Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  The huiskrekel chirps over the ripple and thud of the waves. Light weaves time. Mind’s boundary’s none old Vivante wrote for whom horizon’s glare, but our horizon’s diketop ruler-straight or inkblue line between sky and sea, sky and tulip field.

  Ome Adriaan! For apples and pears you said to look. This Picasso which Saartje says she can draw better than is apples and pears on crumpled paper by a French window wouldn’t you say, ja? That’s a jug and tumbler. I think it’s funny. Saartje says it’s sad and quiet. Whoopee fuck! Your adoring nephew Hans.

  20 MESSIDOR

  Max and Margareta in Paris the summer Joop Zoetemelk won the Tour de France. Great fun. There they were, a surprise, on the hotel steps, Max fiercely bearded, behung with cameras and a case for drawing paper, Margareta in what seemed to be a safari dress, walking shoes, a straw hat. Off we went, after Margareta sprang her plans finished and detailed, to Giverny, by train to Vernon, Max a whizz at making French machines spit out tickets. We were lost at Vernon, going off in the wrong direction (a typical country town that could be anywhere, even England). Lunch at a brasserie in back of the town hall, and some questions got us on the country road down some six or seven kilometers of which we got to the house (American tourists held us up, trying to buy tickets with traveler’s checks of some enormous denomination, the likes of which the girl at the desk had never seen. The Americans kept saying that they’d learned about this historical garden from a magazine, where they no doubt also saw for the first time, and forgot, the name Monet). All very lovely. The house (resplendently colorful) hung with his Japanese prints. Max and Margareta in an ecstasy. The lily pond (across the road, achieved by an underpass) turns out to be a loop of the little river Epte, along which the poplars, tributary of the Seine, so that all Parisian cooking is done with water from Monet’s lily pond. Keirinckx agrees with me that the scenery roundabout is even less distinguished than Holland. The studio is as big as a barn. Painted river grass underwater, Max says, which everyone knows can’t be done, and the color of air, and glare through the interstices of tangled wistaria. We had a fine leisurely walk back, looking at kitchen gardens and flowers in yards, the spirit of Monet in us. We looked at his grave in back of the church: the family a French rabbit warren. His children by his first wife married the wife’s children by her first husband, incest de facto if not de jure, very sexy, and God knows where the process began in the nursery, everybody’s mama having been papa’s mistress for years before anybody traipsed to the altar. Hot little hands poking around under flannel nightshirts, impassioned sighs, grunts in changing voices, scandalized nursemaids. Vernon, which we’d first seen during its siesta, was alive when we returned, crocodiles of camp children at the baker’s, cars on the streets, citizens gossiping over walls. We had Camparis on a sidewalk, got our breath, had a good talk about Kaatje, Bruno, and the children, whom Margareta obviously adores, and came back by train. Long dinner at the Grand Corona, Place Alma. They want me to go back to Amsterdam with them. I plead that I need more of Paris.

  The Pare Floral at Vincennes, Margareta’s idea. A congenial expedition. Max kept making fun of French pedantry. Even the Tour de France. The Mètro an exercise in Ramist logic, he says. But when they abandon logic for inspiration, they soar. Vincent at his most impossible, such as when he tried to draw a grape arbor from inside looking out, never achieved such skeins of wrapped wistaria, tangled willows, perplexed densities of bamboo as Monet.

  HOLLYHOCK, von Flotow, giraffe, walking stick, flags and bunting, constancy of affection, Hokusai, pink tickled blue, courtly love for the sake of manners, Mandarin hierarchy, the Chou dynasty, Lady Murasaki.

  DANDELION, Die Zauberflöte, goldfinch, lightning bug, chandler, cheerfulness rampant, Georges Seurat, yellow, puppy love, canon law, carmina burana.

  Saw the Keirinckxen off, Margareta never more lovely, a lesson in seeing old friends against a different background, and when I got back, there on the sidewalk, blue haversack burdened, in scuffy jeans, Sander. Lost for hours! he bellowed. He took a postcard from his shirt pocket before he moved a step: for me from his sister. It was a view of the White Horse of Uffington in Berkshire. On the back she’d written Braque! The table by the window, he said, the notebook, everything as neat as a doctor’s office. Everything’s purest Adriaan! Design, order, sanity! He went about wrecking this admired condition with his gear onto the bed, shirt over a chair, shoes and socks passim. Hitchhiked, he said. I’ve been on the road two days, starved.

  A joy showing Sander Paris, the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, the Palais Royale, blocks and blocks of the avenues, coffee at the Deux Magots, favorite streets (rue de Seine, Monsieur-le-Prince). We walk and look, look and walk. We have never had so much room, he says, to move about. It is not Amsterdam at all, he says.

  The center of Proust is when Morel plays the other piece by Vinteuil, the Red Septet, le rougeoyant septuor, at the Verdurins, and gets to the enrichment of the magic little phrase of the White Sonata. (Which I associate with a theme in Franck’s Symphony in D Minor that summons thoroughly Parisian memories of my first time in Paris, the St.-Germain in haze on a November day, the Cafè de la Mairie du VIC, St.-Sulpice, Sartre and Richard Wright at the Deux Magots, Picasso at the Salon d’Automne, the quais, the grey majestic practical wonder of it all, and, because of Kaatje, a limpidly lyrical phrase in the first King of Prussia Quartet). As Morel develops the phrase in a kind of rapture, his forelock pitches loose and jounces on his forehead. Charlus’ ecstasy coincides with the narrator’s: a synergy of Epicurus’ I know nothing of the good except the deliciousness of food, sex, music, and the sight of beautiful bodies in graceful motion. Here the Eurydike in Proust and in Charlus (who is Proust’s tragic destiny) listens to the music her Orpheus plays for Hades and Persephone to free her from irredeemable time. Elle était plutôt comme une grande dèesse du Temps. At this point he touches the erotic sense to the quick, and gathers every thread of the book around a spindle in one masterful twist.

  Netjes stout! Sander of a slip sous-vêtement Hom style nouveau in a haberdasher’s window, een blikvanger. Bought him one, after the saucy, chic, merry-eyed salesgirl had pedantically measured his neck (he looked at me cross-eyed and asked why the silly girl wasn’t measuring his hips, to which I replied that she didn’t trust herself, or him), a patch of seat continuing in a smitch underneath to a prow of a pod in front, joined by ischial straps of finger width. White cotton, cornflower blue the cincture. The French eye has a livelier nerve to the crotch. An arm across my shoulders for six blocks. It wasn’t until coffee after dinner that I broached the matter he had been itching to have in the open. Broeder en zuster, wat? Well yes, he said, yes. She hadn’t got along with the folks any better than he had. She’s younger. If his wildness, that had landed him in the consternation of the ever-to-be-remembered good Dokter Tomas, had seemed egregious to the disparate parts of his incoherent family—what family? he says—hers was the more abrasive and got her cooped up with an aunt in the Hague. They took to running up phone bills, discovering the instrument to be a congenial confessional both ways, they who did little more than spit at each other in person. His exemplary recovery from chronic irresponsibility and disappearing for weeks with riffraff merited him the Amsterdam apartment that I found for him when I got him enrolled as a student at the university, not without string pulling and special pleas. She too reformed repentantly and convincingly enough for the aunt to consent to her joining Sander in his apartment and attending lectures, the prospect of the two in one cubicle (she was not told about the one bed) being rather convenient and desirable in the aunt’s view than otherwise. They could, so to speak, keep an eye on each other. There had been the earlier paartijd, out of curiosity on her part, for kranig stukje on his, with dash and abandon for most of a week, a day of which moreover he managed, for statistical boasting, a talented girl setting a new record for successive orgasms among her peers, adding three to the count, the forty-first through forty-third of the series (or whatever actuality beh
ind Sander’s generosity with numbers when reconstructing erotic history), and his own steady girl, in het algameen gesproken, his wisselstroom friend Piet, and the sister, until fear of becoming the parents, and aunt and uncle, of a very unconventional baby stopped the idyll in its tracks. It was jolly, however, to land eventually in the same bed, the kind of adventure imaginative children might have thought up exploring each other’s nature and design, like Eigon Schiele and his sister when they were only a few years into two-digit ages for three days at a country hotel, to be enacted when they were older, freer, and more developed of parts. They were shy at first, even with Sander protesting that he could not sleep in shorts or pyjamas, and with Grietje unable to go to sleep without playing her clitoris for an hour’s wiggly pleasure, a habit of years’ standing. Has anything ever dashed your imagination, Sander? I asked with some point, or failed to drop into your lap? O Lord, no, he said: you, her, all the others. Is unfailing good luck the sign that I’m marked to be squashed by some folklorisch goblin who gets boys with healthy active loving hearts? They found that they liked each other’s company and preferred it, even, with the practical exception of a lover she ran across again and retook up with, a young mechanic whose only charm, au fond, was a member the heft and decidedly the shape of a cucumber weighing a kilo, and on Sander’s part several unengaged engaging girls who after a gin or two, some tricky foreplay, and sticky kisses, gave well enough of their virtue and cunning furrows. They told each other of these conveniences, sometimes in clinical detail. They liked dining together at a nearby hash house, economically the great Dutch sandwich and bowl of soup that keep student soul and body together. A slashing rain one afternoon coupled them until dusk. She was in from lectures, soaked. He, toweled and dossy from a like wetting, pondered her grouse that she had to change and get wet again to be laid by the komkommerlijk young mechanic who confided in her more than she cared to know of the sweetness of carburetors and the timing of points, and offered a solution which would keep them both dry, warm, and fucked. His words. The rain conspired with a richer torrent, blinding the windows, tearing in a spate off the roof. She was, with perfect timing, peeling off her panties at the moment, and stood there laughing fit to kill in long socks and bra only. He pointed out, good old serious Sander when his heart is in what he’s doing, that nobody in the apartment house believed for a minute that they were brother and sister, and thought them naive in offering so moss-covered a wheeze, right down to the old salt of a janitor, who had repeated sister several times and remarked that it was sweet wherever you could get it. She laughed the harder, stumbling over taking her socks off. Unhitch my bra, she said, you’ve uncoordinated me utterly. All very well, geliefd Adriaan, but have you ever kissed a sister? That’s the eery part: I mean the tongue down the throat and painting the inside of her cheeks with your slobber and the ear smooching and nibbling and teats. All the rest is pas de problème, that’s just girl the world over, and the zigzig is as good as with anybody ever, we’re very good at it, championship class and improving, but we’re getting to be lovers, if you see what I mean. I knew this when she left a note one afternoon saying she had run across Cucumber who’d pleaded he could come a liter just by looking at her and drooled over her so ruttishly that she’d gone off to a hotel room with him, and put at the bottom of the note psychologically healthier. Did I see red! Did I gnaw my vitals, and roll in self-pity and jealousy, renouncing all girls forever as shameless sluts, and threw in renouncing sex as well. Her, or nobody! What saved her from getting biffed in the eye and being thrown out of the apartment to peddle it on the docks was that when she got back, latish, in the full dark of my blackness, she said as soon as she got in, wholly unruffled, that he wasn’t nearly as good as she remembered, impressively hung stud as he was and could flush out a cow and smelled of motor oil, and would I hurry and jam her the way she was used to, and don’t finick at being second. For her, fourth. So Comrade Adriaan, there it all is. Have I shocked your back teeth loose? Have I undone all the civilizing you magicked into me? Am I a barbarian lunk all over again? All I will say, I said, is that you have a talent for establishing communities of two that exclude the rest of the world. So do you, he said. What if you make a baby? Raise it and fuck it, he said. We’re that depraved.

  His snookily raked new slip rode under the huckle and skimped his behind. Makes, he said, my downspout poke forward. I remark that it is a well-fadged fellow now, however obstinate an outlaw when on end and ranting. Which got me a goofy smile and flaunted display, nutbrown, with the plump sleekness of one that has done itself proud as le grand seigneur.

  Drawings, a whole pad of them from the rucksack. The rascal has real talent. Why haven’t I seen your work before? I asked in amazement. Never thought about it, he said. Only done it. You think I could ever be good at it? I say yes. Max will want to see these. Max Keirinckx. You just missed him. You know him? My oldest friend. He’s Bruno’s father, though not by Margareta his present wife. Bruno, Sander said. And then in a kind of awe and honest uncertainty: I’ve heard, well, things about you and Bruno and his wife. Around the university. Several different versions, so they can’t all be true. I know nothing of your life, your past, the people you’ve loved. I’m envious.

  Drawings of Grietje superbly rendered, some as if by an unripe and hesitant Degas, some as surehanded and mannered as Schiele. Several self-portraits, impossibly good-looking. The best are of mute objects, sneakers and socks, a geranium done in colored pencils, a sweater over a chair, saucepans and lettuce on a table. Something sweetly puzzling about them. I’m constantly amazed at the young being able to do improbable things spontaneously: play guitars, banjos, and recorders by ear, get the hang of a dance step perfectly in a matter of seconds, begin to speak another language in a week. But drawing, no. All children draw, abandoning the talent as they abandon dolls and blocks. They must come back to it as a man exiled in infancy finds his way back to a country he cannot remember. I draw all sorts of ways, he says. Like whatever I see other people doing. I can do Picasso stuff: you just skew things around, like copying somebody’s handwriting. Why, I ask again, have you kept this talent unmentioned? Your lines are sure, decisive, economic, expressive. You think I can draw? he asked with genuine surprise. Of course you can draw, you silly dolt. I’ve always drawn, he said, long as I can remember. I spent my childhood drawing and jacking off, jacking off and drawing. Considering what I drew, the two were the same. Most of it, except for the occasional ship or airplane, had to be destroyed as soon as I’d drawn it. You’re bottomless when it comes to disclosures, I said. And each more wonderful than the one before. When am I going to hear it all?

  21 MESSIDOR

  Like a field of tulips and lilies to see, like a babble of horns and geese to hear, like dogs and horses to smell, like happy puppies and wiggling piglets to hug, like licorice and dusty caramel to taste, the Little Hordes tumble down from their ponies, IX Kabibonokka on detail. The korporaal, whose haircut is sugarbowl, torso bare, trig faded jeans with fly fashionably open thirdhand from three elder brothers, linen boots of Mongol cut, proceeds to the barracks of the Tourbillon Georges-Marie Guynemer in what he hopes is a military stride, to report to Sergeant Jean-Christophe, who is fifteen. He gives the salute of the Hordes, grimy hand flat against his dirty forehead. Jean-Christophe returns the salute with two negligent fingers to a bored eyebrow. The porcupines have marched, the badger setts are in order, the stupid chickens have been fed and their eggs gathered by the Young Vestals, the Caledonian boars have had their acorns and garbage, and some mush points garnered along the way. Jean-Christophe, annoyed but conscientious, opens his ledger. Mush points for what? The korporaal gives them: they kissed all the sissies in the Bande Oncle Joseph Fourier. They were policing flowers down in the Quartier Rousseau. They didn’t want to be kissed, and in the best interest of the Harmony ought not to have been kissed, but IX Kabibonokka needs the mush points. Kissed how? Affection for thurifer cherubs, regulation which’s whatissiz, cheeks, corners of mouth
, ears, bellybuckle, dick, with two good squeezing hugs. Six of them, and mine had a snotty nose. Give you ten extra for that, says the sergeant with a sympathetic cluck. That’s 610. Then, the report goes on, we invaded Grandpa Florien and climbed all over him and listened to him for half an hour. Give you five hundred, says the sergeant. Better knock off fifty, says the korporaal, if you’ll give me fifty back for absolute honesty: Jean-Luc fell asleep and Martin got the giggles. No deal, says the sergeant. You’re an aspirant, aren’t you? Haven’t you just turned twelve? What are you opting for in the Striplings? The Spartans, says the korporaal with a blush bright as a poppy. And, staring at the toes of his boots, asks if Jean-Christophe likes him enough to have him for a comrade. Eye to eye! Jean-Christophe bellows. All Spartans talk with full eyelock. The question is repeated with an unflinching gaze. I’ll think about it, the sergeant says. It’ll mean going tritone, as I’ve started inside with Julie, and I’m about a million points short of champion with the Zebra Marshal, who’s determined to hit pentatone major before he’s nineteen. So what else are you reporting? Found Madame Orlons’ cat for her, carted away the quagga flop from the Avenue Jonathan Williams, where the Nasturtium Spadgers had a parade. Jules and Freckles loved each other in the Jardin Public, and some people came and watched. Any points for that? Give you fifty: that’s composite, I suppose. Your name’s Auguste, isn’t it? Come here, he says in Porcupine. (They have been speaking in the argot of the hordes and bands. Porcupine is used only by devoted friends and bedmates, but is appropriate for a fifteen-year-old to use to a twelve-year-old who is an aspirant to the Sparticate. It spread from the Porcupine herds, who begin their apprenticeship as Cherubim, and became a favorite language for affectionate assurances and proposals, and is used for tender moments even among twenty-year-olds, who consider it chic. Porcupine is always spoken with noses touching, eye to eye. This is Porcupine minor. Porcupine major presses genitals together as well.) Come here. And just as they are wucking and snuffling nose to nose and Sergeant Jean-Christophe is parting his fly, in comes the Police. Sergeant! Sergeant! Jean-Christophe stands and salutes Capitaine Lucille of the Flowers and Grammar Patrol, in charge of Bon Ton for the district. She is eleven, wears the white peplon with blue sash of the Angelicat, and sparks flick in her eyes. Sergeant! Do you realize that there are ponies in the road eating hollyhocks on one side and roses on the other? What is more, there are two of the dirtiest boys I’ve ever seen making love in the middle of the road. You there! she screeches at Corporal Auguste. Are you the hetman of these barbarians? Oui, Mademoiselle la Capitaine, says Auguste with a snappy salute, the correctness of which is botched by his pizzle still poking out of his fly.