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

orbit around the lamp. His left arm was in the cloakroom nervously fingering a galosh, his right caressed a periodic table of the elements. His rich, musically modulated voice lectured on about ohms and circuits, resistance and watts.

It was my own parable. I had searched for wisdom about the slump of my soul and the sootiness of my spirit in the accounts of vastations by the American Jameses, father and son, who suffered terrible New England moments when all significance drained from the world, when the immediate fortune of life was despair, disease, death. In utter futility shone the sun, man squandered the little time he had alive, a sweet Tuesday here, a golden autumn Sunday there, grubbing for money to pay the butcher, the landlord, and the tailor. The butcher slaughtered innocent animals who were incapable of sin and folly, of ambition or lies, so that one could, by way of a cook enslaved for a pittance and a wife enslaved for naught, gnaw its flesh and after a period of indigestion and indolence from overfeeding, squat over a champerpot and drop turds and piss for a servant to carry, holding his nose, to the lime pit.

I had thought my despair was Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death that pleasure cloys and pain corrodes. But, no, it was rather the Sorbonne professor’s shock. One came to pieces. One used the very words. You had to pull yourself together again.

Feeding the pages of three novels into the fire in Berlin, standing in the rain at my father’s grave, writing my thousandth feuilleton, climbing the dark stairs to any of the forty rooms I’ve rented: no one movement of foot or heart muscle was the hobbler, no one man’s evasion the estranger.

— Another pig’s foot, your lordship?

— And a little more suet, thank you kindly, Robert.

White tile, thermometers, blood-pressure charts, urine specimens, and spasms in the radiator pipes; what color and tone there had been at Rufzeichen’s! The carpet, a late Jugendstil pattern of compact circles in lenticular overply, rusty orange, Austrian brown, and the blue of Wermacht lapels, had dash, and the furniture was Mackintosh, smartly modern in its severity while recalling the heaviest tradition of knightly chairs and ladylike settles, sideboards as large as wains and a desk at which the Kaiser could plan a dress parade. My eye appreciated the dull books around him, china shepherdesses, views of Florence and Rome, a sepia reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, crossed cavalry sabers, a teakwood dragon in a rage, candlesticks held aloft by fat babies tiptoe on the noses of dolphins, a loud clock.

An iron elk stood in a dim recess beyond double doors in the far wall.

AND THEN, pigeon-toed and watching the ground before him as if backtracking for something lost, there was the new patient, Fomich, as his wife or sister called him. The first time I saw him I did not like his silly smile. The mad smile in their own way, as puppets step, with a jerk rather than civilized deliberation. The smile of Fomich was that of the imp, of the red goblin in the corner of Füssli’s Titania und Bottom. Smirk and scowl together it was.

It was the outward concession of inner reserve, two proud men meeting, each believing the other to be of higher rank.

— Kak tsiganye! he complained to his sister or wife.

And then I saw the muscles bunched in his shoulders that had strained the threads of the armscye apart, the heft of his chest, the improbable narrowness of his hips. Hero, with wing, grounded.

They took a walk together every morning and afternoon, solicitous woman and elfin man. Sometimes he would stop, put his heels together, flex his knees, and pass his hands in a sweep from one hip to the other.

One day, to my disbelieving gaze, he jumped over a rose bush without so much as a running start. Faces appeared at windows to watch.

He jumped back over the rose bush, his eyes sleepy and sad.

IT WAS LIKE striding over a sea of gelatin, that bell-stroke swing of our nacelle through the rack of the upper air on elastic wicker, wind thrumming the trapping with the elation of Schumann strings allegro molto vivace.

We talked by cupping hands and shouting into each other’s ears. Benjamin Franklin, Cassirer said, had wanted a balloon for moving about the streets of Philadelphia, rooftop high above the Quakers and Indians. He was to have hitched it to horses, a godlike man indeed.

— Ach, les Montgolfier, Joseph and Etienne! In those days they thought smoke was a gas, as right as they were wrong, as with all knowledge. A transparent blue October day they bundled the physicist Pilâtre de Rozier into the basket of their hot-air balloon and cheered him aloft over the Bois de Boulogne. There, anchored twenty-five meters above the Jardin de la Muette, he looked down on autumn and Lilliputians flapping handkerchiefs. He fed the stove that kept him up there a truss of straw, scanned the horizon with a telescope, took a barometric reading.

— The next month he and the Marquis d’Arlandes went up without a tether, floated across Paris for half an hour, and came down at La Butte-aux-Cailles, where wind had carried them. Peasants were waiting to kill the balloon with scythes and shovels.

History is a dream that strays into innocent sleep.

And everything is an incongruity if you study it well. When, wind plucking my nose and fetching the moment back, I was sent on an errand one day by Herr Benjamenta to buy pen nibs from the stationer and three pounds of Brussels sprouts from the greengrocer, the latter to energize us for writing a round and legible hand with the former, the morning being summery and fine, what should I see straightway, so wonderful is the world, but the handle of a sweep’s broom tipping the hat of a stout and grizzly old party into the bucket of a passing house painter, where it bobbed and lolled