Da Vinci's Bicycle Read online

  — Juno?

  He joined his hands.

  I gave it up. I knew that he would make a fist for Mars and a finger for Venus, would knit his knuckles for Minarva and smooth his hand along the air for Mercurius.

  — Themselves! I cried. I am not a schoolboy.

  He went into the milestone like water into sand.

  ROMA, ROMA. Pain makes us all equal here, in Rome it is the differentiator. We have had to learn not to laugh at the bloody stump, the epileptic jerking along, the milky eye, the legless. Such amusements belong to the city, where a lady, her face a glory of powder, Sidonian lips, a tower of hair woven with pearls, earrings like stars, can shake her litter with a fit of laughter at the sight of a humpback swinging along on crutches, where mothers, barristers, doctors gasp with pleasure as two dwarves hack themselves to a butchered ruin in the Circus.

  Of the crucifixions, that peculiarly Roman entertainment, a Greek said to me one day in tears, have you no Goddess of mercy? None, I said. He had seen a crucifixion against his will, and had been held by the horror of it longer than he could stand, were he sane at the time, as he said, for he lost his mind when he realized that the spectators were laughing.

  And yet he had not seen, as I have, a thief almost apologetic for having such a terrible time with his pain as the nails were driven into his wrists and feet. He bellowed like a bull, driven wild by the pain, and when they pulled the crux up to go into its socket his scream pierced to the quick of your bones, but you could scarcely hear it over the laughter of the audience.

  Here we do not laugh at pain, our lot in common. We have only averted eyes or a word of courage to serve for compassion, having learned something of what the Greeks mean by sympathy. Or is it shame?

  The Procurator comes down in a litter to the channel, a Garamantian trotting beside him with an umbraculum. A wart tarantulous and inauspicious sprouted from the flange of the old custus’s nose and a goiter the size of a piglet wrenched his chin around to his shoulder. He kept shouting that he must not be brought near any lepers.

  The SPQR rides high before, carried by a wheezing corporal whose leather cinctures squeak and whose face shines with sweat.

  The Procurator wiggles his ringed fingers at a scribe. The Machinator leans to listen. The litter out among the ravaged earth which we are hacking and loading into buckets looks like nothing so much as a beribboned and curtained cradle that has been spirited from a censorial nursery onto the wastes of Calabria.

  We see a tall soldier from the guard summoned to the custator’s frilly lecticula. The old boy swings out. He needs to piss and it is his whim to piss against the soldier, who stands at attention while he is being pissed upon. There is natural philosophy in us all. I hope he did not take it as an honor, knowing all the while that he did.

  I SKIDDLE DOWN into grass fading to hay, grass bearding out into awns, worts, burrs, and docks, down among hoppers and midges sawing the air, tumblebugs, ants, and silvery crawlers. I find a ball of grass, a nest, and there lies a mama mouse with three implausibly small and exact baby mice at her teats, pumping with their paws. Her belly, throat, and whiskers are white, otherwise she is as brown as an acorn except for her eyes, which are like wet black apple seeds. She is patient and alert. Her tail lies across her young like the pin of a fibula.

  O Lady Mouse, I breathe, your well wisher here who has come to visit, the round of nothing before you in this fine grass, was the emperor of Rome.

  Whereupon the Consiliarii were suddenly with me, one with a red moth for an eye, a sycamore seed for another, mulberry leaves for hair. Clustered bees were his beard, a lion’s bones, still joined, his body, a lizard his sex. His fellow was a leopard through which you could see, like water.

  — Mus mater haec, Moth Eye said. Here in this place a temple used to stand. The ground is still sacred.

  Whose temple? I watched the mouse no bigger than a thumb and her brood snuggled so neatly between her forelegs and hindlegs, eager little fellows.

  — Diktynna, Leopard answered, the Lady. Cut stone is not to her liking, and she abides these long houses with their thin rock trees out of the courtesy of the undying until old Kelp Beard knocks them down, at which we have heard her laugh, her and her girls, her and her bears.

  Am I now her kin? Does my divinity put me into her family?

  — O no, Moth Eye was quick to say, too quick, for I am easily confused. The gods, he went on, are powers like wind and snow, mercy and light. You, an emperor, when you find something to care for, will be given the necessary power to care for it. That will be the extent of your godhood. There is a king from the north who rides with wrens and spells them on their eggs, an earl of the Angles who roosts with gannets, a queen of the Belgii who has lived for a hundred years with spotted toads in the great wood that grows between the Rhenus and the Mosa.

  THEY MOUNT the crosses where we can see them if we lift our eyes from our pickaxes, carrion crows crowded along the arms.

  Distance, distance. I can lie at night in the stink of piss and smegma and regain the window in which I sat at Poplicola’s house on the Via Nola, English geese gabbling among the poultry for a pastoral note, the cool house warmed by our yellow Roman light that filled the windows like a kindness, a din of traffic beyond just enough garden walls to make a pleasant patter, like rain, or the womenfolk in the atrium.

  I remember my young head turned by the idea of worth, and my book, an Antisthenes or Hekaton, with the life of Cleanthes of Assos in it, Zeno’s successor in the Stoa.

  A man worthy of carrying on for Zeno! Zeno, who had died at a full old age by simply ceasing to eat. He was in pain toward the end. Quit nagging, he cried out to death, can’t you see that I’m coming of my own accord?

  Cleanthes, my book told, was a boxer who had heard of philosophy and came to Athens with but four small coins in his mouth. Zeno accepted him as a pupil. He made his living as a water drawer and miller, selling water for gardens by night and crushing meal at kitchen doors.

  O the strangeness of Athens three hundred years ago! So hale was Cleanthes that he was brought before the Areopagitas and asked how he made his living, for he seemed to do nothing but walk up and down the Stoa with Zeno and his barefoot flock, talking about time and necessity, evil and the moon. When witnesses testified that he was their water carrier and their meal grinder, the archons voted him an income of ten minas, which, on the advice of Zeno, he refused.

  I began to fall in with the stoics then and there, behind the followers of the followers of Cleanthes.

  The mockers twitted him for toting buckets of water. This, they brayed, is philosophy? I know the oily slide of their eyes upward, the ringed hand hanging limp from the wrist, the urine and garlic rictus of ape’s teeth and the lizard tongues playing with the money in their mouths.

  Do I, Cleanthiskos carissimus would reply with the true Zenonian gall, only hustle buckets? You’ve missed me chopping weeds? Watering lettuce, basil, melons? O, but I slave at philosophy, dear citizens!

  One day he showed around a handful of coins. See, he said, I could support a second Cleanthes were I two of myself. Life in the streets of Athens was a kind of myth.

  That old Etruscan olive elf and her hoot owl must have had occasions when she wondered why the Greeks built her a city. Homely old Minarva! Ignea rima micans, with a farmer’s rude understanding of that rima, thundery old maiden aunt with her bundles of lightning, an owl witch that these Greeks in their paganry have tried to make into a lady.

  He was a slow learner, Cleanthes, and never quite understood the physics of Zeno. Yet he studied harder than any of Zeno’s students. The wags called him Herakles, meaning that he was all brawn and skimpy on brains.

  He became popular in a way that usually worked with the Athenians. He wore nothing under his cloak, and one windy day when he was walking with his adolescent followers to some rite on the Acropolis a gust opened his clothes. The streets were full of people who applauded his handsome body and talked about it for days. Therea
fter he was treated with deference and respect.

  Still, he was the butt of Zeno’s collegium, the ass who chose the hardest work, a man proud of his poverty. He said that he would rather dig rock than have to amuse himself. Meaning the rich. Accused of being afraid to botch a task, he replied that this was why he always did things right.

  Sositheos included a joke about Cleanthes in a mimiambus at the theater, and Cleanthes did not so much as bat an eye at the insult. The audience of course looked at him as much as at the actor Sositheos. No rage, no blush. Seeing nothing but nobility, they rose in their seats and clapped for Cleanthes. Then they threw cucumbers and sandals at Sositheos until he fled the stage.

  I ROLL INTO a hawthorn all white and green, around which I fit like a bubble. A sparrow and my knee occupy the same fragrant space wreathed with blossoms, a bee and my right eye. The ground beneath is so intimate, so congenial, that I consider staying here for the life of the bush, to feel rain, wind, snow. Part of me go off to be honey, part wither and fall. In my shoulder the sparrow would weave her nest, feed her young, straddle them with stretched wings atremble in rain, cry other birds away.

  The Consiliarii came to me through a light busy with points of fire.

  — Accident, they said, is design.

  I turned in my jug like the slow spin of milk in a churn.

  — Here, they said, the bobbin is unwound, the engines of futility dismantled and laid out, so that one could see what rain on a Tuesday had to do with the nightmare of a Spanish cook, how a lie told in the reign of Antoninus caused a Scot to lead a life of total illusion.

  WE SPREAD OUT in a line, defined by our chains, and dig. The line behind us gathers the rubble of our digging into baskets. Between the lines the sergeants move with their whips. The senate drones on, the armies at the borders of the empire stick the Celts and Huns like so many wild boars, and in the Circus hungry lions claw the bowels out of screaming Iudaei while the Emperor God picks his nose.

  Once you have muscles in the shoulders and arms, the pick work is not so murderous. And good thick calluses.

  Brother, I say to the Sicilian they have chained to my right leg, what brings you to the inferi before your time?

  Quidnam, ha! Quoquo, ha!

  Tears welled up in his eyes.

  — Uxorem necatu’ misellam. He sank the pickaxe so deep into the rock that he had to fight it out again.

  — Puggiunculo!

  Vae! All the crimes of these wretches look like mine, and all their faces are mirrors. I almost said to him that I too had killed my wife, though I have yet to learn whether I have or not. It little matters whether we cut the fool as a hissing miser, farting tyrant, slave, usurer, madman, whore, or pigherd. By playing the philosopher I have given a good woman more grief than any simple soul ought to face.

  I taught her to read and write, true, and showed her how the philosophical mind has other pleasures and pains than the blind herd and the dreaming rich. I freed her from superstition until she could hear the raven caw and laugh at it as of no matter. We even kept a pet owl to show that we were immune from the paralysis of ignorant fear. She made herself pet it, though it looked as malevolent as a baby gorgon, and in the night she cried out Surely we shall all die!

  But I must live with the look on her face the first time they took me away.

  The first arrest and sentence, from which I came back. I came back. That is the reason I can endure this shit. Not the hope that some sane man will slit the rotten old Catmit’s wezand from ear to ear, or that an honest praetor will lower his hemorrhoids onto a bench free of the fingersnap of a politician, or that Iustitia will flounce down from the clouds swinging her ensis and libra, but the fact that I have been to the bottom and walked up again keeps me swinging my pick.

  We go down into the earth as we dig, and the sky becomes a bay of blue above us. I read the symbol, I take the measure of the calamity.

  IN SPILLWAYS of light through leaves I see boys playing with staves. A black bird with Scythian beak blocks my view. But I see that I can see through that fowl, see sunlight in its bones, the sky through its feathers, see boys through boys, trees through a wall, and on and on until what I see is a trash of color, beautiful rubble.

  There are days when I see only white everywhere.

  Days when I can hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing. I am loneliest then, and fearful. I have learned to search the white for a yellow dot, which grows if I stare at it, until a gnat-swarm of bilious specks gathers around it and becomes a detail: a horse’s eye, a jug of olive oil, a whetstone.

  Once the yellow spot became a fire, thorns cracking under a pot, which emerged from the white after a long wait. I looked, for patience is sometimes all I have, until there were barbarians sitting around the pot. Their eyes were handsome, strange, intelligent. Their women suckled infants at fine brown breasts. Yellow dogs sat on their haunches and grinned.

  There was a moon, later, and even later, an owl, their god.

  I was going to float among them when the Consiliarii came to me, quickly, like lighting birds in an opposing wind, and said, No, that I could not consort with the barbarians.

  They said their name, a word with too many syllables and with the accent impossibly on the penultimate. He was a commander of weather and water, their god. His brother is a snake. He is pleased by drums. By bells, gongs, chants.

  Firelight on the grease of their cheeks kept me ahover just beyond their gray horses, and the beautiful chink chink of their kanoon by which the womenfolk sang lullabies to their young.

  Their time is not yours, the Consiliarii said as they shooed me back.

  — Give me, then, I said, my bee! My sponsor across the Styx. My evangelical bee.

  They smiled, the tall Consiliarii. Where we were rose with a jolt, tilted, and shot forward. A music as of birds and laughing children went with us, though measured like a Lydian dance.

  And on that silver line between the brown earth and the blue deep of the sky, in a field of clover red and green the whole horizon across, we came to my bee.

  — O golden-thighed mite! I cried.

  — Wax hexagon! said the bee. Right deflection under azimuth, earthspin downward polaroid greens in quanta red shift, dip and shake, forward zoom.

  — Brother! I said.

  — A shake and a shake, it sang. Angle, angle! Citron ginger sugar green.

  — Brother!

  — Buzz off, Onion Bulb, it said. Go jump in your jug.

  THE FIRST TIME they got in their rabbit brains that we were magicians I was sentenced to an island. We worked the oars going out, we arrived so glad to be rid of the sea and the whip that we scarcely asked what our punishment was to be. Labor, we assumed, a bitter existence we assumed, the life of a slave.

  But there was no garrison there, no master of the whip. Nothing. Rock, bushes, weeds, and the winking glare of the sea all around.

  And no water. We looked, the miserable lot of us. There was no water on the island.

  We were murderous pimps, men who had lost all to the exactors’ moneylenders, one-handed thieves, highwaymen, merchants of children, magi, philosophers.

  Here in the Great Corinthian Ditch we at least know we shall have our swill, and even when. It’s a kind of frog spawn with iron beans. But it is always there.

  Discipline is our Orcus and our salvation. Rome itself is a shapeless bundle of shitten pissburnt sweatscalded bubonic rotten rags held together with a bronze wire of discipline. Our Centurio gets drunk every sixth day, you can tell by the silly smile and the cinculus on backwards. Every Ides the Dux puts on his yellow frock and goes off with the sergeants and corporals to their Mithraeum they have here in the wilderness. They call each other Brother Lion and Brother Crow.

  Even I am here by law. I am a wizard.

  The catchpoll described me to the Magistrate when I was hauled in on the charge that landed me here as a subverter of the laws of the State and a blasphemer against the gods.

  — Crap, I said.
/>   — What? said the Magistrate.

  — Crap, your Honor. Merda.

  The Accusator read from the charge: Teaches that women are the equal of men and that their status as infants in the adoption of their husbands is pernicious and against nature. Advocates that women should be educated. Teaches that the gladiators are inhuman and that the spectators at the Circus are bestial and coarse of mind, including his Divinity the Emperor. That taxes are collected by usurers, who keep half, that Roman history is largely fiction, that few barbarian peoples have ever exhibited such moral degradation as the Roman mob, that the Roman gentry are more firmly enslaved to their vices than their slaves to their bondage . . .

  He read on, and on, flicking his tongue across his teeth at the items he considered scandalous and raising his eyebrows at the parts clearly definable as sedition.

  — To whom, the Magistrate thought to ask, were these ridicularia being taught?

  A shuffle of tablets, and a list held up, as if by this token damnation was sealed.

  — Clavis, a cobbler, Passer, a catamite, Hispana, a bawd, Tacita, an old woman who keeps a goat, Virga, another catamite, Modestus, a slave, Minicius, a poet . . .

  — Scum.

  — Vero.

  — Why do you do this? the Magistrate said to me, with no uncertainty that my perversity was not as clear to me as it was to him.

  — To teach men what is in their power to control and what isn’t, so that they may cultivate their character and make a garden of their soul.

  My failure is to address men as if they were classrooms.

  The Magistrate rearranged his chins, milked the lobe of an ear, and asked how many offenses I had committed against the Roman Senate and People.

  — Five times jailed and once exiled, the Recorder recited. All for sedition. Repeatedly reprimanded for conducting sessiuncula philosophica, so called, to no purpose, as the accused is pigheaded.

  So they sent me to Corinth to dig a canal through solid rock from this bay of the ocean to that bay of the ocean.

  In my time the world was mad.