How to Paint a Dead Man

by Sarah Hall

  Danny. Danny’s long, symmetrical form could not be displayed after he had died. It could not be handsomely arranged on the boughs of a bonfire, under the bitter glow of Orion. He could not be exhibited ever again. You would never see a last physical reflection of yourself in him, never take his hand, never kiss his forehead. The familiar markings-scar on his chin, scar on his leg, moles, bitten fingernails-were gone, skimmed off by tyre tread, diced between the axles. He was his remains. He was bits and pieces. He was annihilated, and there was no option available except the gathering up of his body parts by police officers from among the bicycle spokes, the slipping of red lumps into sealed bags-his hand, his scalp-and the hosing down of the tarmac. Your father was informed that body identification was inadvisable, no, it was impossible, so it was done from a neck chain and a ring, his back molars and his ever-empty wallet. Danny’s coffin was closed; it was roomy, providing a sympathetic optical illusion, though it was nowhere near to being filled.

  Translated from the Bottle Journals

  It is time to be honest. My lungs are beginning to fail. They work only to half their capacity and they commit me to the house much of the time. I have missed two weeks of teaching. Walking the hill has become difficult, and breathing monumental, as if I am indisposed to the air itself. The cypresses at the end of the road seem further away than ever. I shall be sad not to be able to visit them. I like to see them become luminous in the late evening, as if full of green elixir, or watch their branches shuddering in a downpour, their leaves at a furious boil in the wind. All I can do now is salute them from my window.

  Though I have days of high energy and optimism, the reverse is often true. It is unfortunate to be an intermittent tutor at the school, and unfair to the children, but if I cannot speak for the rust blowing loose around my heart, what use is my presence among them? If I continue to be absent no doubt the mistress will march the children up here in a prim line, like goats with bells, such is her fanaticism.

  The prohibition of ageing! Even bending to retrieve the key from the floor where Theresa has dropped it now requires a Spartan’s stamina! Recovering the leather suitcase of mementos and photographs beneath the valance is almost impossible. There is a great pressure in my chest when I stand, as if I were being trampled at the bottom of the old grape vats. Often Theresa will find me, winded in my armchair after returning from a short walk, and then there will be a lecture. She has taken to clipping out these new health warnings from the cigarette packets after they have been thrown out and putting them like coupons in a little pile. What does she hope to exchange them for?

  I have had discussions with the doctor about my immodest use of cigarettes. He knows I have a high tolerance for them. But he is a man who favours the pipe, and cannot be too strict on such matters for fear of decommissioning his own habit. Besides, we have both breathed in the debris of our destroyed cities. He too, in his quiet green surgery, habitually clears his throat and recalls the dark dust of towers and loggias. We are old emphysemics, and when we talk we breathe out the past. It is history that makes mortals of us. Florio is concerned. We await the results of the X-ray and I have made a promise to rest. I have mounted my brass pocket watch on the studio wall and I will try to smoke less often, especially at night.

  I am intrigued by the business of the X-raying cathode. It appears there is no limit to human inquisitiveness. The procedure is so strange: I did not feel it, but the nurses were instructed to leave the room and the technician wore a heavy lead-lined tabard to avoid radiation. Such a thing is an intrusion of the boldest kind; it is a miracle of science. Or perhaps it is simply a miracle, whereby our divine structures are revealed. The device is being used now to investigate paintings as well as we humans. To expose what was broken and re-cast in a composition is to reveal the fallibility of an artist. The spilled varnish and the misaligned hand, the lost saint and the irregular ghost pavement. All those errors and adjustments in the studios of the past. And in us-the chips and fractures and tumours, the flaws in our exceptional design. Truth has become a hunted thing, but it is eternally insubstantial. The philosophers have always known this.

  I am compelled by the possibility of such revelation for the sake of teaching, yet I confess to be horrified by the scrutiny of my own interior and afraid of the evidence. What secrets will they find beside these tarred lungs? A heart full of historic sadnesses perhaps. The soft blue face of Dina, like a cyanotype; the many layers of guilt and the badly repaired peace.

  During the allied bombing, we watched our industrial architecture become shingle and relic. The Pope negotiated on behalf of the city of St Francis and others, where it was considered the wealth of Italy lay, but the city of Bologna was unlucky. All the cities of the north came under fire. At that time I felt I could not record any item manufactured by human hand. Instead I turned to the objects of the sea. The paintings of this era were small in scale. All around was devastation, and I painted the shells I had owned as a boy. In the still-lifes they are blushing, as if more than calcium, as if more than invertebrate, and closer in texture perhaps to human ears. There were bodies in the rubble. Sometimes it was possible to hold a mother and daughter, the priest, and the church in which they had all prayed, together in one hand. Many felt this intimate travesty during the rescue operations.

  After the war, and the loss of Dina, I moved south to the old region of my family. ‘Take me home,’ the Spanish poet cried to the ocean. ‘Take me home, for I am weary of wars.’

  The shell paintings ran for one series. They were not removed from my studio by the Germans, who looted our homes as they withdrew to the north, though several landscapes and still-lives were taken and have never been recovered. They are in locations unknown; even Antonio cannot seem to trace them. The war paintings are owned by the Vatican and a collector in New York. They are known as The Fighting Shells.

  Antonio has sent me a good selection of newspapers and catalogues this week. We also spoke on the hospital telephone after my appointment, and he is keen to visit me as soon as we know more. I know he is worried. In his note he inquires after my health, as ever, and asks if there is anything I wish for to make life more comfortable. He comments on some of the articles-the commercial forces of Europe are shifting, he notes. I could have hoped for no more considerate son, were I to have had one. Often Antonio’s parcels threaten to spill open, they are so full of cuttings and columns that he thinks will be of interest. He sends copies of the Paris Review and The Nation. Also the London periodicals and the strip cartoons, which I enjoy.

  The news from abroad is intriguing. Krauss and Hughes have taken up the arguments of Rosenberg and Canaday. Abstract Expressionism remains deeply divisive. I do not agree with the theory that in these vast dragged canvases chaos and arrogance are the central motives. The idea of subconscious production is intriguing to me. Intuition remains such a mystery. The objections, however, seem more about notoriety, the fashion of the artists, which restaurants they eat in and with whom they socialise. From obscurity to notoriety in less than a year-it is the era of celebrity. The artist is as the movie star.

  There is a new exhibition in London. A painting I donated a few years ago has temporarily been placed amid the opposing forces of North America. It is creating a stir. It has been done deliberately to polarise, but I do not mind this. In fact, I believe it is often necessary for the curators to provoke such discussions. Naturally, there are two opinions of my painting. The first: it is a fierce little thing, all the more worth attending to because it is dwarfed by hysterical compositions. It is contemporary Italy. The second: though it is formally competent, it is a defunct painting. Like Cepheus-the dead constellation-it contains no bright star. Italy is represented by the nostalgic, a redundant cosmos.

  And so it continues.

  In his letter, Antonio insists I install a telephone at Serra Partucci so that he might speak with me more readily. He has insisted this before many times. You are welcome to speak personally with the municipal engineers, I
have told him, and ask if their scaffolds will extend up to the house. And while they are there, they might as well fill the pockets of their overalls with stones from the surface of the moon.

  Thinking about it, I would like to smoke very much. It has been my habit for fifty years to smoke outside after dinner and look at the landscape. I am attempting to keep my hand busy by writing, but I desire tobacco. The pocket watch is ticking on the wall and it is making everything worse. I find myself in the end writing nothing of importance. But I must try to keep my word. When she comes tomorrow, Theresa will notice the discarded cigarettes and report them to Florio. I am too old to begin to hide things in poke holes like a schoolboy!

  At night the mountainside belongs to others. I feel like an honoured guest. The trees are full of noise and movement, insects shuffling, the slow transit of sap in the bark. Benicio would always try to broker our status at this hour, patrolling the hill in the twilight and scratching at the bottom of trunks and digging between roots. Dogs have a simpler claim to the land than we do. Occasionally his barking woke me in the reading chair, but with no great alarm, and I would sleep again and dream of cats in the alleys and upon the walls of our ruined monuments. Benicio was a nocturnal emissary of unimportant messages. Other times he lay at my feet and the unrest of the night was settled. I had to be careful when I stretched not to knock his back legs, which he always guarded carefully. Theresa does not come after dusk. Her bicycle has no handlebar lantern.

  The Fool on the Hill

  They will have had their supper by now. They will be sitting by the fire talking about what he could be doing, speculating on his unreliability. Susan, tutting–‘He’ll just be in the pub.’ Danny–‘Maybe aliens have abducted him. De-de-de-de.’ Lydia–quiet and smiling. Or they will be in bed, warm, snug, and he will simply be a vacancy, a hole in the cottage fabric. Meanwhile here he is, wringing wet, unfed, unhappy as hell. His stomach gurgles, and a sour belch makes its way up his pipes. Hungry. They will have had their supper. What was on tonight’s menu? Did Lydia mention it this morning? Fish pie. Oh yeah, fish pie. With buttery carrots and peas. He could murder a great enormous dollop of that. With crispy brown potato topping, dill sauce, and salmon and mackerel filling. He’d even eat it off that rock he pissed on a few hours ago, bent over the mound, grunting and snorking like an animal in its byre.

  Though the rain must have washed the surface clean by now.

  It has stopped falling, more or less. The floor of the ravine is splashing and trickling, like the bed of a river, far below him. He can hear nature getting along just fine, going about its business, regardless of his pitiful arrest. He is hungry and thirsty-the rain he sucked from his palms was only enough to dampen his throat, and the slugs that he can feel sliming up the sides of the rock are not appealing enough to consider eating. Not yet anyway. His clothes are sticking to him: when he pulls his shirt it slurps off his skin. He’s wrapped himself up as best he can, arms tucked inside against his sides, but heat is still escaping into the vast draw of night. He can feel the chill making its way into the meat of him. And the foot. Well, that’s the most disturbing thing. He can’t really feel it any more-not even when he concentrates on that spot, trying to locate the injury. There’s nothing. Not a stinging lesion or a swollen outline. Not even a final protesting nerve. There is no pain.

  This is not a good sign. Surely it indicates some hideous and irreversible medical condition, which can’t be fixed by vascular surgery, grafts, or wires and pins. Fantastic blood loss, necrosis, gangrene. Bye-bye useful, well-loved appendage-and off to the glue factory with you. What if rats have smelled the wound and crept along the gulleys to the ripe offering? They could be starting in on his toes with their rotten yellow teeth, infecting him with disease, and he wouldn’t even know. Here’s the ridiculous thing: after all the begging, the litigating with God (no longer is he agnostic, no longer atheist), and the mortgaging of years from his old age in exchange for the stopping of the pain, now that it’s gone he wants it back, absurdly. Fuck morphine. Fuck blissful analgesics. Fuck compassionate relief. He wants the registry of suffering again. He wants a good old belt of it, a reiteration of his vital signs, even if it means biting off his own tongue and roaring again at the horizon. At least he could call that an affirmation. At least then he could say: I am this war.

  Because, what if this is it? What if everything unravels now? What if it is all about to be taken away from him?

  It’s a terrible thought, the thought of erasure, of hopelessness, the thought of losing himself, his family, his tomorrow. He feels like he is falling though the massive blackness above, spinning and spinning away, even while he is caught in this precise spot, pinned like a fragile butterfly, staked like a stupid scarecrow among the potatoes. It feels like there will be no end to the cold, the wet, the weightless rushing air, this stone crucifixion. Fate it’s called. He begins to breathe shallowly and urgently. Ah, the dark epiphany has arrived. He absolutely does not want to be here, here in this rigid, unfair place, in this awful, invalid body, in this bastard providence. He does not want to be this man trapped in the wilderness. He does not want to be Peter. Peter. The name is awful. The name is prison. He doesn’t want to be here. ‘I don’t want to be here!’

  He puts his head in his hands. This is it. This is despair. This is the bitter, unalterable heart of the situation. There’s nothing he can do. There’s no way out. He is choiceless. He is condemned.

  The ravine continues to trickle. There is scuttling, like the scuttling of rats. He yells down at the ground. ‘Get away!’ He peers hard, but there is nothing to see in the blackness. His eyes can’t pull out the shapes of the boulders or the top of the cliff. They can’t detect any little movements through the tunnels of rock, as if scavengers are gathering. He can’t discern his own hands or his body or his damned limb. Perhaps he is no longer there. Peter. Where are you, Peter?

  Home. In another dimension, if he had never come here today, if he had not decided to climb down into the bottom of the deep Gelt gorge, or he had taken a different route back across the boulders, he would be home now. He would be where he should be. With them.

  There’s comfort in thinking about that. The cottage, with its hewn walls full of mice and straw, its warm fireplaces. His brood, his clan. What will they have been up to in his absence? The usual antics. Danny will have arrived home covered in grass stains and mud, saying he rolled all the way from town and can he have another bath. He’s home because she’s home. Susan will have thrown buckets of water over him outside while Lydia cheered, and he’ll have loved the attention. What a plonker. That pie will have been a beauty, as always. There’ll be a portion of it saved, tucked into a compartment in the kitchen range, just in case. They’ll have sat at the table after dinner and spoken to each other, in a lower tone than when he’s there, naturally. Mr Volume; Mr Have-Another-Glass-of-Homebrew. They’ve always managed conversation, his family. They’ve never been stuck over a stuffy platter of English beef, while the mantle clock ticked and the fire crackled. It is not a house of excruciation and repression, where the scrape of cutlery on plates and the dreadful chomping of jaws are the only sounds during meals. There’s always something interesting to talk about, a book, a meeting, the news. And they can always fall back on their common currency. ‘F’art’, the kids call it, doing their buck-toothed posh impression.

  There are almost as many of their pictures about the place as his these days. Susan’s photographs. A few of her early studies, which she tried to throw out but he ‘rescued’ from the bin. Danny’s benders–those weird snares of junk he’s concocted with a welder between one of his many bases, which will find a place on a chest or table, or be strung up from the curtain rails on fishing line by his ma, so the bright blades rotate like a turbine after an apocalypse.

  Lydia will have taken a bath, her hair piled up on top of her head in that mad-dame coiffure. He always finds a reason to go into the bathroom while she’s in there. ‘Oh, I’m just looking for th
at thing I left, love…Oh, I just need a whizz…’ The transparency. The lovesick folly. She’s aged, through motherhood, northern weather, the menopause. Her hair has begun to lose a little of its chestnut gleam, her waist’s a little thicker, and there are little blue knots on her outer thighs, which she points out to him occasionally, with a frown. He doesn’t mind, doesn’t see gun-flaws in her the way he does in canvas. Parts of her still find their way into his compositions. Maybe a rock in a sea pool will be modelled on that beautiful bottom. She is Lydia, the woman who can balance the whole sky on her nose. She is the calm, the anti-cyclone, the eye of his storm. Where would he be without her?

  He’ll catch her watching the twins sometimes, when they’re bickering or play-fighting (in their twenties now, but the same games and provocations still apply), prodding each other with the little mackerel bones from the pie and yelling, ‘Wilse, tell him,’ ‘Wilse, tell her.’ A soft, intrigued look on her face. He wonders what she’s thinking, what her take on these two pod-dwellers is. She’s so good at being internal, his wife. She will not often issue judgement, nor will she declaim. Not like him; Mr Big-Mouth, Mr Well-Here’s-What-I-Bloody-Think!