The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  — Mine’s the next longest, he said to Ravidat.

  — Mine is, Marsal said, crawling back out of his bedroll.

  — No, Ravidat said. Robot, I think, is next in rank.

  Next morning they found the figure of the hunter in the shaft at the back of the cave, a mere stick of a man, bird-headed, ithyphallic, childish. Beside him is a carved bird on a staff. His spear has gored a bison, whose bowels are spilling out. To the left of the hunter is a rhinoceros.

  — These signs, Thaon! What do they mean? These quartered squares on legs, are they houses on piles, as in the Swiss lake wattle houses, houses perhaps for souls? Are those feather shapes arrows, spears?

  — Your houses, l’Abbé Bouysonnie said, have four legs. Could not they too be horses? Written horses beside the drawn horses?

  We’ve got onto a wall of cats. Mountain lions, probably. One old tom has his tail up, testicles well drawn, spraying his territorial boundaries.

  — The artist, Abbé Breuil added, has observed the whiplash curve you get in a stream of water coming from a shaking source. We have all seen a cat wiggle his behind when he’s peeing.

  Another cat has an arrow in its side, like the Sumerian lioness. These are engraved, not painted like the larger beasts.

  Outside, over coffee, Abbé Breuil talked about the hunter, the disemboweled bison, and the rhinoceros.

  — The rhinoceros trotting off to the left is in heat, you can tell that from her arched tail, even if you’ve only seen a cow or a cat ready for the male. It was the realism of the chat qui pisse that led me to see that. The rhythmic dots drawn under her tail are her delicious odor, I should think. She is ready to breed.

  — To the Aurignacian hunter she is ready to die. Except that it is not death he brings with his spear. It is mating in another sense. Nor does this picture mean that she is to die while in heat. It means that in the painter’s vocabulary of symbols to die by the spear and to receive the male are cognate female verbs.

  — Reality is a fabric of many transparent films. That is the only way we can perceive anything. We think it up. Reality touches our intuition to the quick. We perceive with that intuition. Perhaps we perceive the intuition only, while reality remains forever beyond our grasp.

  — Man is the juvenile bearer, the penis bearer. Woman conceives through a wound that bleeds every lunar cycle, except when she holds the gift of the child, magically healed. The hieroglyphs of these cave painters for wound and vulva are probably the same.

  Monsieur Thaon frowned.

  — The hunter with arms outspread before the wounded bison is embracing the idea of death, which to him is the continuity of life. The spilling entrails are an ideogram of the vagina. The bison is life under the guise of death. Who knows what metamorphosis death was to these archaic minds?

  — The hunter wears a bird mask exactly like the bird on his shaman’s baton. He is therefore not a picture of a man but of that intuitive film over reality we call myth. He has assumed the character that the bird totem also represents. Together they have brought the bison down.

  The terrace of the Hôtel Commerce, cèpes paysannes, Laval, Thaon, Breuil, Bouysonnie, truite meunière. Ravidat is in a chair apart, his fingers laced together. Coencas, slapping his beret on his thigh, has just come in.

  — I was at Altamira, bless you, in the year 1902! the Abbé was saying. Eh! It was discovered by a dog, too. It was, it was! I have just now remembered the coincidence. It must have been Robot’s Spanish grandfather.

  — The cave, but not the paintings, which were discovered by a little girl. Her father, the owner of the property, had been going out to the cave for years, once his dog had found it, but he was looking for celts and flints. He had never once looked at the ceiling, if you can imagine. One day his little daughter came along with him, and walked in and looked up, first thing. Papa, she said, los toros, los toros!

  — Cartailhac was convinced that those bulls were thousands and thousands of years old. I went down with him and began making drawings of them. I’ve been in the business ever since.

  — One day at Altamira I was on my back drawing. They hadn’t yet lowered the floor as they have now. I was working with crayons by candlelight, dabbéd all over with dripping wax, drawing the great mural of bulls, when a very large-eyed young Spaniard came in on hands and knees. He had come from Barcelona, and his clothes were, I remember, of the Bohemian cut as they said in those days.

  The Abbé’s eyes became mischievous and knowing.

  — He said bon jour and I said bon jour, odd as it was, vous savez, to be of a civility deep in a Magdalenian cave. And bon jour was precisely all the French he had. He lay on his back, looking, looking. Hermoso, he kept saying, hermoso. He was not interested in the age of the drawings, but, ma foi, in their beauty. He asked, as best I understood his Spanish, if he might touch them, and I explained that pigments that had adhered to limestone for twenty thousand years weren’t likely to rub off now. But he didn’t touch them. He took one of my candles and followed the bold lines of the beasts as if he were drawing them. There was a terrible look on his face, wonder and admiration, and a kind of worship.

  — I got his name straight once we were outside. Picasso. It meant nothing to me then, of course. Such eyes.

  — Picasso. He did not forget Altamira. His eye has never forgotten anything. The bison at Altamira were to him très moderne. I have always thought of him as a Cro-Magnon painter out of time.

  — The painted caves in Spain are in the north, in the Cantabrian mountains. They are all across, from San Román in the west to Santimamiñe in the east, and this last is outside Guernica where the divebombers struck first in this awful war.

  — And when Picasso painted his great symbolic picture of the bombing of Guernica, he made one of the bulls of Altamira dominate the design.

  — But yes! said Abbé Bouysonnie. And I had never seen that at all.

  — I like to think of that bull, whether at Altamira or in the angry and eloquent Guernica, as Being itself, in all its power and dumb presence.

  And as if he suddenly found it more comfortable to change the subject, the Abbé Breuil turned to Monsieur Laval:

  — What a beautiful old tree! he said of the Montignac beech that filled the place with its shade. They are cutting them down, you know, all over France, an obstruction to artillery sighting. A village without a tree is like a woman without hair. Some poet must write an elegy for the trees of the French villages, nay, for the trees of Europe. There was a venerable oak at Guernica, wasn’t there? Some great pagan tree that burned when the divebombers came. I keep coming back, it seems, to Picasso.

  — But, Bouysonnie said, Picasso does not allude to the Basque oak in his mural, does he?

  — No, no, Breuil said. It is not in the prehistoric genius to depict trees. This man Picasso is a painter from the Reindeer Age. The Guernica with its wounded horse, its hieratic bull, its placing of images over images, is a prehistoric painting. It honors and grieves and stands in awe. I have copied hundreds and hundreds of these beasts until they file through my dreams. God will take me to them when I die, to the saucy Shetland tarpans whose jet manes run the length of their backs, to the long red ox and woolly rhinoceros. But perhaps the Guernica I see is not the one everybody sees. The painting I see is as old as Lascaux.

  The Drachenberg bears, their jaws full of shadow: We are Ursus, companions of the Pole Star, god of the Finnmark, brothers of Artemis Diktynna, lords of the forest. We are Bruin, Arkturus, Baloo. We are eaters of the honey of the bees of Han, the golden bees of Mykinai and Tiryns, the red bees of the Merovingians. Man with his gods, fire and flint drove us from the caves but put our souls on the walls along with blind bison, shrill horse, slow cow, royal salmon, wizard elk, cruel puma, idiot jackal.

  In the forecourt of the chthonic granary of souls at Lascaux two long cows shamble toward three long cows, dewlapped Indus horned cattle lowing and prancing on stiff forelegs. They are not domestic and pied but wild and bro
wn, still in their eland grazing age. Nor are these aurochs yet Hathor nor the royal herds of Harappa. They are, bulls and cows together, female to the Magdalenian mind, creatures of the realm of woman. So were bison, ox, and mammoth. The male domain was horse, ibex, stag.

  Breuil leaned on his geologist’s pick and gazed.

  The bison transfixed by the hunter’s spear at the back of the cave is new to us. In a kind of visual pun the spear is drawn from the sexual parts downward and emerges along the bison’s belly like a penis in a ventral foreskin. Men have read languages before now without a dictionary.

  How could he decipher what men had forgotten twenty thousand years ago?

  His eye hurt. He was old. This place was holy. To know, to know.

  — No, Breuil, he said to himself aloud. To see.

  Robot on his knees, the Abbé sat in the red rain of light that trembled through the shelved leaves of the great tree in the place. Ravidat sat at his feet in a seine of leafshadow. Monsieur le Maire in his high collar and the tricolor across his breast rolled the wine in his glass. Agnel and Estreguil stood on each side of Maurice Thaon, whose hands rested on their shoulders.

  — You cannot imagine Africa, the Abbé was saying. Djibouti in the Somaliland, on the Gulf of Aden, Nizan, is it not, who calls Aden the worst place in the world? Djibouti, then, is the next worst place. Admiral Scott, you remember, when he first saw Antarctica, said, Mon Dieu! What an awful place! and I wish I could have said something as fine about Djibouti but I was speechless.

  The Mayor looked from Thaon to a concierge in black stockings who was standing at a respectable distance from the men. He nodded with deep appreciation of the abbé’s words.

  — You have lived all your life in France, mess gosses, messieurs et dames.

  He, too, nodded politely to the concierge, who dared not acknowledge the honor except by folding her arms.

  — The Somaliland is a baked waste. My American friend Monsieur Kelley once said that France smells of wine, urine, and garlic, but Africa smells of carrion, of merde ripened by flies as big as hornets, of rotten water silver with filth and green with contagion.

  — Indeed, said the Mayor.

  — Djibouti is ravaged dirt streets, shacks with blinding tin roofs, whole buildings of rust and packing cases wired together.

  — Il est poète, the Mayor whispered to Thaon, l’Abbé!

  — And all of this steaming rot is surrounded by white mountains, sparkling mountains of salt. Imagine that. I was there with Père Teilhard de Chardin, as in China, and with an extraordinary man, a Catalan with an almost French name, Henri de Monfreid, from the Roussillon, the half-brother of Madame Agnès Huc de Monfreid. Their father fell out of a tree some twenty years ago, strange way to die. He was Georges-Daniel de Monfreid, a painter and friend of Gauguin, whose paintings he used to buy under the pretense of selling them, to encourage him.

  Maurice Thaon was laughing.

  — Since when is a priest not a gossip? the Abbé asked. I’m putting everybody to sleep.

  Monsieur Thaon laughed the louder. The Mayor was confused but smiled nevertheless, rolled the wine in his glass, and leaned forward attentively.

  — Et alors. Where was I? The salt heaps of Djibouti. The stink of Africa. Ah! That extraordinary man Henri de Monfreid. He has been everywhere, everywhere that other people haven’t been. He was the man who took Père Teilhard to Abyssinia, its awful deserts. Harar, where Rimbaud lived, Obok, Diredawa, Tajura. Prehistory is very rich around there. They found rock paintings, lovely graceful animals, hunters with bows, geometric designs all dots and angles.

  Marsal came closer, sitting behind Ravidat.

  — I went with them a bit later, like going to the moon. At Obok there is nothing alive. The old volcanoes are still in the week of creation, black and wrinkled. The silence lifts the hair on the back of your head.

  — And then we got to Ganda-Biftu, where there are four hundred metres of paleolithic drawings across the face of a cliff. We climbed up, having built a scaffold for the purpose. I drew and drew and drew, as high up on the rock as the third story of a building. Sickle-horned African buffalo, lions, antelope. And lithe men, far more realistically drawn than in our European caves. And among the buffalo, quite clearly, were long black oxen. You see what that implies. Domestication.

  The Abbé stared before him, sipping his wine.

  — We found more pictures, found them at Diredawa, and then outside Harar. We went to the Porcupine Cave, as they have named it, that Teilhard had seen earlier. But I saw something he had passed over. It was a calcined protuberance, wonderfully suspicious, and with no trouble at all I found a bone beneath. A human jawbone, but not of man as we know him, but of the breed of men before us, the apelike man Neanderthal. He had never been found in Africa before, and it was not known that he was an artist. It was thought that he could only arrange stones painted red ochre, and set the mountain bears’ skulls on ledges as in the cave at Drachenberg.

  He drained his glass and set it on the table.

  — But he could draw. Mon Dieu, he could draw.

  The first boxes of ammunition were placed in the Shaft of The Hunter and the Bison late in October, when the moon was dark. Long cases of carbines packed in grease, grenades, flares, .45s rose in neat stacks to the black shins of the prancing horses.

  At Drachenberg the bears’ skulls sat on their ledges hooded in dust older than Ur or Dilmun. Their muzzles all pointed to the rising sun, which fell upon them dimly in the depth of their cave in the cliff, lighting all but the sockets of their eyes.

  The Aeroplanes at Brescia

  KAFKA STOOD ON THE SEAWAY AT RIVA UNDER THE EARLY SEPTEMBER sky. But for his high-button shoes and flaring coat, his easy stance had an athletic clarity. He walked with the limberness of a racing cyclist. Otto Brod, with whom he had spent the morning discussing moving pictures and strolling along the shore under the voluble pines and yellow villas of the Via Ponale, lit a cigar and suggested a light beer before lunch. A wash of sweet air from the lake rattled a circle of pigeons, who flapped up into a shuttle of gulls. A fisherman in a blue apron reclined on the harbor steps smoking a small pipe. On a staff over a perfectly square building rippled the Austrian flag with its black, two-headed eagle. An old man knotting cords in a net strung between poles watched them with the open concern of the Italians. A soft bell rang in the hills.

  — Good idea, said Kafka. It will get the taste of Dallago out of our mouths.

  His eyes, when they could be seen under the broad brim of a black fedora, seemed abnormally large. To the natural swarthiness of his square face, rough of bone, Italy had already added, Otto noticed, a rose tint.

  The ora, the south wind blowing up from Sirmione, had begun to scuff the dark blue of the lake. The old Venetian fort between the Città Riva and the railway station seemed to Kafka to be an intrusion into the Euclidean plainness of the houses of Riva. It reminded him of the schloss at Meran that had disturbed him not only for being vacant and blind in its casements but also because of the suspicion that it would inevitably return in his most anxious dreams. Even without his intuition of the mute claim of this empty castle to stay in his mind as a presence neither welcome nor explicable, it was always terrifying to know that there were things in the world empty of all significance and yet persisted, like heavy books of the law which mankind in a stubborn reluctance would not destroy and yet would not obey. The castle at Riva, the Rocca, the Rock, was a barracks housing the new conscripts, but the castle at Meran, the Brunnenburg, was a great shell. Suddenly he heard a telephone ringing in its high rooms, and made himself think instead of the morning at the Bagni della Madonnina and of Otto’s polite but equivocal replies to Dallago the poet who had apologized by rote man’s oneness with nature. What a fool, Otto had said later, on their walk.

  The cubes of Riva, white and exact, were an architecture, Kafka remarked, the opposite of the lobes and tendrils of Prague. And there was truth in the light of Riva that was, as a poet might sa
y, the opposite of the half-truths of the cut-glass sunlight of Prague, which had no fire in it, no absolute transparency. Instead of tall slabs of squared light in just proportions, Prague had weather of a dark and glittering richness.

  Otto replied that the light here was pure and empty, creating a freedom among objects. The very shadows were incised. It is an older world, he added, and yet one to which the new architecture is returning. Concrete is but the Mediterranean mud house again, and glass walls a new yearning to see light sliced as in the openness of the Aegean landscape. The newest style, he said, is always in love with the oldest of which we are aware. The next Wiedergeburt will come from the engineers.

  Max Brod, whom they had left writing at the pensione, was already at the café, and was holding above his head a newspaper for them to see.

  — They are going to fly at Brescia! he shouted, and a waiter who might have been bringing a seltzer to the Tsar of Bulgaria, so grave was his progress, looked with uninterrupted dignity over his shoulder at Max, who to him was but a Czech and probably a Jew, stamping his feet and rattling La Sentinella Bresciana in the air.

  — Aeroplanes! Blériot! Cobianchi! Die Brüder Wright!

  — Due bionde, piacere, Otto said to the waiter, who was relieved that the Czech’s friends did not flap their arms and dance on the terrace.

  — Incredible, Otto said. Absolutely incredible luck.

  Kafka laughed outright, for Max was as of the moment as he a brooding postponer, and their friendship had always been a contest between the impulses of Max and the circumspect deliberation of Franz. It was a comedy that popped up everywhere between them. They had been in Riva a day, Max had spent a month convincing Franz that he must come to Riva on his vacation, and here was Max dashing them off on the second morning. But, as he quickly said, he could not question the call of the flying machines, which none of them had seen. They were well worth giving up the sweet quiet of Riva.