Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

was clay, perhaps in a river. Some craftsman, the potter I suppose, has painted a horse on it, a kind of duck or goose, and some zigzags and stars. Has anything of mine survived? I signed my name over and over. I was never politician enough to kill my enemies, they are great sources of fame. My name must be in a list somewhere. Some schoolmaster will say my name to little boys on their benches.

I escaped a lot of the meanness of the world. I was not a slave or a tax collector.

My wife and her moustache all the depilatories however astringent could not remove rarely haunt my reveries, though I wonder sometimes with a memory as of the knives if she will ever join me here in the swirls of pollen between the two plies of the cloth of light that adheres to all the surfaces of the world. That is where I may be. It was always the outside of light I saw alive. I am most certainly now on the other side. The back of orange is brown. The back of yellow blue. But I may be between the outer and the inner film.

Sometimes when the campagna is hazy with wagon dust and twilight, rain clouds blackening in the north, I see lizards the size of elephants clumping through ferns as big as oaks. They go on their hind legs in a hopping glide, holding their forepaws out like women crossing the street. Their eyes are little and stupid, their tails as long as a ship. They gobble and honk.

I go into a nettle when I see them, peering out through the fuzz. I have mentioned them to the Consiliarii, who say they cannot see them, and praise me for my gifts, and question me as to what I mean by the word size. I have given up trying to explain. A dog is smaller than a horse, I tell them by way of illustration. They smile and look at each other in wonder.

OUR MADMAN has made himself a ragdoll from scraps of cloth, sticks, and bits of twine. He hangs it around his neck while we swing the picks, and cuddles it at night. His eyes are as lost as the exiles’ eyes on the island where there was no water, eyes that were fearful of a bush, of the sun, of footsteps from behind.

What to a child is a tor blue in its own shadow as the light goes level but the humped house of the old steganopodous lar himself whose grin all grizzle and whose pounce illotis manibus are why there are hearths in the world at all?

Habitarunt di quoque silvas collesque. What elves are the gods that we should forget to shiver when they crack a stick in the frost outside the house? Children are not the wolves that men become, if they had a grandmother worthy of the name.

I’ve admired the ragdoll of our madman, who watched me for five puncti together, looking for the spite. He hid the doll in his tatters, but next day he motioned me over with an idiot smile. He was nursing the doll at his bosom.

— We must be so careful, I said.

— Sice sicuti! he sputtered, crouching to look sharply over his shoulder.

I look into his eyes and know that madness is not the way I shall go. I am damned to sanity and to hope. I have seen her again whom I’d never hoped to see. I have seen wildflowers in the wall after they put us on the waterless island to die as best we could. Fortuna moves with fire in her left hand, water in her right. Discovery is always more than what you meant to find. You look for a woman to bake your bread and be delicious in your bed and you find patience and kindness. You look for truth and find strength. I looked for water and found C. Musonius Rufus. I lost him, I think, in the galleys coming out, perhaps in the windowless jail before. Perhaps I had never found him at all. The imitation of a man who found Rufus spoke with the tongue of the shills and panders around him, saw as they saw, lost hope as they lost hope, threw hope away with the abandon of the self hater. Fortuna was a whore, what doubt could there be of it? Cleanthes and Zeno! Had they ever been closed in the bilge of a Roman galley, had they been abandoned on a rock in the Aegean? They had never seen human beings indistinguishable from the gutter rats of Rome.

We talked murder, to drink the blood. We armed ourselves with sticks and rocks, making territories. I found an overhang of rock that I could be under part of the day. The tide of our sea is very shallow, but it was enough to fill my shelter.

In the part farthest back of this little inlet the sand was whiter, finer. I thought how if I were a child I would delight in that clean place under the rock, in the translucent green shelf of cool water over the sand. Jagged stone in hand, I kept one eye on the rise above me, one on the hollow. How long had I seen a burble in the surface of the thin water where it slipped as shallow as papyrus over the sand?

IL RICORDO DELLE ANTICHE PROVE FREME NEI CUORI, COSÌ COME L’IMPETO VERSO IL FUTURO!

La Banda Municipale Filarmonica di Rapallo stood at parade rest in front of the flag of the Motherland, the standard of Genoa, and the bandiera fascista. An honor guard in black shirts, jackboots, and alpine hats stood behind the flags, carbines on the ready. The bandmaster mopped sweat from under his chin. For the fortieth time someone had hushed their chatter and horseplay to say that they heard the automobiles.

— Adesso!

— Finalmente!

NON BISOGNA CREDERE E FAR CREDERE ALLA FACILITÀ DELLA GUERRA: SAREBBE