by Ali Smith
I can help with bad dreams, Barto said.
If it were only dreams, it’d be easy, I said. I could deal with only dreams.
Barto was sure, he said, of a good way to rid oneself of bad dreams and painful memories both : you had to do a ritual in the name of the goddess of memory : you’d drink one water first and you’d forget everything : you’d drink the other water next and it’d give you a forceful remembering, everything crushed into 1 single huge memory boulder, a remembering the size of a mountainside.
Now I sat at the table with the 2 cups in front of me.
I don’t want all my memories falling on me like avalanche, I said.
You won’t know the first thing about it, Barto said. You won’t even know it’s happening. You’ll be protected. You’ll be in a trance. And then we lift you up and we carry you across the room and we put you in the special chair and you tell the oracle all the things the water’s made you remember and then you fall asleep from the effort of it all. And when you wake up you find that you remember in a whole new way. You remember without fear or discomfort. You remember only what you really need to remember. And after it your sleep at night will be deep and good and sound and also – best thing of all – you’ll find you’re able to laugh again.
What special chair? What oracle? I said.
We were down in the servant kitchen : it was empty, Barto had dismissed the serving girls and the cook for the hour it would take, he said, to change my demeanour : we could hear them sunning themselves in the yard lightly complaining about the interruption : but they were used to me there : they were kind to me too : there was always something to eat at Barto’s house if Barto was away from home cause the kitchen was where Barto habitually took me (to keep me out of sight of his wife, I think, who did not like me around the house too much : he’d promised me I’d always stand godparent to his boys, and to all his boys not just the first : and what about your girls? I’d asked, cause I knew I’d be a great patron to girls : ah but the girls are not so much my business, he’d said and I’d seen from the slant away of his eyes that I was permitted, but conditionally, to the parts of his life over which his wife had no jurisdiction : this was fine by me, I had more than enough grace by our friendship : though I’d have liked all the same to be guardian to his girls since girls got less attention when it came to colours and pictures, which meant the loss of many a good painter out of nothing but blind habit : but his wife did not want her girls to have the life of painters).
Barto leapt across to a larder, opened a corner cupboard inside it and brought out a wrapped honeycomb on a dish above which a small cloud of flies appeared and congregated : he put it on the table in front of me.
The oracle, he said.
Is there bread to go with it? I said.
He went back to the larder.
Would you prefer eggs as oracle? he said.
Can the oracle be both? I said. And can I take some of the oracle home with me?
My wife has been complaining there are never enough eggs, he said (cause she knew from her servants that I sent the pickpocket round here often : what neither of them knew was that her kitchen actually gained a lot for the eggs it happened to lose, cause the Garganelli cook had taken lessons from the pickpocket who was good with food when it came to both pictures and stomachs and who’d taught the cook how to hang and dry beef and pork in the way that enhances the flavours).
Barto set a bowl full of eggs on the table beside the honey.
And the special chair? I said (and while he looked round for a chair that would do I pocketed 5 of the eggs).
He was patting the crate of apples in the corner : he covered it with two dishcloths and patted the creases smooth.
Right, he said. Ready.
So. I drink this first, I said.
Yes, he said.
And then my memories fly off the top of me, I said, like someone putting a ladder against my walls if I were a house and climbing up on to the roof of me where all the things I remember are neatly laid like rooftiles, the first under the next under the next under the next. And then that someone jemmies each tile off, throws it down to the ground and doesn’t stop till the rafters are bare. Yes?
More or less, Barto said.
And when they come off, do they stack up neatly, my memories, or do they lie broken in a heap by their fall? I said.
I can’t say for sure, Barto said. I’ve never done this ritual before.
And then, in my new roofless state, I said, what I do is, I drink this, yes?
Yes –, Barto said.
– and those same old rooftiles, I said, hoist themselves off the ground again all at once, all the tiles that haven’t broken and all the little broken bits, both, and they fly up like a skyful of stiff wingless birds back up to the open roof of me where they fix themselves back on, over and under all their old neighbours again? In exactly the same places?
I suppose, Barto said.
So what’s the point? I said.
The point? Barto said. The point is – obviously, Francescho, that moment, with all the tiles, I mean the memories, gone. That moment when you’re like before you were born. Like just newborn. Open to everything. Open to the weather. Everything new.
Ah, I said.
Open like a brand-new not-yet-lived-in home, Barto said. Clean like a wall that’s been returned to what it was like before the painting.
But then the roof, or the same old picture, lands right back on top of me again? I said.
Yes, but by the time it does you’ve had the moment without it, your clean moment, Barto said. And what happens in that moment is, the ritual starts its work, and I put you in the Chair of Mnemosyne, and you say out loud to the oracle on the table –
The eggs and the honey, I said –
Yes, Barto said, you tell them everything that’s come into your head. After that the memory can’t hurt you any more.
Ah, I said.
That’s how it works, he said. That’s the Rite of Mnemosyne.
Barto was my friend so he wished me well : it was a warm-hearted game, sweet, wholesome, funny and hopeful : but perhaps too, I reckoned – I suspected him of it – what he really wished was for me to forget my self so I might be another self to him.
More : I had seen depictions of that goddess Mnemosyne : I had seen how she would place her hand on the back of a man’s head and not just pull him by the hair but get a good handful and yank him nearly off his feet by the head and suspend him in mid-air as if hanging him for a crime : she was not a restful spirit : she was tough and wiry and dark : the scholars and poets thought her the mother of all the muses, even the inventor of words themselves : I didn’t want to offend in any way such a spirit.
– then I take you home to your house, Barto was saying, we put cushions under you, you sleep it off, and then you wake up feeling better, Barto said.
All just from me drinking water, I said.
You’ll see, Barto said.
So I picked up the first cup : but what if I did by chance drink the forgetting and the remembering the wrong way round? I might end up roofless and open for ever, no memories at all of anything ever again : what I would give, to forget everything : cause as I know now from this place of purgatorium this would be a kind of paradise, since purgatorium is a state of troubling memory or the knowledge of a home after home is gone, or of something which you no longer have in a world which you recognize to be your own but in which you are a stranger and of which you can no longer be a part.
Here, my father’d said to me once, soon after I announced to him that I’d stop being his apprentice, that I thought myself ready to do without guardianship being well past 2 decades old.
He handed me a folded piece of paper which, when I unfolded it, was worn to a thinness through which actual light came cause of the too many times unfolded then folded again in its time spent as a fragile thing in the world.
I flattened it gently in my hand and I read what it said in the faded ink in an immature hand which sloped u
p in a curve at the ends of the lines : its writer had made no preparation for keeping his line of words steady as small children are taught to do with the mark of a straight line to follow.
Forgive my insolence if indeed it be insolence but I have held it all this time wrong of you : so much so that I have been unable some nights to sleep well for thinking on it : that you did strike me on the head that day for the pictures I had made of you in the soil and dust : honoured illustrious and most beloved of all fathers I beg of you do not think to strike me that way again : unless of course justly I deserve your wrath which in this instance I maintain it, I did not.
What is it? I asked him.
You don’t remember? he said.
I shook my head.
You were small and I taught you to write, he said, and this is what you first wrote.
!
I looked at the paper in my hand : I’d have sworn my life on that I had never seen it before : yet this was my own writing.
So much we forget ourselves in a life.
I looked at how I held it, my child’s hand in my adult hand, and thought how much paler the paper was in my father’s : cause my own skin was light, white as any lady’s compared to the skin of my father and brothers after the years of weather and work and firing of bricks, all of which will turn skin to a brown quite close to the red of the bricks themselves : my father was proud of my pale skin : to him it was achievement : with my pale hands I folded the paper again and held it out for him to take back.
It’s yours, he said. If you’re leaving my tutelage, then I give into your care what little I still have of your child self. It also holds your mother in it, who will have helped you fashion it, cause you were very young when you wrote this and the sentences have her turn of phrase about them, as well as – look, here, here and here – her habit of putting these 2 dots between clauses where a breath should come.
It’s my habit too, I said.
He nodded. He took another paper from his sleeve pocket and held it out to me.
Yours too, he said.
What is it? I said.
The contractual agreement, he said. We made it when you were a child. Remember?
No, I said.
You sign it here, and here, he said, and I do too. We take it to the notary and he witnesses us sign it. And when he does – that’s it. You’re your own man at last.
He raised both eyebrows and regarded me with comic warmth, and then me him with warmth too, and for a moment a happiness that was also made of some sadness between us.
But I was gone soon after on my new horse, I’d a life to live and a different city to work in and Florence to visit and Venice to see and was no longer apprentice to anyone.
Old father, old brickmaker.
Young gone brickshaper mother who never grew old.
3 years later I came back to the town cause I’d heard there might be work going at the palace of beautiful flowers and cause Cosmo was working on the muses and I might get the chance to work with Cosmo : I’d seen a small crowd of boys down the side of the cathedral throwing stones at a ruined serf, old man in torn cloth pulling by hand a cart loaded with the dregs of household stuff : it looked like he was stopping passers to sell them the things in the cart : he’d reach behind him, take whatever came to hand, a piece of old something, cloth, a cup, a bowl, another bowl, a footstool, a chairleg, plank of wood, and hold it up and offer it : a person took something and didn’t pay : the next people pushed him out of the way : people went past him as fast as they could in a kind of panic : except the boys : the boys followed him and threw stones and insults : he was a stranger Jew or infidel, or a gypsy or wood dweller maybe : there was fear of the blue sickness in town, there was always fear of it even when there’d been no sign of it in the people for years : but a man acting fevered always drew a sharp attention : it wasn’t till after I’d gone, was a mile or 2 away, that I knew I’d recognized the last thing I’d seen him take from the cart and hold up : it had been a stonehammer : I went back along the road to the cathedral but he was gone : the boys too had gone : what I’d seen had vanished as surely as if I’d invented it.
I went to the old house : he was there, he was fine, he was sitting at the table : there was a written list of names on the wood of the table : the list went all down the long side of it where we’d sat and eaten as children : several of the names at the top end had a line scored through them : they’re the people who owe me for work done, he said, I’m writing to them all to absolve them of their debts, I’ve written to those ones there, I still have these down here to write to.
It wasn’t long after this that they came fast horse to Bologna to tell me he’d died.
In my dreams he was always younger, his arms rope-strong.
Once in a dream he told me he was cold.
But there were nights I couldn’t get near any dream cause the real things I’d seen and done, and seen and not done, fell like a shadow curtain in my way.
I came back to Ferara after he died and stood outside the empty house on the road (cause my uncle was dead and my brothers not wanting to inherit the debts had vanished and left them to me) : a woman I didn’t know saw me and came out of a house opposite, she crossed the road and gave me money in my hands that Cristoforo had given her the last time he saw her saying take it, I won’t need it.
4 coins : she wanted me to have them back.
(I lost that contract my father and I signed : I lost that letter my child self wrote to my father : I kept the 4 coins, and had them for the rest of my, till I did I? die?)
I yelled it out into the kitchen.
Nothing I remember nothing.
Through the window I saw the 2 serving girls jump : Barto too nearly leapt out of his own skin. I threw my hands in the air like someone with lost wits : I knocked the cup with the Water of Remembering in it over : it spilled through an open crack in the table wood and hit the floor underneath : the doorways filled with Garganelli servants all wide eyes : Barto held up his hand to stop anyone coming in : he bent low over me, didn’t take his eyes off me : I looked up and through him as if blind.
Who are you? I said.
Francescho –, Barto said.
You are Francescho, I said. Who am I?
No, you are Francescho, Barto said. I’m your friend. Don’t you know me?
Where am I? I said.
My house, Barto said. The kitchen. Francescho. You’ve been here a thousand times.
I let my mouth fall open : I made my face empty : I held my hand up wet from the water on the table : I looked at it like I’d never seen a hand, like I’d no idea what a hand was.
It’s me. Bartolommeo, Barto said. Garganelli.
What place is this? I said. Who is Bartolommeo Garranegli?
Barto went paler than autumnal fog.
Oh dear Christ dear Madonna and all the angels and the baby Jesus, he said.
Who is Christ and dear Madonna and a baby? I said.
What have I done? he said.
What have you done? I said.
I made to stand up, then as if I couldn’t remember what legs were for : I fell off my stool to the ground : I fell quite convincingly : ah but then I felt the wet of the broken eggs in my pocket.
Aw, damnt to hell, I said.
Francescho? Barto said.
Thought I’d got away with it, I said.
Is it you? Barto said.
There was sweat on his forehead : he sat down at the table.
You bastard, he said.
Then he said, Thank the Christ, Francescho.
I got myself to my feet : the wet of the eggs had made a darkness all down my coat and in the clothes on the side of my leg.
For a minute there, he said, my world ended.
I started to laugh and he did too : I put my hand in my pocket and scooped out a single yolk which had – a miracle – stayed whole in its sac in a half-shell of egg still unbroken : the other yolks were mixed up with their own whites and shells and hung off my hand
in a long drip of mucus : I wiped my hand on the table and then on the face of my friend, who let me : then I upended the half-shell into my hand and held out the unbroken yolk on my palm to show him.
The oracle speaks, Barto said.
I completely forgot there were eggs in there, I said.
See? Barto said. I told you it’d work.
The girl can’t sleep : or when she does sleep she shifts around in her bed like a fish not in water : in the nights I watch her writhing in the half-sleep or sitting up blank and unmoving in the dark of her room.
The great Alberti says that when we paint the dead, the dead man should be dead in every part of him all the way to the toe and finger nails, which are both living and dead at once : he says that when we paint the alive the alive must be alive to the very smallest part, each hair on the head or the arm of an alive person being itself alive : painting, Alberti says, is a kind of opposite to death : and though he knows that when we are bared back to nothing but our bones ourselves only God can remake us into humans, put faces back on our skulls on the final day and so on &c, which means there is no blasphemy in what I’m about to say –
cause Alberti said it and it is true –
all the same it’s many a person who can go to a painting and see someone in it as if that person is as alive as daylight though in reality that person has not lived or breathed for hundreds of years.
Alberti it is who teaches, too, how to build a body from nothing but bones : so that the process of drawing and painting outwits death and you draw, as he says, any animal by isolating each bone of the animal, and on to this adding muscle, and then clothing it all with its flesh : and this giving of muscle and flesh to bones is what in its essence the act of painting anything is.
I now sense this girl has had a death or a vanishment perhaps of the dark-haired woman in the pictures on the south wall above her bed which are pictures she sometimes looks at for many minutes and sometimes cannot, in which the woman is both young and older, sometimes with a small infant who resembles this girl, and sometimes with another small infant who then matures to become the brother, and sometimes with strangers : in this instance the pictures mean a death : cause pictures can be both life and death at once and cross the border between the two.
