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

At the inn, waiting for supper, I stole the liberty of looking into the landlord’s office. Whitewashed and splendidly provincial, it was hung with wineskins and strings of red onions, a sheepskin, baskets, fishing canes, straw hats, and, curious to note, a mask of some character in a play, a godly face with elegantly curled hair and beard. From the ceiling hung a cage of plaited grass in which the household’s pet cricket sat folded up, waiting for the night.

We had goat for supper, with a soup of barley and scallions. Pyttalos found an herb in his wallet and broke it into his soup.

— For old age, he said, with a wink at Lykas.

I have sweetened my life with many far places, but I think none was more quietly congenial than the town of Elis. These were the streets which I now watched with their dogcarts in which matrons under parasols rode with the aplomb of Tanagra figurines, with their moustached promoters carrying game cocks under their arms, with their troops of brown athletes walking on the balls of their feet beside their trainers, superbly indifferent to the gaze of the girls’ faces behind every curtain of beads, to the appraisal of the Spartan eye, and the higher appraisal of the Corinthian and Platonic stare, these were the streets that Pindaros had trod. Pythagoras had been here, and the philosophers Thales and Anaxagoras. Simonides, too. Even Diogenes, it is said. Hippias was born here.

We sat after dinner with our landlord Aristander and passed the evening with pleasantries. I asked if the tomb in the market which an old man had told me was that of Oxylos was not that of the ancient king of the Eleans.

— Who knows? he said. Is it not written somewhere?

— It is, I said, but one would expect a more prominent monument.

He expressed regret by opening and closing his hands, as if to apologize for the inexplicable remissness of the elders and archon of Elis.

— Probably too stingy to put up a proper stone, he said.

— Was he a god? Pyttalos asked.

— No, I said. Merely a king.

— As, Aristander said confidentially, were many of the gods that we now count among the immortals.

— So the philosophers say, I said, letting him know that I detected the source of his opinions.

— Graveyard talk, Pyttalos said. Because the gods have not come to their dreams or favored them with a showing—here he opened his ancient hands—they think there are no gods.

— I have heard the bull-roarer, Lykas ventured.

— My great aunt, Pyttalos went on, as if Lykas had not spoken, saw a centaur once. A philosopher came all the way from Epidauros to ask her about it. She was picking dandelions for a salad, a woman with no luck, born in a thunderstorm, and with a cast in her eye. Picking away, she was, and humming, most likely, as was her way, a hymn to the Lady, she was very religious, and looked up, and there in the broad daylight was the centaur. She bolted like the grandmother of all jack rabbits. She screamed all the way home. She went through briars and over walls, and looked as if she’d fought a lynx when she turned up in the yard, scaring everybody out of remembering their own names. For a week she kept to her bed, living off broth.

— To us she said it was wild and awful, deinós. When the philosopher came she said it was noble and religious. She cried as she told him about it, as if she’d seen the Lady or Maia.

I looked at my hands, my dusty feet.

— Did the centaur speak? Lykas asked.

— She didn’t say, dear soul, Pyttalos sighed. She wouldn’t have remembered a word if it had. Or would have added so much to what it said that the philosopher would have been there a week taking it down.

— Did she really see a centaur, Pyttalos? I asked.

— Who knows, he said. My grandfather saw Zeus.

Aristander looked into the wine jug.

— He was an eagle, Pyttalos continued. He spoke.

— An eagle talked! Lykas said.

— An eagle who was Zeus, I said gently.

Landlord Aristander pulled at the lobe of his ear and sat straighter.

We had to wait to hear what Zeus said while Pyttalos enjoyed his power to hold our attention. I passed him the wine bowl. He sipped and smoothed his whiskers.

— Grandfather Hippagoras, that was his name, was physicking the ass, sticking a turpentine and onion bolus down it. Cyrus was the ass’s name, and there was considerable give and take in the business, as Pappa Hippagoras and Cyrus were both stubborn, and both famous for having their way. He had just got the bolus in and was on his knees holding the jaws of the ass closed with both arms, and it had just swallowed its medicine, with a kind of spasm in which, with a little more energy, it would have pulled its head off and jumped to Olympia, the eagle—Zeus—flew by and said, Fine do!

— Fine do! Lykas repeated.

Aristander seemed disappointed.

— He knows his animals, you see, Pyttalos explained.

We spent the evening talking of many things, the price of wool and wine, the games, the stars, the dilatoriness of the Roman bureaucracy, the wiles of tax collectors, until there were few people abroad in the streets, and Aristander was yawning politely behind his hand, Pyttalos openly, and Lykas had gone to sleep, his head on his shoulder.

Next day we said our farewells to Elis and set out on the road to Kyllene, the port of Elis on the Ionian. It has a good harbor, faces toward Sicily, and is a hundred and twenty stadia across the plain.

As we left the west gate, there ran by us a line of weary boys, jogging, naked, dull with dust. Their fatigue was evident in their ribs and eyes. They had run many a stadion, and breakfast was still before them. Had I