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

to time that you could see the pickelhaube on his bandaged head, the swallow-wing moustache, the glint of disciplinary idiocy in his sweet eyes. He was Guillaume, Wilhelm. Forms deteriorate, transformation is not always growth, there is a hostage light in shadows, vagrom shadow in desert noon, burgundy in the green of a vine, green in the reddest wine.

We passed a city that like Richmond had chinaberry trees in the yards of wooden houses hung with wistaria at the eaves, women with shears and baskets standing in the yards. I saw a girl with a lamp standing at a window, an old Negro shuffling to the music of a banjo, a mule wearing a straw hat.

Joyce sat at a kitchen table in the first compartment to the right, a dingy room, as you entered the fourth wagon-lit counting from the locomotive and tender. His eyes enlarged by his glasses seemed to be goldfish swimming back and forth in a globe. There was a sink behind him, a bit of soap by the faucet, a window with lace half-curtains yellowed with the years. Tacked to the green tongue-and-groove wall was a Sacred Heart in mauve, rose, and gilt, a postcard photograph of a bathing beauty of the eighties, one hand on the bun of her hair, the other with fingers spread level with her dimpled knee, and a neatly clipped newspaper headline: A United Ireland and Trieste Belongs to Italy Says Mayor Curley at Fete.

He was talking about Orpheus preaching to the animals.

— The wild harp had chimed, I heard him say, and the elk had come with regal tread, superb under the tree of his antlers, a druid look in his eye.

He described Orpheus on a red cow of the Ashanti, Eurydice beneath him underground making her way through the roots of trees.

Apollinaire stuffed shag into a small clay pipe and lit it with an Italian match from a scarlet box bearing in an oval wreathed with scrolled olive and wheat a portrait of King Umberto. He tapped his knee as he smoked. He batted his eyes. King Umberto looked like Velasquez’s Rey Filipe.

— My wife, Joyce says, keeps looking for Galway in Paris. We move every six weeks.

There came to Orpheus a red mouse with her brood, chewing a leaf of thoroughwax, a yawning leopard, a pair of coyotes walking on their toes.

Joyce’s fingers were crowded with rings, the blob of magnified eye sloshed in its lens, he spoke of the sidhe turning alder leaves the whole of a night on the ground until they all faced downward toward China. Of creation he said we had no idea because of the fineness of the stitch. The ear of a flea, scales on the wing of a moth, peripheral nerves of the sea hare, great God! beside the anatomy of a grasshopper Chartres is a kind of mudpie and all the grand pictures in their frames in the Louvre the tracks of a hen.

Our train was going down the boulevard Montparnasse, which was in Barcelona.

— How a woman beats a batter for a cake, Joyce was saying, is how the king’s horses, white and from Galway, champing in their foam and thundering against rock like the January Atlantic, maul the sward, the dust, the sty, the garden. Energy is in the race, handed down from cave to public house. Ibsen kept a mirror in his hat to comb his mane by, your Norse earl eyed his blue tooth in a glass he’d given the pelts of forty squirrels for in Byzantium, glory to Freya.

Apollinaire was showing his passport to a guard who had come by with the conductor. They whispered, head to head, the conductor and the guard. Apollinaire took his hat from the rack and put it on. It sat high on the bandage.

— Je ne suis pas Balzac, he said.

We passed the yellow roofs and red warehouses of Brindisium.

— Ni Michel Larionoff.

— Whale fish, Joyce was saying, listen from the sea, porpoises, frilly jellyfish, walrusses, whelks and barnacles. Owl listens from the olive, ringdove from the apple. And to all he says: Il n’y a que l’hommequi est immonde.

Somewhere on the train lay the Lion of Judah, Ras Taffari, the son of Ras Makonnen. His spearmen had charged the armored cars of the Italian Corpo d’Armata Africano leaping and baring their teeth.

His leopards had a car to themselves.

When we rounded a long curve I could see that our locomotive bore the Imperial Standard of Ethiopia: a crowned lion bearing a bannered cross within a pentad of Magen Davids on three stripes green, yellow, and red. There was writing on it in Coptic.

We passed the ravaged and eroded hills of the Dalmatian coast, combed with gullies like stains on an ancient wall. There was none of us who looked at the desolation of these hills without thinking of the wastes of the Danakil, the red rock valleys of Edom, the black sand marches of Beny Taámir.

From time to time we could hear from the car that bore Haile Selassie the long notes of some primitive horn and the hard clang of a bell.

Moths quivered on the dusty panes, Mamestras, Eucalypteras, Antiblemmas. And O! the gardens we could see beyond walls and fences. Outside Barcelona, as in a dream, we saw La Belle Jardinière herself, with her doves and wasps, her sure signs in full view among the flowers: her bennu tall on its blue legs, her crown of butterflies, her buckle of red jasper, her lovely hair. She was busy beside a sycamore, pulling water out in threads.

— Rue Vavin! Apollinaire said quite clearly, as if to the car at large. It was there that La Laurencin set out for Spain with a bird on her hat, an ear of wheat in her teeth. As her train pulled out of the Gare St. Lazare, taking her and Otto van Waetjen to the shorescapes of Boudin at Deauville, where we all boarded this train, where we were all of us