"Charles de Lint - Forests Of The Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

stories. Por el reino de los suenos. It lives only in dreams and make-believe,”
“You’ve forgotten everything.”
“No, I remember the same as you. Only I look at the stories she told us with the eyes of an adult. I know the
difference between what is real and what is superstition.”
Except it hadn’t only been stories, Bettina wanted to say.
“I loved her, too,” Adelita went on. “It’s just ... think about it. The way she took us out into the desert. It was
like she was trying to raise us as wild animals. What could Mama have been thinking?”
“That’s not it at all—”
“I’ll tell you this. Much as I love our mama, I wouldn’t let her take Janette out into the desert for hours on end
the way she let Abuela take us. In the heat of the day and ... how often did we go out in the middle of the
night?”
“You make it sound so wrong.”
“Cálmate, Bettina. I know we survived. We were children. To us it was simply fun. But think of what could
have happened to us—two children out alone in the desert with a crazy old woman.”
“She was not—”
“Not in our eyes, no. But if we heard the story from another?”
“It ... would seem strange,” Bettina had to admit. “But what we learned—”
“We could have learned those stories at her knee, sitting on the front stoop of our parents’ house.”
“And if they weren’t simply stories?”
“¡Qu boba eres! What? Cacti spirits and talking animals? The past and future, all mixed up with the present.
What did she call it?”
“La epoca del mito.”
“That’s right. Myth time. I named one of my gallery shows after it. Do you remember?”
“I remember.”
It had been a wonderful show. La Gata Verde had been transformed into a dreamscape that was closer to
some miraculous otherwhere than it was to the dusty pavement that lay outside the gallery. Paintings, rich
with primary colors, depicted los santos and desert spirits and the Virgin as seen by those who’d come to
her from a different tradition than that put forth by the papal authority in Rome. There had been Hopi
kachinas—the Storyteller, Crow Woman, clowns, deer dancers—and tiny, carved Zuni fetishes. Wall
hangings rich with allegorical representations of Indio and Mexican folklore. And Bet-tina’s favorite: a
collection of sculptures by the Bisbee artist, John Early—surreal figures of gray, fired clay, decorated with
strips of colored cloth and hung with threaded beads and shells and spiraling braids of copper and silver
filament. The sculptures twisted and bent like smoke-people frozen in their dancing, captured in mid-step as
they rose up from the fire.
She had stood in the center of the gallery the night before the opening of the show and turned slowly around,
drinking it all in, pulse drumming in time to the resonance that arose from the art that surrounded her. For one
who didn’t believe, Adelita had still somehow managed to gather together a show that truly seemed to
represent their grandmother’s description of a moment stolen from la epoca del mito.
“Not everything in the world relates to art,” Bettina said now into the phone.
“No. But perhaps it should. Art is what sets us apart from the animals.”
Bettina couldn’t continue the conversation. At times like this, it was as though they spoke two different
languages, where the same word in one meant something else entirely in the other.
“It’s late,” she said. “I should go.”
“Perdona,Bettina. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”
She wasn’t angry, Bettina thought. She was sad. But she knew her sister wouldn’t understand that either.
“I know,” she said. “Give my love to Chuy and Janette.”
“Si. Vaya con Dios.”
And if He will not have me? Bettina thought. For when all was said and done, God was a man, and she had
never fared well in the world of men. It was easier to live in la epoca del mito of her abuela. In myth time, all
were equal. People, animals, plants, the earth itself. As all times were equal and existed simultaneously.