by Ali Smith
By the time she gets back upstairs Henry is asleep. She knew he would be. She takes the photo he’s unstuck off the wall out of his hand (the picture of her mother as a teenager sitting on a statue in a park in Edinburgh right up on the back of the horse of whoever the man is the statue happens to represent) and sticks it back in its place (she has arranged them so that there is no chronology).
She sits down on the floor, leans back against her own bed and eats the toast.
It’s so boring, she says in Italy in the palazzo in the mock-child voice they always use for this game.
Only you would come through the doors of a palace designed especially to dispel boredom and know to say out loud, by some magic understanding of the meanings of things, that you find it boring, her mother says.
But George is playing the what’s-the-point-of-art game. Maybe her mother hasn’t realized she’s playing it.
There’s nobody else in this whole place but us, she says still in the voice. What’s the point, what’s the point of it? What’s it got to do with anything? What’s the point of art?
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen. (That’s the wording of one of her mother’s most retweeted Subverts.) Obviously. But this is a family game. They’ve played this game for years. It is one of her father’s games, he plays it to make her and her brother laugh whenever her mother makes them all go to a gallery. He pretends to be a slightly mentally challenged person. He pretends it so well that sometimes people in the galleries turn and look at him, or look away in case he really might be mentally challenged.
In this case the art in this room has already made something happen – the literal cheering-up of her mother, who happened last week to see a stray photo in an art magazine of one of the pictures from here, a blue-coloured picture of a man standing dressed in ripped white clothes and wearing an old rope as a belt, at the seeing and liking so much of which her mother literally stopped being sad (she has been in a bad mood for weeks now because of her friend Lisa Goliard disappearing) then announced to the family over breakfast three days ago that they were all going to see that picture for real next week and that she’d booked a hotel.
Nathan, can you take Wednesday to Sunday off? she said.
Nope, her father said.
Fine, she said. I don’t need you to look at pictures with me. George, can you take Wednesday to Friday off school?
I’ll have to check with my secretary, George said, I’ve got a very busy schedule. And I feel it’s my duty to inform you that it’s illegal to take children out of school just for holidays now.
How’s your throat? her mother said.
Really really sore, George said. I think it’s an infection. Where are we going?
Somewhere in Italy, her mother said. Henry, how’s your throat?
My throat is very well, thank you for asking, Henry said.
Henry, your throat is really sore, George said.
Is it? Henry said.
Otherwise you can’t come to Italy, George said.
Is it good there for throats? Henry said.
Now, in the palazzo, when George says the supposed-to-be-funny thing about what’s the point of art, Henry says, as if he thinks she means it too,
It’s really pretty.
Henry is gay. He must be. Though it’s true, this is a really pretty room. At least, that part up at that end there is, it’s spectacular, or maybe it’s just better lit than the other parts of the room. Her mother is off the whole length of the place towards it. It is like her mother has been struck by – what? Lightening. Her mother has lightened up since the minute they landed in this country and the plane door opened and the warmer air came in.
The moment they walked into this room she lightened even more.
Though it is embarrassing and excruciating when someone won’t play your game George gets over herself. She slips into her real self again.
Is this the place you were talking about in the car? she says. The moral conundrum?
Her mother says nothing.
She is looking.
George looks too.
The room is warm and dark. No, not dark, it’s light. Both. It’s like a huge dark dance hall with a lit-up picture that goes round some of its walls. There is nothing else in the room, except some low benches on which to sit and look at the walls, and over in the far corner a middle-aged lady (attendant?) on a folding seat. Apart from that, there is just the picture. It is impossible to see it all at once. Half the room is covered in it. The other half has faded picture, or no picture. What there is, though, is so full of life happening that it’s actually like life, at least those bits are at the far end. And the people in the broad blue stripe which goes all round the middle of the wall, all through the middle of the picture splitting it into an above and a below, look like they’re floating, or walking on air, especially in that brighter part.
It resembles a giant comic strip. Except it’s also like art.
There are ducks. There’s a man with his fist round the neck of a duck. The duck looks really surprised, like it’s saying what the f–. Above the duck’s head there’s another bird just sitting there completely free. It’s sitting next to the man and it’s watching him throttling the duck as if it’s quite interested in what’s happening.
This is only one detail. There are details like it everywhere. There’s a paddling dog. George stares at its genitals. In fact, look at the largeness of the testicles on all the creatures who have them everywhere in the picture, except the one creature you’d expect it on, the bull. He doesn’t seem to have any.
Then there’s a monkey hugging the leg of a boy, who regards it with snobby disdain. Over there there’s a very small child in a cap, in yellow, reading or eating something. An old woman holding a piece of paper is being attentive to the child. There are unicorns pulling a chariot here and lovers kissing there, and people with musical instruments here, people working up trees and in fields there. There are cherubs and garlands, crowds of people, women working at what looks like a loom up there, and down here there are eyes looking out of a black archway while people talk and do business and don’t notice the looking. There are dogs and horses, soldiers and townspeople, birds and flowers, rivers and riverbanks, water bubbles in the rivers, swans that look like they’re laughing. There’s a crowd of babies. They look haughty. There are rabbits, or hares, no, both.
The buildings in the picture are sometimes beautiful and sometimes broken open, there are broken road slabs and bricks, broken arches up against fine architecture and plants growing through the whole and broken buildings everywhere.
It is impossible, though, not to keep looking then looking back again at the blue-coloured stripe which runs like a frieze round the room between the upper part and the lower parts of the picture and in which the people and the animals seem to float free. The blue calls your eyes every time. It gives you a breather from the things happening above and below it. In the blue there’s a woman in a beautiful red dress just sitting in the air above a cheeky-looking goat or sheep. There’s the man in the white rags. That’s the man who was in the picture her mother saw at home. He’s why they’re here. Along from him, on the other side of the woman floating above the goat, there’s a young man or a young woman, could be either, dressed in beautiful rich clothes and holding an arrow or a stick and a gold hoop thing, like everything’s nothing but a charming game.
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 schoolchildren 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 m
ore 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.