gift of the Khan to Marco Polo, as each of them over the years would tend to doubt his sanity in remembering it. Before they went to sleep Otto had a laughing fit, which he refused to explain, and Pinocchio ran down the street with Mangiafoco after him and three gendarmes after them, and a woman narrated just under their window, as best they could understand her, the family affairs of one of the late emperors.

  Kafka dreamed that night of Ionic columns in a field of flowers in Sicily, which was also Riva, as dreams are invariably double. There were brown rocks alive with lizards, a moth on a wall, a gyre of pigeons, a stitch of bees. The pines were Virgilian, shelved, and black. He was distressingly lonely and had the impression that he was supposed to see certain statues, possibly of statesmen and poets, wonderfully blotched by lichens and ravaged by the sun. But they were not there. Then Goethe came from behind a column and recited with infinite freedom and arbitrariness a poem he could not understand. There was a rabbit at his foot, eating a mullein.