Excerpt
There was no question in Ken’s mind. His grandfather, knowing how
much he loved art, had given him a book of paintings that hung in the
Prado museum in Madrid. One of those paintings had become an obsession
– a landscape dotted with tiny encampments – tiny in relation to the
enormous giant wreathed in mist that strode across that landscape. Beasts
and people fled from his might. “The Colossus,” Don Hymie had explained
to him, was painted by Goya, Spain’s most famous and revered artist.
“I want to go to The Prado and see ‘The Colossus’,” Ken said.
“Very well, go get the book and let’s discuss it,” his father said.
Ken, his father and grandfather pored over the picture. Don Hymie explained,
“Goya was so upset by his own people that he painted and drew
a great number of images of the Spaniards as being a brutal and disappointing
people. Many of his drawings portrayed the people as monsters.
The portrait of this giant is a painting that embodies all his feelings.”
Ken had no idea what it was about the picture that compelled him but
he felt that he had to see it as enormous as it was in life. In the book, it was
merely a postcard stuck on the page.
When the day of his birthday dawned, Ken and his father boarded the
train from Lisbon to Madrid. Don Hymie had returned to Spain but had
arranged to meet them at the station and accompany them to the Prado.
As night fell, Ken and his father wandered from coach to coach and came
upon two Guardia de Seville, rifles slung over their shoulders and tin hats
perched awkwardly on their heads. They were cutting up a watermelon,
standing on the shifting platform connecting two of the cars. One of the
guards offered Ken a hunk of the melon. He accepted gratefully and sat
down on the metal grid, careful to avoid the crack that opened and closed
and shifted from side to side. He bit into the fruit, juice squirting from the
sides of his mouth and dribbling down his chin. He spat out the seeds,
aiming at the steel rails slipping by beneath him.
“I don’t know if I’m hitting the rails. I can’t see,” he said to his father.
His father smiled, “Well, that’s what art is about,” he said. “It probably
takes two hundred years – maybe five hundred years – before we know
what the consequences are of our actions. Whether it’s an artist or an
engineer or a scientist or a philosopher, we will never know at the time.
It’s for others to judge after we’re gone. All we can do is get on with the
getting on and do it with a good heart and try very, very hard not to
have ill intent in any of it, because the world will certainly help you out
in that department. You can make the finest invention you want, and it
won’t be very long before someone finds a way of turning that tool into
a weapon.”
“But has there ever been anybody who knows the final consequences
of what they have made?”
“No,” his father said.
Libros Libertad 