Art & Lies Read Online Free PDF

could only think of mandrake roots. I could see her behind me, quizzical, appraising, and I had an idea what it was that interested her so.
    She ran her hands across my buttocks as a dealer does with bloodstock. I saw her, through the silver mirror, into the white room, a looking-glass fantasy, a reversed image of reversing rules. I was there for her.
    ‘Did you penetrate this woman?’
    ‘No father.’
    ‘Proceed.’
    She stood behind me as I stood in front of the mirror and she flattered me with her hands. She had strong brown hands, calloused on the pads, hands I didn’t expect on a woman. She handled me like a bunch of sticks, my five tough skinny limbs, all hard. And then she turned me to her and bent down.
    ‘Did you ejaculate?’
    ‘Yes father.’
    ‘In what part of the woman?’
    ‘In a bowl on the floor?’
    ‘Proceed.’
    ‘She had a piece of porcelain decorated with Greek heroes. She told me to kneel and I went on all fours like a Passiontide donkey and when she dug her heels into my groin I came over Odysseus. She said she called it her Scholar’s Bowl …’
    Doll Sneerpiece was not a scholar but fond of gentlemen, although to dub her a limmer, would have been to do her a wrong. Her mother, on her death bed, had taken the young Doll’s tiny hand and given her this advice, ‘Never sell property.’ The Doll had taken this to heart and applied the lesson to her other more merchantable parts.
    She was not for sale, she was for hire only, and the rate was steep. She was rich. Rich on her round breasts. Rich on her curved belly. Rich on the peaches of her buttocks. Richest on the fleece of her triangle. ‘My Euclid’ she called it, offering geometric proof to those bogged down in algebra.
    Ruggiero, whom she loved, as a bird loves flight, was bookish, high-minded, chaste. When Doll Sneerpiece flaunted her mathematical credentials, Ruggiero fled into the ivory tower of art. Odysseus-like he lashed himself to his desk and plugged his ears against her siren-song. This was difficult because he loved opera.
    He had never seen a woman’s … a woman’s … what should he call it? Inkpot?
    He fingered his pen and thought of Doll Sneerpiece full of red ink.
    It was Ruggiero’s life’s work to reconstruct an index of those manuscripts likely to have been stored in the Great Library at Alexandria. He was a scholar, and like other scholars, he believed that his work, however arcane, would be of estimable value to human kind. Ruggiero hoped that the estimate might be a pension. It is impossible for a man to read and earn money at the same time, unless he is a reviewer, and Ruggiero prayed never to fall so low.
    Doll Sneerpiece, who had fallen low on so many occasions that she had made falling into a gracious art, knew exactly what her labours were worth. She had found that by arching her bottom in a calculating manner, she could prop her forearms on the bed and continue to read undisturbed by the assaults on her hypotenuse. It was in this way that she had come to delight in the elevating works of Sappho. Her own copy, in its original Greek, had come from a one-eyed trader in antiquities, who claimed to have stolen it from the Medici themselves. It had come to them by way of Alexandria. When Ruggiero had asked to inspect it, the Doll had pointed to the fork between her legs, where, she said, such things were kept.
    A fiction? Certainly, although I see from the extravagant and torn frontispiece that it parades itself as autobiography: ‘The Entire and Honest Recollections of a Bawd’.
    Entire? Honest? I doubt it, but why should I? Even science, which prides itself on objectivity, depends on both testimony and memory. Scientific theory has to be built up from previous results. Scientists must take into account what others have recorded and what they themselves have recorded previously. Science deduces and infers from past explanations, past explorations, the investigative technique that tests its theory against