by Ali Smith
They tell her firmly that it’s not how things are done here and they ask her firmly to leave.
She starts to shout about how she wants to see the director of the school.
A man comes out of a room because of the commotion. He asks her what she wants to see the director for. She tells him she wants a place at the school. She tells him she’s a genius.
He looks at her drawings.
He says, okay, starting tomorrow you’ll be our student.
(He’s the director.)
Soon after she starts at the art school she walks past a cupboard with a notice on it. FILM CLUB. She opens its doors. It’s full of film equipment.
She has never made a film. But she gathers some friends together and they take as much of the equipment as they can carry and move it to her lodgings.
With these friends, and with the help of some very kind strangers, she makes a short film based on one of her favourite stories, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis, she says much later in her life, seems like a powerful act of accusation against the daily grind that makes us indifferent to past, present and future injustice. She calls the film K. She charges the cost of the rather complicated technical stuff on it, developing, dubbing and so on, to the University.
Some days later she’s called in to see the school director again.
He asks her about a large sum of money she’s signed for in the name of the University without asking anyone’s permission.
He warns her she’s liable to go to jail if she’s falsified a financial signature.
She starts to shake. But she tells him about the film.
Okay, he says. This is what we’ll do. We’ll show this film to the rest of the students and I’ll decide when I see whether they like it or not what I’m going to do with you.
At the film’s first showing he introduces her to someone he’s invited to see the film too, a man who’s the director of the British Film Institute.
The British Film Institute director, the art school director and the art school students clap and cheer at the end of the film she’s made.
The BFI awards her an experimental film grant.
She starts working on a new film with this money.
It’s a story about two deaf mutes who live and work in the rubble and the looming old architecture of London’s east end, where they walk the streets talking to each other in sign language, about love, about how to keep properly clean and decent in the dusty postwar aftermath and about things they find strange or beautiful. They’re often followed around by a crowd of funny and merciless children.
This film is called Together.
Like K, it is small, slight, immensely powerful, it is both everyday and near-apocalyptic and it is like nothing any other filmmaker is making at the time.
She meets the filmmaker Lindsay Anderson.
He helps her with the edit of Together.
With him, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, she becomes one of the founders of the Free Cinema movement. Their film work and programming revolutionize the possibilities in British filmmaking. Meanwhile, at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, Together is applauded and loved by both critics and audiences.
Around this time Lorenza Mazzetti returns to Italy to live with her twin sister for a while. Don’t imagine those ghosts have left her in peace throughout all the above; the bleeding ghosts still accompany her, wherever she is, whatever she’s doing. They’d been in my unconscious for too long.
So she writes a novel called Il Cielo Cade. The Sky Falls. It’s about the murder of her family, about the religious and political divisions that divide and rule people, and is told from the point of view of a very young child.
After it, she writes another, Con Rabbia, the literal translation of which is With Rage, or Angrily. It’s a sequel to The Sky Falls and it’s told from the perspective of an adolescent revolutionary soul infuriated by the indifference she sees everywhere after the war regardless of what has happened to so many people. I couldn’t live in calmness and boredom any more. My hand has touched blood and tragedy and I know that while boredom was dozing reality was preparing the apocalypse.
Over the course of her life Mazzetti will paint, exhibit, write and publish in many forms and make more short film interludes; like all her work these short film pieces are about the rupture that happens when innocence and knowledge meet, and about how to retain that innocence even at the core of a smashed-up adult psyche. She will build a puppet theatre in the Campo di Fiori in the centre of Rome and perform over the years to countless audiences her version of Punch and Judy.
Her last great project, Album di Famiglia, or Family Album – a set of paintings featuring portraits of her family up to the time of the murders, and visions of the Tuscan countryside in a sunny, gorgeous summer with Nazis under the trees and fascists teaching the schoolchildren – will bring to mind artists like Henri Matisse and Charlotte Salomon, by their style, by a shared understanding of the way light falls regardless of what it falls on, and by their sheer colourfulness.
—
Does a life end at the death?
How do we define a life?
How do we come to understand what time is, what we’ll do with it, what it’ll do with us?
Everybody’s lifeline is broken somewhere.
Much of what I’ve told you here can be found in Lorenza Mazzetti’s novels, and in her memoir, Diario Londinese, published in English as London Diaries.
The English word for summer comes from the Old English sumor, from the proto-indo-european root sam, meaning both one and together.
I can’t remember where this next quote you’re about to read is from. It’s nothing to do with Mazzetti, though it’s everything to do with her, and us all. But I copied it into a notebook some years ago and now I can’t find its source.
Creativity is cultural not because it is derivative of it, but because it aims to heal culture. Art saturated with the unconscious acts like a compensatory dream in the individual: it tries to rebalance and address deep-rooted problems.
—
As Mazzetti tells it, not long after the summer killing of her family, a vanguard of Allied soldiers arrives at the house in Italy where they’ve been murdered. English and Scottish soldiers find a couple of shellshocked children sitting beside some newly filled graves.
The first thing they do is teach those children to sing some songs, in English.
The first song they teach them?
You Are My Sunshine.
Meet me here in two hours exactly, Grace said. I’m going for a walk.
It was Saturday morning. They were still in Suffolk. They were standing on the pavement outside a cafe in the sunny cold.
A walk? her daughter said.
Yes, Grace said.
By yourself? her daughter said.
By myself, Grace said.
You don’t go for walks, her daughter said. I don’t remember you going for a walk ever.
You are not the expert on me, Grace said.
Can’t we come? her daughter said.
No, Grace said.
Why? her daughter said.
You’ll be bored, Grace said.
I won’t, her daughter said. He might.
You need to give me some cash, her son said.
What for? Grace said.
The people will get angry if we wait here for two hours and don’t buy anything to eat or drink, her son said.
You just ate a huge breakfast, Grace said.
Yeah but we can’t wait around for all that time in a cafe and not pay for something, her son said.
You don’t have to stay here the whole time, Grace said. You could go and do something, anything. Go and explore. It’s a lovely day.
It’s freezing, her daughter said.
Go down to the beach, Grace said. There’s a
putting green. Go to the putting green.
It won’t be open, her son said. It’s February.
Why don’t you want us to come with you? her daughter said.
Her daughter didn’t really want to come with her. Really she was just being meddlesome because she sensed Grace wanted some time to herself for some reason.
Because believe it or not I want some time to myself. For my own reasons, Grace said.
Where are you going to go? her daughter said.
To look at an old church, Grace said.
You are not, her daughter said.
How about you two go the amusement arcade, Grace said. That’ll be open. Go to the pier.
I’m not going to an arcade, her daughter said.
I’ll need some money if we’ve got to spend time in an arcade, her son said.
Grace got her purse out and gave him a £20 note.
That’s not nearly enough, he said. That’s only ten shots on a Terminator.
It is more than enough, and in any case you’ve to give half of that to Sacha, Grace said.
I already factored Sacha in on the ten shots, her son said.
We can get them to change it here at the till, her daughter said. I’ll do it.
No, I’ll do it, her son said. I’ll do it at the arcade.
I’m not going to an arcade, her daughter said. Give it to me now and I’ll get the man at the till to change it.
No, her son said.
Right, Grace said, whatever. Go and do anything you like, I don’t care what it is you do, so long as you both meet me right here outside this cafe, nowhere else, at twelve, I’ve ordered a taxi, there’s a London train from Ipswich at two thirty.
She wants private time to herself for a secret reason, her daughter said.
That’s correct, Grace said. Bye.
She set off in the direction she thought was right. It might be completely wrong. It’d been thirty years. She didn’t remember the name of the church, or maybe never actually knew it. She didn’t remember anything more than that she’d found it by chance, it was out of town, about a mile maybe? Then down a single track road skirted by bramble bushes.
At the edge of the town there was a housing estate that wasn’t there before.
It was perfectly possible the church wouldn’t be there any more, or that someone’d have turned it into a bijou second home, or even that it’d have fallen into the sea. It wasn’t that far from the edge of things if she remembered rightly.
Behind her, her children were still squabbling in the street. She didn’t even turn her head. She walked on as if they didn’t exist, as if she’d never had them, they were someone else’s responsibility and nothing to do with her. She crossed the bridge between the town and the marsh and went towards the housing estate on the hill.
Then turn right at the marsh.
Then look for the little road.
If she turned left here, she saw, the road would take her to the house they’d met the old man in yesterday, who’d mistaken her son for his sister.
Poor Robert!
But he was so happy to think he’d seen her, Charlotte said last night at supper.
They ate in a wooden-walled restaurant in the hotel. There were candles. It was very nice, actually.
Just overjoyed at the notion that he’d somehow seen her, Charlotte said. It didn’t put him up or down that Robert wasn’t her.
I’m not a girl, her son said. I don’t look like a girl.
But something about you. The person you are. It gave that man a great deal of pleasure, Charlotte said. Something about you hit home for him. It’s not about whether you’re a girl.
But I don’t, he said. Look like a girl.
There’s nothing wrong with a boy looking like a girl, Charlotte said. In fact it’s generally accepted that it’s a core quality of true beauty, a bit of symbiosis between the genders.
A bit of what? her son said.
Symbiosis, Arthur said.
Like in biology? her son said.
The old man they’d met was a hundred and four years old. A hundred and four! They talked about that over supper. They talked about how amazing it was that the woman looking after him wasn’t related to him, they were just friends, he was living on her grace, or her family’s, in these latter years of his life, just because they’d been neighbours when she was a child. They talked about her telling them how it was the first time since she’d known him that the old man had ever said anything about having a sister.
And he was just full of happiness, Charlotte said. His sister, there in front of him. Even though she wasn’t.
Is that symbiosis? her son said.
Like meeting history personified, meeting him, Grace said. What a story. Alive since the First World War. Interned in the Second World War.
That’s patronizing, her son said. He’s a person. He’s not history.
We have a war story too, her daughter said. Our dad’s mother. I’m named after her. Her name was Sacha Albert. Have you ever heard of her? She was a concert violinist.
Jeff insisted, Grace said. I wanted to call her my own mother’s name.
Thank God she didn’t, her daughter said. Or you’d all be talking right now to someone called Sybil.
Laughter round the table.
Grace didn’t laugh.
Her daughter cast a guilt-stricken look at Grace. Her daughter knew it was a delicate matter.
But Grace was out for a meal with some people who were nice, kind, if still virtual strangers, so she decided to be gracious, nodded to her daughter that it was all right to talk about her father’s side of the family.
Her daughter gave her a grateful glance back and went on talking about Jeff’s family.
She was French, her daughter said. She died when I was ten.
I was seven, her son said.
And her mother’d died in the war when she was only three, her daughter said. And the people who brought our grandmother up, they knew she’d died because a girl came to see them in the war and told them what had happened. She said people had seen her be shot dead after she tried to help a lady in a market square stand up after a Nazi knocked her down.
We don’t know if any of that old story of their father’s is true, Grace said.
It is true, her daughter said. Gran told us.
That doesn’t make it true, Grace said. Or any truer than most family lore. Anyway, their father insisted when she was born that she get called after his mother, and who was I to argue. It’s a great story. Also it meant I got to choose Robert’s name.
And I wasn’t named after anybody, her son said.
That’s because I wanted you free of inference, Grace said.
It’s not just a story, her daughter said. It’s true.
We’ve got all her violins, her son said. They’re all just in a cupboard. Nobody plays them. Nobody knows how. There are five, in their violin cases. Like violin coffins. Nobody ever takes them out. Nobody even looks at them any more.
There’s one really small one, her daughter said. We think it’s the first one she had when she was a kid in the 1940s, it’s called a quarter-size. It’s only this big.
Smaller than that, her son said.
Grace changed the subject by teasing Arthur about the girl.
I thought you came all this way to meet a man who knew your mother. Not to meet girls, Grace said.
In the end, the old man hadn’t seemed to remember about Arthur’s mother. But he’d taken Arthur’s hand and held it and wouldn’t let it go and he fell asleep holding it and Arthur, Charlotte told them later, had stayed with him until about half an hour before they all met for supper which was hours later.
I didn’t want to wake him, Arthur said.
You didn’t want to leave that girl Elizabeth, Grace said.
Charlotte put an arm round his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek.
Too right, she said.
So it’s a fact, Grace said. You really don’t mind him looking at another woman like that. You two really aren’t together then.
No they aren’t, her son said.
Been there, done that, Arthur said. Much better now.
Not that I’d mind who he looked at even if we were together, Charlotte said. Love happens.
Yes, her son said. It does.
You can’t deny it, Charlotte said. And you probably shouldn’t.
Wish I was young again, Grace said.
Anyway, Art’s like my brother now, Charlotte said.
Poor you, her daughter said.
It’s true, she’s like a sister to me, Arthur said.
Poor you, her son said.
Time is short, Grace said. Prime is short. Good for you. I envy you. All your lives ahead of you like that. You’ve got to use every moment. Because in the blink of an eye it’s past you, and you never get your time again.
Forgive me, Grace, Charlotte said smiling, but I think that’s rubbish. I believe we meet our times with our full and ready selves at whatever ages we are when the times happen to us. That’s what it’s all about.
Ah, Grace said. So naive. I was young once too and believed such things.
You’re not old now, Grace, Charlotte said.
But Grace was finding Charlotte, who kept saying her name in that annoying way, a bit patronizing now.
And who knew that people were interned in England in the last war? she said instead.
I did, her son said.
You did not, her daughter said.
I did, her son said. I did know.
I suppose if he was a German, Grace said, they had to. For everybody’s safety.
Dad’s got stamps in his war collection, her son said. Isle of Man.
What’s wrong with your supper, Robert? Grace said.
I’m just not very hungry, he said.
What do you need instead? Charlotte said. Can we get it for you?
Charlotte’s hand was in the air for the waiter.
I need symbiosis, her son said.
