The Malacia Tapestry

by Brian W Aldiss

  Although Fatember was as hefty as befits an artist who spends much time dissecting men, horses and ancestral animals, every year bowed his broad shoulders a little further, and trained a mass of grey hair about those shoulders. Age and bitterness had added to his ruin since I last saw him; yet those startling black eyes held their power, reinforced by the great black line of his eyebrows. There was no man I respected more than he: if this was failure, then I admired it, and was proud to be in its company.

  'I came to see how the frescoes were progressing, Nicholas.'

  'All finished this very day. No, they're as incomplete as they were, Buglewing before last, when you and the players were performing in the great hall. God will not allow me to portray the happiness of princes while my family starves — my damned principles interfere with my brush strokes, you know. Nothing's happening. I can't work any more without pay and — although I don't want to complain to your face about your own brother-in-law — Milord Volpato would be better employed setting his lands in order than involving me in his schemes for self-aggrandizement. Everything always comes back to land. Use it well, your life's fulfilled, use it ill, your life wastes. Of course, we wretches who never owned a bean-strip find it easy to perceive such fundamentals. Give a man a dowry of a dozen farms and he finds truth more difficult to get at. I'm so hard up I've even had to sack the lad who was colouring in my skies.'

  As he was making this speech, Fatember led me through a side door and across a court where no sun penetrated. Although he ranked among the greatest painters of the age, he had wasted a decade here — indeed, seemed to have settled for ever, for ever working or not working on the Mantegan frescoes, for ever experimenting with a dozen other arts. His genius was of the truculent kind which generates its own impediments.

  'If I marry well, Nicholas, I will see to the money.'

  'That "if" you give me is one of the great shattering weapons of Time. Don't talk like Volpato… Don't marry well, either. No man needs to be the butt of envy. I'm spared that, at least.'

  We entered the banqueting hall, with its pendant vaulting and a splendid lattice window, fantastic with carved transoms, overlooking the bustling water traffic of the Toi. Fatember's unfinished frescoes took their orientation from this window, and their lighting schemes.

  The theme of these famous frescoes was the Activities of Man under the Dereliction of Evil and the Valour of Good. Only one or two pastoral scenes and an ancestral hunt were complete; for the rest, several isolated figures or details of background stood out on the expanse of naked wall behind the scaffolding. On a trestle-table lay sheets of paper, most of them covered with Fatember's bold cartoons. Perfection was adumbrated, but had still to be realized.

  As for the great man himself, he stood stock still, resting a hand heavily on my weaker shoulder and staring about the room as if he had never entered it before. Then he broke away and marched ponderously over to the window, to stand on the dais before it and glower back at me. In the quiet of the great room, as I waited, a brown mouse jumped from the table and scuttled into a corner.

  'And Time has other skilled torturers,' Fatember continued. 'I see a pigment in my mind's eye. So real, I could almost pluck it from my pupil. I work for a week to mix it, and then not only is it not as I imagined but the tonal quality I had in mind is lost, wiped out.'

  'Nothing comes out quite as you visualize it, Nicholas.'

  He stamped his foot so vigorously that dust rose from the boards beneath his sandal.

  'Don't respond if you have no truer response than that! Why should a vision not be realizable in actuality? Why should it not? Why are we granted visions, if not that they are capable of realization?'

  'Visions may be their own realization. They may themselves be actual. I've just been through an experience —'

  'Nonsense. What do you know about it? My vision for these walls remains in all its magnificence. I know that you and Volpato and your sister and half of damned Malacia cannot comprehend on their life why I don't produce — why I don't yield like a meadow, why I don't yoke myself up to my genius and get pulling until all is complete, my vision fulfilled. Well, for one thing, if I'm a meadow, I'm a sour one, over-cropped, never dunged. And if I'm an ox, I've been out to forage for too long, and no longer care for the rasp of the yoke on my shoulders. But if I'm a fool, that's different! Mayhap I prefer to leave the vision in all its glory where it retains its glory, inside my great wooden pudding of a head' — he smote it — 'where the mice and merchants can't get at it. Hey? Rather than trot it out on plaster and have not a thing left to warm the rest of my years. Such visions as mine come only once in a lifetime, Perian, understand that.'

  He strode about, angrily pleased to have an audience.

  'Is it impertinent to suggest that we should all be better for being able to share your vision?'

  'Better? Better? Is a man morally improved by an eight-course meal? Art don't improve you like blood-letting. The great artists have all been villains, yes, and the great patrons, give or take a few sanctimonious exceptions. No, you may want my vision, you may think you deserve my vision, but the truth is I care for nobody's wants but my own and God's when it comes to painting.'

  He marched about the hall, making it echo with his words and the slap of his sandals on the tiles. Thought of his vision warmed him. It seemed to materialize in the air as he expounded on what he intended to do despite the world.

  Then he fell gloomily silent, scratching his armpit and gnawing his bearded lip.

  'New horizons… New perspectives on failure…' he muttered.

  I stood looking at the grand marriage scene. It existed complete as a scaled cartoon, and had been sketched life-size on one wall, with areas of basic colour blocked in. It commemorated the marriage of an early Mantegan to Beatrice of Bergonia.

  Beatrice was a slender figure, leaning backwards in a chariot shaped like a swan and extending a hand to the handsome young spouse beside her. She was more fully finished than the rest of the composition, which existed in ghost form. Light lingered on her with a serene intimacy — and on her banners and followers with no less lucidity, into the distance. The cathedral, with its gothic galleries, and a view beyond it of plain and mountain, were boldly drawn in over delicate construction lines, proof of Fatember's command of perspective. I saw that when and if the scene were completed, it would stand for the ideal in all marriages.

  The artist gave it a shrugging shoulder and moved to a panel which was almost complete. The panel was narrow, fitting expertly into the space available between a doorway and an oriel window; it depicted soldiers with their tents behind them. They were shooting buglewings from a dark sky. A peasant boy stood watching them, wearing a large helmet and tottering under the weight of a shield. In the background rose a fantastic city, bright in painted sunshine.

  'The peasant child — he's a little comic masterpiece,' I said.

  'He's me. Longing to be a soldier, destined never to fight.'

  'Don't be so gloomy, Nicholas, though you relish it! The virtuosity in this panel alone is —'

  He turned angrily on me. 'Don't offend me with talk of personal virtuosity! It may be well enough on a stage, where you need but dazzle an audience for an hour. Here it has no place beside the disciplines. A virtuoso can bring death to art. The tradition ever since Albrecht has been lost because of show-offs, who kill necessary steady progression… There, you're right, I'm too gloomy — Malacia is for the status quo, not for progression.'

  'Do you know Otto Bengtsohn? He believes Malacia should progress.'

  He glared at me from under his shaggy brows. 'I'm a solitary man. I cannot help Bengtsohn nor he me. Yet I respect his ideas. They'll kill him, just as mine will kill me… No, no, Perian, you know I don't complain at my wretched lot, yet the truth is that I can do nothing, nothing! Outside, beyond these walls of mould and mouse-fart, stands the great burning world of triumphs and nobilities, while I'm stuck here immobile. Only by art, only through painting, can one master
that burning world and its secrets! Seeing is not enough — we do not see until we have copied, until we have faithfully transcribed everything… everything… . especially the divine light in all its variety, without which there is nothing.'

  'If you could only continue the work you would have something more than a transcription —'

  'Don't flatter me, Perian, or I'll send you packing as I do the others. You do flatter — it's an ill trait and I hate it. I'll take money, Minerva knows I'll take money, but not praise. Only God is worthy of praise, God and the Devil. There is no merit anywhere but God gives it. See the locks of that soldier's hair, the bloom on the peasant boy's cheek, the plumage of the bird as it flutters dying to the sward — do I have them exact? No I do not! I have imitations! You don't imagine — you are not deceived into believing there is no wall there, are you?

  'A wall is a wall, and all my ambition can only make it less than a wall. You look for mobility and light — I give you dust and statuary! It's blasphemy — life offered death! Vanity's at the bottom of it. Do you wonder I delay, hating vanity so?'

  He stood completely still, fixing his gaze in loathing on the fantastic city.

  Finally, he turned away and said, as if opening a new topic of conversation, 'Only God is worthy of praise. He gives all things, and many gifts we are unable to accept. We run screaming with rage from his generosity. Malacia has entered a new age, Master Perian: the man you mention, the man from the north with his revolutionary ideas, is one token of it. I can feel the new age about me, cooped up though I am in this rat-riddled pile. Now at last — for the first time in a hundred thousand years — men open their eyes and look about them. For the first time, they construct engines to supplement their muscles and consult libraries to supplement their meagre brains — not here, perhaps, but elsewhere, elsewhere. And what do they find? Why, the vast, the God-given, continuity of the world!'

  Pausing as if to digest his own words, he suddenly broke out again on a new approach, at the very moment that I had resolved to speak about my visitation in the forest.

  'For years — all my life — I've slaved to learn, to copy, to transcribe. Don't tell me I'm idle… Yet I have not the ability to do what a single beam of light does. Here, my friend, come with me! One moment. I'll show you how favourably one tick of God's work compares with a century of mine!'

  Impulsively, he seized my tunic and drew me from the banqueting hall, leaving the door to slam behind us. Among its echoes, we hurried back through the court.

  'Why should I decorate this dump? Let what is dead die for ever

  Gripping my arm, he led — or rather propelled — me back to the stable that housed him. His little children sprawled and played, calling out at his entry. Fatember brushed them aside. He climbed the ladder to his loft, pushing me up before him. The children cried merrily to entice him to join their play; he shouted at them to be silent.

  The loft made a capacious workshop. Fatember had boarded off one end of it. The rest was filled with tables and materials, his endless pots and brushes of all sizes, with piles of unruly paper, with instruments of every description, with geometrical figures, and with a litter of objects which bespoke his intellectual preoccupations: an elk's foot, a shatterhorn tusk, skulls of grab-skeeters and dogs, piles of bones, a plaited hat of bark, a coconut, fir-cones, shells, branches of coral, dead insects, sections of armour like dismembered bodies, and lumps of rock, as well as books on fortifications and other subjects.

  Fatember brushed through these inanimate children too. Flinging back a curtain at the rear of the workshop, he gestured me in, crying, 'Here you can be in God's breeches-pocket and survey the universe! See what light can paint at the hand of the one true Master!'

  We were in a stuffy, dark alcove. A table stood in the centre. On it was a startling picture painted in varied colours; so brightly did it glow that it seemed to light the room. One glance told me that Fatember had happened on some miraculous technique, far superior to Bengtsohn's mercurization process, which set him as far apart from other artists as men are from other animals.

  Something moved in the picture.

  In awe I went towards it. In disappointment, I saw that we were in the presence of an ordinary camera obscura. Above us was the little aperture through which light, directed by a lens, shone in from a small tower set in the stable roof.

  Exclaiming with relish, Fatember rubbed his hands together.

  'Can our art counterfeit a picture as perfect as this? All achieved by one paltry passing beam of light! Why should a man — what drives a man — to compete against Nature itself? What a slave I am to my absurd vision!'

  As he complained with gusto, I stared at the scene on the table. From the perspectives of the rooftops, we looked down on a stretch of road beyond the castle, where the Toi ran beside its dusty margins. The road branched as it climbed the hill, one way leading to an old cemetery, the other winding up to the castle gate. By the river, resting on boulders, sat a group of people as dusty as the road itself, their mules tethered nearby. I could see, very minutely, an elderly man who mopped his bald head with a kerchief, a widow woman in black who fanned her face with a hat, and so on. I identified them as a group of penitents, embarked on a pilgrimage and making life hard for themselves. Every tiny detail was perfect.

  'You perceive how they are diminished, my friend,' said Fatember. 'We see them as through God's eye — or the Devil's, for his may be sharper than God's. We believe them real, yet in truth we are looking at marks on a table, light impressions that leave no stain! Look, here comes my wife, toiling back up the hill — yet it is not my wife, only a tiny mark which I identify with my wife. What is its relation to her?'

  'You don't know how recent experiences cause me to be frightened by such remarks as yours, Nicholas.'

  He gestured at the table, ignoring me.

  'She has been copied by a master painter, who uses only light. Light here, flesh there. Reality there, the ideal here.'

  'Why do you believe that is reality down there?'

  'I know my wife when I see her.'

  I watched as the figure of his wife, climbing towards the castle gate, traversed a centimetre or two of table top.

  'Shall we go down and greet your wife?'

  'She has nothing to say. She probably has nothing to eat either, poor jade!' To dismiss her, he stepped back and turned a handle, moving the lens. At once, the slowly climbing woman and the penitents were swept away. Rooftops and gables appeared in the enchanted circle, and then an inner court.

  The steep perspective, the amazing brilliance of the scene, lent the buildings so novel an air that I uttered a cry of surprise on recognizing the scene.

  Minute birds flittered across the table-top picture. They were images of the very cavorts my sister and I had watched an hour earlier. I could even see a haze of cat's fur, spread out like a web and stirred by the warm circulating breath of the courtyard. I looked for my bedroom window. Yes, it was there, and, on the open sill, there was Poseidon himself, staring out at the creatures making free with his abandoned coat! Although the entire window with its parched woodwork was less than half the size of my finger-nail, every detail of it and the cat showed to perfection.

  With startling speed, the view was blotted out by a bird, which rose as if from the depths of the table until it covered it entirely. A scrabbling sounded overhead, and a cavort fluttered down between Fatember and me.

  'Wretched creatures, winged rodents!' Fatember said, lumbering about and striking at the bird, clouting me in the process. 'This isn't the first time one has tumbled in here, making a mess over everything. Get out of the way while I kill it!'

  As he rushed at it savagely, I stepped back and said, 'Nicholas, I need to confide in you. I have undergone the most transforming experience of my life. I was in the forest —'

  'I'll get you, you pest!' He rushed by me, seizing up a long set-square, with which he swiped wildly at the terrified bird. I jumped out of his way.

  'Nichola
s, I had a visitation in the forest, which has disturbed me profoundly.'

  'Like this damned bird!' He chased it into a corner but it skimmed away again, darting past my head. 'You vermin, no you don't!'

  'To be brief, Nicholas, this visitation I'm talking about persuaded me that we may never be able to understand reality, owing to perhaps merciful limitations in our perceptive powers.'

  'Never mind understand — master!' he cried, bringing the set-square so savagely down against a wall that it broke. He rushed after the bird with his fists. 'There's no place for you here — this is a sanctuary of art, you feathered turd!'

  'You devote your life to transcribing what you believe to be real. I fear that what we regard as real is itself a transcription, something sketched by Powers as much beyond us as we are beyond that luckless bird. That there are pentimento moments, when one layer shows through another. That art and life, fact and fiction, are linked transcriptions of each other —'

  'Here's one life I'll do away with! Nearly got it then!'

  'That all arts are an attempt to break down the… an imposed hallucination that we call —'

  He blundered past me. 'I'll give it break down! I'll kill the damned thing before it wrecks my place! Oh, how I'm cursed — now you see what I have to put up with. Out of my way, Perian, for Satan's sake, man!' He lunged again, furiously, striking at the bird with a wooden batten and nearly hitting me. He was beside himself with rage, cursing as the cavort mewled in terror. I ducked under his flailing arm and retreated to safety down the ladder.

  In the rough living area, Fatember's ragged children were mewling with delight as their mother entered by the street door. She had materialized at almost the same time as the cavort. Besieged by little bodies, she leant for a moment against the door to recover her breath, and her great furled wings rustled against the woodwork. She greeted me wearily and sat down to rest, whereupon the children climbed all over her.