How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

  Your version doesn’t make sense, George says. You can’t dress up in thoughts. It’s fought. It’s obvious. You’re mishearing it.

  I’ll prove it to you, her mother says. Next chance we get we’ll play it and listen.

  We could look up the lyrics online right now, George says.

  Those online sites are full of mistakes, her mother says. We’ll use our human ears and listen together to the original when we get home.

  I bet you fifty pounds I’m right, George says.

  You’re on, her mother says. Prepare yourself for a substantial loss.

  Francesco de what? the woman behind the information desk had said.

  Cossa, George said.

  Cotta? the woman said.

  Cossa, and it’s del, George said. With an l.

  Della Francesca, the other woman, coming over, said.

  No, George said. Francesco. Then del. Then Cossa. Francesco del Cossa.

  The second woman shook her head. The first one shook her head.

  It’s a picture of St Vincent. St Vincent of Ferrara, George said.

  Actually, George had been wrong about that. It’s not Ferrara. It’s a painting of a saint called Ferrer and nothing to do with the place George has been to in Italy.

  But even so, neither of the women at the information desk in the gallery back on that first day George went to see St Vincent Ferrer recognized the name of the painter or the picture. Probably no one ever asks about anything here except the really famous paintings, which makes it fair enough, not to know, because a person can’t be expected to know about every single painting in a gallery of hundreds, no, thousands, even if he or she works on the information desk of what’s just one wing of it.

  And when George first looked at the painting herself she’d thought it wasn’t anything much. You could easily walk past it and glance at it and think you’d seen all you wanted to. Most people, most days, as George has seen day after day, do. It is not what you’d call an immediately prepossessing picture. It had taken a bit of looking to get past her own surface reaction to it. It’s not like those ones in the palace in Italy, or it doesn’t seem to be, at first look.

  If you wouldn’t mind spelling it, thank you, one of the women said.

  She typed what George said into a computer. She waited for a result. When it came, both women looked amazed, like they’d really pulled something off, and then delighted like George’s asking and their being able to answer her had made their day better.

  It’s in Room 55! the first woman said.

  She looked like she might even want to shake George’s hand.

  That was three weeks ago near the start of March. Since then, twice a week, George has been getting up, putting her clothes on, having breakfast, making sure Henry’s ready for school, seeing him off on the bus, going into the front room and doing the dance thing in honour of her mother to whatever random French song comes up on the playlist, putting her jacket on, going to the old bureau and filching the Subverts bank card (her father has forgotten about this account) then leaving the house as if to go to school but doubling back round the other side of the house where her father can’t see which direction she’s taking and cycling to the station instead, where she hangs around in the ticket place or the waiting room for the hour it takes till the cheaper fares kick in. Then George, travelling below surveillance cameras like people in novels from the past used to pass below the leaves or bare branches of trees and the eyes and wings of birds, nods to the tower there on the city horizon like a mega insect antenna, where fifty years ago the singer threw the bread roll at the maître d’, goes down into the Underground and comes up again in a different place not far from the wing of the gallery where the only painting in this country done by the painter her mother liked is.

  Francesco del Cossa

  (about 1435/6–about 1477/8)

  Saint Vincent Ferrer about 1473–5

  Saint Vincent Ferrer was a Spanish Dominican preacher, active throughout Europe and ardent in the conversion of heretics. Here he holds the gospels and points upwards to a vision of Christ displaying his wounds. Christ is flanked by angels holding instruments of his Passion. This is the central part of an altarpiece from a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent in San Petronio, Bologna.

  Egg on poplar NG597 Bought 1858.

  The gallery knows more about the man in the picture than it does about the painter who painted it. About. There is nothing here about the painter except the fact that they don’t know for definite the year he painted this picture or the years he died and was born.

  The painting is in a room of other pictures by painters from around the same time. At first all these pictures by the other people look more interesting than this one, which just looks like another religious picture (first reason not to look) of a rather severe-faced monk (second reason not to look) who’s ready and waiting with his finger up, holding a book up and open in his other hand, with which, both finger and book, it looks like he’ll probably admonish anyone who does stop and look at him (third reason not to look).

  But then you notice that he’s not looking at you. He’s looking past and above you, or into the far distance, like there’s something happening beyond you and he can see what it is.

  Then there’s the stone road off to the side of him which seems to be changing from road into waterfall as you look, the paving stones literally morphing, stone to water.

  That lets you start to see that the picture is full of things you’d not expect. There’s a Jesus at the top in a sort of gold arch, he looks weirdly old, a bit rough and ready for a Jesus, a bit friendly, like a well-worn human being or a tramp who’s been dressed up as Jesus. He’s wearing salmon pink which somehow makes him (Him?) look like nothing else in the picture and he’s surrounded by angels who are floating, but very unostentatiously, on clouds. Their wings are bright red or purple or silver. They could all be either male or female. They’re holding torture implements like the people in an S&M session online but really unlike an S&M session in their calmness, or is it sweetness? The information placard says they’re holding ‘instruments’, which is apt because it’s quite like they’re about to play music on them, like a small orchestra waiting to tune up.

  Then you notice that the saint is standing on a little table. The table is like a tiny theatre stage. This makes the black cloak-like thing he’s wearing start to look like theatre curtain too. You can see through the table legs to the base of the pillar behind him and it’s like a behind-the-scenes revelation, like it’s all theatre, but at the same time the wrinkles in the skin of the wrist that’s holding the book up are real-looking. They act exactly like the skin of a hand that’s holding something heavy up does.

  Best of all, up at the level of his head, the pillar’s had its top broken off and there’s what looks like a miniature forest growing out of it.

  There are very small people in the background behind the saint’s legs. They’re meant to be small because of perspective but at the same time it makes it look like this man is a giant and sure enough, when you look away from this painting at the others in the room it’s like they’ve all been dwarfed. After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they’re stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing’s a performance.

  Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

  George has now been seven times. Each time she’s visited, the monk has seemed less severe. He has started to look unruffled, like he’s not bothered by anything – the other paintings in the room, the stuff happening in them, the people passing back and fore in front of him every day with all their different lives, the whole rest of the gallery, the square, the roads, the traffic, the city, the country, the sea, the countries radiating out beyond the gallery and away. Look at the wide-open arms of the God up there a bit like a baby in a
womb in an old cross section of a pregnant woman’s body, a very old wise baby. Look at the cloth of the cloak of the saint which opens wide too and changes from dark to silver right in the middle of the saint’s body. His pointing finger has stopped being about being told off and started to be about looking up, and not really at the God, which is what the gallery placard says he’s pointing at, but more at the way the blue in the sky gets darker and bluer as it rises, or at the way a forest will grow out of stone, or at how what’s meant to be a torture instrument is really powerless, nothing but a museum piece, a stage prop for some old drama whose horror’s all long gone.

  George has become more and more interested in spite of herself and in spite of how little this picture – or any of the pictures in this room, all made more than five hundred years ago – seems on first glance to have to do with the real world. Now when she comes into Room 55, it’s weird, but it’s like she is meeting an old friend, albeit one who won’t look her in the eye because the saint is always looking off to the side. But that’s good too. It’s good, to be seen past, as if you’re not the only one, as if everything isn’t happening just to you. Because you’re not. And it isn’t.

  A friendly work of art. That was when her mother said the thing about how the art they were looking at was a bit like you. Generous but also, what was it? Something else.

  Sarcastic?

  George can’t remember.

  At first, coming here, she knew consciously all the time that she was seeing a picture her mother never even knew existed or might well have walked past without seeing, like people do, on their way to see the more famous pictures.

  Today what she sees is the way the rockscape on one side of the saint is broken, rubbly, as if not yet developed, and on the other side has transformed into buildings that are rather grand and fancy.

  It is as if just passing from one side of the saint to the other will result if you go one way in wholeness and if you go the other in brokenness.

  Both states are beautiful.

  She looks across at the picture to the left of the saint, past the open door. It’s of a woman sitting on a fancy throne holding a sprig of cherries, by a painter called Cosimo Tura, and it has those little glass or coral balls in it too, on a string above her head. So does the one to George’s left, which is a Virgin Mary and Baby and is by Cosimo Tura as well.

  The coral and glass balls on the St Vincent picture are by far the brightest and most convincing.

  Maybe there was a glass and coral ball school where the painters all went to learn to do these things.

  Today is Wednesday. She is missing double maths, English, Latin, biology, history, double French. Today instead she is going to count the number of people who pass through Room 55 in a given half-hour (she will start at noon) and how many of those people stop to look at the Francesco del Cossa picture and for how long.

  From this she will be able to form a statistical study of attention spans and art.

  Then she will get herself some lunch, then off back to King’s Cross and home in time to be there for Henry getting out of school.

  Then she will slip the bank card back into its place as usual and go out into the garden, if it’s not raining, and say the daily hello and how are you today that she’s pledged to the girl in the yurt. She’ll come in and make supper and hope her father comes home in not too bad a shape.

  It is lovely, being intoxicated, her father said the other night. It is like wearing a whole fat woolly sheep between me and the world.

  The smell of an old sheep in the house, George thought when he said it, its fleece all grassy, matted with excrement, would be hugely preferable to the smell of her father after he’s been drinking.

  It was the weekend. She was watching a film on TV. It was about four teenage girls, friends who’d been devastated to find that they were all going to have to spend their summer holidays in different parts of the world. So they made a pact that they’d share a pair of jeans, meaning they’d send the jeans by post from one to the next to the next and so on as a sign of their undying friendship. What happened next was that the pair of jeans acted as a magic catalyst to their lives and saw them through lots of learning curves and self-esteem-getting and being in love, parents’ breaking up, someone dying etc.

  When it got to the part where a child was dying of cancer and the jeans helped one of the girls to cope with this, George, sitting on the floor in the front room, howled out loud like a wolf at its crapness.

  She decided she’d watch instead one of the DVDs H brought round before she left.

  The league of mothers has got your back, H had said handing her a small pile of films all in different languages which her mother had sorted out, in the moving, for your poor friend who likes the 1960s and who is mourning for real.

  Mourning for real. George liked the phrase. The top one on the pile next to the DVD player had the actress whose picture is on George’s wall in it. It was about some people who go to a near-deserted island on a boat. Then one of them goes missing. She literally disappears. The people spend the rest of the film looking for her and falling in and out of love with each other, but they never find out where she’s gone or what’s happened to her. George watched it without moving from where she was sitting on the floor from beginning to end. Then she ejected it and took the next film off the top of the pile.

  It was called, in French, A Film Like The Others. It had no subtitles and when it started it looked like a bootleg, fuzzy, as if copied from dodgy video.

  Her father came into the room and sat in the chair behind her.

  She could smell him.

  What’s the film, Georgie? he said.

  George was about to tell him the title but then she realized that if she told him what it was called he’d think she was being cheeky. This made her laugh.

  It’s French, she said.

  Nice to hear you laugh, he said behind her.

  The film began with some footage of two young men making very small brick walls. They seemed to be learning how to bricklay, could that be it? Over the top of this a lot of people were speaking in a French which George couldn’t really follow. It seemed to be about politics. Then it cut to some young people sitting talking in long grass. There was footage of what looked like strikes and protests, which made George think about the students here, how long they’d lasted in the university building and the stories that went round school about how rough the police and private security men had been to them, which her mother had made her tell her and some of the telling of which she’d sent out in phrases and paragraphs via Subvert.

  Her father was maundering on now about the film and song which had made her mother decide to call George her name.

  I said but what if you ended up looking like the girl in the film. She’s a bit plain, a bit of a loser. But your mother was right. She liked the notion of an anti-hero. Anti-heroine. She was of the belief that people can be who they really are and still come up trumps against the odds. Including me, I hope. Eh? Eh, Georgie?

  Yup, George said.

  She sighed. She hated the song from which her name had supposedly come.

  Her father started whistling it then singing the bit about how the world would see a new Georgie girl. The people in the film, whose faces you never got to see, just their arms and legs and torsos, sat round and talked about God knows what. The film showed them talking like all that mattered was that they were talking. While they talked they played with stems of the grass they were sitting in. They’d break little bits off it. They’d knot it. They’d split it as if to whistle through it. They’d hold up a stem and burn it with the end of a cigarette as they talked, holding the lit end to it till the bit of grass burnt through and fell off, then starting again further down the stem or with a new bit of grass. Then the film cut to a wall with words sprayed on it. PLUTÔT LA VIE.

  You know, her father said behind her, you’ll be leaving me soon, don’t you?

  George didn’t turn round.

  Purcha
sed that ticket to the moon for me already, have you, then? she said.

  Silence, except for the French people all talking years ago. She turned. Her father looked grave. He didn’t look misted or sentimental. He didn’t even look drunk, though the room round him smelt like he couldn’t not be.

  It’s the nature of things, her father said. Your mother, in some ways, is lucky. She’ll never have to lose you now. Or Henry.

  Dad, George said. I’m not going anywhere. I’m sixteen.

  Her father looked down. He looked like he might start to cry.

  Perhaps the day will come, George thought, when I will listen to my father. For now though, how can I? He’s my father.

  As she thought it, she felt mean. So she gave in, fractionally.

  Oh yeah, and dad, she said. My room’s got a leak.

  You what? her father said.

  He sat up.

  The roof’s been leaking, she said. It’s possible that it’s been like that for some time. It was happening behind posters and stuff so I didn’t notice. Not till earlier today.

  Her father leapt up off the chair.

  She heard him take the stairs two at a time.

  George left the interesting / boring French film running and opened her laptop. She typed in Italian Film Directors. She clicked on Images.

  Up came a photograph of a man in the dark whose face she couldn’t see, wearing a lit-up picture on his chest. No, not a picture. Someone was literally projecting a film on to the man using him as a screen.

  George clicked on the link. It was about a director who’d sat in an art gallery in Italy while an artist projected one of the director’s own films from start to finish on to his chest.

  It said that not long after this art act this man was found dead on a beach.

  It said rent-boy, assignation, murder, conspiracy theory, Mafia, Vatican.