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

two fish in the stars. There are four kinds of women, pobu, whose wombs are shaped like beans and who have malformed children unfortunate to behold, a grief.

There are women with a vulva like an antelope’s foot who bear twin boys, women with a double womb who have twins of different sexes, women with wombs like the crabgrass spiral inside its seed who have twin girls. These are all the kinds of women.

XXIX

There are three kinds of men, men with a short thick mentula, men with a mentula like a lizard’s head, and men with a fine long mentula. Our fields are our shrouds. We will be catfish when we die and return to Amma. We are silent at night, lest we stink.

In sixty of Ogo’s burrows are hidden the sixty ways of being. We know twenty-two of these: the world, villages, the house for women during their periods, the house of the Hogon, the granary, sky, earth, wind, and animals who have four feet.

Birds, trees, people, dancing, funerals, fire, speech, farming, hard work, cowrie shells, journeys, death and peace. The Nummo’s face is leaves and flame. The other thirty-eight ways of being are all that stand between us and Ogo.

They shall be known in time. They are like the young shepherds who have not been seen for weeks in the village, who have gone away in discipline, and who come all unexpected to dance Ogo’s dance. Long before they come we hear their drums from afar.

We hear the smith’s drum and the armpit drum. The drums speak to the Nummo, for the Nummo. We will have been hearing the drums a long while before we see the young men in their bloody skirts leaping in the first light, wearing Ogo’s bonnet.

They wear Ogo’s bonnet and pipe in his thin voice. The unshown things will be revealed to us slowly at first, and dimly, as in a mist at dawn, an awakening and a coming, but suddenly and swiftly at the last, like a loud stormwind and rain.

Everybody was on the streets, men, women, children, soldiers, priests, nuns, we saw two nuns being helped into a tree from which they would be able to see. And we ourselves were admirably placed and we saw perfectly. We saw it all.

We saw first the few wounded from the Invalides in their wheeling chairs wheeling themselves. It is an old french custom that a military procession should always be preceded by veterans from the Invalides. They all marched past through the Arc.

They all marched past through the Arc de Triomphe. Gertrude Stein remembered that when as a child she used to swing on the chains that were around the Arc de Triomphe her governess had told her that no one must walk underneath.

XXX

Her governess had told her that no one must walk underneath since the german armies had marched under it after 1870. And now everyone except the germans were passing through. All the nations marched differently, some slowly, some quickly.

The french carry their flag best of all, Pershing and his officer carrying the flag behind him were perhaps the most perfectly spaced.

The Haile Selassie Funeral Train

THE HAILE SELASSIE Funeral Train pulled out of Deauville at 1500 hours sharp, so slowly that we glided in silence past the platform on which gentlemen in Prince Alberts stood mute under their umbrellas, ladies in picture hats held handkerchiefs to their mouths, and porters in blue smocks stood at attention. A brass band played Stanford in A.

We picked up speed at the gasworks and the conductor and the guards began to work their way down the car, punching tickets and looking at passports. Most of us sat with our hands folded in our laps. I thought of the cool fig trees of Addis Ababa and of the policemen with white spats painted on their bare feet, of the belled camel that had brought the sunburnt and turbaned Rimbaud across the Danakil.

We passed neat farms and pig sties, olive groves and vineyards. Once the conductor and guards were in the next car, we began to make ourselves comfortable and to talk.

— Has slept with his eyes open for forty years! a woman behind me said to her companion, who replied that it runs in the family.

— The Jews, a fat man said to the car at large.

Years later, when I was telling James Johnson Sweeney of this solemn ride on the Haile Selassie Funeral Train, he was astonished that I had been aboard.

— My God, what a train! he exclaimed. What a time! It is incredible now to remember the people who were on that train. James Joyce was there, I was there, ambassadors, professors from the Sorbonne and Oxford, at least one Chinese field marshal, and the entire staff of La Prensa.

James Joyce, and I had not seen him! The world in 1936 was quite different from what it is now. I knew that Apollinaire was on board. I had seen him in his crumpled lieutenant’s uniform, his head wrapped in a gauze bandage, his small Croix de Guerre caught under his Sam Brown belt. He sat bolt upright, his wide hands on his knees, his chin lifted and proud.

A bearded little man in pince-nez must have seen with what awe I was watching Apollinaire, for he got out of his seat and came and put his hand on my arm.

— Don’t go near that man, he said softly in my ear, he says that he is the Kaiser.

The compassion I felt for the wounded poet seemed to be reflected in the somber little farms we passed. We saw cows goaded home from the pasture, gypsies squatting around their evening fire, soldiers marching behind a flag and a drummer with his mouth open.

Once we heard a melody played on a harmonica but could see only the great wheel of a colliery.

Apollinaire could look so German from time