How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

That’s good, she said. It’s very good. Well seen. Now. Do me something you can’t see with your eyes.

  I added a straight line to the forehead of her horse.

  Very witty, she said, oh, you’re a very witty cheat.

  I said I wasn’t, cause it was true, I had never with my eyes truly seen a unicorn.

  You know what I meant, she said. Do as I asked.

  She went to collect the eggs : I closed my eyes, I opened them : I turned the stick upside down, used the thin end of it.

  That one’s him angry, I said when she came back. That one’s him kind.

  Air came out of her mouth (by which I knew that what I’d done was good) : she nearly dropped the eggs (by which I learned that the making of images is a powerful thing and may if care’s not taken lead to breakage) : she checked the eggs were safe in her dress, all unbroken, before she called him over to see his faces.

  When he saw the angry one he hit me over the head with the inside of his hand (by which I learned that people do not always want to know how they are seen by others).

  He and my mother stood and looked for a time at his faces in the dust.

  Not long after this, he began to teach me my letters.

  Then, when my mother was gone into the ground, and me still small enough to, one day I climbed into her clothes trunk in her bedroom and pulled the lid down : it was all broadcloth and linens and hemp and wool, belts and laces, the chemise, the work gowns, the overgown, the kirtle and sleeves and everything empty of her still smelling of her.

  Over time the smell of her faded, or my knowing of it lessened.

  But in the dark in the trunk I was expert and could tell almost as well as if I was seeing which was which, which dress, which usage, by the feel of it between finger and thumb: kitchen use, Sunday use, work use : I went deep in the smell and became myself nothing but fabric that’d once been next to her skin : in the dark between the layers I shoved down or up with a fist and felt for a tapering strip, a ribbon or tie or lace coming off the edge of one of the sleeves or collars, a tassel, a strand of whatever, and was awake till I’d twisted and wound something of her round a thumb or a finger : at which point I was able to sleep : when I woke I’d have freed myself up unawares in my sleep from the tether I’d made : but there’d still be a curlicue shape in the strand of stuff afterwards which held for a time, before it went back to the shape of its own randomness.

  One day when I woke and opened the lid and came back to the daylight the cloth I’d been asleep in dragged out after me, blue, still warm from me : I sat beside it on the floor : I put my head and my arms into it then my whole self inside it : it sat on my shoulders and spread out away from me, it so big and me so small it was as if I’d dressed in a field of sky.

  I put my head through the slit in the sleeve as if it was the neck opening : I dragged the dress through the house, me in it.

  I wore nothing but her clothes from then on : I dragged them in the housedust for weeks, my father too weary to say no, until the day he picked me up in his arms (I was wearing the white one, big, filthy now, ripped a bit where I’d tripped on the stones one day and where it’d caught on the doorframe another, today I was all sweat and heat in it, my face a colour I could feel) so that the trail of the heavy materials left the floor and hung behind us both over his forearm like a great empty fishtail as he carried me through to her room.

  I thought he would beat me, but no : he sat me down still in her overgown on the shut trunk of clothes : he himself sat down on the floor in front of me.

  I’m going to ask you kindly to stop wearing these clothes, he said.

  No, I said.

  (I said it from behind the stiff shield of the front of the dress.)

  I can’t bear it, he said. It is like your mother has become a dwarf and as if her dwarf self is always twinkling away in all the corners of the house and the yard, always in the corner of my eye.

  I shrugged.

  (But cause the shoulders were so high over my own deep in the dress, no one but me knew I’d shrugged.)

  So I would like to make a suggestion, he said. If you agree to put these clothes away. I mean stop wearing them.

  I shook my head slow from side to side.

  And if you were to put, say, breeches on, or these leggings I’ve here, instead –, he said.

  He put his hand in his smock pocket and pulled out boys’ clothes, light and thin in the heat : he dangled them enticing like you do with a mouthful of green a mule that won’t be moved.

  – then I can get you a job and a schooling, he said. For the job, you can come and work with me at the cathedral. It would be a help to me. I need help. I need an apprentice, about your age. You could be that help.

  I lowered myself down inside the dress : the shoulders came up above my ears.

  You already have my brothers, I said.

  You could be like your brothers, he said.

  I eyed him through the lace-up of the neck and the chest : I spoke through the holes in the dress.

  You know I am not like my brothers, I said.

  Yes, but listen, he said. Cause maybe. Maybe. If you were to stop wearing these too-big clothes and were to wear, let’s say, these boys’ clothes instead. And maybe if we allow ourself a bit of imagining. And maybe if we have a bit of discretion. You know what discretion is?

  I rolled my eyes in behind the chestlace for even as a child I already knew, or so I believed, more than he ever would, what discretion is : worse, I knew he was pandering to me with his making of suggestions, more my mother’s style than his, when it would’ve been much more usual for him simply to hit me and forbid me : I despised him a bit for this pandering and for using what he considered big words as if these might be the key to me agreeing to do as he wanted.

  But the words he used next were the biggest of all, the biggest words anyone could’ve.

  If you were, he said. Then we might find someone to train you up in the making and using of colours on wood and on walls, you being so good with your pictures.

  Colours.

  Pictures.

  I stuck my head so fast out the top of the dress that the weight of the dress shifted and nearly knocked me off the box : I saw him stifle and have to disguise, cause he wanted to keep the moment serious, the first smile I’d seen on his face since the going of my mother.

  But you’ll have to wear your brothers’ clothes, he said. And you might, if I find you a training, best be, or become, one of them. Your brothers.

  He looked to see my response.

  I nodded : I was listening.

  We can probably get you Latin without it, and mathematics, he said. But schooling will be easier with it. We are not rich though we’ve more than enough and schooling in itself is not the problem. But unless you enter a nunnery, which is the one sure way you can spend your days making colours or filling the pages of holy saint books with your pictures, a training in colours and pictures – I mean out here in the world, with a life lived as a part of it, a life beyond walls – is another thing altogether. Do you agree?

  He looked me in the eye.

  It is a sure thing always, he said. You would always have work. But nobody will take you for such a training wearing the clothes of a woman. You can’t even be an apprentice to me, wearing the clothes of a woman. I think we could start you working with me next week on the bell tower. By which I don’t mean you’ll work on the bell or the tower, I mean I will let you draw it and furnish you with the materials to, and in this way you’ll be seen to be working with me and your brothers, and then, when you are established, when it is clearly established in others’ eyes as to who you have become –

  He raised an eyebrow.

  – we will get you into a painters’ workshop or find you a master of panels and frescoes and so on, and we will show him what you can do and we will see if he’ll take you on.

  I looked down at the front of my mother’s gown then looked back up at my father.

  Such a master might let us pay in
eggs, or birds, he said, or the fruit off our trees, or even in bricks. I am hopeful. But most of all I’m hopeful that if such a man sees what you can already do he might teach you for less, for the sake of doing justice to your abilities, and show you how to correct your natural mistakes, how to shape the head of a man like they do with their squares and geometries, and bodies too, and the measurements it takes, how to make those measurements, the ones which show where to put the eyes and the nose and so on in a face and where to place things on the tiles of a floor or across a landscape to show some things closer and some much further away.

  So things far away and close could be held together, in the same picture?

  So there were ways to learn to do such a thing?

  I reached for the lace ties at my chin. I held them in my hand.

  All these things you will need to know, he said. And if we can’t find someone I’ll give you what training I can. I know a great deal about buildings and walls and the workings, the rules and the necessities of construction. The construction of pictures, well. It’s bound to have something in common.

  I pulled on the ties and I loosened the gown front : I stood up and the whole gown slipped off the clothes trunk then slipped down away from me like the peeled back petals of a lily and me at its centre standing straight like the stamen : I stepped out naked over its folds : I held out my hand for the leggings.

  He went through to my brothers’ things and came back with a clean shirt.

  You’ll need a name, he said as I pulled the shirt on over my head.

  My mother’s name began with an f : Ff : I tried it on my tongue to see where it’d lead : my father misheard me : Vv.

  Vincenzo? he said.

  He flushed up with excitement.

  He meant Vincenzo Ferreri, the Spanish priest dead long long ago, 20 whole years or so and everybody saying for all those years he should’ve been made saint : the travelling sellers were already selling him like a saint in the pamphlet writ by the nuns full of the pictures and stories of him : he was famous for miracles and for converting 8 thousand moorish moslem infidels and 25 thousand jews, raising 28 people from the dead and curing 4 hundred sick people (just by them lying down for a moment on the couch he’d lain on when he was ill and got better on himself) and also for freeing 70 people from devils : his hat alone had done many miracles.

  But my father liked most the miracle of the hostel and the wilderness.

  Vincenzo had been riding through the wilderness on his donkey praying very hard and he and the donkey were near exhaustion from the prayers when suddenly they arrived at the front door of a beautiful well-appointed hostel : Vincenzo went in : it was as beautiful inside as out : he stayed in it overnight : the service, the food, the bed were all very agreeable and gave him exactly the respite he needed to go on next day with his sojourn through the wild places full of infidels and unbelievers : next morning when he got on his donkey, that same donkey was like one 10 years younger and had no fleabites and wasn’t lame any more : off they went, and it was 6 or 7 miles later when the morning sun first hit his shaven head that Vincenzo realized he’d forgotten his hat.

  He turned the donkey around and they went back over their own hooftracks to the hostel to fetch it : but when they got there there was no hostel and his hat was hanging on the branch of an old dead tree in the exact same place where the hostel had been.

  This miracle was one of the reasons housebuilders and wallmakers wanted Vincenzo Ferreri a saint : they planned to claim him as patron.

  My father prayed to him every morning.

  I thought of my mother telling me the stories of some of the miracles of Vincenzo, her arms round me, me on her knee.

  Vincenzo, petitioned by me, had made no difference to her going or her coming back

  (clearly I had petitioned wrongly).

  I thought of my mother’s French-sounding name :I thought of the French shape that means the flower her name meant.

  Francescho, I said.

  Not Vincenzo? my father said.

  He frowned.

  Francescho, I said again.

  My father held his frown : then he smiled in his beard a grave smile down at me and he nodded.

  On that day with that blessing and that new name I died and was reborn.

  But – Vincenzo –

  ah, dear God –

  that’s who my sombre saint is on the little platform with his eyes averted and the old Christ over his head.

  St Vincenzo Ferreri.

  Hey : boy : you hear me? St Vincenzo, famed across all the oceans for making unhearing people hear.

  Cause listen, when Vincenzo spoke, even though it was in Latin the people whether they knew any Latin or none at all knew exactly what he was saying – even people 3 miles away could hear him as if he was speaking right next to their ears in their own vernacule.

  The boy hears nothing : I can’t make him.

  I’m no saint, am I? no.

  Well good that I’m not, cause look now, here’s a very pretty woman, well, from behind at least, stopped in front of my St Vincenzo

  (4 to 1, and she chose me not Cosmo)

  (just saying)

  (not that I’m being prideful)

  (another miracle, that she did, thanks be to St Vincenzo)

  and since I’m no saint I can have my own close look at her, from the back, from her bare neck just peeking through her long white-gold hair down the line of her spine to her waist then down to her bit-too-thin behind –

  but so’s that boy, look at him sitting up at attention, I swear he felt her come into the room cause I felt the hairs on his neck stand up when he saw her glide through the door over the floor like the room was incomplete without her, he saw her before I did, like struck by a shaft of lightning, and look at him now watching her settling her feathers in front of Vincenzo : I can’t see what his eyes are doing but I bet you they’re wide open and his ears and brow forward like goathead : plus I can tell from his back, he knows her already : boy in love? The old stories never change : but in love with this woman? Nowhere near his equal in years, far from it, even from behind I can tell she’s decades ahead, more than old enough to be his mother : but she’s not his mother, that’s clear, and has no idea he’s there, or his ardour, even though something between them’s as strong as hatred or a ray of heat from him that’s aimed at her.

  Hello. I’m a no-eyed painter no one can hear and there’s a boy here wants you to – I don’t know – something.

  She can’t hear me : course she can’t : but she’s giving Vincenzo a good look over and Vincenzo, being saint, is averting his eyes (though the angels with the whips and bows up there are ready for anything).

  She’s standing with one foot up on its heel, a horsehoof at rest : so elegantly her body adjusts the weight of her head : she takes a look at St Vincenzo, up, down, up again –

  then she turns on that heel and she’s off

  (not even a single glance at a single Cosmo by the way,

  just saying)

  and the boy’s sprung up on his own feet like a leveret and off he goes too after her, and me too helplessly dragging after him like one foot’s caught in the stirrup of a saddle on a horse I’m unfamiliar with who does not know or care for me : and as we go, out of the corner of my no-eye I see a picture by – Ercole, little Ercole the pickpocket, whom I loved and who loved me ! and wait – stop – is that, is it really? – dear God old Motherfather it’s Pisano, Pisanello, I know by the dark and the way it works the light.

  Look all you like, since I cannot, cause it is as if a rope attached to the boy is attached to me and has circled me and cannot be unknotted and where the boy goes I must go whether I want it or don’t, through a threshold, through another room – look! Uccello! horses! –

  I protest

  cause this ejection is against my will : I do not choose it.

  As soon as I discover to whom to complain I will do so, in a letter.

  To whichever illustrious most holy i
nterceding Excellency it concerns, this nth day of n in the year nnnn.

  Most illustrious and excellent holy Lordship most inimitable and in perpetual honoured servitude : please deliver this petition of mine to God the Fathermother Motherfather One True Lord of All : I am the painter Franc. del C. who has made for Him in His honour and by His grace alone, so many works, of good materials, just saying, and done them with good honed skills, one of which said works I have witnessed is hung in His halls: and who worked alongside and as equal to other painters whose works also are hung in His halls : and here I make to Him my petition in the hope of His hearing me and granting me what little I ask : I –

  I what?

  I, having been shot back into being like an arrow but with no notion of the target at which He is aiming me, find myself now in this intermediate place, albeit in a neighbourhood of grand houses but all the same next to a very low very poor piece of brickwork (which will not last 4 winters, by the way) with an unspeaking unseeing unhearing boy whose precipitate desires for a fine Lady he has seen in your Lord’s picture halls have dragged me very much against my will to this low wall away from the beauties of His palace, a place in which I should have liked to dwell for longer : but now find myself out in the cold grey and horseless world : such state of horselessness an unfortunate luck for its people, a creatureless world I thought until I saw the doves flying up in a flock like always, the same doves though greyer, filthy, squatter than, but all the same their wings and the clatter of birds were a salve even to a heart I no longer have.

  By this I recognize, most excellent Sir and Lord, that this is a purgatorium, perhaps even your picture palace is a level of this purgatorium : and my St Vincenzo Ferreri panel, for my blasphemous sin of depicting Christ as older than 33, has resulted in the being placed, both picture and painter, in purgatorium as a reminder of my prideful wrong imagining (though consider, illustrious Lordship, that if this is so, then only 1 of my pictures has ended up in purgatorium, and there are 4 of Cosmo’s there, which in the end demonstrates Cosmo’s work as 4 times more blameworthy than mine, just saying).

  Having myself been, I can only presume, formerly until this renaissance in a heaven of forgetfulness, am now for some unforgiven sin reborn into a place of coldness and mystery, with no means of practising my trade and nothing to my name but the broken pieces of a gone life like the breakage of a vase : each piece its own beauty in the palm of the hand but the whole thing shattered, nothing but air where it once was and all the air that was enclosed in it released, now unheld by anything, and the edges of each broken piece sharp enough to bleed me, had I still skin to be broken