"Christopher Priest - The Discharge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Priest Christopher)

anywhere. I had faced the same problem many times in the past, slept rough more often than not, but I
was none the less tired.

I headed through the clamoring traffic to the back streets, looking for brothels. I was assaulted by a range
of sensations: breathless equatorial heat, tropical perfumes of flowers and incense, the endless racket of
cars, motorbikes and pedicabs, the smell of spicy meat being cooked on smoking sidewalk stalls, the
continuous flash and dazzle of neon advertising, the beat of pop music blaring out tinnily from radios on
the food-stalls and from every window and open doorway. I stood for a while on one of the street
corners, laden down with my baggage and my painting equipment. I turned a full circle, relishing the
exciting racket, then put down my baggage and, like the Mester people savoring the rains, I raised my
arms in exaltation and lifted my face to the glancing nighttime sky, orange-hued above me, reflecting the
dancing lights of the city.

Exhilarated and refreshed I took up my load more willingly and went on with my search for brothels.

I came to one in a small building two blocks away from the main quay, attained by a darkened door in an
alley at the side. I went in, moneyless, throwing myself on the charity of the working women, seeking
sanctuary for the night from the only church I knew. The cathedral of my dreams.



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Because of its history, but more because of its marina, shops and sunbathing beaches, Muriseay Town
was a tourist attraction for wealthy visitors from all over the Dream Archipelago. In my first months on
the island I discovered I could make a lucrative income from painting harbor scenes and mountain
landscapes, then displaying them on a section of wall next to one of the large caf├йs in Paramoundour
Avenue, the street where all the fashion houses and smart nightclubs were situated.

In the off-seasons, or when I simply grew tired of painting for money, I would stay in my tenth-floor
studio above the city centre and dedicate myself to my attempts to develop the work pioneered by
Acizzone. Now that I was in the town where Acizzone had produced his finest paintings I was able at last
to research his life and work in full, to understand the techniques he had employed.

Tactilism was by this time many years out of vogue, a fortunate state of affairs as it allowed me to
experiment without interference, comment or critical interest. Ultrasound microcircuitry was no longer in
use, except in the market for children's novelties, so the pigments I needed were plentiful and
inexpensive, although at first difficult to track down in the quantities I needed them.

I set to work, building up the layers of pigments on a series of gesso-primed boards. The technique was
intricate and hazardousтАФI ruined many boards by a single slip of the palette knife, some of them close to
the moment of completion. I had much to learn.

Accepting this I made regular visits to the closed-case section of the Muriseayan Town Museum, where
several of Acizzone's originals were stored in archive. The female curator was at first amused that I
should take an interest in such an obscure, unfashionable and reputedly obscene artist, but she soon grew
used to my repeated visits, the long silent sessions I spent inside the locked sanctums when I was alone,
pressing my hands, my face, my limbs, my torso, to Acizzone's garish pictures. I was submerged in a kind