How to Paint a Dead Man (2 page)

Today a journalist from the city came up here and admired the view and asked me why I paint these objects on the table. They are so plain and ordinary, he said. Why do you paint bottles and bottles and bottles? The same painting, over and over. What does it mean? He asked this of me as if it were answerable, as if it were important. And I said to him, I do not paint bottles. The man must have thought me mad or obtuse or cunning perhaps. He will, no doubt, blame the rustication of the place where I live, or my absence from the galleries and salons. He does not see choice. He does not see beyond the quartet of fruit in the dish, such as it is presented-a plum, two apricots and another plum. On the canvas he sees only the surface: the green paint and the grey and the white, which will not pass over a border unless it is directed. He considers quaint the long shadows taught to us by the academies.

To him, the painting on the easel is a funeral. It is careful and uncluttered, and it is not loud enough for him to understand. He does not have the practical training to recognise the discreet layers of vermilion used, their illuminating effect. If he had turned to the west during our conversation, he might have seen the sun setting behind the mountains, he might have seen the radiance of the sky.

But I am not whom he expects, this young traveller with his recording device and his pressed suit. He tells me he is sorry to hear of my ill health. He grieves on behalf of Italy. Then you must have acute indigestion, I said to him, and you will surely need some Averna to restore the balance. I assured him that I am quite well, merely old. I do not know who makes these reports, in which I am lying on my deathbed. Next week, he told me proudly, he is going to Milan to hear Miles Davis play his trumpet. How wonderful, I said. Now he has gone away, back to his apartment in the street with its commotion and motorcars and thin girls selling chips of ice. And he will write in the magazines and tell his friends that I am an artist of great simplicity and a man of great complexity. He will say that I like to make a joke when the issue of mortality is raised, and my body is profoundly stooped, and I show no sign of enlightening the world about the subject of my work. He will say that the paintings have a strange luminosity, but it is meaningless. The meaning is unavailable; it cannot be grasped. And they will photograph these bottles of mine for the exhibition catalogues, and in America I will upset the critics. They will say it is deliberate.

Look, I told the man, look again, because he had driven a long way to get here.

Theresa visits me once a day, sometimes twice if there is a delivery or laundry to be done. She brings my cigarettes, onions and anchovies, the usual things. She will let herself in without knocking and call out because she imagines one variety of noise disturbs me if I am at work in the studio while another does not. In her there is the bustle of the market where she has been shopping. Hurry is in her hands as she turns items over in the sink to rinse off the soap. There are tremors in her flesh from the broom’s short strokes. If asked she will turn the earth and uproot my garlic, some of which I give her to take away. I tell her to step over the basil, not to water it until it has parched completely, though she will often water it. The tomatoes she likes to bring inside, yellow-red, and she puts them in bowls against the walls, like ornaments. The lizards she sweeps into a pan, flicking them outside with broken tails. They scurry back into the house to begin their campaign again. She might think I want to paint her. I do not know her thoughts. In the winter she comes less often. The hill to Serra Partucci is too steep.

I receive other visitors, and more frequently than has been supposed. Antonio has begun keeping tabs on me. He would like me to move to a house less like the house of a peasant; he would prefer me in the apartment on the Via Fondazza in Bologna where he can call round regularly. The journalists are nervous if arriving unannounced. I do not believe it is stealth but perhaps they feel they will catch my true self. Then the enigma will finally be solved. Perhaps they think they will see me wearing a uniform, or performing a curse, or talking to the objects in the studio. They say the unmade roads remind them of the weddings of their cousins. They leave their motorcars down by the cypresses and walk up the slopes. If a bird skull or an iris catches their eye they will always pick it up and arrive holding it like treasure. Nature is found particularly in single objects here, though it is all around. For city dwellers Nature is invisible, located inside the weather brought to their towns, or inside their bodies when they visit the doctor to hear of its errors. To collect bones and items of colour is instinctual. They practise the language of still-life as they approach.

I like to be surprised by visitors though I can often hear the engines labouring and cutting out and the vehicles reversing back to the bottom of the hill, so I am not truly surprised, just anticipating the appearance of a face at the window. I always have the coffee ready to make by the time anyone arrives. Oh, you take honey to sweeten your coffee, they always say, how unusual, is it not unlucky? It is better not to begin debates about the importing of sugar, and from which states, so instead we talk of bees labouring in our golden fields. I put their stems in a basin to keep fresh and I put their bones on the kitchen table. Other times there will be a letter of inquiry first, with particular mention of this composition or that composition, or the old party, or a new theory, and I write back of course, come, but not on Thursday. On Thursday, if I am well, I teach in the local school. Such courtesy is not necessary but I can instruct them not to attempt the hill. If ever a car makes the climb all the way to Serra Partucci then I will be absolutely surprised and I will enjoy asking the driver of such a fine vehicle if they would like some coffee.

My dog Benicio died a year ago in the summer. I miss his warm presence in the house. He was a loyal dog with short brown fur and he was run over and could not be saved. In the afternoons the sun is very strong, I think it blinded him on the road or he was sleeping on the warm dirt. His back legs were injured in a difficult way-they had already been broken once before. I wish in mercy that he had died more quickly. A companionable dog cannot be replaced for many years. I do not need one for hunting or digging for truffles but have always enjoyed the easy fellowship of dogs. In any case there are too few years for another, so I have taken to finding company in other ways, such as the radio and writing. At the house now there is me, an old man who does not paint bottles, the little broken lizards, and Theresa, installing her red tomatoes.

To begin each day there is only the wind, asking to come in from the north before even the daylight. It is a rolling wind, excitable as it prepares to leave the continent. Some mornings I will accompany the wind to the road above the town. It helps me to unstiffen. There is sciatica in my legs and my breathing these days is somewhat impaired. Really I can do no more than amble. The land often seems like an ocean below-the hill moves through leaves, wheat, lavender tides. It never reaches the mountains on the horizon, but still we can hope. Heat arrives after the wind has passed over the bricks. Then fire blooms across the tiles of the town. The flames of the sun turn back the petals of the flowers in the gardens. It is as if the ground has secreted embers overnight. If I knelt down and cupped my hands to my lips and blew perhaps the day would start early.

There was no decision made to never leave this place, though it has been said that I renounced everything, that I suffered a great dismay and withdrew. Or that I was possessed by art, removing my heart to paint its space, its absence. This is said because of my wife and child. I am a brute and the work denotes much calculation and control. Old news. When I hear such things I do not ask for sympathy. Whatever sins I have committed exist beyond me now. I will let Nature alone judge me; she will abominate me if it is her finding.

We should not forget that when we limp away afflicted through the spirit, it is not to the factory gates or to the corporate steps we pilgrimage. Instead we go to the sea for its salt. We find shade under the sycamores on the great avenues. Or we go to the rivers where water tells us modestly of its own sickness. I cannot say that I have found peace now. But I have never loved with greater strength than in this place, with its earth the colour of
verdaccio
and its generous fruit.

Sometimes I long for the wind in the studio, to harden the tips of the brushes if they have not yet been cleaned, to ruffle these pages, as if in answer to a question I have posed. But the studio faces south and its shutters are quite secure. The work must not move or display movement, otherwise I might try to turn the house and gratefully receive the wind. Then the easel would tumble over and the bottles would sing at their necks. This of course is the alternative, which we must all imagine from time to time.

Benicio used to bite the wind. Poor confused dog! If it came suddenly through the trees and assailed the house, if it tugged his ruff and made balloons of his ears, he would snap and snap his jaws. He did not understand that to lean back against the current is to have a firm friend. Instead he was followed by it and it stroked his coat in the wrong direction and it unsettled him. He would consider no truce. But the invisible enemy always prevailed, surprising him from east and west. He snapped and snapped. Then the eating of air inflated his stomach and made it creak, and he would look very sorry for himself. Sometimes his growling and shouting at the wind, or the wind’s retaliation, disrupted the boar, and Benicio’s adversary was finally made manifest, squealing and grunting as it charged. Then retreat, retreat, back into Serra Partucci! The wind, the dog and the boar; it was such a comedy, like the American brothers.

Today I have also received a letter from England, forwarded by Antonio at the agency. It is a delight. A young man called Peter is asking technical questions about a still-life of 1959. He asks about the placement of the china rectangle, the way one side is favoured slightly in the composition and rests against the left-hand vessel. He does not believe the rectangle is tucked behind its neighbouring box, as the artist seems to imply, but that it exists in the frontal plane, its angles shortened. He mentions the white piping through the vase and its relation to a mathematical scale. He asks, am I the inventor of negative space? He writes in English, with regret, and I am able to translate most of it. For that which I cannot, I have asked Theresa to retrieve a dictionary of phrasing from the library. This has displeased her; she does not approve of ferrying intellectual books in the basket of her bicycle. Is
L’Unità
not too heavy for you to cycle with, I ask her, and she clicks her tongue. We must not talk of politics or newspapers, Theresa and I.

In the letter the young man says he does not know where the artist of the piece could have been standing during its production, such is the ‘almost independent but myopic’ perspective of it. There is, within his letter, the subjective mania of the youthful mind. Alas, he is too excitable, for there is no address to which I might return his correspondence. The painting was sold to a private collector; perhaps the young man has seen a reproduction, or perhaps the original if it is on loan. I do not always know the whereabouts of the paintings, though Antonio keeps good records. Peter tells me he is a student of art in Liverpool and he is eager to learn. From the slope of the lettering, and the dragging of the palm across the ink, I can see that he is a left-handed scribe, like Leonardo. His wishes are kind in conclusion. His signature is flourished. Peter; I will remember his name.

And I will test myself with the questions posed. The piece was completed six years ago. It contained the tall blue bottles, a hatbox, a china receptacle. In 1959 the red towers of Bologna were still standing impressively, having survived the war. Wine was less expensive. Cardinal Montini kissed the reactor at Ispra and we entered the new atomic age. Benicio was troubled by his hindquarters, and was limping. I was troubled by arthritis, and dropping things. There was a ladder placed against the rear wall of the studio. First I worked on its third step, with the easel set at its highest bolt. Further away to achieve detachment: the vantage point of a ghost. Then I set the easel an arm’s length from the objects and in this way found greater detail.

Of all the conditions we experience, solitude is perhaps the most misunderstood. To choose it is regarded as irresponsible or a failure. To most it should be avoided, like an illness. Inside solitude people see the many compartments of unhappiness, like the comb of a pomegranate. To be emptied from the world, to be cast away and forgotten–is this what we fear most? So we must shake hands and pass money and hear talk of society and talk of our families and our selves. We must move in and out of doors, press buttons for lifts, catch each other’s colds, laugh and weep, and contribute to the din and the restlessness. We must dance and sing, and visit the courts. We must make these daily contracts.

But if it is embraced solitude is the most joyful of commitments. In the grace of these quiet rooms I know far better the taste of each day. How well I know life. I understand water in its glass. As the afternoon circles, shadows move behind the objects on the table. There is a pinch of cinnamon in Theresa’s lamb casserole. Such acceptance! Such intimacy! The paint on the chassis of the easel is as thick as guano on the cliffs where seagulls nest.

I am not lonely, but receiving such a letter reminds me of the other souls in this world whom I might have liked to meet.

Peter’s first rule of practice is that a canvas should fit into the boot of a car. It’s a simple rule: size dictates size. A commonsense policy, the best kind. He’s been telling his daughter for years she should adopt such measures in her work, and in her life also, but she won’t listen. ‘Dad,’ she says, ‘you should expand your mind. You don’t have to think small any more.’ No, no. Children are not interested in the wisdom of fathers. He can hear her creaking around in her room now, treading the oak boards, hauling up the sash window to let the dewy, laundered air in; dragging her enormous portfolio around. Always an early riser, Suzie, like her mother. And always contrary. A mystery where that particular attitude comes from.

He on the other hand is not what we might call lark-like. At least not today, on this late-summer morning with its light like ageing copper, and its insistence on no more than his being in the world. The breeze is thick and green in the trees outside the window. He casts a long leg outside the quilt to cool off-hot under the covers now the sun is beginning to magnify through the glass pane. He should get up. He should get up, have a cup of coffee, a glass of water and a rolly; get going for the day. He should swing into action, yes indeed. And if he were a man of greater resolve, if he were a man of veritable habit, perhaps he would do that. But it’s tough, this whole business of entering the world. Pondering the opposing poles of rules and daughters is enough to be going on with just now, never mind tackling burnt toast scrapings in the sink, hardboard emulsion, and all else the risen must contend with.

With a bit of luck Lydia might fetch him up a brew and deposit it on the bedside table. With a bit more luck she might be inveigled back under the covers and they can put the morning glory to use. Unlikely. She knows better than to enable his inertia. Better to tempt him out of his comfortable pit with the grinding of coffee beans, the black aroma wafting through the kitchen and up the stairs, and with the frazzling of wheat crumbs under the grill. Better to torture a fellow with unavailable pleasure; she’s got that one right, his wife. Just another five minutes or so, maybe then he’ll be fit for employment; then he’ll spring up, ‘ta-da’, and surprise them all.

He tucks the leg back under the quilt, folds the cover down off his chest to cool his upper body. Nope. Children never listen to the rules of their parents. It’s like advising a horse to saddle itself. Nor did he give much credence to the laws and logistics of his old man. Neville Caldicutt had routines they could set the Metro clock by. Off to Shildon club on Wednesdays and Saturdays, partaking of not more than three pints of stout and a finger of Grouse for the road. Bed at a good hour on weekdays so as to be up at five the next morning to catch the colliery bus. Fish on Friday when the pay came in, no matter the catch, no matter the monger’s chalkboard list and the bad bloody north-east tides. NCB coat to be worn winter and summer, bonfire night, and election day. Union votes. Coronation mugs for visitors. And a halfpenny tossed off the bridge into the river after church, as alms for the Lord. Because Neville Caldicutt would not put anything into the cloth collection purse passed up and down the aisles; he was averse to new vicarage roofs, but was a God-fearing man nonetheless, and the river seemed as likely a channel to charity as any. ‘Heads for the Holy Ghost, tails for the fishes,’ he would say to them as he spun the coin off his thumbnail into the cleggy water. That was a genuine bit of daftness, Peter always thought. That was enough for two liquorice laces, one for him and one for his sister Hillary. Or maybe it was the price to pay for not being sent to Sunday school.

His father used to bring him a cup of tea and a biscuit in those unoccupied, dogwatch hours, before he went off to the mine. It was the pitching of the mattress that always woke Peter, not the chirping of the outhouse door or the shuffling of the tartan slippers on the stairs. Neville Caldicutt would leave the light off, and would sit on the wire-sprung bed, and talk softly about this, that and the other to his son. He would talk about working men’s politics, right and wrong, about school, and his great hero Bevan, and places to which he had never been but had always hoped to go. South America. Australia. Brighton pier. ‘That’ll be me then, lad,’ he would say a few minutes later as they heard the old grumbler stalling on the corner of Alnwick Street and the doors on the terrace shutting, one by one. And the bedsprings would squeak and rattle as his father stood up to leave.

Peter would switch on the light for a few minutes, drink maybe half the cup of tea, to the third blue line painted round its inside. He’d nibble the digestive, then sleep again until his mother screeching the curtain rings woke him two hours later. ‘Time to get up, Petie. Shake a leg.’

His father sitting in the dark: that’s what he remembers. Those gloomy, unseen movements. That pipey underground voice, preparing for the day with inconsequential murmurs. And the malty crunch from a biscuit packet, and those cold-stove winter mornings, when men in the street rose before the birds’ chorus and Peter waited for the next blue ring of daylight before getting up.

He’s told the kids all this. He likes to talk about it when he’s got them all home at the cottage and the fire is crackling and the homebrew is doing the rounds. It’s good to recall the past and family. Good to know where you come from. Danny thinks it’s hilarious-biscuits at the crack of dawn. Danny boy: never up until midday, then usually hung-over or coming down, and presently kipping, for some reason, in a jerry-rigged berth under the cottage stairs. But always amused by his dad when cogent, always willing to play a hand of nostalgia poker. Danny Dando, Two of Two. ‘Was there an outside lavvy?’ he asks. ‘And bits of the
Sun
to wipe your bum on?’ ‘Yeah, kiddo, there was-not even Bronco.’

Susan smiles like the Sphinx during his chatter and busies herself with other things. Flicking through a book. Keeping the coal turned towards its orange industry in the grate. She looks away from the stories he tells, towards the embers, or towards the pages. Suzie-Sue. One of Two. She with her impatience and that daughterly tendency to spat with her old man. She with her fine eye and those gigantic sheets she likes, that cost a bomb to print and frame and have got her into Goldsmiths College. Here she is next door, creaking the floorboards, not lying in. Just finished her foundation year and straddled between home and a brassy move to the capital. She doesn’t believe in his car-boot rule, never has, never will. ‘What would Kokoschka have done with that kind of attitude?’ she asks him, her brow pinched. Yeah, children always see the limitations of their parents. She’ll find her own way, no doubt about that, he thinks, whenever her face disappears from him, whenever she turns a log in the grate holding the corner with her bare hand. ‘Something wrong with the tongs, love?’ He can’t help asking, pedantic old bugger that he is.

Peter stacks all the pillows behind him and sinks his head back into the cotton swale. He switches the radio on. On the morning programme, a plum-tongued Tory is smarming about kids overdosing at warehouse parties, so he switches it off again. Could do with a piss–it feels like his bladder’s begun shrinking at night. Time to think about getting up, seriously. Time to get organised and think about the doings and happenings of today. One–go for a run and clear the cobwebs. Two–bastard accounts. Three–ring Abbotsford and bollock them about printing the wrong dates for his talk (always getting the simplest things wrong!). Then do some clearing up in the studio maybe, though that would take a kind of mental fortitude probably not available today. No, he should make the most of this gorgeous fading season, get out and do something useful. He should use the light. He should go to the ravine with his gear and make some more studies. Remembering first to put some petrol in the car. And to look at the exhaust to see if it’s coming unmoored from the chassis, as the recent grunting sounds would imply. He’s loath to admit defeat just yet and condemn it to the great scrapyard in the sky.

His cars have always been one mile away from expiration it seems–cheap to buy, and cheap to run. They’re usually crumpled European bangers, with slack steering and alarmingly high tickovers that suggest ambition to get airborne. There’s a certain runt-like motor he favours–the no-frills variety. Cars with snapped-off window winders and hard, haemorrhoid-inducing seats. Cars with simple interior mechanics to tinker with and a recessed shelf by the oil reservoir to tuck in a rag. Often a boot where the engine should be. These ones are the best; he likes unloading paintings from the front end at the galleries. It feels like theatre, like a magician grasping a series of rabbits by the ears and extracting them from an improbable cavity. What’s that called again? Counter-intuition.

It’s not a question of money. They’re doing OK now, better than OK. There have been good years and bad years over the decades. In this profession it’s always the way. There are things he’ll blow his wad on–distilling equipment, limited editions, Indian black. Cars though, are not worthy of great expenditure; this is another rule of practicality he should make sure to pass along to the kids. So long as they get where they should be going and back again–that’s what matters. It’s about the skill of the driver anyway, not anti-lock brakes and air-conditioning and all that rubbish. At least he bloody well drives! Lots of his arty friends don’t, or won’t, or can’t, or claim not to have any inclination to, especially the bloody poets. Donald doesn’t, nor Robson. They take some kind of socialist pride in it, and at being able to expediently decipher bus and train timetables instead. ‘The number forty-four will be here in eight minutes, comrades.’ And they’ve developed a sort of royal posture and odd passenger tics. Reading the review sections and getting colicky rather than looking at the passing scenery for one. Dexterity with radio tuning, but an inability to locate the washer fluid if it’s required while Peter’s rolling a smoke and steering with his knees.

He’ll be sad to see it go, this latest motor–a boxy, bug-eyed Daffodil–for the acquisition of which he talked the man in the dealership down to under two hundred pounds. Not a bad little deal. Then he sportingly upped his own price by a quid, saying the beast was on the endangered species list of cars and he’d better acknowledge it. And Jimmy Walton of Walton & Sons laughed and shook his hand, and was glad to see the wrecker trundling off the forecourt, whirring like a helicopter, and spotting on the ground. Another man might be embarrassed to drive such a car. Another man might consider it an inferior status symbol. Not Peter. Life’s too short for material displays.

In any case the Daf does well on the hills in winter. Its thin rigid tyres suit the snow, slicing through it like knives through icing sugar. And its engine pitch clears hares from the road without him having to beep them back into their burrows. Two gears–forward and back, both as quick as each other–an ingenious system, if ever there was one. Steep gradients require agriculture-speed struggles, of course, but the thing usually makes it in the end. It’s not often he has to leave it stranded at the bottom of the moor and walk home. Lydia uses her own car, a smart little Volkswagen Beetle, a dependable runarounder. Susan says it’s ‘a false economy’, buying cheap cars and having them conk out hither and thither. It seems whenever he arrives back at the cottage from a trip out these days, she’ll be waiting, shaking her head, and ready with a stern lecture before he’s even clambered out of the offender. ‘Wilse’, she’ll say (‘Wilse’, not ‘dad’, not ‘father dearest’, but ‘Wilse’, the slang for all the local Peters), ‘What a clapped-out old heap!’ And just to make the case for her when he turns off the ignition some spastic belt along one of the engine cones will continue squealing. ‘Look, kiddo, there’s no point in getting a new Merc and having it lathered in shit from driving through the farmyard every day.’ She’ll roll her eyes, and kick the dinted hubcap. ‘But the place looks like a wrecking yard, Dad.’

Touché, daughter. There is of course ‘The Whale’–the enormous, filthy-white Volvo, his previous fin-de-siècle automobile, now parked up by the cattle-grid and growing over with ferns. An industrious branch of bracken has furled its way up through the rusty hole in the floor and is filling the interior, like a splendid Victorian glasshouse, with greenery. And yes, at some point it needs to be towed away to the scrappy. It’s just that he’s not got round to it yet. He’s a very busy man. ‘I think it looks adamantine,’ he tells her. ‘Like a Ted Hughes poem.’ At which point she grimaces and stalks back into the cottage. Missy Miss. Suzie-Sue. ‘Is that brother of yours in my pouch again?’ he calls after her. A bony shrug while she’s departing. Stoner brother’s not high on her agenda of reform it seems. Just crazy pikey dad.

That rich drift of percolating coffee is killing him, as is his walnut bladder. He can hear female laughter downstairs, and groaning. Lydia and Susan are trying to wake up the under-stair monster with a spritz or two from the watering can. ‘Tip it, tip it, tip it!’ Poor lad. Still, that’s probably his cue; if the ladies of the house are feeling feisty he should surface pronto and avoid a dousing. He hauls himself up out of the bed’s soft vegetation, straightens the quilt out with a flap, and goes for a whizz. Remember to put petrol in the car, put petrol in the car, he chants. And get a quote for a tow-away. Maybe.

In the bathroom the toilet looks a long way down; maybe it’s been shrinking overnight too. Maybe there’s a conspiracy of shrinking things. He puts a hand against the wall, leans over and unleashes. He starts, then stops, then starts the stream of yeasty yellow properly. Oh prostate, dear prostate. The Daf will cope, a good few months left in it, he’s sure. Besides, you can’t avoid the battle of machine against nature. Danny had a picture book called
Tractor Max
when he was little–Peter remembers the illustrations it contained. Those massive sweeping fells and turgid fields, vivid and sky-less. Human endeavour seemed diminished within the grandness of that landscape. Every time he read it to Dan at bedtime he felt something wobble in his gut from the sheer bloody tenacity of that little tractor hauling away. He felt like he might fall off the bunk bed. Yeah, that illustrator knew the score.