Da Vinci's Bicycle Page 4

  CONSIDER GLAUKOS, the Consiliarii said together, who fell into a jar of honey as he chased a mouse, and drowned. I saw the consonance of image with image, his jar and mine, the honey in his, the bee in mine. But I was bald and fat, briefest of emperors. Glaukos, they smiled, was a little boy, his hair coppery and finished, neat cross his forehead and snug around his ears. His limbs were so kin in color to the honey in which he fell that the first astonished eyes thought that only his shirt was what they saw.

  At first they did not know where he was. Minos sent for men of second sight, and for the godly Kyretes, the circle dancers who could claim the ear of Zeus. They came, they danced, they beat their swords on their shields.

  There is a cow among your herds, they said, that changes color twice a day, every fourth hour. The morning finds it white, noon red, evening black. Who knows that cow can bring your son to life when he is found.

  That cow, the seer Polyidos said to Minos, is like a mulberry, which is first white, then red, then black.

  So hasten, said Minos, who knew by the look in his eye that Polyidos could find his son.

  And find Glaukos he did. He knew the jar as soon as he saw it. And none too soon, for a snake had found it just before and was coiled around the jar, sliding upward, as if it were an arm of the octopus painted there in blue.

  Polyidos killed the snake with a stone. It came loose from the jar like a knot untied and lay limp in the dust. But before Polyidos could draw near, a second snake rode forward. It smelled its fellow with its tongue, slid away as quickly as a fish through water, and came back with the leaf of an herb in its mouth before Polyidos could take two steps toward the jar. It stuffed the leaf in the dead snake’s mouth, and waited. Before long, the dead snake raised its head, shivered down its length, and drew itself together to move.

  And with that same herb, said one Consiliarius, Polyidos revived the drowned Glaukos and returned him to his father.

  You are like the child Glaukos, said the other, drowned in the honey of time. We think a snake will come to be your dream. Our sources are confused. We are only messengers.

  RISE UP, dead man, help me drive my row! Grieve, Rufus, I nagged myself with my philosophy, for the poverty of the rich, the impotence of the powerful. The discontinuous ownership of what cannot be kept has smashed us all to shards, the love of what cannot be loved has changed our minds until the business of mind is a ewe in the thicket. Man will die weary of what he was never intended to do.

  The ecliptic had left the Ram, where every dawn from Theseus to Tiberius the sun rose red, bringing rain and heron on the one equinox, silencing cricket and scythe on the other, the time of the bloody Persephone and the sleep of snakes, but the world itself was mad.

  The Fish were as they have been through eternity, swimming in their forked river and with their field of starry wheat between them, but the world was mad.

  Men with ulcers for eyes carry baskets of rock up the face of the excavation. They are chained, they will not go astray. Hernias bound up with rags brown with urine, piles, teeth rotting with the ache of death itself, boils, welts splitting green, jaundice, fever, hair alive with lice: they ought to bring the Roman crowd here to see us.

  They could build a grandstand and bring the spectators here in excursion boats. The slaves at the oars would serve for the praeludium. No doubt they would find it boring. They have become bored with the chariot races, and they have long since ceased to see horses, at whose deaths they begin to flutter their fans and gossip.

  Your Roman has in fact never quite seen anything but the surface, the outside of anything. He would die of shame to be a slave because he would be seen as a slave. You might know that Roman sovereignty would be inherent in a color. And no Roman would be seen watching the butcher work in the Circus except in the whitest of togas.

  God bless the flies! Their maggots are our only doctors.

  The spectators would much rather have seen us on the island, the waterless island.

  — Nonnunquam pluit, nonne?

  — Never. It has not rained in these islands since the dawn of the world.

  Were it to rain, we considered, we could let it drench our clothes and wring them over our mouths. Was there dew? Could we dig a well? And with what?

  Thirst is a deprivation that drives you mad before it kills you. I knew that much.

  There is a man here in the gangs at Corinth whom madness has touched to the marrow. We go stupid as we are worked to death, drained of the last of our mother wit, humanity out, dullness in. Madness, though, is a kind of conflagration of the intellect, a man locked in a room beating on all the doors and walls just in case something might give. It is childish, madness, the irrational frenzy of wanting. Yet to a dullard who has long since absorbed his childhood with greed, the bondage of easily gratified desires, the return of a smidgin of innocence shocks him into madness. A man rots when the child in him dies.

  The genius philosophers urge us to heed is but a grasp of one’s childhood, any moment of which unrelinquished to the demons of time is sufficient to keep the god Apollo near enough, near enough. One touch of virginity can sweeten the sourest vinegar of a ravaged soul, one touch of liberty still green, one unforgotten chill at looking at a moth on the back of the hand. Savage folly in a turm of white butterflies, a quitch shot with crickets, hide and seek in the barley awns!

  THISTLE, GOLDFINCH, STAR. A star in its eye, the goldfinch pecks a blue thistle with pert bill. Cricket chitter charms the air. Anna Perenna! sings the finch. Anna Perenna!

  I am, or think I am. I know I was. I and the bee, we were. I and the bee and the flower. And now we all three are, somewhere. Of the jug I do not know the tenses. It was once on a potter’s wheel and in a kiln, and before that it was clay, perhaps in a river. Some craftsman, the potter I suppose, has painted a horse on it, a kind of duck or goose, and some zigzags and stars. Has anything of mine survived? I signed my name over and over. I was never politician enough to kill my enemies, they are great sources of fame. My name must be in a list somewhere. Some schoolmaster will say my name to little boys on their benches.

  I escaped a lot of the meanness of the world. I was not a slave or a tax collector.

  My wife and her moustache all the depilatories however astringent could not remove rarely haunt my reveries, though I wonder sometimes with a memory as of the knives if she will ever join me here in the swirls of pollen between the two plies of the cloth of light that adheres to all the surfaces of the world. That is where I may be. It was always the outside of light I saw alive. I am most certainly now on the other side. The back of orange is brown. The back of yellow blue. But I may be between the outer and the inner film.

  Sometimes when the campagna is hazy with wagon dust and twilight, rain clouds blackening in the north, I see lizards the size of elephants clumping through ferns as big as oaks. They go on their hind legs in a hopping glide, holding their forepaws out like women crossing the street. Their eyes are little and stupid, their tails as long as a ship. They gobble and honk.

  I go into a nettle when I see them, peering out through the fuzz. I have mentioned them to the Consiliarii, who say they cannot see them, and praise me for my gifts, and question me as to what I mean by the word size. I have given up trying to explain. A dog is smaller than a horse, I tell them by way of illustration. They smile and look at each other in wonder.

  OUR MADMAN has made himself a ragdoll from scraps of cloth, sticks, and bits of twine. He hangs it around his neck while we swing the picks, and cuddles it at night. His eyes are as lost as the exiles’ eyes on the island where there was no water, eyes that were fearful of a bush, of the sun, of footsteps from behind.

  What to a child is a tor blue in its own shadow as the light goes level but the humped house of the old steganopodous lar himself whose grin all grizzle and whose pounce illotis manibus are why there are hearths in the world at all?

  Habitarunt di quoque silvas collesque. What elves are the gods that we should forget to shiver when the
y crack a stick in the frost outside the house? Children are not the wolves that men become, if they had a grandmother worthy of the name.

  I’ve admired the ragdoll of our madman, who watched me for five puncti together, looking for the spite. He hid the doll in his tatters, but next day he motioned me over with an idiot smile. He was nursing the doll at his bosom.

  — We must be so careful, I said.

  — Sice sicuti! he sputtered, crouching to look sharply over his shoulder.

  I look into his eyes and know that madness is not the way I shall go. I am damned to sanity and to hope. I have seen her again whom I’d never hoped to see. I have seen wildflowers in the wall after they put us on the waterless island to die as best we could. Fortuna moves with fire in her left hand, water in her right. Discovery is always more than what you meant to find. You look for a woman to bake your bread and be delicious in your bed and you find patience and kindness. You look for truth and find strength. I looked for water and found C. Musonius Rufus. I lost him, I think, in the galleys coming out, perhaps in the windowless jail before. Perhaps I had never found him at all. The imitation of a man who found Rufus spoke with the tongue of the shills and panders around him, saw as they saw, lost hope as they lost hope, threw hope away with the abandon of the self hater. Fortuna was a whore, what doubt could there be of it? Cleanthes and Zeno! Had they ever been closed in the bilge of a Roman galley, had they been abandoned on a rock in the Aegean? They had never seen human beings indistinguishable from the gutter rats of Rome.

  We talked murder, to drink the blood. We armed ourselves with sticks and rocks, making territories. I found an overhang of rock that I could be under part of the day. The tide of our sea is very shallow, but it was enough to fill my shelter.

  In the part farthest back of this little inlet the sand was whiter, finer. I thought how if I were a child I would delight in that clean place under the rock, in the translucent green shelf of cool water over the sand. Jagged stone in hand, I kept one eye on the rise above me, one on the hollow. How long had I seen a burble in the surface of the thin water where it slipped as shallow as papyrus over the sand?

  IL RICORDO DELLE ANTICHE PROVE FREME NEI CUORI, COSÌ COME L’IMPETO VERSO IL FUTURO!

  La Banda Municipale Filarmonica di Rapallo stood at parade rest in front of the flag of the Motherland, the standard of Genoa, and the bandiera fascista. An honor guard in black shirts, jackboots, and alpine hats stood behind the flags, carbines on the ready. The bandmaster mopped sweat from under his chin. For the fortieth time someone had hushed their chatter and horseplay to say that they heard the automobiles.

  — Adesso!

  — Finalmente!

  NON BISOGNA CREDERE E FAR CREDERE ALLA FACILITÀ DELLA GUERRA: SAREBBE UN ALIMENTARE DELLE ILLUSIONI ASSURDA. LA GUERRA SARÀ ASPRA E DURA.

  The moment, if ever it would begin, was sacred and potent with glory. The Duce di Fascismo, himself, would arrive with certain members of the Party. He was to be greeted with Giovanezza, Giovenezza! They would salute in the salute of the Caesars, he would salute. The bandmaster would shout the order to about face, so that the banners and the guard were facing toward Rapallo, which lay by the sea two long downward curves of a road lined with people who would throw flowers and cry Duce du-ce du-ce! Viva l’Italia fascista!

  They would doubletime, smartly, swiftly, elegantly, never blurring a note. The flags would stream in the wind. They would enter the town with tilted horns, tilted chins, under the banners strung from building to building.

  MA È TEMPO DI CESSARE OGNI SCHERMAGLIA POLEMICA. GLI EVENTI INCALZANO. L’UNIONE DEGLI ITALIANI È ORMAI UN FATTO COMPIUTO. NESSUNO DEVE TURBARLA. NESSUNO LA TURBERÀ. È IL SEGNACOLO DELLA VITTORIA.

  Two motorcycle couriers arrived first, minutes before the Duce. They braked, expressionless in their goggles, gave a gauntleted salute of the Caesars, shouted that the Duce di Fascismo was immediately behind them, and rode forward around the band, one to the right, one to the left.

  The automobiles were suddenly there, while everybody was still watching the motorcyclists. The Duce was in his Alfa Romeo between two Mercedes. He was the first one out, doubletiming as soon as he was on the road. The bandmaster gave three salutes.

  The Duce jogged in place, pulling down his tunic and setting his Sam Brown belt right. A gold sash looped his torso and hung from its hip knot down his left thigh. Il Aiutante danced beside him, his moustaches flapping, his chin high like the Duce’s.

  — Avanti! shouted the Duce.

  — Avanti a passo di corsa! ordered the Aiutante.

  — Dietro front! bellowed the bandmaster.

  And down the road they went, Giovanezza, Giovanezza! thumping out in a wonder of shrill brass and resonant drum, the ancient gonfalon of Genoa jouncing beside the tricolor and the Fascist flag with its Italic ax bound in a bundle of sticks. A yellow dog and a brown joined them on the first curve, outpacing the guard and the color bearers.

  The sad eyes of Max Beerbohm watched them as they bounced past his garden wall.

  SONO OGGI FIERI E FEDELI GLI ITALIANI ALL’ ESTERO!

  The Mayor of Rapallo standing in a school of priests gave the salute of the Caesars as the band and the Duce trotted into the square in front of the City Hall. Children with bouquets of roses sang The Fascist Hymn. The Duce stood with his legs apart, his thumbs hooked in his belt, his chin high.

  — Camicie Nere! he said. Popolo di Rapallo!

  And made a speech. Non vi è dubbio che giammai, come in questi ultimi tempi, l’Italia ebbe uno spirito militare così elevato. And so forth.

  Afterwards, the sun low over the bay of Tigullio, he visited the American poet Ezra Pound and admired his bust by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

  — Why do you write poetry? he asked.

  — To put my ideas in order, Ezra Pound said.

  — Will you read us one of your poems?

  Ezra Pound read two pages from his Cantos.

  — Ma quest’, said Mussolini, è divertente!

  AFTER NIGHTFALL, on my knees in the water, I dug. I scooped the sand out by handfuls. The deeper I went, the wetter the sand. This, hercle, was Rufus work.

  The world is out there, independent of your will. I am here, behind the red furze of my beard, in my eyes, in my crazy knees and spine all but sprung. Demetrius the silversmith liked to say that he was a better silversmith than Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus was an emperor. Old Nihil Magnus. I am a better slave than he is an emperor. You suck such consolation at your peril.

  Give me, frater, fatter consilia. I remember the tombstone seen by some traveler in Asia Minor which a barbarian woman had set up, saying that she was the mother of two strapping sons, and that she had attended the grammar school in her old age to learn to read and write.

  I remember the bitch the urchins found trapped in a wareroom, her ribs a corrugation down her pitiful body. She had eaten one of her puppies all except the head. She had eaten her shit. They brought me the bitch and pups, knowing me to be a fool, and when I gave her a bowl of mush she would not eat until her puppies had eaten. And when she ate she kept an eye on her brood. I renewed my devotions to Artemis. Rome has declined in virtue since Remus and Romulus pulled at the wolf’s dugs. Would they had got her solicitude along with the milk.

  I remember while licking my pan clean of its swill, dinners at which the vomitoria went around twice. You drink melted snow after you spew, chew a bit of ginger, and then go at the partridge breasts roasted in wine and garlic.

  I remember tubs of leavings going off to the swine for which we would give thanks enough to run a sweet tickle into the ears of the gods. Once they brought a fat man here who wept like a woman while the smith soldered the shackles on his trotters. We watched the lard melt away day by day. He buckled fairly soon, pitching forward with his eyes rolled white and his tongue somewhere down his throat. His fellows beside him on the chain robbed him of his rags while he was still pitching in his agony. Liber ille est, someone s
aid.

  Voices, voices. I who had loved rhetoric like a mistress rarely hear two words together more articulate than the hinny of an ass. It was a voice hoarse as a raven over my shoulder when I was digging under my rock that said, You’re clearing a spring!

  Caepoculus, who had a chancre for his left eye. I knew him when he ran a little theater on the Via Scortilla where he was to be seen in a beaked mask, tail feathers on his butt, castanets on his fingers, dancing in the street to a music played by boy drummers and a fat whore with a tambourine who was so heavy that she had to be carried in a litter by slaves with gilded eyelids.

  God, what an ostentatio. From that he came to this, no doubt by ways as mazy as Roman streets.

  — Help me dig, and keep quiet, I said.

  He hopped down beside me, hot as a stove with fever, and plunged his stringy arms into the sand. His one eye had horse terror in it, unblinking and staring. It was a bawdy eye in its day, eloquent of suggestion, when I had seen him cavorting in his feathers like an ostrich with piles, luring customers to his cellar where he presided as master of ceremonies over sottish musicians whose flesh was the color of lead. They played what they called antique Greek music while one of the boys humped a miserable old nanny goat, and the hippopotamine whore, she of the tamborine, danced the shimmy, and Caepoculus did the act for which he had a certain vogue. He lifted his tail feathers and farted in various styles announced beforehand in a solemn voice. A cultivated swain easing a squeak of sewer gas past the attention of a hera. A senator inadvertently punctuating his bombast with garlicky trumpetings. A poet’s lyric toot while in rapture. A judge’s authoritative peditum. A Christian’s pious hiss. Imperator Nero’s thunderous role and clap.

  I remembered my geology, I remembered wells, the nature of earth, the evidence of the weeds, which were richer over my nook of the island than elsewhere. My hands bled, my nails tore. I had to stop Caepoculus and teach him how. I made a hole so deep my arms were in to the shoulders to get the next scoop of sand, wet sand, wet sand.