Page 350 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Chapter 58.

Tired of looking for goats

Aurelio thought if he looked at another painting of a goat, he would burst. How many
goats had Santi painted!? It felt like a thousand. And yet none of them yielded a map of any
kind. Oh, the symbols and analogies and metaphors practically oozed from each and every goat,
and it was fascinating to see how many of them appeared in pairs, or just as often, as flanking
symmetrical objects, echoes, or mirrors of each other, sometimes across vast stretches of a
ceiling. But did any of them look anything like a map?

It had only been three days since Santi had disappeared, but it might as well have been
three months, so exhausted was Aurelio from painting, and looking at goats, and painting more,
then looking at more goats. Down on the floor once again near Bay 33, Aurelio banged his head
against a wall, hoping to knock loose something which would clue him to which goats were the
key. By now he knew how Santi’s mind worked: some blend of the tangible observable world
and an abstraction. But what? Aurelio felt that he had looked at every goat on Santi’s ceilings,
whether it be a lone goat or a pair of goats, but he wasn’t seeing anything which would help him
identify a place on a map. He thought perhaps he’d find a compass pointing to a direction, or a
symbol for direction such as a weathervane or octagon, or an anthropomorphized wind, or a
sequence of bent/broken flowers where the wind has blown. Footprints? Horse prints? Horse
shoes?

Aurelio was at a loss. Conjuring Half-Wit Tozzo did him no good; Tozzo just shrugged,
munching on a krapfen (or was it a cornetti?). Aurelio dismissed Half-Wit Tozzo who, truth be
told, was all too eager to go. He’d long ago tired of Santi’s guessing game and just wanted to
read the stories and leave off all the rest; he couldn’t be bothered with it. So Aurelio sent him
back to the Imaginary Wheat and Chaff, cynically renamed the Imaginary Chaff and Hull, to
drink himself to imaginary oblivion, perhaps to keep company with those other forgotten literary
castoffs such as Magistrate Number One Hundred Twenty-Nine, and the other character who got
similarly discarded and even now forgotten a second...who was that? Wasn’t there another
character who was summarily dismissed?

Aurelio summoned Imaginary Santi in hopes of generating a conversation with himself to
dislodge the last remaining piece of the puzzle he was missing, but Imaginary Santi was in a sour
taunting mood, grinning with silent superiority that he knew the answer, and if Aurelio couldn’t
put together all the clues successfully on his own, well, then, no jewels for him! Clearly, parried
Aurelio, trying to maintain his dignity, but losing the battle, Yes, I know I’m on my own, Santi! If
you were actually here to help me find you, then I wouldn’t need you to help me find you, now
would I? So, fine, go away, go join Half-Wit Tozzo and his pretend tankards of fictional ale!

This Santi did promptly, and not without a certain amount of obvious satisfaction.
Aurelio was alone again. Utterly alone. Santi, the real Santi, had been his sole companion, and
now he was gone, there was no one, literally no one who could understand him. The harshness

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