How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

(After which, a final touch, there at the end of a grassblade, 2 or 3 points, a slip of the pen? a butterfly? for my pleasure alone cause no one else’d notice.) Long gone, the picture, I expect. Long gone the life I, the boy and the man I, the sleek good sweet-eyed horse Mattone I, the blushing girl I. Long gone, torch bearer Ferara seen from the back, ink on paper folded torn eaten, wasp nest shredded into air burnt away to ash to air to nothing.

perlato : paonazzo : cipollino with its coloured veins, my mother making me laugh pretending a stone held near the eyes could make her cry : arabescato, just the fineness of the word near made me cry : breccia, made up of broken things : and the sort I can’t remember the name of that’s 2 or more stones crushed together to make a whole new kind of stone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I could see a redness at the angel’s shoulder and neck like the minium pigment which is a red that soon turns to black, it came from the hand of the new Duke gripping it hard enough to leave an imprint on it : but it is a hard thing in the world, to be modest, and must probably result in bruises for somebody somewhere along the line.

Cause I met many female Marses and Joves in the house and many Venuses and Minervas in and out of all sorts of clothes. None of them earned anywhere near her true worth in money : all of them suffered misuse, at the very least the kind of everyday misuse you hear any night through the walls of such a house, and though these women and girls were the closest thing alive I ever met to gods and goddesses, the work they did would first pock them on the surface like illness then break them easy as you break dry twigs then burn them up faster than kindling.

it was as simple as agreement, as understood and accepted and as pointless to mention as the fact that we all breathed the same air : but there are certain things that, said out loud, will change the hues of a picture like a too-bright sunlight continually hitting it will : this is natural and inevitable and nothing can be done about it : Barto had been challenged by someone, concerning me, and he had been humiliated by the challenge.

That you marry makes no difference to me, I said and this is the last thing I said that day to him cause he looked at me then with eyes like little wounds in his head and I understood : that he loved me, and that our friendship had been tenable on condition that he could never have me, that I was never to be had, and that someone else, anyone else, saying out loud to him what I was, other than painter, broke this condition, since those words in themselves mean the inevitability, the being had.

Funny to think of it now, that bleak evening : cause the biggest patrons of my short life were after all to be the Garganelli family, and the reason I couldn’t find the legging-stuff was that my friend Barto had rolled it in his hand and put it in his pocket and taken it as souvenir, as he told me years later sitting on the stone step by my feet while I worked on the decoration for the tomb of his father in their chapel.

Cause nobody knows us : except our mothers, and they hardly do (and also tend disappointingly to die before they ought). Or our fathers, whose failings while they’re alive (and absences after they’re dead) infuriate. Or our siblings, who want us dead too cause what they know about us is that somehow we got away with not having to carry the bricks and stones like they did all those years.

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).

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.

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.

He painted me a branch exactly as branches look, that’s right – cause I remember everything now – say it quick before I forget again – the day I opened an eye, the other wouldn’t open, I was flat horizontal on the ground, had I fallen off the ladder? I found you wrapped in the old horse blanket half an hour ago, he said, no, don’t – don’t do that, the heat coming off you, you’re sweating and it’s so hot outside, Master Francescho, so how can you be cold? Can you hear me? Can you hear?

I taught the pickpocket to burnish : I taught him hair and branches : I taught him rocks and stones and how they hold every colour in the world and how every colour in every picture ever made comes from stone, plant, root, rock and seed : I taught him the body of the son held in the mother’s arms, the last supper, the miracle of the water and wine, the animals standing round the stable and the day going on behind it all, in both the foreground and background of it all, from death to last supper to wedding to birth.

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.

This will be the first year her mother hasn’t been alive since the year her mother was born. That is so obvious that it is stupid even to think it and yet so terrible that you can’t not think it. Both at once.

Because this particular art, artist and conundrum are all about walls, her mother says. And that’s where I’m driving you to. Yeah, George says. Up the wall. Her mother laughs a real out-loud laugh, so loud that after it they both turn to see if Henry will waken, but he doesn’t. This kind of laugh from her mother is so rare right now that it is almost like normal. George is so pleased she feels herself blush with it.

I’ve never seen anything like it, her mother says. It’s so warm it’s almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I’ve never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It’s never sentimental. It’s generous, but it’s sardonic too. And whenever it’s sardonic, a moment later it’s generous again. She turns to George. It’s a bit like you, she says.

Nobody shouts at anybody to get out of the way. Even very old ladies cycle here wearing black with their bicycle baskets full of things wrapped up in paper and tied with ribbons or string, as if being old, going to a shop and buying things and bringing them home are all completely different acts here.

When H goes home at eleven George literally feels it, the house become duller, as if all the light in it has stalled in the dim part that happens before a lightbulb has properly warmed up. The house becomes as blind as a house, as deaf as a house, as dry as a house, as hard as a house.

George scowls. History is horrible. It is a mound of bodies pressing down into the ground below cities and towns in the unending wars and the famines and the diseases, and all the people starved or done away with or rounded up and shot or tortured and left to die or put up against the walls near castles or stood in front of ditches and shot into them. George is appalled by history, its only redeeming feature being that it tends to be well and truly over. And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see?

She thinks something else quick; she thinks how typical it’d be. You’d need your own dead person to come back from the dead. You’d be waiting and waiting for that person to come back. But instead of the person you needed you’d get some dead renaissance painter going on and on about himself and his work and it’d be someone you knew nothing about and that’d be meant to teach you empathy, would it?

You know, her father said behind her, you’ll be leaving me soon, don’t you? George didn’t turn round. Purchased 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.

Is worth the same as money? Are they the same thing? Is money who we are? Is it how much we make that makes us who we are? What does the word make mean? Are we what we make? It is so bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit. We saw the pictures. What more do we need to know? The banking crisis. The food-banking crisis. The girl in the yurt. (She was probably very well paid for it.)

When I remember, it is like an earthquake, Henry said yesterday. Sometimes I don’t remember, for almost all day. And then I do. Or I remember maybe a different thing that happened. Like when we went to that shop and bought the pipe that when you blew down it the very long bubbles came out of it.

Think of all the paintings made with all the eggs laid all the hundreds of years ago and the blips of life that were the lives of the warmblooded chickens who laid them.)

All of which meant that I shied away from her when she tried to kiss me on my way out the door to school. Then the next time she came home was two weeks after and it was in the form of bits of rubble in a cardboard box, which my father put in the passenger seat of his work van then drove round town stopping to leave handfuls of her in places she’d really liked.

But think of her mother. Think of her smiling, looking the minotaur in the eye and – winking. Think of her father taking what was left of the shape her mother had when she was alive and driving round in the rain to find the places she’d want to be.