by Ali Smith
Behind the rubbish through the straggle of branches I saw hands in the air as if attached to no body : they were covered in pustules like coated in a deep soup paste made of lentils but lentils coloured blue and black : I remember the smell : the smell was strong : I came round the bushy hill and I saw that the hands were on arms and at the ends of the arms there were shoulders and a head but with this pox over everything, even the face : he was breathing : he was alive : something moved in the whites of his eyes, the eyes saw me and a mouth opened below them.
Don’t come any nearer, he said.
I stepped well back : I stood in a place where I could still see the hands through the twiggy stuff.
Are you still there? the man said.
I am, I said.
Go away, he said.
Are you young or old? I said (cause I couldn’t tell from looking).
I think young, he said.
You need a new skin, I said.
He made a noise a bit like a laugh.
This is my new skin, he said.
What’s your name? I said.
I don’t know, he said.
Where are you from? I said. Is there no one to help you? Family or friends? Tell me where you live.
I don’t know, he said.
What happened to you? I said.
I had a headache, he said.
When? I said.
I don’t remember, he said. I only remember the headache.
Shall I fetch the nuns? I said.
It was nuns who brought me here, he said.
Which nuns? I said.
I don’t know, he said.
What can I do? I said. Tell me.
You can go away, he said.
But what will happen to you? I said.
I’ll die, he said.
I got back to the workshop and I was full of the vision : I shouted to the pickpocket that we were to paint strands of bush and tree, but to paint them like they were both seeing and blind.
You mean with actual eyes on, like in your Lucia? the pickpocket asked.
I shook my head : I didn’t know how : all I knew was I had just seen the man, the rubbish, the leaves, the twigs of the scrubland and I had understood pity and pitilessness both as something to do with the push of the branches.
The imperturbable nature of foliage, I said.
Eh? the pickpocket said.
He painted me a branch exactly as branches look, that’s right –
cause I remember everything now –
say it quick before I forget again –
the day I opened an eye, the other wouldn’t open, I was flat horizontal on the ground, had I fallen off the ladder?
I found you wrapped in the old horse blanket half an hour ago, he said, no, don’t – don’t do that, the heat coming off you, you’re sweating and it’s so hot outside, Master Francescho, so how can you be cold? Can you hear me? Can you hear?
What I saw was the pickpocket above me at my forehead, he poured water on to his sleeve and put his arm on my forehead again, too cold : people ran away out of the place : everyone but the pickpocket who opened the buttons of my jacket then took a knife to my shirt then cut further, deeper, sliced open the wraps of my binding and peeled it back and open saying forgive me, Master Francescho, it’s to help you breathe and I mean you no disrespect : I was worried, flailed my arms, furious, not about the cutting of the binding but about the prophets and the doctors we were painting on the walls and the ceiling (cause there were no real doctors brave enough for that room that day and the only doctors near me were pictures), the best work I’d done so far, not finished yet and we’d been fully paid in advance for it : I told the pickpocket to finish the prophets but to paint out the doctors altogether : he said he would : I felt better when I heard it : never leave work unfinished, Ercole : he got me out of that place where we were now not wanted cause of the colours that had come in my skin and carried me on his own back to a bed, I don’t know where, it was next to a wall : whatever the room was it faded and sharpened and cracked round me as if a quake happened and when the whitewash cracked in the wall I saw the people –
Ercole, tell me, I said, who those fine people are who are coming through the wall. I can’t make them out, quite.
What people? Ercole said. Where?
Then he understood.
Ah, them, he said, they’re a troupe of young fine people, they’re coming out of the woods and they’ve wound oak leaves and branches through their hair and round their necks and round their wrists and their ankles, they’ve the scent of trees all round them like a garland too as if they’re dressed in tree and flowers instead of clothes, and they’re carrying great overflowing armfuls of the flowers and grasses they’ve picked in the meadow out behind the wood, grass and flowers so scented that the fragrance of them is coming ahead like a herald, and I know that if you could have seen them properly, Master Francescho, you’d want to paint them, and if you’d painted them you’d have caught them right cause they look the way that means they’ll never die, or more, that if they do, they won’t mind or hold it against life, shall I lower the blind, is it too bright for you in here? he said.
I congratulate you, Ercole, I said. It is so bright it’s dark
can’t remember
what came next
but that’s what a proper burnishing of gold does : properly done it will give out both at once darkness and brightness : I taught the pickpocket to burnish : I taught him hair and branches : I taught him rocks and stones and how they hold every colour in the world and how every colour in every picture ever made comes from stone, plant, root, rock and seed : I taught him the body of the son held in the mother’s arms, the last supper, the miracle of the water and wine, the animals standing round the stable and the day going on behind it all, in both the foreground and background of it all, from death to last supper to wedding to birth.
I taught him, too, how things and beings shown to be moving upwards into the air always have about them the most and the best vitality : he was always loyal, sweet pickpocket : I remember now the winter after we finished the frescoes in the palace of not being bored sending him back to Ferara again, and he went without complaint, cause I wanted to know how the work was looking nearly one year dry.
He went on the Wednesday and came back on the Friday straight to the church we were restoring the Madonna in.
He’s only changed one thing since we were there, one thing in the whole room, the pickpocket said. His own face.
Who has? The Falcon? I said.
Borse, of course, the pickpocket said. He’s had his face redone throughout the months, including your months. I asked the man at the door, I know him, old friend of my father’s. He says Borse brought in his cousin Baldass to redo it.
The pickpocket told me the doorman had welcomed him like a son and taken him through to the serving quarters where they’d all done the same and fed him and fussed over him and asked after me –
(they asked after me?)
– yes, he said. And listen, that’s not all. Borse is away a lot these days cause he’s decided to build a mountain – not just move a mountain, since faith can do that, easy, but make a mountain, a whole new one, big as an Alp, in a place there’s not been one before. So there’s a lot of dragging and shifting and piling of rocks at Monte Santo and a lot of stoneworkers being worked to near-death, and sometimes to actual death and when that happens Borse adds the bodies to his mountain.
But Master Francescho, the pickpocket said. This other stuff they told me. Our month room has become quite famous among folk. There’s often a crowd comes to the palace from the town and when they get in there they go and stand in front of your justice scene. They just stand there and look. They never say anything out loud. Borse thinks it’s that they like to come to see the picture of him, you know, giving out justice. But the doorman says the people, when they leave that room, go on their way as pleased as if someone’s put money in their pockets. They come especially, his wife told m
e while she poured stew into my bowl, to see the face you painted in the blackness, the face there’s only half of, whose eyes – your eyes, Master Francescho –look straight out at them, as if the eyes can actually see them over the top of Borse’s head.
They’re not my eyes, I said.
Uh huh, the pickpocket said.
You didn’t tell them they’re my eyes? I said.
Wouldn’t matter if I had, he said. I know they’re your eyes. I see your eyes every day. But they think what they like. The doorman’s wife told me all the women who come to look go away talking about how the eyes are a woman’s eyes. All the men who come to look go away sure the eyes are a man’s. And you know how you made it only half a face, a face without a mouth? Like there are things that can’t be said? People come for miles to see it and nod their heads at each other about it. And they told me this too, listen to this – that a great many workers are always coming to the palace now, infidel workers and other field workers, workers from our own south and the poor working locals too, and they knock on the door in large numbers, sometimes as many as 20 at a time, to pay their respects, they tell the doorman, to show obeisance to Borse. By which they mean they want to bow before him in person, which Borse lets them do, if he’s there, and he always sees them in the virtue room.
So? I said.
Think, Master Francescho, the pickpocket said. Cause to get to the virtue room you have to pass through the month room, don’t you?
So we’ve turned him into the popular man he wanted us to paint him as? I said.
The pickpocket laughed : he took off his travelling coat : he’d been telling me it all so fast he hadn’t even put his bags down : he did now and sat on the softer of them at my feet and went on with his tale.
The story goes, the pickpocket said, that when the workers passing through the room of the months get anywhere near the far end of that room they veer towards the month of March where they stop below your worker painted in the blue and stand there for as long as they can. Some have even started coming in with their sleeves full of hidden flowers and at a given signal between them all they let their arms fall to their sides and the flowers fall out of their clothes on to the floor beneath him. When they’re made to move on, they go in and they bow to Borse like they’re meant to, it takes about half a minute to, then they’re escorted from the palace back through the room of the months and they strain their heads round on their necks to keep their eyes on the picture for as long as they can the whole length of the room.
And one day 25 or so of them got in there and were standing below him, dust coming off them from the fields, all looking up at him, and they refused to be moved on for nearly an hour, pretended not to understand the language when asked, though in the end when they went they went quite peaceably.
And Borse hasn’t had it altered? I said (and my voice came out like the squeak of a mouse).
Borse has no idea it even happens, the pickpocket said. Nobody’s told him. Nobody cares to, and he’s never seen it with his own eyes, has he? Since he’s always on the other side of the wall squeezed into the chair in the room of the virtues waiting to be bowed to. When he’s not off in Monte Santo, that is, making that new mountain.
For that moment I felt a sorrow for him, Borse the Just, whose vanity reminded me of me –
but what I really felt was frightened that something I’d done or made might have such wild effect.
Your stories are nothing but flattery, I said.
They’re nothing but true, the pickpocket said.
I don’t want to hear any more of your lies, I said.
You sent me to see. I saw. Now I’m telling you, the pickpocket said. I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d be pleased. You’re such a vain cunt, I thought you’d be delighted.
I hit him across the top of the head.
I don’t believe you even went there, I said.
Ow! he said. Right. That’s it. Hit me again and I’m leaving.
I hit him again.
He left.
Good.
I put away all the work things : I went off home to my rooms, to bed : I locked the door against the pickpocket, whose habit it was to sleep at the foot of the bed : he could sleep in the open air tonight
(he came back 3 days later,
sweet pickpocket, who’d die still young, though long after me, of too much drink, tempus edax, forgive me)
as for me, I lay in the bed that night by myself and wondered if Cosmo had heard about my pictures and about all the people coming to look at them.
Cosmo bloody Cosmo.
I am small : I am only newly become Francescho : I am learning to tint parchments and papers and to mix colours for painting the range of different skin and flesh tones in all the different lights : I’m teaching myself from books while my father is working on a house near the edge of the town and one day in an empty room in the half-house I’m leaning out of the brickwork which will become a window and I see crossing the meadow the son of the cobbler, everybody knows who he is cause he’s been taken on at the court : he’s young, he’s to paint the pennants and horsecoats and the armour they use in tournaments, but those who know anything about pictures also know he is a painter of pictures himself so full of twisting and arguing life that they surprise everyone who sees them : as he crosses the meadow it is as if it is revealed to me : he is a being wholly formed of and giving off the colour green : cause everything about him as he walks through the high grasses (he has left the path the people generally use to cross the land and is making his way across a wild-grassed place instead) is green : his head, his shoulders, his clothes are tinted green : above all, his face is the greenest green : it is as if his body gives out a greenness, one I can nearly taste, as if my mouth has been filled with leaves and grass : although I know of course it is the meadow casting its colour on to him, all the same he’s the reason the grasses spread round him for miles are the green they are.
I am 18 years old : I have high hopes cause my father has persuaded the most exciting new young master the town has seen for a long time to look over some of my pictures and has gone to the municipal palace with a great many of them to show him (who isn’t new at all, who’s been working as a tapestry and fabric designer and painter of horsecoats and pennants there for a decade and making a name too for his pictures which are near-shocking things in their toughness, all roots and stones and grimaces and all of an astonishing arrogance, so much so that to look at them for any time will fill you with a kind of discomfort and distaste : more, Borse, the newest Marquis, has tired of his old masters, good Bono and Angelo, who weren’t his but his half-brother’s court painters, and word’s gone round that this new painter has caught his eye and has received many gifts) : my father has decided he’d be a good man to know and that a court job could be mine easy as anything if I were apprenticed to him : I am home in the workshop my father made for me in our yard from sticks and hanging canvases, shelter from the wind but full of plain daylight, good for painting : it’s a place both flimsy and serviceable and I haven’t had to re-erect it this morning (my brothers like to knock the sticks out of the ground at night when they’ve come home from work or drinking, but last night they forgot to, or were kind enough not to) and I’m hard at work on a picture as large as the canvases that make the walls hung round me, I am picturing a story I remember from childhood : a musician has an argument with a god about whose music is better : the god wins the argument and the musician has to pay the price, which is to be skinned and hand over the pelt to the god as a trophy.
It’s a story I’ve puzzled over almost all my years : right now though I’ve found the way to tell it : the god stands to one side, the unused knife slack in his hand : he has an air near disappointment : but the inner body of the musician is twisting up out of the skin in a kind of ecstasy like the skin’s a thick flow of fabric coming rich in one piece off the shoulder and peeling away at the same time from the wrists and the ankles in little pieces like a blown upward sno
w of confetti : the body appears through the skin’s unpeeling like the bride undressing after the wedding : but bright red, crystal red : best of all the musician catches the skin over the very arm it’s coming off and folding itself, neat.
I hear someone behind me : I turn : a man is standing between the folds of canvas that make the door of my workshop : he’s quite young : he is adorned : his clothes are very beautiful : he himself inside the clothes is also good on the eye and he has an arrogance that actually has a colour : I will try quite a few times after this to mix that colour but will never be able to get it.
He is looking at my painting : he is shaking his head.
It’s wrong, he says.
Says who? I say.
Marsyas is a satyr and therefore male, he says.
Says who? I say.
Says the story, he says. Say the scholars. Say the centuries. Says everyone. You can’t do this. It’s a travesty. Says me.
Who’re you? I say
(though I know quite well who he is).
Who am I? Wrong question, he says. Who are you? Nobody. No one will ever pay you, not money, for this. It’s worthless. Meaningless. If you’re going to paint a Marsyas, Apollo has to win. Marsyas has to display ruin and be defeated. Apollo is purity. Marsyas has to pay.
He is staring at the picture with, is it a kind of anger? He comes up closer and rubs the lower corner roughly with a thumb and first finger.
Hey –, I say
cause I am annoyed at his touching it.
He acts like he can’t hear : he examines the fields and fencing and trees, the far houses, the rock formations, the people going about their day and the nothing unusual happening, the boys throwing stones in the river for a dog to chase, the woman tramping the cloth in the barrel, the birds in flight, the clouds going where they’re blown and the tree to which the musician was to be bound by ropes and from which the musician has twisted free.
He’s as close to the surface of the painting as he can get, so close it’s as if his eyelashes might be brushing the twigs and leaves of the crown on Apollo : he puts himself equally close to the place where the skin of the musician’s face and neck, all that’s left still attached to the body, meets the red of the underflesh : he steps back, steps back again, steps back again so he’s level with me : he looks down at the colours on my table.