"Bradbury, Ray - In A Season Of Calm Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

IN A SEASON OF CALM WEATHER

by Ray Bradbury

George and Alice Smith detrained at Biarritz one summer noon and in an
hour had run through their hotel onto the beach into the ocean and back out to
bake upon the sand.
To see George Smith sprawled burning there, you'd think him only a
tourist flown fresh as iced lettuce to Europe and soon to be transshipped home.
But there was a man who loved art more than life itself.
"There..." George Smith sighed. Another ounce of perspiration trickled
down his chest. Boil out the Ohio tap water, he thought, then drink down the
best Bordeaux. Silt your blood with rich French sediment so you'll see with
native eyes!
Why? Why eat, breathe, drink everything French? So that, given time, he
might really begin to understand the genius of one man.
His mouth moved, forming a name.
"George?" His wife loomed over him. "I know what you've been thinking.
I can read your lips."
He lay perfectly still, waiting.
"And?"
"Picasso," she said.
He winced. Someday she would learn to pronounce that name.
"Please," she said. "Relax. I know you heard the rumor this morning,
but you should see your eyes - your tic is back. All right, Picasso's here, down
the coast a few miles away, visiting friends in some small fishing town. But
you must forget it or our vacation's ruined."
"I wish I'd never heard the rumor," he said honestly.
"If only," she said, "you liked other painters."
Others? Yes, there were others. He could breakfast most congenially on
Caravaggio still lifes of autumn pears and midnight plums. For lunch: those
fire-squirting, thick-wormed Van Gogh sunflowers, those blooms a blind man might
read with one rush of scorched fingers down fiery canvas. But the great feast?
The paintings he saved his palate for? There, filling the horizon like Neptune
risen, crowned with limeweed, alabaster, coral, paintbrushes clenched like
tridents in horn-nailed fist, and with fishtail vast enough to fluke summer
showers out over all Gibraltar - who else but the creator of "Girl Before a
Mirror" and "Guernica"?
"Alice," he said patiently, "how can I explain? Coming down on the
train, I thought, Good lord, it's all Picasso country!"
But was it really? he wondered. The sky, the land, the people, the
flushed pink bricks here, scrolled electric-blue ironwork balconies there, a
mandolin ripe as a fruit in some man's thousand fingerprinting hands, billboard
tatters blowing like confetti in night winds - how much was Picasso, how much
George Smith staring round the world with wild Picasso eyes? He despaired of
answering. That old man has distilled turpentines and linseed oil so thoroughly
through George Smith that they shaped his being, all Blue Period at twilight,
all Rose Period at dawn.
"I keep thinking," he said aloud, "if we saved our money..."