They returned to the den, there to contemplate in silence a fact of which they were always partially aware but had not taken sufficiently into account, namely that “The Tree of Life” and “The Scale of Being” had apparently nothing to do with one another. They had embarked on that long journey of adding zeros to the numeral of themselves, for only the most courageous of men could admit that as their knowledge increased by infinite magnitudes, their basic ignorance had scarcely diminished.
But in Cannonia, where time flows back and forth, and observers are always linked to the observed, it was difficult to deny that distant feeling that everything is morphically interconnected and resonates.
I had the distinct apprehension that given just the slightest excuse — another glass of whiskey or another chart — these two men would have sauntered out the door and left their families in their great houses, renouncing their life insurance and wealthy clientele for the road, leashed and snaffled together as oft-erring vagabond folk, diligently scrutinizing men, loving women in haste, reveling in animal and gustatory marvels, and traversing the humming plains of Flanders, or the mellow gardens of France, or the desolate Spanish uplands, playing jokes on prime ministers, kings, and potentates, and finally traveling east to the most Byzantine of nations to give the reigning pasha a hot foot.
IN DARKEST CANNONIA (Rufus)
On our return to Semper Vero, I was given a rough inventory of the many classical statues. Each time Iulus’s parents had wanted to modernize the bathrooms, they had decided instead upon yet another piece of garden sculpture. We circled a huge zinc figure of a winged woman from the design of an unknown Parisian sculptor. Her wings were quite small for her body and she held her right breast with her left hand as the dogs urinated merrily on her feet. Further on sat a cast-iron statue of an Eastern knight in need of immediate repair, a huge knotted sash barely covering his feverish groin, his big-balled horse rearing precipitously upon a millstone so that he might be turned toward an enemy like a weathervane. Then a rather nervous bronze Buddha with extraordinary earlobes, (“Not a copy,” it was pointed out), and finally a cluster of three negro boys, one in breechcloths with a snake in his hands, another in pharaonic headdress with a vessel on his shoulders, and a third in rather elegant and modern tennis shorts, holding a sphere in one hand and a handle of something which had been broken off in the other.
“All cast locally,” Iulus said, pinging the fine legs of each athlete as we passed, humming a local ditty, “Wo ist der Negerstatue mit einer Schlanger in der Hand?” (“Where Is the Negro Statue with the Snake in its Hand?”) I was very happy to be among this bric-a-brac, which appeared so happy to have me among them.
We passed a neoclassical rotunda without a name, apparently built simply to show off a rare whiterind fir tree, which had grown “naturally” into the shape of a lyre (only one of a number of dendrodological curiosities), and ultimately we strode across a series of low stone humpbacked bridges to the “Freemason’s Pavilion,” a roofless brick and stucco ruin with a blue slate cornice and windows in the shape of five and six pointed stars, surrounded by red beeches and Japanese maples. The stucco had been peeled away artfully from its exposed arches, framing broken Saracen columns and a severely but precisely damaged stairway to nowhere—“Just the sort of place,” my guide commented with his usual abstracted air, “where one might wander from time to time after dinner in the library, and find an unknown guest who might amplify a line of Dante you did not quite understand.” Then we meandered past a group of gnarled olive trees, enormously high, which still belonged to the same peasant family who had refused to sell to any of the former owners, and now towered above even the maples. Its fruit was still harvested by the same family, or rather picked up from the ground after the first winter winds, Iulus related proudly.
The final stop on our itinerary was his grandfather’s discovery — the source of the Mze. Less was known then about the peoples and gods who occupied the banks of this river than those of the Nile itself. The Mze dove, resurfaced, and redoubled upon itself so many times that it was only recently that people connected its parts. We were climbing the crest of a hill, by no means the highest locally, with the only unlandscaped meadow within the park, when we came upon an empty shack of no discernable function. It sat there in disillusioned clarity, with no nature around or behind it. Iulus pointed out a listing piece of gutter which fed a rain barrel, at the bottom of which a rusted spigot dribbled onto the ground, apparently the origin of four hundred and eighty miles of serpentine river basin. He pointed again to the collection point of the Hermes well and thence to the ponds, one roaring like an engine, the other still as a mote, then to the broken dam and its dry cascade, and finally to a bright, harmonious, and sweet-flowing stream which wound in its infancy to a sluice in the village, where it began to rage from human mismanagement — and shortly thereafter, outflanking and checkmating its own tributaries, confused and inundatory, simply dissolved. We had sunk to our boottops in the sodden grass. The dogs drank happily but appeared bored. Iulus waved us back to the house.
We had gone only a few hundred yards down the gentle incline when we came upon a huge mound of earth only recently thrown up.
“An Astingi warrior,” he explained, “no doubt of high rank. They bury them mounted on their horse, even if the horse is alive.”
“What happened?” I said in my smallest voice.
“Just another bloody and inconclusive struggle,” he shrugged, and then sighed gravely. “Any disclaimer for lost pasts is childish.”
But for me, no amount of ignorance or atrocity could take the magic out of Semper Vero, that compact universe of pure play, the promise of a life of singular details and no general upkeep, a life of the given. I was watching myself have an emotion which had no name. It wasn’t exactly love; I was happy in a different way. For the first time in my life I had a companion who I liked precisely because I knew I could never be like him. I was also losing the facility of my sincerity.
“You are looking at me with such interest,” he said, “that I hope you won’t become disappointed with me.”
On the terrace we cleaned our muddy boots with bayonets. Through the French doors I could make out nothing but vases of the largest flowers and portraits of the boldest nudes I had ever seen. He let the dogs in and they thudded immediately into a groaning goosedown sofa. He apologized for knowing so little of the history of his own home. This was neither a matter of secrecy nor deception, he insisted; his parents simply did not know nor care about its original functions. Then he offered me a chair on the terrace, sat down on his haunches like a hound, and as he began to talk, a large black crow with brilliant black plumage suddenly alighted on his shoulder.