How to be both

~ ~ ~

I had a memory of my father from not long before he died that I could not bear: it shook me awake at nights even 10 years after his death: as I got older the memory got stronger: sometimes I could not see to paint cause it came between me and what I did and changed the nature of it: so Barto sat me at the table and put 2 cups in front of me: he filled 1 from the jug of water: he filled the other from the same jug of water.

Now, he said. This cup here has the Water of Forgetting in it. This cup here has the Water of Remembering. First you drink this. Then you wait a little. Then you drink the other.

But you poured them both out of the same jug, I said. They’re both the same water. How can this one be forgetting and this one be remembering?

Well, they’re in different cups, he said.

So it’s the cups of forgetting and remembering and nothing to do with the water? I said.

No, it’s the water, he said. You have to drink the water.

How can the same water be both? I said.

It’s a good question, he said. The kind of thing I’d expect you to ask. So. Ready? So first you drink —.

It would mean that forgetting and remembering are really both the same thing, I said.

Don’t split hairs with me, he said. This one first. The Water of Forgetting.

No, cause a minute ago you said that that one was the Water of Forgetting, I said.

No, no, it’s —, he said. Uh. No. Wait.

He looked at the 2 cups: he picked them both up and crossed the room with them: he threw the water in both of them out the open back door into the yard: he put the empty cups on the table and refilled them both from the jug again: he pointed to one, then the next.

Forgetting, he said. Remembering.

I nodded.

I was here cause Barto had come across town to see a Madonna I was painting for his friend who wanted to be painted in kneeling next to her and some saints for good money: Barto’d stared at it and shaken his head.

The people in your pictures these days, Francescho, he’d said. I mean, they’re still beautiful. But they’re strange. It’s like stone in their veins, where it used to be blood.

Canvas is different from wall, I said. Fresco is always much lighter looking. Materials can make things darker.

But it’s the same with the work you showed to Domenico, he said

(Barto found me and the pickpocket a lot of our work in those years).

Well, he gave me the job, I said. He liked it.

A bitterness was through it, Barto said. Not like you. Like you’re a different person.

I am a different person, I said.

Ha! Ercole said behind us (he was working). I wish you were. Then I’d be working for someone else.

Shut up, I said.

What’s wrong? Barto said.

Master Francescho is not sleeping much, the pickpocket said.

Why not? Barto said.

Be quiet, Ercole, I said.

Bad dreams, Ercole said.

I can help with bad dreams, Barto said.

If it were only dreams, it’d be easy, I said. I could deal with only dreams.

Barto was sure, he said, of a good way to rid oneself of bad dreams and painful memories both: you had to do a ritual in the name of the goddess of memory: you’d drink one water first and you’d forget everything: you’d drink the other water next and it’d give you a forceful remembering, everything crushed into 1 single huge memory boulder, a remembering the size of a mountainside.

Now I sat at the table with the 2 cups in front of me.

I don’t want all my memories falling on me like avalanche, I said.

You won’t know the first thing about it, Barto said. You won’t even know it’s happening. You’ll be protected. You’ll be in a trance. And then we lift you up and we carry you across the room and we put you in the special chair and you tell the oracle all the things the water’s made you remember and then you fall asleep from the effort of it all. And when you wake up you find that you remember in a whole new way. You remember without fear or discomfort. You remember only what you really need to remember. And after it your sleep at night will be deep and good and sound and also — best thing of all — you’ll find you’re able to laugh again.

What special chair? What oracle? I said.

We were down in the servant kitchen: it was empty, Barto had dismissed the serving girls and the cook for the hour it would take, he said, to change my demeanour: we could hear them sunning themselves in the yard lightly complaining about the interruption: but they were used to me there: they were kind to me too: there was always something to eat at Barto’s house if Barto was away from home cause the kitchen was where Barto habitually took me (to keep me out of sight of his wife, I think, who did not like me around the house too much: he’d promised me I’d always stand godparent to his boys, and to all his boys not just the first: and what about your girls? I’d asked, cause I knew I’d be a great patron to girls: ah but the girls are not so much my business, he’d said and I’d seen from the slant away of his eyes that I was permitted, but conditionally, to the parts of his life over which his wife had no jurisdiction: this was fine by me, I had more than enough grace by our friendship: though I’d have liked all the same to be guardian to his girls since girls got less attention when it came to colours and pictures, which meant the loss of many a good painter out of nothing but blind habit: but his wife did not want her girls to have the life of painters).

Barto leapt across to a larder, opened a corner cupboard inside it and brought out a wrapped honeycomb on a dish above which a small cloud of flies appeared and congregated: he put it on the table in front of me.

The oracle, he said.

Is there bread to go with it? I said.

He went back to the larder.

Would you prefer eggs as oracle? he said.

Can the oracle be both? I said. And can I take some of the oracle home with me?

My wife has been complaining there are never enough eggs, he said (cause she knew from her servants that I sent the pickpocket round here often: what neither of them knew was that her kitchen actually gained a lot for the eggs it happened to lose, cause the Garganelli cook had taken lessons from the pickpocket who was good with food when it came to both pictures and stomachs and who’d taught the cook how to hang and dry beef and pork in the way that enhances the flavours).

Barto set a bowl full of eggs on the table beside the honey.

And the special chair? I said (and while he looked round for a chair that would do I pocketed 5 of the eggs).

He was patting the crate of apples in the corner: he covered it with two dishcloths and patted the creases smooth.

Right, he said. Ready.

So. I drink this first, I said.

Yes, he said.

And then my memories fly off the top of me, I said, like someone putting a ladder against my walls if I were a house and climbing up on to the roof of me where all the things I remember are neatly laid like rooftiles, the first under the next under the next under the next. And then that someone jemmies each tile off, throws it down to the ground and doesn’t stop till the rafters are bare. Yes?

More or less, Barto said.

And when they come off, do they stack up neatly, my memories, or do they lie broken in a heap by their fall? I said.

I can’t say for sure, Barto said. I’ve never done this ritual before.

And then, in my new roofless state, I said, what I do is, I drink this, yes?

Yes —, Barto said.

— and those same old rooftiles, I said, hoist themselves off the ground again all at once, all the tiles that haven’t broken and all the little broken bits, both, and they fly up like a skyful of stiff wingless birds back up to the open roof of me where they fix themselves back on, over and under all their old neighbours again? In exactly the same places?

I suppose, Barto said.

So what’s the point? I said.

The point? Barto said. The point is — obviously, Francescho, that moment, with all the tiles, I mean the memories, gone. That moment when you’re like before you were born. Like just newborn. Open to everything. Open to the weather. Everything new.

Ah, I said.

Open like a brand-new not-yet-lived-in home, Barto said. Clean like a wall that’s been returned to what it was like before the painting.

But then the roof, or the same old picture, lands right back on top of me again? I said.

Yes, but by the time it does you’ve had the moment without it, your clean moment, Barto said. And what happens in that moment is, the ritual starts its work, and I put you in the Chair of Mnemosyne, and you say out loud to the oracle on the table –

The eggs and the honey, I said –

Yes, Barto said, you tell them everything that’s come into your head. After that the memory can’t hurt you any more.

Ah, I said.

That’s how it works, he said. That’s the Rite of Mnemosyne.

Barto was my friend so he wished me well: it was a warm-hearted game, sweet, wholesome, funny and hopeful: but perhaps too, I reckoned — I suspected him of it — what he really wished was for me to forget my self so I might be another self to him.

More: I had seen depictions of that goddess Mnemosyne: I had seen how she would place her hand on the back of a man’s head and not just pull him by the hair but get a good handful and yank him nearly off his feet by the head and suspend him in mid-air as if hanging him for a crime: she was not a restful spirit: she was tough and wiry and dark: the scholars and poets thought her the mother of all the muses, even the inventor of words themselves: I didn’t want to offend in any way such a spirit.

— then I take you home to your house, Barto was saying, we put cushions under you, you sleep it off, and then you wake up feeling better, Barto said.

All just from me drinking water, I said.

You’ll see, Barto said.

So I picked up the first cup: but what if I did by chance drink the forgetting and the remembering the wrong way round? I might end up roofless and open for ever, no memories at all of anything ever again: what I would give, to forget everything: cause as I know now from this place of purgatorium this would be a kind of paradise, since purgatorium is a state of troubling memory or the knowledge of a home after home is gone, or of something which you no longer have in a world which you recognize to be your own but in which you are a stranger and of which you can no longer be a part.

Here, my father’d said to me once, soon after I announced to him that I’d stop being his apprentice, that I thought myself ready to do without guardianship being well past 2 decades old.

He handed me a folded piece of paper which, when I unfolded it, was worn to a thinness through which actual light came cause of the too many times unfolded then folded again in its time spent as a fragile thing in the world.

I flattened it gently in my hand and I read what it said in the faded ink in an immature hand which sloped up in a curve at the ends of the lines: its writer had made no preparation for keeping his line of words steady as small children are taught to do with the mark of a straight line to follow.

Forgive my insolence if indeed it be insolence but I have held it all this time wrong of you: so much so that I have been unable some nights to sleep well for thinking on it: that you did strike me on the head that day for the pictures I had made of you in the soil and dust: honoured illustrious and most beloved of all fathers I beg of you do not think to strike me that way again: unless of course justly I deserve your wrath which in this instance I maintain it, I did not.

What is it? I asked him.

You don’t remember? he said.

I shook my head.

You were small and I taught you to write, he said, and this is what you first wrote.

!

I looked at the paper in my hand: I’d have sworn my life on that I had never seen it before: yet this was my own writing.

So much we forget ourselves in a life.

I looked at how I held it, my child’s hand in my adult hand, and thought how much paler the paper was in my father’s: cause my own skin was light, white as any lady’s compared to the skin of my father and brothers after the years of weather and work and firing of bricks, all of which will turn skin to a brown quite close to the red of the bricks themselves: my father was proud of my pale skin: to him it was achievement: with my pale hands I folded the paper again and held it out for him to take back.

It’s yours, he said. If you’re leaving my tutelage, then I give into your care what little I still have of your child self. It also holds your mother in it, who will have helped you fashion it, cause you were very young when you wrote this and the sentences have her turn of phrase about them, as well as — look, here, here and here — her habit of putting these 2 dots between clauses where a breath should come.

It’s my habit too, I said.

He nodded. He took another paper from his sleeve pocket and held it out to me.

Yours too, he said.

What is it? I said.

The contractual agreement, he said. We made it when you were a child. Remember?

No, I said.

You sign it here, and here, he said, and I do too. We take it to the notary and he witnesses us sign it. And when he does — that’s it. You’re your own man at last.

He raised both eyebrows and regarded me with comic warmth, and then me him with warmth too, and for a moment a happiness that was also made of some sadness between us.

But I was gone soon after on my new horse, I’d a life to live and a different city to work in and Florence to visit and Venice to see and was no longer apprentice to anyone.

Old father, old brickmaker.

Young gone brickshaper mother who never grew old.

3 years later I came back to the town cause I’d heard there might be work going at the palace of beautiful flowers and cause Cosmo was working on the muses and I might get the chance to work with Cosmo: I’d seen a small crowd of boys down the side of the cathedral throwing stones at a ruined serf, old man in torn cloth pulling by hand a cart loaded with the dregs of household stuff: it looked like he was stopping passers to sell them the things in the cart: he’d reach behind him, take whatever came to hand, a piece of old something, cloth, a cup, a bowl, another bowl, a footstool, a chairleg, plank of wood, and hold it up and offer it: a person took something and didn’t pay: the next people pushed him out of the way: people went past him as fast as they could in a kind of panic: except the boys: the boys followed him and threw stones and insults: he was a stranger Jew or infidel, or a gypsy or wood dweller maybe: there was fear of the blue sickness in town, there was always fear of it even when there’d been no sign of it in the people for years: but a man acting fevered always drew a sharp attention: it wasn’t till after I’d gone, was a mile or 2 away, that I knew I’d recognized the last thing I’d seen him take from the cart and hold up: it had been a stonehammer: I went back along the road to the cathedral but he was gone: the boys too had gone: what I’d seen had vanished as surely as if I’d invented it.

I went to the old house: he was there, he was fine, he was sitting at the table: there was a written list of names on the wood of the table: the list went all down the long side of it where we’d sat and eaten as children: several of the names at the top end had a line scored through them: they’re the people who owe me for work done, he said, I’m writing to them all to absolve them of their debts, I’ve written to those ones there, I still have these down here to write to.

It wasn’t long after this that they came fast horse to Bologna to tell me he’d died.

In my dreams he was always younger, his arms rope-strong.

Once in a dream he told me he was cold.

But there were nights I couldn’t get near any dream cause the real things I’d seen and done, and seen and not done, fell like a shadow curtain in my way.

I came back to Ferara after he died and stood outside the empty house on the road (cause my uncle was dead and my brothers not wanting to inherit the debts had vanished and left them to me): a woman I didn’t know saw me and came out of a house opposite, she crossed the road and gave me money in my hands that Cristoforo had given her the last time he saw her saying take it, I won’t need it.

4 coins: she wanted me to have them back.

(I lost that contract my father and I signed: I lost that letter my child self wrote to my father: I kept the 4 coins, and had them for the rest of my, till I did I? die?)

I yelled it out into the kitchen.

Nothing I remember nothing.

Through the window I saw the 2 serving girls jump: Barto too nearly leapt out of his own skin. I threw my hands in the air like someone with lost wits: I knocked the cup with the Water of Remembering in it over: it spilled through an open crack in the table wood and hit the floor underneath: the doorways filled with Garganelli servants all wide eyes: Barto held up his hand to stop anyone coming in: he bent low over me, didn’t take his eyes off me: I looked up and through him as if blind.

Who are you? I said.

Francescho —, Barto said.

You are Francescho, I said. Who am I?

No, you are Francescho, Barto said. I’m your friend. Don’t you know me?

Where am I? I said.

My house, Barto said. The kitchen. Francescho. You’ve been here a thousand times.

I let my mouth fall open: I made my face empty: I held my hand up wet from the water on the table: I looked at it like I’d never seen a hand, like I’d no idea what a hand was.

It’s me. Bartolommeo, Barto said. Garganelli.

What place is this? I said. Who is Bartolommeo Garranegli?

Barto went paler than autumnal fog.

Oh dear Christ dear Madonna and all the angels and the baby Jesus, he said.

Who is Christ and dear Madonna and a baby? I said.

What have I done? he said.

What have you done? I said.

I made to stand up, then as if I couldn’t remember what legs were for: I fell off my stool to the ground: I fell quite convincingly: ah but then I felt the wet of the broken eggs in my pocket.

Aw, damnt to hell, I said.

Francescho? Barto said.

Thought I’d got away with it, I said.

Is it you? Barto said.

There was sweat on his forehead: he sat down at the table.

You bastard, he said.

Then he said, Thank the Christ, Francescho.

I got myself to my feet: the wet of the eggs had made a darkness all down my coat and in the clothes on the side of my leg.

For a minute there, he said, my world ended.

I started to laugh and he did too: I put my hand in my pocket and scooped out a single yolk which had — a miracle — stayed whole in its sac in a half-shell of egg still unbroken: the other yolks were mixed up with their own whites and shells and hung off my hand in a long drip of mucus: I wiped my hand on the table and then on the face of my friend, who let me: then I upended the half-shell into my hand and held out the unbroken yolk on my palm to show him.

The oracle speaks, Barto said.

I completely forgot there were eggs in there, I said.

See? Barto said. I told you it’d work.

The girl can’t sleep: or when she does sleep she shifts around in her bed like a fish not in water: in the nights I watch her writhing in the half-sleep or sitting up blank and unmoving in the dark of her room.

The great Alberti says that when we paint the dead, the dead man should be dead in every part of him all the way to the toe and finger nails, which are both living and dead at once: he says that when we paint the alive the alive must be alive to the very smallest part, each hair on the head or the arm of an alive person being itself alive: painting, Alberti says, is a kind of opposite to death: and though he knows that when we are bared back to nothing but our bones ourselves only God can remake us into humans, put faces back on our skulls on the final day and so on &c, which means there is no blasphemy in what I’m about to say –

cause Alberti said it and it is true –

all the same it’s many a person who can go to a painting and see someone in it as if that person is as alive as daylight though in reality that person has not lived or breathed for hundreds of years.

Alberti it is who teaches, too, how to build a body from nothing but bones: so that the process of drawing and painting outwits death and you draw, as he says, any animal by isolating each bone of the animal, and on to this adding muscle, and then clothing it all with its flesh: and this giving of muscle and flesh to bones is what in its essence the act of painting anything is.

I now sense this girl has had a death or a vanishment perhaps of the dark-haired woman in the pictures on the south wall above her bed which are pictures she sometimes looks at for many minutes and sometimes cannot, in which the woman is both young and older, sometimes with a small infant who resembles this girl, and sometimes with another small infant who then matures to become the brother, and sometimes with strangers: in this instance the pictures mean a death: cause pictures can be both life and death at once and cross the border between the two.

Once the girl held one picture of this woman so close to a source of light, to see it more fully, as if to illuminate things in its dark, that I thought surely the picture would burn: but the lights in purgatorium are an enchanted kind of flame and nothing in the end caught fire.

Either this woman, or it is St Monica Victims who is the girl’s loss? Or perhaps one of the 2 girls in the picture on the sunlit street, the 2 friends, the light one and the dark one, one in gold, one in blue: maybe it is all of them who vanished: perhaps there has been a blue sickness here and they have all died of it.

But the girl is an artist! Cause she has peeled down off her north wall all the many pictures of the house we sit and wait outside so often, and she has, on a table in the room, been making a new work out of them and I cannot help but feel I have hit target with her cause the new work is in the shape of — a brick wall.

As if each of the little studies is a brick in this wall, she has lined them up with the right irregularity and she has drawn and shaded with lead the mortar lines round and between each and cut some pictures short for each alternating brickline at the ends of her wall, just like cut or turned bricks look, it does look very like a wall! She’s artisan and can very well make good things: the picture wall is very long and falls and curls off the table on to the floor and part of the way across the room as if the room is a divided territory in which

yes

here come all the memories complete with all their forgettings

doing St Vincenzo for good money in Bologna, I’d got a thick aurum musicum (cause the great Cennini, who is only rarely wrong, is wrong about this gold when he says it is not as good to use as other gold): I had painted my dead father up above Vincenzo’s head in the form of a Christ: not blasphemic I hoped cause my father had so loved and revered Vincenzo, the new saint patron of builders and brickmakers: my father had celebrated his saint day 8 times in the 8 years before he died

(though I liked too the notion that the Christ might maybe have lived longer than they all say that he did, which, yes, is a blaspheming but worth darkening a corner of the soul for and with any luck forgivable).

The painting was full of egg: I wanted it richer and richer, especially the cloakwork and the skin of the saint.

You can’t use that much, the pickpocket said. It won’t set.

Wait and see, Ercole, I said.

And the lazzurrite is too thick, the pickpocket said.

Wait and see, I said again.

But I needed more of the gold so I went for a walk to stretch my eyes and to fetch more from the colourmakers, also to pay them fairly too cause I owed them a deal of money

(had done a St Lucia with more of the gold on it than I could afford at the time: she had eyes on a sprig in her hand, eyes opening at the end of the sprig like flowers will, cause the great Alberti writes that the eye is like a bud, which made me think of eyes opening like plantwork, cause St Lucia is the saint of eyes and light and is usually seen blind or eyeless and many painters give her eyes but not in her face, instead they put them on a platter or set them in the palm of her hand — but I let her keep all her eyes, I did not want to deprive her of any.

But Master Francescho, if the stalk has been picked, how long will the eyes last held up out of water like that? They’ll wilt and die, the pickpocket said.

Ercole, you’re an idiot, I said.

No, they’re every bit as fragile as real flowers, the pickpocket said. If not more so.

He looked at the picture: he looked near tears.

First of all she’s a saint, so the flowers are saintly. Which means the flowers won’t die, I said.

Saints are all about death. It’s prerequisite, for saints, he said.

Second, it’s a picture, which means the flowers can’t die cause they’re in a picture, I said, and third, if they do die, it’ll be in the special saint world of the picture that they do and she can always pick herself another sprig from whatever bush she picked those from.

Ah, the pickpocket said.

He went on with his work but I saw him keep glancing at the slender stalk with the eyes on the end of it in the hand of the saint: from his face, all unease, and his own eyes unable not to look, I knew it would be a good picture).

On my way back from the colourmakers I was coming along the river near the place where people leave putrid things and I saw a good pair of boots lying on their sides behind a hill of bushes whose roots were all covered in rubbish and dumped guts and entrails.

I went to see what size they were: flies rose: as I did I saw one of the boots move by itself.

Behind the rubbish through the straggle of branches I saw hands in the air as if attached to no body: they were covered in pustules like coated in a deep soup paste made of lentils but lentils coloured blue and black: I remember the smell: the smell was strong: I came round the bushy hill and I saw that the hands were on arms and at the ends of the arms there were shoulders and a head but with this pox over everything, even the face: he was breathing: he was alive: something moved in the whites of his eyes, the eyes saw me and a mouth opened below them.

Don’t come any nearer, he said.

I stepped well back: I stood in a place where I could still see the hands through the twiggy stuff.

Are you still there? the man said.

I am, I said.

Go away, he said.

Are you young or old? I said (cause I couldn’t tell from looking).

I think young, he said.

You need a new skin, I said.

He made a noise a bit like a laugh.

This is my new skin, he said.

What’s your name? I said.

I don’t know, he said.

Where are you from? I said. Is there no one to help you? Family or friends? Tell me where you live.

I don’t know, he said.

What happened to you? I said.

I had a headache, he said.

When? I said.

I don’t remember, he said. I only remember the headache.

Shall I fetch the nuns? I said.

It was nuns who brought me here, he said.

Which nuns? I said.

I don’t know, he said.

What can I do? I said. Tell me.

You can go away, he said.

But what will happen to you? I said.

I’ll die, he said.

I got back to the workshop and I was full of the vision: I shouted to the pickpocket that we were to paint strands of bush and tree, but to paint them like they were both seeing and blind.

You mean with actual eyes on, like in your Lucia? the pickpocket asked.

I shook my head: I didn’t know how: all I knew was I had just seen the man, the rubbish, the leaves, the twigs of the scrubland and I had understood pity and pitilessness both as something to do with the push of the branches.

The imperturbable nature of foliage, I said.

Eh? the pickpocket said.

He painted me a branch exactly as branches look, that’s right –

cause I remember everything now –

say it quick before I forget again –

the day I opened an eye, the other wouldn’t open, I was flat horizontal on the ground, had I fallen off the ladder?

I found you wrapped in the old horse blanket half an hour ago, he said, no, don’t — don’t do that, the heat coming off you, you’re sweating and it’s so hot outside, Master Francescho, so how can you be cold? Can you hear me? Can you hear?

What I saw was the pickpocket above me at my forehead, he poured water on to his sleeve and put his arm on my forehead again, too cold: people ran away out of the place: everyone but the pickpocket who opened the buttons of my jacket then took a knife to my shirt then cut further, deeper, sliced open the wraps of my binding and peeled it back and open saying forgive me, Master Francescho, it’s to help you breathe and I mean you no disrespect: I was worried, flailed my arms, furious, not about the cutting of the binding but about the prophets and the doctors we were painting on the walls and the ceiling (cause there were no real doctors brave enough for that room that day and the only doctors near me were pictures), the best work I’d done so far, not finished yet and we’d been fully paid in advance for it: I told the pickpocket to finish the prophets but to paint out the doctors altogether: he said he would: I felt better when I heard it: never leave work unfinished, Ercole: he got me out of that place where we were now not wanted cause of the colours that had come in my skin and carried me on his own back to a bed, I don’t know where, it was next to a wall: whatever the room was it faded and sharpened and cracked round me as if a quake happened and when the whitewash cracked in the wall I saw the people –

Ercole, tell me, I said, who those fine people are who are coming through the wall. I can’t make them out, quite.

What people? Ercole said. Where?

Then he understood.

Ah, them, he said, they’re a troupe of young fine people, they’re coming out of the woods and they’ve wound oak leaves and branches through their hair and round their necks and round their wrists and their ankles, they’ve the scent of trees all round them like a garland too as if they’re dressed in tree and flowers instead of clothes, and they’re carrying great overflowing armfuls of the flowers and grasses they’ve picked in the meadow out behind the wood, grass and flowers so scented that the fragrance of them is coming ahead like a herald, and I know that if you could have seen them properly, Master Francescho, you’d want to paint them, and if you’d painted them you’d have caught them right cause they look the way that means they’ll never die, or more, that if they do, they won’t mind or hold it against life, shall I lower the blind, is it too bright for you in here? he said.

I congratulate you, Ercole, I said. It is so bright it’s dark

can’t remember

what came next

but that’s what a proper burnishing of gold does: properly done it will give out both at once darkness and brightness: I taught the pickpocket to burnish: I taught him hair and branches: I taught him rocks and stones and how they hold every colour in the world and how every colour in every picture ever made comes from stone, plant, root, rock and seed: I taught him the body of the son held in the mother’s arms, the last supper, the miracle of the water and wine, the animals standing round the stable and the day going on behind it all, in both the foreground and background of it all, from death to last supper to wedding to birth.

I taught him, too, how things and beings shown to be moving upwards into the air always have about them the most and the best vitality: he was always loyal, sweet pickpocket: I remember now the winter after we finished the frescoes in the palace of not being bored sending him back to Ferara again, and he went without complaint, cause I wanted to know how the work was looking nearly one year dry.

He went on the Wednesday and came back on the Friday straight to the church we were restoring the Madonna in.

He’s only changed one thing since we were there, one thing in the whole room, the pickpocket said. His own face.

Who has? The Falcon? I said.

Borse, of course, the pickpocket said. He’s had his face redone throughout the months, including your months. I asked the man at the door, I know him, old friend of my father’s. He says Borse brought in his cousin Baldass to redo it.

The pickpocket told me the doorman had welcomed him like a son and taken him through to the serving quarters where they’d all done the same and fed him and fussed over him and asked after me –

(they asked after me?)

— yes, he said. And listen, that’s not all. Borse is away a lot these days cause he’s decided to build a mountain — not just move a mountain, since faith can do that, easy, but make a mountain, a whole new one, big as an Alp, in a place there’s not been one before. So there’s a lot of dragging and shifting and piling of rocks at Monte Santo and a lot of stoneworkers being worked to near-death, and sometimes to actual death and when that happens Borse adds the bodies to his mountain.

But Master Francescho, the pickpocket said. This other stuff they told me. Our month room has become quite famous among folk. There’s often a crowd comes to the palace from the town and when they get in there they go and stand in front of your justice scene. They just stand there and look. They never say anything out loud. Borse thinks it’s that they like to come to see the picture of him, you know, giving out justice. But the doorman says the people, when they leave that room, go on their way as pleased as if someone’s put money in their pockets. They come especially, his wife told me while she poured stew into my bowl, to see the face you painted in the blackness, the face there’s only half of, whose eyes — your eyes, Master Francescho — look straight out at them, as if the eyes can actually see them over the top of Borse’s head.

They’re not my eyes, I said.

Uh huh, the pickpocket said.

You didn’t tell them they’re my eyes? I said.

Wouldn’t matter if I had, he said. I know they’re your eyes. I see your eyes every day. But they think what they like. The doorman’s wife told me all the women who come to look go away talking about how the eyes are a woman’s eyes. All the men who come to look go away sure the eyes are a man’s. And you know how you made it only half a face, a face without a mouth? Like there are things that can’t be said? People come for miles to see it and nod their heads at each other about it. And they told me this too, listen to this — that a great many workers are always coming to the palace now, infidel workers and other field workers, workers from our own south and the poor working locals too, and they knock on the door in large numbers, sometimes as many as 20 at a time, to pay their respects, they tell the doorman, to show obeisance to Borse. By which they mean they want to bow before him in person, which Borse lets them do, if he’s there, and he always sees them in the virtue room.

So? I said.

Think, Master Francescho, the pickpocket said. Cause to get to the virtue room you have to pass through the month room, don’t you?

So we’ve turned him into the popular man he wanted us to paint him as? I said.

The pickpocket laughed: he took off his travelling coat: he’d been telling me it all so fast he hadn’t even put his bags down: he did now and sat on the softer of them at my feet and went on with his tale.

The story goes, the pickpocket said, that when the workers passing through the room of the months get anywhere near the far end of that room they veer towards the month of March where they stop below your worker painted in the blue and stand there for as long as they can. Some have even started coming in with their sleeves full of hidden flowers and at a given signal between them all they let their arms fall to their sides and the flowers fall out of their clothes on to the floor beneath him. When they’re made to move on, they go in and they bow to Borse like they’re meant to, it takes about half a minute to, then they’re escorted from the palace back through the room of the months and they strain their heads round on their necks to keep their eyes on the picture for as long as they can the whole length of the room.

And one day 25 or so of them got in there and were standing below him, dust coming off them from the fields, all looking up at him, and they refused to be moved on for nearly an hour, pretended not to understand the language when asked, though in the end when they went they went quite peaceably.

And Borse hasn’t had it altered? I said (and my voice came out like the squeak of a mouse).

Borse has no idea it even happens, the pickpocket said. Nobody’s told him. Nobody cares to, and he’s never seen it with his own eyes, has he? Since he’s always on the other side of the wall squeezed into the chair in the room of the virtues waiting to be bowed to. When he’s not off in Monte Santo, that is, making that new mountain.

For that moment I felt a sorrow for him, Borse the Just, whose vanity reminded me of me –

but what I really felt was frightened that something I’d done or made might have such wild effect.

Your stories are nothing but flattery, I said.

They’re nothing but true, the pickpocket said.

I don’t want to hear any more of your lies, I said.

You sent me to see. I saw. Now I’m telling you, the pickpocket said. I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d be pleased. You’re such a vain cunt, I thought you’d be delighted.

I hit him across the top of the head.

I don’t believe you even went there, I said.

Ow! he said. Right. That’s it. Hit me again and I’m leaving.

I hit him again.

He left.

Good.

I put away all the work things: I went off home to my rooms, to bed: I locked the door against the pickpocket, whose habit it was to sleep at the foot of the bed: he could sleep in the open air tonight

(he came back 3 days later,

sweet pickpocket, who’d die still young, though long after me, of too much drink, tempus edax, forgive me)

as for me, I lay in the bed that night by myself and wondered if Cosmo had heard about my pictures and about all the people coming to look at them.

Cosmo bloody Cosmo.

I am small: I am only newly become Francescho: I am learning to tint parchments and papers and to mix colours for painting the range of different skin and flesh tones in all the different lights: I’m teaching myself from books while my father is working on a house near the edge of the town and one day in an empty room in the half-house I’m leaning out of the brickwork which will become a window and I see crossing the meadow the son of the cobbler, everybody knows who he is cause he’s been taken on at the court: he’s young, he’s to paint the pennants and horsecoats and the armour they use in tournaments, but those who know anything about pictures also know he is a painter of pictures himself so full of twisting and arguing life that they surprise everyone who sees them: as he crosses the meadow it is as if it is revealed to me: he is a being wholly formed of and giving off the colour green: cause everything about him as he walks through the high grasses (he has left the path the people generally use to cross the land and is making his way across a wild-grassed place instead) is green: his head, his shoulders, his clothes are tinted green: above all, his face is the greenest green: it is as if his body gives out a greenness, one I can nearly taste, as if my mouth has been filled with leaves and grass: although I know of course it is the meadow casting its colour on to him, all the same he’s the reason the grasses spread round him for miles are the green they are.

I am 18 years old: I have high hopes cause my father has persuaded the most exciting new young master the town has seen for a long time to look over some of my pictures and has gone to the municipal palace with a great many of them to show him (who isn’t new at all, who’s been working as a tapestry and fabric designer and painter of horsecoats and pennants there for a decade and making a name too for his pictures which are near-shocking things in their toughness, all roots and stones and grimaces and all of an astonishing arrogance, so much so that to look at them for any time will fill you with a kind of discomfort and distaste: more, Borse, the newest Marquis, has tired of his old masters, good Bono and Angelo, who weren’t his but his half-brother’s court painters, and word’s gone round that this new painter has caught his eye and has received many gifts): my father has decided he’d be a good man to know and that a court job could be mine easy as anything if I were apprenticed to him: I am home in the workshop my father made for me in our yard from sticks and hanging canvases, shelter from the wind but full of plain daylight, good for painting: it’s a place both flimsy and serviceable and I haven’t had to re-erect it this morning (my brothers like to knock the sticks out of the ground at night when they’ve come home from work or drinking, but last night they forgot to, or were kind enough not to) and I’m hard at work on a picture as large as the canvases that make the walls hung round me, I am picturing a story I remember from childhood: a musician has an argument with a god about whose music is better: the god wins the argument and the musician has to pay the price, which is to be skinned and hand over the pelt to the god as a trophy.

It’s a story I’ve puzzled over almost all my years: right now though I’ve found the way to tell it: the god stands to one side, the unused knife slack in his hand: he has an air near disappointment: but the inner body of the musician is twisting up out of the skin in a kind of ecstasy like the skin’s a thick flow of fabric coming rich in one piece off the shoulder and peeling away at the same time from the wrists and the ankles in little pieces like a blown upward snow of confetti: the body appears through the skin’s unpeeling like the bride undressing after the wedding: but bright red, crystal red: best of all the musician catches the skin over the very arm it’s coming off and folding itself, neat.

I hear someone behind me: I turn: a man is standing between the folds of canvas that make the door of my workshop: he’s quite young: he is adorned: his clothes are very beautiful: he himself inside the clothes is also good on the eye and he has an arrogance that actually has a colour: I will try quite a few times after this to mix that colour but will never be able to get it.

He is looking at my painting: he is shaking his head.

It’s wrong, he says.

Says who? I say.

Marsyas is a satyr and therefore male, he says.

Says who? I say.

Says the story, he says. Say the scholars. Say the centuries. Says everyone. You can’t do this. It’s a travesty. Says me.

Who’re you? I say

(though I know quite well who he is).

Who am I? Wrong question, he says. Who are you? Nobody. No one will ever pay you, not money, for this. It’s worthless. Meaningless. If you’re going to paint a Marsyas, Apollo has to win. Marsyas has to display ruin and be defeated. Apollo is purity. Marsyas has to pay.

He is staring at the picture with, is it a kind of anger? He comes up closer and rubs the lower corner roughly with a thumb and first finger.

Hey —, I say

cause I am annoyed at his touching it.

He acts like he can’t hear: he examines the fields and fencing and trees, the far houses, the rock formations, the people going about their day and the nothing unusual happening, the boys throwing stones in the river for a dog to chase, the woman tramping the cloth in the barrel, the birds in flight, the clouds going where they’re blown and the tree to which the musician was to be bound by ropes and from which the musician has twisted free.

He’s as close to the surface of the painting as he can get, so close it’s as if his eyelashes might be brushing the twigs and leaves of the crown on Apollo: he puts himself equally close to the place where the skin of the musician’s face and neck, all that’s left still attached to the body, meets the red of the underflesh: he steps back, steps back again, steps back again so he’s level with me: he looks down at the colours on my table.

Who made your blue? he says.

I did, I say.

He does a shrug like he doesn’t care who made that blue: he lifts his eyes and looks back at the picture again: he sighs: he gives a little disapproving shake of the head and then he disappears again through the opening in the airy walls.

2 nights later the painting went: I came out in the morning, the workshop was wrecked and ruined as usual but cause I knew my brothers liked their fun I always stored the tools and things that mattered well away: I went down to my mother’s storeroom: the overgrown grass on the path down the field had been stamped back by more feet than mine: its door was open: the painting was gone and the roll of sketches too (though my father had taken everything else with him to the palace where no one had had the time to see him so he’d brought it all back home again: it was safe in the house, in my mother’s bedroom up on top of the cupboards out of the reach of the mouths of the goat and her babies).

Who knows where it went? The river? A fire? A back room, cut, rolled and squeezed into the gaps between the wall and the window or the door and the floor or hammered into the cracks in the wood or the brick to block out the damp?

(Shining Cosmo, favoured court painter who’ll oust the court painters favoured before you then be ousted in turn by my own beloved apprentice pickpocket (ha!): bright bejewelled Cosmo old and ill, writing to the last of your Dukes a letter for money cause you’re too ill now for painting and the bishop and the clerk who owe you for the altarpiece and the saint panel are both ignoring your invoices: them so rich and you so poor: green forgotten Cosmo, old then dead, though quite some time after me, of poverty, yes,

but not of the cold,

cause I take my unfinished working of an old old story and unroll it over you, spread it all your length, tuck you in beneath it and fold its end down under your chin to keep you that bit warmer in the winters of being old –

I forgive you.)

The girl has a friend.

The friend has a look of my Isotta, very fine, and has arrived in here like a burst of air as if a new door opened itself in a wall where no door was suspected: there’s a kin between them and their hearts are high with it: they are sharp and bright together as the skins of 2 new lemons.

The girl is holding up to her friend the wall she’s made from the many small pictures: her friend is admiring and nodding: she takes a piece and looks closely at a single picture and then at how the picture has been made to become a brick.

One girl takes one end of it and the other takes the other and they measure its length by stretching it across the room: it is long, the wall: then into the room like a mischievous small dog comes the little brother who ducks down below the stretch of picture-wall in the middle then knocks into it with his head like a goat or a ram: both girls squeal: they gather it and swing it carefully away from him, drape it in its fragility on the table and place its ends on either side on the floor with no twists in it so it will stay whole: when this is done the girl turns and yells at the brother: he is abashed: he leaves the room: the girls go back to fussing at the long picture-wall: moments later the brother comes in again carrying 2 cups with something hot in them, steam coming off: a truce, an offering: sure enough, there is a kind of accord: he is to be let to sit in the room with them for bringing them these drinks: he sits good and quiet on the bed as if he has never been anything other.

The girls go back to examining their wall: as soon as they forget he’s there the brother dips his head and his hands into the bag the friend has brought with her: he has found something to eat in there and is ripping at its wrap: both girls hear him and turn and see and shout at him at once, then both stand up and chase him out of the room.

But when they get back –

ruination!

They have put their too-hot cups on the surface of the picture-wall and the cups have spilled a bit when the table got knocked: these cups are stuck to some of the pictures of — what are they of, again? — so much so that to pick a cup up by a handle is also to pick up the whole wall.

Both girls peel the picture-wall off the cups: the studies the cups stuck to are marked from the heat and the spill with 2 perfect circles from the shapes of the bases of the cups.

The girl looks appalled.

She holds up the bit of the wall: she unsticks with a little knife the 2 studies marked with the circles: she waves the studies in the air as if to dry them.

But the friend takes them out of her hands: she laughs: she holds them both up in front of her eyes like they’re eyes.

Ha ha!

The girl looks astonished: her mouth opens: then it breaks into a smile: then laughter from them both: then both girls take one end of the long wall of pictures each, like they did before but now with its cut-out bricks gone from the middle and they stretch it out across the room again: this time rather than treating it with such care the girl, when the wall is at full stretch, wraps her end of it round her shoulder and tucks it under her arms like a collar or a scarf.

When she sees the girl do this the friend does the same: next moment both girls are shawling themselves in it: they twist themselves round inside the swath of wall until they are both a bristle of pictures like armour over their chests and stomachs and arms and up to their necks: then they twist towards each other as if it is the wall that is bringing them together: they meet wrapped like caterpillars in the middle of the room: but they don’t just meet, they collide: at which the paper wall breaks and as it comes apart its brick-shapes fly off like rooftiles and the girls hit the floor together in each other’s arms in the mess of the pictures littered round them.

I like a good skilful friend.

I like a good opened-up wall.

I’m doing a portrait now of my brown-eyed friend: what’s his name? I forget his name: you know who I mean, I mean what’s-his-name: his father has died which means he is the official head of his family: he owns all the land and all the ships and has come into all the money: it is an unofficial portrait though cause his wife will not have me paint him officially so to placate me he has asked me to do him too, since official versions are never true, is what he says when I ask him why

(can’t remember his name but I remember pretty clearly my annoyance at his wife)

and I’ve sketched some ships in the far background and come back to the shape of his head again: but my friend, sitting in front of me, is even more restless today than usual: I work on the fold in the undershirt where it prettily tops his collar but with my eye on him today he can hardly sit still.

I know his frustration: I’ve always known it: it is almost as old as our friendship: the walled-up power, the dismay in the air round him like when a storm is unable to break.

But as ever out of kindness he pretends to me to be feeling something else.

He says he has been infuriated by a story.

It haunts him, he says: he can’t stop thinking about it.

What story? I say.

All stories, he says, really. They’re never the story I need or really want.

I ready the picture: I am quiet: I let the time pass: after a bit he speaks into this silence and tells me the bones of the story.

It’s about a magic helmet which allows its bearer to turn into anything, transform into any shape he likes, all he has to do is put the helmet on his head.

But that’s not the part that maddens him: he likes that part of the story: there’s this other part of the story and it’s about 3 maidens, guardians of a store of gold, and whoever wins the gold from them and forges it into a ring will have power over everything, over the land, the sea, the world and all its peoples: but there’s a snag: there’s a condition: he’ll have all the power, the man who forges the ring, but to keep this power he’ll have to renounce love.

My friend looks at me: he shifts about on the stool: his eyes are blunt and aimed: the everything that he can’t say to me makes him even finer to my eye.

I mark behind where his shoulder will end the curve of the line for the rock where I’ll put the fisherman: over here I’ll put the 2 children with the fish-spear under the high rock overhang: I mark where his hand will come over the frame at the front: I mark out in rough the little circle shape for the ring his hand will hold.

I just don’t see why, he is saying. Why whoever is brave or lucky enough to win the gold and make it into the ring can’t have both the ring and the love.

I nod that I agree and that I understand.

I know now what to make of the rest of the landscape behind him.

Here I am again: me, 2 eyes and a wall.

We are outside a house, have I been here before? There are 2 girls kneeling on the paving.

An old woman, I think I

do I know her? no

has come out and is sitting on the wall watching them: they’re painting, eggs? No, eyes: they’re painting 2 eyes on to a wall: they take an eye each: they begin with the black for the hole through which we see: then they ring the colour round it in segments (blue): then the white: then the black outline.

An old woman is telling them something: a girl (who is she?) bends down to a pot with white in it, reaches forward, adds a small square of white the size of the end of her fingertip then does the same in the same place to the other eye cause an eye with no light is an eye that can’t see, I think is what the old woman sitting on a wall is telling

hardly able to hear though cause there’s

something

God knows what

drawing me

skin of my father?

the eyes of my mother?

down to

that thin-looking line

made of nothing

ground and grit and the

gather of dirt and earth and

the grains of stone

there at the very foot of this

(really badly made just saying)

wall at the place where the crumble of

the brickbase meets the paving

look

the line where

one thing meets another

the little green almost not-there weeds

take root in it

by enchantment

cause it’s an enchanted line

the line drawn between planes

place of green possibles

cause whatever they’re doing up there

eyes painted on a wall

it’s nothing

to the tiny and the many

variations of colours invisible

till the eye’s so close it

becomes the place

where a horizontal line meets a

vertical and a surface meets a surface and a

structure meets another which looks to

be 2 dimensions only but is deeper than

sea should you dare to enter or

deep as a sky and goes as deep into the

earth (the flower folds its petals down

the head droops on the stem)

through layered clay on stone

mixed by the

worms through whose mouths

everything passes

paddled by the many legs of

spores so small they’re much

much finer than an eyelash and

are colours only darkness can

make

veins like tracery

look

the treebranch thick with

all its leaves before even the

thought of the arrow

how

the root in the dark makes its

way under the ground

before there’s

any sign of the tree

the seed still unbroken

the star still unburnt

the curve of the eyebone

of the not yet born

hello all the new bones

hello all the old

hello all the everything

to be

made and

unmade

both