The Guy Davenport Reader by Guy Davenport

Author:Guy Davenport [Reece, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781619022522
Publisher: Counterpoint

Boys Smell Like Oranges

ON A FINE AUTUMN AFTERNOON IN 1938 TWO ELDERLY MEN MET AT the Porte Maillot, as was their habit, to walk together in the Bois de Boulogne, Professor Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who was eighty and strolled with an easy dignity, his hands behind his back except to accompany a remark with rounded gestures, and Pastor Maurice Leenhardt, missionary and ethnographer, who was sixty, tall and white-haired, his usual long stride curbed to match the amble of his slower friend.

They knew all the paths and small roads, the playing fields and children’s zoo, and each had favorites among them, the one making his choice without a word from the other.

— These Trumai we were talking about yesterday, Lévy-Bruhl said, who are known by their neighbors to sleep at the bottom of the river.

He stooped to greet and stroke a cat, causing a second and third to glide from the underbrush. Pastor Leenhardt took the occasion to light his pipe. Lévy-Bruhl held out empty hands to show the cats he had nothing to give them. There was an old woman laden with sacks who fed cats in the Bois. She was one of the regulars they met on their walks.

— Madame your friend will be along. We know that it is a waste of breath trying to explain to the Trumai’s neighbors that nobody can sleep underwater. They know they do. The syllogism men cannot sleep underwater, the Trumai are men, therefore the Trumai cannot sleep underwater won’t work.

— Perhaps, Professor Leenhardt said, we are looking at their logic the wrong way.

— Their logic!

Footballers, their shoulders sagging, their feet heavy, straggled muddy and tuckered toward the goalposts, where they sat and lay, like tired soldiers making bivouac. Some were in jerseys so worn that the blue was slate and the red collars and cuffs pink, colors more fitting for a Chinese poet than for a French boy. Late-afternoon light burnished their hair, making flames of cowlicks. Time stood still.

The captain of the juror team Jacques Peyrony, fifteen and a half, was pulling on his sweater when he saw that he was being spoken to by an older halfback on the senior team, Robinet, twenty-four, old enough to have been in the war.

— Went down four to one, ouch! Robinet said. I’ve been watching you for the last twenty minutes.

— I saw you.

Peyrony’s face was gloriously dirty from being wiped with muddy hands. His hair tangled out over his ears. It spun onto his forehead from a whorl like a young bull’s. He rubbed sweat from his eyelashes with his forearm. His mouth was half open with fatigue.

— So you noticed me? I like that, but didn’t think you did. When you were barreling toward the touchline you gave me a quick glance as if I were a total stranger. No time for a hello, I know.

Peyrony flopped down on the grass. Robinet took of his jacket and laid it over his legs.

— Keep warm, he said. Cold muscles don’t relax.

A

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