by Ali Smith
Master Francescho?
The pickpocket.
Aren’t you gone yet? I called down.
I’ve one last thing to say before I go, the pickpocket called. Can I come up?
The pickpocket had learned good pillars from me : he’d learned good rocks and bricks : he’d learned the drawn bow of a curve and the perspective behaviour of straight lines and he’d learned how lines brought together like woven threads will make a plane : I’d let him do some buildings in the lower space of May and some work on the workers there going about their daily business.
He wasn’t yet 20 years old : his hair still fell over his eyes : he was good at colour and at mixing thicknesses of lime and plaster : he had the understanding that a fresco needs a wall and that at the same time the skin we apply to a wall is as sensitive as our own skin and becomes as much a part of that wall as our skin is a part of us.
I caressed the lip of a Grace : he clambered on to the platform and stood behind me and watched me work.
I know you have to let me go, he said. But you should have signed the letter. You should have signed the first 2 we wrote. It was wrong of you not to. So I signed you this time. It was for the good of us all that I did it. And Master Francescho, you should know this too. The Marquis won’t be persuaded to give you any more money than us. You’ll get 10 pennies per foot. He won’t give you anything more.
He will, I said. It’s a mistake. Cause above all Borse is fair. When he hears he will sort his mistake.
He won’t, ever, the pickpocket said. Cause you should know, Master Francescho. That he likes the boys. Not the girls.
I split the lip of the Grace.
I dabbed the split away : I steadied myself on the wood.
And I should tell you too, the pickpocket was saying behind me. That when we were working on the month of May I heard him ask the Falcon to bring you to him, in the way he likes the new boys and men to be brought, cause he likes to be entertained by talent and he likes a talent to belong to him. And I heard the Falcon refuse him. Which is why you were never called to serve him in that way. But it’s not the Falcon who told him anything about you, Master Francescho. The Falcon knows your worth. Now, I’ll go if you still want, though I don’t want to. But I’ll wish you a fruitful New Year.
Behind me I heard him get back on the ladder : when I turned I saw him waiting, just his eyes and the top of his head above the platform : it was comic and sad both : but the fear I saw in his eyes let me see there was something I might do.
I’ll have a bet with you, Ercole, I said.
You will? he said.
His eyes looked relieved.
I crouched down near his head.
I bet you the worth of 5 square feet of this fresco that if I write to him and ask him direct he’ll give me what I ask, I said.
Okay, but if I lose that bet, the pickpocket said coming back up to sit on the platform. Though I know full well I won’t, but just in case. If I do. Can we agree that I’ll pay at the assistant rate? And if I win, that you’ll pay at the Master Francescho rate?
Go down and grind me some black, I said, just in case I find I’ll need it.
(Cause black has great power and its presence is meaningful.)
Black? the pickpocket said. No. It’s New Year. It’s holiday. I’m on holiday. Anyway, I’m sacked.
Make it deeper than sable, I said. Get it as deep as a lightless night.
I wrote on the Friday : I delivered the letter myself by hand to the doorman of the palace.
On the morning of the first Sunday, 2 days into the new year, the palace was cold and near-empty : I came up the stairs to the month room alone and I took the knife to March.
I peeled off the wall a small portion under the arch between the garland and Borse giving out justice to an aging infidel : it came away complete like marzapane off a cake.
I layered on the thin new undercoat : I went home to bed cause I planned to be working all night.
That afternoon I packed my things into my satchels except my tools, my colours and a good piece of my mirror.
That evening, alone again in the long room, I lit the torch : the faces round me flickered their hello : I climbed to the lower level by the garland and the cupids.
I layered the second skin over the hole in the picture below.
I replaced the lunette of Borse with a profile portrait like the one on the Justice medal : haec te unum : but I turned him so everyone who’d seen the medal would see he was looking the other way.
I placed next to the figure of Borse at the heart of the crowd waiting for justice a hand – with nothing in it.
Under the word JUSTICE written in the stone where the Est colours were I used black.
Above the black I whited out the letters till all you could read was ICE.
I held the mirror up to my own eyes.
Then it’s down off the scaffolding and out of the palace of not being bored, out on to the street and up on to the back of Mattone and off on the hoof at speed down the streets past the smoky ghetto, under the palace tower, past the half-made castle and through the town gates for the last time cause I’d never be back and such leaving takes only a matter of minutes when the town of your birth is a small one easily passed through.
(Just a year and a half after that, as it happened, and just 6 days after the Pope made him Duke of Ferara at last, Borse would turn, blink, fall down dead, dead as an arrowed bird, the months of his year still circling regardless the walls of his palace of not being bored.)
When the town was as distant over my shoulder as the far towers in the landscapes in the work I’d just covered that wall with
(for not enough money to pay for the blues and the golds, never mind other colours)
when the morning light was up, when I’d reached the first rise of land to let the plain lie down behind me, I stopped.
I calculated my loss.
My pockets were near-empty.
I would have to hope for work.
A bird sang above me when I thought it.
I’d be fine : my arms and hands were good : I would go to Bologna where I’d friends and patrons, where there was no laughable court.
I heard through the birdsong something behind me and turned and saw a raising of dust on the line of road in the flat land : there was a horse far back, the only horse in the whole morning : no, not a horse, a pony, grey, and when it got near enough I saw someone on its back with his too-long legs sticking out at the sides : when the pickpocket drew up level with me the pony he was on was so small I looked down from a godheight.
Master Francescho, he said over the cough of the pony all out of breath from the speed it’d been made to go and the bags on its back full of all the pickpocket’s worldly.
I waited till he’d got his own breath himself, as covered in dust as the pony : he wiped his face with his sleeve : he readied himself to speak.
That’s 5 square feet you owe me, he said. To be paid at the higher rate.
Here I am again : me and a girl and a wall.
We are outside the house of the girl’s beloved and sitting by the poorly made wall : this time she is not sitting on it : she is sitting on the ground on the paving.
We have been here now many times.
I am not so sure it is a love though any more cause one of the times we were here the girl, staring with a face full of hostility, almost so that I believed she might spit like a snake, was approached direct by the woman we saw in the picture palace who came out of her house and crossed the road : and although the woman spoke to her the girl simply sat on the paving stones and looked, saying nothing, though her face was all irony, at the beautiful face of the woman : then quick as a magic trick she took out her tablet and made a study of the woman with it : the woman put her hands up over her face : she did not want a study made : she turned like that and went back inside the house : a minute later though the woman stood looking out her window at the girl across the road : at which the girl held up her tablet
again and took a study of the woman in the window : the woman drew a curtain down : then the girl took a study of her doing this too, and then one of the blinded window : then the girl stayed cross-legged on the ground watching the house until the dark came down : only then she stood up, shook her limbs which will have been cold and stiff from the sitting and went.
And the next day, back again, she and I and the paving stones.
We have done this visit many days now : so many that the north wall of the room she sleeps in is covered in these small tablet studies : each study is the size of a hand and the girl has arranged them in the shape of a star, going towards its points the lighter of the pictures and the darker ones going to the centre.
The pictures are all of the house, or of the woman coming and going from it, or of other people who come and go : they are all from the same view, from in front of the poorly made wall : there are differences in the hedge leaves and tree leaves and as the season has shifted she has caught the differences in light and weather in the street from day to day.
The much older woman, the one the years have bent, who lives in the house to which the poorly made wall belongs, came out every day at first to shout things at the girl.
The girl said nothing, but on the third day simply moved from sitting on the wall to sitting on the paving stones in front of it.
The much older woman shouted then too : but the girl folded her arms over her skinniness and looked up from the ground with such calm and resolve that this older woman stopped shouting and left her in peace to sit where she chose.
One day instead the old woman said kind words to her and gave her an awning on a stick to keep rain off (there has been much rain in purgatorium) : that same day she brought a drink with steam coming off it and refreshments made of biscuit for the girl : on another colder day a woollen blanket and a large throw-over of a coat.
Today there will be blossom in the study the girl will make cause the trees in the street round this house she is looking so hard at have the beginnings in them of some of the several possible greens and some, the blossoming ones, have opened their flowers overnight, some pink along the branches, some loaded with white.
Today when the old woman came out of her house she brought nothing but for the first time sat down on her own poorly made wall behind the girl in silence and companionable.
There are bees : there was a butterfly.
That blossom will smell good to those who can smell blossom.
How the air throws it into a dance.
I had a memory of my father from not long before he died that I could not bear : it shook me awake at nights even 10 years after his death : as I got older the memory got stronger : sometimes I could not see to paint cause it came between me and what I did and changed the nature of it : so Barto sat me at the table and put 2 cups in front of me : he filled 1 from the jug of water : he filled the other from the same jug of water.
Now, he said. This cup here has the Water of Forgetting in it. This cup here has the Water of Remembering. First you drink this. Then you wait a little. Then you drink the other.
But you poured them both out of the same jug, I said. They’re both the same water. How can this one be forgetting and this one be remembering?
Well, they’re in different cups, he said.
So it’s the cups of forgetting and remembering and nothing to do with the water? I said.
No, it’s the water, he said. You have to drink the water.
How can the same water be both? I said.
It’s a good question, he said. The kind of thing I’d expect you to ask. So. Ready? So first you drink –.
It would mean that forgetting and remembering are really both the same thing, I said.
Don’t split hairs with me, he said. This one first. The Water of Forgetting.
No, cause a minute ago you said that that one was the Water of Forgetting, I said.
No, no, it’s –, he said. Uh. No. Wait.
He looked at the 2 cups : he picked them both up and crossed the room with them : he threw the water in both of them out the open back door into the yard : he put the empty cups on the table and refilled them both from the jug again : he pointed to one, then the next.
Forgetting, he said. Remembering.
I nodded.
I was here cause Barto had come across town to see a Madonna I was painting for his friend who wanted to be painted in kneeling next to her and some saints for good money : Barto’d stared at it and shaken his head.
The people in your pictures these days, Francescho, he’d said. I mean, they’re still beautiful. But they’re strange. It’s like stone in their veins, where it used to be blood.
Canvas is different from wall, I said. Fresco is always much lighter looking. Materials can make things darker.
But it’s the same with the work you showed to Domenico, he said
(Barto found me and the pickpocket a lot of our work in those years).
Well, he gave me the job, I said. He liked it.
A bitterness was through it, Barto said. Not like you. Like you’re a different person.
I am a different person, I said.
Ha! Ercole said behind us (he was working). I wish you were. Then I’d be working for someone else.
Shut up, I said.
What’s wrong? Barto said.
Master Francescho is not sleeping much, the pickpocket said.
Why not? Barto said.
Be quiet, Ercole, I said.
Bad dreams, Ercole said.
I can help with bad dreams, Barto said.
If it were only dreams, it’d be easy, I said. I could deal with only dreams.
Barto was sure, he said, of a good way to rid oneself of bad dreams and painful memories both : you had to do a ritual in the name of the goddess of memory : you’d drink one water first and you’d forget everything : you’d drink the other water next and it’d give you a forceful remembering, everything crushed into 1 single huge memory boulder, a remembering the size of a mountainside.
Now I sat at the table with the 2 cups in front of me.
I don’t want all my memories falling on me like avalanche, I said.
You won’t know the first thing about it, Barto said. You won’t even know it’s happening. You’ll be protected. You’ll be in a trance. And then we lift you up and we carry you across the room and we put you in the special chair and you tell the oracle all the things the water’s made you remember and then you fall asleep from the effort of it all. And when you wake up you find that you remember in a whole new way. You remember without fear or discomfort. You remember only what you really need to remember. And after it your sleep at night will be deep and good and sound and also – best thing of all – you’ll find you’re able to laugh again.
What special chair? What oracle? I said.
We were down in the servant kitchen : it was empty, Barto had dismissed the serving girls and the cook for the hour it would take, he said, to change my demeanour : we could hear them sunning themselves in the yard lightly complaining about the interruption : but they were used to me there : they were kind to me too : there was always something to eat at Barto’s house if Barto was away from home cause the kitchen was where Barto habitually took me (to keep me out of sight of his wife, I think, who did not like me around the house too much : he’d promised me I’d always stand godparent to his boys, and to all his boys not just the first : and what about your girls? I’d asked, cause I knew I’d be a great patron to girls : ah but the girls are not so much my business, he’d said and I’d seen from the slant away of his eyes that I was permitted, but conditionally, to the parts of his life over which his wife had no jurisdiction : this was fine by me, I had more than enough grace by our friendship : though I’d have liked all the same to be guardian to his girls since girls got less attention when it came to colours and pictures, which meant the loss of many a good painter out of nothing but blind habit : but his wife did not want her girls to have the life of painters).
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Barto leapt across to a larder, opened a corner cupboard inside it and brought out a wrapped honeycomb on a dish above which a small cloud of flies appeared and congregated : he put it on the table in front of me.
The oracle, he said.
Is there bread to go with it? I said.
He went back to the larder.
Would you prefer eggs as oracle? he said.
Can the oracle be both? I said. And can I take some of the oracle home with me?
My wife has been complaining there are never enough eggs, he said (cause she knew from her servants that I sent the pickpocket round here often : what neither of them knew was that her kitchen actually gained a lot for the eggs it happened to lose, cause the Garganelli cook had taken lessons from the pickpocket who was good with food when it came to both pictures and stomachs and who’d taught the cook how to hang and dry beef and pork in the way that enhances the flavours).
Barto set a bowl full of eggs on the table beside the honey.
And the special chair? I said (and while he looked round for a chair that would do I pocketed 5 of the eggs).
He was patting the crate of apples in the corner : he covered it with two dishcloths and patted the creases smooth.
Right, he said. Ready.
So. I drink this first, I said.
Yes, he said.
And then my memories fly off the top of me, I said, like someone putting a ladder against my walls if I were a house and climbing up on to the roof of me where all the things I remember are neatly laid like rooftiles, the first under the next under the next under the next. And then that someone jemmies each tile off, throws it down to the ground and doesn’t stop till the rafters are bare. Yes?
More or less, Barto said.
And when they come off, do they stack up neatly, my memories, or do they lie broken in a heap by their fall? I said.
I can’t say for sure, Barto said. I’ve never done this ritual before.
And then, in my new roofless state, I said, what I do is, I drink this, yes?
Yes –, Barto said.
– and those same old rooftiles, I said, hoist themselves off the ground again all at once, all the tiles that haven’t broken and all the little broken bits, both, and they fly up like a skyful of stiff wingless birds back up to the open roof of me where they fix themselves back on, over and under all their old neighbours again? In exactly the same places?