Читать книгу The Book of Colors - Raymond Barfield - Страница 9

But I have to say that it’s not always easy having a real donkey around instead of just a painting or an idea. He mostly stays out back where he does his business. If the little bit of breeze we ever get comes off the tracks it’s fine, but if it comes the other way it smells like a zoo. There’s no latch on the gate in back and Jesus pushes through whenever he’s hungry and eats weeds growing in the field nearby then always comes back. He can’t pull the gate closed so Jimmy fixed up a rope from the gate into Rose’s kitchen window so I could just pull on it and close the gate.

He’s a little thing and he’s old and has lots of gray in his muzzle. He never seems to mind if the train is passing by or if Ambrosia is screaming and during the summer when the windows are open if he stretches his neck he can just barely get his nose up to the window to sniff. There must’ve been something about the smell in Ambrosia’s room because if he wasn’t wandering around the back side you could just about bet you’d find him sniffing at Ambrosia’s window, just standing there with his body still as a rock.

Ambrosia pays him almost no mind. Even if he comes near and sticks his nose by her hair she just rocks and turns the pages of her little book. If I was to come near her cheek she’d swat me like a bug without even looking at me. I can understand thinking of wind and rocks and bugs as things you just feel or push or swat. But she seems to think of people that way, like they are just things moving around and she doesn’t want to be bothered. Jesus is more like a part of her body, like her own leg, which she might move if it started to ache or bother her.

The first time I saw Jesus nuzzling Ambrosia I worried that he was gonna bite her. I would never think that now that I know him. But at first what I thought was that Layla just didn’t pay enough attention to her girl. Now I think she was jealous in a way that Jesus could nuzzle the girl without being pushed away and Layla couldn’t. But I could never say that.

When the donkey turns away to nibble grass there’s spit in Ambrosia’s hair half the time. If it was my girl I’d wipe it off right away. But Layla just let it sit and dry while she looked out over the tracks sometimes sipping on lemonade. And Jesus clomped around the yard.

It’s embarrassing to say anything about Jesus’s maleness, which is very noticeable sometimes, even though he is a little donkey. But I couldn’t help but giggle and Jimmy and Rose joined in with Rose sometimes saying, Lord have mercy, which was funny coming from her lips and knowing that she’d seen just about everything. But Layla just stared and sipped her lemonade without any joking to make sense of the thing. Like one rock staring at another rock. It’s one thing to see everything and another thing to see too much.

This is to say I am just amazed sometimes at how two people can be so different as me and Layla, even though we are about the same age. It’s like the difference between a full moon and no moon. I didn’t say that to Layla. She might’ve taken it as a comment on her womb.