The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  A good cough, first.

  —‘lo, Samantha. I’m not as awake as Gunnar. Congrats on being pregnant. Gunnar told me last night. You must show me how to change diapers and dust on baby powder. None of last night happened, you know? Yes, I’m Mikkel.

  Listening, head cocked, tongue over lips.

  —And I’ll give you a big hug, too, when you get back. Tuesday? OK, here’s Gunnar again.

  By way of good manners, Mikkel rolled out of bed. Downstairs he started coffee and poured orange juice into burgundy glasses, for style. The studio seemed strange, and he looked at the rosy marble of the Ariel as if he’d never seen it before.

  MR. CHURCHYARD AND THE TROLL

  When the chessboard in the coffeehouse seemed an idle ruse to beguile away the hours, and the battlements around Kastellet with their hawthorn and green-shanked moorhens and pacing soldiers ran thin on charm, and his writing balked at being written, and books tasted stale, and his thoughts became a snarl rather than a woven flow, Mr. Churchyard, the philosopher, hired a carriage to the Troll Wood for a long speculative walk.

  The lout on the box was eating peasecods from his hat.

  —To the Troll Wood, Mr. Churchyard said, tightening the fit of his gloves.

  The sky was Baltic, with North German clouds.

  Copenhagen was a thunder of rolling barrels, squeaking cart wheels, hooting packetboats, Lutheran brass bands, fish hawkers, a racket of bells.

  And impudent imps of boys crying after him Either! Or! while their sisters warned ’E’ll turn and gitcha!

  If it were a lucky afternoon, the troll would be in the wood. Mr. Churchyard knew that this troll, so strangely beautiful in a mushroomy sort of way, was a figment entirely in his mind, the creature of overwork, indigestion, or bile, perhaps even original sin, still it was a troll.

  Socrates, that honest man, had his daimon, why not Mr. Churchyard his troll? Its eyes looked at him from among leaves, above. Its hair was Danish, like thistledown, and was neatly cut and finished, the shape of a porridge bowl. He did not come when called. You had to sit on a log, and wait.

  The wood was of mountain ash and beech which had grown thick and dark among flocks of boulders silver with lichen and green with moss. Underfoot, spongy and deep, lay a century’s mulch of fallen leaves, through which the odd wildflower pushed, convolute and colorless of blossom, from the morning of time. We are welcome in meadows, where the carpet is laid down, with grass to eat, if we are cows or field mice, and the yellows and blues are those of the Greek poets and Italian painters.

  But here, in the wood, we intrude. Across the sound, in Sweden, there are forests with tall cone-bearing trees, and wolves. Nature has her orders. A wood is as different from a forest as a meadow from a marsh. Owls and trolls live here. And philosophers.

  In Plato’s grove you heard the snick of shears all morning long, and rakes combing gravel. Epicurus spoke of necessity and fate while watching his grass lawn being rolled smooth. Aristotle and Theophrastus picked flowers in Mytilenian meadows, under parasols. And there was the Swede Linnaeus, as he called himself, who studied nature in Dutch gardens, yawned at by fat English cats.

  The troll was somewhere over there, where the leaves shifted.

  If Nikolai Grundtvig were here, or Mr. Churchyard’s brother, Peter, the bishop, they would invite the troll to join them in a jolly folk dance.

  Was that a foot in the ferns, with cunning toes? If there was one troll, there were two. It would have a wife. Nature would have it so. And young. Why should one doubt trolls when the god has kept himself hidden all this time?

  When Amos talked with the god, was Amos talking to himself? For the god is hidden in light, in full view, and we cannot see him.

  Curled, small fingers in the beech leaves. Fate must drop like a ripe apple. He was not especially eager to see the troll. He was not, despairingly, eager to see the god, even if he could. He had, twice now, seen the troll. It was its singularity that was important. Beyond that he could not think. There was the pure goodness of the god, all but unimaginable, and there was the pure sensuality of Don Giovanni, imaginable with the cooperation of the flesh, and there was the pure intellect of Socrates, easily imaginable, as the mind, that trollish ganglion, like Don Giovanni’s mutinous testicles, was a gift from the god.

  Hegel’s brain in a jar of formaldehyde on the moon.

  The troll was another purity, that much was certain, but of what? Your coachman, Mr. Churchyard, is sitting out there, beyond the copse, picking his nose and waiting.

  The troll had said its name was Hitch. Was it of an order, upward from the mushroom (which, he could not see, it was munching) as angels are an order downward from the god? He did not see it as one finds Napoleon in the drawing of two trees, where you find his figure delineated by the branches, but as an image soaking through the fabric of vision, leaf-and-berry eyes, peanut toes, sapling legs, An acorn for sex.

  —There are interstices, Mr. Churchyard said, taking off his tall hat and setting it on the log, through which things fall. In one of the spurious gospels, for instance, there is Jesus choosing Simon from among the fishers drawing up their net. And with Jesus is his dog. Or a dog.

  —Yes, Lord, Simon says, coming willingly.

  —And when he calls you again, says the dog, you are to answer to the name Peter.

  This has been edited out of the gospels as we have them, by some high-minded copyist who did not notice that an animal whose whole soul is composed of loyalty and whose faith in his master cannot be shaken by any force, neither by death nor by distance, is given a voice, like Balaam’s ass centuries before, to remind us that our perception of the otherworldly is blind.

  And then in a fanciful Acts of the Apostles there’s a talking lion who works as a pitch for Paul and Barnabas.

  —Hello folks! Though I am only a numble beast, and have no theology, I’m here to get your attention and invite you to rally around and listen to my dear friends C. Paulus, a Roman citizen, and Joseph Consolation Barnabas, who have a message for you.

  A blue-eyed lion, washed and fluffed for his public appearance, paws as big as plates.

  Was that the troll, there, peeping from behind a tree?

  —We met last autumn, Mr. Churchyard said in a voice he used for children, when the sky was packed with clouds like hills of dirty wool, and a mist smoked along the ground. You would not, you know, tell me your name, and so I named you Hitch, by your leave, taking silence for assent. How have you fared since then?

  There was a flicker of leaves, a deepening of the wood’s silence.

  —You are not afraid, are you, of my walking stick leaning here against the log? It is just a length of wood with a silver knob which gentlemen in Copenhagen carry about with them. It goes with my hat here, and my gloves. They make a set of things to indicate to the world that we have money and that we pretend to morals approved of by the police and the clergy. Come out into the open.

  In a shared fish, said Demokritos, there are no bones.

  —So let me tell you a story that may shed light on our predicament. There was once a highwayman in England who disguised himself with a great bag-wig, such as the noted Samuel Johnson was the last to wear in polite society. When a wayfarer came along the road he worked, so to speak, he emerged from behind a bush, giving the wayfarer the choice of giving up his money or his life. The frightened wayfarer quailed at his pistol, and probably at his wig, and turned over to him his horse and purse.

  The highwayman, riding away, threw the wig by the side of the road, where a pedestrian later found it, and put it on as windfall finery.

  Meanwhile, the wayfarer who had been robbed came to a town where the pedestrian with his newfound wig had also just arrived. The wayfarer, seeing him, called out for the bailiff and had him charged before the magistrate with highway robbery. He would, he testified, know that wig anywhere.

  The magistrate sentenced the pedestrian to be hanged.

  Now this was a small town, and the assizes dr
ew a large crowd, among whom was the highwayman.

  —Fool! he cried out to the magistrate. You are sending an innocent man to the gallows. Look, give me the wig, and I will put it on and say, Your money or your life, and this false accuser will see his mistake. Yes, yes! the accuser said. That is the voice I heard from under the great wig.

  The magistrate, however, ruled that the first identification was made under oath, before God, and that the sentence, pronounced through the majesty of the law, had been passed. And must stand.

  Surely there was a shifting of shadows over there, between the Norway pine and the larch, upward and sideways, where the troll must be.

  It would be charming if the troll looked like a Danish child, if it upended itself and stood on its head, pedalling its feet in the air and turning pink in the face. Or stand on its right leg with its left foot hooked around its neck, like the Gypsy acrobats on market day.

  —The law, you see, is unbending. We made the law after the manner of the god, so it has nothing human in it. Let me tell you about the god. When he brought his people out of bondage in Aegypt, he led them to Kanaan, but for forty years they wandered in the desert, where the god fed them with a white fluffy bread, manna it was called, of which they became tired. So they asked for something different, something savory. Like quails, quails roasted brown on a spit over a fire, basted in their own juice, salted and rubbed with sage. So the god, who was in a proper snit about their ingratitude and greed, with their placing the sensuality of taste before a just appreciation of his grandeur and might, said:

  —Ye shall eat until it comes out of your nose!

  And a hail of dead quail fell from the sky, and his people dressed and cooked them, and (here I quote Scripture) even as the meat was yet in their teeth, the god caused a deadly plague to kill them who had eaten of the quail.

  —What do you think of that? It was a prayer he was answering.

  The troll’s eyes were those of a happy child and therefore unreadable, for a child’s happiness is something we have all had to forget. It is a happiness that comes from wrenching the hands off the clock, of pitching Grandpa’s false teeth in the fire, of stealing, of lying, of pulling the cat’s tail, of shattering the china vase, of hiding from one’s parents to make them sick with worry, of hitting one’s best friend’s toes with the hammer. Of a child with beautiful hair, as if of spun and curled gold, and with big blue eyes, culture says behold an angel! and nature says here is your own personal devil.

  A bird in those branches, or the troll?

  —Listen! he said. You see me here in my great coat of German cut (in which I have heard Schelling lecture, for German auditoria are as cold as Greenland), gloves, stovepipe trews, cane, and handkerchief up my sleeve, but you cannot see from any of this, from my large nose or the face that my brother Peter is a bishop, that I live in a city of merchants who imagine themselves to be Christians. You might as well say that a banjo player from Louisiana is Mozart.

  You cannot guess from any of this that my father once shook his fist at the god on a hill in Jylland, and cursed him to his face.

  The troll, the troll! But no: a hare or fox whose home this wood is.

  Trolls belonged, Mr. Churchyard imagined, to the genera of toadstools, in the same way that trees were kin to angels. Mr. Churchyard’s century was looking into nature, and the Germans were scrutinizing Scripture. Why have the god, after all, when they have Hegel?

  Were not there passages in Scripture where the scribes wrote the opposite of what mercy and fear suggested that they suppress? Abraham most certainly sacrificed Isaac.

  His father had cursed the god and moved to Copenhagen and prospered as a merchant, money begetting money in his coffers. He died in the arms of angels bearing him to heaven.

  The corollary, is it not, is that if we pray we are answered with death while the meat of the quail is yet in our teeth. But the world is here, and to despair is sin. Even in their churches the tall light, the ungiving hard January light in the high windows bespeaks that worldliness of the world which no Hegelianism can pretend isn’t there, isn’t here.

  Mr. Churchyard lifted his specs onto his forehead, ran his little finger along an eyebrow, massaged his nose, closed his eyes, licked the corners of his mouth, and coughed softly.

  The irony of it.

  A horse was as alive as he, and a cow had exactly as much being. A midge.

  It would be some comfort if he could know that he was precisely as ugly as Socrates. He was, like all Danes, beautiful in his youth. Then his nose had grown and grown, and his back had warped, and his digestion gone to hell.

  Perhaps the troll was not the size he thought it was, and was wrapped in a leaf.

  Whatever we say of the god that he isn’t, he is.

  —Absconditus we say he is, seeing him everywhere. What’s with us, O Troll, that we have faith in the unseen, unheard, and untouched, while rejecting what’s before our eyes? In the mists of despair I see that we prefer what isn’t to what is. We place our enthusiasm in scriptures we don’t read, or read with fanciful misunderstanding, taking our unknowing for knowing. Our religion’s a gaudy superstition and unlicensed magic.

  Mr. Churchyard knew that the troll was behind one of the trees before him. He felt it as a certainty. He would have, when seen, a flat nose, round green eyes, a frog’s mouth, and large ears.

  —Listen! This Sunday past, in the palace church, the court chaplain, who is very popular and who in his bishop’s robes looks like a Byzantine emperor, preached a sermon to a select congregation of fat merchants, lawyers, bankers, and virgins. He preached with eloquence and resonating solemnity. His text was Christ chose the lowly and despised. Nobody laughed.

  The afternoon was getting on and the sky was graying over with clouds. Mr. Churchyard decided to make a bargain with himself, a leap of faith. He would believe the troll was there, and not bother whether it was or not. An event is real insofar as we have the desire to believe it. Bishop Mynster preached his eloquent sermon because Mr. Churchyard’s father had admired him, not because Mr. Churchyard was sitting between an outlaw dressed as a merchant banker and a lady whose bonnet was made in London. He heard Bishop Mynster for his father’s sake. He would converse with the troll for his own sake.

  And so, the troll. He was not prepared for it to be naked. Its Danish, when it spoke, was old.

  An urchin from up around Swan’s Mill. It put out an arm for balance, standing on one leg, swinging the other back and forth.

  —Be you a frog? it asked.

  —I am a human being.

  —Could have fooled me. What way comest ye, through or under?

  It was amused by the consternation on Mr. Churchyard’s face and crimped the corners of its mouth.

  —If through color, that be the one way, to butt through yellow into blue, through red to green. T’other way’s to back up a little, find a place to get through, and wiggle in. Through the curve, at the tide. Even’s one, odd the other.

  The troll came closer. Mr. Churchyard could see a spatter of freckles on its cheeks and nose. It cautiously touched his walking stick.

  —Ash, it said. I did not know the tree. Always on this side, one moon with another, bayn’t ye?

  —This side of what? Mr. Churchyard asked quietly.

  —Ye’ve never been inside the mullein, have ye? Never in the horehound, the milkweed, the spurge? What be you?

  —I am a Dane. What if I were to ask you what you are? You are to my eye a boy, with all the accessories, well fed and healthy. Are you not cold, wearing nothing?

  The troll raised a leg, holding its foot in its hand, so that its shin was parallel to the forest floor. It grinned, with or without irony Mr. Churchyard could not say. Its thin eyebrows went up under its hair.

  —Let me say, Mr. Churchyard said, that I am certain you are in my imagination, not there at all, though you smell of sage or borage, and that you are a creature for which our science cannot account. When we think, we bind. I have not yet caught y
ou. I don’t even know what or who you are. Now where does that get us?

  —But I am, the troll said.

  —I believe you. I want to believe you. But this is the nineteenth century. We know everything. There is no order of beings to which you could belong. Do you know the god?

  The troll thought, a finger to its cheek.

  —Be it a riddle? What have ye for me if I answer right?

  —How could it be a riddle if I ask you if you know the god? You do, or you don’t.

  —Be you looking hereabouts for him?

  —I am.

  —What be his smell? What trees be his kinfolk?

  —I’ve never seen him. No description of him exists.

  —How wouldst ye know did you find him?

  —I would know him. There would be a feeling.

  —Badger, squirrel, fox, weasel, hopfrog, deer, owl, grebe, goose, one of them? Or pine, oak, elderberry, willow, one of them? Elf, kobold, nisse, one of us? Spider, midge, ant, moth?

  The troll then arranged itself, as if it had clothes to tidy the fit of, as if it were a child in front of a class about to recite. It sang. Its voice had something of the bee in it, a recurring hum and buzz, like the Barockfagott in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and something of the ringdove’s hollow treble. The rhythm was a country dance’s, a jig. But what were the words?

  Mr. Churchyard made out the horse sick of the moon and the owl who had numbers. The refrain sounded Lappish. One fish, and another, and a basket of grass.

  When the song was over, Mr. Churchyard bent forward in an appreciative bow. Where had he heard the melody, at some concert of folk music? At the Roskilde market? And had he not seen the troll itself, astoundingly dirty, in patched clothes and blue cap, on the wharf at Nyhavn?

  And then there was no troll, only the forest floor and the damp green smell of the wood, and the ticking of his watch.

  That the god existed Socrates held to be true with an honest uncertainty and deep feeling. We, too, believe at the same risk, caught in the same contradiction of an uncertain certainty. But now the uncertainty is different, for it is absurd, and to believe with deep feeling in the absurd is faith. Socrates’s knowing that he did not know is high humor when compared to something as serious as the absurd, and Socrates’s deep feeling for the existential is cool Greek wit when compared to the will to believe.