And Bartolomeo de Bartolai answered, You look up and you see misery. You see how the lords overrun one another's territory, spreading disaster, spreading strife. You see how brigands steal anything that glistens. How soldiers bring contagion and take away flour. You see starving mothers who leave infants to die on the mountainside so that the ones at home survive.
And Martín de Martinelli replied, The days of a peasant's false humility are over. Do you not see that a new day is coming which will do away with antiquated ways? Do you not see that there will be new systems to classify, new instruments to understand the world?
Bartolomeo de Bartolai asked him, Does it bring comfort to think that there will be instruments to measure cold and heat, that will measure the strength of wind and the weight of air? Will they not take away the hours of the day, the days in their merciful order? The seasons that make this life, with its empty stomach and lesions, bearable? Will it not take away the calendar that begins with the feast day of the Blessed Virgin and ends with the feast day of San Silvestro? Would you have me break this whole?
Martín de Martinelli said, I would not have you break anything. I am not here to cause you to do anything. I can only say what I am going to do: I am leaving. I am not going to remain up here, my stifled voice vibrating against the vocal cords. Do you know how it is when you have a great sadness, a great anger, and try to make no sound? Do you know how it is when you hold it inside your throat? Of course you know, because you are a mountain dweller, made of stone, and you think you can outlast the pain without opening your mouth.
Bartolomeo de Bartolai answered, I notice no such pain.
Martín de Martinelli said, If a dog catches his paw in a trap, and the paw is cut, it yelps and howls, and then, if the dog survives, and the wound heals, he becomes accustomed to the pain and merely winces each time he puts his weight upon the paw.
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He must turn away from the admonishments; he must turn away and try to recall something else. Something beautiful. A mosaic. On the other side of the river above Ardonlà are the ruins of a fortress that sits on a steep bluff. Below it is a cave. The entry way is hidden among bushes and rocks along the riverbed. The passageway opens into caverns where Christians hid when they fled into the mountains. They were followers of Sant'Apollinaris of Ravenna. They built an altar in a cave, and, on the vault, they made a mosaic like the ones they had left behind. When it became safe, they built their altars above ground, and the ones below were forgotten. The forest above was cleared and a landslide buried the cave's entrance.
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He saw the mosaics only once. He was a child. He was taken there by his great-grandmother who is now being fed like a baby. She was not afraid of wolves or bears, and she took his hand and led him there. He was not afraid because she was not afraid. She was bent over as she walked beside him, leaning on her wooden walking stick, which was shaped like the letter T. She told him she was going to show him where a saint was buried, told him that no one else remembered, that they were too afraid to look. As she walked, she became transformed and stood up straight; she threw away her walking stick. She moved like a goat from one rock to another and she was not afraid of slipping on a wet stone. All the lines were erased from her face; her blue eyes were lights; she balanced on one rock, and then another, along the bank of the river.
He is trying to see the mosaic again. There was a strange source of light. There were foreign plants and creatures. A palm tree with leaves that grew out from the center like the legs of a spider. A turtle climbing out of the water onto a bank. There were two cranes drinking from a pedestal fountain.
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At night, he crosses the ara, and sits on the straw with a sackcloth blanket covering his legs. The lantern hangs on a wooden peg. On the floor, there is a jar containing mastic, which he has made from the resin of pine. Before him on a rag, he has spread out the fragments of broken glass and painted terra-cotta. Each night, he lays out a row, edging one piece against another.
He thinks, We hear things up in the mountains. We are isolated, but we hear things, just as we heard of Giotto. Just as we have heard that in France on the other side of the river called the Var, men slaughter each other. One man slashes the gullet of the other, like a pig is killed before dressing, from ear to ear, without remorse. Except they are doing this in every season and pigs are only killed once a year, in the autumn, when the weather is cold, just before water freezes. They hang the bodies upside down, bound by the feet, suspended from a tree, and the blood is left to drain out onto the ground. An itinerant bookseller said this.
One man massacres the other over the right to name God. One man slays one man, then, there is retaliation, and five more are slain. Each sect buries its dead in trenches, all together, one body piled on top of another, because there are too many bodies to give each soul its own grave. The foot soldiers of the holy war do not allow firewood to pass through their territory into the towns; there are no trees left to be cut. The wealthy possess furniture to burn, but the poor man, who has already burned his one table and one bench, freezes to death. The warriors are violating women, and the women who survive are left with the hated seed. They are slaying children who are not yet steady on their feet.
They say that Peace, herself, is revolted, and that she holds her stomach and retches; she has hidden her face under a hood and has started to walk away from the battlefields, following along in the ruts made by the wheels of carts, dragging herself along a muddy road that is lined with corpses, not even bothering to lift the hem of her cloak.
This is what the merchant passing through said. We hear things. We hear it in fragments, we hear it in imperfect remnants.
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Remnants like the tunic he wears, a saltimindosso it is called. Giotto's shepherd wears a saltimindosso like this, with a hem torn in three places. The tear must have been recent, otherwise the shepherd would have repaired it, because it is the only garment he possesses. Bartolomeo de Bartolai's shirt is made from clothing discarded from the Signore's villa, a deep black-purple of a fine heavy material. But who is to say this saltimindosso is made from a discarded article of clothing? Perhaps it was a blanket that covered his horse.
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Each night, he looks at all the irregular pieces and stares at them. A dot, a line, a wave. At times, he has to look away; the pieces seem to be moving, clattering against each other like hundreds of rows of broken teeth.
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He scratches his scalp, the discomfort is great.
Even as a child, he got scabs on the top of his head. He would stand with his back to his mother, who sat on the bench and looked through his hair at his scalp. She applied an ointment which she made from beeswax and mint and rosemary and lard. She put this on his scalp in the morning and at night before he went to sleep. She told him the skin of his scalp was drying out, and that his scalp was drying out because his head was too hot from thinking. She asked him again and again about the thoughts inside his head. You have to let your thoughts escape with breath. Otherwise your mind will get too warm, and strange things will begin to happen. As a way of encouraging him to speak, she asked him questions constantly: Do you think it will rain tomorrow? Do you think the frost will come early this year? She would ask him, What are the thoughts bouncing around inside your head? He would try his best to answer her, to describe the thoughts in his head. Why, if the bell tower in Ardonlà blessed by San Bernardino is supposed to keep away storms, why then did the roof of the house called Le Borre collapse? And his mother said, It was from the weight of the snow and it was the will of God. He asked her, If an angel dropped a string from the sky, could you climb to heaven, and, if you could, would your weight pull the angel down? She answered, Angels do not need rope, that is why there is prayer. He asked, Why did the side of the mountain fall into the river and smother the cave with the mosaics? She said, Because the earth has grown heavy and swollen with pride.
; In the kitchen, in front of the low stone sink, she grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, told him not to tell anyone about the sores and not to scratch his scalp in public. Otherwise, they will tell the priest and he will call you before him to ask you what you are thinking. They are burning even humble people at the stake for what they are thinking. When I was a girl, they wanted to execute a miller in Savignano because he was going around saying that the world created itself, that God Himself did not make it. His mind was working too hard; he was burning up with thoughts.
His mother put more salve on his scalp and stopped asking what he was thinking. She asked which plants the sheep had eaten and how many weeds he had pulled from the soil.
Talk, talk, she said to her son, putting ointment on his scalp. Let the heat escape. She urged him to speak, but to not say anything.
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He must not speak, and so he listens. He listens when the priest speaks in church about books, saying how books are like people. How each one is made differently, how some contain holy thoughts, how some contain impure thoughts, how some contain heresy.
The priest says a book is like a human being; it has a spine, and if the book is opened roughly, too quickly, the spine can be snapped, and that a book can scream in pain, yell out, hurl out words, shriek.
A book, he also says, is like fire, and if there are unholy things inside, when the book is closed, the marks on the pages rub against each other, embering twigs, one on top of another, smoldering, burning low as long as the book is closed, and then, the moment the covers are opened, the pages ignite and the book explodes into a ball of fire, singeing the skin and blinding the eyes.
An evil book, he says, can be the Devil himself, taking an elegant, refined form, with the hems of his garments embroidered with gold thread. He can take the form of a book, its covers decorated with fine-tooled leather, its pages fluttering like silk. And at night, the priest says, the book changes shape and goes to each of the people sleeping under the roof and puts impure pictures inside their heads so that they dream of sinning in unimagined ways.
He speaks about books in the small round church, even though there is no one present who can read.
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Bartolomeo de Bartolai cannot read, but he knows this much, that inside a book there are pages. And on those pages are marks. And those who understand the marks get pictures inside their heads. The marks look like vines in spring, brittle and dark, clinging to a wall washed white with lime. He does not understand how to adjust his eyes, the way one does when moving from a field into a forest. In a field, you look for the hare's round shape against the tall straight blades; in the forest you look for a glint of white, the spot on the animal's hind. It is a question of teaching your eyes how to look. This is the secret of understanding a book, he believes, but he does not know how to instruct his eyes.
At night, in the stable, the fragments he has assembled assault his eyes and mock him: This makes no sense, a band of gorse yellow here? Why, Fool?
All the fragments laid out together, separately inarticulate, broken, chipped. It makes him dizzy. It is an untrained swirl, and he becomes so confused he must look away.
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He fans the pieces out carefully.
In one pile, the fragments of blue.
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Giotto's angels tore their hair, clawed the skin of their faces. And he has made three faces like theirs.
He has sketched them out on the panel, and is now forming them with tiles. But on his panel, in his shed, there are not mere angels. The top one is a god, who, like the Signore, is the most powerful. The one in the middle is a god who is the next most powerful and is his heir. Below him is another god who is the least powerful, but has other powers the other two do not, because he is also light. Bartolomeo de Bartolai has made three gods; he believes they are three and distinct and separate, each having his place in the hierarchy.
He believes he has made a picture that is holy and sacred, but if the ambitious priest were to hear of it, a priest who wants to escape from the mountains and be allowed to return to the plains, Bartolomeo de Bartolai would be interrogated. Why have you drawn this, my son? You do not really mean to say that God is three different beings? The priest would turn to Bartolomeo de Bartolai, ask him to renounce the work, to redefine it, reminding him that God is one and indivisible. That God created light. That God is not light.
He shows the panel to no one, not because he considers this dissent, but because it is a peasant's habit to conceal. For the cheeks, he has saved his most precious glass, pieces of Asian porcelain tinted pink.
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It is nearly winter. No one passes through on the narrow road above. Snow has already fallen. Bartolomeo de Bartolai tells himself he must admit what is obvious, that Giotto is ancient and it is unlikely he will travel up into these mountains.
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He returns to the stable each night, crossing the ara. He hangs the lantern on a wooden peg, burns the precious oil. He throws the goat Diana a piece of crust he has saved. He stares at the dried-out board of pine, dreams of pictures he has seen before. He is no longer waiting for the great man. Great men do not arrive. He will never go down out of the mountains. He will soothe the foreheads of his elders, and the past will be his future.
Bartolomeo de Bartolai sits on the ground on clean straw under a dim yellow light, his fingers aching with cold. He fans out the pieces before him. He examines his few shards of cobalt and azurite blue. He begins to set them in mastic, though he has not collected sufficient fragments to complete the sky.
Authors' Biographies
GEOFFREY BECKER is assistant professor of English at Towson University in Towson, Maryland. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Poet and Critic, The Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, The Chicago Tribune, and Crazyhorse and have been included in Best American Short Stories (2000), It's Only Rock and Roll, and Short Takes: Fifteen Contemporary Stories. His novel Bluestown was published in 1996.
ADRIA BERNARDI received the 1999 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for Fiction for her novel The Day Laid on the Altar. She is also the author of Houses with Names: The Italian Immigrants of Highwood, Illinois, and has translated literary works from Italian to English, including Gianni Celati's Adventures in Africa, Rafaello Baldini's Page Proof, and Gregorio Scalise's poetry.
DAVID BOSWORTH is a professor in the University of Washington's Creative Writing Program, where he was Director for five years. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship. His novel From My Father, Singing was selected for the Editors' Book Award.
JENNIFER CORNELL is associate professor of English at Oregon State University. Her short stories and essays on popular culture have been published in numerous literary reviews and anthologies, including Irish Cinema Reader, The Brandon Book of Irish Short Stories, Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish-American Women Writers, and Writing Ulster.
BARBARA CROFT has taught at Loyola University, DePaul University, and Columbia College, Chicago. Her collection Primary Colors and Other Stories won the 1989 New Rivers Minnesota Voice Project competition. Her short fiction has appeared in such literary reviews as The Kenyon Review, Colorado Quarterly, Plainswoman, and Poet & Critic. Her awards include the Pirate's Alley William Faulkner Society Prize for Novella, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction (honorable mention), the Daniel Curley Award for Recent Illinois Short Fiction, and the Pushcart Prize. She has also published a work of scholarship: “Stylistic Arrangements”: A Study of William Butler Yeats's “A Vision.”
RICK DEMARINIS is emeritus professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. His novels include A Clod of Wayward Marl, The Mortician's Apprentice, The Year of the Zinc Penny, The Burning Women of Far Cry, Cinder, Scimitar, and A Lovely Monster. He has also published five collections of short fiction and one nonfiction book, The Art and Craft of the Short S
tory. He received the Independent Publishers' Award for Best Book of Short Fiction for Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories. He has also won The Jesse H. Jones Award for Fiction and The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
ELIZABETH GRAVER is associate professor of English at Boston College. She has published two novels, The Honey Thief and Unravelling. She has received the O. Henry Award three times, and her short stories and essays have been included in Best American Essays (1998), Chick-Lit 2: New Women's Fiction Anthology, and Sacred Ground: Writings About Home. Her third novel, Night Light, is forthcoming.
RICK HILLIS has been a Jones Lecturer in Fiction Writing at Stanford University, a Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellow, and a Writer-in-Residence at Reed College. He has written numerous screenplays and published short stories in journals and anthologies, including Voices 1: Contemporary Short Fiction, An Ounce of Cure, and Voices 2: Canadian Short Fiction.
LUCY HONIG is associate professor of International Health at the Boston University School of Public Health. Her novel, Picking Up, was the winner of the 1986 Maine Novel Award. Her short fiction has been published in a number of literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Oxalis, Indiana Review, and Antaeus. She has been the recipient of an O. Henry Award, and her work has been included in Best American Short Stories (1988), and Inside Vacationland: New Fiction from the Real Maine.
ELLEN HUNNICUTT has won numerous awards for fiction including the Herbert L. Hughes fiction award, the fiction prize from Indiana Review, the Council for Wisconsin Writers prize for book-length fiction, the Banta Award, and the Writer of Distinction Award from the International Reading Association. Her stories have been published in Story, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, Cimarron Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She has published one novel, Suite for Calliope.
JANE McCAFFERTY is assistant professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University. She has won the Great Lakes New Writers Award and two Pushcart Prizes, and six of her stories have been included in Best American Short Stories. Her first novel, One Heart, was published in 2000; her second, With Lily by the Sea, is forthcoming in 2002.
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