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

in the last few days. It was phenomenal. He strode ahead of us all up the salita, swung himself onto the yacht like a sailor, walked the streets of Rapallo as soldierly as a major general on parade.

They swam around him like dolphins. Miss Rudge kept hailing me back to the pier.

— He won’t listen to us, I said. He keeps swimming farther out. I’ve told the boys not to leave him for a second.

— Tell him to come back!

I didn’t want to say I might as well command the Mediterranean to turn to lemonade for all the good it would do, so I raised my eyebrows and looked hopeless. She nodded her understanding but insisted again that I make the attempt.

Meanwhile he was well out into the offing, going great guns, straight out, flanked by Steve and Massimo. I had the awful feeling that their presence merely egged him on.

And at lunch he had been stubborner. We went to a place he had eaten in for years. The waiters made on over him. The proprietor came and shook hands. But when it came to giving an order, Pound fell into his silence. Miss Rudge cajoled. The waiters understood. We kept up a screen of talk to fill in for the silence after the repeated question as to what Pound would fancy for lunch. He would neither say, nor answer yes or no to suggestions.

— Well, then, Miss Rudge said cheerfully, you do without your lunch, don’t you, Ezra?

He was anguished, terrified, caught. Then we all became helplessly silent. His head sank deeper between his shoulders. His tongue moved across his lips. He spoke in a plaintive whisper.

— Gnocchi, he said.

When I first knew him, years before, at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, he was not yet the immensely old man that I would eventually have to remember, old as Titian, old as Walter Savage Landor, glaring and silent, standing in gondolas in Venice like some ineffably old Chinese court poet in exile, flowing in cape and wide poet’s hat along the red walls of the Giudecca.

But in those days his beard and hair were already white. He wore an editor’s eyeshade, giving him the air of a man who had just come off a tennis court. He had come instead from a cell. He would have letters from Marianne Moore in a string bag, letters from Tom Eliot, Kumrad Cummings, Achilles Fang, together with a battered and much-scribbled copy of The Cantos, and food for the squirrels, who knew him, and ventured close, their necks long with hope, their tails making rolling whisks.

And in those days he talked.

— Billy Yeats, he closed his eyes to say, is most decidedly not buried under bare Ben Bulben’s head, did you know?

We did not know. He gave us a look that implied that we did not know anything.

— The story goes this way. WBY was parked temporarily beside Aubrey Beardsley in the cemetery for Prots at Roquebrune, up above Mentone, in which place there resided a certain exile from the old sod, her name escapes me if I ever knew it. When, therefore, the only naval vessel ever to leave Hibernian territorial waters, a destroyer which I think constitutes the entire Irish Navy, made its way after the war to reclaim Willy’s mortal remains, it was met by whatever French protocol and then by the lady exile, who asked the commander if he had an extra drop on board of the real whisky a mere taste of which would make up for centuries of longing for the peat fires in the shebeens, and for the Liffey swans.

— Most naturally he did. Moreover, the captain and crew accepted the lively lady’s invitation to her quarters somewhere up the hill between Mentone and Roquebrune, bringing along with them a case of the specified booze.

— Dawn, I believe, found them draining the last bottles. The full litany of Irish martyrs and poets had been toasted at this festum hilarilissimum, Lady Circe had danced the fling, the Charleston, and a fandango native to the Connemara tinkers, and the honor guard that was to dig up Willy and bring him with military pomp down the old Roman tesselated steps, presumably with pibrachs squealing and the drum rolling solemnly and without cease, and a flag displaying the shamrock and harp whipping nobly in the breeze, were distributed about the lair of the lady like so many ragdolls spilt from a basket.

— Well, and well, some deputation of frog officials turned up, the press had wetted its pencils, and there was nothing for it but that the gallant crew shake a leg, exhume Billy Yeats, and mount the distinguished coffin on the prow of the destroyer, where, flanked by handsome Irish guardsmen, it would sail to old Ireland to rest forever, or at least until Resurrection Day, in Drumcliffe churchyard.

— They did, shall we imagine, the best they could. If the ceremony lacked steadiness, nothing untoward happened until they had the stiff in the jollyboat headed across the bay. The French Navy boomed a salute and the local filarmonica tootled an Irish tune, and well out in the offing but far short of the Irish Navy, the jollyboat, Willy Yeats, and the convivial crew capsized.

— They sank.

— The French, well, the French were étonnés, and made haste to fish them out.

— But they couldn’t find Willy. The Irish were beyond trying, having been drowned two ways, as it were, and the frogs shrugged their shoulders.

— Never mind, they decided. The coffin of state into which they were to put Billy was on board, so they simply moved it up to the prow, hoisted the flag, rolled the drum, and steamed away.

— Billy being still there, at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Mischief had danced in his eyes. He tied a peanut to a string and dangled it at arm’s length. A squirrel ventured toward it, hop a bit, run a bit, stood, and got the peanut