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

XXIV

Mr. Beckett in the Closerie des Lilas lit an Henri Winterman cigar and sipped his Irish whisky. Joyce, he was saying, had first lived somewhere around Les Invalides when he and Nora first came to Paris. They moved, it seemed, every month thereafter.

This was Nora’s doing. She was trying to find Galway in Paris, I think. A charming smile softened the hawk’s gaze that we knew from photographs. He wore a tweed jacket, old and mended, corduroy trousers, and black turtleneck sweater, and socks.

The socks, we knew, were unusual. His briefcase on the table bore the initials SB above the clasp. Joyce, he said, liked the epigraph from Leopardi on the title page of his Proust because il mondo could be made to sound like the French immonde.

É fango il mondo. The sentiment flowed back and forth from Italian to French, declaring that the world is nasty. We had remarked at Les Invalides that here was the Napoleonic museum in the opening of the Wake and the riverain of Napoleon’s will.

And the concealed Stephen in past Eve and, and he smiled again at God knows what memories of the alert blind face asking the Greek for this and the Gaelic for that, the ringed fingers tip to tip. He’d a letter from Lucia in England that day.

Jarry with his powdered face had sat in this room, sipping Pernod with the dour Gide. Picasso had sat at these tables drawing caricatures of Balzac and Hokusai. Here Ford and Hemingway corrected the palustral proofs of The Making of Americans.

You must understand, Becket said, that Joyce came to see that the fall of a leaf is as grievous as the fall of man. I am blind, Ogotemmêli said, opening a blue paper of tobacco with his delicately long wrinkled fingers, his head aloof and listening.

Tobacco gives good thoughts. We are all blind in relation to Amma. You must go into the caves where the contents of Ogo’s ark are painted in tonu. There are shepherds who will take you. You must see the shepherds when they dance in Ogo’s skirt.

They wear the masks and bloody skirts and make the drums speak. I shall never see them again, except in my mind. The dancers come from afar. They have been away for days. They enter the bounds wearing the masks of creation. They wear the granary and the ark.

XXV

They wear the ark of Ogo and the granary of the world and the skirt of the earth bloody from Ogo’s rape. We fire the Frangi rifles. Our hearts are light, our hearts are gay. It is a funeral and a birth. The eight families of drums begin to beat at dawn.

The Hogon in his iron shoes is with his smiths. The Lébé serpent is to dance for us again. The sun is bright and hot upon the granaries. The altars run with blood. We cry with joy. The calendars are right, the great calendar of the sun, the yazu star.

Venus, said Griaule. And, said Ogotemmêli, the calendar of sigi tolo. Sirius. Once Ogo had hastened creation and wrecked it, the world needed uguru. Another ark had to descend from heaven. All had to be reorganized, redone, reset in their ways, made over.

This was the work of the nummo anagono, the catfish. The nummo were in the placenta that Ogo had not stolen. They were twins. The mud-wiggler catfish, nummo anagono titiyayne, would be the victim, by his own wish, the sacrifice, the redeemer.

He is the beginning of sacrifice. Our altars are in quincunxes because that is the way his teeth fell when he submitted to disintegration. First he was separated from the umbilical cord by which he was attached to Amma in the collarbone.

The cord lay across his penis, which was cut away with the cord. It is now in the sky, the star Sirius, spindle of the world, the pole, the hub. The blood from this severing became the stars. Their spiral is the turning of the world. O greater than acacia!

Greater than Dadayurugugezegezene’s work, greater than Ogo’s work! The sperm spilt from the testicles of the Nummo became the male waters of wells and rivers and springs and the female water of the sea, the great ax of the rain in its season.

The sperm became the dugoy stones which are the twins of the grains, the cowries, and the catfish anagono sala. These six things are in the crabgrass seed. The Nummo, to organize the world half made and crazy, circumcised Ogo and made the sun.

The sun is Ogo’s foreskin. That is his female twin whom he can never approach, for the fire of the sun is intolerable to be near. As the sign on earth of the sun, the lizard nay is Ogo’s foreskin. Foreskins are female. It is chaos we slice away in circumcision.

XXVI

When we circumcise we take the chaotic element from the male, the female part of the male. We are born into Ogo’s world, and our work is the Nummo’s, to organize. We are nummo in the womb, an unborn child is a catfish, anagono, and when we die.

We are born crazy, full of mischief, like Ogo. From the woman we take her clitoris, from the man the foreskin. The sun is woman, the moon man. Sirius is the center of the sky, and around him there circles a star you cannot make out with the eye.

The center of the earth is the crabgrass seed. Balance of quinces, basket of oranges. Alice, tell me, tell me, Alice, how so settled a soul as I can be so giddy about la gloire. About what? says Alice. La gloire. You have it, says Alice, whatever it is.

Wilbur Wright flying around the Statue of Liberty and then up the Hudson over all those warships and dipping down to receive the hoot of the Lusitania’s whistle, c’est la