Eclogues, p.23
Eclogues, page 23
Once we’d spurted, with practical wantonness and sound technique, we flumped flat, laughing into the heavy silence that a moment before was ruckled only by boys’ yips of pleasure and the nittering about of bugs. We sat up, whacked each other’s shoulders, and whoofed like zanies.
There was light enough to see the splat across Michel’s nose, his cheek, on his chin. He wiped viscid fingers on my knee. He smeared together the dollops on his tummy and tasted his fingers, milked a residual gout from me, dipped, and flicked it off with his tongue tip.
He pedantically tried it on his palate and fastidiously pronounced it alkaline. We lay shoulder to shoulder looking out on the darkening meadow, the stars, the risen moon. Michel asked tactless questions about Jonquille and me, revealing an unsuspected ignorance.
Rings of trees, giving their age, is first mentioned as a fact by Montaigne, though suspected by Leonardo. Tullio says Montaigne learned about them from a goldsmith in Italy who, it has been recently discovered, was an apprentice in Leonardo’s studio.
CXIII
Jonquille and I at the Porte Dijeaux, glum. A whippet in a red coat with brass buttons sniffs us, tightens the coil of its tail, and prisses off. Michel, eh? I said, tiens. I’m afraid so, she said. Sort of like being fucked by a puppy, or in the operative detail, by a horse.
I had, she said, this intuition that you wanted us to. Oh sure, I said, what else? Try not to feel it that way, Joli. It won’t happen again, word of honor. Besides thinking maybe you wanted me to, my only excuse is that I’d been enjoying myself rather well and raving for it.
You know how loose I am when I have the house to myself of an afternoon, and was beginning to popple and squeeze in on some really juicy ones. So help me, Joli bébé, I phoned you. You were taking a roll of linoleum, of all things, to Marc Aurel, sweet of you and good-natured.
And there was Michel, who thought you were with me. Right there at the door, with that body. I did everything, my fault from beginning to end. He was all for galloping away and blushed like a crossing signal. I told him he was acting as your stand-in, what women won’t do, eh Joli?
How many times? What a vulgar question: twice. He didn’t calm down enough to pay attention to what he was doing until the second time. His first two times, I said. Joli! He tried it with a chippy over at St.-Projet and nothing happened. I feel awful. So do I. Good old Miche.
CXIV
Demanding my football jersey, jeans, underwear, and socks for the wash, Maman had to learn that she couldn’t have them and sat down with the back of her hand to her forehead. You’ve worn them since Monday. I can smell you over here. Since last Monday, I said. Mon Dieu, Joli.
Talk about crazy, Victor said, who had given up all to the laundry and was finishing his breakfast as naked as a lizard. The basket heaped with clothes and sheets sat in the middle of the kitchen. Jolivet Bonnat! What is this, existentialism, a bet, something from the cinema?
From the Bible, I said. I’m losing my mind! Maman can do her mother number to perfection. You know Jonathan and David? I said. Everybody, she said patiently, knows Jonathan and David. They wore each other’s clothes, because they were friends, the best friends ever in the world.
I didn’t know about the clothes bit, but Marc Aurel was swatting it up for the Culte Baptiste, and was telling about it at the Globe. Miche and I have had the same idea, but not only to wear each other’s clothes, clean clothes, girls are always doing that, but dirty clothes, to swap.
Horse Jolivet, horse Michel, reaching his wry scantling briefs snugger and nestling the hitch of the pod, having hefted a fifty kilo barbell a hundred times in four sets of presses, Michel of the precisely synclined philtrum, leavened chest, suavely bunched calves, and long trunk.
CXV
We prance, skittish in the scarrow, shy of thunder, candid neck rubbing fellows galloping bellydeep in flowers, proud inwardly beasts snorting at shifts of the wind, watched by dark, hidden, concerned human eyes. We nicker and neigh and stomp. Les Eyzies a flowery prairie.
In the Grotte de la Mairie, Teyjat, discovered in 1903 by Denis Peyrony, its drawings deciphered and copied by Henri Breuil, the animals were painted late in the twenty thousand years when horse and his kin revolved around an axis, opposing and complementing bison and her kin.
Horse kin were ibex and stag, bison kin were ox and mammoth. The one was phallus, the other vulva, one was spear, the other wound, one was mortar, the other pestle, one was light, the other dark, one was hunter ranging the savannas, the other weaver at the hearth, circle and center.
Bison pairs with horse, horse with reindeer. Horses stand inside the contours of larger horses. Horses upside down share the same space with horses rightside up. Bear is suspended on a surface already occupied by ponies, tilted as the creatures descried in the stars are tilted.
Bison shambles through a clockwhirl of tarpans and ibexes. Three reindeer, one on its back, one raising his lordly head, one lowering his to graze, pace in montage across a horse of the steppes, wild ass grey, its mane running from its tousled foreshock the length of its chine.
CXVI
So we’re wearing everything for two weeks and will swap on Saturday. Everything, Maman said faintly, fanning herself with the morning paper. Actually, I said, testing an armpit for aroma, we’re going the Bible one better. David got Jonathan’s clothes, not Jonathan David’s.
A pair of thumbslot dimples flank his sacral bight, his well-hung engenderer froggishly nubbly and clinched by runner veins when it’s standing spritraked, steep flare to the glans rim, plumply snooted. I am slenderer, tan, trim, and everywhere on the sprout, very leggy.
David, who was a ruddy and comely youth, was a shepherd, and he’d just conked the giant Goliath with his slingshot, bap between the eyes, and I suppose for clothes he had some kind of goatskin or Old Testament sugarsack with a rope for a belt, hair a mess, brown as a nut.
Jonathan was the king’s son and would have been the dernier cri of Bible times fashion. I suppressed the phrase because their souls were knit. Mothers deserve being spared. Michel’s are going to be wonderfully rotten. He’s worked out all week on the river with the boat crews.
Maman stared at the ceiling. Is your father to be told this, assuming he doesn’t ask first why you smell like a locker room? Oh sure, I said. He’ll understand. Men! we said together. Horse Jolivet, horse Michel, we canter in the sedge of the Val Dordogne, long and red.
CXVII
The gift of apples, the beautiful gift of apples. Tullio shaped apples in the air with his pudgy hands. The shepherds in the Eclogues gave the shepherdesses apples to signify their love. We were around a table outside the Globe, Jonquille, Michel, Marc Aurel, Tullio, and I.
The schoolboy Cézanne in Aix, shy and awkward, made friends with the younger Zola, the pariah of their class, at the bottom of the pecking order. Boys tolerate nothing. I gave Jonquille a glance, she slid her hand into mine. They ganged up against Paul, kicked him, bloodied his nose.
He held his own nevertheless, and refused to join them in not speaking to Émile, the torture they’d chosen. To seal their camaraderie Émile brought Paul a basket of apples. Bravissimo! A basket of apples. I got a smiling glance, bemused, from Michel. Jonquille squeezed my hand.
They walked the countryside together, those two. The idle ramble was the vehicle of their friendship, that and Latin poetry, especially Virgil’s Georgics and Bucolica, which they recited to each other. Paul was too shy ever to show Émile his translation of the Corydon and Alexis.
The second eclogue. What charm to the irony of withholding a text from Zola because of its indelicacy. What did it say? Marc Aurel asked. And from Virgil, Tullio went on, unheeding, Cézanne conceived the ambition to paint one perfect landscape with pastoral figures, an eclogue.
CXVIII
How they crouch, kneel, reach in these paintings, as if he could not imagine anything for them to do. And then the still lifes with apples, Zola’s gift, painted over and over. Did anyone think to send Zola a basket of apples when he wrote J’Accuse? Jonquille gave me a lovely look.
Horse Jolivet and Jonquille deer, we lie kissing on the sunroom couch, brown on flowery chintz, in a disarray of parted clothes, my dactylion twiddling her thrilled nubble to a pitch, her chummy fingers coddling a dipping crawl along my scrotum seam, tongue around tongue.
Horse king of the grass, thunder and rain, kin of acorn, prong of the griot, lion of the fat testicles, speckled salmon of all cunning. Deer, queen of flowers, kin of apple, round-hipped moon, jucking quail cousin, mistress of basketry, randing, scallom, and willow fitching.
Sister to her slim daughters in elktooth bracelets and sons shoulder-girt with bows, nipples circled with ochre, dotted lozenges of white clay on their cheeks. A nuchal kiss, daddled foreskin, tongue and whisper into an ear together. Klitoris is a town in Arcadia, I mumbled.
Scrumptious, she murmured. I found it on a map in Larousse. Loud horse, silent deer. You are, I began. Stop there. You are. La Tène. Reindeer drinking. Pizzle slant in a tufted sheath along his belly. Delicate steps in moss. Grave eye, flicked tail, tall antlers, wolf light.
CXIX
Saturday afternoon, Michel’s mansarde with its two windows, situp board and weights on a raffia mat, a tall narrow cheap mirror from Prisunic, cot, shipcabin spareness bright with posters, maps, sports gear, and all in the pitch of summer’s hot western light, the afternoon.
Do we close the shutters? I asked, and he replied, shit no. Maman’s off with some bum, for the night if I know her. The place is ours. And if Mademoiselle Rat Whiskers across the way wants to watch two healthy boys get each other off, it will be good for her constipation.
He pulled the dirty white jersey he’d worn for two weeks, its sleeves underarm sodden with fresh sweat soaking into old, over his head and knuckled his nostrils with droll disgust. Yours, he said. And yours, I said, dipping my head out of my striped jersey for him to wear.
How, he said, did you talk a skunk into peeing on this? It was two of them, I said. We unlaced our sneakers, drew off fetid socks, and passed them to each other. Do I read the apples right? Michel asked, unzipping his jeans. I think so, I said. It doesn’t in any case matter.
After our run in the park that morning, we’d had breakfast at my house, banished by Maman to a walk in the garden, the fun of which Victor relished, holding his nose. He brought us a sack which Postel found left at the gate, addressed to Michel in lipstick. Two apples.
CXX
And with the two apples in a sack, a perfumed billet doux: All yours, it read, but may I have him, bathed or unbathed, tomorrow? About time. Jonquille, with kisses of various sorts for the both of you, which please pass on. Studying for exams and the interview anyway.
The punch of Michel’s briefs, yellowed in the pod, pushed the shirring at the groin smooth. Looks promising, I said, stepping out of mine and handing them over in the swap. I asked if, as it seemed, he had come in his. Just after dribble, he said smiling. I slept in them for you.
We sniffed, made faces, and dressed ourselves, eye-locked, wry smiles identical, in each other’s clothes. The apples, I said, mean what they say. His lashpent eyes were solving the same qualms as mine, his lips parted in surmise. Sex as a sport can confuse the heart.
Michel unlatched his belt, slid his zipper down, and spancelled his thighs with his briefs, which were mine, pissburnt and musty. He rolled his elbows shoulder high, enjoyed a roguish grin, and hunkered to unzip me and unseat my underpants. The cot. Take off our sneakers?
Everything on, however undone, else we’re not in each other’s clothes. Other way around, Miche? D’accord, he said as if I’d surprised him. A billygoat wouldn’t stay in the room with us! He would if he were as horny as I am, and intend to get hornier as we go along, joli joli.
CXXI
The You’re sure? we may have each needed to ask the other our stubborn and goatish bodies bypassed, not our stiff ramping squalid cocks in their rabid willfulness alone, but all of us, legs, hands, eyes, chests, hair, shoulders, in a maniac sexiness that pitched into us harumscarum.
My heart kicked, my testicles knotted tight, the back of my neck flushed hot. Interjoined, arms locked around each other’s butts, we gave as we took, with deep breaths, hugging closer as we made headway, resolutely ungagging, grunting, thrashing heels, emboldened by doing.
Up, Michel gasped, for air. And I, panting. And with sporting retches rejoined our double juncture. Late afternoon levelled the light and stretched the shadows in the mansarde. We wiggled free of jeans and briefs, which were hobbling our knees, and padded to the WC to pee.
Do we ever stink, I said, and, with awe, it gets better and better, Miche. Three times, can you believe? Four coming up, he said. Want to take off these rotten shirts? Not me. Nor me, but I’ll go along with unsneakering. Socks, anyway, are smellier with sneakers off.
The armpits of this shirt of yours, I said, are so rancid foul that I don’t know whether I’m me or you. Sex, he said, is what we smell like most. Isn’t that why we’re here, loving each other up, to be all mixed together, like? That, I said, a bit uncertain, is why we’re here.
CXXII
At dusk we ran, still in each other’s clothes, to the rue Roquelaure, achieved my room, Victor right behind us, without encountering parents or Postel. Stripped, we showered, brushed our teeth, gargled mouthwash, dabbed on cologne, and dressed in clean clothes, mine.
We appeared for dinner new minted. Jolivet, Victor said, promised me that if I wouldn’t pester him this afternoon, not that anybody wanted to get near him, he’d mount stamps with me tonight, take me swimming all of next week, and to the movies on his allowance whenever.
I blushed, Michel beamed. Is all this foolishness over, you two? Maman asked. Yes, ma’am, I said, in a much smaller voice than I had intended. It was, Papa said, damned imaginative of you. Saves on the laundry bill, as well. May I tell Tullio? He will find it charming.
I suppose he would, instigator, among others, as he was. Testiculus, he had said, et oculus. Darwin thought the evolution of the eye the miracle of nature. There’s the stomach, which knows how not to digest itself, and the cooperation of voice and ear, all the natural systems.
No system is ever quite independent of all the others. Who has studied the relation of foot to logic, shoulder to skepticism, our bodily organization into front and back, left and right, to geography, grammar, mathematics? And then consider that subtle affinity testiculus et oculus.
CXXIII
The great meditations on it are Shakespeare’s sonnets and his Love’s Labor’s Lost, a play set next to us here in the Basses Pyrénées, and Montaigne’s Sur des vers de Virgile, and the Greek poets of Alexandria. The Sicilian masters of pastoral, too, and Virgil himself.
But beside Darwin’s wonder at the eye put Pasteur’s remark that we will not understand the order of things until we understand the asymmetry of things. These two observations belong together, but how? Look. Here is an Alexandrian poem that takes its imagery from honey and wine.
And contrasts sweet and sharp, taking elements in the sexual processes of insects and plants, but each a peripheral phenomenon to those processes, both gifts, so to speak, that nature can afford to give us without in the least stinting her voluptuous onwardness. The poem.
A sharp longing and a sweet response are like honey and wine, as when Alexis, who is young and handsome, loves thick-haired Kleoboulos, who is as young and handsome as he, the two together, narrow hip to narrow hip, rubbing noses, are as sweet as honey, as sharp as wine to see.
In Alexandria Greek and Roman eroticism of the classical period, apt to serve practically any end, political, satiric, comic, except the purely erotic, became refined and charming. The poet, let us surmise, is concocting a fiction: for the eye and for the testicle, a brace of pairs.
CXXIV
His picture is asymmetrical. Boys do not think each other pretty, but admire each other for strength, skill, daring, cleverness, and so on. These are not real boys in the poem, but porcelain figurines in a neoclassical tradition, like Virgil’s and Theokritos’ shepherds and girls.
They are imaginary. The wine, however, and honey are there. How deep do we go? To the pseudocopulation of the bee with its blossom, the amorphous sexuality of the yeast in the grape must? What’s the structural affinity of honey and love? Pubens and florescens are molecular.
At every period in history we find the body as a term in a larger metaphor. Greek physiology was a matter of liquids suffusing muscles and organs. Disease came from an improper wetness in an organ that ought for its own good to be drier. A matter of temperature of the liquids.
Michel says his stomach wants him to be a Socialist, his verge a sailor, his eye my friend. He says Postel letting me in when I pull the bell at the gate gives the impression of being a peasant who has been called away from getting in the harvest to tie my shoe.
The speed of gravity is a fly’s weight over that of radiance, else the earth and moon and all the stars would boil away and wander in space as random dust. France, Tullio says, is perfectly poised between julvernerie and the sense to keep her vinestocks well tended.
CXXV
Tullio lay dead on the sidewalk of the Cours Clemenceau when Marc Aurel and Trombone found him, two blocks away from the Gambetta to which he was walking. He seemed, they said, to be a fat man asleep on his back. Just the day before he had been talking to me about Trombone.
Of Trombone’s vestiary bouvardisme he remarked that it is more vieux grognard than clochard, a corporal on the powderwagons at Waterloo preserved by excitement until Napoleon’s second coming, an observation thoroughly Tullio, as Papa agreed when I told him these last words.
