Page 385 - The Grotesque Children's Book

Zaccario took a deep breath and sojourned on. “Her green scarf is arching upwards, so
she wants you to touch the ascending banners, starting with the blue one. Now the question is,
how many more banners to count? In her hand, the one touching the blue, do you see there are
two distinct folds in the cloth.”

“They look like two fingers.”
“They’re not fingers; it’s not anatomically possible to curl fingers that way.”
“I could do it.”
“No, you can’t.”
Lorenzo Pulveri for the next few minutes became preoccupied with trying to curl his
fingers like he thought the naked girl in the picture was doing, so he missed the bulk of the
following explicative ramble from Zaccario:
“Counting blue then two more, you get blue-red-green, clearly code for you to look
elsewhere in the ceiling for similar blue-red-green banners. A thorough scan of the ceiling
reveals the blue-red-green pattern on this ceiling points to fourteen birds and a monkey.
Obviously the birds represent not only the fourteen statues of the Way of the Cross, but the
fourteen ascending and downward days of the moon, and thus the monkey represents the darker
side of human psyche, the non-verbal. Mankind without his rational side. Where else do we see
the blue-red-green? Two bays further south, in the portrait of Joanna of Austria blaming me for
her death.”

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