The Bat Tattoo

5 Adelbert Delarue

Always it is interesting, is it not? to look rearward from the present moment to those earlier present moments from which it has arisen. If one perspicaciously from effects to causes traces the development of anything, one sees with clarity how infallibly one thing leads to another. And yet sometimes it is easier from the present to look forward and predict an outcome than it is from an outcome to look backward and determine a cause. But at every moment of every day and in the night as well, like newly hatched turtles racing to the sea, causes are hurrying to their effects. To me it seems that each of us is the effect of past causes and the cause of new effects.

And who am I? Herewith I introduce myself: Adelbert Delarue at your service, patron of the arts and champion of the insufficiently recognised. The events of this history have in these pages not yet run their course but in reality they are already in the past and I have been asked to make my small but I hope useful contribution.

May I speak briefly of guilt? Who is there without it? Guilt can be inherited like money and I have been living comfortably on the interest of what was left to me. One makes one’s arrangements. My name was not in the beginning Delarue, no. I was christened Adelbert von Peng. Ha ha, what a funny name. Peng means bang in German, and my father was Ludwig von Peng who was, three guesses, yes? a munitions maker. Ho ho. Such fun. From these roots a little distance is not a bad thing, is it? My fortune is discreetly deployed in many places: I don’t even know where all of it is but I employ those who do the deploying and they know where to find it.

Art! What is there more wonderful? From the acorn grows the oak and from talent comes maybe a real artist who from nothing makes something, who from here, there, out of the air, plucks an idea that takes us all to a place where we never before have been. Crash-dummies, what a conception, truly. What a metaphor.