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the horizon, but it was alone in the sky, not part of a con-
stellation. The shepherd was dressed in an animal skin kilt,
and a staff lay in the grass near him. The same rays that
shot from the sun/star shot from the brow of the shepherd.
The drawing was highly compelling. Emotional. The shep-
herd with his shaggy kilt seemed to lift off the card stock. It
was not a modern hand, nor a medieval hand, that drew it.
Older, deliciously crude, and a great presence in the card
THE MAGICIAN AND THE FOOL 227
seemed to swell toward Rosemont as he let his heart rise to
the image of the shepherd, behold it, embrace it. An im-
mense, oceanic personality washed over him. In Latin, the
personality said to him, I am the half and the other side of
your hope, and he could not bear to resist a word that it
spoke as though forgotten generations were finally. . .
lifting water
in a silver banner
. . . of native Canadians or the bulls painted on the
Lucerne cave walls.
Though he took this in and marveled at that lone, un-
sealed card, Rosemont didn t analyze the image itself yet,
but instead examined the cracks in the paint on each card.
The craquelure, as the network of tiny fissures and splits
was called, wasn t fake, per se. It wasn t a paint job itself,
that much Rosemont could see right away, and it cracked
through the subgrade paint in a satisfying randomness like
the web of a drunken spider. Clearly not a bake-and-roll
forgery. Under the microscope, Rosemont examined the
craquelure more closely and saw that the cracks weren t
etched into the dried paint, either. In places, the cracks
went down to the very base, where the paint slightly sepa-
rated from the card stock like fruit segments ripening away
from the rind.
Rosemont lifted his head from the microscope and
sighed.
It made his mouth water, it was so real. And that s how
he always knew. Whatever the images might have been,
whatever culture or occult tradition might have spawned
them, the paintings spoke to Rosemont s salivary glands,
228 Barth Anderson
his stomach, and his body, and that s how he always knew
when he was beholding authenticity.
Are you all right, authenticator? di Trafana asked.
Rosemont realized he had stopped to rub his eyes.
Fine. He was exhausted from his trip, from the bizarre
run across the Aventine. That had to be it. Light-headed and
a little buzzed from festival beer. He looked back at the card
after blinking his eyes clear. What was happening? He had
distinctly different visions of the same card, he suddenly re-
alized. Several visions. A shepherd. A ram. Not just differ-
ent interpretations or impressions, but he had different. . .
memories of what he had just seen. A ram. A shepherd.
Are you ready to tell Priscilla and Marni what you
think?
Rosemont nodded vaguely.
Di Trafana s whole body gave a little bob. After you.
Rosemont entered the banquet hall and saw Miles
standing next to Transom and Visconti and three men who
looked like hired muscle. Miles seemed fine, unbeaten, but
his face looked clammy and damp, even from across the
room, so Rosemont assumed he d at least gotten a good
scare thrown into him. Transom and Visconti looked ready
to declare victory of someone or something.
Rosemont stretched and made like he was trying to
crack his back. It s a fake.
Rosemont expected that the held breath and tension in
the room would release slowly as the players absorbed his
words. Or perhaps an outburst of I-told-you-so s or that-
cannot-be s. But the room remained tense as they each kept
their eyes on Rosemont, poised, as if they yearned to bash
him open and snatch the truth out of him with their bare
hands.
THE MAGICIAN AND THE FOOL 229
Miles alone looked deflated, crushed by the news, and
when he spoke, he sounded drugged. How? How do you
know, Jeremiah?
Rosemont slid into a chair next to Priscilla. The
craquelure is phony, he said to Miles, who was about
twenty feet away. It s telltale. Very difficult to forge good
craquelure.
He s right. It s a fake, said Visconti. I saw it six hun-
dred years ago, you ll all remember. I thought it was phony
then too.
Priscilla was still watching Rosemont carefully. He
should have been reduced to a pile of tears and screaming.
But he s sane as an egg, look at him. He knows what he s
talking about and he sounds convincing.
Or he survived it, Marni said. And is now trick-
ing us.
Rosemont said, I m just telling you what I saw.
But what about Ingebretsen? Miles said, getting his
wind back. What about the Guelph report? They said it
was real. They verified it was from AD 950.
Transom apparently thought that was a good point. He
crossed his arms and looked at Rosemont.
Well sure, Rosemont said, the paint and card stock
may be authentic, but I believe someone painted this thing
and doctored it to look real. The typical way to fake a
painting, make the cracks in it look old, is to throw it in
the oven right after finishing it in order to dry it quickly.
Then you take it out and roll it over, say, a cylinder or a
rolling pin while the paint is drying and becoming brittle to
get this web effect of aged cracks. But whoever did this
one really knew what they were doing. I d guess they
cracked them from below at several different points.
230 Barth Anderson
Pressing upward into the card stock in what we might call
the upper middle quadrant. In the upper left. And perhaps
at two points in the center, he said, bullshitting freely
now. It s a very similar pattern on each one. That s what
tipped me off. That and the crappy paint. Feigning be-
musement, Rosemont met every eye in the room, as if he
found them to be the dreariest suckers. But his full atten-
tion was on the paintings behind him, looping his mind
around them, making them his with his every fiber and
want. With better oils, even a century-old painting would
look fresh and bright. With these paints, a hundred-year-
old work looks ancient.
Rosemont pretended to be fascinated by the proceed-
ings but he was desperately calculating how he could dart
away with the paintings. Could he do it now, while they ar-
gued? Could he get Miles out of here too? He pretended to
rub his ear and stole a look at di Trafana to see if the Monk
was equally absorbed in the argument.
But di Trafana was staring at Rosemont, wide-eyed and
inquisitive, like a cat poised before rustling grass. And
while Rosemont looked at him, the man gave a little nod of
encouragement.
Rising on the balls of his toes, he looked back at the
paintings again, and feeling the hum of the plats beneath
the Aventine, he stared at one, the picture of the stargazing
shepherd, until he could feel it begin to lift off the paper.
And just as that same curious sensation hit him, of a fish
being pulled from a stream and pulling with it a silver ban-
ner of water, Rosemont had the sensation of pulling him-
self from the red Naugahyde banquet room, the Chi-Chi s
of the Damned, and Rome.
16
ead river rushes and the stiff stalks of old weeds and
Dreeds snapped under Boy King s feet as he walked
along the Mississippi, headed for the Wiggle Room Saloon
and Lara. It was April. The new growth hadn t come in
thick yet, and the river had flooded several times recently
so the ground sucked at his feet. There was a walkway, a
paved riverfront for bikers and joggers up the hill above
him, but down here he could walk without frightening
people with his bashed face and black eyes. Down here, he
could see the symbols and marks left by hunters, and read
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zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plkwiatpolny.htw.pl
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| Cytat |
Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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