by Ali Smith
I am 18 years old : I have high hopes cause my father has persuaded the most exciting new young master the town has seen for a long time to look over some of my pictures and has gone to the municipal palace with a great many of them to show him (who isn’t new at all, who’s been working as a tapestry and fabric designer and painter of horsecoats and pennants there for a decade and making a name too for his pictures which are near-shocking things in their toughness, all roots and stones and grimaces and all of an astonishing arrogance, so much so that to look at them for any time will fill you with a kind of discomfort and distaste : more, Borse, the newest Marquis, has tired of his old masters, good Bono and Angelo, who weren’t his but his half-brother’s court painters, and word’s gone round that this new painter has caught his eye and has received many gifts) : my father has decided he’d be a good man to know and that a court job could be mine easy as anything if I were apprenticed to him : I am home in the workshop my father made for me in our yard from sticks and hanging canvases, shelter from the wind but full of plain daylight, good for painting : it’s a place both flimsy and serviceable and I haven’t had to re-erect it this morning (my brothers like to knock the sticks out of the ground at night when they’ve come home from work or drinking, but last night they forgot to, or were kind enough not to) and I’m hard at work on a picture as large as the canvases that make the walls hung round me, I am picturing a story I remember from childhood : a musician has an argument with a god about whose music is better : the god wins the argument and the musician has to pay the price, which is to be skinned and hand over the pelt to the god as a trophy.
It’s a story I’ve puzzled over almost all my years : right now though I’ve found the way to tell it : the god stands to one side, the unused knife slack in his hand : he has an air near disappointment : but the inner body of the musician is twisting up out of the skin in a kind of ecstasy like the skin’s a thick flow of fabric coming rich in one piece off the shoulder and peeling away at the same time from the wrists and the ankles in little pieces like a blown upward snow of confetti : the body appears through the skin’s unpeeling like the bride undressing after the wedding : but bright red, crystal red : best of all the musician catches the skin over the very arm it’s coming off and folding itself, neat.
I hear someone behind me : I turn : a man is standing between the folds of canvas that make the door of my workshop : he’s quite young : he is adorned : his clothes are very beautiful : he himself inside the clothes is also good on the eye and he has an arrogance that actually has a colour : I will try quite a few times after this to mix that colour but will never be able to get it.
He is looking at my painting : he is shaking his head.
It’s wrong, he says.
Says who? I say.
Marsyas is a satyr and therefore male, he says.
Says who? I say.
Says the story, he says. Say the scholars. Say the centuries. Says everyone. You can’t do this. It’s a travesty. Says me.
Who’re you? I say
(though I know quite well who he is).
Who am I? Wrong question, he says. Who are you? Nobody. No one will ever pay you, not money, for this. It’s worthless. Meaningless. If you’re going to paint a Marsyas, Apollo has to win. Marsyas has to display ruin and be defeated. Apollo is purity. Marsyas has to pay.
He is staring at the picture with, is it a kind of anger? He comes up closer and rubs the lower corner roughly with a thumb and first finger.
Hey –, I say
cause I am annoyed at his touching it.
He acts like he can’t hear : he examines the fields and fencing and trees, the far houses, the rock formations, the people going about their day and the nothing unusual happening, the boys throwing stones in the river for a dog to chase, the woman tramping the cloth in the barrel, the birds in flight, the clouds going where they’re blown and the tree to which the musician was to be bound by ropes and from which the musician has twisted free.
He’s as close to the surface of the painting as he can get, so close it’s as if his eyelashes might be brushing the twigs and leaves of the crown on Apollo : he puts himself equally close to the place where the skin of the musician’s face and neck, all that’s left still attached to the body, meets the red of the underflesh : he steps back, steps back again, steps back again so he’s level with me : he looks down at the colours on my table.
Who made your blue? he says.
I did, I say.
He does a shrug like he doesn’t care who made that blue : he lifts his eyes and looks back at the picture again : he sighs : he gives a little disapproving shake of the head and then he disappears again through the opening in the airy walls.
2 nights later the painting went : I came out in the morning, the workshop was wrecked and ruined as usual but cause I knew my brothers liked their fun I always stored the tools and things that mattered well away : I went down to my mother’s storeroom : the overgrown grass on the path down the field had been stamped back by more feet than mine : its door was open : the painting was gone and the roll of sketches too (though my father had taken everything else with him to the palace where no one had had the time to see him so he’d brought it all back home again : it was safe in the house, in my mother’s bedroom up on top of the cupboards out of the reach of the mouths of the goat and her babies).
Who knows where it went? The river? A fire? A back room, cut, rolled and squeezed into the gaps between the wall and the window or the door and the floor or hammered into the cracks in the wood or the brick to block out the damp?
(Shining Cosmo, favoured court painter who’ll oust the court painters favoured before you then be ousted in turn by my own beloved apprentice pickpocket (ha!) : bright bejewelled Cosmo old and ill, writing to the last of your Dukes a letter for money cause you’re too ill now for painting and the bishop and the clerk who owe you for the altarpiece and the saint panel are both ignoring your invoices : them so rich and you so poor : green forgotten Cosmo, old then dead, though quite some time after me, of poverty, yes,
but not of the cold,
cause I take my unfinished working of an old old story and unroll it over you, spread it all your length, tuck you in beneath it and fold its end down under your chin to keep you that bit warmer in the winters of being old –
I forgive you.)
The girl has a friend.
The friend has a look of my Isotta, very fine, and has arrived in here like a burst of air as if a new door opened itself in a wall where no door was suspected : there’s a kin between them and their hearts are high with it : they are sharp and bright together as the skins of 2 new lemons.
The girl is holding up to her friend the wall she’s made from the many small pictures : her friend is admiring and nodding : she takes a piece and looks closely at a single picture and then at how the picture has been made to become a brick.
One girl takes one end of it and the other takes the other and they measure its length by stretching it across the room : it is long, the wall : then into the room like a mischievous small dog comes the little brother who ducks down below the stretch of picture-wall in the middle then knocks into it with his head like a goat or a ram : both girls squeal : they gather it and swing it carefully away from him, drape it in its fragility on the table and place its ends on either side on the floor with no twists in it so it will stay whole : when this is done the girl turns and yells at the brother : he is abashed : he leaves the room : the girls go back to fussing at the long picture-wall : moments later the brother comes in again carrying 2 cups with something hot in them, steam coming off : a truce, an offering : sure enough, there is a kind of accord : he is to be let to sit in the room with them for bringing them these drinks : he sits good and quiet on the bed as if he has never been anything other.
The girls go back to examining their wall : as soon as they forget he’s there the brother dips his head and his hands into the bag the friend has brought with her : he has found something t
o eat in there and is ripping at its wrap : both girls hear him and turn and see and shout at him at once, then both stand up and chase him out of the room.
But when they get back –
ruination !
They have put their too-hot cups on the surface of the picture-wall and the cups have spilled a bit when the table got knocked : these cups are stuck to some of the pictures of – what are they of, again? –so much so that to pick a cup up by a handle is also to pick up the whole wall.
Both girls peel the picture-wall off the cups : the studies the cups stuck to are marked from the heat and the spill with 2 perfect circles from the shapes of the bases of the cups.
The girl looks appalled.
She holds up the bit of the wall : she unsticks with a little knife the 2 studies marked with the circles : she waves the studies in the air as if to dry them.
But the friend takes them out of her hands : she laughs : she holds them both up in front of her eyes like they’re eyes.
Ha ha!
The girl looks astonished : her mouth opens : then it breaks into a smile : then laughter from them both : then both girls take one end of the long wall of pictures each, like they did before but now with its cut-out bricks gone from the middle and they stretch it out across the room again : this time rather than treating it with such care the girl, when the wall is at full stretch, wraps her end of it round her shoulder and tucks it under her arms like a collar or a scarf.
When she sees the girl do this the friend does the same : next moment both girls are shawling themselves in it : they twist themselves round inside the swath of wall until they are both a bristle of pictures like armour over their chests and stomachs and arms and up to their necks : then they twist towards each other as if it is the wall that is bringing them together : they meet wrapped like caterpillars in the middle of the room : but they don’t just meet, they collide : at which the paper wall breaks and as it comes apart its brick-shapes fly off like rooftiles and the girls hit the floor together in each other’s arms in the mess of the pictures littered round them.
I like a good skilful friend.
I like a good opened-up wall.
I’m doing a portrait now of my brown-eyed friend : what’s his name? I forget his name : you know who I mean, I mean what’s-his-name : his father has died which means he is the official head of his family : he owns all the land and all the ships and has come into all the money : it is an unofficial portrait though cause his wife will not have me paint him officially so to placate me he has asked me to do him too, since official versions are never true, is what he says when I ask him why
(can’t remember his name but I remember pretty clearly my annoyance at his wife)
and I’ve sketched some ships in the far background and come back to the shape of his head again : but my friend, sitting in front of me, is even more restless today than usual : I work on the fold in the undershirt where it prettily tops his collar but with my eye on him today he can hardly sit still.
I know his frustration : I’ve always known it : it is almost as old as our friendship : the walled-up power, the dismay in the air round him like when a storm is unable to break.
But as ever out of kindness he pretends to me to be feeling something else.
He says he has been infuriated by a story.
It haunts him, he says : he can’t stop thinking about it.
What story? I say.
All stories, he says, really. They’re never the story I need or really want.
I ready the picture : I am quiet : I let the time pass : after a bit he speaks into this silence and tells me the bones of the story.
It’s about a magic helmet which allows its bearer to turn into anything, transform into any shape he likes, all he has to do is put the helmet on his head.
But that’s not the part that maddens him : he likes that part of the story : there’s this other part of the story and it’s about 3 maidens, guardians of a store of gold, and whoever wins the gold from them and forges it into a ring will have power over everything, over the land, the sea, the world and all its peoples : but there’s a snag : there’s a condition : he’ll have all the power, the man who forges the ring, but to keep this power he’ll have to renounce love.
My friend looks at me : he shifts about on the stool : his eyes are blunt and aimed : the everything that he can’t say to me makes him even finer to my eye.
I mark behind where his shoulder will end the curve of the line for the rock where I’ll put the fisherman : over here I’ll put the 2 children with the fish-spear under the high rock overhang : I mark where his hand will come over the frame at the front : I mark out in rough the little circle shape for the ring his hand will hold.
I just don’t see why, he is saying. Why whoever is brave or lucky enough to win the gold and make it into the ring can’t have both the ring and the love.
I nod that I agree and that I understand.
I know now what to make of the rest of the landscape behind him.
Here I am again : me, 2 eyes and a wall.
We are outside a house, have I been here before? There are 2 girls kneeling on the paving.
An old woman, I think I
do I know her? no
has come out and is sitting on the wall watching them : they’re painting, eggs? No, eyes : they’re painting 2 eyes on to a wall : they take an eye each : they begin with the black for the hole through which we see : then they ring the colour round it in segments (blue) : then the white : then the black outline.
An old woman is telling them something : a girl (who is she?) bends down to a pot with white in it, reaches forward, adds a small square of white the size of the end of her fingertip then does the same in the same place to the other eye cause an eye with no light is an eye that can’t see, I think is what the old woman sitting on a wall is telling
hardly able to hear though cause there’s
something
God knows what
drawing me
skin of my father?
the eyes of my mother?
down to
that thin-looking line
made of nothing
ground and grit and the
gather of dirt and earth and
the grains of stone
there at the very foot of this
(really badly made just saying)
wall at the place where the crumble of
the brickbase meets the paving
look
the line where
one thing meets another
the little green almost not-there weeds
take root in it
by enchantment
cause it’s an enchanted line
the line drawn between planes
place of green possibles
cause whatever they’re doing up there
eyes painted on a wall
it’s nothing
to the tiny and the many
variations of colours invisible
till the eye’s so close it
becomes the place
where a horizontal line meets a
vertical and a surface meets a surface and a
structure meets another which looks to
be 2 dimensions only but is deeper than
sea should you dare to enter or
deep as a sky and goes as deep into the
earth (the flower folds its petals down
the head droops on the stem)
through layered clay on stone
mixed by the
worms through whose mouths
everything passes
paddled by the many legs of
spores so small they’re much
much finer than an eyelash and
are colours only darkness can
make
veins like tracery
look
the treebranch thick with
all its leaves before even the
thought of the arrow
&nb
sp; how
the root in the dark makes its
way under the ground
before there’s
any sign of the tree
the seed still unbroken
the star still unburnt
the curve of the eyebone
of the not yet born
hello all the new bones
hello all the old
hello all the everything
to be
made and
unmade
both
The eye and camera icons are designed
by Francesco del Cossa and Sarah Wood
Thank you, Daniel Chatto, Polly Dunn,
Robert Gleeson, Jamie McKendrick,
Cathy Moore, Sarah Pickstone,
Matthew Reynolds, Kadya Wittenberg
and Libbi Wittenberg
A huge and special thank-you to Kate Thomson
Thank you, Andrew and Tracy and everyone at Wylie’s
Thank you, Simon, and thank you, Anna
Thank you, Xandra
Thank you, Mary
Thank you, Emma
Thank you, Sarah
THE BEGINNING
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HAMISH HAMILTON
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