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

it! Look at that haystack, that windmill, that Schloss. You can see greenhouses. Have you ever been taken so by the paralleleity of light?

We saw red and gold circus wagons on the turnpike, followed by elephants, each holding the tail of the next with its trunk.

Did Nietzsche go up in a balloon? After Nietzsche, as the wag said, there had to be Walser. Did Buonaparte? I tried to feel like each in turn, to lounge like Nietzsche, blind and postured, with some lines of Empedokles for Fräulein Lou, to pout my corporation like the Empereur, pocket my fingers in my weskit, and think Caesar.

But, O Himmel, it was Count Rufzeichen I wanted as a ravaged and outraged witness to my Ballonfahrt. It was as an orphan under his roof that I came nearest to belonging anywhere at all, except here, perhaps. Perhaps.

I arrived at his estate sneezing and ruffled a wild blustery day that had reddened my ears and rolled my stovepipe hat before me. Why Benjamenta had specified a stovepipe hat for going off to one’s first position will be known only at the opening of the seals. To catch my hat I abandoned my cardboard suitcase to the mercy of the rain, which went for its seams. In the hat was my diploma, signed and sealed, from Herr Benjamenta’s Institute for Butlers, Footmen, and Gentlemen’s Gentlemen. My umbrella was the sort Droschkenkutscher saw their fares safely to shelter with, copious enough to keep dry a lady in bombazeen, bustle, and extensive fichu even if she were escorted by an ukrainischer Befehlshaber in court dress. The wind played kite with it.

My hat had hopped, leaving rings of its blacking on the gleaming wet of the flagstones. My umbrella tugged and swiveled, jerked and pushed. I ran one way for the suitcase, another for the stovepipe hat. Were anyone looking from the stately mansion, it was the grandfather of all umbrellas on two legs tiptoeing like a gryllus after a skating hat across a sheet of shining water they would see.

The cook Claribel had seen, and would allude to it thereafter as a sight that gave her pause.

Unsettled as my affiliation with the morose Count Rufzeichen had been, it was a masonic sodality compared with my and Claribel’s crosscurrent encounters. Our disasters had been born in the stars.

It was she who met me at the door, challenge and hoot in her hen’s eyes.

— Is this, I shouted over the wind, Schloss Dambrau?

To this she made no reply.

— I am Monsieur Robert, I said, the new butler.

She studied me and the weather, trying to decide which was the greater affront to remark upon.

— As you can see, she finally said, there is no butler here to answer the door. A cook, the which I am, can make her own meals, but a butler, like the new one you are, ja? cannot answer himself knocking at the door, fast nie.

I agreed to all of this.

— Would you guess I am Silesian? she next offered. Frau Claribel you may address me as. Why the last butler had to leave is not for one of my sex and respectability to say, I’m sure. What were you doing running in a crouch all over the drive? Furl your umbrella. Come in out of the wind, come in out of the rain.

I marched to my quarters, past a cast-iron Siegfried in the foyer, preceded by Frau Claribel with the mounted, cockaded Hessians, royal drum rolls, and jouncing flag of Haydn’s Symphonie militaire, which came all adenoidal violins and tinny brass from a gramophone beyond a wall.

— Der Graf is very cultivated, she said of the music. He has tone, as you will see, Herr Robehr.

I approved of the Lakedaimonian bed in my room. And of the antique table where I was to spend so many hours by my candle, warming my stiff hands at a brazier. All my rooms have been like this, cramped cells for saint or criminal. Or patient. The chamberpot was decorated with a sepia and pink view of Vesuvius.

O Claribel, Claribel. No memory of her can elude for long our first contretemps. That is too bookish a word. Our wreck.

It was only the third day after my installment, just when the Count and I were blocking out the routine that would lead, from the very beginning, to my eventual banishment to a room above the Temperance Society of Biel for eight years, while archdukes died with bombs in their laps, ten million men were slaughtered, six million maimed, and all the money in the world five times over was borrowed at compound interest from banks. Solemn, hushed, sacred banks.

On my way in haste down the carpeted hall to answer the Count’s bell, I would prance into a cakewalk, strutting with backward tail feather and forward toe. I would hunch my elbows into my side, as if to the sass of a cornet in a jazz band I would tip a straw hat to the house. And just before the library door I would do the war dance of Crazy Horse. Then, with a shudder to transform myself into a graduate of the Benjamenta Institute, I would turn the knob with one hand, smooth my hair with the other, and enter a supercilious butler deferential and cool.

— You rang, Herr Graf?

The old geezer would have to swivel around in his chair, an effect I could get by pausing at the periphery of his vision, a nice adjustment between being wholly out of sight and the full view of an indecorous frontal address.

— I rang, by Jove, didn’t I? I wonder why.

— I could not say, Sir.

— Strange.

— You rang, Sir, unless by some inadvertence your hand jerked the bell cord, either out of force of habit, or prematurely, before the desire that would have prompted the call had formed itself coherently in your mind.

Count Rufzeichen thought this over.

— You heard the bell, did you, there in the recess?

— Positively,