The Death of Picasso

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The Death of Picasso Page 31

by Guy Davenport


  16

  I’m a little drunk with you, Hugo said to Mariana. We began with busting the mattress, which is fun, and now I hear your voice when you aren’t here, and smell you in my nostrils, your girl smell and your vanilla panties and that cucumber taste of your breath, milk and cucumber, and see your China-blue eyes when I’m working. Sounds awful, Mariana said. By drunk, Hugo said, I mean I lose my balance a little when, coming from class, I tell myself that I’ll see you soon, and kiss and fuck you, and hug you a nice long time afterwards, and then we’ll talk, and I’ll learn that you’ve never heard of Ibykos or Li Po or Braque. Greek poet, way back, quinces in one of his poems, and a black wind from. From. Thrace, he said. Thrace, she said. Chinese poet, green rivers, plum blossoms. Braque is a painter. Blobbed mandolins, skinny little clay pipes, anemones in a bowl. Just like Picasso but different. Read Greek, look at Braque, and then go teach Scouts how to tie knots, sheepshank clove hitch stoppers trumpet shoestring and square. Life is very simple, Hugo said, when you know what you’re doing. Yes, said Mariana, but I’ll bet you don’t.

  17

  At Elseus Sophus Bugge they swam naked, boys and girls together, showered together, and learned where babies come from. Good enough, Anders said. And, Kim went on, they learned that masturbere is good in moderation, and it was Kim who asked how many times a day is moderate, and why in moderation anyway? Girls had giggled and Kim’s friend Karl put his hands over his face and peeked through his fingers. And here, freckles, foxred hair, beaver teeth, and snatchy glances, was unge hr Karl in person, brought by Kim to be shown Ander’s dick. He comes a handful, Kim said, and it’s white and thick. Scrounge it out, Anders, so Karl can see how crazy big it is. Kim’s, Anders said, obliging, is going to be a whopper if he keeps it in condition with steady exercise and long workouts. Aldrig i livet! said Kim. Karl asked to feel. Sure, Anders said. Kim’s friend’s my friend, and friends can snug anyway they want, jo? Karl swallowed a frog, and said, he’d like to see Anders shoot off. No problem, Anders said. Back of the boathouse, under the willows, there Kim says he used to whack off before we imprinted on each other. Gee whillikers, said Karl. It jumps when he comes, Kim said, and bounces. At Grundtvig they walk around in the dorm in their underpants, some in nothing, and everybody whacks off whenever they want to.

  18

  Who’s Grey Eyes here in his birthday suit? Mariana asked of a canvas. That, said Hugo, is the Bicycle Rider. He never came again for me to finish the picture. He was a student here, bone lazy, a day student who lived out on Nordkalksten where, as you know, there are dens of louts mainly American and German, and where the Gospel has not been preached. Pretty nasty place, Mariana said. Creepy. I’ve seen him about I think. Tall, blond, very pretty face, clothes from the Salvation Army? He was in my Greek Myth class, Hugo said, and by the third day it began to get through to me that he was quite simply the handsomest boy I’d ever seen in my life. But with arrogantly messy hippy hair, and as you say, oil rags for clothes. A young prince in peasant disguise, I said to myself. And then he had very little to do with anybody, except some students who envied his revolutionary costume and easy cynicism. He was quick to point out to his admirers the particular stupidities of all the faculty, whom he pitied for their stodginess. He was alert in class, though, and could fake the most sincere interest in myths and Greek culture.

  19

  Reindeer across golden moss in a cloud of their own breath, Sibelius. The forest, Kim said lying face down on the bed, talking into the pillow. Snow down the steep sides of fjords. Wolves with silver eyes. A dust of frost in the air that gets up your nose and stings, and tickles the corners of your mouth. He reached under his hips to undo his jeans, buckle, brad, and zipper. Fucking the bed, he worried and wiggled his jeans down to his knees. Bach, he said, dances. Mozart dances. But Sibelius flies. He tried getting his jeans off with a squirm of toe work, hobbling his ankles. Keeping the cadence of his humping steady, he thumbed down his underpants and fidgeted them, wriggle by twitch, as far as the wadded jeans. My wizzle, he croodled, is up so loving touchy stiff that it’s got a crick in it. He freed a foot and pushed jeans and briefs off the end of the bed. Imp, Anders said. One deplorable imp. See how long you can keep it up. I hear Rutger down the hall. O wow, Kim said. Rutger. Does he josh you about me? Wait and see, Anders said. Sibelius, Rutger said, and for guds shyld, Ven Anders, take Nipper here up on whatever he’s pushing.

  20

  The white Mountain Daffodill with Ears rises up with three or four broad leaves, somewhat long, of a whitish green color, among which rises up a stalk a foot and a half high, whereon stands one large flower, and sometimes two, consisting of six white leaves apiece, not very broad, and without any show of yellowness in them, three whereof have usually each of them on the back part, at the bottom upon the one side of them, and not on both, a little small white piece of a leaf like an ear, the other three having none at all: the cup is almost as large, or not much less than the small Nompareille, small at the bottom, and very large, open at the brim, of a fir-yellow color, and sometimes the brims or edges of the cup will have a deeper yellow, as if it were discolored by saffron: the flower is very sweet, the root is great and white, covered with a pale coat or skin, not very black, and is not very apt to increase, seldom giving offsets: neither have I ever gathered seeds, because it passes without bearing any with me.

  21

  Anders husking down his briefs, fighting out of his jersey, stripping loose his shoelaces, said that the black stripe on the neck and feet of archaic horses and asses is called in Greek the mykla. From the plains of Poland, Kim said, grasslands from this horizon to the other, the last herds of wild horses in Europe, rounded up like a hundred years ago, jo? Lovely big horses, iron grey, nickering and whinnying, up to their knees in Russian pink and Ukrainian blue meadow flowers, frolicking foals and dignified mares. Hej! So last night, reading in my sockfeet across from Papa in his fog of burnt applejuice pipesmoke and telling me bits from the paper, what assholes politicians are, my dick began to burrow in my jeans like a perky little mouse. So I nudged it along, by way of petting it, until it was hard as a rib, and throbbing. Den er mægtig! We sluddered three jumping slurps out of it over the afternoon, with that crazy bird saying Well I never! I think so! in the tree above us, and here he was randy again. And Papa looked funny over the top of his glasses and then up to heaven, and then paid me a wink. O boy. Lille djævel, Anders said. You’re going to have little nubbly horns growing. One here and one here.

  22

  Six or so, I suppose it was, Hugo said, when an agemate and I, Ole Vinsson, all freckles and towhead, made a scientific study of sexual differentiation, with his sister, who was ten and had a mind both forthright and level. We simply took off our togs and satisfied our curiosity. It was his sister Julie’s opinion that whereas God gave babies, people had to love each other to show that they wanted them, and that parents fucked all night long, all day long too, right after they’re married, with ineffable pleasure, until God was convinced, and supplied the baby. We found out about her kildrer, and she gave us a demonstration of tickling it. She had friends who could tickle themselves into hysterics, passing out with the pleasure of it. Real boys, she gave us to understand, had stiff peters all the time, like the satyrs of old. Surely, Mariana said, you were older, eight or nine? By then, said Hugo, Ole and I had learned from a rangy teenager the fly of whose jeans always seemed to be cordially distended that jacking off makes one’s peter grow. Doesn’t it? Mariana said. Don’t tell Franklin if it doesn’t.

  23

  Squeamish, me? Rutger hooted, towelling down. Meg’ll not blink a lash, and like all women is nosey about you and your gamy sweetmeat nipper. Give her a hot crotch maybe even. Anders, well balanced in the articulately inflected fit of his jeans and smug about the sidesway wrench of his fly that gapped the top teeth of his zipper and canted out its tab, was in a whickering good humor, hard balls, he said. Cock growing a bone inside. But, said Rutger, you milked that rowdy l
ast night, and grunted a lot doing it. Twice, said Anders, and got pulled off twice in the dingle, by untuckering boypower, a tongue in overdrive, and an everloving will. Does he pant, Rutger said, when he sees your dick rearing up, like Meg? Says her heart lurches. What if I’m turned on by your pukey kid and his pink little sprig of a weewee? Every man his specialty, as you say. Whereupon Kim stomped in, hair tousled, and got hugged by Anders and, wickedly, by Rutger. I think I’m scared, Kim said, judging by one cold shiver or another I keep getting. Makes it spicier, said Rutger. Meg’s setting out about now. We meet her at the bend and head for the boathouse. Then we all fuck and whatever it is you do until we pass out with coming. And then go at it again, gasping and weak, squish squish. Crazy, said Kim.

  24

  Through the hornbeam and beech forests of Transylvania and the Djerdap Gorge, the Danube over seething rapids, white shoals, falls, foaming sluices, comes to the whirlpool of Lepenski Vir. Here, on a ledge above it, lived an epipaleolithic people whose vestiges Dragoslav Srejovič found in 1960. Their community sat on a horseshoe shelf above the great spiral of water, with the steep cliffs of the Koršo Mountains at its back. Among apron-shaped houses laid out like steps stood monumental Erewhonian statues whose faces groan with the agony of birth, or with awe before some wonder or terror. The endemic plants were lilac smokewood manna ash slow buckthorn Dalmatian toadflax cypress spurge oxeye camomile. Bone bracelets needles awls. The dead were buried as if giving birth, the skull of a stag over the shoulders. A frieze of geese on a pot, deer in a thicket. Ovens altars hearths were decorated with wave patterns. Elk and salmon, and the navel of the river below. Owl in the hornbeam was father’s sister’s daughter, redcombed quail mother’s brother’s son, celt hook lilac, lilac circle spinning water. Night rain, noon rain. Salmon river, bear wood.

  25

  He was a pleasant interest, Hugo said. I like people. He was moreover poor, taking courses at NFS Grundtvig as a day student on tuition from a government grant, parents divorced, making him eligible for a stipend for the disadvantaged. He had the one pair of ratty jeans, a few secondhand shirts, and perhaps not enough to eat. So the first time I invited him over, ostensibly for a drawing, I laid in sausages, beer, cold ham, a potato salad, a melon. He was charming. It was his second time over that I learned he slept in a large box in a hallway. This he rented from a hack freelance artist, gay, unfortunate personality. By the third visit I’d decided to move him in with me. There’s room. So I said, Bring your traps. He said that the idea of sharing quarters with me was like a dream. He would have all these books to read. Engines in the switching yard would not wake him before dawn. No hideous fights among toughs in the street outside one’s window. No cockroaches. He was to move in on the Wednesday. I waited in a nice excitement. I like new things, new turns. I knew it would be difficult having him here. What did I know about him, really? Pretty much nothing, except that he needed taking in. I waited and waited. He never came.

  26

  Six Ryvitas, Mariana gasped. And came like a brass band passing the royal box on Liberation Day. Franklin at his lookout was chinning on a limb, up and down like a puppet on elastic strings. Det hele? he called. Forbi. The river’s not the ocean, Hugo had said. Drop in, holding your nose, bob up, and I’ve got you. Hang on around my neck and I’ll swim you out to the sandbar. Your own island. Here he danced out some intricate fantasy, crouching, springing, kicking water, falling down shot, rebounding to repulse ten insectoid invaders from another galaxy with laser spurts. Zonk, zink, zonk. Ferried back twice now to stand guard while they fucked, jeans rolled to pillow Mariana’s bottom. At Skordbærbjerg, experimental school for brats and trendies, Mariana said, run you know by worldsavers and psychologists, there was this little nipper of a girl, all of ten, going up and down the hall holding her twat, naked as a newt, and in her free hand two Ryvitas and a krone, which she was offering to whoever for a fuck. Fun was, the look on a face of some government functionary inspecting the school that day, who had already seen two teenagers doing it in the library and half the kids naked in the pool, and had been propositioned by a boy with a twinge of pubic hair if you looked close.

  27

  Bunce, Hugo said. Five kilometers, ten lengths of the pool, and I find a girl looking hopeful on my doorstep and her little brother, The Rabbit Who Invented Electricity, looking bored. He wants to go to the beach, Mariana said. Does his big sister? Hugo proposed the river instead. Is it textile? Oh no, they’re boys there from school naked as they came into the world, and as innocent, and as loud. Lay out croissants and jam while I shower, Hugo said, and explain why I’m happily lecherous so early on a Saturday. Crazy, I guess, Mariana said. It is standing sort of straight out, isn’t it? And slipping its big pink head out of its hood. A cold shower? Mariana suggested. Pure thoughts? Shower with you, Franklin said, untying his shoes. Two cold showers, Mariana said, and shall I make coffee, and why do I have a monkey for a brother? Is that him there, under the suds? Grit your teeth, Hugo said, cold rinse, needle spray. They both howled, falsetto and baritone. Nobody, Franklin said, has dried me in ages. Lean over and I’ll dry you next. Not only did your dick not wilt in the shower, Mariana said, but now the little shaver has his up, too. Lovely, said Hugo. Let’s bounce the bedsprings, eat, and go to the river. I’ll eat all the breakfast, Franklin said, and hide my eyes and think pure thoughts if my pizzle will let me.

  28

  I’ll understand it, Mariana said. You too, but not him. Yes, said Hugo, but you have given me the bow of Hercules. Didn’t need to give you his balls, Mariana said.

  29

  So Muggins came over here the first time to be sketched, Mariana said, and radiated charm from wall to wall? He was two hours late, Hugo said. I didn’t recognize the sign at the time. He explained, when I asked him to, that he met somebody on the way he wanted to talk to. I’m listening, Mariana said. I’d made supper, which he picked at. He posed well enough, and I got two good drawings. We talked about all sorts of things over beer afterwards. He recited a poem, rather awful, but with expression.

  30

  In moments of sweet clarity, Hugo said, I doubt if we can communicate at all. You mean one thing, I hear another, benignly in banter, violently in an argument. But, said Mariana, we’ve never had an argument. Of course not, Hugo said, and don’t intend to. I mean that human beings probably can’t make each other understand what they mean. We have to get our meaning from art, from writing. That’s awful, Mariana said.

  31

  Rutger barefoot on his shoulders, Anders stood, all the way to tiptoe. A fingerhold on the sill and Rutger monkeyed up the wall. A heave, and he was in Meg’s room. He blew a kiss to Anders in the dark. Hours later he shinnied through his own window at NFS Grundtvig, feet wet with dew, in briefs only, hair tangled. Anders, Kim asleep in his arms cheek to cheek, woke and whispered hi! Rutger wrapped himself in a blanket and sat beside the bed. Came three juicy everlastingly sweet ballcramping times, on a pallet, as the bed sounds like a tin wheelbarrow loaded with kettles over cobbles, Meg’s roommate obligingly away. Then, just as they were in the heaves and wild thumping of the third fuck, there was some species of Gorgon stalking the hall and opening doors. He’d just had time to pull on briefs and drop from the window. Passed a rabbit, he said, but I turned an ankle somewhere along the way and hopped the last fifteen or so meters. My feet are ruined forever. Isn’t it time for Nipper there to be decanted from your bed and sent home? You look wonderful, Anders said, with your hair all a charming mess.

  32

  Meadows, Anders said. If I could write a poem it would be about a meadow. A symphony, Kim said. Only music could get the feel of a meadow, I think. Monet, Rutger said, painted lots of meadows, and Pissarro. Lots of painters. Russians, Norwegians, they’re good at meadows. So what do I say? Kim asked, who had to write an essay on meadows. Sunday afternoon, Meg visiting her parents, they were walking in the long meadow that flowed speckled with wildflowers and butterflies down from the knoll back of the woo
d to the river. Us and those cows yonder, Anders said, we have the world to ourselves. I love quiet. Be inventive: say the long quiet of a meadow, the green minty grassy smell. They sat. Kim took off his shoes and socks. Kim’s brown as a nut all over, Anders said, the brownest he’s ever been. Anders pulled off Kim’s jersey, standing over him and hauling it up inside out over rolling bony shoulders. Bare feet in clover and daisies, he said, I’ll put that in. Wild strawberries, chickweed, darnel, cowflop. He stood by caprice and doffed his britches. Baby in his nappies, Rutger said. A sight, said Anders. Baby out of his nappies, Kim said, tossing his briefs in the air. See, Anders said, nutbrown all over. You’re going to have a cock, Rutger said. Why do we wear clothes, Kim asked, when it feels so good to have air all over you? To keep people from going crazy looking at you, Anders said.

  33

  I like my sandbar, Franklin said, like my river. Also Hugo’s house all one room and a big window in the roof. Sand on your dick and balls, Mariana said, brushing. And, said Franklin, you and Hugo have come three times and I’ve only come once. Hejsa! that feels yummy. This isn’t icky? Hope not, Hugo answered for her. But, said Franklin, his eyes squeezing closed, acute pleasure making his fingers spread and his mouth a muzzle, when she lollies your dick you’re kissing her between the legs, and then you fuck. Oh ho, Hugo said, sweet and slow. Hunch in, and you’ll get a flutter of tongue-tip on the backdrag. Warm and wet, Franklin said, and good. Me next, Hugo said. Mariana shooed him away, smoothing hands up Franklin’s thighs to his collarbones. Faunulus on the mossbank, Pastorella on her knees. The blithering phone. Hallo, jo. Not really: an afternoon with friends. Love to, but can’t. Later, then, or another time. Bore’s delight, the telephone. Going to come, Franklin said. Coming! he sang. Figmilk, said Mariana, a nice skeet and a fribble. What a blush! Hugo hefted him out of the chair and crushed him in a hug. Bet you, he said, you can’t come again, two handrunning, and then we’ll all be even, and start over.

 

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