by Ali Smith
I lowered myself down inside the dress : the shoulders came up above my ears.
You already have my brothers, I said.
You could be like your brothers, he said.
I eyed him through the lace-up of the neck and the chest : I spoke through the holes in the dress.
You know I am not like my brothers, I said.
Yes, but listen, he said. Cause maybe. Maybe. If you were to stop wearing these too-big clothes and were to wear, let’s say, these boys’ clothes instead. And maybe if we allow ourself a bit of imagining. And maybe if we have a bit of discretion. You know what discretion is?
I rolled my eyes in behind the chestlace for even as a child I already knew, or so I believed, more than he ever would, what discretion is : worse, I knew he was pandering to me with his making of suggestions, more my mother’s style than his, when it would’ve been much more usual for him simply to hit me and forbid me : I despised him a bit for this pandering and for using what he considered big words as if these might be the key to me agreeing to do as he wanted.
But the words he used next were the biggest of all, the biggest words anyone could’ve.
If you were, he said. Then we might find someone to train you up in the making and using of colours on wood and on walls, you being so good with your pictures.
Colours.
Pictures.
I stuck my head so fast out the top of the dress that the weight of the dress shifted and nearly knocked me off the box : I saw him stifle and have to disguise, cause he wanted to keep the moment serious, the first smile I’d seen on his face since the going of my mother.
But you’ll have to wear your brothers’ clothes, he said. And you might, if I find you a training, best be, or become, one of them. Your brothers.
He looked to see my response.
I nodded : I was listening.
We can probably get you Latin without it, and mathematics, he said. But schooling will be easier with it. We are not rich though we’ve more than enough and schooling in itself is not the problem. But unless you enter a nunnery, which is the one sure way you can spend your days making colours or filling the pages of holy saint books with your pictures, a training in colours and pictures – I mean out here in the world, with a life lived as a part of it, a life beyond walls – is another thing altogether. Do you agree?
He looked me in the eye.
It is a sure thing always, he said. You would always have work. But nobody will take you for such a training wearing the clothes of a woman. You can’t even be an apprentice to me, wearing the clothes of a woman. I think we could start you working with me next week on the bell tower. By which I don’t mean you’ll work on the bell or the tower, I mean I will let you draw it and furnish you with the materials to, and in this way you’ll be seen to be working with me and your brothers, and then, when you are established, when it is clearly established in others’ eyes as to who you have become –
He raised an eyebrow.
– we will get you into a painters’ workshop or find you a master of panels and frescoes and so on, and we will show him what you can do and we will see if he’ll take you on.
I looked down at the front of my mother’s gown then looked back up at my father.
Such a master might let us pay in eggs, or birds, he said, or the fruit off our trees, or even in bricks. I am hopeful. But most of all I’m hopeful that if such a man sees what you can already do he might teach you for less, for the sake of doing justice to your abilities, and show you how to correct your natural mistakes, how to shape the head of a man like they do with their squares and geometries, and bodies too, and the measurements it takes, how to make those measurements, the ones which show where to put the eyes and the nose and so on in a face and where to place things on the tiles of a floor or across a landscape to show some things closer and some much further away.
So things far away and close could be held together, in the same picture?
So there were ways to learn to do such a thing?
I reached for the lace ties at my chin. I held them in my hand.
All these things you will need to know, he said. And if we can’t find someone I’ll give you what training I can. I know a great deal about buildings and walls and the workings, the rules and the necessities of construction. The construction of pictures, well. It’s bound to have something in common.
I pulled on the ties and I loosened the gown front : I stood up and the whole gown slipped off the clothes trunk then slipped down away from me like the peeled back petals of a lily and me at its centre standing straight like the stamen : I stepped out naked over its folds : I held out my hand for the leggings.
He went through to my brothers’ things and came back with a clean shirt.
You’ll need a name, he said as I pulled the shirt on over my head.
My mother’s name began with an f : Ff : I tried it on my tongue to see where it’d lead : my father misheard me : Vv.
Vincenzo? he said.
He flushed up with excitement.
He meant Vincenzo Ferreri, the Spanish priest dead long long ago, 20 whole years or so and everybody saying for all those years he should’ve been made saint : the travelling sellers were already selling him like a saint in the pamphlet writ by the nuns full of the pictures and stories of him : he was famous for miracles and for converting 8 thousand moorish moslem infidels and 25 thousand jews, raising 28 people from the dead and curing 4 hundred sick people (just by them lying down for a moment on the couch he’d lain on when he was ill and got better on himself) and also for freeing 70 people from devils : his hat alone had done many miracles.
But my father liked most the miracle of the hostel and the wilderness.
Vincenzo had been riding through the wilderness on his donkey praying very hard and he and the donkey were near exhaustion from the prayers when suddenly they arrived at the front door of a beautiful well-appointed hostel : Vincenzo went in : it was as beautiful inside as out : he stayed in it overnight : the service, the food, the bed were all very agreeable and gave him exactly the respite he needed to go on next day with his sojourn through the wild places full of infidels and unbelievers : next morning when he got on his donkey, that same donkey was like one 10 years younger and had no fleabites and wasn’t lame any more : off they went, and it was 6 or 7 miles later when the morning sun first hit his shaven head that Vincenzo realized he’d forgotten his hat.
He turned the donkey around and they went back over their own hooftracks to the hostel to fetch it : but when they got there there was no hostel and his hat was hanging on the branch of an old dead tree in the exact same place where the hostel had been.
This miracle was one of the reasons housebuilders and wallmakers wanted Vincenzo Ferreri a saint : they planned to claim him as patron.
My father prayed to him every morning.
I thought of my mother telling me the stories of some of the miracles of Vincenzo, her arms round me, me on her knee.
Vincenzo, petitioned by me, had made no difference to her going or her coming back
(clearly I had petitioned wrongly).
I thought of my mother’s French-sounding name :I thought of the French shape that means the flower her name meant.
Francescho, I said.
Not Vincenzo? my father said.
He frowned.
Francescho, I said again.
My father held his frown : then he smiled in his beard a grave smile down at me and he nodded.
On that day with that blessing and that new name I died and was reborn.
But – Vincenzo –
ah, dear God –
that’s who my sombre saint is on the little platform with his eyes averted and the old Christ over his head.
St Vincenzo Ferreri.
Hey : boy : you hear me? St Vincenzo, famed across all the oceans for making unhearing people hear.
Cause listen, when Vincenzo spoke, even though it was in Latin the people whether they knew any Latin or
none at all knew exactly what he was saying – even people 3 miles away could hear him as if he was speaking right next to their ears in their own vernacule.
The boy hears nothing : I can’t make him.
I’m no saint, am I? no.
Well good that I’m not, cause look now, here’s a very pretty woman, well, from behind at least, stopped in front of my St Vincenzo
(4 to 1, and she chose me not Cosmo)
(just saying)
(not that I’m being prideful)
(another miracle, that she did, thanks be to St Vincenzo)
and since I’m no saint I can have my own close look at her, from the back, from her bare neck just peeking through her long white-gold hair down the line of her spine to her waist then down to her bit-too-thin behind –
but so’s that boy, look at him sitting up at attention, I swear he felt her come into the room cause I felt the hairs on his neck stand up when he saw her glide through the door over the floor like the room was incomplete without her, he saw her before I did, like struck by a shaft of lightning, and look at him now watching her settling her feathers in front of Vincenzo : I can’t see what his eyes are doing but I bet you they’re wide open and his ears and brow forward like goathead : plus I can tell from his back, he knows her already : boy in love? The old stories never change : but in love with this woman? Nowhere near his equal in years, far from it, even from behind I can tell she’s decades ahead, more than old enough to be his mother : but she’s not his mother, that’s clear, and has no idea he’s there, or his ardour, even though something between them’s as strong as hatred or a ray of heat from him that’s aimed at her.
Hello. I’m a no-eyed painter no one can hear and there’s a boy here wants you to – I don’t know – something.
She can’t hear me : course she can’t : but she’s giving Vincenzo a good look over and Vincenzo, being saint, is averting his eyes (though the angels with the whips and bows up there are ready for anything).
She’s standing with one foot up on its heel, a horsehoof at rest : so elegantly her body adjusts the weight of her head : she takes a look at St Vincenzo, up, down, up again –
then she turns on that heel and she’s off
(not even a single glance at a single Cosmo by the way,
just saying)
and the boy’s sprung up on his own feet like a leveret and off he goes too after her, and me too helplessly dragging after him like one foot’s caught in the stirrup of a saddle on a horse I’m unfamiliar with who does not know or care for me : and as we go, out of the corner of my no-eye I see a picture by – Ercole, little Ercole the pickpocket, whom I loved and who loved me ! and wait – stop – is that, is it really? – dear God old Motherfather it’s Pisano, Pisanello, I know by the dark and the way it works the light.
Look all you like, since I cannot, cause it is as if a rope attached to the boy is attached to me and has circled me and cannot be unknotted and where the boy goes I must go whether I want it or don’t, through a threshold, through another room – look! Uccello! horses! –
I protest
cause this ejection is against my will : I do not choose it.
As soon as I discover to whom to complain I will do so, in a letter.
To whichever illustrious most holy interceding Excellency it concerns, this nth day of n in the year nnnn.
Most illustrious and excellent holy Lordship most inimitable and in perpetual honoured servitude : please deliver this petition of mine to God the Fathermother Motherfather One True Lord of All : I am the painter Franc. del C. who has made for Him in His honour and by His grace alone, so many works, of good materials, just saying, and done them with good honed skills, one of which said works I have witnessed is hung in His halls: and who worked alongside and as equal to other painters whose works also are hung in His halls : and here I make to Him my petition in the hope of His hearing me and granting me what little I ask : I –
I what?
I, having been shot back into being like an arrow but with no notion of the target at which He is aiming me, find myself now in this intermediate place, albeit in a neighbourhood of grand houses but all the same next to a very low very poor piece of brickwork (which will not last 4 winters, by the way) with an unspeaking unseeing unhearing boy whose precipitate desires for a fine Lady he has seen in your Lord’s picture halls have dragged me very much against my will to this low wall away from the beauties of His palace, a place in which I should have liked to dwell for longer : but now find myself out in the cold grey and horseless world : such state of horselessness an unfortunate luck for its people, a creatureless world I thought until I saw the doves flying up in a flock like always, the same doves though greyer, filthy, squatter than, but all the same their wings and the clatter of birds were a salve even to a heart I no longer have.
By this I recognize, most excellent Sir and Lord, that this is a purgatorium, perhaps even your picture palace is a level of this purgatorium : and my St Vincenzo Ferreri panel, for my blasphemous sin of depicting Christ as older than 33, has resulted in the being placed, both picture and painter, in purgatorium as a reminder of my prideful wrong imagining (though consider, illustrious Lordship, that if this is so, then only 1 of my pictures has ended up in purgatorium, and there are 4 of Cosmo’s there, which in the end demonstrates Cosmo’s work as 4 times more blameworthy than mine, just saying).
Having myself been, I can only presume, formerly until this renaissance in a heaven of forgetfulness, am now for some unforgiven sin reborn into a place of coldness and mystery, with no means of practising my trade and nothing to my name but the broken pieces of a gone life like the breakage of a vase : each piece its own beauty in the palm of the hand but the whole thing shattered, nothing but air where it once was and all the air that was enclosed in it released, now unheld by anything, and the edges of each broken piece sharp enough to bleed me, had I still skin to be broken
but He or His clerks will know all these things already, so there is no need for me to note them in my petition, which is nothing but mewling and carping and perhaps I must just accept.
Cause I know this is not hell cause I am intrigued not hopeless and cause I am surely put here for some good use albeit mysterious : in hell there is no mystery cause in mystery there is always hope : we followed the beautiful woman until she came to the door in the house and went through it and shut it and left the boy, still unseen, outside, at which point he (and I) retired to the small wall across the thoroughfare but still in sight of that shut door, which is where we are now : though also I did notice, I could not fail to as we went, that the woman, who has about her an air of some beauty and grace, unfortunately has a walk like a swan out of element or a flightbird forced to walk, a waddle so unsuited to her beauty that in the end it endears in that it mitigates that beauty : if I had paper and a pen or a willow charcoal (and hands and arms, even just one of each, to do it with) I would show it with an unexpected angle, a flatness, the bodily form appearing a touch unknowing, and it would make her even more graced and likeable and I’ve had much time and leisure to think and plan these things cause we followed her a great distance and were I still embodied I’d be exhausted so it’s as well I’ve no legs : but this boy has some stamina, will by luck and justice live long I thought as we covered the distance : until I felt the dip in his spirit when the woman came to some steps and went up the steps and in through a door and shut the door behind her and
(oof)
it was a punch to the gut, a door shut on a boy obsessed.
It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things : cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence : paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first-hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and underdry of its feathers, a bri
ck about the rough kiss of its skin.
This boy I am sent for some reason to shadow knows a door he can’t pass through and what it tells me just to be near him is something akin to when you find the husk of a ladybird that has been trapped, killed and eaten by a spider, and what you thought on first sight was a charming thing, a colourful creature of the world going about its ways, is in reality a husk hollowed out and proof of the brutal leavings of life.
Poor boy.
Just saying, even though these houses we’re outside are grand, well appointed and many-storeyed, the boy is on a small low wall whose bricks are crying out for love : the knowing of this is the knowledge of my father turning over in his grave in his natural impatience and knocking on the lid of the box I put him in to have someone let him up and out of the ground to remake such a wall : cause if all the dead were given this chance, with their hindsight and experience this world or purgatorium would I think be better made.
I am wondering where it is, grave of my father, wondering too where my own grave, when the boy sits up, faces the woman’s house, holds his holy votive tablet up in both hands as if to heaven, up at the level of his head like a priest raising the bread, cause this place is full of people who have eyes and choose to see nothing, who all talk into their hands as they peripatate and all carry these votives, some the size of a hand, some the size of a face or a whole head, dedicated to saints perhaps or holy folk, and they look or talk to or pray to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers and staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despairs to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons.
He holds it in the air : he is maybe saying a prayer.
Ah! I see : cause a little image of the house and its door has appeared in the tablet : which makes these votive tablets perhaps similar to the box the great Alberti had and which he displayed in Florence (I once saw) whereby the eye looks through the tiniest of holes and sees a full distant landscape formed small and held inside it.