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The
Pharaoh's Statue
The man sat in front of the Pharaoh's
statue. It was about three thousand years old or something. He didn't sit down
to look at the statue but to rest his feet. He'd been wandering the museum for
hours, out of duty almost, so that when he was looking at a book many years
hence he could say, yes, seen that, seen that.
Nothing had moved him. He noticed that
the colours of the Renoir paintings were more vibrant than in picture books. He
saw a real page from a Leonardo da Vinci notebook and observed the mirror
writing, but when he deciphered the letters it was in Italian, which he
couldn't understand. The spears from Papua-New Guinea were... well… um… spears
from Papua-New Guinea.
So he sat in front of the Egyptian
Pharaoh: white, solid, ancient, silent, stone. He noticed the hand and
fingernails. He thought of the carver, three thousand years ago, carefully
crafting the tips of the Pharaoh's fingers. He felt some secret affinity with
the man the statue stood for.
Suddenly he wanted to cry. He couldn't
because a guard, a woman, was watching from the door. He wanted to become lost,
engrossed, totally captivated. But the woman was watching. He wanted to call
out the Pharaoh's name. If only the woman would go away.
Later he went back to the statue, but the
Pharaoh beneath had gone. Still later, in Florence, he laughed at the size of
David's balls. And in Rome, in the Sistine Chapel, he remarked in a letter that
it was one helluva long walk down the corridors to get there. Again, at Dachau,
he thought the movie presentation was well done, and took a photo of the fire
extinguisher behind the door in the oven chamber.
If only he could've cried at the
Pharaoh's statue.
Bruce Goodman is a New Zealander freezing to death in rural Quebec.
E-mail Bruce Goodman
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