by Ali Smith
Male or female? she says to her mother who’s standing under these figures.
I don’t know, her mother says.
Her mother, smiling, points to the man in rags then the woman sitting on air then the playful rather dilettante richly dressed figure in turn.
Male, female, both, she says. Beautiful, all of them, including the sheep. And look at that.
She points to the top level, the level it hurts more to look at for longer because it’s so high, where there are three chariots, pulled by different creatures, and a lot of people standing about, and birds and rabbits and trees and flowers and far landscapes.
In come the gods, her mother says.
Are they the gods? George says.
And nobody even notices, her mother says. Look at all the people round them. Like the gods are no big deal. In they come and nobody even bats an eyelid.
George turns on her heel to look at the other wall. Down that long side of the room there’s more of the picture. It’s meant to be the same kind of thing as this wall. The overall design is the same. But it’s just not as good, not as eyecatching or interesting – or maybe it hasn’t been as well restored.
George has a closer look at the other picture-wall.
Its figures are just not as beautiful. There are creatures, like that giant lobster there, but they’re nothing compared, say, to that horse on that wall looking out almost directly, whose eyes tell you he’s not at all sure about having that man on his back. There are people and flowers here too, even people covered in flowers, but they’re less attractive, or more grotesque, than the people there on that end wall where the horses get fatter as the skies get bluer.
It is meant to be the seasons, is it?
She goes back to the good wall.
It is like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details, like that man with the duck. They’re all also happening on their own terms. The picture makes you look at both – the close-up happenings and the bigger picture. Looking at the man with the duck is like seeing how everyday and how almost comic cruelty is. The cruelty happens in among everything else happening. It is an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is.
There doesn’t seem to be hunting or cruelty in the top parts, just the lower parts.
The unicorns have horns that look like they’re made of lit-up glass.
The clothes all the people are wearing look as if breeze is blowing through them.
George turns towards her mother and is surprised by how young and bright she looks standing under the blue.
What is this place? George says.
Her mother shakes her head.
Palazzo, she says.
Then she says a word that George can’t catch.
I’ve never seen anything like it, her mother says. It’s so warm it’s almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I’ve never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It’s never sentimental. It’s generous, but it’s sardonic too. And whenever it’s sardonic, a moment later it’s generous again.
She turns to George.
It’s a bit like you, she says.
Then she doesn’t say anything. She just looks.
The place is completely silent behind them except for the lady attendant who has been charmed by Henry into leading him from picture to picture and telling him the words for whatever he points at.
Cavallo, the woman says.
Horse, Henry says.
Si! the woman says. Bene. Unicorni. Cielo. Stelle. Terra. Dei e dee e lo zodiaco. Minerva. Venere. Apollo. Minerva Marzo Ariete. Venere Aprile Toro. Apollo Maggio Gemelli. Duca Borso di Ferrara. Dondo la giustizia. Dondo un regalo. Il palio. Un cagnolino.
She sees George and her mother are both listening to her too. She points at the blank and faded walls.
Secco, she says.
She points at the still-picture-covered walls.
Fresco, she says.
She points at the really good bright end wall.
Mando o andato a Venezia per ottenere il meglio azzurro.
I think she’s saying that the blue colour is Venetian, her mother says.
George’s mother goes over to speak to the attendant. She speaks in English. The attendant speaks back in Italian which her mother doesn’t speak. They smile at each other and have a conversation.
What did she say? George asks her mother as they leave the room through the curtained door and go down the stairs.
I’ve no idea, her mother says. But it was nice to talk to her.
Afterwards they sit at an outside restaurant table in the garden of this place. Yellow sweet-smelling flowers drop off the trees on to their heads and on to the table. George notices a huge crack in the outside of the palace building up near the roof.
The earthquake maybe, her mother says. Quite recent. Last year. I think we’re lucky to have got to see it at all. I think it’s just reopened to the public.
Is that why some of the walls have pictures and some just blank plaster? George says. And two of the people in the chariots on the end wall have faces and one of them doesn’t?
I don’t know, her mother says. I don’t know much about it. It was quite hard to find out anything. But I’m finding it quite enjoyable, not knowing.
But what about the moral conundrum? George says.
The what? her mother says.
The getting paid more for the better art, George says.
Oh, yes. That, her mother says. Well.
She tells George again about the artist who did part of the room five hundred and fifty years ago, who thought his work should be paid better than everybody else’s in the room and wrote a letter asking the Duke for more money.
In fact, what happened is something even more compelling, she says. Because that letter he wrote’s the only reason we know anything about that artist even existing. And they only found that letter a hundred years ago. Which was more than four hundred years after he painted his bit of the walls. For four hundred years he didn’t exist. No one even knew the room had frescoes in it till only about a hundred or so years ago, end of the eighteen hundreds. They’d been whitewashed over for hundreds of years. Then some whitewash fell off the walls and they found these pictures underneath. The room’d been lost till then.
So if you were in a room, I mean like if you were just sitting in a room. Could the room you were actually in get – lost? Henry says.
He looks stricken.
No, George says. Don’t be an idiot.
Don’t call your brother an idiot, George’s mother says.
You’re an idiot, Henry says.
Don’t call your sister an idiot, their mother says.
I didn’t call him an idiot, I said nidiot, George says. Nidiot is much worse than just idiot.
You’re far and away more of a nidiot than me, Henry says.
Than I am, George says.
Her mother laughs.
You can’t not do that, can you? she says. It’s your nature, isn’t it?
Do what? George says.
Henry runs off into the cow parsley at the rough end of the garden where there are some modern-looking sculptures and the meadow has been left to grow as high as it likes. Because the grass is so high he vanishes completely.
This is like a magic place, her mother says.
It’s true that it is kind of spectacular here, George thinks – and that’s the second time she’s thought the word spectacular – because when they walked out here a moment ago and down the garden path to this restaurant, which looked like it might be a junk shop but turns out to serve pasta and wine, a jazz track with old-fashioned piano and trumpets suddenly started playing as if by itself in the air (in reality out of one of the restaurant’s speakers) as if especially for them.
Now the garden fills with Italian sch
oolchildren younger than George and older than Henry. They sit round the tables and talk to each other.
Did he get the money in the end? George says.
Who? her mother says.
The painter, George says. Because he really was better. If he painted the part of the room at the far end.
I don’t know, George, her mother says. I know almost nothing about it. I only really know what I’ve told you, which is what it said under the picture when I saw it at home. When we get back I’ll read up about it. Though, you know, it might just be that our eyes are more used to finding some parts of the room more beautiful than the others, because of what we now expect beauty to be. It might be our standards rather than theirs. But I agree. I agree with you. Some of it is really outstandingly beautiful. Some of it is breathtaking. And I find it pretty interesting that the only reason we know that the painter who did that wall existed, even lived at all, is that he asked for more.
Like Oliver Twist, George says.
Her mother smiles.
In some ways, she says.
What was his name? George says.
Her mother screws up her eyes.
You know, I knew this, George, I did know. I read it when we were at home. But right now I can’t remember it, her mother says.
We came all this way to see a picture you like that much but you can’t remember the name of the man who did it? George says.
Her mother widens her eyes at her.
I know, she says. But it kind of doesn’t matter, does it, that we don’t know his name. We saw the pictures. What more do we need to know? It’s enough just that someone painted them and then one day we came here and saw them. No?
I could look it up on your phone, George says.
Then she immediately feels a mixture of things ranging from unpleasant all the way to bad.
(Guilt and fury:
– Sing me a love song
– No, my singing voice went with pregnancy
– I wonder where it went. I bet its in a cathedral city up in some fancy cathedral ceiling hanging out with the carvings of the angels
Fury and guilt:
– Howre your eyes today and how you doin what you doin where are you & whenll we meet)
Her mother doesn’t notice. Her mother has no idea. Her mother is looking down for where her phone is, checking it is safely in the pocket of her bag.
(George’s own phone is not a smartphone though she will be given one of her own in less than a year’s time, at Christmas, three and a half months after her mother dies.)
Let’s not look anything up, her mother says. It’s so nice. Not to have to know.
Her mother is going soft.
Not that there’s anything wrong with soft. Her mother, soft, forgetful, vague and loving, like other people’s mothers always seem to be, is a whole new prospect.
But it is very unlike her not to try to know or to find out everything there is to know. And this morning at the hotel, when they’d been leaving the breakfast room and passing the reception, her mother had said buona sera to the man and the girl behind the counter, and the girl had laughed. Then that girl had realized she was being impolite, had become ashamed and had stopped herself laughing. George had never seen anyone correct herself or himself like that.
Not buona sera, madam, forgive me, the man said. But it is buon giorno. Because you are wishing us a good evening and right now it is morning.
Outside the hotel her mother had stopped on the pavement and looked at George.
This place is shaking loose everything I thought I knew, she said. All the things I’ve been taking for granted for years.
She put her arm round George’s shoulder. She hugged Henry close in to her other side.
It is so bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit! she said.
She looked genuinely happy there on the pavement outside the shop selling the souvenirs and products of Ferrara.
George turns now in the palazzo garden and straddles the bench. She has noticed there’s something strange about those schoolkids and she has just realized what it is. None of them is on a phone or looking at a screen. They are all talking to each other. Some of them are now even talking to Henry, or trying to. Henry is describing something. He draws a circle in the air. The kids he’s talking to do the same circling thing with their arms.
George looks at her mother. Her mother looks at George. A yellow-white flower drops, brushes past her mother’s nose, catches in her hair and comes to rest on her collarbone. Her mother laughs. George feels the urge to laugh too, though she is still wearing her guilt / fury scowl. Half her mouth turns up. The other half holds its downward shape.
This town they’ve come to is both bright and grim. It is a place of walls and has a huge and imposing castle about which, if George were writing about it at school, she’d use the words impervious and threatening. There is this constant sense of battlement, then there are the winding high-walled little streets which look like nightmares will happen down them, that they’ll definitely leave you lost. But things change in a moment here, light to dark, dark to light, and although it is so stony it is somehow also bright green and red and yellow too; all the walls and buildings go red-golden in the sun. The walls are high and blank but it sounds as if beyond them is hidden garden. There are the long straight avenues of really beautiful trees, as if it’s not a city of walls at all, it’s a city of trees. In fact, all the buildings and walls have bits of tree and bush and grass sprouting out of them at the tops and up the sides of their bright walls.
It smells of jasmine, then more jasmine, then the occasional sewer, then jasmine again.
It’s very very strange here, her mother had said last night as they were getting ready for bed. I can’t quite get a grip on it.
She looked at the map on the bed.
It’s as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.
They’d been wandering about getting lost the whole day even though they had the map the hotel had given them. Things that looked close by on the map were, when they tried to get to them, actually quite far away; then they’d try to do something that looked like it’d take a very long time to do and they’d find themselves arriving almost immediately.
If her mother’d simply looked it up on Google Maps or Streetview they could’ve got to places with more precision and alacrity. But her mother is reluctant to look anything up, or even switch the phone on, for some reason.
Alacrity? That’s a good word, George, her mother says.
From the Latin. For briskness, George says.
We don’t need briskness. Let’s follow our noses unbriskly for a change. It’s the first modern city in Europe, her mother says as they walk back through it after seeing the palace. Because of the town planning and the walls. Though both of you are used to historic towns, growing up where you’ve grown up. You see stuff like this every day. It’s probably no big deal to you. Anyway, the palace we just saw, with the pictures, pre-dates even the walls. It’s from before this city was walled. It’s that early. It’s outstanding, for something that early.
Then she stops saying things like that and they simply wander in a daze looking a bit like the reprobate kids at school do after spliffing, because this is nothing like home. For instance now that it’s the time of day when people here come out and wander about, the streets are full of pedestrians. At the same time the streets are full of people on bikes but the cyclists all mingle in with the crowds and weave round and past her and her mother and Henry and all the other people in a way that seems effortless. It is miraculous that no one ever hits anyone and that people can cycle so slowly and not topple. Nobody topples. Nobody hurries, even in the rain. Nobody rings a bike bell (except, George notices, the tourists, who are easy to spot). Nobody shouts at anybody to get out of the way. Even very old ladies cycle here wearing black with their bicycle baskets full of things wrapped up in paper and tied with ribbons or string, as if being old, going to a shop an
d buying things and bringing them home are all completely different acts here.
A boy the same age as George passes them at a crossroads with his bare arms on either side of a pretty girl lightly perched holding on to nothing on his handlebars.
George’s mother winks at George.
George blushes. Then she is annoyed at herself for blushing.
That night the noise of the summer birds swooping round the roofs near their hotel gives way to a noise of drums and trumpets. They follow this new noise to a square where a crowd of quite young people, older than George but still young, some of whom wear historical costumes tabard-like slung over their jeans and T-shirts, or have leggings like the people in the pictures they saw earlier, one leg one colour, the other a different colour, are taking turns to do marching dances or dancing marches where they throw huge flags on sticks up in the air, flags which unfurl to be bigger than bedspreads as they go up then fold themselves round their sticks again as they come down. The flag throwers walk with them held at their backs against their shoulders like folded wings, then they wave them about in the air like outsize butterfly wings while other members of their teams (it seems to be a rehearsal for a flag-throwing contest) blow long medieval-looking horns and thump their drums.
She and her mother and Henry stand on an old historic staircase with the other people, above two tall sign boards which say on them TALKING WALLS (you can download a walking tour from each board and one will tell you about where a film director her mother likes grew up, and the other about Giorgio someone, her mother says a novelist who lived here in the past). It is so loud, the rehearsal, that it literally shakes these boards.