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

— Didn’t imagine it, I suppose, what?

— No, Sir.

— I’m damned, the Count said, gazing at his feet. Go away and let me think why I called you.

— If, Sir, you would jot down on a pad the reason for my summons, you would not forget it before my arrival.

— Get out!

— Very good, Sir.

We played such scenes throughout the day. I had just had some such mumpery with him before the first entanglement with Claribel’s withered luck.

She, barefoot for scrubbing the stone steps down to her domain, had forked a lid off the stove onto the floor to pop on a stick of firewood, and as the best piece in the box was longish, Claribel stepped back the better to fit it in, putting a foot both naked and wet on the hot lid, and cried out for Jesus to damn it for a bugger and a shit britches.

I, meanwhile, coming belowstairs and hastening to see what her howl was about, stepped on the cake of soap riding there on the steps in a wash of suds. My foot slid out and up in a kick so thorough that I missed by a minim marking the ceiling with a soapy footprint.

My other foot, dancing for balance, dashed the bucket of water forward toward the hopping Claribel, where its long spill hissed when it flowed around the lid at about the same time that I, soaring as if from a catapult, rammed her in a collision that knocked us breathless and upside-down through the kitchen door and into a dogcart drawn by a goat which was backed up to the steps for a convenient unloading of cowflop to mulch the rhododendrons.

Startled, the goat bleated and bolted, taking us through the kitchen garden, across the drive, into and out of the roses, around the well, by the stables, and as far as the chicken run, where a yellow wheel, unused to such velocities and textures of terrain, parted from the axle and went on its own to roll past backing pigs, a cat who mounted a tree at its coming, a cow who swallowed her cud, and after some delirious circles, wobbled and lay among the wasps and winey apples in the orchard.

Claribel and I, tilted out by the departure of the wheel, sat leg over leg in the compost of manure, Claribel screaming, I silent.

THIS WAY. The bracken is very fine a little farther on. Trajectory is all. I was born on Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday the year the bicycle suddenly became popular all over the world, the seventh of eight. My father ran a toy shop in which you could also buy hair oil, boot blacking, and china eggs. My mother died when I was sixteen, after two years of believing that she was a porcupine that had been crowned the queen of Bulgaria, the first sign that I was to end up here.

My brother Ernst, grown enough to be teaching school while I was still in rompers, began to think that he was being hunted by malevolent marksmen. Schizophrenia. He died in 1916, Hermann, a geographer in Bern, in 1919. Fanny and Lisa are well placed, Oskar works with money. Karl is the success in the family. God knows how he can stomach Berlin.

I was at Waldau before I came here, into the silence. And before that—look at the rabbit standing on its hind legs!—I was variously a student, a bank clerk, an actor, a poet, a sign painter, a soldier—I have seen those white butterflies as thick as snow over clover—an insurance salesman, a waiter, a vendor of puppets, a bill sticker, a janitor, a traveling salesman for a manufacturer of prosthetic limbs, a novelist, a butler, an archivist for the canton of Bern, and a distributor of temperance tracts. I’ve always belonged decidedly to the tribe of Whittington, but of course the bells rang when I couldn’t hear them, and when a cat was to be invested I had none. Franklin was of the tribe, and Lipton the British merchant, and Mungo Park, and Lincoln and Shakespeare. I got as far as being a servant. Diogenes and Aesop were slaves.

Freedom is a choice of prisons. One life, one death. We are an animal that has been told too much, we could have done with far less. The way up and the way down are indeed the same, and Heraklit had been wiser to add that rising is an upward fall.

I often put myself to sleep by wondering if there could be a mountain road so steep and yet so zigzag of surface that in seeming to go down an incline one is actually going up?

How do they put themselves to sleep, Mann of the field marshal’s face and Hesse with his gurus and Himalayan Sunday Schools? Imagine being interested like Hesse in the Hindu mind! Once in Berlin I talked to an Indian from Calcutta or Poona or Cooch. Chitter chitter, he said. Mann is also interested in these little brown monkey men with women’s hands.

— What is the meaning of life? the little Hindu asked me for an opener.

I had the distinct impression that he was switching his tail and flouncing his cheek ruff. Soon he would be searching for lice in my hair.

— You do not know! In the west you are materialistic, rational, scientific. You listen too much to the mind, too little to the soul. You are children in spirit. You have not karma.

We stood nose to nose, toe to toe.

— You have not deep wisdom from meditation a long time reaching back to ages already old when Pletto and Aristettle were babbies in arms.

— Indeed not, I said.

— You admit! the Hindu squealed, showing a gold tooth and a black. Of course you admit for you know it is true ancient Indian wisdom is universal transcendental thought as studied by Toolstoy in Russia, yes, H. B. Stove and Thorough in United States.

He chittered on, something about God and man being