by Ali Smith
I protested that there was no way a set of pictures done by me and given as fair payment to her girls meant I owed her anything.
The old woman pressed the jewel harder into my hand so its edges near cut me.
You little idiot, she said. Have you no idea? They look at your pictures. They get airs and graces. They come to my rooms and they ask me for more of a cut. Or they look at your pictures. They get all prowessy. They decide to choose a different life. And all the ones who’ve gone have left by the front door, unprecedented in this house which has never seen girls go by anything but the back. Don’t you understand anything? I can’t have that. You’re costing me. So, it follows. I must ask you to stop frequenting my house. Or at least to stop drawing my girls.
She left a space for me to speak : I shrugged : she nodded, grave.
Good. But before you go, she said. This jewel. The one in your hand. It’s yours. If you’ll do me.
So I did her picture,
after which she gave me the jewel as agreed, and the next time I came to the house she took me aside and gave me a front door key she’d had her locksmith make for me.
In all these ways I gained yet more understanding of what the great Alberti, who published the book that matters most to us picturemakers, calls the function and the measure of the body, and also of the truth of the great Alberti’s notion that beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body.
But I also learned to disagree with my masters.
Cause even the great Alberti was wrong when he wrote in disapproving terms that it would not be suitable to dress Venus or Minerva in the rough wool cloak of a soldier, it would be the same as dressing Mars or Jove in the clothes of a woman.
Cause I met many female Marses and Joves in the house and many Venuses and Minervas in and out of all sorts of clothes.
None of them earned anywhere near her true worth in money : all of them suffered misuse, at the very least the kind of everyday misuse you hear any night through the walls of such a house, and though these women and girls were the closest thing alive I ever met to gods and goddesses, the work they did would first pock them on the surface like illness then break them easy as you break dry twigs then burn them up faster than kindling.
Ginevra I heard died in one of the blue sicknesses.
Isotta, my darling one, vanished.
I liked to think she went by her own choice.
I liked, after I heard she’d gone, to see her in my head fine and hearty in a small town or village, living in a house that was strong at the roof under vines and figs and lemon trees in a noise of the good unruliness of a mob of her own children : most of all I liked to think her smiling with her eyes and mouth both (which means love) at a lover or friend or at least at someone whose money she shared equally.
Agnola I heard years later was found in the river tied at the hands and feet.
So I understood plenty of dark things too, learned plenty of things that were the opposite of pleasure, at the pleasure house.
Then the end of my time there did come, after all, in our 18th year of age cause Barto had commerce with Meliadusa, young, new to the house, new to the work, who’d had me the fortnight before, first, on her arrival, and had let it slip with her guests the next few times after me that what she expected in this house was something better : to be brought to good climax regardless of what they wanted, then to be allowed to sleep for a bit, and finally to be given, in exchange for the night’s work, a very fine drawing of herself.
She told Barto laughingly about it a fortnight of work in the pleasure house later when she found it very funny that she’d been so misconstruing and that the reality of life in the pleasure house was so other.
It wasn’t all she laughingly told him.
Barto sat opposite me on the grass: it was early morning : carts were coming into the city to market behind him : he rubbed at his jaw : he was solemner than a bear : he’d maybe had a bad night, bad supper, maybe bad wine.
What? I said.
Be quiet, he said.
He leaned forwards, took one of my boots in his hands : he untied the laces and straps : he took the boot off my foot : he untied the boot on the other foot : he took it off me : he stood my boots to one side : he unsheathed his knife from his pouch : very careful with the blade not to cut me in the skin and the blade cold where it touched me, he nicked its point through my leggings at the ankle and cut in a circle all round first one, then the other.
He peeled the legging-stuff off each foot : he placed both pieces to one side : he took my bare feet in his hands : then he spoke.
Is it true? he said. You’ve been false? All these years?
I have never not been true, I said.
Me not knowing, he said. You not you.
You’ve known me all along, I said. I’ve never not been me.
You lied, he said.
Never, I said. And I have never hidden anything from you.
Cause there’d been many times when Barto’d seen me naked or near-naked, by ourselves swimming, say, or with other boys and young men too and the general acceptance of my painter self had always meant I’d been let to be exactly that –myself – no matter that in 1 difference I was not the same : it was as simple as agreement, as understood and accepted and as pointless to mention as the fact that we all breathed the same air : but there are certain things that, said out loud, will change the hues of a picture like a too-bright sunlight continually hitting it will : this is natural and inevitable and nothing can be done about it : Barto had been challenged by someone, concerning me, and he had been humiliated by the challenge.
You are other than I thought, he said.
I nodded.
Then the fault is with your thinking, or with the person who has changed your thinking, not with me, I said.
How can we be friends now? he said.
How can we ever not be friends? I said.
You know I marry in the summer, he said.
That you marry makes no difference to me, I said and this is the last thing I said that day to him cause he looked at me then with eyes like little wounds in his head and I understood : that he loved me, and that our friendship had been tenable on condition that he could never have me, that I was never to be had, and that someone else, anyone else, saying out loud to him what I was, other than painter, broke this condition, since those words in themselves mean the inevitability, the being had.
His hands were cold and my feet in them : he put my feet down on the grass, stood up, touched his chest where his collarbone was (cause my friend was quite the dramatist always) and turned his back on me.
I looked down at my own feet : I looked at how my taken-off boots held the foot shapes even though there weren’t any feet in them : I searched around for the legging-stuff after Barto left but I couldn’t find it : so I pulled my boots back on my bare feet, strapped and tied them on.
I walked round Bologna for a bit : I had a look at some churchwork, some that was finished and some being done in the early morning light, cause I was a painter before I was anything else, including a friend.
Then I went home to my father in Ferara and told him our chances of Garganelli patronage were over.
What did you do wrong? he shouted,
cause first he was furious : then he was all pride puffed up, all no child of mine will prostitute itself : in his fury my father looked old to me for the first time, so I took off my boots and looked at my feet which had blistered from the walking all day with nothing between skin and leather : the blisters were like little balls of unclear glass surfacing in the skin of me : how would I paint such opaqueness? What kind or what making of white would it take?
Even as I thought it I felt white all over at the loss of my friend and thought that I’d never know other colours again.
Funny to think of it now, that bleak evening : cause the biggest patrons of my short life were after all to be the Garganelli family, a
nd the reason I couldn’t find the legging-stuff was that my friend Barto had rolled it in his hand and put it in his pocket and taken it as souvenir, as he told me years later sitting on the stone step by my feet while I worked on the decoration for the tomb of his father in their chapel.
Girl : do you hear me?
cause although it seemed to be the end of the world to me –
it wasn’t.
There was a lot more world : cause roads that look set to take you in one direction will sometimes twist back on themselves without ever seeming anything other than straight, and Barto and I were soon friends again : no time at all : many things get forgiven in the course of a life : nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right : we were friends until I died (if I did die ever, cause I remember no death) and I trust that he remembered me lovingly till the day he died himself (if he did, cause I have no memory of such a thing).
I am watching the girl watch an old old story, the performance of love through a too-small window : yesterday it was the theatre of saints, today it’s love : albeit love performed for an audience : but an audience is only ever really interested in its own needs regardless, whoever you were or are, Cosmo, Lorenzo, Ercole, School of Unknown Painters of Ferara Workshop : I forgive.
Cause nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do (and also tend disappointingly to die before they ought).
Or our fathers, whose failings while they’re alive (and absences after they’re dead) infuriate.
Or our siblings, who want us dead too cause what they know about us is that somehow we got away with not having to carry the bricks and stones like they did all those years.
Cause nobody’s the slightest idea who we are, or who we were, not even we ourselves
– except, that is, in the glimmer of a moment of fair business between strangers, or the nod of knowing and agreement between friends.
Other than these, we go out anonymous into the insect air and all we are is the dust of colour, brief engineering of wings towards a glint of light on a blade of grass or a leaf in a summer dark.
Let me tell you about the time I was seen, entered and understood by someone I was acquainted with in my life for 10 minutes only.
I’m walking along the road and I pass a fieldful of infidel workers dressed in the white that marks them as worker and makes their skin all the darker : they’re ploughing and planting : I go past freely on my way.
Further on down the road someone springs out from a copse of trees : he’s one of the working men, far enough from the field to seem a touch fugitive. I pass quite close to him : his white clothes are ragged, but less from poverty, I see as I come closer, than from what seems the strength of his own body, as if it can’t help but break through : his sleeves are frayed by the strength of his hands and forearms : his knees have made holes in the cloth, being so strong : the line of dark hairs above his groin sits visible : his eyes are reddened by work.
When I’ve gone a little distance this man calls after me, a word I don’t know.
When I don’t stop, he calls the word again.
It is a benign word as well as a pressing one : something in the sound of it stops me and turns me around on the road.
He is standing in the shade of the copse, perhaps so as not to be seen, maybe more for a rest from the sun, cause I can see even from the distance I’m keeping that nothing about him fears a foreman or overseer : nothing about him fears anything.
Did you mean to call after me? I say.
Yes, he says
(sure enough there’s no one else on the road).
Tell me again, I say, that word. The word you were calling me with.
I was calling you a word in my language, he says.
An infidel word? I say.
He smiles a broad smile. His teeth are very strong.
An infidel word, he says. I don’t know the word for it in your language.
I smile back. I come a little nearer.
What does your word mean? I say.
It means, he says, you who are more than one thing. You who exceed expectations.
He asks me if I can help him. He tells me he needs a twist.
A what? I say.
A –, I don’t know the word, he says. I need to bind my clothes around me, I need a binding thing, for here.
He gestures around his midriff.
You mean a belt? I say. Something to tie?
(cause his shirt is flapping open on him except for one clasp at the collarbone, and it’s March, a cold beginning to the month).
I have a length of rope in my haversack, bought in the market in Florence from a man that told me it was a lucky rope from a hanging and quartering (cause if you carry a hanging rope, it means you’ll never yourself be hanged, he said) : it’s a good length and a fair thickness and will probably do : I walk back towards him as he comes towards me : I hold out the rope to him : he looks at it, takes it, weighs it in his hand, then smiles at me as if to pay me with the smile.
When you’ve nothing, at least you’ve all of it.
I have never seen such a beautiful man.
He sees me see this beauty in him and it makes his nature rise.
In the copse of trees at the side of the road there I put my mouth to him and play him like the muse Euterpe plays her wooden flute : then both : he has a smell and a taste about him of grass, clean earth, bread, sweat : he makes redness at the eye a sign of something other than tiredness : he makes calloused hands a means of greater feeling when they go beneath clothes.
We stood up after and I was covered in grass and earth, so was he : he dusted me down : he picked one grass piece off my shoulder and smiled a goodbye, put the piece of grass between his teeth, slung my rope over his shoulder and walked back openly to the fields and the work he’d left.
It was all : it was nothing : it was more than enough.
Fine.
As if the girl knows I’ve come to the end of my story she shuts the love window down dark : the poorly performed love-acts disappear : I think they have not cheered her cause she seems very doleful.
She sits with the shut window on her lap.
We watch a blackbird, with 4 other blackbirds of both male and female type, chase a bird that’s not a blackbird to stop it eating with them at a bush loaded with berries the red of which is the red which the great Cennini in his handbook called dragon’s blood, good for parchment but not for long.
The girl gets up and crosses the patch of grass : halfway across, the brother behind the wicker divide shouts something in their language at her : she calls something back at him, something longer than a name or a stop it, something more like a game or a spell and she walks past the wicker heavy-browed and dismissive : then she’s under a deluge of twigs and little stones and rubble, he is standing on a ledge or barrel and he has them all on a little spade and is throwing them first one lot then the next in the air so they land all over her like it’s raining little stones and sticks : she stops : instead of being angry she laughs out loud.
She stands with her arms out and away from herself and from nowhere her misery is vanished, she is laughing like a child : then she puts the window down on the grass and dives behind the wicker fence, she fells her brother and drags him out on to the grass and the earth, both laughing and rolling on the ground and she tickles him into even more hilarity.
It is a fine thing to see a sudden happiness like that.
She is lucky in such a brother and such a love : between me and my brothers, even though there was nothing between us but air, there were invisible divisions thick as the walls of her room.
Back in that room, the room with the bed in it, back comes the sadness : she sits behind the veil of it for many whole minutes then she shakes herself to her feet and takes off her dusty shirt, shakes the dust and stuff off it out of the window : she shoulders the shirt back on, leaves its buttons unbuttoned and sits on the bed again.
T
here are many made pictures, all true to life in their workings, on the 4 walls of this room.
The south wall, along which the narrow bed runs, has a picture of 2 beautiful girls seen walking along like friends do : one has gold hair, one has dark but the dark of her hair is sunlit to lightness – both the heads of the girls are : they are walking along a street with awnings : it’s a warm place : their clothes are mosaic gold and azzurrite : the girls are in conversational commerce and look as if between sentences : the goldener one is preoccupied : the darker-headed girl turns her head towards her in a most natural gesture in open air and so she can see the other better : her looking has about it politeness, humility, respect, a kind of gentle intent.
The picture is by a great artist surely in its patchwork of light, dark, determination, gentleness.
The west wall has a large picture of 1 singularly beautiful woman : her eyes look straight out : there is something just beyond you, it says, I can see it and it’s sad, puzzling, a mystery : this is a very clever thing to do with eyes and demeanour : one of her arms is tight around her neck holding herself, at least I think it is her own arm, and this means the curve of her hair (which is coloured between dark and light) round her face makes her face look like the mask that means sadness in Greek ancients : she is sorry I think : I think on behalf of victims : cause she is a figuring of St Monica I guess from it saying underneath in words that chance to be in my own language M O N I C A V I C T I M S.
Behind the head of the bed the whole east wall here is all pictures, lots of pictures, of yet another woman : it is the same woman in all the pictures with the same laughing eyes : there is love in their arrangement, they are an overwhelm in this arrangement, they fall almost into and over each other : but the woman in these pictures is not the woman from the picture palace : no, this is a dark and different lady who has this warm demeanour and a finesse too about her clothes and her body in them which I admire : there are many portraits of her and at different ages like the spill of a life straight on to a wall : there are some done in greys of a small child I also take to be her.