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

— It’s all in knowing how to tie the knot, he had said.

And now the awful silence had found him. Aside from the word gnocchi and the observation that there was a mouse in the tree, he had said nothing all day.

The evening was coming on cool and sweet. Our meal was set out on a long table. Pound sat at the head, Steve and I along one side facing Olga Rudge and Massimo. The conversation was about certain experimental film makers, in whom Massimo was interested, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Gregory Markopoulas, Smith, Bailie, Anger. Pound plucked the back of a hand already raw. Suddenly he looked up, glared, and spoke.

— There is a magpie in China, he said, can turn a hedgehog over and do it in.

His rusted hand lifted his wine to his frizzled beard but he did not sip.

Massimo shot a glance my way.

— Where in the world did you learn that, Ezra? Miss Rudge asked.

He put his wine back on the table. He sighed. One hand clawed at the knuckles of the other.

— I found it, he said, in Gile’s dictionary.

Miss Rudge smiled at me.

— We’ve been reading your Archilochos. Ezra says that you drew the decorations as well.

The conversation changed over to translation. I tried an anecdote about Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and his stout refusal to believe that Sappho was anything but a sound wife and mother of good family.

— Wilamowitz! Miss Rudge said. He was the handsomest man in Europe in his day.

— There’s a restaurant down in Rapallo, Pound said, where Nietzsche inscribed the guest book. The padrone knew who he was and asked him to write his name. They still show it. It says: Beware the beefsteak.

— Ezra, Miss Rudge said, taking a bottle from her purse, it’s time for your pill.

His face fell. She handed him a small tablet.

— Take it with your wine. Right now, so I’ll know if you’ve had it.

Pound closed his hand around the pill, tight.

— Please, Ezra. What will these young men think? They adore you. They’ll remember these days as long as they live. Do you want them to remember that you refused to take your medicine?

She did not say that Massimo’s father was Pound’s doctor, and that there would be criticism from another quarter if he didn’t take his pill.

Massimo asked about Jack Smith. Pound talked about a profile of Natalie Clifford Barney that some artist had made with a single hair pasted onto paper. He had found it among his plundered possessions after returning to Italy.

— But it had come unstuck in places and didn’t look like her anymore.

— Ezra, have you taken your pill?

He glared at her.

We talked about Sartre’s Les Mots, which Pound had said he was reading.

— The very beginning is like a page of Flaubert, I said.

— Perhaps, Pound said.

We talked about William Carlos Williams, the Biennale, Greece, Hugh Kenner (such an entertaining raconteur, Miss Rudge said), words (Ezra has been trying to remember the Spanish for romance), scholars (It’s their wives who are such a trial), Tino Trova, John Cournos, photographers from Life who had run wires all over the apartment in Venice until the furniture looked like the Laocoon, the olive crop, Michael Ventris.

— Ezra, you really must take your pill.

His fist tightened.

It was fully night, and we had had a long day. I asked to be allowed to pay for the meal.

— Never, said Miss Rudge.

No waiter was in sight and I got up to go in search of one.

— No, Miss Rudge said. This is our treat.

She was up and away into the trattoria before I could see any sign of a waiter.

As soon as she was out of sight, Pound uncurled his fist and popped the pill into his mouth, washing it down with a swallow of wine.

— Time to hit the hay, he said.

Miss Rudge returned with the padrone and his wife. There were handshakes and farewells.

— Ezra, have you taken your pill?

He did not answer. He glared at us all. Both his hands were obviously empty.

We exchanged knowing glances, Massimo, Steve, and I. Miss Rudge graciously did not ask us if he had taken his pill. We did not offer to say that he had. It was a trying moment.

We drove them to the house where Miss Rudge had lived twenty years before, to which she was now returning. We said our goodbyes in a room where Pound’s cot was neatly made with an American Indian blanket. The pillowcase was of unbleached linen. Ernst’s Blue stood against the wall.

— Addio! he used to say. Now, anguish in his eyes, he said nothing at all.

The Invention of Photography in Toledo

BITUMEN OF JUDEA dissolves in oil of lavender in greater or lesser densities of saturation according to its exposure to light, and thus Joseph Nicéphore Niepce in the year of Thomas Jefferson’s death photographed his barnyard at Chalon-sur-Saône. Hours of light streaming through a pinhole onto pewter soaked asphalt into lavender in mechanical imitation of light focussed on a retina by the lens of an eye.

The result, turned right side up, was pure de Chirico.

Light, from a source so remote that its presence on a French farm is as alien as a plum tree blossoming upon the inert slag of the moon, projects a rhomboid of shadow, a cone of light. A wall. A barn. Geese walking back and forth across the barnyard erased themselves during the long exposure.

Foco Betún y Espliego, the historian of photography, spends several pages sorting out the claims of Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel and Nicéphore Niepce to the invention of photography and decides that the issue cannot be resolved without more evidence. Herschel, the discoverer of The George Star which Fourier the philosopher and Joel Barlow, in his unfinished epic on the Erie Canal, called the planet Herschel, and which is now known as Uranus.

A small town safe in its whereabouts, Titus Livy said of Toledo. It sits on a promontory at a convergence of rivers.

Has not a silver cornet