20

by John Edgar Wideman

  Bartolomeo de Bartolai stares down at what he has drawn: three faces, one floating above the other. Three bodiless beings. Each face is round, with wide, almond-shaped eyes that stare out, impassive and severe, orbs that nearly fill the socket. Each pupil is obsidian, a perfectly round stone. Above the eyes, the thick brows merge together and form a painted gash. He gives each face a tiny, set mouth. In the place of a body, there is an arc, a boat whose prow and stern fan upward into wings. He has copied these figures from angels chiseled in stone above the door of his farmhouse, the work of his grandfather's father. The men of the mountains all know how to work with stone, they can chisel celestial beings from it. His nails are dirty. His fingers are scraped and cut, stiff from the cold. He comes into this stable at night, while the others quietly drink their aqua vita in front of the hearth, dulling their hunger, numbing their sores.

  By day he tends the sheep, in the evening he comes to the stable. It is the second night of November in 1560.

  ————

  The winter is long. Bartolomeo de Bartolai sits drawing on a flat piece of rock, over and over. He draws with clay dug from a ravine and ash taken from the hearth. He draws with charred twigs of chestnut and hawthorn, with charred walnut shells. He makes drawings on flat stones and rough wood. Drawings of what? The usual things. The things that he knows. Sheep. Goats. Everyday things.

  ————

  Bartolomeo de Bartolai lives in a remote narrow valley, far away from a city, but knows the story of Giotto, the greatest artist in the history of the world, word of Giotto has made its way even this far. He knows how Giotto's father was a simple fellow who gave his son sheep to tend. How the boy was forever drawing on stones, on the ground, in sand, on anything, and how, one day, he was discovered, by the great painter Cimabue, who saw the boy drawing a sheep on a flat, polished stone. How Cimabue asked the father for permission to take the boy Giotto to Florence, and the father lovingly granted permission. Bartolomeo de Bartolai knows this story, the holy men themselves disseminated it, and he has heard how Giotto, singlehandedly, restored good design and drawing to Christendom after it was corrupted by the infidels.

  ————

  So many others have left to find a way in the world. Others younger than he, who were babies when he was already tending sheep.

  He watched them leave with canvas sacks upon their backs, depart and not look behind. From his spot near the river, he was stunned and astonished: They were not waiting. How did they conceive such a thing?

  He wanted to say, Stop! You are not ready to go yet! You are too young to set off in the world. This is not how you are supposed to do it. You are supposed to do it like this: sit here by a river, drawing, like me, drawing, drawing, shapes and lines and figures, making them look like they are moving in three dimensions. It is very difficult. You will not necessarily understand the shapes you are making, but you must keep making them and a picture will emerge. Slowly, slowly, until one day, they will dance upon the rock. This is how it must be done. You must serve an apprenticeship, here.

  But they did not. They were bold. They told the priest, You have nothing more to teach me. They said to their parents, I break with you.

  He watched them leaving, climbing the hill, through the gate of the walled town, up the side of the mountain toward Faidello, up higher toward the house of Abramo, toward the Long Forest and over the hill toward Cutigliano, on to Pistoia. Pistoia, where they have invented a tool, a handheld weapon that exhales explosion. A pistol. These people who were younger than him headed past Pistoia, past Prato, where abandoned babies are left at the hospice of the Misericordia. They went down the slopes of the foothills, where grapes and acacia grow, onto the plain, into the river bed of the Arno, into the city, Fiorenza.

  He envied them, but crossed himself and prayed, because invidia is a sin. The envious sinners in purgatory, between the Wrathful and Proud. He saw the others leaving, bounding away, and thought, Do they not risk worse sins?

  No, he wanted to shout. Wait. Wait right here with me. Wait your turn. Do not risk abandonment. Come sit beside me; I have been practicing, practicing for years. Come wait with me.

  He opened his mouth to shout, he could see them up the hill, but his throat was dry and no sound came out.

  ————

  Before he can make his way down from the mountains, he must learn the principles; this is his understanding. And so he has prepared and prepared and prepared. Before you even begin to contemplate the journey, you must understand certain things. The principle of perspective. Vanishing point.

  Bartolomeo de Bartolai sits making figures on a panel of wood, over and over, waiting for Giotto.

  ————

  He scavenges and hoards, and whenever he finds a broken plate, a cracked vase, a shattered bottle from the midwife, he gathers the pieces in a canvas sack that hangs from his waist. This sack is called a scarsella, an alms purse. Since no one in these mountains possesses coins to fling to beggars, a scarsella is any type of gathering sack, whether for mushrooms or for chestnuts.

  Whenever he goes to town, to Ardonlà, on market days, he wears the scarsella and walks behind the shops on either side of the street to see what has been discarded. Once he found an apothecary jar, broken and without its lid, decorated with blue and yellow scrolls. He gathered the pieces of this ointment jar, wrapped the fragments in a rag, then put the bundle under his cloak. He looked to see what was behind the shop of the blacksmith. Nothing. And behind the tinker. Nothing. Beside the church, he found a broken chalice, made of wine-red glass, which the priest had unblessed and thrown into a heap. Behind the tavern, he found a broken string of beads, pieces of flat blue glass, and he took these as well.

  For this scrounging, his mother cuffs the back of his head. At least leave intact our dignity, so that we are not seen picking up broken things from people who have as little as we do. They will call us mendicants and hoarders. But Bartolomeo de Bartolai cannot stop himself from squatting down to pick up a shard if it glints.

  He saves the collected fragments in a chest inside the stable.

  ————

  Halfway down the valley, the windows of the villa are filled with panes of glass. When the Signore married a lady from Ferrara, he put in glass that came all the way from Venezia. In Venezia, he has heard, there are hordes of men and women and children, arrived from the mountains, who work in shops making glass. How dazzling it would be to live there. Bartolomeo de Bartolai imagines a city of glass, color reflecting everywhere. He imagines heaps of glass everywhere, glistening like the mounds of jewels inside a sultan's tomb. Whenever a glassmaker makes an error, or inadvertently drops a bottle, he tosses the broken pieces into a heap. He has heard of a young person who travelled to Venezia and is etching spectacular mountains on the insides of vases. In Venezia, the brilliance would only blind him and cause him to wince. Here, instead, he can keep his eyes open, scanning the ground for the rare discarded colored piece.

  ————

  How were those others able to leave so soon? Not sit up here and wait? He saw their proud chins jutted forward. He saw how they waved to him as they passed by. He believes they saw him as a simple person, sitting there with his sheep. He wanted to remind them that Giotto was a shepherd, but they would not have cared. They would have said, You are left behind by time. They do not even recall Cimabue, he is irrelevant to them, and their gazes are fixed beyond the mountain pass.

  He sits and waits for a master, someone to tap his shoulder, to lift him up, usher him by the elbow. Invite him into apprenticeship. Perhaps Giotto himself, stern in profile, will see the drawings, his fine collection of shards, and will say, Yes. Then lead him away, down out of the mountains.

  ————

  Once, he went to see a great man as the entourage passed on the road above, he had heard he was a great painter. Everyone clapped and sang as the man approached, reached out their hands to him. Young men carried the great man on their backs, on a chair fasten
ed to poles. They sank down in the mud to their knees. From the side of the road, Bartolomeo de Bartolai stretched out his arm, and the great man mimicked the way his hand trembled.

  He looks up into the face of each stranger passing through, wondering if he is the Master. Each season, the Giotto he envisions has a different face.

  He sits and he waits for Giotto; he knows better than to wait for Cimabue. Too much time has passed. He lives below a narrow dirt road, a mule path no more than three men wide, the only road that passes through the mountains and links one city to another. He lives in a cluster of ten houses that is too small to be called a hamlet. One house touches the other, and they are all made of the same grey stone as the cliff. The houses sit on a ledge supported by a single granite column. It is called La Gruccia, the crutch, because from a distance it looks as if it were perched on a walking stick.

  Giotto might travel some day along the mule path above. He might stop because he needed to sleep. Or because he needed to eat. Because his horse was tired. Giotto would somehow know that Bartolomeo de Bartolai was sitting by the edge of the river drawing figures of sheep on stone, just as Giotto himself had done, and surely, he would appreciate this diligence.

  ————

  Did the ones who have gone down receive a call? Because no one goes down without an invitation. How did it enter their minds that they were worthy enough to knock on the door of the privileged? A shepherd does not go through the gates of a rich man's house, not even to a door around back, unless he knows that there is someone who will answer. He knows he would be apprehended, arrested, beaten, put outside the gate to starve. He would be mistaken for a vagrant. Who are they, the ones who went down? These privileged ones who have taken it upon themselves to go down to a master's shop?

  ————

  He knows that the ones who have left would mock him: That old man, what do you want with that old man? He has nothing to teach you. No one has anything to teach you that you cannot learn by yourself. You are wasting time; your life is passing. Count the days already gone. In winter you could die suddenly of pneumonia; in summer, contagion travels up from the plain. What do you wait for? An invitation on parchment? With gilt edges, rolled tightly into a scroll? Bah, they would say, these young people with sacks hoisted over their shoulders, their chins in the air. Bah. There is no messenger that brings correspondence intended for these parts; the only messages are those that travel through, being carried from one city on the plains to another. This Giotto you wait for is archaic. His students have moved beyond him. They have already stood on his shoulders and seen things he could not dream of. You are too solicitous, too timid. You defer, when you should demand.

  But I am only a simple shepherd.

  ————

  The bell down in the village bongs seven times, a slow weighted rumble. Outside the shed, the sky is black.

  He sits on straw in the stable at night and remembers a fresco at a church, the pilgrims' destination, the monastery of San Pellegrino, built on a pinnacle where three valleys come together. The monks say this fresco was done by Giotto.

  He carried away the fresco, holds the picture inside his head: San Gioacchino is asleep on the ground in the mountain, chased from the temple into the mountains because he has fathered no children. He wears a rose-colored robe. He is sitting, head on arm, which is resting on his knee. While he is asleep, an angel announces that his barren wife is with child, and that the child will become the mother of God. A shepherd leans on a crutch. One sheep stands on a granite scarp. Another one sleeps. A black goat looks away, while a ram sits wide awake. They are all fat, healthy creatures. The halo of the sleeping saint is golden. A gorse plant nearby is flecked with yellow.

  On a piece of stone, Bartolomeo de Bartolai imitates the way the rib cage of the shepherd's dog is visible through its skin, the way the goat's hoof splays as it steps down the side of a cliff.

  ————

  When Bartolomeo de Bartolai looks around, he sees that all the young people have gone down out of the mountains. One, whom he called friend, Martín de Martinelli, patted him on the head, and then was gone like the rest. He last heard that Martín was in Fiorenza preparing walls for frescoes.

  When he left, Martín de Martinelli did not look back or sideways; he had always been preparing to leave. Those who move away carry off what they wish and remake in their minds those who have stayed, while the ones who remain behind are left to wonder what has become of those who depart. Some who stay in the mountains close their hearts tight to forget the ones who have left; some turn the departed into heroes, making them more than they are. And if those who have ventured out should return, the ones who have remained lose voice in their presence because the returning emigrants claim the expertise of the world.

  As a child, Bartolomeo de Bartolai followed after this friend, imitating him. He was intrigued, intimidated. It was excessive adoration. His heart is hardened, and yet he still hopes for a single message. Like a puppy dog. Then he wishes to kick himself for this suppliance, but does not. He turns back into himself and makes marks on stones.

  ————

  Why was he so dazzled by Martín de Martinelli, a person who treated others like servants? Finally he understands what he had refused to see for so long: Martín de Martinelli is the earth and everyone else is a planet circling.

  Martín de Martinelli would occasionally glance over his shoulder as he sat bent over a panel of wood, commenting upon his progress. Bartolomeo de Bartolai wants to know if noteworthiness is like this? Others watching to see if you might be recognized, if you are the one who will go to work in the shop of a master. They watch, afraid of approaching too close lest you remain forever hunched over, eccentric and obscure. It was an infatuation, he decides, a kind of being in love with Martín de Martinelli, with a person incapable of listening. How do you comprehend the world if you see only yourself, over and over and over? Do you see yourself finally as a spectre? As spectre, you then consume the air around you like a flame. And while some pull up cushions to sit at your feet, you fail to notice that others have wandered off, neglected and stung. One person in town called Martín de Martinelli a trinket maker of worthless things, spoiled, and Bartolomeo de Bartolai said, No, there is genius, wait. I was young, he thinks now. Spellbound. But the truth is, I wanted his way of being for myself, his ease and his boldness. Now I see that these thoughts were a form of Envy, and that this elaborate infatuation was Covetousness, and that I coveted his signature.

  ————

  He blames others for his timidity:

  His great-grandmother who was once a lioness and now does not know her own daughter.

  His grandmother who must tend to her and grips his wrist when he passes by.

  His mother who drinks a bitter liquid made from distilled walnuts, each time the great-grandmother wails.

  His father who leaves the house and wanders into the woods to escape. Bartolomeo de Bartolai stays in the corner waiting to see if his mother will call out for him; when he leaves, his father pats him on the head, and calls him his favorite child, though he knows his favorite child is the one who has stayed, the one who is huddled in the kitchen with a wrist being gripped.

  He stays. He waits. He holds his great-grandmother's hand in the dim light while she moans. His grandmother begs him to tell her what is beyond the threshold and he describes the garb of the pilgrims. The painted cart of the book merchant and the books laden onto the back of a mule. Bartolomeo de Bartolai puts a cool cloth on his mother's forehead after she has fallen asleep. He unbolts the door for his father when he comes back home. They all grow old.

  It is a new era, the ones who left have said. The old order is gone. Be bold, be deferential no more.

  ————

  There is calm as his hand moves across a flat, polished stone. He draws, draws, draws, and on his way back from the fields into the house he tosses the stone into a pile in a corner of the threshing floor. The literate call the threshing
floor an aia. Aye-a. Like a scream. From all the being beaten down. The peasants like him call it an ara, which also means altar.

  ————

  Before they go off, when the journey is still before them, do they feel the twinge of misgiving? In the months before they leave, the impending journey has already changed them. Every encounter becomes a question: Will this be the final encounter? So that in the future you will say, The last time I saw Martín, he was at the fountain in town. But if you should see him once more, this is how he is remembered: The last time I saw Martín, he was in the tavern, playing tresette and winning. Once he announced his desire to leave, he could never be Martín in the same way again; he became Martín-who-will-leave-in-September. Once he revealed his intention to leave, he ceased to be part of the daily flow of mundane activity, bodies leaning into plows, planting, training vines against a trellis, harvesting, threshing, butchering a hog, coming into a stone house silently from the snow. He could not be part of the winter's circle around the hearth, or, when the sun emerged in the spring, he was no longer one who replaced slate tiles upon a roof or gathered early berries. At the moment he said he was leaving, Martín de Martinelli placed himself outside all this. It was irreversible. Even if he had changed his mind at the last instant, others would have thought, This year he stayed, but next year? He was no longer part of day-to-day movement, taking tools to the blacksmith or standing against the side of the mountain at the mill as grain was being ground, talking loudly above the roar of the cascade. When the wax of candles dripped onto the stone floor of the church at midnight on Christmas, he was not part of the chanting.

  ————

  But wasn't it always so, the leaving? Is not the Holy Book that is read on Sunday the story of departure, one after another after another? Were not these mountains populated by nomads with tents and sheep? The Etrurian people coming up from the plains, some of whom buried the bones of their dead, some of whom buried their ashes in urns. They were followed by Christians who prayed in caves and, then, by Roman soldiers deserting, who were followed by the red-haired, blue-eyed ones with their bagpipes made of sheep gut who built stone huts here, warriors from the north with massive beards and long, consonant-filled words. Then the descendants of Esther fleeing the walled cities on the plains, accused of killing infants. They all fled into the mountains, staggering up here, burying their dead along the way. Trying to outrun war and pestilence. For centuries and centuries, they came up into the mountains. Bartolomeo de Bartolai is all of them. Who can say where he began, and who was the one who begat the person who begat him, who begat that person, all the way back to the beginning? Back to the gods of the northmen. Back to Job.