by Ali Smith
Is it possible then that all the people of this place are painters going about their world with the painting tools of their time?
Perhaps I have been placed in a specific painters’ purgatorium –
but the boy slumps beside me again, his spirit in the gutter.
No : cause these people have none of the spirit necessary for a lifelong making of pictures.
Look, boy : cheerful thing : spring flowers in a sort of bucket hanging off the top of a metal pole stuck at the side of this roadway.
Is there spring in purgatorium? Do they have years in purgatorium? Yes, surely : given that purgatorium holds in its nature a promise of an end to it, when its inmates are judged purged, then it must have some way by which time can be measured : but I’d’ve thought such a place would be full of the moans and the supplicatings of thousands : no, purgatorium could surely be worse, cause look, at least there are blackbirds in it : one comes out of a hedge right now and sits along on the wall with his beak a good Naples yellow and a ring of the same yellow round the black of the eye : he sees the boy there, twitches his tail and wings back into the hedge : in the hedge he starts a song : can it really be purgatorium and not the old earth when it is so like the earth in the song of the bird, its everlasting unchanging fineness? Hello bird : I’m a painter, dead (I think, though I remember no going), placed here for my many prideful sins in this cold place that has no horses to watch unseen unheard unknown the back of a boy in the kind of love that means nothing but despair.
What kind of a world, though, that has no horses?
What kind of a journey can you make with no creature to befriend you to let your going anywhere reveal itself as the matter of trust and faith going somewhere always is?
Now, when I bought my horse, Mattone, he had a stupid name, Bedeverio? Ettore? something from the stories of kings all the rage and everyone naming their children Lancelotto, Artu, Zerbino, and their horses too, by God : I bought him from a woman who had fields outside Bologna, I had a pocketful of money from the job I’d done and hitched a ride in a cabbage cart out to her fields : I saw him and I pointed him out, that one, I said, the one the colour of excellent stone, can I maybe try him? Oh he’s unrideable, she said, a thrower, worse than useless to me, he’s never let anybody, and when the slaughterer or the gypsies come he’s the top of the list : then that’s the one I want, I said and I pulled the money in a bag out of my pocket, out came green leaves from the cart with it and fell all at my feet and it seemed a good omen : so she went into the field and caught him, it only took an hour and a half, and she brought him in, he’d good feet, was clean-haunched, most of all had a curve from his back round to his flank that moved the heart (cause the heart is, itself, a matter of curves) and when I went to look at his teeth he let me put my hand in his mouth, oh he’s never let anyone do that before, the woman said, he’s bitten them all : so she saddled him, there was a furore of kicking and snorting when she did (and it wasn’t all the horse) : but as soon as I was up and straddling him, and had got back on after he’d thrown me that first time in the woman’s yard, I sensed he heard what my hands and heels were saying and he understood I’d not do him harm, also from that first moment not just that I’d be for him a hostelry in a wilderness but that I would trust him to be the same for me.
So I bought him plus the tack he was wearing then and there, I hung on to his neck and leaned down without getting off (in case of difficulty of getting back on) and gave her the bag of coins, and on our way back to Bologna he only threw me the 3 or 4 times and always let me back on again without much disagreement, which was a civil thing in a horse unused to it : with my hands at the place in his neck where the warm skin folded and stretched as he walked (cause I couldn’t get him to go any faster than a walk unless he had a mind to canter, at which point he would canter as he wished and I’d let him, which is a trait I felt he liked in me) so by the end of our journey 2 things had happened, it had entered my head to change his name to a more workmanlike one that suited his colouring, and it had turned out he and I were friends, this horse whose eye was still clear, for all the ill-treatment at the hands of the woman or whoever had had him before (it did not say on his bill of sale and she would not sell me a guarantee and said she could not write to sign a paper) and I don’t, can’t recall, ever selling him on, so I must suppose I never had cause to.
Dead, gone, bones, horsedust.
In this particular ring of purgatorium I long right now for that smell of home, the smell of the horse I travelled the earth with and the horse who travelled it with me, with the dividing line of whiter hairs from his forehead down to the soft dark of his nostrils, cause he was a creature of symmetries and a reminder that nature is herself a bona fide artist of intent both dark and light.
Cause there was the morning when I was with the daughter of a man who’d no idea I was in the barn and his daughter there too, or that we’d been in there in each other’s arms warm all the cold night, and Mattone let me know, by taking my shirt which I still had on me in his teeth and pulling it up to let the cold air in then lipping me hard in the back, not just that it was first light but that the man was up and breakfasting and his workers were in the yard, and I’d kissed the girl and was on his own back and off at a canter across the fields before the sun had the chance to melt any more of the frost, from which adventure I was left bruised, yes, but from the swift activities of our love and the biting of my own horse not from the wrath of or blows from any father or his workers, and so with dignity through the birdsong.
The blackbird in the hedge now stops his song : he darts off out and up with a chirrup and flurry cause the boy shifts : he turns in towards me : he looks at me!
No : he looks through me : it’s clear that he sees nothing.
What I see for the first time is his face.
Most I see that round his eyes is the blackness of sadness (burnt peachstone smudged in the curve of the bone at both sides of the top of the nose).
It is as if he is a miniver that’s been dipped in shadow.
Then I see that he looks very girl.
It is often like this at this age.
The great Alberti, who published in the year in which my mother birthed me the book for all picturemakers, and wrote in it the words let the movements of a man (as opposed to a boy or young woman) be ornato with more firmness, understands the bareness and the pliability it takes, ho, to be both.
The great Cennini, though, in his handbook on colours and picturemaking, finds no worth and no beauty of proportion in girls, or in women of any age – except in the matter of hands in themselves, since the delicate hands of girls and women, providing they’re young enough, are more patient, he says, than those of a man, from spending so much more time indoors which makes them more suited to making the best blue.
Myself I went out of my way, then, to be expert at the painting of hands and be good at the grinding of blue and the using of blue, both : there were others like me, painters I mean, who could do my particular both : we knew each other when we saw each other, we exchanged this knowledge by glance and by silence, by moving on and going our own ways : and most anyone else who saw through the art of what some would call our subterfuge and others our necessity graced us with acceptance and an equally unspoken trust in the skill we must surely possess to be so beholden to be taking such a path.
In this way my father made sure of an education and an apprenticeship for me, though it maddened my brothers to be always what they considered his workshop serfs, like infidel workers compared to me they thought, carrying and working the stones and bricks that I sat and drew and calculated with, seeing to the shaping of the windows I then used as frames for seeing or sat below using the light of for reading a mathematical book or a treatise on pigments, protecting my hands.
I’m good at walls too cause I also learned from looking how to handle stone and brick and how to build a wall to last a lot longer than this one the boy is sitting on now.
But though I w
as descended from the men who’d made the walls which themselves made the municipal palace – the walls on which the great Master Piero in his stay in Ferara had painted for the Ests the victorious battle scenes
(and from looking at whose works I learned
the open mouths of horses,
the rise of light in landscape,
the serious nature of lightness,
and how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it) –
I would paint my own walls.
So my father, when I’d trained to what he thought enough degree (which was not until I’d seen 19 summers) and news reached him that there was a need for someone to provide 3 pietà half-figures and a quantity of painted pillars to the side of the high altar in the cathedral, went out into the wet night with works of mine rolled up under his arm wrapped in treated skins to keep the rain off and showed the priests how I could with colours turn plain stone to what seemed marble column : the priests, who’d seen me many times in my youth with him and my brothers, gave me the job and paid us good money : by both luck and justice we all benefited and I did not formally leave my father’s tutelage till 3 years before he died, old father, old wallmaker, by which time I had come of age, was full grown, had been binding my chest with linen for a decade, not too difficult being slim and boylike then, and had been visiting the house of pleasure with Barto for nearly as long, where the girls taught me both binding and unbinding and some other useful ways in which to comport myself.
Barto.
Cause if this boy could hear me I’d tell him : we all need a brother or a friend and at some point you need a horse too : I had 2 brothers and admittedly was more friends in the end with my horse : but even better than brothers, and even than horse, my friend Barto, whom I met after fishing barefoot out on the stones in the river on my 12th birthday, and though usually I caught not much, that day the fish had been opening their mouths at the surface of the water as if congratulating me on having been born and I had caught 7 altogether, 3 fat carp with their whiskers trailing and the rest were little and middle-sized perch, the black stripes over their gold : I knotted the lines together and hung them over my shoulder and left my brothers to their displeasure (they’d caught less) and was walking home through the cow parsley along the foot of a tall wall when a voice called down to me.
I once caught a catfish, the voice said, that was so big I couldn’t land it. In fact it almost rivered me.
I liked the word rivered so I looked up : it was a boy leaning over the top of the wall.
I could feel from the mouth and the pull of it, he said, that it was a lot bigger than you from head to foot, and though you’re not that tall yourself it’s quite long for a fish, no?
His cap was new : he was wearing a finely embroidered jacket, I saw its quality though the wall was more than 2 men high.
So I couldn’t land it, he said. Cause it was a lot bigger than me too, and there was only me and the catfish, no one else, and I couldn’t hold it and bring it in myself. So I cut my line and I let it escape me, I had to. But it’s the best fish I’ve ever caught, that fish I didn’t catch, cause it’s a fish that will always be with me now and never be eaten, it’ll never die, that fish I’ll never land. I see you’ve done well today. Any chance you’d give me one of your hundred fish?
Catch your own fish, I said.
Well, I would, but you’ve taken so many it wouldn’t be fair to the river, he said.
How did you get up there? I said.
I climbed, he said. I’m more monkey than man. Coming up? Here.
He leaned over the top and held out a hand but he was so far above me and his gesture so charming that I burst out laughing : I untied the smallest of the perch, separated it from its brothers and laid it in the grass.
A piece of gold for making me laugh, I shouted up.
I hoisted my other fish and my stick back on my shoulder and waved my hand : but when I’d got a little along the path the boy called me back.
Can’t you throw that fish you gave me up here to me? he said. I can’t reach it from here.
Don’t be lazy, I said. Come down and get it.
Frightened you can’t throw a fish as well as you can catch a fish? he said.
I’d happily throw it, but I’m not meant to misuse my hands, I said, cause I plan to earn my living by them, and throwing, as the masters say in all the books, could tire or hurt them.
Scared you’ll miss, he said.
You don’t know it yet, I said, but you’re besmirching an expert aim.
Oh, an expert aim, he said.
I put down my things and picked up the little perch.
Hold still, I said.
I will, he said.
I aimed it. The boy turned with languor and watched both cap and fish on their way down the other side of the wall.
There’ll be trouble now, he said. I’m supposed to keep it clean. What kind of fish was it you knocked it off with?
A perch, I said.
He made a face.
Gutterfish, he said. Mudfish. Haven’t you anything tastier?
Come down and we’ll go to the river, I said. I’ll lend you my stick. You can catch yourself your own taste in fish. And if what you hook’s as big as the one you caught before I’ll help you.
He looked pleased when I said this : then his face went miserable.
Ah, I can’t, he said.
Why not? I said.
I’m not allowed near the river, he said. Not in these clothes.
Take them off, I said. We’ll hide them somewhere. They’ll be fine till we get back.
But then I worried for a moment in case I’d be expected to lose my own clothes if the boy did come down and remove his, cause I was now become my new self in the world, which involved taking strict pains to preserve what I appeared : though something in me also found this idea a good one, but in any case in the end there was no divesting of any sort, on this day at least, cause the boy called down –
I can’t. These are clothes I have to wear. And I’ve got to go in a minute. I have to attend celebrations. It’s my birthday.
Mine too! I said.
Really? he said.
Happy birthday, I said.
And to you, he said.
Years later he’d tell me it was my feet being bare on the path as I walked that he was most taken with, and it’d be some time, a long time, into our friendship before he’d tell me it wasn’t just cause he was in his best new clothes that he wouldn’t come that day to the river, it was that his mother didn’t like him going near rivers cause of the brother that had drowned before he was born, and he had been named for the brother, the others were all sisters.
We met whenever his family came to town, though increasingly in secret cause he was from a family which would have had little to do with mine, and we went often to the river so he could doubly defy his mother, first by going at all and second by going without her knowledge : but he never went by himself in case the river decided it wanted to claim this other brother too : though truth be told I didn’t know this about him until we were both much older.
On our first shared birthday he showed me all the things you can do if you’re balanced on the top of a very tall wall : you can hang yourself off it by nothing but your hands, then by nothing but one hand : you can walk along the top of it like a cat or a rope-walking gypsy performing : you can dance : you can run along it like a squirrel or stand on it on only one leg like a heron and do little jumps : you can tuck the other leg up behind your back or kick it openly back and fore while keeping your balance : finally you can jump off the wall up into the air with your arms out wide like a heron taking flight.
He demonstrated all these things except the last : of the last he only spread his arms like wings to show me, as if about to.
Don’t, I shouted.
He barked a laugh full of the daring of his dancing : he did one last leap in the air and lande
d square and safe sitting down with a thump on the top of the wall, his arms still wide : he swung his legs at me like a figure in a painting sitting half in and half out, legs over the woodframe.
You’re a boy afraid of a wall, he called down at me.
And you’re a boy with no idea how wrong he is, I called back at him. You’ll need to know me better. And to know I’m afraid of nothing. And my father is a maker of walls, among other things, and if you can kick your legs like you’re doing against one and nothing chips off it then you’re lucky, it’s a pretty good one. But that’s far too high a wall to jump off. Any fool can calculate that.
Exactly, and I’m no fool, he said and then stood up again as if to do the jump and made me laugh again. Instead of jumping he bowed as low as was safe to.
Bartolommeo Garganelli is very pleased, on this day auspicious to both of us, to make your quaintances, he said.
You might talk as fancy as your clothes, I said. But even a common fisher of gutterfish knows you’ve just got that last word wrong.
1 quaintance. 2 quaintances, he said. And I’ve met more than 2, I’ve met 3 of you. Expert fisher. Expert fish-thrower. Expert in walls and their trajectories.
If you’d care to come down, I said, I’ll consider introducing you to the rest of me.
Here I am again : me and a boy and a wall.
(I will take it as an omen.)
But this time the boy looks straight through me as if I’ve swallowed a magic ring and the ring has rendered me invisible.
(I will take this as an omen too.)
First he was all sainthood : now he’s all lovelorn : what use to him is a painter?
I’ll do what good I can.
I’ll draw him an open threshold.
I’ll put a lit torch in his hand.
For the making of pictures we need plants and stones, stonedust and water, fish bones, sheep and goat bones, the bones of hens or other fowls whitened in high heat and ground down fine : we can use the foot of a hare, the tails of squirrels : we need breadcrumbs, willow shoots, fig shoots, fig milk : we need bristles from pigs and the teeth of clean meat-eating animals, for example dog, cat, wolf, leopard : we need gypsum : we need porphyry for grinding : we need a travelling box and a good source of pigment and we need the minerals which are the source of colour : above all we need eggs, the fresher the better, and from the country not the town mean better colours when dry.