Page 19 of Outside the Veil
“Some of them, surely. Is it because you destroy so much beauty that you are compelled to create it?”
“I…” Diego drummed his fingers on the table, trying to construct a solid, honest answer. “I think people have asked that question for as long as we could draw. And you’d probably get as many answers as there are artists.”
Finn snickered. “Is this what you meant by ‘ducking the question’?”
“Yes.” Diego smiled, the tight band around his heart easing. “I’m not an artist or an art historian, so I’m probably not qualified to answer your question. I mean, some art’s symbolic, or satirical, or provocative instead of beautiful. I think maybe it’s something about helping the viewer see things in a different way. In a way you hadn’t thought of before. Art evokes an emotional response. Maybe not the one the artist intended. But some kind of gut reaction.”
Finn traced over the lines of David’s marble face. “I don’t understand. The words, yes, but I can’t grasp it.”
“Like holding water in your hand.”
“No, that I can do.” Finn cocked his head to the side. “Ah. You jest. I wasn’t certain you knew how.”
“I’m a little out of practice.” Diego finished his beer and started to clear the table. “Maybe we should go see some in person. Art, that is. It’s hard to feel the real impact from pictures in a book.”
Finn’s head rested on his arms, his eyelids sliding shut. “I don’t think I would survive a trip to Italy.”
“We don’t have to go that far.” Explanations could wait until morning, or the next afternoon, or whenever Finn could manage the stairs better.
After he put Finn to bed, Diego realized he’d never called social services about placement for him. “Don’t suppose theyhave a Fairy Support Division anyway,” he muttered to his computer. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
Finn turned the corner into yet another room and sighed. More blasted odd things on the walls he couldn’t fathom. In the crush of humans, he had lost Diego many rooms before. A large group had come between them, all tagging behind and hanging on the words of a strident-voiced woman who pointed at the things on the walls and said incomprehensible nonsense about them. When he had extricated himself from the herd, Diego was nowhere to be seen. His absence was like standing on a cliff in a hurricane. Nothing to lean against. No shelter to be seen.
They had stood in a grand hall at one point, one with lovely, ceiling-high windows looking out on trees and with interesting representations of naked or near-naked humans every few feet. Diego had waved a hand to the chairs by the wall and told him the name of the room. “Come back here if we get separated or if you get tired. Just sit down and wait for me. No one will bother you if you don’t touch the statues.”
“European Sculpture Court,” Finn repeated under his breath. He knew he wasn’t anywhere near the place. Diego had also said to ask one of the people in the jackets with the shiny buttons to help him if he became lost. But they all looked so forbidding and stern, he’d been rather anxious about approaching any of them. The last person he’d talked to in a jacket with shiny buttons had locked him in an iron cage.
Lovely buttons, though. Made his fingers itch to touch.
He sat down on a stone bench in front of a man-high, painted canvas. As a representation of something, it made no sense, but the colors shone bold and bright. Not for the first time that day, he wished he could decipher the lines and circles humans usedto label everything. Perhaps it held a clue as to what he was supposed to see.
A small boy flopped down beside him, legs swinging.
“Are you tired, too?”
The boy glanced sideways at him with a frown.Gods of night, the children here are all so suspicious.For a moment, he thought the boy might run away.
“I guess.” The boy shrugged.
“Don’t you like this place?”
“It’s okay. I like the armor and swords and stuff. The rest is boring.” He peered at Finn more closely. “You talk funny.”
“I’m from far away.”
“No, I mean like you can’t breathe right.”
Finn rubbed at his chest and coughed. Observant child. “It, ah, gives me trouble sometimes.”
The boy nodded. “I have asthma, too. You probably forgot your inhaler, didn’t you? My mom yells at me when I forget mine.”
“Yes, exactly.” Whatever an inhaler was, it sounded plausible.
A portly man sat down beside the boy. The set of his features indicated annoyance; the tone of his voice confirmed it. “You’re not even looking at anything, Jaime. I don’t know why we bother coming.”
“I’m tired,” the boy muttered. “And thirsty.”
“At least look at some of it. Read the plaques. Jasper Johns is a very important artist, the father of pop art…”
