The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  —Swimming it is, or the various somethings, Holger said. Off with the two of two.

  —Will you be all right? Pascal said.

  —No, never. I’ll fall out of my chair and get gangrene and die of thirst and loneliness. And take Jos with you.

  —I’d thought, Jos said, I’d have a little nap here beside your chair, in case you need something, until four.

  67

  I crossed the Neva, muddy and in spate, at Vincum, an old town with fine new Roman walls. It was here that the legions trounced a revolt of the Gauls as thoroughly as Hannibal crushed the legions at Cannae years before. The peaceful fields I walked across, sweet with hay and with nothing more than the lowing of cattle and the whistling of larks to ruffle the quiet, were once strewn with black corpses of the Treveri, flocks of carrion birds cawing and pecking.

  A deep forest to get through beyond the fields, pathless, dark and thick. Here in the northern reaches of the empire these wildernesses maintain, forests without roads, unmapped marshes, wooded valleys with no human beings for miles and miles. The town of Dumnissus, I knew, lay over to my left, and the springs at Tabernae: lands recently settled by Sarmatians, barbarians brought into the empire to learn farming and to pay taxes.

  On the other side of the forest I could see the Belgian town Noviomagus, Constantine’s headquarters when he brought the Franks and Alamanni into the peace of Rome. The sunlight after the dark of the forest was wonderful under a blue and open sky, making me for a moment feel that I was in my own country, and half expected to find the vineyards of Bordeaux, steep radiant skies, broad blue rivers, the red roofs of country villas. For the Moselle of the Belgii is the Garonne here in the north, and Roman civilization has made it even more like. Here are Roman vineyards on slopes, green pastures cleared along the river, which is deep enough for ocean vessels, and the tide comes far upstream. This is a watery part of the world, rich in creeks, lakes, springs. No cliffs, no river islands, no shoals. Boats can move freely by current, by oars, by rope and towpath, and the river is fast, unlike the unhurrying, the majestic Garonne with its slow bends and long promontories that impede its progress to the sea. Nor does the Moselle silt up its banks or have swamps of reeds along it. Here you can walk on dry ground to the river’s edge. There are even beaches of hard sand, like marble floors, taking no footprint.

  A DIAL HAND, NO PACE PERCEIVED

  The tent by lantern light, side flaps down and secure, had the temporized homeliness of nomadic space. The silence of deep dark for Bach, Spartan disregard of the ground’s hardness for comfort, accuracy of memory. No depths, Hugo had said, there are only distances. Jos’s clinically white jockstrap, that bulked his genitals into a double fist, thumbs out, was the more erotic for being without any decorative line. It remembered archaic basketry, the harmony of its coarse meshwork finely woven, form without style. A little other.

  Holger listened to the night, hearing a badger, perhaps, perhaps a stoat. The lake lay as still as mercury.

  69

  And the river is transparent right to the bottom, where one can see with perfect clarity ribbed and furrowed sand, blue-green watergrasses combed flat by the current but undulant, stitched by zigzagging fish, or clean stretches of pebbles, or whitest gravel with patches of moss. And toward the estuary, seaweed and pink coral, and mussels with pearls, as if nature, which wastes with a prodigal hand, and which owns with indifference all that mankind lusts for, had strewn jewels and the baubles of the rich along the river bottom.

  Chub swarm here, a toothsome bony fish, best when cooked within six hours of catching; trout speckled purple and silver; roach, whose bones are not the needles of most fish; grayling, shy and hard to catch. And barbel, who comes down the Saar, a river that rushes through gorges, and is happy, once it has swum past the three-arched Consular Bridge, to be in the calm Moselle. The barbel alone of living things improves in taste with age.

  And salmon, with its rose flesh, whose robust tail even at middepth ripples the surface. Who, at a meal of many dishes, has not asked to have the salmon first? Fat, savory, silver-scaled salmon!

  And the eel pout is here, too, brought from the Danube to stock another noble river, a welcome immigrant, and one that has thrived. Nature, the master designer, has speckled its back with spots, like the first raindrops of a storm on stone, and each spot she has ringed with a saffron circle. The lower back she has made skyblue. And perch, the only river fish that can vie in taste with those of the sea, delicious as red mullet, and like it filleting easily into halves. And pike, whose local name has given way to the Latin lucius, eater of frogs, who keeps to creek mouths and pools, fancier of marshgrass and mud, never seen on the gentry’s tables but a frequent fellow in taverns and peasant kitchens, fried golden brown in deep fat. And with him other hardy fish of the people: green tench, and the bleak, favorite of boys at their campfires, and shad, delicacy of the humble hearth, the poor man’s salmon or trout. And gudgeon.

  And catfish, that genial monster, defying classification. Is it the smallest of the whales and dolphins? Is it the last of a primeval order of nature, living on beyond its epoch?

  FRIEDRICHSTRASSE 1927

  Gunther in a secondhand belted jacket the color of oatmeal, a blue pinstriped blouse a size too large, scruffy shoes, wide-brimmed straw hat, short pants. Hair feathery and full at his nape. All of an afternoon Holger had read Der Puppenjunge. Hugo had brought it to him, saying that it was a book he ought to know. Narrative is the music of prose, and prose the mute inner thought of poetry. Holger found such statements annoying, neither fact nor theory. They were valuable, however, because Hugo said them. The meaning, Hugo had said, is in the narrative.

  71

  Look up. Every slope is a vineyard, as if we were in the Campania, Rhodope, or Bordeaux, where our vines are mirrored green in the yellow and silver Garonne.

  From the highest ridge down to the Moselle, grapes. The tenders of them shout jovial obscenities to the barges and travelers on the river road. Voices carry over water, and the hills make a natural theater for coarse laughter and rival wit. This scaena, a poet might say, includes men half goat and blue-eyed watergirls locking eyes in brambles on the bank, swimming saucily away. Panope, the lady of the river, steals with her daughters, as stealthily as mist at dawn, to nibble grapes, and rude fauns with the gourdish testicles of rams and a bullwhorl of hair between their nubby horns, chase them back into the river. Peasants have seen them dancing all of a summer night, and more, which I will not repeat. Secreta tegatur et commissa suis lateat reverentia rivis.

  More fit for human gaze is the grove on the hill reflected upside-down in the blue river. The illusion is of trees and vines flourishing deep in the water, swaying with a liquid motion. Barges floating through treetops!

  Oars dipping into grapevines!

  Sinuous silver slices limb from limb, instantly rejoining them in a rippling dance.

  —We should be reading this down at the river, Asgar said.

  —Naked, Halfdan added.

  And across this inverted landscape comes a battle of boys in skiffs, oars dipping deep, their boats circling each other, the one driving the other into the bank. Workers in the vineyards stop to watch, and cheer their naked sons and brothers on, boys browned by the summer sun, with copperbright hair. When the ships of Caesar Augustus defeated those of Antonius and Cleopatra at Actium, Aphrodite declared games to celebrate the victory at Apollo’s temple. She commanded Eros and his stripling friends to re-enact the battle in toy triremes, with tenor shouts mimicking the cries of marines and sailors, and all against a background of the vineyards that slope down Vesuvius, the hanging black cloud of which represented the smoke from burning ships. So the Euboians replay Mylae with charming adolescents in boats. Here on the Mosella, if we look at the inverted reflections of country boys shoving each other’s boats with oars, shouting battle cries, we can imagine we are seeing naked Eros playing Roman sailor for Aphrodite’s delight, Hyperion embracing them.

  And t
heir sisters, watching from the bank, use the river as a mirror to reset the combs in their hair, and to blow kisses to their warping reflections, and wind a curl onto a finger, and study the effect, and complain that their brothers are shaking the river so.

  A fishing boat with nets comes along, and boats with men fishing with pole and hook. The boys leave their play to help with the cork-buoyed seines. The catches are laid out, panting and gasping, on the rocks, to drown in air.

  72

  Whisking rain on the window, weak daylight ruling a stack of thin slits in the blind, the room chill, Jos, rolled in blankets with Pascal on the floor beside Holger’s bed, propped himself on his elbows, and craned his neck to see if Holger was, by luck, awake.

  —Holger! he said softly.

  Pascal ruckled in his sleep.

  —Jos? Holger said.

  —Half an hour before reveille. The floor has gotten much harder than it was night before last, and twice as flat, and it’s cold down here. What about I stick a whippet of a boy in bed with you, followed by myself? Nobody’s looking.

  —Sure, Holger said.

  —I’ll take off my doggy sweatshirt, and add our blankets to yours. Pascal smells as sweet as a shampooed and talcumed baby, and has been cooing like one. Is there room on this side? He’s sound asleep. I’ll huddle in on the other.

  —Charming, Holger said.

  —Apply an arm around our sleeping friend, or he’ll miss me.

  —You can keep your sweatshirt on, Jos. I’m not finicky.

  —Oo! Jos sighed. It’s warm under here, and most of all it’s not the hardhearted floor. Listen to the rain.

  —Go back to sleep, Holger whispered.

  A surge of weightlessness had tossed through his genitals as he slid his arm over Pascal’s shoulders. Pascal snuggled his hair against Holger’s cheek, and stretched a leg across his thighs.

  —It’s too nice to go back to sleep, Jos said. Just need to lie here and soak the ungiving floor out of my back and butt, and feel warm and affectionate, and think about people already up and out in the rain. Hugo, about now, is lugging his overworked cock out of a sore and overfucked Mariana, saying his prayers in Greek, to run six kilometers through the wet, singing Lutheran hymns. Franklin’s probably with him, hair stuck flat to his head, happy as a piglet at the teat. There are fat and farting politicians out there, dreaming of money. First thing they’ll think about when they get up is new ways to steal, start wars, starve the people.

  —Starve the people, Pascal said, wrapping both arms around Holger.

  —Thinks you’re me, Jos said. He gropes, I might warn you. Nothing personal. Dreaming of Franklin.

  —Who’s dreaming of Franklin? Pascal asked, awake. Hey! Where am I? What is this?

  —Good morning, Holger said.

  —Holger, Jos said, took pity on us on the hard floor, and has put us in his soft bed, picking us both up at once, you under one arm, me under the other, despite having to hop with us on one foot, and has distributed us around on this supercomfortable mattress, with him in the middle, to keep you from throttling my dick and depraving me.

  —How long have we been here? Pascal asked in a small voice.

  —All night, Jos said. You had wet dreams the whole time. Couldn’t tell which was the rain outside and which the pitterpatter of Pascal sperm under the covers, splashing all over us.

  —Good old Jos, Pascal said. Is this all right, Holger? Us in the bed with you?

  —Of course not, Holger said. The headmaster would go weak in the knees and have several heart attacks. One boy in my bed would have the same effect on him. And I have, by last count, two.

  —Went to sleep on the floor, Pascal said, Jos and me, and I wake up in a bed. Did Jos wake up when you put him in?

  —Jos put you in, Holger said. And put himself in. Me, I’m an innocent Icelandic Reformed Evangelical Lutheran, bachelor and hermit, with a tender foot in a bandage, piled all over with naked boys.

  —Let’s see it with kippers and marmalade, Pascal, Jos said. Eh? Toast and coffee.

  He rolled out of bed onto all fours, prowling over to fetch Holger’s crutches, which he brought to him ceremoniously. Of his erection he said that it was like his heart.

  —Upright and loving God.

  73

  And along the winding course of the beautiful river country houses sit in orchards.

  Once the admiration of mankind was for turbulent and wild waters, such as the strait Sestos faces, the Hellespont, or the treacherous channel between Euboia and Boiotia, where Xerxes crossed into Greece. Now we admire rivers such as this lovely Mosella, where one language flows into another, where merchants, not soldiers, meet, a river narrow enough to talk across.

  With what eloquence can I describe the architecture of places? Here are palaces worthy of Daedalos, that man of Gortyna who flew; and temples worthy of Philo who designed the portico at Eleusis; fortresses worthy of Archimedes; and worthy too of the architects in Marcus Terentius Varro’s tenth book. Did Metagenes and Ktesiphon of Ephesus inspire the Roman work hereabout, or Iktinus, architect of the Parthenon, who painted an owl of such magical realism that its stare could drive living owls away? Or Dinokhares, who built the Egyptian pyramids which swallow their own shadows and made an image of Arsinoe, the sister and wife of Ptolomaeus Philadelphus to stand in the middle of the empty air under the roof of her temple at Pharos?

  All of these might well have built the marvelous structures here in the land of the Belgii, to be ornaments along the Mosella. Here is one high on a cliff, another built out over a bay, another sits on a hill overlooking its vast estate. And here is one flat in a meadow, but with a tall tower. Another has fenced in a portion of the river, for private fishing. What can we say of the many villas with their lawns flowing down to river landings? The marble bathhouses, with steam rooms and swimming pools, where one can see happy and athletic swimmers, some preferring the river itself. A chaster, healthier Naples.

  I feel at home among these people, and wonder if the old poetry can picture them, their neat gray villages and winding green rivers, with a proper tone. I have confided in my friend Paulus my misgivings in this matter. Vergil, yes, and Flaccus, their art will serve me, as it has, in making poems of these northern woods. But their center of gravity, to be Archimedean, is in Greece, halfway around the world, and that center is shifting. The young Gratianus, my pupil, and his little brother, know Greece by rumor. It is a fading rumor, and we are moving away from it. This new religion of the imperial family, with its Zeus who was born as a human infant and taught philosophy in a tropical and zymotic province until he was crucified as a common criminal, fits strangely into the order of things. In utmost privacy I have hinted that it is making a prig of Gratianus.

  I am myself part Celt, part Roman. The culture of Bordeaux, of which I like to think I am as good an exemplar as one can point to, is a fusion, beautifully proportioned. Of Rome and Gaul. Perhaps, as Aristotle says, any two things generate a third, and it is that nameless third quiddity I think I feel in these northern and western reaches of the empire. It is something I see in my Bissula, her braided yellow hair and frank blue eyes. She was a charming slip of a girl when I bought her. Her language was that of the Swabii, and her first lispings of Latin gave me more pleasure than hearing the royal princelings mouthing Greek, their suspicious priest with us in the nursery, cutting his eyes at me if one of our texts alluded to the firm breasts of an Arcadian girl or the hyacinthine hair of a Sicilian shepherd.

  Bissula, Bissula, child of the cold and turbulent Rhine. Eyebrows were raised when I freed her. I could not abide the slave’s collar around her tender neck. From the slaughterhouse of war, pain, and desolation beyond all powers of a poet to describe, they brought her to me, a promising little scullery maid of a slave, who might also be warm in bed. I freed her before she could know what it feels like to be a slave, and put her in charge of my quarters, diminutive housekeeper that she is, spoiled as she is. The emperor’s officious staff can h
ave no notion that she gives me more pleasure to talk to, to watch, to admire for her beauty, than all the princes and fellow grammarians, and these Christiani with their fasts and mystical feasts of magic loaves and wine, among whom I have to move.

  The Greek and Roman poets talk about the color of faces, reciting one another’s formulae about roses and lilies. By Jupiter! they could do nothing just for Bissula. She has freckles across her nose, like a trout’s flanks, and her skin is now clear, like the air itself in the lower sky, now pink, now the brown of breadcrust, when she has been in the summer sun. Her smile is of the north. She is not a miniature woman already skilled in the politics of a family, as in Rome, nor yet a little vixen babbling of fashions in hairdos and romantic alliances, as in Bordeaux and Aries. She is a child.

  She has a puppy, name of Spot, and a cat named Grace, and a pet chicken wittily named Imperatrix. She reminds me of my grandson Pastor with his honest eyes and frisky ways. I care nothing for the looks askance and the gossip. She is firmly the mistress of my household. If you want a bottle of Bordeaux, she has the keys to the winecellar on the belt around her trim waist. If you want to be paid for vegetables or a hare, for grooming the horses, my purse is on her hip.

  She is, in some sense poets and peasants can understand, but not the corps of diplomats and soldiers with whom I dine and whose rank I share, she is the Mosella. She is the spirit of this land.

  At table we talk law and economics, engineering and taxes, politics and Rome. Everything always comes back to Rome, to the Senate and Caesar. It does not exist, this Rome. It must be made up, hour by hour. Two legions of barbarians who have learned to march and attack in our way: Rome. Paved highways with couriers and goods trains: Rome. And now priests and bishops with their Hades of eternal damnation and their Elysian Fields with golden streets and a gate of pearls: Rome. A bronze eagle on a standard: Rome.

  This Rome will melt, as all the others have. The most ancient Rome, the one of red terra-cotta, born of a she-wolf, melted in the pulse of time to become the seven hills ruled by lightning and the entrails of cows, by philosopher kings conversant with gods who lived in the forests and marshes. But this Rome is that of the hobnailed boot, the tax collector, and the new religion from the east, always from the east, one religion after another, Cybele and Attis and the Magna Mater and Mithras, with stranger and stranger rites.