Changing Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

climate. And then one terrible arrival. The hot plate.
    At the Art Gallery of Toronto, one of her mother’s favourite downtown destinations, Ann crosses the parquet floor. It squeaks under her feet like the bones of abandoned old ladies, while, on the right and on the left, monumental, dark oil paintings slide in and out of her line of vision. These works of art are full, as always, of tumbling figures set against angry skies and brooding vistas. Venus Bringing Arms to Aeneas, The Elevation of the Cross, Judith with the Head of Holofernes . Such weapons! Such torture!
    In the midst of all this adult chaos, Ann searches for the children whose portraits, if not comforting, are at least calm, and Ann has become familiar on previous visits with their small sober faces. How stiff they look in their bejewelled garments, holding a bird or a flower in one raised hand as if to say, “Look, this is what I am … destined to fade, destined to fly away.” Like the little white tombstones Ann has seen in country graveyards, the ones with a carved lamb or an etched rose, their eyes carry messages concerning removal. “We are gone,” they seem to say, “We are gone and we will never come again.” Portrait of a Boy with a Green Coat, Boy with a Dove .
    Her mother thinks these children are cute. But Ann knows better. They are not cute at all; they are terrifyingly absent, as is everything connected to them. Oh, little boy , Ann thinks, where are your curls now, your bird, your green coat?
    Room after room, groaning step after groaning step. Ann and her mother walk and pause and walk and pause. Eventually they reach the end of the last room of the gallery and there, on the far wall, is a large photo mural that has been divided, by some painstaking hand, into thousands of one-inch squares. Hanging directly above this strange work of art, which depicts Christ washing the disciples’ feet in fuzzy black and white, is a fabric sign that states OWN A SQUARE INCH OF TINTORETTO ! in bright block letters. Ann carries the ten dollars necessary to make the purchase in her little black purse, the one with the small brass clasp and the three pink flowers, because last Sunday she discovered, in the middle of the painted, then photographed, table, something from which all the disciples turned away, busy as they were removing their shoes and stockings for their master’s attention. It rests right in the middle of the painting on the white tablecloth and is so flat, so unobtrusive, that you might mistake it for something else altogether. But Annsuspects, Ann knows. And Ann will buy the square inch of canvas that it rests upon as a sort of charm to ward off the possibility of having it foisted upon her when she’s old.
    She approaches the woman at the desk beside the painting. Her mother hovers proudly behind her.
    “I’d like,” she says, “to buy a square inch of Tintoretto. That part in the middle of the table. The hot plate.”
    “The plate …?” asks the woman, surprised. “You are sure that you wouldn’t like Christ’s eye?”
    “No, I mean yes, I’m sure.”
    The woman smiles at Ann’s mother, and says to Ann, “Is this your first art purchase?”
    “Yes.”
    Patting Ann on the head, the woman murmurs, “Congratulations. You are now a patron of the arts.”
    These glass shields that block the betrayed from contact with the child seem permanent, somehow, as if they have been cemented to her right shoulder. It is odd that in order to visit culture, Ann and her mother must travel into the dark heart of cities, past alleys filled with starving cats, past Indians lounging by liquor stores, past immigrant labourers returning from night shifts carrying black lunchpails. “They earn their groceries,” her mother says. Past brick walls covered with grime and manholes belching steam to the Art Gallery of Toronto, the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Massey Hall. Near these palaces of the arts there are steamy restaurants filled with tired