How to Paint a Dead Man

by Sarah Hall

  Though her brothers are light-hearted, there is an ill force in the air. Annette feels it against her face, a sensation like pushing into the damp, heavy wool hanging in the courtyard when the bedding is washed. From the gilt cage above the altar rail he is still watching her. He is watching her through her clothing, and his tongue is flicking at the buttons on the hem of her dress.

  After mass, Annette greets those who call to her and ask about her mother. ‘Not with you again today?’ ‘Mamma is sick,’ she explains. ‘Ah, yes, of course.’ On the stone steps of San Lorenzo, as they wait for Father Mencaroni to press their hands, she hears snippets of conversation not intended for her ears. ‘Keep her uneducated…very pretty if you don’t consider…surely a brassiere now…yes, yes…beautiful arrangements…such humiliation…the mistress…in prison.’ Tommaso holds her skirt and winds round and round her, twisting the material into a tight tourniquet. Then he swaps hands and winds round the other way. Maurizio says he is tired of waiting and is going to swim in the lake with friends. ‘Netta, I’m going to take off all my clothes and lie flat on a rock,’ he whispers. ‘What do you think about that piece of information?’ Then he makes a fist with a hand and rests it on the crown of Annette’s head. With the other hand he taps it, as if breaking an egg, and gently his hand opens and his palm slithers through her scarf and her hair. She pulls his elbows down to his sides. ‘Stop. It’s disgusting.’ Mauri puts his hands into his pockets and she hears him slouch off down the steps.

  When it is hot Maurizio swims in the lake or lies in the tall grass with his shirt off, turning dark brown. When he comes home his skin smells of chaff and lake water and the musk of the sun. Sometimes he walks to the viaduct and smokes cigarettes and then chews mint. He and the other boys hold on to the lower beams and wait for a train to pass overhead and shake their bones, seeing who will be the last to drop. They look at magazines that stay hidden between the girders. At these meetings they discuss important things, he tells Annette, like measurements and speed and strikers. They go to watch films like the Torn Curtain and The Dreamers. The girl who works at the cinema selling tickets is very pretty. Maurizio says she is in love with him, and that she has offered to show him her secret garden.

  Meanwhile Annette must look after Tommaso, taking him to the greenhouses or to the cimitero di campagna where they pay respects to their father. This is their duty and their responsibility. Their oldest brother, Andrea, is married and has children of his own. In Turin he works at the Fiat factory. Before that he worked at the Coca-Cola factory. Before that, a precision-tool factory. Vincenzo has been in Argentina for several years: ‘the land of forgetting’ their mother calls it, sniffing loudly, whenever she talks about his desertion.

  It is pointless, her mother says, for Annette to go to the cinema and pay money for a film she can’t watch but can only hear. She may as well listen to the radio, which is free. And the mezzanine is too dangerous, and such a suggestive venue is not a suitable environment for an innocent girl. Italian films now contain lewdness and violence, and American films are filled with prostitutes and criminals with guns. ‘I cannot be sure what influence they will have on you,’ she says. Then she sighs. ‘Joseph used to take me to watch Garbo, but that’s finished now.’ When Annette asks why Mauri is allowed to see prostitutes on the screen her mother says he may watch them because he knows how to confess and cleanse his conscience. God knows to forgive men for their primitive urges, she says. He has been doing this for centuries.

  More importantly, Annette is forbidden to swim in the lake. She is to keep her legs covered and to wear a headscarf if she ever goes near the water. There are giant eels that can smell the scent of girls from the depths and will slither out from under the rocks to attack them. ‘No one has ever been attacked by a giant eel, Rosaria!’ Uncle Marcello protests when Annette’s mother begins with her underwater fable. ‘At least not in a lake. What kind of nonsense is this for the girl to believe in!’ But her mother is resolute. There is to be no swimming.

  Instead, Annette and Tommaso visit the cimitero di campagna. Their father has been dead a long time, long enough for their mother to put away her cowled dress were she to choose to. Annette remembers only his neat moustache, trimmed down exactly from his nose so that it formed a thin orderly hedge on his lip. His work boots were heavily soiled. His street shoes were always polished. His eyes were as green as river algae and he was handsome. Uncle Marcello has the same green eyes, but he has a weaker chin, according to her mother. Her father was Marcello’s older brother but, her mother says, in spirit he was much younger.

  Tommaso remembers nothing of their father. He was just a baby when he died. He likes visiting the old walled enclosure at the top of the flight of steps on the outskirts of the town, in the same way he likes bicycling, football, learning new songs at the Montessori and writing stories.

  He takes off his shoes and they walk up the steep, foot-polished steps together. The heat collects in the wings and wells of stone; Tommaso says he can feel it on his bare toes. He counts the steps. Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight. He must place both feet on every step or it does not count, he tells Annette. At the top, sixty-two, he has an announcement to make. He would like to race in the Tour de France. He is going to begin training tomorrow. He will eat only raw eggs to prepare. He will drink only goat’s milk. He will require a striped, tight-fitting jersey with the number 6 stitched to the back. This is how old he is, and it is also his lucky number.

  Around the shady grove, the trees hiss and rustle. Annette opens the gate with a creak, and they enter the small city of the dead, with its roofs and chambers, its walls of remembrance and its fenced tombs. She gathers the dried flowers from the niche where her father’s handsome, moustachioed photograph resides. The blooms crumble and disintegrate like ash. She puts new cuttings into the little tin canister. The last of the white roses, and white cultivated cyclamens whose hearts are bigger than the cyclamens under the olive trees in the hills. ‘Why doesn’t he wash off in the rain?’ Tommaso asks.

  ‘He’s waterproof. He’ll always be here.’

  Beside the other photographs are jugs of wine and oil. Brooms of sage have been burned, and incense cones. Someone has left a candle flickering, its waxy taper studded with cloves. There is a Polaroid picture of a new baby, Tommaso reports, after his customary detective tour of the cimitero; its tiny feet and hands, he says, are bumpy and curled like cabbage leaves. Annette runs her fingers around the stonework. She pulls small weeds and mosses from the crevices. Tommaso has begun building a pyramid with pebbles on the flat rim of the monument. ‘You’re giving Papa a shave,’ he says. There is a small china statue of the Madonna, which has fallen over on to its face. ‘She’s looking pale,’ says Tommaso. ‘Has she seen a ghost?’ The sun has bleached the Madonna’s robes to ivory, like an old wedding-cake ornament. Annette blows the dust and dirt from the creases, rubs her clean with a wetted finger, and stands her upright again.

  She wonders if her father misses them. She wonders if he misses the flowers he used to grow and the rooms of Castrabecco. She chats to him as she administers to the niche. ‘Uncle Marcello says business is reasonable. Poppies should come up next week in the fields. Uncle Marcello says some people believe if you look at a poppy without making the sign of the cross it will make you go blind. Do you believe it, Papa?’ Tommaso drops the last pebble, his arm at full stretch, and the little pyramid collapses. ‘Is that what you did, Annette?’ She shakes her head. ‘I can still see some things.’

  ‘But you can’t find the edges,’ he says.

  She smiles. ‘Yes. I can. I can find yours,’ and she tickles him until he squeals.

  It is true that she does not often take anyone’s arm. She can remember all the routes to and from the familiar places; they exist as remembered geometries, blue lines in her mind. She can still see light, sometimes colour, sometimes movement. It is like occasional weather inside her head. ‘Uncle Marcello is having trouble with the greenfly again,’ she t
ells the photograph. ‘He wishes you were here to consult. He doesn’t want to use chemicals. He says chemicals are barbaric. But the vinegar isn’t working any more. He says they even seem to like it. He says he’s going to cause a drought in Modena.’

  Tommaso has wandered back out of the enclosure. He is looking for small wildflowers with which to make a necklace. His school teacher has shown him how to split the stems in the middle to make an eyelet, through which another stalk can be fed, and then another, and another, until the chain is long enough to pass over his head, and he can crown himself prince of the forest. It must be placed tenderly around the neck without breaking any of the frail clasps.

  After attending to her father, Annette crosses the cimitero to visit the chamber of Signor Giorgio. She empties the tall bottle on the carved shelf and into it she slips two stems. There are seldom other offerings left for him, no candles, no wines, though once Tommaso said he saw an old woman weeping as she left the crypt. There is a plaque on the wall that commemorates him as an artist of great importance.

  When the artist first came to the school, Signora Russo told them that he was very respected, and they were fortunate to be able to share his generosity and his intellect. Their parents would of course know of him and his famous still-life paintings. She said that he was not an advocate of brutality, as some newspapers had suggested, and they were not to talk about the rumours in his presence. In the classroom the other children would bend over their drawings and constantly ask him questions, inviting him to look at what they had produced. ‘Signor Giorgio, how do I clean the brushes? Tipped down or tipped up, which way is correct? Signor Giorgio, look at my work. I have copied this stone to make a mountain like Cennino Cennini instructs us. Signor Giorgio, how old you are! How white your hair is! Are you as old as Michelangelo? We can hear you breathing like a winter sheep!’ And with his good humour and patience their tutor would laugh, a broken coughing laugh, and he would answer their questions and instruct them again how to make solidifying dots or modelling gesso, how to animate limbs and how to dry brushes. Annette did not solicit his attention but instead waited for him to make his way around the room to her. If the weather was good, he took them on field trips, where they would search for useful tools and find shapes to study. Sometimes he held her hand.

  Every week he told them secrets about the glorious nature of art; then he said these were not secrets after all because everyone with an inquiring disposition and a desire to be an artist was entitled to know them. And he set them a task with the pencils, and a task with the ink, and he went to each child and watched them work and asked questions about the picture they were making. He listened very carefully as they answered. When he arrived at Annette’s station, she would put her brush aside and turn towards him, giving him her full attention. He was very tall. His trousers rode up above his ankles. There was often a rushing sound in his chest, like the sea in a shell, and his breath was gamey, like lamb fat. She didn’t mind because he was very encouraging. His compliments made heat spill into her cheeks and rash her neck.

  He told Annette he liked her paintings of the flowers she had brought from Castrabecco best of all. He told her the flowers in her paintings contained exactly the purple substance of the flowers on the desk in front of her. He said he could even detect the fragrance of the paintings from the other side of the room. ‘Such a remarkable waft of begonias,’ he would say, ‘I felt we must have been overtaken by them while my back was turned talking to Sandro. Let us open the window and see if your painting can entice the butterflies.’

  Once he asked if her eye condition brought any discomfort. She told him her eyes felt quite comfortable ordinarily. They were snowy and sore from time to time, and her back hurt when she had to bend over the page to concentrate on joining her letters together properly. It was almost no longer possible for her to read the books given to them for recitation, she said, and her recitation was slower than everyone else’s and sometimes she did not recite at all. One day in the future she would be blind, she told him. Her family had been forewarned, it was expected. Signor Giorgio sighed deeply, and gently put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You are an illumination,’ he said. It was then that he told her about the mind’s eye. He said that between the articles of reality and their depiction lay an invisible place, which was filled with as many things as could be seen in the visual world and more. This was the place to which Annette could go when her sight eventually failed her. She could go there to see her beautiful flowers. He said that, in the history of art, painted flowers were treasures that defied time.

  He sat with her a long time that afternoon. He told her about the artists of Holland who had created fanciful bouquets from their imaginations, with pineapples and quinces, the bounty of the different seasons combined together. In these paintings there would often be something sinister and cautionary in the corner, a little unpleasant danger, like a fly walking towards an apple, a snail on the lip of a jug, or some mould or blemish on the rind of a clementine. This was called symbolism. ‘It is like life,’ he said. ‘All things desist. All things are temporary.’ The Dutch artists were conveying the truth about nature, and reminding everyone that life was short, even while their paintings were impossibly artificial.

  The next week he brought a large picture book with a canvas cover, full of the impossible paintings. He also brought a magnifying glass with a horn handle, which expanded the image beneath and lifted it from the page. She studied the images carefully. On one page there was a still-life picture with a bird about to peck at a fig. Signor Giorgio told her that such works contained many messages. Though everything seemed captured and held in a single chosen moment, the world beyond could be seen, endlessly. For example–he turned the page–there, could she see it? In the glass vase holding the pale pink rose was reflected the artist’s window, which was a window showing what was outside his studio. ‘Can you see?’ he asked, and Annette bent close until she could make out the four squares of light in the perfect glass.

  For two weeks there were no lessons, but when he returned he brought a gift for her and said that she might take it home. It was a bottle. He said it had been one of his favourite tools and in it was all his life’s work. He said he was very glad to have met her, even so late in his life. She did not know why he had given her the gift or what he meant. It was an old bottle, with flakes of paint on it, but she cherished it. He came to the school only once more, and for that lesson he had to remain seated while the children carried their work over to his chair.

  Until then Annette brought flowers into school for the drawing classes, which she stole from the stone storage room of Castrabecco. She would wait until her mother was talking with Mauri beside the van, then take a cutting. She would shake beads of dew from the stems, place them down inside her pinafore and button up her cardigan. If Uncle Marcello saw her hiding the blooms he would tiptoe over to her and hold his finger to his lips. ‘Shh. I will keep your secret. Don’t get pollen on your dress.’

  Whichever the stolen item, Annette would tell Signor Giorgio about its folk history. ‘The first bell in Nola was made because a bishop saw these growing in a clearing nearby,’ she would say, pointing to the peal of campanulas on the table. Then she would gently tap the stem to make the flowers sway. ‘See.’ She would offer any such note of plant trivia her uncle had told her, and her tutor would clap his hands together and say, ‘Marvellous!’ When he died she felt as if she had lost someone very special, like a grandfather. She returned the bottle to him, placing it on his tomb in the cimitero di campagna, and continued to bring him flowers.

  The Mirror Crisis

  The worst part was having no idea-not an inkling, not the faintest glimmer of sadness, like dew in the corner of your dreams. You had no clue that Danny had veered his bike on to the motorway, that he was swerving cheerfully from the hard shoulder to the third lane and back again, like the apparition of an Edwardian soak, a century late for a midnight appointment. Danny, on top of that brilliant contraption, pe
rfectly balanced, bare-chested and wearing moleskin trousers, making one of his impromptu nocturnal runs to the farm. Danny, high as a kite, kept warm by the ardent adventure that was his life and by the bowl of dope he’d smoked, the empty road before him, the winter frost and icy moonlight.

  Now it’s clear. Now you can see it all. A man and a bike on the carriageway at night, like a silent-picture routine. The starry darkness. The lisping wheels of that revolutionary machine going, for fifteen immortal minutes, the perfect speed. Danny with the world to himself. Danny weaving, standing up on the seat. Danny steering hands-free. Danny flying. How close it must have been to rapture. Now you can see it all.

  But that night you slept right through as he pedalled on. You barely turned beneath the covers or altered position. There were no terrors, no anxieties nesting in your brain; there was no unconscious euphoria as your brother freewheeled. You found out by the trilling of the telephone the next morning what had happened. Peter Caldicutt told you the news and he was gutted, hollowed out of himself. There was not a trace of the Geordie, no hint of the decades in Cumbria. All that came from him was that awful empty voice, immaculately reproduced down the wires, and caught in the same quiet loop, whispering over and over. He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone. Then you heard gentle words and your mum took the receiver from him. No lights. Danny had no lights on the bike, she explained. The wagon driver didn’t see him until it was too late. You didn’t know. We thought…we thought maybe…