Читать книгу The Galisteo Escarpment - Douglas Atwill - Страница 6

Behind an adobe wall near my house I have several piles of building materials, bricks of different sizes, quarried stones, river rocks, wooden lintels, short ends of vigas, a fireplace surround, a pair of shutters from Virginia, windows taken out of houses about to be demolished, doors of curious dimensions from the flea market and other oddities. The sensible man can leave them for what they are, happy stacks of like matter, but the obsessed man sees a house wanting to be realized, or a studio, or a pergola. The pieces ask him aloud to be brought together, knowing they will be greater combined than left apart. Cooks probably have the same fixation, unable to ignore the ripe peaches alone in their wicker basket, imagining the glory of the succulent pie appearing later in the day, unable to leave well enough alone.

When I shifted focus this summer from building to writing, the twenty-one stories I wrote a few years ago became so much construction fodder, peaches awaiting their fate. This character asked to be brought back, another came forward reluctantly, this incident needed expansion, that incident changed in its outcome and there was a setting in another story the perfect size to contain them all. Thus, this book is built from bricks that were laid up before, and if parts seem familiar, this is the reason.

Moreover, it may be a preference of mine, something deeply imbedded, to use materials that had a former life. I remember with rue a small house for sale near Grasse many years ago, a four room farm-house built with the stone blocks stolen from a nearby ruined temple, the Roman numerals and letters turned this way and that, an elaborate cornice piece squeezed without ceremony over a window. Roman stones relaid in the eighteenth century, waiting quietly for me. How could I have passed them up?

As the title indicates, Galisteo, New Mexico plays a part in this story. Dozens of painters have fallen under its spell, not so much the village as the whole basin surrounding it. It may not be such a queer thing to bond with a place, to take up its parts as you might the tresses or eyes of a human paramour, to be entranced by them. You see colors there like nowhere else; blazing yellow light; patterns of darkness, almost blackness, even at mid-day; clay-reds and the full spectrum of siennas; greens that walk all the way to orange; clouds that pick up speed as they cross overhead, then slow down thereafter, and vistas nearly to another country.

So Galisteo is the unfinished business, at least one of them, that concerns our man Bronson, the young man becoming a painter. The story takes him other places, distracts him, seduces him, but in the end he cannot ignore its multi-colored call.