by Ali Smith
Why not? I said.
I’m not allowed near the river, he said. Not in these clothes.
Take them off, I said. We’ll hide them somewhere. They’ll be fine till we get back.
But then I worried for a moment in case I’d be expected to lose my own clothes if the boy did come down and remove his, cause I was now become my new self in the world, which involved taking strict pains to preserve what I appeared : though something in me also found this idea a good one, but in any case in the end there was no divesting of any sort, on this day at least, cause the boy called down –
I can’t. These are clothes I have to wear. And I’ve got to go in a minute. I have to attend celebrations. It’s my birthday.
Mine too! I said.
Really? he said.
Happy birthday, I said.
And to you, he said.
Years later he’d tell me it was my feet being bare on the path as I walked that he was most taken with, and it’d be some time, a long time, into our friendship before he’d tell me it wasn’t just cause he was in his best new clothes that he wouldn’t come that day to the river, it was that his mother didn’t like him going near rivers cause of the brother that had drowned before he was born, and he had been named for the brother, the others were all sisters.
We met whenever his family came to town, though increasingly in secret cause he was from a family which would have had little to do with mine, and we went often to the river so he could doubly defy his mother, first by going at all and second by going without her knowledge : but he never went by himself in case the river decided it wanted to claim this other brother too : though truth be told I didn’t know this about him until we were both much older.
On our first shared birthday he showed me all the things you can do if you’re balanced on the top of a very tall wall : you can hang yourself off it by nothing but your hands, then by nothing but one hand : you can walk along the top of it like a cat or a rope-walking gypsy performing : you can dance : you can run along it like a squirrel or stand on it on only one leg like a heron and do little jumps : you can tuck the other leg up behind your back or kick it openly back and fore while keeping your balance : finally you can jump off the wall up into the air with your arms out wide like a heron taking flight.
He demonstrated all these things except the last : of the last he only spread his arms like wings to show me, as if about to.
Don’t, I shouted.
He barked a laugh full of the daring of his dancing : he did one last leap in the air and landed square and safe sitting down with a thump on the top of the wall, his arms still wide : he swung his legs at me like a figure in a painting sitting half in and half out, legs over the woodframe.
You’re a boy afraid of a wall, he called down at me.
And you’re a boy with no idea how wrong he is, I called back at him. You’ll need to know me better. And to know I’m afraid of nothing. And my father is a maker of walls, among other things, and if you can kick your legs like you’re doing against one and nothing chips off it then you’re lucky, it’s a pretty good one. But that’s far too high a wall to jump off. Any fool can calculate that.
Exactly, and I’m no fool, he said and then stood up again as if to do the jump and made me laugh again. Instead of jumping he bowed as low as was safe to.
Bartolommeo Garganelli is very pleased, on this day auspicious to both of us, to make your quaintances, he said.
You might talk as fancy as your clothes, I said. But even a common fisher of gutterfish knows you’ve just got that last word wrong.
1 quaintance. 2 quaintances, he said. And I’ve met more than 2, I’ve met 3 of you. Expert fisher. Expert fish-thrower. Expert in walls and their trajectories.
If you’d care to come down, I said, I’ll consider introducing you to the rest of me.
Here I am again : me and a boy and a wall.
(I will take it as an omen.)
But this time the boy looks straight through me as if I’ve swallowed a magic ring and the ring has rendered me invisible.
(I will take this as an omen too.)
First he was all sainthood : now he’s all lovelorn : what use to him is a painter?
I’ll do what good I can.
I’ll draw him an open threshold.
I’ll put a lit torch in his hand.
For the making of pictures we need plants and stones, stonedust and water, fish bones, sheep and goat bones, the bones of hens or other fowls whitened in high heat and ground down fine : we can use the foot of a hare, the tails of squirrels : we need breadcrumbs, willow shoots, fig shoots, fig milk : we need bristles from pigs and the teeth of clean meat-eating animals, for example dog, cat, wolf, leopard : we need gypsum : we need porphyry for grinding : we need a travelling box and a good source of pigment and we need the minerals which are the source of colour : above all we need eggs, the fresher the better, and from the country not the town mean better colours when dry.
We can dull things down if they’re too bright with earwax which costs nothing.
We need skins of sheep and goats, clippings of the muzzles, feet and sinews, skin strips, skin scrapings, and a source of clear water to boil them in.
I think of all the sketches and dessins and paintings on panels and linens and crack-covered walls, all the colours and the willows and the hares and the goats and the sheep and the hoofs, all the eggs cracked open : ash, bones, dust, gone, the hundreds and hundreds, no, thousands.
Cause that’s all the life of a painter is, the seen and gone disappearing into the air, rain, seasons, years, the ravenous beaks of the ravens. All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
I’ll tell him instead about the small boy who wished to see the Virgin,
he prayed and he prayed, please let me see the Virgin : let Her appear here in the flesh before me : but an angel appeared instead and the angel said, yes you can see the Virgin, but I don’t want you to be naïve about it cause seeing Her is going to cost you one of your eyes.
I would gladly pay an eye to see the Virgin, the boy replied.
So the angel vanished and the Virgin appeared instead and the Virgin was so beautiful the boy burst into tears and then the Virgin vanished and when She did, just as the angel had said, the boy went blind in one eye, in fact when he put his hand up to feel his face with his hand there was no eye there, just a hole like a little cave in his face where the eye had been.
But even though he’d lost the eye, he had loved seeing Her so much that he wanted nothing more than just to cast eye (not eyes, cause he only had the one) on Her one more time.
Please let the Virgin appear to me again, he prayed and he prayed until the angel got fed up listening to him and arrived in a flashing of purple-gold-white wings and stood in front of him folding these wings with a graveness that meant business and said, yes you can see Her again but you have to know – I don’t want you entering into this contract naïvely – that if you do you will have to pay for it with the loss of your only remaining eye.
I rocked up and down on my mother’s knees with the blatant unfairness of it, it was a story in the pamphlet of Vincenzo illustrated by the nuns, one of the stories Vincenzo liked to tell to the multitudes who could hear every word he spoke for miles regardless of whether they knew his tongue or not, and it wouldn’t be till I could read for myself, some time after my mother had gone, and I found the pamphlet, True Happenings From The Life Of Most Humble Servant Vincenzo Ferreri Including Countless Miracles That Came To Pass screwed up behind the bedhead and I unfolded it and sat and read it to myself the first time, that I found that my mother had never ever, in all her tellings of it, told me the end of the story where
1. the Virgin appears again
2. the angel takes the second eye
3. then finally the Virgin gives the boy back both his eyes out of kindness,
instead she had always left me twisting myself in her arms on her lap with the dilemm
a of it.
Will he give away both his eyes? she said. What do you think? What should he do?
I put my fists up to my own eyes and dug the heels of the hands in to see if my eyes were both still there, to torture myself and imagine them gone while I waited for her to turn the page over from the drawing of the boy with the black holes where his eyes had been to the drawing which did not scare me so, of Vincenzo curing the dumb woman : one day Vincenzo met a woman who could not speak : she had never been able to speak : he cured her, after which she could speak like everybody else.
But before she’d uttered a word, he held up his book and his hand and he said – Yes, it’s true, you can speak now. But it’s best if you don’t. And I’d like you to choose not to.
So the woman said Thank you.
After which she never spoke again.
My mother always laughed hard at this miracle : one day she fell off a stool she was laughing so much at it, and lay on the floor beside me next to the upturned stool with her arms holding her chest, tears coming out of her eyes, laughing in a way that meant it was fortunate we were in the thick-walled part of the house and no passers-by could hear her laugh like that, like the wild women did who lived in the forest and were shunned, cause known to do witchery.
Otherwise she held me on her knee after my bath and told me the terrifying stories like the one about the boy whose father, Apollo the sun-god, forbade him from driving the horses who drew the sun across the sky from its place of rising to its place of setting every day cause those horses were too wild for him and too strong, and she glided her arm through the air to show the horses and the sun all going their steady way : but when the boy took the forbidden horses out she shuddered her arm (the horses getting a little bit too strong) then shook and threw her arm from side to side (the horses getting stronger and stronger) then her arm threw itself wildly about as if it was a wild mad thing no longer even a part of her (the horses out of control, the reins flapping loose in the air) and the day passed and became night in a second or 2 like the whole day passing in the swoop of a bird across the sky, then horses chariot boy all dashing to the ground so fast that words can’t – and here she made as if to drop me off her knee, as if I’d fall and hit the ground like them, but no, cause as soon as the fall seemed to start I’d find myself instead flung upwards not down, cause she’d stand up just as she dropped me, swing me up instead into the air very high and dangerous and free as if my heart and throat might leave my body and leap up above us both towards the ceiling – yet she never let go of holding me firm for a moment on either the down or the up, my mother.
Or the story of Marsyas the musician who was half-man and half-beast and who could play as sweetly as any god on his flute and did so until Apollo the sun-god himself heard rumours about how good the earthly musician was, came shooting down straight as a ray of light to earth, challenged him to a contest, won the contest and had the musician skinned alive as his prize.
Which isn’t necessarily the injustice that it sounds, my mother said. Cause imagine, the skin of Marsyas slipped off as easily as a tomato’s will in warm water to allow the red raw sweetness out of the fruit below. And the sight of such release moved everyone who saw it to a strength of feeling more than any music anywhere played by any musician or god.
So always risk your skin, she said, and never fear losing it, cause it always does some good one way or another when the powers that be deign to take it off us.
This boy is a girl.
I knew it.
I know it cause we sat on that poor specimen of wall (which will not last) until a much older woman, bent by the years, came out of the dwelling behind us making a great furore : she poked the boy in the back with the bristle end of a brush on a long wood pole and she shouted something and as we came away the boy made, I think, apology, very polite and in the unbroken undisguised voice of what can only be girl.
Also, this girl is good at dance : I am enjoying some of the ways of this purgatorium now : one of its strangest is how its people dance by themselves in empty and music-less rooms and they do it by filling their ears with little blocks and swaying about to a silence, or to a noise smaller than the squee of a mosquito that comes through the little confessional grille in each of the blocks : the girl was doing a curving and jerking thing both, with the middle of her body, she went up then down then up again, sometimes so low down that it was a marvel to see her come back up again so quick, sometimes pivoting on one foot and sometimes on the other and sometimes on both with her knees bent then straightening into a sinuous undulate like a caterpillar getting the wings out of the caul, the new imago emerging from the random circumbendibus.
Also, this girl has a brother : he is several years younger, of the same open countenance but also fatter, weller, much less shadowed at the eyes, and dancing can be as catchy as laughing and I was not alone in this knowledge cause into the room came this small boy with long and brown curling hair to dance the same dance very badly (boy I know anatomically cause bare as a bacchus cherub from the midriff down) : he danced the dance badly and laughingly half naked round her till the girl, who could not hear him and did not know he was doing it till she opened her eyes and saw him, roared like a furious African cat, hit him over the head with her hand and chased him from the room, by which I gauged them sister and brother.
She started the dance again : she performed its strangeness with such deftness and attention that I was filled with verve by her taking of her own ups and downs so earnestly.
I’ve come to like this girl who will so solemnly dance with herself.
Right now she and I are outside the house that is home to her and the brother : we are sitting in a garden of shivering flowers.
Through the small window she holds in her hands we are viewing frieze after frieze of lifelike scenes of carnal pleasure-house love enacted before our eyes : the love act has not changed : no variation here is new to me.
Cold here and she’s shivering too : surmise she is watching the love act repeating like this to keep herself warm.
The little brother came out here too and by a single glance in his direction she both warned him and dismissed him : this is a girl with a very strong eye : he hasn’t gone far, he is behind a small wicker fence about as tall as he is, behind which there are tall black barrels hidden close to the door of the house and I think has some mischief planned : every so often he dashes out on to the grass in front of the fence and picks up a stone or twig then dashes back behind the fence and he has done this several times now without her noticing him once.
Girl, I remember it, the way the game of love makes the rest of the world disappear.
Best not to watch it through such a small window, though.
Best on the whole not to watch it at all : love is best felt : the acts of love are hard and disillusioning to view like this unless done by the greatest master picturemakers : otherwise the seeing of them being done and enjoyed by figurations of other people will always lock you outside them (unless your pleasure comes from taking solo pleasure or pleasure at one remove, in which case, yes, that’s your pleasure).
Now inevitably I am thinking of Ginevra, of most lovely Isotta, of silly little lovely little Meliadusa, and Agnola, and the others into whose company I came first in my 17th year the night Barto and I, having been to see the processions in Reggio, travelled back to the city and Barto took me to what he called a fine place to spend the night.
What do you think, Francescho, will we go and see the Marquis be celebrated becoming the Duke? Barto’d said.
I asked permission of my father cause I’d a longing to see a throng : he said no : he said it unblinkingly.
Tell him it’ll be good for your work, Barto said. We’ll go a journey and see history be made.
I repeated the gist of this to my father.
There’s much for a painter to see there, I said, and if you ever want me to get closer to the court and its workshops there’s much I ought to know, much I ought not to miss.<
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My father shook his head : no.
If these fail, Barto said, tell him you’re going with me and that this is an intelligent thing to let a painter do cause the more chance my family has to see your skill – you’ll draw the procession, won’t you – the more chance there is they’ll give you work when you’re fledged. And tell him you’ll be away for only one night and that my parents will give you your lodging in Reggio at one of our houses.
But your houses are nowhere near Reggio, I said.
Francescho, you’re green as an early leaf, Barto said.
There are a lot of kinds of green, even in just the earliest leaves, I said.
How many kinds of green are there? Barto said.
7 main kinds altogether, I said. And perhaps 20 to 30, maybe more, variations on each of these kinds.
And you’re all of those greens put together, he said, cause anyone but you would already have gathered and would never have needed to be told that I’ve other plans for us than our spending the night at Reggio. Look at you, you’re still calculating, aren’t you, how to make how many greens is it?
It was true : so he laughed and threw an arm round my shoulder and kissed the side of my head.
My sweet unassuming friend, taker of things, people, birds, skies, even the sides of buildings at their word, he’d said. I love you for your greenness, and it’s partly in honour of it that I want you to persuade your father to let you accompany me. So persuade him. Trust me. You’ll never regret it.
Well, Barto was always wise to how to go about such things, cause sure enough the thought of a Garganelli bed with his offspring tucked in its sheets made my father blink, pause, then say the yes we needed though he gave me plenty ultimatums about behaviour and even had a new jacket made for me : I packed some things, left early in the morning and met Barto : we got to the town of Reggio and we saw it all.
We saw more people than I’d ever imagined and all packed into the square of the small town and we saw the flags, we saw the white banners with the figures painted on them : we saw it all very well too from the balcony of the house of Garganelli family friends (who were off on a Venetian ship touring to the Holy Land, Barto said, so didn’t care who was on their balcony) : there were horsebacked courtiers : there were boys waving and tossing flags high into the air and then catching them : then a platform came pulled by horses so white they must’ve been white-leaded : on the higher bit of it there was an empty seat, tall, painted and cushioned like a throne and 4 youths stood at each of its corners draped in togas, meant to be ancient Romans of great wisdom with their faces charcoaled to make them look old and we were so close we could see the drawn lines at their brows and eyes and mouths : below them on the lower bit of the platform were 4 more boys, 1 at each corner, holding tall banners with ensigns of the town’s and the new Duke’s colours, that made 8 boys altogether and a 9th one too sitting at the front, and all 9 dressed-up boys struggling to keep their balance cause there was nothing to hold on to when the man leading the horses stopped them and the platform rocked to a halt below us.