Da Vinci's Bicycle Read online

  All at first was the fremitus of things, the jigget of gnats, drum of the blood, fidget of leaves, shiver of light, boom of the wind. The tremor of my cry may have had something to do with choosing this threshold. There are other sills, empty places with intolerable glare, presences, noon quiet, lonely desperate desert wastes. I have died again in them. Those who go to the inhuman to place their hopes upon its alien rhythms, its bitter familiarity with nothing, its constant retreat from all that we can love, are hostages to vastation.

  The majesty of the eagles in their gold, the arms raised in salute, the cries of obeisance, praise, and glory, the rise of the horns falling in fioritura: we never ask why the gods do not march in pomps, under arch after arch after arch.

  I AM THE EMPEROR Balbinus kept in a jug. Together with Illyrian dust. Some flower petals a congenital mourner threw on the body are also in here along with a dead bee that was by occupation connected with the flowers.

  The ghosts of bees I am told by the Consiliarii form a congregation in Cyprus though many are in Elysion itself and others where they sang and foraged in their little lives. Hymettos and Chios and such bright places.

  Having been an emperor I am divine. Not the kin of the gods as I had supposed but a god patent and absolute.

  Nature is here too. In the first weeks when I was still drunk with death I fretted to be out. An instinct as it were to flow was my initial response to the new state of things. They had come to me, crowding against the outside of the urn, the Consiliarii as they called themselves, and hailed me as a divinity, just as the general, the few senators, and functionaries recently hailed me Imperator, anxiously, with not more than two aves apiece, immediately urging me make haste and flee. A rival faction in Hispania or the Provincia Gallicum had also wrapped an emperor in the purple.

  Trumpets, a roll of the drums, a hasty salute, and I was off. We rode toward a forest.

  The horror of the knives was soon over, and they talked of other things while they were doing it. I remember squealing like a pig.

  Light through matter makes it spin. Knowledge is to the mind what water is to grime and sweat. I was turning in my jug and I wanted to know why. No sooner had I wondered than I knew. A Consiliarius put his face to mine, eye to eye. He turned as I turned. A kind of red music ran in and out of my ears, what used to be my ears.

  Was I to spin forever, a turbo from which God himself had whipped the cord? To ponder is to pose, and my answer was that to turn is to exist. The very pollen which a bee has kicked from the nectary of a poppy goes into orbit before it sifts down to turn with the earth itself. A cow munching clover is pitching forward with the large roll of the earth.

  As the giddiness became usual, I longed to flock to what I loved. My goats, for instance. My fig tree. My favorite window looking out over the olives. Especially my goats. I saw their oblong eyes and ellipsoid udders and cornered anatomies.

  Was memory to bodger or enrich eternity? I remembered barracks, parades, charges, hospitals, speeches, but as a mouse overhears the talk of a room from the rafters, with perfect unconcern.

  What is there to shiver so when a flight of sparrows flutters through my middle? I am not flesh. Unbroken habit of flinching where the body used to be will no doubt fade in time. If I am in time. I think I have become a globe, like all things that spin. Light is round. The Consiliarii have taught me that. It goes in all directions at once and thus balloons out from its source. Spirit must be a substance very like light. Old polarity of head and butt no longer maintains. I find that it is sweet to flow through water. Is this thirst?

  I say flow and flit and other words of motion without knowing what I mean. For I do not leave my jug. Here in this dark I can still see the pitted terra-cotta interior. The dead bee. Withered flowers. The bee is on its back with its little legs bent at the knees. But I also see an army crossing a ford, a vineyard, and barbarians on mares. Their slant eyes glint like blue steel. Their hair is combed down over their faces and tucked into their belts in front. Gold clasps hold the hair away from their faces. The hair of the head is combed into the hair of the beard. They stink of tallow and horse.

  I see flax and roses as if the jelly of the eye were amber honey from Illyria. Whatever I have for an eye it is never closed. Lids are flesh. The eye was spirit all along. Imagine that if you can, whoever beyond the Consiliarii can feel my thoughts. And I can smell. That was spirit too. O, and I can feel. Not surfaces. It takes two for an encounter and I am nothing. But I can pass through. In a tree I feel the thousand threads of water that rise from the roots to the leaves.

  I move constrained by the shape of my jar in a kind of crouch, my elbows on my knees, my knees on a line with my ears. Weightless, I still adhere to the ground. At first I waddled through the leaves of trees but found such progress absurd. I went up toward the clouds. O Hercules, what loneliness, what devastation, what fear! I like the open road, especially stationing myself on a bridge. I try to talk to donkeys, not knowing what to say.

  Nor is it congenial to go downward into the earth. I first ventured a well. Then I went down to where iron grows. Down past root seines in loam like condered oakgall and down past yellow marl hard with quartz the splintered ores begin. Green, edged, with the black metal smell horses hate and wine sours next to, and which thunder has entered. Chill, sacred iron, bitter with lightning. Stay away. It is not human. It is from the beyond, from up, the stuff of the moon and cold stars. It is down, the pit is iron. It neither breathes nor moves. The gods own it but it is not a god. Pity is not in it.

  I have thrust myself into a sunflower and washed in its basil green. Near deep iron I have shuddered and gone numb.

  Like a snake I take my warmth from the world. I make none of my own. This godstuff I’m of is not by Hercules flesh. It is a kind of air, but more organized and articulate. There is the ghost of a bunion on the ball of my left foot, the soldier’s corn, where we pivot. Though I feel, there is no seriousness to it, as in a dream. The ride of a wasp through my eyes, rain through my arms, wheat awns combing my bowels, all I meet in my flow swims through me as easily as a fish.

  But things do not always get to me or I to them. I stream across geese to a wall and find myself in a country I have never seen, the brick hives of Chaldea mayhap, Indus fowls bright as flowers in the streets.

  I nod in a cowstall, liking the straw and dried pease. I wake by a river, near a skiff, an old Tiber herm brown with time, baskets. I exist without continuity. While squatting in a wine vat I am suddenly on board the Hecate sailing for Marsala. And in my urn all the while.

  WE ARE DIGGING a canal across Greece, through rock, the depth of a mountain’s height.

  If you have never swung a pickaxe, brother, never been chained ankle to ankle, you know no more than a child what’s ahead of you.

  The canal is to connect the bay of Corinth and the Saronicus and be a path from the Adriatic to the Ionian. God knows when they began it, some centuries ago judging by my first look, and Rome will be as old as the world itself when it is finished, if it is finished.

  Greece! I would have taken this place to be Africa. Corinth is somewhere over there, they say, a separate city from the Acrocorinth, on a hill, sacred to the slut Aphrodite.

  Flies, shit, sweat rancid as a whiff of billy goat, fatigue as deep in the bone as water in the sea.

  There is a kind of exhilaration in having lost all, once the anguish subsides. Once the anguish subsides.

  We are chained ankle to ankle, and to each other. My fellow to the left is a Scythian who lives off fury. He eats his beans like a wolf, he scoops clay when he can get at it and eats that too. He prays to strange gods.

  My fellow to the right is Roman enough, but dead. I tell him that they have our bodies only, not our souls, but he stares at me as if I were a lunatic.

  To want nothing, I tell him, is freedom, to will nothing is death. He wills nothing. He wants his freedom, still, and his soul is sick with that lust. It is a terrible want that adds to the weight of the pick,
thickens fatigue, mixes rage with mere despair.

  We sleep in our filth, unconscious as soon as they order us to lie down. And we rise while we are still asleep, and drink swill, and go off under the lashes to the rockface. It takes them awhile to unchain the dead, and it is harder on us, in both spirit and body, to drag a corpse in the chains. Yesterday we dragged poor Mnescus half the morning before the crew with the files and snippers could get around to us.

  The third or fourth swing of the pick and he died standing, his tongue out like a mouthful of sponge, his eyes rolled back white, his old knees trembling like a wet dog.

  After you’ve had your fill of horrors, they cease to burn. There is to be nothing else, after all. It rains, we work in mud. We are grateful for the difference. The beans are sometimes black rather than red. New prisoners arrive, and we are avid to learn why they are here.

  The horns, the long horns blare, and we are off in our chains, morning after morning. Yeorgi, three down to the left, will probably die before the day is out. I’ve looked my look at the son of a bitch of a guard when they had us out at the crack of dawn, meaning that if he had the featherweight of a man in him, he would take Yeorgi out of the gang, spitting blood as he was, fever in his eyes.

  The guidons were up, no man might speak. The horns, the old sergeants who had frozen their balls on the Rhine and roasted them in the Oxus held their dignity under the standards, the drums, and the shouting in our faces, as if we were barbary apes, the shit in the latrines being shoveled over, another day, another day.

  They even have an emperor here, as if we were the army on a campaign, or a deputation in Hispania. It is the old fart himself, a marble bust thereof, around which they put the purple nightshirt, and a breastplate and greaves. They march him behind the SPQR, goose-stepping and pounding on the drums, jingling the sistrum, and roaring Ave!

  O to kiss a pig’s butt and it ripe with diarrhea!

  Once when I was in Old Granny’s Pisspot, that windowless judgment down by the Maxima, black as Egypt on a Thursday night, a wealth of rats traveling in all directions, jugged all over again because the monster’s spies had found another nest of philosophers and stirred us up with their sticks and frogmarched us before a hogjowled magistrate who sentenced us from behind his nosegay, looking at us sideways, to three months’ darkness, or longer, subject to the emperor’s pleasure, once when I was going fishbelly white and blind as a mole because the emperor emits little yipes of horror when he hears of a philosopher in Rome, a letter came to me from God knows where or how, it was tossed in with the mildewed bilge they fed us.

  A letter! It was from Apollonius.

  Esteemed Musonius, it said, it was written in Greek. Esteemed Musonius, than whom no one is more able in philosophy, my heart is sore pressed to learn that you are detained by the government. And so on and so forth, and he would come to see me.

  The next handing around of the slop I asked the guard if his imperial majesty’s postal service, famed for its delivery of eclogues from the Caucasus to Celtiberia and of sycophantic procurators’ lies from the Pillars of Hercules to the spice groves of Arabia Felix, extended to this colicky whore’s ass of a jail?

  — He is here, he whispered.

  — He? Who?

  — The wizard.

  — Apollonius?

  — Him.

  — Me hercle, nai gonades kynoi!

  And then there was a scratching about in the dark, and the slit of gray light up the corridor that one saw when the guards slipped in and out opened up into a rectangle of glare, and light even got into my cell, strange as snow in the desert.

  I could see him in black outline only, legs as spindly as a stork’s, nose huge, dressed in some antique robe with fringes, something one’s Etruscan maiden aunt would turn up in at the Circus.

  — Musonius?

  — The wretch himself.

  I should not have replied in despair, for it is more painful to the free to see you jailed than it is to be jailed.

  — Menippus here.

  Menippus? He was, like Damis, one of the master’s henchmen. He wanted to make a trial run, he said, before he brought the Philosopher. Meanwhile, he had brought another letter, which I read by the light of the open door up the passage.

  Apollonius the learner to Musonius the philosopher, greeting! I would like to come share your lodgings in order that I might share your conversation, it said, so help me Jupiter and Hera. Unless, it went on, you cannot believe that Herakles freed Theseus from the dreary house of Hades. Answer, dear soul, what you would have me do. Errôso.

  — I shall take your answer down, Menippus hissed at me in the half dark.

  I dictated, his stylus flicked at the wax.

  I said that he was not to come. I could see Nero having the hysterica passio into a perfumed handkerchief at the report that the most spiritual of philosophers, the stringy haired, barefoot ascetic Apollonius had moved into a jail cell with the red Rufus. I can defend myself, I said. My mind is stronger than ever. I have done no wrong. Find my students and talk with them, until we can converse in the quiet and peace befitting philosophy. I said that to fit in with what I knew to be his style. He knew that like randy old Socrates I could talk philosophy in stables and at the baths, in the fish market and on the road, practically anywhere except at a rich man’s table, where the level of conversation is below that of a dovecote of whores conniving to up their prices.

  He would never find the cobbler who was one of my best disciples, old Marcus who had a true flare for the Pythagorean poetry of things and a noble grasp of stoic wisdom. Nor would he stumble upon the Senator who keeps his philosophy to himself, or the slavewoman Dorcas whose dignity of mind I would place beside that of Cicero. More than likely he would ferret out, such is my luck, the scamp Fabricius who follows me for my knuckly rhetoric, as he calls it, and who spends half his time at the gymnasia ogling backsides and pretty eyes and the other half pumping his seed onto the garret ceiling or alley walls or tiles of the public baths. But the boy has a mind and a lovely imagination, and Apollonius probably has the Platonic flare for a snub nose and black curls and a peplon that stops in the middle of the butt. And when Nero throws Fabricius in the jug, he’ll take it like a man.

  Aie! Apollonius, Apollonius.

  He wrote again. He reminded me that Socrates, refusing help from his friends, was executed.

  I wrote back that Socrates died because he would not take the trouble to defend himself. I shall defend myself.

  Errôso.

  He has since learned for himself what the inside of a Roman prison is like. Pythagoreans and Stoics are all one to the imperial police.

  Roma, you old baggage and suet sack, you are worthy of your Nero.

  A DELEGATION CAME of trembling splendor, Consuls of the dead they said they were. One lifted a hand. Their patrician faces and beautiful feet seemed to me to be godlike, their eyes a fidget of light.

  — We are the wardens, they said.

  I confused them with the other delegation, the colonels of the Praetoria who came to make me emperor. On both occasions a dread chill struck my bones, my real bones the first time, a memory of bones the second. Great moments should not have made me feel so small. But the letter of the law is spite. I have had ample opportunity to see that with awful certainty. The law requires an emperor. The great families had no more emperors. The landlords and the equestrians declined absolutely, having better sense. Anybody would do. When great nations go to seed, you will find all sorts of men in the purple, provincial tax collectors, lawyers, bald generals with remote victories in the Rhineland to their credit, grocers, and petty army officials, like me.

  To the Consiliarius with silver eyes who sat with a basket of anemones as red as blood at his elbow I said I had been made emperor of Rome a fine morning in Pannonia. By noon we were crossing the Ister, where I was advised to flee toward Singidunum with a contingent of Praetoriani. At sunset they abandoned me.

  Surely I was not the first emperor to p
ee the purple? I remember banked rack over the Carpathians, a band of Gypsies, a brown child riding a goat. I gave the Gypsies the damp toga and six denarii in exchange for an ass on which I made my way into a terrible wood. I soon heard hooves and saw the knives in the half light. Never should man kill anything at all.

  If the name Balbinus does not go into your ear like Caligula or Augustus it is because history is a slut. She will accept pomp everytime over worth. Did not Augustus say with the last of his breath that instead of a funeral oration he wanted a round of applause?

  It is because the historians would find little beyond my name to record that the Consiliarii were patient with me. They seemed not to want to obtrude, and kept a polite distance when they appeared. Of one I could make out a blue eye only. The rest was shadow. The second was clearer, the folds of his toga fell through a rose bush, a very pretty pattern.

  Another time they came through an ilex with a rabbit in each hand. A sacrifice, I assumed. One that I had perhaps omitted on the outside, the inside, whichever I’m on now. I can’t get it straight. Pensum is verbum in this layer of the world, between the tissue of light and its stay on the bought and hollow of things. They are of our realm, I understood them to mean. We may talk with eyes here, I don’t know. And the pensum inside the word folds out here. I was beholden to these staring bucks. Even they come through the membrane, the one said to the other, meaning me.

  I began to see the significance of having come across with the bee. It brought me, I think.

  I found a Consiliarius in a stand of thistle by a milestone, turning himself leisurely inside out and back again, like candle-smoke in a still room.

  — Jupiter! I said, remembering that I had not thought to ask after the gods.

  He closed his hand and opened it.

  — Jupiter, he said.