unlucky heroes and persecuted virgins and wise visionaries and all that stuff, sublime, incredible, ridiculous, fake.
The man was called Ferager-Manad. He was a sculptor and arrived richly dressed in a coach pulled by the first glossy ponies with silver-mounted harness the city had ever seen, attended by three servants. No doubt he’d spent his last penny on the coach and the ponies and the servants, since he wasn’t a very good sculptor and it was a long time since anybody had ordered an allegorical group or a monument or even a little bas-relief for a modest tombstone. All the same he certainly hoped to meet with good fortune in the city, because it was only twenty days since the death of Mr. Nilkamm’Dau, first mayor of the city, president of the Chamber of Commerce and of the Resident Founders Club, creator of the first Municipal Census, the first school, the first hospital, the first library, the first asylum, and the Department of Storage and Distribution of Meat, Leather, and Grain. Mr. Nilkamm’Dau’s widow, now twice widowed but no longer young, needed to provide further motives of admiration and respect as soon as possible, since, having secretly despised him for his lowly origin and because he was from the South, she now found herself with a fortune larger than she had ever calculated on even during nights of insomnia, and had resolved not only to show off a little of the money but also to excuse her scorn by thanking her silent husband for being rich and dying. A mausoleum, she thought, what a good idea. A mausoleum was what they needed, she, her dead second husband, and the humble cemetery in the suburbs. Let’s see, she said, a sculptor, a sculptor from the capital, an artist trained at the Imperial Academy, who’ll make a monument of pink and black marble crowned with mourning figures and covered with garlands and vases and surrounded by bronze palings with little pots where aromatic herbs are burning. And she chose a name at random, because she thought she’d seen it before and because it was on the list of graduates of the Academy.
You’ve all seen the result: the beautiful marble ladies with marble tunics and floating marble hair gathered weeping about a prone figure, one of them lifting her hands to heaven, calling upon him who has left us. But the cemetery’s gone, taken over by the city that obliterated and forgot it. The crypt is a candy warehouse, and the mourning figures lean over the watertank that supplies the Registry of Real Estate. Yet this isn’t what matters in the order of events. The stone is worked, modeled, polished, the empty eyes of the statues gaze unseeing at people. What matters are the people, who have eyes that sometimes see. What matters is that the sculptor was a widower and poor and the woman who commissioned him was a widow and rich. They got married, not before the funeral monument was finished, as that would have been unseemly, but they got married the instant the aromatic herbs were set alight, and the sculptor paid his debts and acquired more servants and more carriages and more horses, and no longer worked in marble or bronze but became a patron of the arts, which is far less tiring, less risky, and more respectable.
So the artists arrived. The first were mere rowdies and idlers who’d heard that there was a rich patron of the arts in that city who might provide them food and lodging while they sat around in cafés till dawn talking about the poems they were going to write, the pictures they were going to paint, the symphonies they were going to compose, sneering at the world which had so far failed to understand them and despising the rich man who insisted that he did understand them and who, before paying for their bed and wine and soup, made them listen to him describing his own works of art and, even worse, giving them advice. But later on came another sort, who only sat around in cafés occasionally and spent most of their time shut away in silence weaving
The man was called Ferager-Manad. He was a sculptor and arrived richly dressed in a coach pulled by the first glossy ponies with silver-mounted harness the city had ever seen, attended by three servants. No doubt he’d spent his last penny on the coach and the ponies and the servants, since he wasn’t a very good sculptor and it was a long time since anybody had ordered an allegorical group or a monument or even a little bas-relief for a modest tombstone. All the same he certainly hoped to meet with good fortune in the city, because it was only twenty days since the death of Mr. Nilkamm’Dau, first mayor of the city, president of the Chamber of Commerce and of the Resident Founders Club, creator of the first Municipal Census, the first school, the first hospital, the first library, the first asylum, and the Department of Storage and Distribution of Meat, Leather, and Grain. Mr. Nilkamm’Dau’s widow, now twice widowed but no longer young, needed to provide further motives of admiration and respect as soon as possible, since, having secretly despised him for his lowly origin and because he was from the South, she now found herself with a fortune larger than she had ever calculated on even during nights of insomnia, and had resolved not only to show off a little of the money but also to excuse her scorn by thanking her silent husband for being rich and dying. A mausoleum, she thought, what a good idea. A mausoleum was what they needed, she, her dead second husband, and the humble cemetery in the suburbs. Let’s see, she said, a sculptor, a sculptor from the capital, an artist trained at the Imperial Academy, who’ll make a monument of pink and black marble crowned with mourning figures and covered with garlands and vases and surrounded by bronze palings with little pots where aromatic herbs are burning. And she chose a name at random, because she thought she’d seen it before and because it was on the list of graduates of the Academy.
You’ve all seen the result: the beautiful marble ladies with marble tunics and floating marble hair gathered weeping about a prone figure, one of them lifting her hands to heaven, calling upon him who has left us. But the cemetery’s gone, taken over by the city that obliterated and forgot it. The crypt is a candy warehouse, and the mourning figures lean over the watertank that supplies the Registry of Real Estate. Yet this isn’t what matters in the order of events. The stone is worked, modeled, polished, the empty eyes of the statues gaze unseeing at people. What matters are the people, who have eyes that sometimes see. What matters is that the sculptor was a widower and poor and the woman who commissioned him was a widow and rich. They got married, not before the funeral monument was finished, as that would have been unseemly, but they got married the instant the aromatic herbs were set alight, and the sculptor paid his debts and acquired more servants and more carriages and more horses, and no longer worked in marble or bronze but became a patron of the arts, which is far less tiring, less risky, and more respectable.
So the artists arrived. The first were mere rowdies and idlers who’d heard that there was a rich patron of the arts in that city who might provide them food and lodging while they sat around in cafés till dawn talking about the poems they were going to write, the pictures they were going to paint, the symphonies they were going to compose, sneering at the world which had so far failed to understand them and despising the rich man who insisted that he did understand them and who, before paying for their bed and wine and soup, made them listen to him describing his own works of art and, even worse, giving them advice. But later on came another sort, who only sat around in cafés occasionally and spent most of their time shut away in silence weaving
Similar Books
