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

in a creamy distemper, while, as if miracles hadn’t grown scarce in our time, a grackle with determined eye swooped down and snatched off the same old party’s curly red wig, taking it over a roof before the street could frame a single sentence of articulate consternation.

— His hat is in the bucket, a little girl said to her nurse.

— Yes, said the nurse, there it goes.

— That grackle, said a bearded gentleman, took off his wig.

The nurse acknowledged the gentleman’s remark by blushing. The little girl did him a curtsy. I stood as in a dream.

The old party, meanwhile, stopped dumbfounded, his hands to his naked head, where a fringe of reddish hair enwreathed his occipital salience. It pleased me that he had not chosen so red a wig without cause.

— The man is distracted, explained the nurse to her charge. See how he rolls his eyes and chews his moustache.

— Yes, said the little girl. This is something I can tell to Ermintrude. She will be beside herself with jealousy.

Whereupon, weeping with such feeling that both cheeks shone like glass, the old party hugged himself so furiously that his coat split down the back. The sound of this was that of a dry limb cracked by wind from a tree, and he went limber as if unstrung.

The left half of his coat slid, sleeve and all, onto the sidewalk, followed by the right half, sleeve and all.

The collar, I considered, drawing closer, should have held the two halves together, but no, upon inspection, I saw that it was a coat, Moravian or Sephardic, of the kind that has no collar.

A scarf, which even now, as the old party was running back and forth imploring God and the gendarmerie to witness that he was a victim of some untoward fracture of natural law, snagged on the spike of an area railing and whipped away with an elastic flounce, never to be seen on this earth by its owner again.

The waywardness of accidents, I mused, can go only so far until it collides with the laws of probability or the collapse of its martyr.

The old party sat down on the sidewalk and wept into his hands. The gentleman with the beard came to his aid, prefacing his remarks by saying kindly that he had seen all that had happened. Here the old party gasped, alluded to his heart, and fell backward.

— I do believe, said the nurse, that he is having some sort of fit.

— Zu hilfe! Zu hilfe! cried the bearded gentleman.

— I will do an imitation of this, said the little girl, rolling back her eyes and grabbing her throat, that will make Ermintrude hate herself for a week.

— Remember that you are in public, said the nurse.

— So is he, said the little girl.

— And it is ill-bred in both of you, said the nurse, to make a spectacle on a city street.

A crowd gathered, from which a slender man in dark glasses, explaining that his uncle was a pharmacist in Lichtenstein, advised that the old party’s waistcoat be undone. Deftly the gentleman undid fourteen buttons, disclosing trousers that came up to the armpits in the manner of the English. The flies of these were undone as far as the navel, fourteen more buttons, and indeed the old party groaned and breathed more freely, it seemed.

— Polizei! screamed the nurse.

The laces of his boots should be untied, the Lichtenstein pharmacist’s nephew said, and the suspenders of his stockings loosened, for circulation’s sake.

— I will, said the bearded gentleman, take his watch, wallet, tie pin, and ring for safekeeping, lest they tempt someone here in the crowd.

— My watch! squealed the old party, kicking with such indignation that both boots leapt off his feet. A dog got one and made off with the agility of a weasel. The other bounced into the gutter, where it lay forlorn and strange in the brief moment before a policeman arriving on the trot shot it along the curbing to drop into a drain. We could all hear it bumping on its way through gurgling water to the river Aar.

— Let us see if his name is written inside his shirt, said the policeman, lifting the old party by the armpits and taking off his waistcoat.

— What is this? he exclaimed, peeling a mustard plaster from the old party’s back.

— That, said the pharmacist’s nephew, is probably the cause of his fit. It is a poultice of asafoetida, mustard, and kerosene such as country doctors prescribe for pulmonary and liver complaints. It is too strong, as you can smell, and has induced an apoplexy. Take off his shirt and undervest to air his back.

Struggling to arrange the old party, the bearded gentleman inadvertently stood on both his loose stocking suspenders, anchoring them, so that as the body was dragged backward the better to extract the long shirt tail from inside the seat of the trousers, the elastic suspenders stretched their limit, snapped, flipped, and catapulted themselves and stockings together off the old party’s feet, one flying into my face. And, O, how I was gratified to have joined the event with something of my own, and I sneezed, casting stocking and suspender into the shopping basket of a cook who, later and at home, dropped them into her stove, making a hex. The other was got from the air by a dog who had envied his fellow the previous shoe.

At this moment, crazed with fury and mindless with disbelief, the old party fought his way up to choke the policeman, losing trousers and drawers as he stood.

— Attack the law, will you! the policeman said.

— Where am I? the old party cried. Who am I? What has happened?

He was as naked as the minute he was born, minus, of course, an umbilical cord.

— Scheisse und verdammt! It comes back to me that I am Brigadegeneral Schmalbeet. That’s who I am! General Schmalbeet!

With this he gave the policeman a kick in the groin