In Partial Disgrace by Charles Newman & Joshua Cohen

Author:Charles Newman & Joshua Cohen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781564788160
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2013-02-26T08:00:00+00:00

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.