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

when he ran a little theater on the Via Scortilla where he was to be seen in a beaked mask, tail feathers on his butt, castanets on his fingers, dancing in the street to a music played by boy drummers and a fat whore with a tambourine who was so heavy that she had to be carried in a litter by slaves with gilded eyelids.

God, what an ostentatio. From that he came to this, no doubt by ways as mazy as Roman streets.

— Help me dig, and keep quiet, I said.

He hopped down beside me, hot as a stove with fever, and plunged his stringy arms into the sand. His one eye had horse terror in it, unblinking and staring. It was a bawdy eye in its day, eloquent of suggestion, when I had seen him cavorting in his feathers like an ostrich with piles, luring customers to his cellar where he presided as master of ceremonies over sottish musicians whose flesh was the color of lead. They played what they called antique Greek music while one of the boys humped a miserable old nanny goat, and the hippopotamine whore, she of the tamborine, danced the shimmy, and Caepoculus did the act for which he had a certain vogue. He lifted his tail feathers and farted in various styles announced beforehand in a solemn voice. A cultivated swain easing a squeak of sewer gas past the attention of a hera. A senator inadvertently punctuating his bombast with garlicky trumpetings. A poet’s lyric toot while in rapture. A judge’s authoritative peditum. A Christian’s pious hiss. Imperator Nero’s thunderous role and clap.

I remembered my geology, I remembered wells, the nature of earth, the evidence of the weeds, which were richer over my nook of the island than elsewhere. My hands bled, my nails tore. I had to stop Caepoculus and teach him how. I made a hole so deep my arms were in to the shoulders to get the next scoop of sand, wet sand, wet sand.

We damned the inlet with what we dug out, adding rocks for strength. The sea could not slosh in.

That is my shield against the Gorgon stare when the drums beat and the awful trumpets blow for the day’s work in this monster of a ditch. I slog off to the latrines, to the messline, clanking in step with my brothers along the chain, to the great gully the sides of which are deep enough to make twilight of its bottom. For I am Rufus.

We found water.

I DO NOT KNOW where I am. I live in the oak Volscna, who is a thousand years old. Trees are people I have learned. There is too dark a difference between me and the animals. I cannot understand what they are doing, so busy all the time.

But trees like me, I think. I can hang from their boughs like a pear, an olive, an apple. They eat light. Volscna tells me tales, old, old tales. He remembers when elks were the kings of the world. He remembers the Etruscans, who watched the lightning with him. He has seen the sun black at noon. He calls me one who moves in winter.

I have been with ships on the sea, so far that the horizon is water all the way around, I have flown with the kestrels to their nests, I have been down to the bottom of the sea and watched spiders frail as hairs walking through forests of coral. The Consiliarii have abandoned me. I go by feel. I long to know the animals, to whom I am a stranger, perhaps forever.

In the oak Volscna I can lose myself in leaf after leaf, where light is fermented and all smells of a sharp green, in the mellow brown acorns, in the mistletoe. I can get close to the owls when they are asleep. At night we watch the stars, Volscna and I, the moon and the planets.

The Wooden Dove of Archytas

INTO THE EYE of the wind it flew, lollop and bob as it butted rimples and funnels of air until it struck a balance and rode the void with a brave address. We all cried with delight.

My name is Aristopolites, called Trips. One of a wheen of tanlings enrolled in the gymnasium, where we learn to double the volume of a cube, chart harmonic proportions, wrestle, saltate, construe Homer, and sing, we also learn that the universe runs by strict laws which are at the mercy of chance.

The wooden dove was culver trim and very like, no gaudy anywhere about it. Its eyes were painted on, a circle with a dot inside, larger than natural, so that it goggled like an owl. It even had cronets made of byssus of the penna that splayed between its toes. It was the gazingstock of Taras for days before it flew. When important people came to see it, our handsomest oxboy would bring it on the flat of his hands, like Cora with the pomegranate, padding with his toes turned in. We littles, whose pizzles are no bigger than the gaster of a wasp, as the lizards tease us, were not allowed even to touch it.

When its works were explained to us at school, I told at table that Archytas the Pythagorean had made a wooden pigeon that could fly. Mama said I was neglecting my squash, Pappos crinkled his eyes, which is his way of laughing when his mouth is full, and Pappas asked how, by the cullions of Hermes.

— By steam, I said.

— By steam, Pappas said, to himself, the way you repeat something you want to remember.

— Out its bung, I suppose, he added, wiping honey from his beard and licking his fingers.

— Not only that, I said. The steam is going to be compressed inside, and will turn cogs with ratchets that will flap the wings. Most of the steam, it is true, will hiss out from under the tail and shoot the dove forward.

Pappos grinned with