Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  Chirico’s Pears (1918).

  Kameraad Alexander: Woef! We do well, the island and I, and the nattering terns and quarreling kestrels, and thank you for your ruttish scrawl on a filleted shopping bag. De jongeheer Cupido has rather made his hammock in the pouch of your onderbroekje, hasn’t he? Members, in het algemeen gesproken, of that pod-dwelling family run loose even here to hassle what they can. While I was having a contemplative walk around the island this morning de Heer Eros and his cousin de Heer Pothos dropped down, who knows from where, one on each shoulder, with old tales from years ago when my friend Piet and I used to come to the islands in a kayak. No voice has ever shouted among these foggy rocky pine islands that groot Pan is dood, and we ran wild and naked, browned by the northern summer sun. Greek these urchins spoke, with a lisp like Alkibiades, and teased me with laughing pagan eyes. One hugged, arms around my neck, legs around my waist, smelling of sage and dry grass. The other, after some puzzlement with the zipper, undid your jeans I was wearing, liefje Sander, and with deft tickles bunched my balls tight as an apple. But, and when, and later. I remember a piece of buttery crumbly cake at Sarlat, years ago, and with no Danes or stunned Americans.

  Ass bray is to cockcrow as an esterházy of kettledrums a haydn of trumpets a sousa of bugles is to quagga whinnock.

  Coffee by the fire, schetsboek, pipe. Out trouserless in Sander’s denim shirt with musky essence of Sander underarm and a doggish kindly seasoning of Sander overall.

  In the crowd swirl around the Beaubourg the boy on the train who was reading Proust. Eyes still bright with attention, still rabbit innocent. White duck tennis shorts, buff jersey with spare white collar, sandals. Blue butt pack like a scut. I’m pretty certain I’d seen him once before, on the Metro, in lively conversation with agemates.

  22 MESSIDOR

  Silver is sleeping gold. Finch and larch are awake in a world other than ours. How, in the awakened dark of light, do these binaries occupy the same space? They do, they don’t. Awareness extends, and over real space, but does not occupy or exhaust the space it fills and traverses. Ten species in one territory inhabit ten different worlds. Ten people in a room are in ten rooms.

  Pewter and frogspawn green, the sea.

  Adriaan! The caves, the caves. There’s a hotel here in Les Eyzies, as per the front of this card, called the Cro-Magnon Annexe. The food, the food. Actually, I long for a bowl of good Dutch vegetable soup. Sander has gone bonkers over our Danes. I’m not left out, oh no, but the postman’s eyes are already out on stems. Sander’s sketchbook is, as you’ll see, a sight. Ad interim, Grietje.

  What can be learned has already happened, in quanta which, like the frames of a film, are discrete, perhaps independent, but which seem to flow in a continuity and seem to be a series of causes and effects. Thus we imagine reality to be of a piece, whereas every evidence that can be tested shows it to be discontinuous and incomplete.

  Roger de la Fresnaye gives Guynemer in his portrait of him the heroic frown of Rude’s figures on the Arc de Triomphe and large Picassoid eyes of intense concern. In Henry Bordeaux’s biography the eyes are mentioned first. His two older sisters and his mother thought them beautiful, and kept his girlish hair long well beyond the age for it. As with Rilke, another garçonnet en jupes, he was whisked one decisive day to the barber (who wept). Little Guynemer said, Now I’m a man. Anakreon’s haircut poem:

  Your bunched curls so crisp

  around your slender neck

  are clipped and lie scattered

  in ravaged handfuls, in heaps

  on the black ground. Poor hair!

  Laid waste by the scissors.

  What grief I suffer to see

  you close-cropped, like a calf.

  And nothing can be done about it,

  nothing at all.

  Roger-Viollet’s photograph shows the same handsome brown French eyes. La Fresnaye’s brother built the Nieuport in which he spiraled to his death at Poelcapelle. The crash was into a battle. Before Germans or English troops could find out if Guynemer were alive in his coucou (as the brash devils called their planes), the field where he lay was churned by three days of artillery fire and no trace of plane or aviator was ever found. He was almost twenty-three. The official war records credit him with shooting down fifty-three German aircraft (he learned to dance his plane around in a victory jig after he had made a hit). The French, giving him the doubt for the plane he was dueling with when he fell, credit him with fifty-four. He was too underweight for the infantry, and got into the air force by going to Pau as a mechanic, where they called him the girl. He and his gunner, younger than he, came into a canteen after a foray, and were seen by a general who was unfamiliar with the squadrons. When told that they were aviators, he boomed, Mon dieu! this war is being fought by children. He was tubercular. He wanted to be a mathematician after the war. At the height of his heroism he threw away unanswered all letters except those from schoolboys. He spent his recesses at the lycée rollerskating. His first plane was a Blériot.

  The silk darts into the labyrinth. 1886, Hugo de Vries in the flower market, a basket of wild primroses like no primroses he has ever seen. His mind brims with Darwin, Wallace. By what tediously slow process did this primrose come about? He breeds primroses, goes through gardening books, botanical papers, finds a forgotten paper by a monk, one Brother Gregor Mendel, who charted generations of sweetpeas. The series distributes the harmonies, attractions and destinies standing in exact proportion.

  On his one-seated Nieuport Guynemer painted his device: Faire face. Even before Verdun he wore the Croix of the Legion d’Honneur, and in parade dress at twenty-one, still a sergeant, he sported the yellow ribbon, the red, and the green War Medal with four palms. At Verdun the Germans attacked for the first time in squadrons of eighteen planes together, new types with machine guns firing through the propeller: Albatros, Halberstadt, Ago, Mercedes, Argus, Benz.

  23 MESSIDOR

  Sartre’s consciousness is not what it is, it is what it is not follows the Rilkean structure of outward perspective streaming inward, light being a neural event in the mind, the actual world being dark. Sander cries and stomps No! Light is not light only in the eye. Light is real. We argue wonderfully, going into leaves, which eat light, and the feel of light on the skin, with its melanin, and rudding response, and uncorridored space hung with fiery stars. And all pitch black, I say, except in the mind. Ik denk andersom, afschrikwekkend filosoof!

  In the unfailing cooperation of accident and design one or the other must be a seamless continuum. If design, then Michelet’s vision of harmonic unity is true. If accident, then Fourier’s vision of universal yearning of a torn and disintegrated nature for harmonic unity is true. Nature is the extension of seed generating a membrane of cells whose destiny was to be metamorphic, synergetic, inventive, adaptive. Michelet’s symbol for this viscous progress was the copulation of Isis and Osiris in the womb, one organism differentiated into male and female. The same blood pulsed through their embranchments of veins as thin and as blue as the phloem of violet petals. Osiris’ pink fingertip, gelatinous palp sheathed in transparent skin around transparent bone, found Isis’ clitoral tip pelagic under its pellicle as fine as a gnat’s wing, as rich a nucular perplexity as the bud of his standing met. Their mouths joined, rose-petal tongues twined and rolling. Elf ears. Eyes of gazelle fawns. His finger floats away, her calyx hand guides his peniculus in, and the three-month-long orgasm begins at the meeting of thrust and hunch, a suffusion of light through honey, spreading like music along every course and nest of nerves.

  Pietro Crescenzi wrote his Opus Ruralium Commodorum at Villa d’Olmo in Urbizzano ten miles from Bologna, continuing the work of Columella, Cato, Palladius, Varro centuries before. Rosemary against the moth, borage against depression, convolvulus against constipation, the rose against earache.

  Ome Adriaan! Alexander and Grietje Floris when they get back from Frankrijk soon are going to draw us, Saartje and me, in a picture poodlenaked togethe
r Mama says. They’ve sent us lots of postcards of prehistoric animals. When can we visit on the island? Your affectionate nephew Hans.

  24 MESSIDOR

  In The Madonna and Child in the Enclosed Garden with Sint Catharina of Alexandria, Johannes de Doper, Sint Barbara, and Sint Anton Abt (de Meester van Flémalle), Barbara offers a pear to the Christus. A pear balances an apple in the Washington Crivelli Madonna and Child. The pear is a symbol of the Incarnation; the apple, malum (both evil and apple in Latin) is a symbol of the Redemption, the cherry of Heaven.

  Hoffding followed de Vries into the maze. He talked with his friend Christian Bohr, whose son Niels listened. Everything is a variant of a nonexistent norm. Only the discontinuous individual exists. Individual, nothing, individual, nothing.

  Adriaan! Een brandpunt. What’s the opposite of droomgezicht? I mean when you’re widest awake, furthest from deepest asleep. At Les Eyzies, across the road from the museum up the cliff there’s a little dirt road we walked along, our Danes and us, and there in a grassy meadow was a tree, a youngish pear I think, and while I was looking at it I remembered Redon’s delicate lithograph and Leonardo’s drawings of plants and quivery trees, and that Engelsman Palmer, and all the Impressionists doing naked light spattered on leaves and grass. But this slender tree all by itself at the edge of this meadow, near the road, was all mine, and spoke to me, you know what I mean. I was stirred up by the flints and bird bones up at the museum (their spooks are fetuses, ja?) and Tom was making a poem right there in his notebook, saying that the word pity must be put near the words leaf and seed, and we were all kissing each other strolling down the hill, to scare some houten Americans (it never fails), and as we got to the road there was a troop of French boys in driehoekig slipjen and brown as peperkoek singing back to their campsite, with yellow and blue pennants on staffs, exciting both Grietje and Tom. And then this slim young tree. Why was it so sweet, so perfect? Tell me. We’re headed back. I’m going to paint till I drop. None too soon, as Grietje’s giving Pier and Tom ideas about girls, and I’m getting seriously confused by the allen zonder onderscheid, jolly as it is. Spoedig, spoedig. Sander.

  And, as ordered from Museum Replicas, a sixth-century BC Athenian athlete’s ceramic oil bottle in the shape of a penis en balsak, de voorhuid modestly pursed to a tip, scrotal seam in raised definition, the funiculus of a pericarp, the frenal hilum a ridgelet between dimples, the onderschacht neatly vascular. Handle to the bottleneck for securing a thong.

  Four sacred games: Zeus Apollo Palaimon Arkhemoros: Olympian Pythian Isthmanian Nemaian: whose victors wear wild olive coronets apple leaves celery sprays pine branches.

  25 MESSIDOR

  Bastille Day. Six Phantom Jets over the Arc de Triomphe like the great wind at the end of time, two streaming red trails of smoke, two white, two blue, their vibrant booms going through us into the ground. Some sprightly pomp of a Renaissance march from all the lampposts. Tricolor bunting and flags everywhere. And pouring rain. I had my London Fog and umbrella. We’d put Sander into a Prisunic green plastic poncho, with hood (from which his handsome face looks out soldierly) and zippered kangaroo pouch in front, made in Taiwan. And a fig, from two Dutchmen, for falling water. Giscard d’Estaing came by in a jeep driven by a general. Weapons carriers, tread-mounted eight-inch howitzers, field guns, a hundred tanks each painted with the name of a battle, from Roncevaux to Dien Bien Phu. This was Leclerc’s armored division. Les Pyramides. Solferino. Ypres. Agincourt. Marne. Passchendaele. Strasbourg. Quatre Bras. Berlin. Fuck war, said Sander. Infantry, cavalry, a pontoon bridge in sections, field kitchens, the Parisian Fire Department, its twirling lights flashing.

  Lunch in Chaillot, under an awning, rain splattering at our feet. Mucked about a bit, and decided to give up and go back to our hotel lobby and watch the Tour de France on TV. Raining on them, too. Several cyclists took nasty spills on curves, spinning all over the road. Sander drew cyclists in his pad, and swimmers at the Olympics.

  26 MESSIDOR

  Tweede jongelingschap. O my. De herdersgod Pan, zoon van Hermes en een nimf, stalks in the larches, and his garden cousin Eros mousles here, tigging and throppling his piddler. This racketry from some outback of the will, coming in from the country, like, and welcome, why not. Coffee on the rock, notebook, Sander’s gamy denim jacket, shed for the sun’s warm kindness, his shared broekje, about to be shed.

  Salsify the root of goatsbeard.

  Greek gymnos does not mean our naakt, but unarmed. Eros, whose parsnip of a sathon jutting over his quince of a scrotum was as presentable as his hyacinth cluster of curls, was naked when he’d laid aside his bow and quiver. There’s a poem in the Anthology in which he’s gymnos but carries under one arm a dolphin and under the other a basket of flowers, emblems of sea and land, of all.

  27 MESSIDOR

  The sun! And from Sander: This place swings! This of the end of a long walk on the Left Bank, through markets and narrow streets, sitting awhile in the Luxembourg (quel beau garçon, a frank old lady said to me of Sander), strolling along all of the rue de Seine, then along the river. At the Quai du Louvre we went down to the embankment toward the Pont Alexandre IIIe. Not until we were down along the high wall were we aware of so many people out taking the sun after such a long spell of rain. A woman of years, doughy of flesh, very Francis Bacon, was spread in our immediate path, horrendous in a bikini. Next, a man my age had shed his clothes, which lay stacked beside him, and was soaking up the sun in briefs poked up by an obvious erection. He likes the sun, Sander said. Then a boy and girl in their underwear stood against the wall, hip to hip, mouth to mouth. Two more teenagers lay on the cobbles, thirstily kissing, wearing skimpy bathing togs, the boy’s being an inadequate container in the circumstances. I thought we Dutch were unrestrained in our parks, Sander said, but we have much to learn from the French. And then a charming curly-haired boy, twelve I would guess, in sweater, jeans, and expensive rainboots of soft leather, Lappish of toe, leaning on a stanchion, watching something with amused interest. He was, as we soon saw, watching two boys about Sander’s age. The one lay on the cobblestones of the quai, hands behind his head. His shirt was off, folded beside him. His jeans were unzipped and open on a rich pubic bush, and his lean torso was thick with hair across his chest and along the midline, whorled around the navel. He was watching his friend with a concerned smile, who was standing braced against the quai wall, his shirt open, dark blue corduroy jeans unsnapped and off his hips and on the fly enough to allow his hand inside, masturbating with a steady deliberation. His eyes were intent on his friend reclined in front of him. They both of them seemed well bred, good-natured boys, kempt, washed, and neat. It was impossible not to stare, especially as they were oblivious to people walking past, camera-wrapped Americans hastening by, others having a good look, the curly-haired boy studying it all with big round grey eyes. Have we, said Sander, seen what I think we’ve seen? He gave his crotch a hitch and pull. The sun has driven them mad, I said. It has been raining for weeks, with one sunny day in seven. But that’s the real knuckle, man, to do it right there with your buddy before you. That’s the way I’ve wanted to live all my life, and nobody’s ever let me. Ask the good Dokter Tomas, the brow wiper. That’s how I got turned over to you to be civilized. It’s all wearing off. At the Pont Alexandre I said, Let’s go back. This is like the mimes I’ve been seeing, but from a hardier playwright. Wait a bit, Sander said. That kid knows how to make it last. Is he going to come down his pants leg?

  We did not, in the event, go back. We explored further up the river, seeing some girls smooching and holding hands, more sunbathers in scantling briefs, and a boy mother-naked when we came in sight, pulling on a pair of jeans. He was with a bargeman in arrears with shaving who sat on a bench, shuffling his gumboots and batting his knees with his hands, merry as a grig. The boy was laughing, too. I’d have to study for years to understand these people, Sander said, but they seem to enjoy being the French.