How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

  but He or His clerks will know all these things already, so there is no need for me to note them in my petition, which is nothing but mewling and carping and perhaps I must just accept.

  Cause I know this is not hell cause I am intrigued not hopeless and cause I am surely put here for some good use albeit mysterious : in hell there is no mystery cause in mystery there is always hope : we followed the beautiful woman until she came to the door in the house and went through it and shut it and left the boy, still unseen, outside, at which point he (and I) retired to the small wall across the thoroughfare but still in sight of that shut door, which is where we are now : though also I did notice, I could not fail to as we went, that the woman, who has about her an air of some beauty and grace, unfortunately has a walk like a swan out of element or a flightbird forced to walk, a waddle so unsuited to her beauty that in the end it endears in that it mitigates that beauty : if I had paper and a pen or a willow charcoal (and hands and arms, even just one of each, to do it with) I would show it with an unexpected angle, a flatness, the bodily form appearing a touch unknowing, and it would make her even more graced and likeable and I’ve had much time and leisure to think and plan these things cause we followed her a great distance and were I still embodied I’d be exhausted so it’s as well I’ve no legs : but this boy has some stamina, will by luck and justice live long I thought as we covered the distance : until I felt the dip in his spirit when the woman came to some steps and went up the steps and in through a door and shut the door behind her and

  (oof)

  it was a punch to the gut, a door shut on a boy obsessed.

  It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things : cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence : paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first-hand what petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and underdry of its feathers, a brick about the rough kiss of its skin.

  This boy I am sent for some reason to shadow knows a door he can’t pass through and what it tells me just to be near him is something akin to when you find the husk of a ladybird that has been trapped, killed and eaten by a spider, and what you thought on first sight was a charming thing, a colourful creature of the world going about its ways, is in reality a husk hollowed out and proof of the brutal leavings of life.

  Poor boy.

  Just saying, even though these houses we’re outside are grand, well appointed and many-storeyed, the boy is on a small low wall whose bricks are crying out for love : the knowing of this is the knowledge of my father turning over in his grave in his natural impatience and knocking on the lid of the box I put him in to have someone let him up and out of the ground to remake such a wall : cause if all the dead were given this chance, with their hindsight and experience this world or purgatorium would I think be better made.

  I am wondering where it is, grave of my father, wondering too where my own grave, when the boy sits up, faces the woman’s house, holds his holy votive tablet up in both hands as if to heaven, up at the level of his head like a priest raising the bread, cause this place is full of people who have eyes and choose to see nothing, who all talk into their hands as they peripatate and all carry these votives, some the size of a hand, some the size of a face or a whole head, dedicated to saints perhaps or holy folk, and they look or talk to or pray to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers and staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despairs to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons.

  He holds it in the air : he is maybe saying a prayer.

  Ah! I see : cause a little image of the house and its door has appeared in the tablet : which makes these votive tablets perhaps similar to the box the great Alberti had and which he displayed in Florence (I once saw) whereby the eye looks through the tiniest of holes and sees a full distant landscape formed small and held inside it.

  Is it possible then that all the people of this place are painters going about their world with the painting tools of their time?

  Perhaps I have been placed in a specific painters’ purgatorium –

  but the boy slumps beside me again, his spirit in the gutter.

  No : cause these people have none of the spirit necessary for a lifelong making of pictures.

  Look, boy : cheerful thing : spring flowers in a sort of bucket hanging off the top of a metal pole stuck at the side of this roadway.

  Is there spring in purgatorium? Do they have years in purgatorium? Yes, surely : given that purgatorium holds in its nature a promise of an end to it, when its inmates are judged purged, then it must have some way by which time can be measured : but I’d’ve thought such a place would be full of the moans and the supplicatings of thousands : no, purgatorium could surely be worse, cause look, at least there are blackbirds in it : one comes out of a hedge right now and sits along on the wall with his beak a good Naples yellow and a ring of the same yellow round the black of the eye : he sees the boy there, twitches his tail and wings back into the hedge : in the hedge he starts a song : can it really be purgatorium and not the old earth when it is so like the earth in the song of the bird, its everlasting unchanging fineness? Hello bird : I’m a painter, dead (I think, though I remember no going), placed here for my many prideful sins in this cold place that has no horses to watch unseen unheard unknown the back of a boy in the kind of love that means nothing but despair.

  What kind of a world, though, that has no horses?

  What kind of a journey can you make with no creature to befriend you to let your going anywhere reveal itself as the matter of trust and faith going somewhere always is?

  Now, when I bought my horse, Mattone, he had a stupid name, Bedeverio? Ettore? something from the stories of kings all the rage and everyone naming their children Lancelotto, Artu, Zerbino, and their horses too, by God : I bought him from a woman who had fields outside Bologna, I had a pocketful of money from the job I’d done and hitched a ride in a cabbage cart out to her fields : I saw him and I pointed him out, that one, I said, the one the colour of excellent stone, can I maybe try him? Oh he’s unrideable, she said, a thrower, worse than useless to me, he’s never let anybody, and when the slaughterer or the gypsies come he’s the top of the list : then that’s the one I want, I said and I pulled the money in a bag out of my pocket, out came green leaves from the cart with it and fell all at my feet and it seemed a good omen : so she went into the field and caught him, it only took an hour and a half, and she brought him in, he’d good feet, was clean-haunched, most of all had a curve from his back round to his flank that moved the heart (cause the heart is, itself, a matter of curves) and when I went to look at his teeth he let me put my hand in his mouth, oh he’s never let anyone do that before, the woman said, he’s bitten them all : so she saddled him, there was a furore of kicking and snorting when she did (and it wasn’t all the horse) : but as soon as I was up and straddling him, and had got back on after he’d thrown me that first time in the woman’s yard, I sensed he heard what my hands and heels were saying and he understood I’d not do him harm, also from that first moment not just that I’d be for him a hostelry in a wilderness but that I would trust him to be the same for me.

  So I bought him plus the tack he was wearing then and there, I hung on to his neck and leaned down without getting off (in case of difficulty of getting back on) and gave her the bag of coins, and on our way back to Bologna he only threw me the 3 or 4 times and always let me back on again without much disagreement, which was a civil thing in a horse unused to it : with my hands at the place in his neck where the warm skin folded and stretched as he walked (cause I couldn’t get him to go any faster than a walk unless he had a mind to canter, at which point he would canter as he wished and I’d let him, wh
ich is a trait I felt he liked in me) so by the end of our journey 2 things had happened, it had entered my head to change his name to a more workmanlike one that suited his colouring, and it had turned out he and I were friends, this horse whose eye was still clear, for all the ill-treatment at the hands of the woman or whoever had had him before (it did not say on his bill of sale and she would not sell me a guarantee and said she could not write to sign a paper) and I don’t, can’t recall, ever selling him on, so I must suppose I never had cause to.

  Dead, gone, bones, horsedust.

  In this particular ring of purgatorium I long right now for that smell of home, the smell of the horse I travelled the earth with and the horse who travelled it with me, with the dividing line of whiter hairs from his forehead down to the soft dark of his nostrils, cause he was a creature of symmetries and a reminder that nature is herself a bona fide artist of intent both dark and light.

  Cause there was the morning when I was with the daughter of a man who’d no idea I was in the barn and his daughter there too, or that we’d been in there in each other’s arms warm all the cold night, and Mattone let me know, by taking my shirt which I still had on me in his teeth and pulling it up to let the cold air in then lipping me hard in the back, not just that it was first light but that the man was up and breakfasting and his workers were in the yard, and I’d kissed the girl and was on his own back and off at a canter across the fields before the sun had the chance to melt any more of the frost, from which adventure I was left bruised, yes, but from the swift activities of our love and the biting of my own horse not from the wrath of or blows from any father or his workers, and so with dignity through the birdsong.

  The blackbird in the hedge now stops his song : he darts off out and up with a chirrup and flurry cause the boy shifts : he turns in towards me : he looks at me!

  No : he looks through me : it’s clear that he sees nothing.

  What I see for the first time is his face.

  Most I see that round his eyes is the blackness of sadness (burnt peachstone smudged in the curve of the bone at both sides of the top of the nose).

  It is as if he is a miniver that’s been dipped in shadow.

  Then I see that he looks very girl.

  It is often like this at this age.

  The great Alberti, who published in the year in which my mother birthed me the book for all picturemakers, and wrote in it the words let the movements of a man (as opposed to a boy or young woman) be ornato with more firmness, understands the bareness and the pliability it takes, ho, to be both.

  The great Cennini, though, in his handbook on colours and picturemaking, finds no worth and no beauty of proportion in girls, or in women of any age – except in the matter of hands in themselves, since the delicate hands of girls and women, providing they’re young enough, are more patient, he says, than those of a man, from spending so much more time indoors which makes them more suited to making the best blue.

  Myself I went out of my way, then, to be expert at the painting of hands and be good at the grinding of blue and the using of blue, both : there were others like me, painters I mean, who could do my particular both : we knew each other when we saw each other, we exchanged this knowledge by glance and by silence, by moving on and going our own ways : and most anyone else who saw through the art of what some would call our subterfuge and others our necessity graced us with acceptance and an equally unspoken trust in the skill we must surely possess to be so beholden to be taking such a path.

  In this way my father made sure of an education and an apprenticeship for me, though it maddened my brothers to be always what they considered his workshop serfs, like infidel workers compared to me they thought, carrying and working the stones and bricks that I sat and drew and calculated with, seeing to the shaping of the windows I then used as frames for seeing or sat below using the light of for reading a mathematical book or a treatise on pigments, protecting my hands.

  I’m good at walls too cause I also learned from looking how to handle stone and brick and how to build a wall to last a lot longer than this one the boy is sitting on now.

  But though I was descended from the men who’d made the walls which themselves made the municipal palace – the walls on which the great Master Piero in his stay in Ferara had painted for the Ests the victorious battle scenes

  (and from looking at whose works I learned

  the open mouths of horses,

  the rise of light in landscape,

  the serious nature of lightness,

  and how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it) –

  I would paint my own walls.

  So my father, when I’d trained to what he thought enough degree (which was not until I’d seen 19 summers) and news reached him that there was a need for someone to provide 3 pietà half-figures and a quantity of painted pillars to the side of the high altar in the cathedral, went out into the wet night with works of mine rolled up under his arm wrapped in treated skins to keep the rain off and showed the priests how I could with colours turn plain stone to what seemed marble column : the priests, who’d seen me many times in my youth with him and my brothers, gave me the job and paid us good money : by both luck and justice we all benefited and I did not formally leave my father’s tutelage till 3 years before he died, old father, old wallmaker, by which time I had come of age, was full grown, had been binding my chest with linen for a decade, not too difficult being slim and boylike then, and had been visiting the house of pleasure with Barto for nearly as long, where the girls taught me both binding and unbinding and some other useful ways in which to comport myself.

  Barto.

  Cause if this boy could hear me I’d tell him : we all need a brother or a friend and at some point you need a horse too : I had 2 brothers and admittedly was more friends in the end with my horse : but even better than brothers, and even than horse, my friend Barto, whom I met after fishing barefoot out on the stones in the river on my 12th birthday, and though usually I caught not much, that day the fish had been opening their mouths at the surface of the water as if congratulating me on having been born and I had caught 7 altogether, 3 fat carp with their whiskers trailing and the rest were little and middle-sized perch, the black stripes over their gold : I knotted the lines together and hung them over my shoulder and left my brothers to their displeasure (they’d caught less) and was walking home through the cow parsley along the foot of a tall wall when a voice called down to me.

  I once caught a catfish, the voice said, that was so big I couldn’t land it. In fact it almost rivered me.

  I liked the word rivered so I looked up : it was a boy leaning over the top of the wall.

  I could feel from the mouth and the pull of it, he said, that it was a lot bigger than you from head to foot, and though you’re not that tall yourself it’s quite long for a fish, no?

  His cap was new : he was wearing a finely embroidered jacket, I saw its quality though the wall was more than 2 men high.

  So I couldn’t land it, he said. Cause it was a lot bigger than me too, and there was only me and the catfish, no one else, and I couldn’t hold it and bring it in myself. So I cut my line and I let it escape me, I had to. But it’s the best fish I’ve ever caught, that fish I didn’t catch, cause it’s a fish that will always be with me now and never be eaten, it’ll never die, that fish I’ll never land. I see you’ve done well today. Any chance you’d give me one of your hundred fish?

  Catch your own fish, I said.

  Well, I would, but you’ve taken so many it wouldn’t be fair to the river, he said.

  How did you get up there? I said.

  I climbed, he said. I’m more monkey than man. Coming up? Here.

  He leaned over the top and held out a hand but he was so far above me and his gesture so charming that I burst out laughing : I untied the smallest of the perch, separated it from its brothers and laid it in the grass.

  A piece o
f gold for making me laugh, I shouted up.

  I hoisted my other fish and my stick back on my shoulder and waved my hand : but when I’d got a little along the path the boy called me back.

  Can’t you throw that fish you gave me up here to me? he said. I can’t reach it from here.

  Don’t be lazy, I said. Come down and get it.

  Frightened you can’t throw a fish as well as you can catch a fish? he said.

  I’d happily throw it, but I’m not meant to misuse my hands, I said, cause I plan to earn my living by them, and throwing, as the masters say in all the books, could tire or hurt them.

  Scared you’ll miss, he said.

  You don’t know it yet, I said, but you’re besmirching an expert aim.

  Oh, an expert aim, he said.

  I put down my things and picked up the little perch.

  Hold still, I said.

  I will, he said.

  I aimed it. The boy turned with languor and watched both cap and fish on their way down the other side of the wall.

  There’ll be trouble now, he said. I’m supposed to keep it clean. What kind of fish was it you knocked it off with?

  A perch, I said.

  He made a face.

  Gutterfish, he said. Mudfish. Haven’t you anything tastier?

  Come down and we’ll go to the river, I said. I’ll lend you my stick. You can catch yourself your own taste in fish. And if what you hook’s as big as the one you caught before I’ll help you.

  He looked pleased when I said this : then his face went miserable.

  Ah, I can’t, he said.