The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  —Bob bobs, read Mariana, recognizable by the gourdlike shape of their bole, with a circumference of seven to ten metres and surmounted by an enormous mass of hanging branches. There were silk cotton trees with their trunks opening into a series of hollows big enough for a man to hide in. Mahogany trees with trunks a metre and a half in diameter from which might have been excavated dugout canoes from five to seven metres long.

  —Ho, Hugo said, Zuntz on the centurion with Jules Verne from across the room has filled me with lovingkindness, expecially as Monsieur Verne’s expositor has had her hand in her knickers from the beginning of the chapter.

  —Can I help it if I’m a sweet person? she said.

  —When, Franklin said twirling the soccer ball on his chin, I get to my peter, it jumps. See? Chin to peter, peter to chin.

  —Phenomenal! Hugo said. I’ll bet if you went to the baker’s, by way of the kiosk for an evening paper, you might find a half dozen strawberry-jam cakes with custard topping that we can have with coffee, which I’ll make, as Mariana is not going to be able to walk or see straight after our expression, or expressions, of mutual esteem.

  BLUE SUMMER SKY

  Hugo under his oak at the meadow’s edge saw the oval shadow of the hot-air balloon sliding toward him before he looked up and saw the balloon itself, a gaudy upside-down pear shape the oiled silk of which was zoned in bands: the equatorial one was a rusty persimmon, a Mongol color, and around it were the figures of the zodiac copied from the mosaic floor of Bet Alpha Synagogue in Byzantine Israel, archaic but supple of line. The band above was bells and pomegranates in orange and blue, the one below was egg-and-dart Hellenistic. The basket was of wicker and belonged to the protomachine age, for a propeller that seemed to be made of four cricket bats was turned by a fanbelt connected to a brass cylinder leaking steam vapor. There was a wooden rudder, and levers at the taffrail. Three ten-year-old boys were the crew, as happy as grigs at their work bringing the balloon down right in front of Hugo, who stood and gaped, at a loss to account for anything he was seeing. The boys were dressed in nautical Scandinavian togs, with long scarves around their necks, as if the air from which they’d descended was very cold. One boy manipulated a lever that seemed to bring the balloon down, another braked the propeller, which stopped spinning and rolled to a lazy halt. Puffs of vapor smoked from the cylinder. The boys’ bright grins were for the joy of surprising Hugo, for the joy of being aeronauts in a balloon on a fine summer and for the joy of being messengers, which they said they were, talking all at once.

  —Who in the name of God are you? Hugo asked. Where have you come from, hey?

  —My name is Tumble, and my friends are Quark and Buckeye. Where we’ve come from we’re not to say, and we’re messengers.

  —Bringing a message, Quark said helpfully.

  —The coordinates are right, Buckeye said consulting a length of paper scrolled between two rollers. Oak tree, meadow, Sjaelland, Denmark. Hugo Tvemunding by the world for name. Shapes alphabet into words about the Company. Yeryuzu kendi kendine bir toprak.

  —Buckeye! Tumble said sweetly, you’ve slipped off band. That’s Turkish.

  —Sorry! said Buckeye. I was about to blush anyway, this part of the printout about shepherd to the young, a good son, and superb lover in both flesh and spirit, tam avidus quam taurus in a different hand in the margin, the dispatcher I suppose. Nesuprantamas disonansas tarp, oops! Sor-ree. Anyway, you’re the right soul.

  —Yes, said Tumble, and here’s the message. Road auspicious. Though young, act like a man. Be steadfast, patient, and silent.

  —About what? Hugo asked. And Why?

  —That, smiled Quark, we are not free to say.

  BOUNDARY

  There is only one sense: touch. The sun, by way of caroming off a mellow brick wall with lonely afternoon light on it, firm plump pair of breasts with delectable nipples, a page of Homer, touches the eyes. Eating is touch carried to the utmost. Vibrant air touches the ear. Smell is so many particles from aromatic things. The world is a mush of matter rather than the separateness we ascribe to things. Franklin in his Wolf Cub cricket cap, blue shirt with yellow kerchief, little blue pants, tall ribbed socks, and red sneakers listened to Hugo in Eagle Scout khakis with solemn attention. Boys named Abel and Bruno had got out of him, moments before the powwow, that he has no father, that his sister Mariana is the bedmate of Scoutmaster Tvemunding, that he has only been camping with Hugo and Mariana, that he is poor, that Hugo makes love to Mariana lots and lots, and that his uniform is so new it has little squares of paper in all the pockets with an inspector’s number, to accompany complaint of manufacturing defect. As to other questions, Franklin had offered to bloody Bruno’s nose for him. Knots, naming of tent parts and tools, cards with animal tracks, cards with flowers and weeds, and here was Scoutmaster Tvemunding, who taught Latin, Greek, and gym at NFS Grundtvig and Sunday School at Treenigheden, talking about everything being touch.

  —Eugenius, he said, front and forward. Face each other, tall and straight, shoulders back. Theodor, cup your hands. Eugenius is going to give you something, out of his wild imagination, and you are going to feel it, in your wild imagination, and describe it, how it feels.

  —A frog! Eugenius said.

  —Well, said Theodor, I had a frog in my hands just the other day, and a snake, and a hedgehog, so I’m not up a creek. A frog looks damp but is dry, looks flabby but is hard. It twitches, trying to jump away, but can be still, probably because it’s scared. I’d be scared. It’s cool. Its throat pulses.

  ZUM ZIELE FUHRT DICH DIESE BAHN

  —Theodor, Hugo said, didn’t know the dative of accommodation from a rat’s ass, and has been stricken with amnesia in the matter of ablative absolutes, Frits and Asgar bloodied themselves in a fight back of the gym, nasty little beasts, and the grounds trolls ran a power mower outside the windows for half of Greek, and around three Ulrich gave me a frantic signal to come quick. Golo and Abel were, for reasons best known to themselves, having a little conviviality outside study hall, playing push and pull with each other’s pizzles while gazing into each other’s big soulful eyes. Fine by me, though they have rooms and showers and woods and meadows in which to welcome puberty cross-eyed and breathless, but why waste the ten minutes before study hall, and then Aakjaer Minor, who grabs people and goes cataleptic, happens along and pins them both. Ulrich was the first to notice this predicament, and knowing that McTaggart had study hall and would be stomping along crabwise at any moment, and would bore everybody for days with the psychology of it all, had the diplomatic genius to push all three into the broom closet and sprint for the gym. We nipped back. McTaggart was bleating about combining study with transcendental meditation, so we could craftily open the broom closet and walk the interlocked three down the hall, one walking backward and zipping himself up, the other sideways, and both carrying the clinging Aakjaer with my and Ulrich’s help, God laughing at us all fit to kill. We disentangled the mass in my office. Abel, who had not managed to get his britches up with his arms pinned to his sides, stood there in pretty outrage. What in hell does it mean? he begged of me.

  Mariana, listening with wide eyes, had deshoed and unsocked Hugo as he talked in the chair where he had flopped and sagged, tugged his trousers off, and was unbuttoning his shirt when a banging on the door announced Franklin in full Cub Scout fig.

  —O Lord, Hugo sighed, I was forgetting that tonight’s the little bastards in yellow and blue, with beanies.

  —Hi, said Franklin. Things look real interesting.

  —Hugo, Mariana said, has had a trying day, and has taken a whole ten minutes to get over it.

  ZWECK

  In pipestem trews snug of cleft, flat Dutch cap, thickwove jersey, Norfolk jacket, hobnailed brogues, and Finnish scarf with an archaic pattern of reindeer and runes worked into its weave, Tumble climbed from the basket of the steam balloon, bounced from his jump, and cued Quark and Buckeye, poised with flute and glockenspiel, to give him a tune. Master Erastus
, he sang, stomping with seesawing shoulders and chiming smile, Equuleus quagga! Likes, said Quark in recitative over the catch, clover bluegrass dill, spring onions oats and hay. Kin to, said Buckeye, lowering his flute, Eohippus Five Toes, silver wolves, red deer on Rum, dandelions, and Ertha when she’s broody. Maybe, said Quark, depressing the declinator, which seeped vapor, but the mykla puts them in with asses burros zebras and horses of the good old Hwang Ho Valley, don’t it? Yuss, said Tumble, but Buckeye means chord. Spartan spadgers, springbokker, leapers and runners. So hold fast, wait long, and don’t speak. No, not to anybody.

  ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

  Even though we can never see the head that sang, with its deer’s eyes staring at infinity, we have the strong torso from whose animal grace we can imagine the hot summer clarity of its gaze. If the gone head is still not there, in light, why then does the proud chest disturb your looking, or the sweet shift of the hips, slight as a smile, that takes our eyes down the cunning body, to its cluster of seeds? Otherwise this stone would stand senseless under the polished slope of its shoulders, without its wild balance, and would not be as rich with light as the sky with stars. The world sees you, too. You must change your life.

  AN EVENT ALSO HAPPENS WHERE IT IS KNOWN

  Out past the warehouses and quays on Nordkalksten is a seawall of gray stone. A catwalk at its base, a bicycle path along the top, with iron rail. Harbor, river, barges. Here one could see old men fishing, sailors sleeping off a terrible drunk, and sunbathers spread against the slant of the wall. Boys in dingy bargain-basement briefs, boys impudently naked.

  UNDER

  We distinguish this seventh stratum by stringers of the stone that readily melts in fire of the second order. Beneath this is another ashy rock, light in weight and five foot thick. Next comes a lighter stratum the colors of ash and a foot thick. Beneath this lies the eleventh stratum, dark and like the seventh, two foot through. Below the last is a twelfth stratum, soft and of a whitish color, two foot thick. The weight of this sits on the thirteenth stratum, ashy and a foot thick, whose weight in turn is supported by a fourteenth stratum of black color. There follows this another black stratum half a foot thick, which is again followed by a sixteenth stratum still blacker in color, whose thickness is also the same. Beneath this, and last of all, lies the cupriferous stratum, black colored and schistose, in which there sometimes glitter scales of gold-colored pyrites in very thin sheets, which, as I have said elsewhere, often take the forms of various living things.

  HOLLYHOCKS ALONG A GARDEN WALL

  —I’m wonderfully delighted, Pastor Tvemunding said to Mariana, that you and Hugo are friends. He has always been a friendly boy. He used to toddle off behind the postman, and grieve that he could not stay longer than to hand over the mail and exchange comments on the weather. He made friends with the girl who delivered butter and eggs. He fell in love with all his schoolmates.

  —He’s a loving person, Mariana said, that’s for sure.

  —His loving nature causes him grief from time to time. You know about the student he calls the Bicycle Rider?

  —Who’s dead, Mariana said. I know what you mean. He hurt Hugo.

  —Because, Pastor Tvemunding said, Hugo had never really before encountered evil face to face. He doesn’t want to admit that evil cannot be dealt with. He cannot believe that there are wholly selfish people drowned in themselves, beyond the reach of love or understanding. That there are people who, impotent to create, destroy. That there are people whose self-loathing is so deep they know nothing of generosity and invariably do the mean thing even when they might as easily do the generous one. The young man was on drugs, and had been for years, but I’m not one to blame drugs for human evil: the evil is there before the drugs, which are part of the meanness and not its cause.

  —You couldn’t be righter, Mariana said.

  —All this theological work, which will not take him into the ministry, began with a remark I made years ago, that God will remain inscrutable and uncertain forever, but that Jesus (Hugo’s Yeshua, for the Aramaic name is of the essence for him) had an intuitive idea of God that put goodness in our hands. He is light, of which we are free to partake, or be in darkness. We can be transparent to our fellow man, or opaque.

  BUCKEYE

  Possum ate a lightning bug and now he shines inside.

  RED AND YELLOW ZINNIAS

  —I want to be up-to-date, Pastor Tvemunding said at tea, reaching over to wipe whipped cream from the corners of Franklin’s mouth with his napkin. There’s Hugo’s room, and the guest room that’s so jolly with the apple tree at the window.

  —Mariana and I, Hugo said, will sleep together, and I’ll rig out my old scout cot for Franklin.

  —But, said the pastor, there’s the guest room he can have all to himself.

  —Oh, no, Hugo said, travellers stay together.

  MEADOW WITH GOLDFLOWERS AND POPPIES

  Buckeye in a Portuguese sailor’s shirt, abrupt white denim pants, beret, and espadrilles climbed backward down the rope ladder of the balloon, singing onward under over through!

  Quark tossed the anchor onto the meadow. The balloon tilted its drift, exhaled vapor from its cylinders, bounced and swayed as Tumble pumped the declinators. Quark swung himself over the wicker taffrail with a deft scissors kick and landed springing.

  Tumble closed valves, cinched a line, made an entry in the log and vaulted out, rolling forward in a somersault.

  —Hejsa! said Buckeye.

  —Hi! said Quark.

  —Hup! said Tumble.

  For adoration beyond match

  sang Tumble pulling his sailor’s middy over his blond rick of wind scrumpled hair,

  The scholar bulfinch aims to catch.

  The soft flute’s ivory touch

  sang Quark sopranino, his gray American sweatshirt halfway over his head.

  And, careless on the hazel spray,

  Buckeye sang as he snatched off his Portuguese sailor’s blouse,

  The daring redbreast keeps at bay

  The damsel’s greedy clutch.

  Shoeless, socksless, Tumble backed out of his sailor’s pants singing

  While Israel sits beneath his fig.

  With coral root and amber spring

  Quark sang with trills and a cadenza as he wriggled off his Sears Roebuck blue jeans.

  The weaned adventurer sports

  Buckeye sang tossing his short white pants into the gondola of the balloon.

  Tumble, pretending to blush, thumbed down his drawers, Quark and Buckeye their pindling briefs, and the three in the pink-brown slender ribby nakedness sang in chiming Mozartian harmony

  Where to the palm the jasmin cleaves

  For adoration mongst the leaves

  The gale his peace reports.

  —Now labor, they sang making a triangle of arms on one another’s shoulders, his reward receives.

  For adoration counts his sheaves,

  To peace, her bounteous prince.

  The nectarine his strong tint imbibes,

  And apples of ten thousand tribes,

  And quick peculiar quince.

  TROLLFLÖJTEN

  Ring-tailed kinkajous trotting on the logging road, bouncing and siffling, squeaking and hopping, in pairs and trios, alone and in quartets. Yellow parrots above them, monkeys and kingfishers. Franklin’s world, Mariana said. Years ago he was a rat in the Pied Piper festival, he and scads of littles in brown and gray rat suits with rope tails, creeping along behind the Piper playing Mozart. I remember a rat who lost his way and had to be carried by a woman and restored to the pack. Wasn’t me, Franklin said. I crept good.

  GOLDEN SAMPHIRE

  Buckeye in the meadow, where the balloon was tethered. Tumble and Quark were leapfrogging by the river. He held out his hand for a meadowlark to fly to him and stand on his palm. She spoke to him. He answered in quail. Silly! she said. Do I look like a quail hen? He spoke goat. She laughed. Frog. Giggle.

  AURIGA. BETELGEUSE. B
ARNARD’S STAR.

  In spite of their intangibility, neutrinos enjoy a status unmatched by any other known particle, for they are actually the most common objects in the universe, outnumbering electrons by a thousand million to one. In fact, the universe is really a sea of neutrinos, punctuated only rarely by impurities such as atoms. It is even possible that neutrinos collectively outweigh the stars, and therefore dominate the gravity of the cosmos.

  RIGHT THE SECOND TIME

  —Tom’ll be here in a bit, Hugo said to Mariana nose to nose.

  —I think I can walk, Mariana said, though my brains are all gone. Melted into a jelly. Who’s at the door?

  Franklin.

  —O wow! he said looking squiggle-eyed and pretending to barf.

  —Who, said Mariana, pulled his piddler until his eyes rolled back in his head the whole week we were at Papa Tvemunding’s, while we had to make do with teenage smooching?

  —You said Augustus would spoil me, Franklin said solemnly. I like Augustus.

  —I imagine so, Hugo said. Nasty little spy. Papa with a dry cough to introduce the subject, which amused him tremendously, said that you confided in him that we were not making love, but only kissing a lot and whispering before we went to sleep. You thought Papa wouldn’t want us to, not knowing that he says that people are close to God when they make love. And being Franklin, you got Papa to say a good word for rabbity-nosed boys jacking off, in moderation, of course.

  —It’s nature, Franklin said. And fun. Once in the morning, and once in the afternoon. Augustus said I was to. And at night you said I was to.

  —I suppose, Mariana said to the skylight, if a third party had assured Franklin of the naturalness of the kinship between monkeys and boys, he would have had no time to eat, sleep, or those long talks with Papa Tvemunding.

  —Who spoiled him rotten, Hugo said.

  —I promised to write him a letter, Franklin said.

  —Tom’s here, Mariana said.

  Hugo, who had pulled on long sweat pants and a singlet and was howling for coffee, set the painting of the Bicycle Rider on the easel. He had whited out the lazily handsome blond face and dead blue eyes. The right arm, on the fist of which the head had leaned, was also overpainted.