Still Life

by Sarah Winman

It’s what we’ve always done. Left a mark on a cave, or on a page. Showing who we are, sharing our view of the world, the life we’re made to bear. Our turmoil is revealed in those painted faces—sometimes tenderly, sometimes grotesquely, but art becomes a mirror. All the symbolism and the paradox, ours to interpret. That’s how it becomes part of us. And as counterpoint to our suffering, we have beauty.

Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world, Ulysses. It repositions our sight and judgment. Captures forever that which is fleeting. A meager stain in the corridors of history, that’s all we are. A little mark of scuff.

The Ponte Vecchio was saved by a sentimental Führer, who’d visited the city in ’38 and formed an attachment to the famous landmark. Darnley said it proved the man had fucking awful taste. So had invading Poland, added Ulysses.

Cress had once told her she needed to tell Eddie things. Words are gold dust, that’s what he’d said. So she’d told Eddie stuff, stuff that would make her toes curl now. Laid out her heart on the bed and had cut it open, a full autopsy of love. That’s what being in a hotel room could make a girl do. Sex in soft sheets and room service. Making plans. And all the time war was eavesdropping . .

There are moments in life so monumental and still that the memory can never be retrieved without a catch to the throat or an interruption to the beat of the heart. Can never be retrieved without the rumbling disquiet of how close that moment came to not having happened at all.

And the Earth spins at a thousand miles an hour and turns on its axis once every twenty-four. This is what we’re governed by, Alys. Space, time and motion. Hours, days, seasons. Our lives segmented into a series of moments. You see over there, that faint patch of light? That’s the Andromeda Nebula. When we look at it, we’re looking back nine hundred thousand years into the past. Big numbers, Cress. They are big numbers, my love. That’s why ten years of school will go by in no time.

Evelyn remembered the journey from the rail station to the Pensione Simi, down dark streets teeming with life and smells and across trecento squares where she saw statues come to life and where the bells called the medieval dead to rise. A conspiracy of beauty everywhere. The city threw aside its cloak and introduced itself to her, and she met it with eyes wide and heart thumping and openmouthed. She stumbled clumsily from the cab into the vestibule of the hotel. She couldn’t speak. It wasn’t being struck dumb by beauty per se, but the acknowledgment that if such beauty existed, then so did the opposite.

By then, something had happened to her, to her soul. She had been eroded by war. An all-consuming weariness she could find no way back from. Nights were spent quietly drinking in the Hotel Excelsior, watched over by Enrico, who knew when to bring her another drink long before she knew she needed one herself.

There—the Biblioteca. A showcase for men. There—the Palazzo Vecchio, showcase for men. There—the Institute of the History of Science, a showcase for men. Over there—the Uffizi Gallery, a showcase for men. History has erased the unseen, said Evelyn. And we will never know the contribution women made to that unique time. Where were they then? said kid. Evelyn looked down at her young pupil. How old are you? she said. Nearly nine. But they say I have an old head on young shoulders. Do they? Well, they say I have the opposite. Kid laughed. You’re funny, she said. So where were the women? Well, that depended on class. Inside, mostly, if you were wealthy and married. Considerable time in the birthing room, hoping to produce male heirs. A constant succession of pregnancies from your midteens to your forties. You’d also be expected to run the household, of course. Organizing the servants. Sewing. Making bread. Making fires. That was a woman’s life, kid. Or the convent—the only available career for a woman. That was the choice. You’re not selling this life to me, Evelyn. No. I’m not, am I? Evelyn laughed. Didn’t women paint as well? They weren’t allowed to. Actively forbidden

The world of the domestic kitchen is a female world (she underlined this). It is a world of routine, of body and of bodily function. A world of blood and carcass and guts and servitude. Men may enter but they do not work there and yet work is all that women do there. Occasionally in such paintings, male items may appear on the table—pipes, watches, maps—often in the most ludicrous composition and yet, they succeed in what they intend to do—revoke the feminine space. Male triumph over the triviality of the scene. She drank from her glass. She continued to write. The power of still life lies precisely in this triviality. Because it is a world of reliability. Of mutuality between objects that are there, and people who are not. Paused time in ghostly absence. Who was it who prepared the food? Who gutted the fish? Who scrubbed the kitchen? These are the actions that maintain life.

Significance of still life

She’d become self-conscious and shy around him and he didn’t know when that had crept in, but the sense of losing her was sharp. She told him less and less about her life, so whenever she sang and played guitar with other young people in the square, he took his chance. Sometimes he’d rush to the window and throw open the shutters just to learn about her—what interested her, what moved her, what made her angry. Recently there’d been a lot about love. There was so much to keep up with. He just wanted her to finish school.

She lived partly at Col’s and partly on a sofa nearby. She lived in a state of uncertainty but came to realize she probably always had. She struggled, initially, in the way she saw things and how this was expressed as marks on a page. But she turned up every day and she practiced her craft and that was significant.

Evelyn read out loud. “Florence struggles to save its past.” Well, it’s always done that. Oh God no! Cimabue’s Crucifix unsalvageable, they say. Is that significant? Oh gosh yes. It really is, Dotty. A salutary link between the Byzantine and the Renaissance. Without Cimabue there wouldn’t have been Giotto. And without Giotto? said Dotty. We may as well have called it a day.

and the morning turned dark, she realized London in wartime had been the star of that fateful show. Love and sex came fast and danced with the nearness of death and my God did it make life golden. Made it giddy and immediate. They clung to one another because the essence of life itself had been revealed to them, and it was as simple as a Californian orange grove with the sound of bees, and blossom, and heat as heady as existence itself.

And Alys came to understand why women would seek refuge on a bridge and she drew their youth, their pain, their aging. Their existence and worth given shape by a virgin who birthed a child. She drew the lives they’d given up in the microscopic study of a flower, a vase, a cup, a plate, a piece of fabric—lace intricate and fine—darned sheets on a bed, a sketchbook in the corner, a fine lock of baby hair hidden between two pages. On and on and on, she drew the details of undetailed lives. Of forgotten women who once may have wanted so much more.

Right- and left-wing political extremists were trying to transform the country according to their own utopian vision, and assassinations and bombings hit the headlines. The gentle people of the pensione were quietly shaken, Ulysses especially. Evelyn said, We’re still living in the footprints of the French Revolution, of Hitler and Mussolini. Scratch the surface of the varnish and it raises its head again. Evil was defeated but it never went away.

So, time heals. Mostly. Sometimes carelessly. And in unsuspecting moments, the pain catches and reminds one of all that’s been missing. The fulcrum of what might have been. But then it passes. Winter moves into spring and swallows return. The proximity of new skin returns to the sheets. Beauty does what is required. Jobs fulfill and conversations inspire. Loneliness becomes a mere Sunday. Scattered clothes. Empty bowls. Rotting fruit. Passing time. But still life in all its beauty and complexity.