The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

by Guy Davenport

  Les Exploits de Nat Pinkerton de Jour en Jour: Un Texte de René Magritte Translated and Improved

  Nat Pinkerton, the private detective, has arrived by horsecar, foot, and elevator at his office in New York. As soon as he has handed his bowler, gloves, and cane to the buttons, his lieutenant introduces a client.

  —My case, the client, who is a lady of the upper middle class, explains without preamble, is one the likes of which you have never heard. My husband plays the bassoon in the Nineteenth Precinct Fireman’s Marching Band. Our cook is Irish. I have a weakness for the finer things.

  Nat Pinkerton lights a cheroot, listens attentively, makes a note with a pencil from time to time.

  —I see it all, he says.

  —The potato stew, she says, was strewn, you understand, from the living-room linoleum to the fire escape.

  —You had no premonition? You suspected nothing?

  —The tureen shattered in countless pieces right before my eyes.

  She leaves. The detective gives orders to his lieutenant. The lieutenant, disguised as a Wall Street broker, leaves with a shotgun and bloodhound.

  The detective writes a letter. He affixes a pink postage stamp depicting General George Washington, value three centimes. He uses a pseudonym in his return address.

  He admires his office. A portrait of Mozart hangs above the steam radiator. On a table covered with a turkey carpet there is an Edison phonograph, an electric fan, a porcelain bust mapped phrenologically, a stereopticon viewer, a revolver, a lantern, an Argand astral lamp.

  Towards noon, his morning’s work being over, he strolls down Broadway to a well-appointed restaurant. He has an andouillette, some salad, and a half bottle of sauterne. He takes his coffee on the terrace, where he makes notes in a small book.

  After his meal, he takes his customary walk. From habit he makes a mental photograph of all the people he passes. Everybody, he knows, is a potential criminal. The avenues are an endless spectacle. Indians from the Plains, trappers from Canada, English tourists easily spotted by their monocles and rolled umbrellas, senators from the capital who have Negro servants carrying their law books and writs, actresses of unsurpassed beauty lolling in carriages, John Jacob Astor looking out the window of his mansion.

  He notices that his client of the morning is sitting in Central Park.

  He penetrates the disguise of a well-known anarchist who is trying to pass for a nursemaid wheeling a pram. He steps deftly across the street, blowing his police whistle while felling the anarchist with one stroke of his powerful arm.

  —Desist, Sir, cries a policeman arriving on the scene. You cannot strike a respectable nursemaid on the avenues of New York!

  —Fool! says Nat Pinkerton. Do you not see that this is Osip Przwynsczki, the notorious anarchist from Paris, France?

  Lifting the baby from its pram, he strips it to show that in effect it is a bundle of dynamite sticks bound with a fuse.

  Soon after he goes into a bookstore to select a volume for his afternoon’s reading. He chooses Captain Wilkes’s Voyages.

  Twice on the way back to his office he is shot at by dastardly outlaws whose careers he has thwarted. As always, they miss. The detective frequently consults the mirror in his hat to see who is behind him. At his tobacconist he buys a box of John Ruskin cigars and the latest edition of the Herald Tribune.

  At the corner of Forty-Second Street and the Avenue Christophe-Colombe one of his operatives dressed as a banjo player from the Louisiana Purchase breaks into a tap dance, singing Love Them Watermelons Mighty Fine while reporting sotto voce and out of the side of his mouth that a slayer of six with ax for whom the Metropolitan Police have looked in vain is across the street buying an eggplant and some endives.

  The detective nips over, coshes the criminal, and blows his whistle.

  —Do I have to do all your work for you? he says tauntingly to the squadron of policemen who gallop up in a Black Maria.

  Back in his office, he lights a cigar and reads his book. The lieutenant arrives and reads his report from scraps of paper secreted about his person. Nat Pinkerton files the information away in his unfailing memory, like wax to receive, like marble to retain.

  The buttons bring him a telegram on a salver.

  —Just as I thought! he says, telegram in hand.

  Two women are presented by the lieutenant, and as soon as they have outlined their case, they weep awhile before leaving.

  —Why, Nat Pinkerton asks his lieutenant, are matters so transparent to me, so opaque to everybody else?

  The lieutenant does not answer, but smiles knowingly.

  Nat Pinkerton reads about Captain Wilkes’s antarctic expedition with genuine appreciation. He would like to see a penguin walking about upright and gabbling. He would like to hear the piercing cry of the albatross.

  The door flies open and there, suddenly, is Florent Carton Dalton, leader of the famous gang. Though he wears a bandana across his face just under the eyes, Nat Pinkerton recognizes him and laughs at him while snapping his finger under his nose.

  —Your time has come, you rancid son of a bitch! cries F. C. Dalton.

  —Yours first! replies Nat Pinkerton, drawing a revolver from a holster concealed inside his coat and shooting Dalton then and there.

  At eventide the lieutenant makes an arrest. One of the lady clients of the afternoon, he ascertained, was living with an acrobat as his concubine. Together they received stolen goods. The lieutenant is now free to return to his boardinghouse, his day’s work well done. But not before he makes his report to Nat Pinkerton, whose thoughtful eyes register the interest he takes in the matter. The report is recorded in shorthand by a secretary and placed in the detective’s files.

  Then Nat Pinkerton goes home for the day. He stops at a quiet brasserie for a game of cards with his friends and a drink before dinner. Even here he knows the weaver by his tooth and the compositor by his thumb, the carpenter by his saw and hammer and the prostitute by her leer and the spots on her face.

  He is withal a kindly soul, Nat Pinkerton, and buys a pretzel for the dog of the brasserie. By nine-thirty he is home. His wife and mother-in-law have waited for him in the dining room and together they eat some meat and vegetables. The detective is silent about his day’s work. Instead, he gives his whole attention to his wife and mother-in-law. They are actresses and he has promised to write them a play fitted to their talents. His mother-in-law fancies aristocratic roles from the days before the Revolution. His wife favors a part in which she can cry and wring her hands, preferably in a scene with a cavalry officer of dashing appearance.

  They all have a glass of Vichy water before bedtime. Nat Pinkerton, as always, goes down to check with the concierge that all the doors and windows are secured for the night.

  He kisses his wife and mother-in-law, and goes off to his private bedroom. By a single candle he records some memoranda, to study some effective author’s style for felicities of phrasing and purity of diction with an eye to writing down some of his more curious exploits which not many, but a discerning few, must surely find worthy of intelligent attention. Secundo, to recommence Sandow’s exercises for toning the muscles and slimming the waist. Tertio, to purchase the new patented flyswatter as advertised in the evening paper, as a modern adjunct for his office.

  The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

  KING OF PRUSSIA I IN D MAJOR, K. 575

  Summer morning, awake a tick before the clock’s ring, the work of bird-charm and circadian wheels, Hugo Tvemunding, assistant classics master and gym instructor at NFS Grundtvig, Troop Commander of Spejderkorps 235, and doctoral candidate in Theology, sat bolt upright in bed to yawn and stretch. The Great Walrus, said Mariana beside him, her eyes still closed, is on the loose, grumping all rivals away from his rocks. His walruser is reared up like a gander trying to see over the hedge, but first we must say our prayers. Hugo recited the prayer to the creator of being that he’d said every morning since he was a very little boy, a prayer composed by his pa
stor father. Amen, said Mariana. Franklin has slept through it all. Have not, said Franklin. Amen, too. Tickle me, and I’ll bite. My rocks, said Hugo. Franklin for all his contribution to the dialogue is still asleep. Long hairy feet on the floor, said Mariana, who wore a shirt of Hugo’s for a nightgown, square pinktoed feet on the floor, shapely girl’s feet on the floor, plop, slap, and gracefully silent. Who lost a Band-Aid in the bed? Your T-shirt fits Franklin like a potato sack on a weasel.

  HOLLYHOCKS

  Hugo’s run before breakfast was along a macadam road through pine-woods with an undergrowth of fern and laurel. He freed himself with every stride of the residue of dreams, of warm lethargies that had nested in his muscles, of anxieties that had made trash in his mind. He spoke to rabbits hopping across the road, to a cheeky fox doing a little dance in a clearing. The light was silver, early, cold. He had dreamed of his mother standing beside hollyhocks and coleus. Idiotically, he had said, They’re dead, aren’t they? She’d said, with her usual placid composure, Why no, dear, they’re not dead. And indeed nothing could have been more alive than these dream hollyhocks and coleus, so crisply beautiful in the accurate light of the dream. And his mother’s kindly ghost was like a blessing. She wore her apron, as for housework, and her voice was as sweet as springwater. White latticework of the back porch door behind her. A perfectly temperate summer day. Why no, dear, they’re not dead at all.

  CABIN WITH SKYLIGHT

  Stables once, Hugo’s room was designed and appointed by a drawing master who, having made it into a Danish Modern oblong of continuous space with a skylight, left to take a position elsewhere. Bed and worktable under the skylight, bookcases, chairs beyond, toward the kitchen area, which had a small barn window over the sink and cabinets. On the walls were a large photograph of Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer, a Mondriaan of the severest geometric period, a Paul Klee angel grinning about some sacred mischief, a photograph of Brancusi’s Torso d’un jeune homme, and three paintings by Hugo: Mariana naked, slouched reading in a chair, a still life of meadow flowers in a coffee mug, and a large painting that had once been of the Bicycle Rider, repainted with Tom Agernkop as model.

  GARDEN

  The colors in the dream where his mother stood placidly in her coverall, print cotton polka-dot gloves, and straw hat were those of photographs in The Country Garden and House and Family: early greens, soft browns, reticent blues in sharp silvery focus.

  WATER

  This is Franklin the Rabbit Who Invented Electricity, Hugo said to Rutger, Kim, Asgar, Tom, and Anders in the showers. We’ve run six kilometers, Franklin said. Oof! These wolf cub mystery knots you did my laces in, Hugo, won’t untie. Hugo! Knowing eyes found laughing eyes. Let me, Rutger said, kneeling. Franklin, looking hard at Kim and Anders under a shower together, soaping each other, wiggled his fingers at his ears and ruckled like a dove. They like each other, Skipper, Hugo said.

  WHEAT

  He wasn’t out to set himself up through signs and wonders, Hugo said to his Sunday School class. He was not concerned about who he was. That showed in everything he did. And from moment to moment he was the people he suffered with, whom he could cure or comfort or free. Most of these are people estranged from themselves by pain or deformity. People who are out of their minds are no good to anybody else, and Yeshua’s idea of man was that he was first of all someone who could help another.

  EYES BLUE WITH FATE

  A nipper, Mariana sighed, locked herself in the laundry room and no amount of cajoling and instructions about the catch did anything but make her howl the louder, so I had to climb onto the roof and jimmy open a window the size of a handkerchief and plead with the little demon to listen while I showed her how to let herself out, and another nipper stuck modelling clay up his nose and turned blue, and another had hiccups for an hour, and another was passing around color photos of her big brother doing it with his girl on the sunroom floor, and another barfed on the vocabulary cards. So I’ve had it, and want love, understanding, and sour cream pineapple pancakes for supper. She was holding an ice cube to Franklin’s knee, which was skinned bloody. His silkflop thatch had leaftrash and twigs in it. A smutch of mud saddled his nose. The seat of his pants was piped with clay. They had all converged at the bus stop, Franklin from the soccer field, Mariana off the bus, and Hugo from class, going home. While Mariana set up a field hospital to deal with Franklin, Hugo, out of his jeans, exiguous briefs taxed by a randy flex, said that he would provide love, Franklin understanding, and Mariana sour cream pineapple pancakes. Iodine, Mariana ordered, and fill the sink with hot soapy water, skin Franklin of his pants and underpants and put the one in the other. The two in the other, Franklin said. Hugo is hanging out like the donkeys at the zoo. Better still, Mariana said, strip the lout and stand him in the sink, soap him up, and pour panfuls of water over his head. Family life is wonderfully exciting, Hugo said, lifting Franklin into the sink. You know Pascal? he asked. I know Pascal, Hugo said. He is the light of Holger Sigurjonsson’s life, as everybody from the kitchen staff to the headmaster knows. He, said Franklin around the washcloth, lost one of his shoes. So I told him to throw the other away. What good is one shoe? They tease him real pitiful about hr. Sigurjonsson, so we beat up Otto with the weasel eyes. He was picking on Pascal. I heard him. I didn’t know, Hugo said, that you were friends with Pascal. I am now, Franklin said. After we beat up Otto. Well yes, Hugo said, let’s hear about that. I booted him in the butt, Franklin said, hard. He called Pascal a name, and Pascal just took it. I was behind them both, you see, and here was Otto’s butt for the kicking. That’s when he tried to pin me, and I did my knee there. I’m not listening, Mariana said, I’m not hearing a word of this. So, said Franklin, Pascal got in it then. He pushed Otto on a shoulder while hooking his ankle: laid him flat. Then we both jumped on him. Hr. Sigurjonsson showed Pascal how to defend himself.

  YESHUA IN THE WHEAT

  Goose grass, said Hugo, found with knotweed in hard ground poor soil cinder paths. Old meadows are thick with it, an archaic wheat from which the horseriding plunderers made bread and foddered their shaggy Shetlands. It came to Eleusis, Joseph Gaertner thought, by way of India. That’s why he named it Eleusine indica. Crabgrass and crowfoot are of the same family. The florets are ashlared thick along the spikes, see? And there’s no awn. Grass, Franklin said, is just grass. Here, said Mariana, is where we get Hugo’s handsome blond cross-eyed stare. Meaning I hear it but I don’t believe it. The pathfinders never get it, only us, and the occasional Grundtvigger. Franklin calm and unheeding. What Mariana says is what Mariana says. It has nothing to do with him until she starts shouting. Emmer of the prophets embedded in the clay of Ugaritic pots under the botanist’s microscope is like implicit information in a text. It came along, like Franklin underfoot, of itself. Now I’m grass, Franklin said.

  ACORN IN ITS CUP

  To get to the bus stop where Mariana with shining eyes and bright smile arrived at afternoon’s end, Hugo damp from his second gym class, his book bag charged with Latin and Greek exercises to correct, had but to cross the soccer field and amble along two blocks of guardedly prosperous houses with colorful gardens behind low front walls. If he let the class go ten minutes early and skipped a shower, he had time to walk to the bus stop by way of the meadow beyond the wood where he could sit under a favorite oak, elbows on knees, and have a rich moment of calm and anticipation. The river shone at the other side of the meadow, if the light was right. Here passages of the thesis on Yeshua took form and texture, the day disclosed patterns, abrasions healed, letters were opened and read.

  Papa’s hollyhocks. Papa’s reading, the lectures and concerts he had been to. A note on a Hebrew word.

  Aakjaer Minor had begun a cataleptic syndrome that was as yet more comic than serious. He hugged people and wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let go. In the locker room he’d seen Golo Hansen embarrassed and helpless in Alexander Aakjaer’s grasp. I don’t want to hurt him, Golo had wailed to Hugo. He grabs people like this, his eyes go b
lank, and he won’t turn loose. Hugo had said, quit trying to pull him loose. Just stand cool. He got me the other day, Asgar said, and two people couldn’t pry him off. It’s mental. He doesn’t know what you’re talking about when it’s over. Hugo had studied the unfocussed eyes, the sweaty back of the neck, cold wrists, locked knees and elbows. Gently he’d guided Golo out of Alexander’s gripping arms, hoisted the suddenly slack Alexander onto his shoulders and carried him to the infirmary where he said to Nurse that Aakjaer Minor had had a dizzy spell in gym and only needed to lie still for a while. Nurse nevertheless stuck a thermometer in Alexander’s mouth and took his pulse, seeing nothing interesting in either.

  JONAS

  The pompion or million creeps upon the ground if nothing be by it whereon it may take hold and climb with very great ribbed rough and prickly branches whereon are set large rough leaves cut in on the edges with deep gashes and dented besides, with many claspers also, which wind about everything they meet. The flowers are great and large, hollow and yellow, divided at the brim into five parts, at the bottom of which grows the fruit sometimes of the bigness of a man’s body and oftentimes less, in some ribbed or bunched, in others plain and either long or round, green or yellow. The seed is great flat and white, lying in the middle of the watery pulp. The root is of the bigness of a man’s thumb, dispersed underground with many small fibers. They are boiled in fair water and salt, or in powdered beef broth, sometimes in milk, and so eaten, or else buttered. The seed, as well as of cowcumbers and melons, are cooling, and serve for emulsions in the like manner as almond milks, for those troubled with the stone.

  BLUE PUP TENT

  In the ferns beyond birches. Hugo slowed, running in place, and hollered ho! Whoever you are, he sang in stentorian buffo, I come in peace. Silence. Brilliant early morning northern light. Ho! from the pup tent. I’ll go away, Hugo said, if you want me to. This is school property. Grundtviggers are you? Tvemunding here, having a run before breakfast. A head, bare shoulders, an ironic sleepy grin. Anders. Out of the tent on knuckles and toes, mother naked. Morning, he said.