"Rudy Rucker - Hieronymus Bosch's Apprentice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

by adding something in. Instead of quitting, he’d surrender. He opened his heart, feeling a sweet, even
glow. God would help him, whatever God was. Everything. Nothing. The harp. The pitchfork. The
Cosmos. Saint Anthony’s eyes. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was wanting to change.

“Dear God please help me,” said Jayjay silently to himself, testing out how it felt to pray. It wasn’t about
God, really. It was about admitting that business as usual had stopped working. Business as usual was
costing him his sanity—and his wife.

While Jayjay mulled this over, Bosch continued painting. The man was a sage, a genius, a prick. Jayjay
sure as hell didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing his advice had hit home. So he talked
about other things.

“Can I see the harp? Now that the others are gone?”

“No.”

“Um, my wife said you were supposed to decorate the harp to look like your Garden of Earthly
Delights. Is that what you did?”

“You’ve heard of this triptych?” said Bosch with some surprise. “How remarkable to have such a
worldly apprentice. Have you been in the Brussels palace where it hangs?”

“I’ve—I’ve only seen a copy,” said Jayjay. “In California it’s known as your great masterpiece.”

“A youthful success,” said Bosch. “An early blessing. I weary of hearing about it. I painted the Garden
fifteen years ago when I was thirty, during the first year of my marriage. I thought I’d entered a paradise
of love, but it proved chillier than ever I thought.”

“You and your wife—do you have children?”

“God did not wish it so,” said Bosch. “Aleid had painful miscarriages and still-births. That part of our life
is over. An unfinished path.” He shrugged and sighed. “Better to speak of art. Perhaps this new triptych
is the equal of my Garden of Earthly Delights. Or perhaps not. The important thing is that I’m painting
it.”

“Who’s it for?”

“It’s a commission from the Brotherhood of St. Anthony here in town; I depict the torments of their
patron saint. In the left panel, the devil lifts him high into the sky, in the right panel he’s besieged by lustful
women, and in the middle he’s surrounded by monsters conducting a Black Mass. I’m throwing in
everything I can think of: some hundred and sixty humans, animals, and demons so far—and that’s not
counting the hundred or more soldiers in the little armies. Prickly dots.”

“The Antonite brothers nurse the victims of St. Anthony’s fire,” said Jayjay. “Do you know that condition
is caused by a fungus in brown bread? I had an experience of it last night. I spent part of the night
hallucinating in the Antonites' courtyard.”

“And drinking wine,” said Bosch, with a telling sniff. “Gluttony. The Holy Fire is caused, like any physical
affliction, by sin. God abandons the sinner and the devil attacks like the wolf bringing down a wayfarer.
Brown bread is the Lord’s wholesome gift to the lower classes. The bread’s essence is pure in and of