Apples and Pears

by Guy Davenport

  Sander talks to free his eye and hand for drawing. Keirinckx, too, likes to draw and talk. Grietje says: this whole story shows what a selfish pig you are. But I’m not, Sander pleads. Am I, Adriaan? Adriaan is platonisch. Sort of, in his way.

  14 THERMIDOR

  Grand loneliness. A walk around the island, copper flakes winking and jiggling on the sea, the larches red, the pines Tuscan brown. Mosses silvery black, woolly grey. Nebulae of gnats in blurred light. A sense of duur, of seamless time, the seasons, the years. Gathered various small agrestal flowers, weeds no doubt, complex tight buttons, for the vase on my desk.

  Xronos and Eros, our age and youth, were in their proper paideuma Time and Love. They are both wavilinear. Love, like time, is a medium, for nothing would be beautiful, no day sweet, or time a gift rather than a burden, without euphoria and benevolence, wavelengths in love’s spectrum. Leonardo: the beauty of things lightens our hearts.

  Out and around the island at the exquisite hour as Sander and Grietje said they needed to bounce on the bed. Aankweken, Grietje’s word, with wicked laugh. Looked in after a half hour and they were still fucking their brains out. Bevallig. A gold of bracken in moss and rock. Saffron thistle. Skeins of mist smoking on the sea. Was watching a bike of gnats when Sander bellowed from the slope. Pulling a sweater over his head, his cock scrumped and shiny wet. Come home, he said, having a pee. Grietje, doing jumping jacks and counting them, hit fifty and said she was going to make us a superior supper. She’s always like that, Sander said, after getting laid.

  15 THERMIDOR

  TAFELBLAD: Dundee Orange Marmalade jar with goldweed, the aryballos, Schillebeeckx’s Jezus, coffee cup, pipe, pinecone, can of pencils, the mail, Sander’s sketchbook (three profiles of Grietje, each a continuous line), bottle of ink, pebbles in a Japanese bowl.

  GRIETJE, charmed by the aryballos, comes up with a blue ribbon from her kit to serve as a strap, and hangs it around Sander’s neck. Not quite, she said, the scarf and slip clasp of a padvinder, is it?

  The colmar, or late burgamot, the winterlong green pear or landry wilding, la virgoule, the poire d’Ambrette, the winter thorn pear, the St. Germain, the St. Augustine, the pound pear, the Spanish bon chrêtien, the wilding of Cassoy, the Lord Martin pear, the winter citron or musk orange, the winter rosselet, the gate pear of Poictou, the Bergamotte Bugi or Easter Burgamot, the Cadillac and pastourelle.

  Peer, bij, braamstruik. The series of pear growers begins with those who enjoy challenge and variety. To them goes the cultivation of quinces and sortes bâtardes dures. The aileron ascendant works with hard cooking pears. The ascendant wing: crisp pears. Pivot of the series: juicy luscious golden mellow pears. Descending wing: poires compactes. Aileron: mealy pears. Rearguard: nèfles et sortes bâtardes molles.

  Avant-garde: boys for whom pears are missiles, Biblical scholars for whom the word quince (enta in Hebrew) glints with poetry, housewives with the character to make quince jelly.

  Aileron ascendant: Cézanne, practical grocers, hill people who like things with substance and durability.

  Aile ascendante: adolescents learning the taste of the world, girls who pride themselves on having different eating habits than their brothers or younger sisters.

  Pivot: Dunoyer de Segonzac. Gide. Matisse. Patient voluptuaries, for even these pears must be wrapped in paper and put away awhile to ripen to their mellowest. Bees and wasps, for whom the fallen ripe pear, slightly fermented, macular with nectary brandy-flavored sprits and bruises. Keats, Rubens, Poussin.

  Aile descendante: Vintners, distillers of alcools, Spinoza, people who admire nature’s organization more than its prodigality.

  Aileron descendant: millers, Protestants, those who have accepted spiritual deprivation and made a virtue of it, sentimentalists.

  Arrière-poste: spoiled brats, gourmands, procrastinators.

  Oxen under the yellow perpendicular of noon, hares in the blackberry bramble, bees in the quince. A trembling silence. August a young man browned by the sun, straw-hatted, loosely mantled, barefoot, under his arm a basket of pears, plums, and apples. Grietje in a long blue towel, drying herself after a dip in the afternoon sea, eyes muscadine purple silvery with laughter, breasts tight and pointed. The little musk pear, or supreme. The Chio, or bastard musk pear. The Hasting, or green chiffel. Sander brown-straked with blue shadows from the larch, wet hair drying wild. I play a Corelli sarabande on the flute. The red muscadell, the little muscat, the jargonelle. A blue sky! Grietje says, I thought the sun would never make it. The god Pan with his pipes. She spread her towel in the sun and lay naked. The Windsor pear, the orange musk, the great blanket and long-stalked blanket. Why, says Sander ruffling my hair and knuckling the back of my neck with a wet fist, is Mijnheer Pan overdressed for the last fine day of the year? The musk robin, the musk drone, the green orange. Autumn a Braque Ceres with wicker panniers of gourds and wheat. Sander on all fours straddles Grietje, up to mischief. She tickles him mercilessly in the armpits, he collapses onto her, she traps his neck between her shins and drums on his behind. The cassolette, the Magdalene, the great onion pear. They wiggle and wrestle, slippery wet, until Sander allows himself to be bested. The August muscat, the rose pear, the summer bon chrêtien, or good choaky. Sander with a fish flop frees himself, and stalks on all fours to where I sit crosslegged, music book on the moss before me, a gigue of Bach. He butts me in the midriff, pushes me backward, unzips, unseats, and drags off my trousers. Wat leuk! says Grietje. Snatch off everything. Between being so furry and having such een aantrekkelijk lichaamsbouw, Adriaan makes you look like such a gawk, Sander brother. Peel him spiernaakt. Which he does. The salviati, the rosewater pear, the russelet. Let’s do something untellably silly, Grietje says.

  The great mouthwater pear, summer bergamot, the red butter pear, the autumn bergamot, the dean’s pear, the long green or autumn month water pear, the white and grey Monsieur John, the flowered muscat, the vine pear, the rousseline, the knave’s pear, the green sugar pear, the marquis’s pear, the burnt cat or virgin of Xantonee, Le Besidery, the flat butter pear, the dauphin, the dry martin, the villain of Anjou or tulip pear or great orange, the amadot, the little lard pear.

  16 THERMIDOR

  Morning coffee on the high rock, the air warm and sweet. Grietje wearing Sander’s studentenpet cockily, my blue shirt unbuttoned, and floreted French underpants, said out of the blue that she knew who she was, had never properly known before. That’s awful, said Sander, kissing her nose. Are you going to tell us who? Of course not, she said. One thing you are, said Sander, is a girl dressed just like that on the far right of the long canvas that has Adriaan and the littles on the far left, and in the middle goes old Fourier on a quagga. In floppy Mongolian trousers, with Chinese boots, a Gypsy shirt, a rakish freebooter’s felt hat with a lilac scarf around it that hangs down his back to the quagga’s rump. The first canvas they’re to see is Hansje stitchless holding an apple in one hand, a pear in the other. Then Saartje with her armload of autumn flowers. Then the ten long pastoraals with their people and animals and moths and pumpkins. Then the portraits and still lifes alternating. And at the end the big one: Adriaan with the littles sitting and climbing all over him, Fourier in the center, Grietje in flowery little pants, open blue shirt, and my student cap, on the right, weight on left foot to get a slant of hip and contra-posto shoulder, right arm gesturing, or about to gesture. Meaning what? O, said Sander, everything. Everything good.

  Erewhonian Apple, New Harmony Pear

  17 THERMIDOR

  He trumpets through cupped hands, the boy standing hipdeep in the Seine at Asnières in Seurat’s painting, a water god sounding a conch, a French child imitating the foghorn of a paquebot, a Wind from the corner of a map bellying the sails of a galleon with Favonian trades.

  Arion calling to his dolphin, young Triton rallying nymphs. His bell hat, the color of a tangerine, matches his bathing drawers, bought by his mother at the Bon Marché or Samaritaine, la mode being the vernacular common to
the middle class, their identity and coherence.

  An admirer of the hat can have one just like it, must have one just like it. To frolic in the river on a Sunday afternoon, he has shed a cotton nautical blouse, tight gabardine culottes, a sous-vêtement combinaison tricot de corps en coton, socks, hightop button shoes.

  1884, this painting, the same year as Thomas Eakins’ Swimming Hole. Four years before Pater Hopkins wrote his poem about a summer bevy of bellbright boys with dare and with downdolphinry in earthworld airworld waterworld thorough hurled all by turn and turn about.

  1884 is also the year Huckleberry Finn was published, with its river idyll of Neger Jaap and Huck on their raft. Why this moment a century ago of sudden pastoraal found in reality, not a quotation from the neoclassical? And Coubertin and Henri Rousseau, the rebirth of games.

  Geestelijke gezondheid is de conditie die in fysiek, intellectueel en emotioneel opzicht een optimale ontwikkeling van het individu toelaat, volgens de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie, opgesteld in 1948, voor zover deze verenigbaar is met die van andere individuen.

  Woke to find Sander in my Finnish reindeer and Lapps cringlecrangle sweater and briefs, making a fire. I slept in the camping bedroll, sound as a block of teak, so’s they could have the bed, where they fell asleep after a charitably curtailed sighing, humping, and grunting.

  Grietje, peeping from under the covers, blew me a good-morning kiss, and pointing to the snooked-out crop of Sander’s onderbroekje, said: woof! He only wants to pipi, said Sander, making a face. Here, he said, throwing her my raincoat, come along and you can pee with us.

  Come, Adriaan. So we three went onto the porch in fog and drizzle, Grietje squatting under her tenting of the coat, Sander and I shoulder to shoulder, crisscrossing our streams. You two! Grietje said. Indrukwekkend, Adriaan. Dare you, said Sander to us both, stripping.

  We threw clothes through the door and ran to the sea, the shock of it exhilarating. It bites! Grietje cried, and Sander showed off by swimming out and doing porpoise dives. Back inside, blue around the gills, we toweled down before the fire, tingling and fresh, happy.

  From every one of the four regions

  of human majesty

  there is an outside spread without

  and an outside spread within

  beyond the outline of identity

  both ways

  an orbed void of doubt

  despair hunger thirst and sorrow

  Here the twelve sons of Albion (that is, humanity) join in dark assembly, jealous of Jerusalem’s children (the imaginative, those who have kept what Fourier calls the flame), become wheels turning upon one another into nonentity, murdering their souls, building a dead city.

  The outside spread without is the world, the outside spread within is the perceived (Rilke’s taking in of essence, as a bee gathers nectar, to be made into the honey of memory). The outline of identity is Wittgenstein’s eye, field of vision on one side, vision itself within.

  Blake’s grief is for things seen flat and empty, without their charge of spirit. Jerusalem is the imaginative frame in which things exist in an harmonic wholeness. A Shaker chair must be worthy of an angel’s visit. A Rietveld table is a philosophical statement in a discourse.

  Lovely body, Grietje’s, her sex virginly sparse of hair, her legs and butt coltish and trim. Sander dried her roughly and affectionately, buffing and kissing. And combed her hair, whistling, having wrapped her in a blanket before the fire, himself as naked as the day he was born.

  He assumed the Finnish sweater for breakfast, thoughtfully giving me his ratty cardigan. So this is it, Grietje said, where wild boys are civilized. You even taught Sander manners. I said I only put him to work. We finished building this cabin together, the two of us alone.

  We brought every plank, nail, brick, dish, and pot from the mainland. The windows and doors were readymade. The chimney is our masterpiece. It was all so much fate, that whole summer. Tomas, Sander’s favorite doctor, told me that he had a completely disoriented boy on his hands.

  A boy who, he felt, needed normality in great heaps and doses, and I said I could use a strong back here on the island. I convinced Dokter Tomas that I’d had experience in the feeding and care of other people’s children, and he handed over to me one Alexander Brouwer.

  Who was one of the most mixed up people I’d ever seen. I was scared, Sander said, fussing about pouring coffee, setting plates, tossing us rolls, poking up the fire. Scared, gone to earth, afraid to be alone. The Finnish sweater left him homerisch naked from hipbone to toe.

  This is my brother? Grietje asked, charmingly lost in Sander’s jersey and jeans. You’ve made a street dog into a cottage cat. If he had on britches he’d pass for civilized. O no! said Sander, making rabbit teeth at her, the style here on the island is according to Fourier.

  The idiot philosopher Karel Marie Frans Fourier, in whose design for the redeemed world you dress to please your friends. Grace and beauty tickle Adriaan’s particular eye. In our summer we spent whole days bare assed. What, said Grietje, do you two do? Something wildly lovely.

  O but nothing, said Sander, or almost nothing. I was crushed when I got it into my bone head that Adriaan doesn’t give a hoot whether I’m the handsome knaap I am or a weaselfaced drip with mouse meat. It’s my soul he loves, God help us, not my blue eyes or big long hangdown.

  I protest that Sander had just contradicted himself. Sander’s soul, Grietje said, if he has one, does tend to nip back and forth between his big blue eyes and horse peter. It has a weakness for the latter. Not horse, said Sander, donkey. Or quagga maybe, Fourier’s steeds.

  Once sun and work had healed his bruised spirit, Sander was desperate for affection. The body is an animal and at his age it was a puppy. Still is, she said. Don’t explain it, Sander said. It was lovely and sexy and friendly and wonderful and like nothing ever before.

  You don’t know this charmer, Grietje. Imagine you’re a donkey with a donkey’s simple hankering to have its head knuckled, its ears scritched, its tummy stroked, its butt patted. I don’t think I’m up to hearing the details, Grietje said, except that I absolutely must.

  Spare me nothing. Oh, bear hugs, Sander said, and nuzzlings and pawing and squeezing. All I know is that I needed it and had no notion what we were doing, no words for it. But O how I hugged back! That was the sweet nuttiness of it, as it still is, ragdoll and teddy bear.

  A big rough sprawling shameless romp, and the delight that made me blubber and laugh together was that I could accept it as just that, even though my scheming mind was as rich in lechery as a rutting girl on her back being fucked blind, with a whole football team waiting its turn.

  I’d come in from nipping around the island. Adriaan was writing his things there at the table. I sauntered in and while unlacing my sneakers, which was all I was wearing, I offered him my body, brassy as a hustler. He smiled. The bastard smiled. Didn’t even look at my dick.

  I really honest to God don’t think he knew what I was talking about. Ongelooflijk! The smartest, most understanding friend I’d ever had, and there he was revealed for what he was, an idiot. I mean, he’d patted me on the behind when I got the carpentry straight, hadn’t he?

  And squeezed me around the waist to say goodnight, and fluffed my hair, and swapped sexy adventures while we worked or lay in the sun, and he was perfectly understanding when after weeks and weeks I couldn’t stand chastity any longer and jacked off half of a night.

  This, deliriously good, at the other end of the island, not noticing that it was raining frogs and herring. How was I to know that I could have done it right here by the fire, as I did afterwards, or that he would spell my hand in one of my longplaying endless orgies?

  So in that first roll and hug I was snakenaked and my generator rigid as a lead pipe, but my kameraad here was in borstrok and jeans, which, considering my helpless evidence of affection, seemed unfair. I’m waiting, said Grietje, for Adriaan’s version of all this bragging.

  After the first wallow,
Sander went on, rolling like bear cubs squeezing the breath out of each other, butting like calves, winded and laughing, I wriggled his shirt off, and with him helping, got him out of everything, hairy as a bath mat. Het was reuze!

  We went back at it, silly as halfwits, and my black heart thumped doubletime when there was evidence, as against my leg, of my friend’s humanity, a decidedly stiff, unphilosophical, sporting and proud humanity it is, too, making me saucier, fresher, and much happier.

  If I was going to disgrace myself I had already done it. May I tell it all, Adriaan? Grietje offers to wring his neck if he doesn’t. But all I’m telling, Sander said with open hands and big honest eyes, is that we learned how to have fine long friendly fits of affection.

  No questions asked, no rules to break. Making us friends forever. He’s a great philosopher, Max Keirinckx says so, I’m going to be a great painter, famous as far away as Belgium, collected by bald Americans and jetset Japs. He is Adriaan, I am Sander. Beautiful.