The Guy Davenport Reader

by Guy Davenport

  The Committee had suggested that they take the train to the aerodrome, and they had agreed that, Italy being Italy, this was decidedly an order. What little gain over chaos they could find, Max laid it down as a principle, there they would scramble. The line to Montechiari was the local to Mantua and ran beside the road all the way, so that they had the illusion, once aboard, standing on the swaying and heaving platform between two cars, that the world in all its ingenuity was moving along with them. There were automobiles bouncing in their dust, trembling with speed, their goggled drivers keeping a strange dignity above the wild agitation of their machines.

  There were carriages rocking behind horses that paced as if to the bucca and drum of the Praetorium, drawing Heliogabalus to the Circus Maximus. There were bicycles on which one could see characters out of Jules Verne, Antinoos in a plaid cap, Heidelberg duellists, English mathematicians, Basques whose faces were perfect squares under their berets, and a priest whose dusty soutane flared as if he were Victory bringing in the fleet at Samothrace.

  No aeroplanes were in the air when they arrived.

  The way to the aerodrome was like a gathering of the Tartar tribes at an English garden party. Booths and tents, all topped with flags, rose above a crowd flowing in all directions, of people, carriages, horses, and automobiles.

  A heron of a German flashed his monocle and pointed the way to the hangars. A Socialist with a wooden leg was selling The Red Flag to a priest whose purse was deeper than his fingers were long. From a bright yellow Lanchester descended a dwarf whose bosom protruded like the craw of a pigeon. His clothes were black and pearl, with many elaborately buttoned panels and facings.

  Gypsies haughty as Mongol royalty stood in a line, watched by a gendarme whose very eyes seemed waxed.

  Above the bumble of voices they could hear a band clashing its way through the overture to I Vespri Siciliani, and suddenly a clatter of cavalry parted its way through the crowds, a brave disarray of silken horses, tossing plumes, and scarlet coats.

  An old woman with a milky eye offered them bouquets of tiny white flowers. Beside a French journalist in pointed shoes stood a peasant in a great coat that had seen Marshal Ney.

  The hangars were like large puppet theatres, their stage curtains drawn, Otto explained, to keep all the inventions from prying eyes. Some aeroplanes were out, however, and they stood, rather guiltily, and allowed the strangeness of the insect machines to astonish them more than they had anticipated. They are too small, a Frenchman said from behind them.

  The Brothers Wright were indeed not there. They were in Berlin, but here was their rival Curtiss sitting in a folding chair, his feet propped on a benzine tin. He was reading The New York Herald Tribune. They looked at him in utter awe. Kafka appreciated his professional nonchalance, which was like that of an acrobat who is soon to be before everybody’s eyes, but who for the moment has nothing better to occupy him than a newspaper. He was satisfyingly an American.

  Then they saw Blériot.

  A man with calm, philosophical eyes stood with folded arms and legs spread. Twice he broke his meditative stance and strutted from the door of his hangar to the engine of an aeroplane on which two mechanics were working. The mechanic bending over the engine kept reaching back an empty hand, its fingers wiggling, and the other mechanic put into it a wrench or screwdriver or wire brush.

  — That is most certainly Blériot, Otto said. Because that is his airship, the one in which he flew the Channel.

  Max remembered later, at dinner, the anecdote of the father and son on horseback who came upon a painter at work in a field. That is Cézanne, said the son. How in the world do you know? the father asked. Because, the son replied, he is painting a Cézanne.

  It was indeed Blériot. He wore a snug cap with ear flaps that tied under the chin, like the caps of the medieval popes. His nose was cinquecento, a beak befitting a bird man. He kept darting forward, standing on tiptoe, and watching the fingers of the mechanic.

  The Bleriot XI was a yellow dragonfly of waxed wood, stretched canvas, and wires. Along its side ran its name in square letters of military gray: ANTOINETTE 25 CV. Otto offered the information that its motor had been built by Alessandro Anzani. Its power was clearly in its shoulders, where its wings, wheels, and propeller sprang at right angles from each other, each in a different plane. Yet for all its brave yellow and nautical wire-work, it was alarmingly small, scarcely more than a mosquito magnified to the size of a bicycle.

  Near them a tall man with thick chestnut hair held his left wrist as if it might be in pain. It was the intensity of his eyes that caught Kafka’s attention more than his tall leanness which, from the evidence about, marked the aeronaut and the mechanic. This was the age of the bird man and of the magician of the machine. Who knows but what one of these preoccupied faces might belong to Marinetti himself? This was a crane of a man. The very wildness of his curly brown hair and the tension in his long fingers seemed to speak of man’s strange necessity to fly. He was talking to a short man in a mechanic’s blue smock and with an eye-patch. From his mouth flew the words Kite Flying Upper Air Station, Höhere Luftstazion zum Drachensteigenlassen. Then the small man raised his square hands and cocked his head in a question. Glossop, was the answer, followed by the green word Derbyshire.

  Further along another aeroplane was being rolled from its hangar. Before it an aviator walked backwards, directing every move with frantic gestures.

  Otto squared his shoulders and approached a man who was obviously both an Italian and a reporter.

  — Informazione, per favore, he said with a flamboyance Max and Franz had thought he used only upon the waiters of Prague. The reporter’s eyes grew round and bright.

  — Per esempio?

  — Chi è il aviatore colà, prego?

  — È Ruggiero. Francese.

  — Ask him, Franz said, if he knows who that tall man is with the deep eyes and chestnut hair.

  — E quest’uomo di occhi penetrante e capigliatura riccia?

  The reporter did not know.

  Nothing seemed ready to fly. They wandered to the bales of hay which separated the flying field from the grandstand where society sat in tiers under a flag-hung canopy. It all looked like the world’s most crowded Impressionist painting. In a wicker chair the heavy Countess Carlotta Primoli Bonaparte sat under a blue parasol. She was the center of a flock of young ladies veiled in blue and pink.

  Were the three Bourbon princesses here, Massimilla, Anatolia, and Violante? To move from the long steps of the Villa Medici, now scattered with the first leaves of autumn, from the tall trees and noseless herms and termini of their walled Roman gardens to the hills of Brescia, was it simply an outing to which they were invited by male cousins all moustaches and sabres? Yet D’Annunzio was said to be here, who had published this year a Fedra and a Contemplazione della Morte, titles which reminded Kafka of mortuary wreathes, and had they not heard that he was taking flying lessons from Blériot?

  They saw Puccini. He was leaning on the barricade of straw that protected the grandstand. His face was long and his nose a drunkard’s.

  The profile of a lady with a perfect chin and gentian eyes was blocked from Kafka’s view by the top hat of a gentleman in bassets, and then, as Max was trying to show him a boy in a sailor suit walking on his hands, he discovered that all the while he had been thinking of the interior of high grass, the mouse’s world.

  Blériot was going to fly. Arms waved. Mechanics slapped their pockets. Blériot, with a nonchalant pivot in the swing up, was suddenly in his machine, holding the lever by which he was to guide, a kind of upright tiller. Mechanics were everywhere. One wondered if they knew what they were doing or if they were frantically preserving their dignity. Blériot looked toward the grandstand but obviously did not see it. He looked in all directions, as if to assure himself that the sky was still there, and that the cardinal directions still stretched away from him as they always had.

  Kafka realized with a shiver somewhere deep unde
r the lapels of his coat that nothing extraordinary was happening as far as Blériot was concerned. He had seen the wrinkling crawl of the Channel thousands of feet beneath him; he had seen farms and rivers and cities stream below him as casually as one watches fields from a train window. He had the athlete’s sureness and the athlete’s offhandedness. Perhaps only in the awful light of the extraordinary was there real calm in human action. Nothing he might do was superfluous or alien to the moment.

  A mechanic was at the propeller, grasping it with both hands and standing on one leg for leverage. He pulled downward with a fierceness. The machine waggled its wings but the propeller didn’t budge. Another mechanic took over, and this time it spun, kicked, and froze in another position. One after another they spun the propeller. The engine spit and whined, dying in its best efforts. They brought spanners and screwdrivers, a can of oil, and began work on the engine. One could feel the excitement in the grandstand wilt. Talk sprang up. Otto did not take his eyes off the beautifully trim yellow machine.

  The propeller was stubborn, and worse than stubborn, for it stalled after a few hopeful whirrs as often as it refused to spin at all. Blériot’s heroic indifference was wearing thin, though even the most comely Italian ladies could be made to understand that the fault was in the engine. A long-beaked oil can was brought from the hangar by a running mechanic. Another took it from him and poked it here and there in the engine. A mechanic brought what was probably a part for the engine. A part like it was unscrewed, taken out, and compared critically by three mechanics, who talked softly, as if in a dream. The Princess Laetitia Savoia Bonaparte watched them with purple eyes, as well bred as if she were at the opera.

  Blériot climbed down. Leblanc swung up to replace him. Otto opened and closed his hands in sympathetic help. He remarked that Blériot had crashed some eighty times before he flew the Channel. He was not a man to be discouraged. In the Channel flight an English rain had all but swamped him just as he reached the coast.

  The reporter who had identified Rougier for Otto was signalling them with his notebook. He opened it as he ran toward them, tearing out a page, which he handed Otto with a smile of ancient courtesy. Otto frowned over the page. The reporter took it back and frowned at it himself. Then with the air of a corporal delivering a dispatch to a field marshal, he gave the page back and hastened away, for something new was developing around Blériot’s aeroplane.

  Otto gave the page to Franz.

  — There’s the name of the man you asked about, he said. He wrote it down for the giornalista.

  Kafka looked at the name. It read, in light pencil, the kind meticulous men used to jot down fractions and the abbreviated titles of learned journals, volume, number, and page, probably a thin silver pencil with fine lead, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  — Who? Max said.

  Suddenly the propeller was spinning. Blériot ducked under a wing and vaulted into his seat. The mechanics grasped the aeroplane, for it was beginning to roll forward with trembling wings. Their clothes rippled. Blériot’s moustache blew flat against his cheeks. The engine deepened its voice and the propeller whirred on a higher note. He was going to fly. Everyone exchanged glances and quickly looked back at Blériot. The aero-plane waddled forward. It seemed to slide rather than roll, and darted one way and another like a goose on a frozen river. Kafka was appalled by its desperation and failure of grace before he reflected that the most agile birds are clownish on the ground. Surely there was danger that it would tear itself to pieces before it got into the air. Now it was making a long curve to the left, hopping and sliding. Then it wagged its wings and flew up, bouncing once in the air while no one breathed.

  He flew out toward the sun. Then they realized that he was making a long turn and would fly over them. A slash of light flared on his wings when they dipped.

  As he passed overhead he seemed to be a man busy at a desk, pulling now this lever, now that, and all with studied composure. Heroism, Kafka reflected, was the ability to pay attention to three things at once.

  It was not after all a machine for the grave Leonardo, his white beard streaming over his shoulder, his mind on Pythagoras and on teaching Cesare Borgia to fly. It was rather the very contraption for Pinocchio to extend the scope of his mischief. A random wizard would have built it, an old Dottore Civetta of an artificer who had not been heard from by his friends since his graduation from Bologna. He would have built it as Gepetto carved Pinocchio, because the image was latent in the material, and would not have known what to do with it, being too arthritic to try it himself. The fox and the cat would have stolen it, being incapable of not stealing it, and enticed Pinocchio into it, to see what trouble would come of it.

  Blériot hummed in circles around them like an enormous bee. There was obviously a rumor going through the crowd. They picked it up in German. Calderara had crashed on the way to the air show. There were distressed faces everywhere. He was flying his Wright. He was hurt when he crashed. He was not hurt when he crashed. The Wright was ruined. The Wright could be repaired in a matter of hours. He would still fly, if they all had patience. He was the only Italian who was to fly, and now the Italians must watch but foreigners fly at their own air show.

  He would turn up, most certainly, with a gloriously bandaged head.

  The band, which had been playing idle waltzes, struck up La Marseillaise, a tribute to Blériot, who was obviously going to fly over the grandstand. Women cowered and waved their kerchiefs. Officers threw him salutes. They could see him plainly. He did not look down.

  He was going to land, they heard, only to go up again. The red windsock on its mast filled and rippled to the west. A man in a gray fedora remarked that the wind was just so, and that Curtiss was going to put down the Herald Tribune and fly. Blériot was flying for practise, they supposed, for the sheer fun of it. Now they were all to fly for the Grand Prix de Brescia. There was a stir on the grandstand. Officers and husbands were explaining it to the women.

  Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was wearing a cream lounge suit striped in lime and a hot rose cravat, was paying his devoirs to Count Oldofredi, the chairman of the Committee. He twirled his poet’s finger above his head. The Count grinned at him and nodded, and frequently looked over his shoulder. D’Annunzio waved his arms, spread his open hand on his chest, and talked like a herald in Sophocles. Kafka noticed how thin and short he was, and how accurately he resembled a rat.

  Everyone was looking up. From nowhere at all the dirigible Zodiac had appeared, and was drifting majestically toward the grandstand. The band began a confused national anthem. Dignified Germans leaned backwards and stared, their mouths open. Two boys leapt up and down as if on springs.

  Ladies and gentlemen hastened to the bales of hay. Photographers went under their black cloths. The violent, Republican flag of the Verein-ig-ten Staaten von Amerika ran up a staff and as soon as its red stripes and blue reticulation of stars rippled out into the Lombard air there was a roar more sonorous than they had heard all day.

  Curtiss’s propeller’s had caught on the first kick. The man himself was standing beside the fuselage of his machine pulling on long-cuffed gauntlets. His throat was wrapped with a scarf which streamed over his shoulder in the wash of the spinning propeller. He mounted, settled himself, and with a toss of his head signalled the mechanics to stand away.

  He was across the field before they realized that his preternatural composure was going to take him immediately into the air. The wheels cleared the ground with a dreamy laziness. The prospect which they had watched all afternoon was suddenly immense, and there was a wood on a knoll which they had not noticed either. Curtiss flew over the wood, lost to view. They watched the wood intently, and then they realized that he was now behind them. His machine had arisen from behind some farmhouses. Then he was above them. The underside of his wings looked peculiarly familiar and wildly strange all at once, like a ship in harbor. And while they watched his trim biplane it was already above the wood again, small and melancholy. This time everyone
turned to watch the farmhouses. Because they were waiting, the trip seemed longer the second time, but there he was, as suddenly as before, up out of nowhere.

  He made five flights over the wood and around a circuit they could not see, returning each time over the farmhouses. Before he was down, word went around that he had most certainly won the Prix de Brescia. He had flown fifty kilometres in forty-nine minutes and twenty-four seconds. He had won thirty thousand lire.

  The bandstand stood and clapped as Curtiss climbed from his machine. His wife was standing with a group of men, who ushered her forward. The blood was draining back into her face, and she was trying to smile.

  The man named Wittgenstein was again holding his left wrist, massaging it as if it were in pain.

  They heard that Calderara was definitely injured, and that his Wright was a wreck.

  Curtiss was scarcely down when three machines all started their engines. The evening was coming on, a brown haze with a touch of gold. Dust blew against dust.

  The crowd became restless. Rougier was now in the air, between two great wings on a sled the runners of which curled up at both ends to bear smaller wings. He seemed to have more to do than he could manage, pulling and pushing levers. But apparently he was managing beautifully, like a man for whom writing with both hands at once is natural.

  Blériot was in the air again, too. Leblanc’s monoplane looked redder in the air than it had on the ground.

  The crowd was moving away, to get seats on the train, which could obviously take only a small part of them. By running, they got to the train in time to pry themselves aboard.

  Rougier was still in the air when the train began to move. Ancora là! His craft droned above them like a wasp at the end of a long afternoon at harvest time, drunk with its own existence and with the fat goodness of the world.

  — Franz! Max said before he considered what he was saying, why are there tears in your eyes?