by Sarah Hall
You were still siblings, still the Caldicutt twins. But cognitively you went your separate ways. At school you accelerated through academic disciplines while Danny tooled around, arranged local haunted-house tours, scoured the fields and marshes for mushrooms, got into Ecstasy and speed. He formed discordant bands, cycled the Roman roads. After his foundation year, there was never an attempt to make it past amateur artist. He was a craftsman of the ordinary, he said, a plain old smithy. I’m a lesser-bearded Ruskin, a salon-less Courbet. Not a Peter. Not a Suzie. He was happy for you and your dad, proud of the acclaim, the attention, proud too of everything your mum did, her loaves, her scrapbooks, the haircuts she gave him. He was humble, and deeply pleased.
Your silly, soulful brother. The one on the right side of the womb, the one, it turns out, earmarked for extinction. Cut short in his prime, they said at the funeral. Poor Danny, people said, why did it have to be him? Life is so cruel. He got such a raw deal.
But that’s not true. Danny was blessed. He was touched by the hand of a benign deity. He was living the dream, seizing the day. Somehow your brother avoided the solemnity and dross of the modern world. A tap dripped happiness into his temperamental reservoir. There was no lust for money or new things, no lamenting the terrible state of the world and the depravity of humankind. Instead he tracked comet showers, had skinny-dipping parties, read Walt Whitman. He shared flats above chippies and launderettes with old friends from school, worked for minimum wages, saved up to go to Greece and Glastonbury and to get ferries to Man for the races. Then he always came back again. I’m all right here, Suze, he would say to you when you offered to help set him up in the city. This is home. I like it here. Danny with his flat of so few items and his slack wallet. But almost five hundred people turned up to his funeral, from Carlisle, Bowness, and Scotland, from Hexham and London. And didn’t they sing for him.
No. Danny wasn’t unlucky to be killed. The world was unlucky to lose him.
Don’t stick me in the ground. I want Suze to make a big bonfire. Toss me on.
You pocketed the note, took the boxes out to the car. You locked up the flat, and dropped the keys down to the po-faced landlady in the shop below. She said something to you about having him as a tenant. You didn’t hear and you didn’t care. You were thinking about Halloween, when you were teenagers, running crazy between the burning whin bushes. All across the common land in the darkness, the wagging yellow cones of gorse that you had fired. Danny would yell at you to light another one and you’d hold the lighter to the green spines and hear them rat-tat-tat-tatting as they caught. Then you’d take turns to jump across the flames, from blackness into blackness. When you ran and launched yourself Danny would be so afraid and full of laughter. He’d wait on the other side and grab you.
You drove out of town and turned on to the military road towards your parents’ cottage. As you drove into the hills, you had a strange fantasy, about making his pyre, like he had asked you to. You imagined laying his body on a mound of hawthorn and sitting with it as the sun went down and then lighting the fire. The wind would bellow it fierce, until the red embers were hot enough to leave no trace of hair or bone or molar, not even the pins screwed into his leg. His essence would billow across the valley. And when the fire burnt down, the soft tresses of ash would blow away, and nothing would remain above the ruined black cot of stone.
You were thinking of this as you drove back to the cottage, and it was so very comforting, and for the first time in days you felt he was close.
Translated from the Bottle Journals
I fear we are beginning to lose our oldest skills. The repair of mosaics and frescoes is a delicate matter and one that is currently providing much consternation. The younger generations do not understand the manufacturing processes and the raw materials with which we have produced great works. These lessons are still relevant–there is much the medievalists can teach us about quality and application. During class on Thursday I asked the children to tell me about paint, about how it is made and where it comes from. To children, paint is a miracle produced alchemically within the tube. Suppose the shops were shut, I proposed, and the materials not available to us. Suppose the factories stopped making these miraculous tubes. There would be no violet, no orange, or green, or indigo. Is it not a predicament in which we find ourselves? But what solution might there be?
Next I produced quills of goose feather and showed them how to split the shaft and insert and bind the brush and trim the tip, and I gave them a rudimentary lesson on the manufacture of yellow. We walked to the mountainside and took ochre out of its seams with palette knives and the children were obliged to grind the earth with pestles and bind the substance and strain it, which they did with great enthusiasm. Suddenly they were the busy apprentices of the fifteenth century. Now you can see, I said to them, that as artists you are free to paint whenever you choose. The use of such methods is a long and trusted endeavour. It is not naïve. It is not quaint. You can wear the leather apron of the journeyman with pride. You are enabled always by the grace of the land.
Signora Russo permits the children to leave the establishment if they hold a knotted rope, which I must lead. It is knotted to indicate the number of children; each child holds a knot when we walk. I do not know if this is the typical method for transporting her assembly or whether she is worried that I will lose some of them down the burrows and into the lake. I have no trouble remembering where I have placed my shoes each morning, I tell her. I am reminded of the Eastern fairytales my mother told me as a boy. And with our childish knots, safely through the woods we go.
My cough has become less offensive. I have felt well all week and so have postponed the appointment at the hospital. I know I am old and susceptible: I do not need a medical diagnosis stating this. I only need to look up from the page to see that my garden has become a province of tangled grass. The garlic thrives, as do the small fruits and herbs, but much else is running away. We have had heavy rain and the banks have begun to erode. Theresa cannot attend to these tasks, though she has sympathy for the garden and my affection for it and my increasing inability to care for it. Giancarlo has helped with repairs in the past. I have no wish to employ a gardener. It would be to admit defeat.
Theresa is filling her big pan with the last tomatoes as I write. Later she will prick their skins and remove their seeds. She will take the sauce home balanced on her bicycle seat. Today we have not been getting along. Theresa is vexed by the library of books in the house–that is to say my collection of books, catalogues, and pamphlets. The piles are impossible to clean round, she says. Ants nest between them and then march into the kitchen, into the pot of honey and the pot of sweet dates. But ants are marvellous creatures, I tell her. Do you know they have a private stomach for themselves and a public stomach for the good of the colony? If an ant could read a newspaper surely it would choose L’Unità?
She does not wish to be told jokes or teased about her proclivities. She wishes to re-order the books and put them on the shelves. By this she means she wishes to dispose of them. All the shelves at Serra Partucci already contain books. I suspect that she believes books to be unimportant. She is a provincial woman who cannot tolerate literature. Her opinions are intractable and she will not be enlightened. If I contradict her she becomes sullen and puts too much salt into her dishes to dry up my mouth. In the past I have accused her of attempting to poison her employer. We can pass hours in silence if the mood of the day is one of bitter disagreement. The books will leave this residence only after I do and much less quickly than Theresa if an ultimatum is issued. I informed her of this quite plainly this morning. No doubt I have become abrupt over the years. This afternoon, by way of a truce, I found a poem in the collection of Giacomo Leopardi and read it to her. ‘And as I hear the wind rustling among these plants, I go on and compare this voice to that infinite silence.’ He is the most crystalline of writers. She left the room halfway through the recitation. She is often an intolerable creature.
Once I made for Theresa a little straw model to show the frame of a lizard. One long piece and two shorter horizontal pieces twisted to it. It looked, in fact, like her double crucifix. I have also shown the children in the school this replica. This is how the lizard moves, I said, and I bent the front and back legs together on the left, and then I bent the front and back legs together on the right. This is how they can climb to such great height, I said. This gives them great speed and great stability. Do you see? Theresa retrieved her dustpan from the cupboard and swept the model into it and deposited it outside, and then she collected her bicycle and went home.
The slow rusted bicycle of Theresa, its wheels pleading for oil with each rotation as she pushes the contraption down the hill.
There has been no letter from Peter this week. I have been spoiled to receive so many. I think of him often. I wonder how he progresses with his studies and his painting. What are his current philosophies? Which sculptors and colourists does he admire, and how will he begin to articulate these influences? How will this Peter of the Rocks found his church? He should heed the words of Cennini, who writes so intelligently on the subject.
You, therefore, who with lofty spirit are fired with this ambition, and are about to enter the profession, begin by decking yourself with this attire: Enthusiasm, Reverence, Obedience and Constancy. And begin to submit yourself to the direction of a master for instruction as early as you can; and do not leave the master until you have to.
For three years I studied in the red city. It was a different age of learning then. The gates of Accademia di belle Arti were decorative iron. But as immovable as this firmament were the teachings within the establishment. All affiliation and experimentation with the modern was quickly denounced. In my youth, I burned pictures related to Braque and the fragmentalists. The scholars at the Academy would tolerate no such curiosity or experimentation–they believed in paralysis and perfection. All attempts at the primitivist styles were accused of impatriotism and, if found guilty, we were made to study the great pieces again, and in some cases retake corso comune as humiliation. These teachers could, with one stroke, intervene and impose upon any painting that offended them. I have never felt such frustration as when watching a canvas dividing its wooden brace as the flames consume it. I have never once touched a brush to the paintings of my students.
In these times, poetry was the only salvation, and we were, all of us, poets and hungry for what the true poets were saying. It was they who collated our passion and our insult. It was they who reminded us to breathe when we held our breath, and taught us courage.
I have prepared a canvas for the new painting but I have altered the position of the bottles again-something was not quite right. I have written to inform Antonio. Each time I begin a painting I think I know everything, I believe myself fully equipped to work, but in truth I am starting with nothing and I know nothing. It can be a desolate thing. I am unable to convince myself of success. When I turn to look in the studio mirror I see a man of superficial health who reads poetry to his housekeeper instead of going to the hospital. I watch him. His hair is shockingly white. He smokes until the cigarette scalds his fingers. He smokes another. He waits for something-a bird, perhaps-to flit across the window, or for an announcement from the wind at the door of the house. He waits for permission from the objects on the table. He considers the spaces between. He rearranges by a fraction.
Peter must visit the National Gallery in London. He must see the glazed earthenware and the pewter, the wet fish-scales and gold-ringed eyes in the marine studies of Velázquez. He must see the liquid pooled in the sockets. He must see these paintings and not try to interpret utensils or religion or any such thing, nor should he try to unravel the symbolism of Vanitas or the elegant paradox of each title. Peter must feel the temperature of the bream, the death-shroud of seas over it, and the crackling of garlic skin as it is peeled. He must hear the sound of grinding in the kitchen mortar. And he must see the dragonfly of van Os–arrested–its transparent wings, its essence of flight. In America he must see Cotán’s quince and cabbage, suspended, tied delicately with string. The melon’s seeds slipping from the orange flesh.
I would present him with the timeless gifts of the nature morte. Still-life with citrons and walnuts. Still-life with lobster, the serration of claws. Still-life with parrot, and fruits out of season. Still-life with cloves, chilli, eggs, hare, dead birds, dewdrops, and rose. With asparagus, coins, straw skull, wicker, terracotta vase. Still-life with drinking horn.
Only then will he begin to understand living art.
The Fool on the Hill
The temperature is dropping, and the night is beginning to get uncomfortable. After all, he has on only the flowery cotton undershirt and the overalls, and wasn’t expecting to have to use a coat–typical northerner, coming out unprepared. The chill breath in the gorge circles his shoulders, stealing the heat from his body. There is less pain in his leg now though, or perhaps he is getting used to it. For an hour he has been fighting the cold, blowing into his cupped hands, flapping his arms and going nowhere, like a clipped bird. He has been throwing punches out into the darkness, boxing to keep his blood warm. A song is lodged in his head, something the kids have been listening to over and over on the stereo–some Manchester band, something about wanting to be a dog. Not a bad tune compared to the other crap on the radio these days. For some reason it’s stuck on repeat, is going round and round, and he’s been humming it, nodding his head to its melody. It’s keeping his spirits up at least, giving him something to think about. He’s even caught himself laughing a few times at the idiocy of his predicament, and that’s made him feel better too.
It’s apparent tonight that this is the changeover season. He can feel summer’s end. There’s the memory of frost down in the earth’s membranes. The northern rivers are carrying a message to the Solway that winter is coming. It’s nippiest on his arse, where he’s leaning against the stone. Things are getting particularly numb down there. The rocks seem to have their own gelid circulation; they seem reptilian that way. But that’s rocks for you, Peter–creatures with a system all their own. Hasn’t he said it many times, in interviews, and to visiting collectors? ‘The rocks, the rocks are alive…’
Hoist by your own petard, daft bugger. The irony is not lost on him. To have wound up here, stuck fast in this landscape, pincered between two apparently sentient, apparently wilful obelisks. To have been caught out by this densest of environments, which he has spent a lifetime rendering. Yes. It’s just perfect. And if he doesn’t get out of here, if he gets hypothermia, starves, dehydrates, and carks it; if the rooks start pecking out his eyes and have away with his nose; if no one in fact finds him down in this semi-remote gulley for years, until he resembles an odd, upright bouquet of bones, they will all say it: what an ironic way to go. How fitting. How right, how totally bloody meaningful!
He is not going to get hypothermia. This isn’t Everest. He is not icebound. Yes, he is thirsty. Yes, the injury is probably not very pretty; it may even be severe–a bloody bundle of skin and splinters down there, impacted, mashed, beyond repair. But this is a minor inconvenience in the scheme of all mountain disasters. Unlikely it will become legend. Unlikely he will have to eat himself to survive. It probably won’t make it past Border News. Yeah. He can see the smirking presenter now, turning the page for this last somewhat entertaining item. ‘Yesterday a local artist discovered there’s more to his landscapes than meets the eye.’ Oh Christ! How will he live it down? Maybe he can keep it quiet. If the Mountain Rescue aren’t involved. If there’s no filmed helicopter drama, no Ian Lumb or Adrian Bodger being winched down in a fluorescent helmet. ‘Oh, it’s you, Peter. How’re you doing, lad?’
I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be a dog.
On the other hand, if he’s honest, Mountain Rescue would be welcome right about now. His position is, in actual fact, intractable. It is fairly bloody miserable. And the leg is really sore. It isn’t the wild, contractive pain of a fe
w hours ago; now it’s levelled off, and is just very tender. But a needle full of anaesthetic would be really good. And maybe this won’t hurt his profile at all. He could give an exclusive account to one of the art supplements. The mountain versus me! Maybe it’ll give him some kudos, it’ll be something to rival the urban set, always banging on about how dangerous and radical and cutting-edge they are.
Oh come on. Here he is, wedged under a lump of fell, and he’s being competitive with his peers. Don’t be so ridiculous, Peter, don’t be a clod. He’s got to put the testosterone to better use. He’s got to concentrate on getting free. ‘Bastard! Bastaaaards!’ Yes, that’s more like it. Diabolical, unhinged ranting. Very helpful, very gainful. Numpty. Dimwit. Bozo.
Right. No. He’s got to think positive. Got to gather himself. These stones are not his enemies. They are not vengeful organisms with creepy arctic blood and carnivorous appetites. They are his lifelong friends. He respects them. He must put the wounded, and frankly a little hysterical, side of his imagination away. This is not comeuppance. It is not self-prophesying fate. This place might presently be fucking him up quite savagely but he must remember he loves it. He has always loved it.
Beaches, mountains, rivers. These have all been his working provinces. Places where the weather intensifies. Places where the rock is clean–polished by water or rough air, with a texture older than dinosaur skeleton, so old it has moved beyond history. Corrie. Tarn. Glacier-run. Causeway. Craters. Ghylls. Sea runes. The Cumbrian hills. The coastlines. He has chosen places of rock over all else, rock in the majority-towering, teetering magma–or rock in paucity–sediments, submerged in sand and fluid. Stone is as honest as landscape gets. It is this that has governed his career, made him antiquated, then avant-garde, then antiquated again.