How to Paint a Dead Man

by Sarah Hall

  Your commute on foot to the gallery, over the blustery stretch of heath, is almost satisfying enough to make living in the city worthwhile. This is what you tell yourself every day. It’s nothing like your formative landscape though, nothing like the wet invigorating ticking in the air up there, the ripe horizons, the freshened skin. But it’s the trade-off for demanding something more cosmopolitan out of life, for weighted salaries, opportunity, and being able to get a takeaway at 4 a.m.

  You’re fond of the heath. While others scream themselves hoarse and escalate their blood pressure on the M25, or sardine it on the tube, you get to stroll across this cultivated wilderness. The stress of the city is temporarily jettisoned here. Kids canter about in pleated school uniforms, launching plastic sandwich boxes on the pond. Cat-hipped mothers push prams and lend lip-gloss to each other while dogs hurtle after balls. This is the meteorological zoo where the city keeps its winds. Up above, kites with streamers pitch and drag in the buffeting air. As you walk your hair straightens, your skirt snaps and flutters. In the summer you watch people wilt on blankets and pet heavily, like the couples on the prohibition signs at swimming pools. In winter, fog and rain obscure the racks of period houses on either side. You squint and step off the tarmac paths bisecting the expanse and lose your coordinates momentarily. You pretend it is your home county underfoot, crusty with moor grass and prudishly draped with cloud. Ten minutes after setting off across the heath, you arrive at work.

  The current exhibition will be something of a novelty. You still aren’t entirely sure about its concept. At first you did not like the idea at all. Being something of a purist, it sounded to you like a gimmick, its focus on personality rather than art. You thought the public wouldn’t want to pay to see a collection of memento mori and soiled knick-knacks. But Angela was gung-ho as usual. She secured loans from private museums, archives and well-off families, and the show is going ahead. Currently en route to Borwood House are a number of heavily insured dispatches containing some real anthropological curiosities. There are combs, and surrealist pipes, callipers, brass-handled syringes with needles still bearing addict DNA, tooth-cups and hairbrushes. There’s a wicker girdle used by Manet that is currently listing in the Channel, waiting for permission to enter the port of Dover. There are spectacles, monocles, inkwells, and beads. A pair of bed slippers. A lock of hair from Kokoschka’s infamous doll. There are handkerchiefs, photographs, letters, and the Italian diary, which Tom is translating.

  You thought your father, of all people, would disapprove. You thought he would issue you with one of his standard lectures about idiotic administration, money wasted, dimwits with purse strings. But he did not. Instead he seems peculiarly interested in the items of the collection. Last night you rang to see how your parents were, to check in, to tell them what you are doing and to reassure them, as you do most days now, that they still have one of their offspring. His spirits lifted a little when you talked about the exhibition. Hey, I bet there’s some bloody deviant stuff, eh Suze? I bet there’s vintage dildos and all sorts of jiggery-pokery. Those randy old sods! When’s the opening? You’ll get us on the bloody list, eh?

  It was nice to hear his gigantic old voice back again, banging down the phone after weeks of quiet depression, good to imagine him sitting in his usual chair with his foot up, balancing the receiver between his ear and his shoulder, and rolling his tobacco into a black paper while he nattered on with you. His great rimy sole stretched out towards the hearth, toes furling and unfurling. You were midway through a sentence when he clattered the phone to the floor and you heard him yell out I’ll be back in a minute, Sue. Then squeaking stair boards, and silence except for a faint crackle down the line. After several minutes he picked the receiver up again. I just needed a pee. You talked a while longer, then said goodbye.

  After you hung up, you thought about the place downstairs in Shoreditch. You’d walked along its corridor with Tom, not touching, but close together. There was the smell of something sweet in the air, like unpasteurised honey, speckled with pollen and lustrous. There were liquorice-black doors with small windows. You’d expected a worse environment, somewhere silty and culpable. You’d expected disturbing scenes inside. Multiples. People being stretched and held down perhaps. Everything done roughly and expressions of distress, breasts being flung and rocked beneath bodies. As you walked down the corridor you wished for a moment you hadn’t come here with him, and you weren’t sure how it had happened, how it had been agreed. It was only the second time you’d arranged to meet in the city. In the bar you’d had a drink, two drinks. You had both heard of the place, but you don’t know which of you suggested it. Because of what you’d begun doing you felt adventurous. You felt upended, sensed the lees of sex drifting in the air around you. The idea seemed un-boundaried and appropriate.

  When you looked through the glass pane it was very delicate, exquisite even. A man kneeling in front of a woman, giving her oral sex. A second man came into the room. He entered her by fractions; pain and rapture registered on her face, though she must have been used to it. The glass panel was thin enough to hear their sounds. She was shaved. You couldn’t see it all. The act was carried out as if you were not there looking. Watching excited Tom and his reaction excited you. Afterwards, you wanted each other urgently. You tore your dress on the railing of the churchyard. He couldn’t stop himself coming inside you.

  You could say you didn’t mean for it to happen. You could say that it is out of your hands, out of your control. You are simply searching for feeling, for meaning, and it was this that sent you to him the first time, and to the hotels, and to that accommodating place of voyeurs. It is this which made you show him the hidden clasp of your dress under your lifted arm, while your other hand held his wrist, letting go of it as he worked his fingers across your ribcage, to your softly polished nipple. It is a workable defence. These exchanges are simply a confirmation of life to your entropic atoms, an attempt to reverse the exodus of your psyche. You are simply grief fucking. But you are too good at it. This beautiful wet correction, this deep erotic. You are too generous and emotional at his mouth and his prick not to recognise the possibility of something else, something meaningful. You have both become reckless. Once Angela was still in the building, holding their baby on her lap, nursing it. You kissed, only two doors away from her, after he found you sitting in the cloakroom, your mobile pressed against your forehead, having scrolled no further in the index than Danny’s undeleted number.

  Susan, he whispered. Conosco questa sensazione. Non ci sono bordi a cui aggrapparsi. È come essere pazzi. Aggrappati a me. You didn’t understand what he was saying, until he kissed you. It was a kiss of such complicity, of such uncomplicated sympathy, that you felt for the first time not alone in your suffering. His hands held the sides of your head while you continued to cry. She could have walked in at any moment. When he drew back and looked at you, you felt certain he had lost someone too. Later, in the emptiness of the galley after Angela had gone home, with the door locked and the sound of cars on the road outside beginning to thin, you lay back on the floor. You felt yourself tense as he worked himself in. The smell of the day was on your bodies, transferring between your hands and mouths. Both of you struggled to breathe. And it was as if he was staring into the void, making love to those rich and fallow griefs between. Then his eyes closed and he swore and gathered you to him.

  Always there are apologies after finishing, as if you have offended each other with such efficient function, such discomposure. You both swear it will not happen gain, and you both know it will continue. It is a good fit, this indiscretion. It has the right scent. There is the match of something disturbed. It is a romance of ill-health. Like hyacinth, like sugar and must, his serum, and you taste him elsewhere. You carry away images of him to use later, his lightly muscled groin, his eyes put into climax as you are.

  You know you must be wearing this illicit new history. Soon someone will see it. The smears on your breasts when you undress. Hi
s semen dry as lichen on your skin. In the shower, the soap pulps, your hands wearing it down like the two incessant tides of the sea. But you can still feel the sting and tear of that first time, the bruising at the neck of your womb. You can still smell him. You know that soon your raw interior will be revealed, its marks and bacteria, its record of infidelities. And so you flee. You pull on layers of clothing, phone National Rail Enquiries, and leave messages on phones where you know Nathan will not be. You go north, back to the fells, to the cottage with its stained gable and its crow-stepped chimneys. You go back to your beginning, the place where Danny first existed, where he was with you.

  No one has questioned your movements. Angela trusts you; she trusts your symptoms. Nathan too knows you are deeply injured. The darkly obvious looms close by, encompassing everything. It is huge, your bereavement. It is consuming, protecting. Loss has cast you utterly into shadow. They all tiptoe around the tragedy. They tiptoe around you. After losing him, so violently and suddenly, your vagary, your absence, must be understandable. You are heart-broken. You are recovering. You are letting go.

  Translated from the Bottle Journals

  On the days the envelopes arrive from England my spirits are lifted and I am more charmed by the things in my house. Antonio forwards all correspondence and I should like to be dutiful and reply, but still there is no return address. Peter is a transient agent! I am beginning to understand that these letters are simply gifts and I should accept them gratefully and enjoy them. Currently Peter is reading the Irish Ulysses. After many attempts he has not read past the first twenty pages. Something in the language has prevented him, he says. But on the last attempt a revelation! The text is a doorway, or a device for transporting the mind. In itself it resists interpretation, but instead affords the opportunity to think in tandem, like a man riding a bicycle while on board a ship. Peter thinks this is what Joyce intended. It will not make him unhappy to be oblivious to the narrative until the book’s very end, he writes, for he is sure to enlighten his mind in other ways.

  Such interesting philosophy! My advice would be to concentrate. There are ideas in my young friend’s head which are perhaps too rapid. He has the energy of immature creativity, of a newly found muscle. And he runs and runs. Yet is he not close to a curious truth? Even as I write this, the breeze through the open kitchen door opens in turn the door of the studio.

  To Peter, the efforts of life must seem to be inevitably rewarded; the human system is one of cooperation and opportunity. He searches for satisfaction, and little doubts its existence. This is a quality so precious in the young. He is generous to an old man whom he has not met. After reading his letter I am able to forget the discomfort that has returned to my chest and the rotten taste in my mouth. I am able to forget that the doctor has visited to make an assessment and his suspicions are grave and that I have an appointment at the hospital. I find myself transforming ordinary things into joys; the scent of rosemary in the garden, rosemary baked on to the crust of the bread. I imagine Benicio lying at my feet again, and I am content.

  Peter says that he will borrow a camera from a friend and photograph his paintings outside against a wall, which will complement their images, and then he will send them to me. It will be some time before he can afford to develop the photographs. He is no longer cleaning the orchestra pit. He is working in the bar.

  I am reminded of my own youth-the sparse possessions, the poverty and hunger, too much acid in the stomach. The priorities of culture and a carafe, access to the museums and churches, and exact-fitting shoes with which to walk their rooms, with which to stand in reverence. I remember passionate conversation, which could not be anything other than profound, because profundity atones for poor revenue. And the arguments of students in the cafés and bars of the red city-the styles and schools, the old and the new; and such were the merits and such were the techniques and such was the integrity. Tradition versus the contemporary manifestos. What fierce advocates we were. How little we knew about war then, and how terribly we would learn. Each night a new argument, books and papers and glasses flung to the tiles with emphasis, accusations of killing the country or laments for a country already lying dead. The conflict of young men! We were as engaged in our battles as the mercenaries of Florence and Milan.

  But all of us with the same sickness, the same manipulations and gratitude for Cennini. All learning to mend like tailors, cotton at the elbow and knee; our mothers mixing flour carefully against eggs, counting beans, cutting cheese to see daylight through it, and our sisters taking cherries from the trees by the railway station. In winter, boiling goat’s glue or quicklime to make domestic cements or mordants with white lead and verdigris, to earn a small income. And in summer painting the large civic properties until it rained. And working in the fields, and selling olive oil and making soap.

  And finding the most unusual strong-boned girl to make love to and use as a model-if she had distinguished flesh between her hip and her navel, if her eyes were like marble and her hair auburn, if she would wear it down across her breasts or up off her neck, if she set jealousy among the young men like a songbird among cats, if she brought her temper or her sexuality to the canvas. Her heels in the summer storms made careful steps across the cobbled stones of each courtyard she visited. She was immortalised by whichever artist she came to with her modern love.

  We were all emaciated and our hearts and livers were inflamed. We measured our passions like weights on empty scales. And the only cure, for conventionalists and Futurists alike, was the fresh colour squeezed on to the palette. And then another, compatible, deposited by its side.

  I remember the Café Bassano with its Romany music and heavy corrugated awning. The weeping accordion café we called it. I went there first as a student and then many years later as a tutor, after touring Italy to study the masters. The bread was so stale it was hard enough to break a tooth, and the stale bread soup had too much garlic. This did not change in a decade! But it was a venue close to the studios of the Accademia-convenient-and we were creatures of habit. I was in love with the woman who brought trays of hazelnuts to the tables. Once the other students and teachers had departed I watched her folding linens and removing ash, sometimes tying her coat at the waist to go to deposit money in the bank. To make one glass of wine last so long in order to gaze-this was my talent! And ordering a second glass I could ill afford, in case she might return for the evening menu.

  How my heart lifted when she did step back into Bassano, with her hair pinned up so chicly, a discreet garnet within the soft black. I imagined that jewel lost in my glass; I pleaded with it to fall. I was a middle-aged man, lecturing every day, and yet I was mute. So many times I tried to speak her name and could not, until finally she sat with me and spoke it: Dina. My voice is lost again today and every day when they ask me about her, whenever they talk of the camps.

  In the valley I can hear the barking of dogs. Giancarlo and his brothers have found another boar. Soon the hunting dogs that have failed will be beaten and released into the woods. Two white dogs have already passed the house this morning. They were hungry and their ribs stuck out and their bells were ringing so pitifully. They become the ghosts of the forests, these dogs. They join the outlawed trespass of the wolf. I confess that I do not like such a penalty-it is an unnecessary thing. The men of the town would consider me sentimental for thinking it, of course.

  I found my dog Benicio at the end of the season also. He was under a bridge in the long grass with injured back legs, as if the boar had trampled him. He was the last of an abandoned pack, trying to bark, but with a tongue so dry it sounded like sticks snapping. The bodies of the others were not even warm. They had been shot and they were bloody. I put him in my tobacco coat and took him to the stream and fed him water from my palm until he could be held from underneath to lap at the water’s edge. Then he began to shake furiously and then he slept. I made splints for his legs.

  There was a Spanish poet who wrote that thirst is humanity turned bri
ttle; it is the desiccation of faith itself. And so I named the dog after the poet. For a month the dog slept on my overcoat and nowhere else. It could never be put away into the cupboard because he would whine for it. Gradually he stood up and walked again, but throughout his life he limped. He loved to drink from the rivers and the lake and the fountain in the square, and he would drink without his thirst ever being slaked, until dragged away by the collar. They say that animals are not rational, but it is we who are most dangerous in our rationality. How else can the cruelty of this century be explained?

  The girl in the Café Bassano already knew my name. My colleagues at the Accademia talked loudly of my peculiar paintings, and my love for Holland and the folk art of Czechoslovakia, calling me der hohe maler or festo. I was considered a native foreigner. Because of my timidity and inexperience they would tease me, instructing me to go to each attractive lady with protestations and flowers. They would straighten my collar and replace my hat like so many fussing mothers. And I would be pushed forward having prepared no romantic statement. Only when they were gone from the café would I look openly at Dina in the smoke between the tables.

  I have never drunk wine quickly, not even on our wedding day.

  Even after many years her name is still a thing of rawness for me. Her name cannot be left sacred–cannot be left in the black documents with so many others. They would make a saint of her now though perhaps their fathers and uncles were the ones who failed her. With continual naivety I face their questions about my life. With tired duty. An interview might turn to ash at any moment if Dina is mentioned. First they will always talk of business. To what extent do I adhere to historic privation and self-sufficiency, for no other painter of the century is so contained in subject matter and execution? Why do I only paint bottles? What is the reason? My replies are invariable. I am not the rogue of such imagining. The continuity of art is unquestionable. How can I abdicate the influence of Giotto? How am I unlike Uccello-meticulous and mathematical with his pavements, but stripping armour from the warhorse that its form be better seen? How can I say of Cézanne he is my opposite in visual organisation? How, in fact, might I be devoid of any of these great influences? I am incremental. I am a fraction of change only. The seashell bathed by its own interior light, the balustrade of shadow around the rim of the bottle, the plane through the glass gathered on the table, the objective of my whole life’s work-it is all inherited. It is a house of immortal fathers in which I work, and their discipline finds consequence in the rooms of my expression. But just as I am a good and faithful son, so too must I become disobedient, and rise up against them. This is my responsibility. For how else is art?