The description of this one apple was to have been worked up and polished, but the Belgian, M. Henri, cabinetmaker, offered the empty place at his table and quietly spoke of his work, his two sons, each around forty, who work alongside him, also of his little farm near Namur. The apple's elliptical surfaces are striped, rose and orange, dawns, sunsets, someone might say; with deep dimples north and south, or top and bottom, it looks at you out of a socket of fire. And he was once, M. Henri, a commando. In Belgium nowadays an antiquarian in the trade of restoration or imitation requires no diploma, makes no cash deposit, but can freely collect old timbers, of apple wood, cherry wood, walnut, and turn them into chairs; or else fresh timber, antiqued, can be made into Louis Quinze furniture. There are also several languages spoken in Belgium, while the apple stands, no, it does not stand, what does it do, there are great gaps yawning even in this other language, on an old wooden table, and shines. Its fiery stripes resemble the defective pigmentation of someone's skin, but you still feel invited by the rondure of the apple to stroke it, to clasp it. The American, Mr. Bob, accepts his glass of wine and speaks Good Evening to M. Henri. Two acquaintances, dear ladies, settle at another table and are waving, so we all wave back, while, under an apple tree, the trunk of which might be artfully turned, by M. Henri, with an instrument, into the knobbed legs or clubfeet of tables, an eighteenth-century ploughboy sinks for lunch his ivory teeth into the apple's flesh and chomps a mouthful out of it -clock. He ignores the dawn and the sunset. He forgets death, the pressgang, the Duke of Marlborough, No Popery, and Marshal Ney. What is lunch for him might have been a garnish for us. Finally one of the two ladies has caught the waiter's eye. There is a pause in the process-make your words pause to call up related ideas, said Petrarch, a frugivore, in a long letter. Then a bottle of wine lands, with a faint thud, on their table, and so does, on the grass beside the ploughboy, an apple, which he turns; finding no worms in it, he drops it into his satchel. Remotely visible, through a quartet of remarkably oblong jaws opening and closing at intervals, are the ladies' throats, down which their wine is poured, and, being cloven by the ploughboy's knife, the original apple, one bite out of it, displays the face of a barn owl, which perches in a moss'd cottage tree. Apple seeds blinking in the core; pause; the owl's heavy-lidded eyes. Do not forget, even then, the dimples, one for the stalk, the other housing a dried star of vestigial leaves. Do not forget the round, wounded as it is by the ploughboy's teeth, the round into which the dimples go, craters, although the Belgian, M. Henri, recalls that when he was, at twenty, a commando, trained to scale rock faces, he never saw a bomb crater, or the Congo, so never might have considered this rose and gold refine des reinettes apple as a missile, let alone as a fruit which Petrarch would enjoy or a painter (the Belgian's father was a painter who died in penury) contemplate, his brush impending, not quite ready to plant the highlight. …
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Sep 8, 2006
Jeffrey Mullahey + 3
