How to Paint a Dead Man

by Sarah Hall

  You were offered time off from the gallery after the accident, which was kind of Angela, but you haven’t taken it. Instead you’ve been erratic, not turning up, or giving short notice for impromptu trips back up north. And you’ve let your photography slide too: lucrative commissions remain unfinished, your Leica and the pricey digital sit in the kit bag in the spare room; you’ve lost money on the unused studio, and your films are tucked away at the back of the refrigerator behind the butter and bacon. There is enough art-world gossip for people to know what has occurred to your family, for them to extend consideration. Recently, Nathan told you that you’d woken up in the night crying, and hitting him, but you didn’t remember doing it. The patience granted in the wake of Danny’s death has been nothing if not remarkable.

  You don’t deserve it. You’ve behaved worse than this. You’ve found that there is something that can make you feel, and make you feel present: sex. Not the routine, dusk-and-dawn sex of a trusted, established relationship, but illicit, dangerous sex. Sex that is novel and leaves you sore; that is experienced in the gaps between your mundane, moral life; that is strange and breathless and addictive.

  You have been seeing someone else. You’ve discovered this man is capable of creating that hot primary yearning from the cervix down. There have been several indiscretions to date. You want there to be more. You want the skin and the smell and the taste and the movement of him. His beautiful mouth, his top lip shaped like a bird in flight. The anise of his fluids. Him made hard and pushed inside you. You understand the risks, the damages, but they seem irrelevant. This is right for you; he lets you remember what it is to be human.

  You and your partner Nathan have been together for six years. There are days you are sure you love him, and days you are indifferent towards him. Oddly, the moments of desire you have experienced with this other man are the moments in which you feel the most tenderness and compassion towards Nathan. As if only by hurting him do you make him relevant.

  He loves you. He has not stopped loving you since you first got together. In the last few weeks he’s been trying gently to manage you, trying to corral your grief, and provide support. He speaks quietly, as if not to spook you. He calls you regularly throughout the day, brings home flowers, cleans the house, cooks. He has not pushed you on any of the issues that must seem alarming to him as an informed observer. The meat-eating. The bitchery. The hours spent at the gallery in the evening when you should be home. The times you’ve gone running so hard on the heath you’ve made yourself vomit. He’s worried, of course he is, about your health, your state of mind, the way your brother’s accident has stripped you of your usual spirit. He’s worried about the disappearance of the woman he knows. He doesn’t say, Darling, why don’t you see someone about being depressed, or, Really, you should finish the work for the Trust, or, Susan, please come back to me. Nor does he cry in front of you, though you know he loved your brother too, and misses the times they stayed up late drinking whisky and playing cards, or watching Bond reruns, the times they biked the trails, or walked either side of you up the fells. He has not unpacked his grief.

  You exist just outside the life you have with Nathan. It isn’t your life any more. Within is the choreography of eating and sleeping and paying bills, the mechanics of being together in a relationship, which has nothing to do with who you are. The man you live with is a kind stranger.

  If Danny were told about all this, if by some miraculous paradox Danny could be drawn from the dark ether into which he has been vented and rearranged around his old anatomy and then told about your response to his death, he would get it. He would smile in that broad, puerile way of his, or laugh, or put his arm around you and say, Lighthouse extinguished, Captain. The rocks! The rocks! or something equally endearing and childish. The awful irony is that he’d be the one person to truly sympathise. By which you don’t mean just accept poor old you, having it hard, missing him and messing up your life. No. Danny would have an exact perspective, a clear understanding of how it is to be you. If Danny were alive, he wouldn’t need to be told what was wrong. He would simply know. Your little brother was cleverer than anyone gave him credit for. He didn’t exhibit those unhealthy verbal symptoms or throw fits about swapping milk beakers. He didn’t have to see Dr Dixon for any sessions. He was the quiet one, the dummy, ‘the secondary’ in a way, he held all the power.

  It’s hard to explain this connection. Kids at school would ask you to read each other’s minds. What’s Danny thinking, Suze? What colour are your sister’s knickers, Dando? Woooh, can you levitate this pencil case between you? Can you feel her bits? As if the two of you were holding private séances.

  Maybe it’s best described like this. You have always liked fire. In the cottage where you were brought up you were the one who kept watch over the hearth, clearing the grate in the morning, stoking the coals before dinner, and smooring the embers at night. You hated anyone else poking it, which your dad often did, as dads often do. He would tell you off as a kid for building the fire too high, being wasteful with the wood and coal, which he had to shovel, chop and stack. You’ll start a chimney blaze and kipper me paintings, Suze! You weren’t a pyromaniac; it wasn’t about the thrill of conjuring up that thin, vigorous spirit and unleashing its ravenous appetite. It was the history you’d had with it.

  You were never afraid, not since the moment you crawled over to the pretty sparking hearth when the guard was down, put one chubby fist in towards the flames and removed a burning stick by its un-charred end. You were still holding it a minute later when your mum arrived and dropped her washing basket. Oh poppet, poppet, be careful, she said, walking with soft haste towards you. As your head turned towards her the torch drooped and touched your leg. Then you understood what that red synaptic bloom was. It was pain, seen. It was how pain looked outside the body. There’s still a scar, silky and white, like a spider’s nest, above your kneecap.

  It was your brother who cried the loudest and made the most fuss though. He squalled and wrung out his eyes in the next room, blind to the events but no less invested in the trauma. Bur bur bur, he yelled. Suzeeeee. He screamed and bawled and rubbed the wound until your mum went to him, lifted him up, and doused his knee with cold water. That was the first time there was clear evidence.

  Afterwards, Danny was nervous. Any time a spark cracked in the fire and missiled out on to the rug, or later when a hot rock fell from a joint into his lap, he would stamp and flap and batter until the tiny smut went out. In contrast, you picked shooters up between your thumb and forefinger and flicked them back over the grate. At teenage parties you would pass your hand through a candle flame at the exact possible slowness for it not to burn you, while Danny panicked and clattered the wax stem to the floor. He was anxious, but giddy around fire. He loved it when you lit the whin bushes on the moor, or made bonfires, or held a lighter to the straw scarecrow belonging to the farm next door. He liked watching you lay fires in the cottage, aiding the draw with a sheet of newspaper, the orange eye brightening behind the events of the world. When the newsprint turned brown and flamed to life, you punched the paper up the chimney, and Danny blinked and blinked, and left the room, and then came back in.

  Now he is gone, and you are here, trying to find yourself in the mess, trying to locate the intimate filaments of which you are comprised. So that from this chaos order is achieved. So that you might be restored. To summarise: you are, or were, a twin. You like fire, veal, the seagull-shaped mouth of the man you are fucking when it dips below your navel and preens in the emulsion of you. You don’t find comfort in books. Your name is known in the art world, because you are relatively talented, and because you are your father’s daughter. You have your mother’s teeth, her black and topaz moles. You were the embryo on the left side of her uterus, the embryo fate was kind to. Your brother rode his mountain bike the wrong way up the motorway one night and was killed. You are alive, somehow, continuing to pulse, continuing to breathe.

  Translated from the Bottle J
ournals

  Theresa has brought a fine array of mushrooms this week and, as a special gift from her husband, Giancarlo, two good-sized truffles, which she has grated on to her omelettes. Their little dog has had a busy season in the forest so far. I was invited to the morning gatherings, but it has been impossible. My chest is suffering in the colder air and last year’s cough has returned with renewed vigour. Soon I will need to use the oil heater in the studio. I miss such excursions. I’ve always enjoyed the muttering of the forest as it prepares to disrobe, and the smell of the old earth being turned when the dogs begin to dig.

  The olive groves on the slopes have almost finished preparing their fruit. I can see the leaves fluttering-dark green, light green and silver. Soon they will be stringing the nets. Perhaps I might have gone with Giancarlo and the others. I should make an effort not to become sedentary. There is a paralysis of the mind that accompanies immobility. I have seen it in friends and colleagues; intellectuals who were once fierce and deft of thought, who later became lost in conversation and fixated on small, unimportant details or phantoms in the air before them. I fear this above all else. I find cigarettes to be the most useful tools for concentration, but in this matter there are arguments with Theresa. She would prefer that I took her breakfasts instead of smoking cigarettes. She believes passionately in their ill effect and is attempting to banish them from Serra Partucci. I have noticed of late the lady of this household is becoming disinclined to produce them from her shopping basket. Often she swears she has no knowledge of any new packet or any request for a new packet. She will hoist the shopping list into the air like a flag of victory and wave it in the face of her old ward.

  It is played like a comedy, so familiar that I can step to the side and watch the performance. Giorgio puts out his finger. He is belligerent. He demands exactly the same amount of soft tobaccos each week, he says. He has his wits and would not forget to request such an essential. Then he snatches the list from Theresa’s hand and strikes each item off the inventory as he finds it present on the kitchen table while she stands defiant, her arms crossed. There are no cigarettes, she says. Then it is not accurately taken dictation, he protests. It is slovenly! It is sabotage! How dare he call her slovenly, she cries; she is a woman of high virtue and cleanliness. And so, stalemate. The old man tries another tactic. He has depended on cigarettes for fifty years, to work, he says, and he has a certain image to uphold. When visitors arrive they expect to see their artist stooped in his winter overcoat, with his decrepit iron spectacles, and an eternal cigarette in his hand. They must not be disappointed. Such are his weaker arguments.

  Eventually the tyrant Theresa relinquishes. The carton is ingeniously camouflaged behind her apron. Giorgio smokes in the terrible silence. He grinds out the stubs with extravagant force. Later, to make her begin speaking to him again, he engages her on inappropriate topics of conversation, such as the propaganda-filled newspaper her husband reads, her son’s military service, the joys of the changing season, and her routing of the lizards. All she wishes to do is to proceed with her domestic duties in peace, if he pleases. He slinks away to the studio.

  In autumn, the lizards all wear attractive green cowls. They take warmth from any warm surface, finding refuge from the bristles and the broom handle in the grooves of the shutters. Make room for me, little friends! Have mercy, Theresa, on such habitual creatures as us! Theresa and I are engaged in a masquerade-this is very obvious. The argument is not over cigarettes. There is occasional blood in my mouth from coughing. Theresa wishes for me to see the doctor. It is not a seasonal complaint, she insists. I suspect she has noticed the warnings they are currently printing on the packets and she is alarmed.

  In the morning after listening to the wind kindling the daylight I listen to the radio. I enjoy new music and operatic. I remain interested in national events, the debates about divorce. The voices reporting are dyspeptic-the world can be a terribly bitter thing to swallow. We remain divided on many issues. There is still shame; until we are united it will never pass.

  Many of the day’s tasks can be done accompanied by the sounds of the radio. Reading. These journal entries. Letters to the bank, to Antonio, or a reply to an inquiry. I have been listening while putting glass tunnels over the basil-the radio casing is set on the windowsill and the dials adjusted. Sometimes I hear words coming from the radio when it is switched off, but it is only Theresa scolding the lizards for defying gravity on the ceiling where her broom cannot reach, or scolding her elderly ward dozing in an armchair for his tendency to leave the rind of the cheese in the drawer belonging to the cutlery. When I am in the studio I listen to the sporting events.

  Though I have not felt inclined to join the truffle dogs at daybreak in the woods, I have been to the school this week. I should note that I was deceived into teaching there and I am now hostage to it. The mistress of the establishment invited me to lecture her class one Thursday last spring, and when I arrived she sent me home saying too many of the children were absent with colds. The following week I came again and she sent me away again for another reason, which I have forgotten; perhaps it was a holiday. She insisted we should try once more. On the third week I arrived earlier than any pied piper and I taught drafting and anatomy. By then I was used to the walk into town and the children enjoyed the lesson and Signora Russo asked me to tutor on Thursdays. I tried once to cancel the teaching and she became very annoyed and said duty and social contribution were essential for those in professions such as mine. I should consider the inheritance of our country and I should guide its young minds in beneficial directions. The economic miracle is oblivious both to our school system and to the arts, she said. She knows something of my relationship to the old government I think, and that I taught at the Academy, and the reasons I have extracted myself. She is versed in the country’s history, as we all are, and has, no doubt, strong opinions. We have not had the opportunity to discuss this at length. I suspect, like much of the population here, she is Communist.

  I do not begin the class until I have recited all the names of all the children to myself. They sit in alphabetical order, which is convenient. When they are concentrating they are very quiet and it is a briefly peaceful time for me. Their drawings are wonderful. Children have no conscious knowledge of talent until informed of it by adults and they will suffer no intimidation until then. Sometimes the mothers come to the school gates to collect their children. They look at the images and ask why they have sketched the root of a tree or a small stone, rather than painting family portraits and little Davids, and I say to them, in this class it is pertinent to select such material, and I send them away.

  There is a young girl in the class who has a congenital disease of the eyes. Her spectacles have a prescription even stronger than mine, and they pinch red marks on to the bridge of her nose. She finds it difficult to read. It is anticipated that by adulthood she will be blind, but she does not seem to be afraid. Her left eye is the worst, wasted to half the size of the right through its white aspect, with the lid often closing of its own accord.

  We will never truly realise what blessings we receive along with our losses. Annette has a gift for discovering invisible things. If positioned in front of flowers she can detect borders and colours very well. She makes compartments and then fuses forms back together. She is a true Impressionist. Her natural medium is watercolour. I find in her work the most observant understanding-it has taken me over sixty years to acquire such skill. It is as if she has been freed from the convention of what exists only to seek it out with more integrity. The children are not unkind to her. She will not waste a single visible day. What can we hope for but this? Annette’s white peonies at rest in a vase. The white scent ends where the white page begins.

  Peter has written to me again asking about the substance of shadows. A shadow can be one of two themes for a whole year in the Academy. He tells me he has been painting along the north-east coast where he is visiting his sick father and it is very cold. Peter imagines the
rocks on the beaches have personalities. There is character in their detail, he says. Something peers out at him from within their forms. He wears gloves to paint. When the tide comes in he can hardly bend his fingers and wonders if the damp English air will one day give his joints arthritis. I should inform him that when he reaches my age it is certain to arrive regardless of the patriotism of the weathers.

  Again his letter searches for clues. He has found a copy of La Voce in the university bookshop and he quotes Soffici: ‘It is through still-life that one can establish the true essence of what painting is all about.’ My friend, Ardengo Soffici, who I have not thought about for such a long time! I imagine Peter reaching out his cold hands. He reaches so much further than those who might more easily come here, to this hill, to this realm of discussion-those who catch trains from the capital, those who come to ask about my bottles and those who telephone Antonio at the agency in Bologna to ask about my health. From the distance of another country, from an old magazine with deep folds, which has no doubt been passed between many hands, his curiosity arrives.

  Peter is accused among his peers of a disconnection from the modern world. He is warned of being labelled out of date. My friend, how well I know this charge! Even after all these years such notions are put to me. Is production of the still-life merely the ventilation of a dying genre? Is this lyricism and formality now redundant? Elsewhere artists swing paint cans tied to their hearts, people tell me, and these are expressions of the unbound spirit. I was told this again by the young journalist last week, as if I were a man in a cave kept in darkness. Of course, I said to him, it’s like the incense swung by priests. This is neither a riddle nor an invention.