How to Paint a Dead Man (4 page)

Theresa has brought a fine array of mushrooms this week and, as a special gift from her husband, Giancarlo, two good-sized truffles, which she has grated on to her omelettes. Their little dog has had a busy season in the forest so far. I was invited to the morning gatherings, but it has been impossible. My chest is suffering in the colder air and last year’s cough has returned with renewed vigour. Soon I will need to use the oil heater in the studio. I miss such excursions. I’ve always enjoyed the muttering of the forest as it prepares to disrobe, and the smell of the old earth being turned when the dogs begin to dig.

The olive groves on the slopes have almost finished preparing their fruit. I can see the leaves fluttering-dark green, light green and silver. Soon they will be stringing the nets. Perhaps I might have gone with Giancarlo and the others. I should make an effort not to become sedentary. There is a paralysis of the mind that accompanies immobility. I have seen it in friends and colleagues; intellectuals who were once fierce and deft of thought, who later became lost in conversation and fixated on small, unimportant details or phantoms in the air before them. I fear this above all else. I find cigarettes to be the most useful tools for concentration, but in this matter there are arguments with Theresa. She would prefer that I took her breakfasts instead of smoking cigarettes. She believes passionately in their ill effect and is attempting to banish them from Serra Partucci. I have noticed of late the lady of this household is becoming disinclined to produce them from her shopping basket. Often she swears she has no knowledge of any new packet or any request for a new packet. She will hoist the shopping list into the air like a flag of victory and wave it in the face of her old ward.

It is played like a comedy, so familiar that I can step to the side and watch the performance. Giorgio puts out his finger. He is belligerent. He demands exactly the same amount of soft tobaccos each week, he says. He has his wits and would not forget to request such an essential. Then he snatches the list from Theresa’s hand and strikes each item off the inventory as he finds it present on the kitchen table while she stands defiant, her arms crossed. There are no cigarettes, she says. Then it is not accurately taken dictation, he protests. It is slovenly! It is sabotage! How dare he call her slovenly, she cries; she is a woman of high virtue and cleanliness. And so, stalemate. The old man tries another tactic. He has depended on cigarettes for fifty years, to work, he says, and he has a certain image to uphold. When visitors arrive they expect to see their artist stooped in his winter overcoat, with his decrepit iron spectacles, and an eternal cigarette in his hand. They must not be disappointed. Such are his weaker arguments.

Eventually the tyrant Theresa relinquishes. The carton is ingeniously camouflaged behind her apron. Giorgio smokes in the terrible silence. He grinds out the stubs with extravagant force. Later, to make her begin speaking to him again, he engages her on inappropriate topics of conversation, such as the propaganda-filled newspaper her husband reads, her son’s military service, the joys of the changing season, and her routing of the lizards. All she wishes to do is to proceed with her domestic duties in peace, if he pleases. He slinks away to the studio.

In autumn, the lizards all wear attractive green cowls. They take warmth from any warm surface, finding refuge from the bristles and the broom handle in the grooves of the shutters. Make room for me, little friends! Have mercy, Theresa, on such habitual creatures as us! Theresa and I are engaged in a masquerade-this is very obvious. The argument is not over cigarettes. There is occasional blood in my mouth from coughing. Theresa wishes for me to see the doctor. It is not a seasonal complaint, she insists. I suspect she has noticed the warnings they are currently printing on the packets and she is alarmed.

In the morning after listening to the wind kindling the daylight I listen to the radio. I enjoy new music and operatic. I remain interested in national events, the debates about divorce. The voices reporting are dyspeptic-the world can be a terribly bitter thing to swallow. We remain divided on many issues. There is still shame; until we are united it will never pass.

Many of the day’s tasks can be done accompanied by the sounds of the radio. Reading. These journal entries. Letters to the bank, to Antonio, or a reply to an inquiry. I have been listening while putting glass tunnels over the basil-the radio casing is set on the windowsill and the dials adjusted. Sometimes I hear words coming from the radio when it is switched off, but it is only Theresa scolding the lizards for defying gravity on the ceiling where her broom cannot reach, or scolding her elderly ward dozing in an armchair for his tendency to leave the rind of the cheese in the drawer belonging to the cutlery. When I am in the studio I listen to the sporting events.

Though I have not felt inclined to join the truffle dogs at daybreak in the woods, I have been to the school this week. I should note that I was deceived into teaching there and I am now hostage to it. The mistress of the establishment invited me to lecture her class one Thursday last spring, and when I arrived she sent me home saying too many of the children were absent with colds. The following week I came again and she sent me away again for another reason, which I have forgotten; perhaps it was a holiday. She insisted we should try once more. On the third week I arrived earlier than any pied piper and I taught drafting and anatomy. By then I was used to the walk into town and the children enjoyed the lesson and Signora Russo asked me to tutor on Thursdays. I tried once to cancel the teaching and she became very annoyed and said duty and social contribution were essential for those in professions such as mine. I should consider the inheritance of our country and I should guide its young minds in beneficial directions. The economic miracle is oblivious both to our school system and to the arts, she said. She knows something of my relationship to the old government I think, and that I taught at the Academy, and the reasons I have extracted myself. She is versed in the country’s history, as we all are, and has, no doubt, strong opinions. We have not had the opportunity to discuss this at length. I suspect, like much of the population here, she is Communist.

I do not begin the class until I have recited all the names of all the children to myself. They sit in alphabetical order, which is convenient. When they are concentrating they are very quiet and it is a briefly peaceful time for me. Their drawings are wonderful. Children have no conscious knowledge of talent until informed of it by adults and they will suffer no intimidation until then. Sometimes the mothers come to the school gates to collect their children. They look at the images and ask why they have sketched the root of a tree or a small stone, rather than painting family portraits and little Davids, and I say to them, in this class it is pertinent to select such material, and I send them away.

There is a young girl in the class who has a congenital disease of the eyes. Her spectacles have a prescription even stronger than mine, and they pinch red marks on to the bridge of her nose. She finds it difficult to read. It is anticipated that by adulthood she will be blind, but she does not seem to be afraid. Her left eye is the worst, wasted to half the size of the right through its white aspect, with the lid often closing of its own accord.

We will never truly realise what blessings we receive along with our losses. Annette has a gift for discovering invisible things. If positioned in front of flowers she can detect borders and colours very well. She makes compartments and then fuses forms back together. She is a true Impressionist. Her natural medium is watercolour. I find in her work the most observant understanding-it has taken me over sixty years to acquire such skill. It is as if she has been freed from the convention of what exists only to seek it out with more integrity. The children are not unkind to her. She will not waste a single visible day. What can we hope for but this? Annette’s white peonies at rest in a vase. The white scent ends where the white page begins.

Peter has written to me again asking about the substance of shadows. A shadow can be one of two themes for a whole year in the Academy. He tells me he has been painting along the north-east coast where he is visiting his sick father and it is very cold. Peter imagines the rocks on the beaches have personalities. There is character in their detail, he says. Something peers out at him from within their forms. He wears gloves to paint. When the tide comes in he can hardly bend his fingers and wonders if the damp English air will one day give his joints arthritis. I should inform him that when he reaches my age it is certain to arrive regardless of the patriotism of the weathers.

Again his letter searches for clues. He has found a copy of
La Voce
in the university bookshop and he quotes Soffici: ‘It is through still-life that one can establish the true essence of what painting is all about.’ My friend, Ardengo Soffici, who I have not thought about for such a long time! I imagine Peter reaching out his cold hands. He reaches so much further than those who might more easily come here, to this hill, to this realm of discussion-those who catch trains from the capital, those who come to ask about my bottles and those who telephone Antonio at the agency in Bologna to ask about my health. From the distance of another country, from an old magazine with deep folds, which has no doubt been passed between many hands, his curiosity arrives.

Peter is accused among his peers of a disconnection from the modern world. He is warned of being labelled out of date. My friend, how well I know this charge! Even after all these years such notions are put to me. Is production of the still-life merely the ventilation of a dying genre? Is this lyricism and formality now redundant? Elsewhere artists swing paint cans tied to their hearts, people tell me, and these are expressions of the unbound spirit. I was told this again by the young journalist last week, as if I were a man in a cave kept in darkness. Of course, I said to him, it’s like the incense swung by priests. This is neither a riddle nor an invention.

This is the age of abstraction and the split atom. And yet, as Peter writes, the infinite shoreline is so much greater than the reactors. He suggests that if I pass a hand over his letter I might feel the cold of the northern sea and that I too should wear gloves. Perhaps he is a fan of the ‘marvellous reality’! In his spare time he is studying Fra Angelico and he hopes one day to walk the pilgrim paths in homage. He is saving money to visit Italy. He is working at night cleaning the stalls of the philharmonic orchestra. I imagine him standing against a great ocean, like the monk by the sea. I imagine his rock portraits. Bravo, Peter. Bravo!

I have collected each edition of
La Voce
that survives. The publication existed for less than a decade with only one thousand to each print run, but its influence has been wide. Like so many birds, its ideas have migrated to every corner of the globe. The theories of those brave editors have opened many minds. To be free of spite in such a century of hostility! To have unveiled eyes and no vendetta! To be radical and respectful, to know history and yet embrace the definite future! There is no comparable forum now. There are no independent voices and there is no comprehensive inquiry and it saddens me. The demagogues and the elitists prevail. It is as if we do not want to understand art, nor will we protect its integrity. Those editors were the finest thinkers, and perhaps the best men, of my generation. Some of the copies lie in tatters, their pages rubbed away from the thumbing and the words faded.

That which is radical is often that which is formal. Even the sea has its tides.

Today I have rearranged the objects on the table. Antonio will like the different symmetry I think–he will be surprised by my choice. The light in the afternoons has been good. If I finish a new painting before the snow comes perhaps I will spend some time in Bologna with Antonio. The truth is that winter here is particularly unkind to the old, but a long time has passed since I last travelled. Now there are unified passenger cars and the trains pass by at two hundred kilometres an hour. The Fascist emblems are gone. I could take my suitcase on the ferry to Sardinia or arrange rooms in the Vatican City. I have read that in Rome Howard Hughes keeps an aeroplane in a hangar, always fuelled. I suppose I could leave, and see some more of my country. It has been years since I attended the Biennale and I have a liking for the salty fish of the Adriatic, which are pressed in oil beneath heavy stones until they become tender and the bones can be cleanly pulled. It is not Lent but Theresa might ask the market vendor if our fast trains have brought anything from the clear green waters of the Dalmatian. Then she might bake a flat corn bread on which they can be served.

Lydia is baking when he gets back from his run. He can see her through the open window, sifting clouds of flour. Her hair is caught up in a loose bun at her neck, which looks nesty and sparrow-built. Her elbows are patched with white powder and a white handprint sits above her rump on the brown twill of her skirt. Who is that lovely lady, he wonders. Who is she and what is she doing in this house? There is music coming from upstairs-one of the kids has the stereo booming and Lydia is sashaying a little as she works. ‘Free from the filth and the scum…’ There are moments when he catches a glimpse of her and she is not the woman who has given birth to their children. She is not the woman who squeezes the remaining toothpaste to the top of the toothpaste tube so it is gathered conveniently at the nozzle for him to use. She is not the woman who digs the vegetable patch over with a hoe, and takes punnets of redcurrants to the market. She is unknown, this apparition floating amid the bakery dust. She is the girl on the grass by the priory that he once lay down next to, all those years ago. Someone who revealed the workings of the hinterworld to him.

Light-headed, he needs to eat something. He’s dragged the old bones ten miles-the whole loop of the valley-on a fag and an espresso, and feels like he’s running on fumes now. His legs are brittle, knees like rusty hinges. It’s not good enough, mister, says the voice in his head. Used to be able to do it nay bother. Then do it again. Howay, Peter.

He hefts his leg on to the window ledge, stretches the tendon, and peers into the cottage. Definitely some strange vapour in his noggin. There’s river-life inside the house. Look, there. A dark scarf on the windowsill like an otter’s pelt-did it move just then, did it stroke a whisker, flex a paw? There are sparks behind his eyes. The woman inside is waving a ghostly white hand. Hello, husband. Welcome to your disassociated reality.

Lydia bustles outside, tells him to take off his filthy trainers; in fact gets him to strip completely naked at the front door before he can come in. She disposes of the damp, splattered shorts in the corner, while he stands in the kitchen, red and steaming. ‘Arts North West have rung again,’ she says. ‘They want to know if you’re applying for a grant this year. If you are, the application’s got to be in by Friday. It would be good to have your name, they say’ He huffs and tears a corner off the loaf on the table, chews through seeds and walnuts. ‘Bugger them. Hey I tell you what though, Suze should go for it, shouldn’t she? If she put in her portfolio? She’d bloody walk it.’

Lydia shakes her head, wobbling the fluffy bun. If there are any eggs tucked inside it they’re in danger of rolling out and smashing on the flagstone floor. ‘She won’t qualify if she’s in London. Peter! You’ve got mud, even in your beard.’ He brushes breadcrumbs and dirt from his face and fills a glass of water at the sink. ‘Well, it’ll go to some winnety postgraduate who’s painted a church floor with his girlfriend’s tits then.’ Lydia laughs, her head tipped all the way back. The eggs are safe. ‘Go on. Get Danny out of the bath and go in yourself before you set like a clay pig. He’s been in there an hour with his wacky baccy, steaming up the windows.’ No, with my wacky baccy, Peter thinks; Two of Two’s been raiding my stash again. Lydia puts a hand on his arm. ‘I’m heading out. Yoga. Won’t be too long. You should come-it’d be good for you. You’re very stiff.’ She smiles with those two long incisors, dental pronouncements the twins share, and gives him a slap on his bare backside. ‘Giss-giss then, pig.’

He goose-skins through the house. The cottage floor is even colder than the river ford. A pair of brown tights is hanging on the radiator: two dead moles on a fence. Danny’s banged-up old steamer trunk at the bottom of the stairs looks like the cows’ mossy drinking trough. The blue silk pincushion on the pile of mending: a waterbird. When he runs along the river it’s always too fast to see kingfishers on the crooks of the branches. They flit away, turquoise, faster still.

In the bath, the mud on his shins slowly dissolves. His memories have started to do that too lately. Curse of breaking the half-century, he supposes. Unlike his formative years of coal dust and cod and library books, the spell in America is becoming worryingly erased. His early twenties-Susan and Dan’s age now. Bloody hell. Where does the time go? Emigration. His first wife, Raymie. The transatlantic crossing-how many stops did it involve? London. Shannon. Gander. Boston. Music and bright times in Golden Gate Park. That insane army medical when he was drafted: a knock on the chest to test the heart, and please bend over, sir. And up into Canada to avoid reporting for duty. There are carefully edited notes about that period. There are yarns and inventions. Somewhere along the line the stories he’s told have supplanted anything real. Sometimes he wonders, did any of it even happen? Was he even present?

There is a world. Who wrote that-was it Sartre?

Almost thirty years ago! The kids were enthralled as youngsters when he talked about San Francisco and Alphabet City. North Beach. Vesuvio. The Village. It was as if he’d been up the beanstalk and back down again, and true, he spun it that dark delighted way for them, exaggerating, ornamenting, giving it some welly. But he loved their wide and wonderful eyes. It was pure magic, the look on their faces-all Christmassy and open. He invented a whole treasury of fables just for them. It was over there he realised exactly why he should wear the artist’s beret, because it was illegal not to if you were an artist, and they could throw you in jail. It was over there that he hung out with Brautigan, and things were pretty crazy, and the hippies came. Over there, he surfed in a tuxedo. Over there, he enjoyed the presentation, from the mayor himself, of a skeleton key to Frisco, which got him into the best joints, temples, and on to the ferries. He still had it in fact, here in his pocket (yes Suzie, coincidentally similar to the key for the cottage mortise). Over there, he drank absinthe, smoked opium, took excellent $5 acid (this one told a little later, after Danny had asked for poppers for his thirteenth birthday–‘I’m interested in getting out of body, Dad’). Over there he ate sea snake, mandrake, barbecued griffin wing, probably actually did without recognising it, those Chinese restaurants, ho-ho. San Francisco was psychedelic, man. New York, well it was just the bees’ knees–literally-all the skyscrapers were built from giant insect parts, what, didn’t they know!? They with their faces like open mouths, drinking his fantasies in. Those were the days!

Now Susan’s been to visit these places with pals she made at college, to jewellery sales, Telegraph Hill and the Nuyorican café. She likes the New York dog-runs, she says, the égalitaire of canines. ‘It’s true democracy, Wilse, big ones taught to play with little ones.’ A perverse dependence on therapists though, she says, scowling. The twang of touched nerves in his daughter. Should he feel guilty about that? Who knows. ‘Hey, kiddo. If you were there in the sixties,’ he tells her, ‘you’d know. We were all into scrambling back then. Baby boomers have omelettes for brains.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah Peter, the sixties, old hat, poor line. But you’ve got to keep justifying things. You’ve got to defend the imagination or the world goes under, of this he is sure. Meanwhile, the kids accept his blag now like they’d put up with a doddery relative’s foibles; vowel glitches developed to cover the geriatric stutter, weepy drunkenness at weddings, the uncontrollable passing of gas.

He twitches the hot tap with a hairy big toe. Warm water streams in around his heels and the bathroom fills with humidity. He balances the bar of soap on his belly.

It’s unravelled in their minds now, his exuberant, figmented past. It’s been investigated, confronted, and vetoed. It’s just shite, fertiliser for their cynicism to grow. ‘You couldn’t have been at The Six Gallery in fifty-five, Dad. You were only fifteen.’ They believe none of it any more, not even the actual actualities. Oh! The pair of them! When did the growing-up happen! He only had his eye off them for a minute. It seems like yesterday they were in nappies, twittering on in that peculiar talk of theirs. They were both so pale as children that he could see through to the red scribble of capillaries in their cheeks and in their ankles. He could see absolutely how they were made, the remarkable pattern of cells. He would hold their bare, doughy feet as they slept in their cots and stare. Or he’d nuzzle up to their faces and examine the threads in their cheeks. ‘Let them sleep,’ Lydia would whisper from the nursery door. ‘They’re tired little things. Come and pour me a damson gin while I’m on boob reprieve.’

He never mentioned this fascination to anyone, not even Lyds, but it did occur to him there must be secret infant fascinations the world over. As they got older and ran about outside in the sun, their skin grew thicker, becoming less transparent. The bright alveoli patches disappeared. It made him sad really. There was something in the private display he had loved. He would peer at Susan’s ankles all through her teenage years, until she got fed up with it and demanded he stop, saying that he was being a weirdo.

And there’s the gist of it. All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It’s the law of paternal disenchantments.

The fact is he can’t exactly remember his legacy, can’t entirely defend himself, and say, as a matter of fact, O petty disbelievers, O ye of bolshy attitude, I am telling the absolute truth. He has contaminated the water supply with piddle, so to speak. The Big Bumper Book of Peter’s Life and Times is a white-paged, ad-libbed tome. But he does recall, with some clarity, the hot gothic stoops in the Village, the cooking summer steps against which they lolled, and the desperation for an old brass rotary fan found in somebody else’s trash, saved and re-wired. In winter, the obverse, the necessity for several jumpers, apartments too cold even to piss in, and hot dumplings gobbled down at Vaselka to make them thaw. If he concentrates, he can remember the extraordinary districts of San Francisco. The Asian tattoo parlours. The views. Rivera’s frescoes. He remembers the feeling of anti-climax when everything began to fade, when life began to look too real again.

And he can remember her. He can remember her long slim American legs. Her astonishingly clear eyes and her awful bloody temper. Her never going without a high for more than a day. The depressions that tasted nothing like apple pie, that tasted lysergic, like chemicals dripped on to paper. The clever Latin ink on her inner thigh:
Believe Not What You See.
This is what he’s come away with, what he’s managed to stash in the chaotic archives of the brain. It’s not very pleasant, wouldn’t be fun conveying it to anyone, the way the phantom friendship with Ginsberg is-that myth founded on a collision at a party and a brief exchange through untrimmed beards.

Raymie had legs like the spindles of the water towers, and she also was bursting with moisture; this he elliptically knows. But there are few cherished recollections.

Do his peers have the capacity to recall their former lives better than he can? Do they see fragments in the necklines of actresses in films, or find themselves wafted back by cheese or sandalwood smells? Is everyone in his generation taking gingko biloba, doing brain aerobics and writing pompous memoirs? Or are they all crumbling mentally, having heart attacks while shopping for tweed jackets, or banging their secretaries, or emptying their colostomies? Dear God, are they officially old?

What he needs is a smoke.

Beneath him the bathwater is turning tea-coloured, his balls float white and wrinkled in the stew. The room smells half of soap, half of Danny’s pilfered ganja-he knows the good stuff when he sees it, does Master Caldicutt, wants none of the muck coming in from Spain these days. He’d reach for it himself while the rest of his filth slurries up the tub but the pouch is in his studio upstairs. Forgot to fetch it before getting in. Ho-hum. Pass the bloody gingko.

Yes. He remembers Raymie. Bleeding from her nostrils as if she would never stop. Narcotic pioneer, showing them all how it was done. Holding forth about post-modern art and the inauthentic project of being. Being thinner and more beautiful than all the other girls. Climbing the railing of the Empire State Building, her pale hand fluttering like a bird in the uproar. He remembers that night, before they bailed out of college, before they left merry old England for her home turf. The horrible
ménage à trois.
Him, their tutor, and her. The cuckold, the muse, and her new lover. Their bizarre agreement to share a human experience of loss and love and urges, to signal an end and a future between them. So he had to watch. He had to uncouple his primitive urge to smash in their skulls as she turned around on to all fours. And the man he had loved and respected like a father whispered to Peter, ‘There, I’ve warmed the pearls for you, you bastard,’ as he slid off the bed and left the room. Free love. More like a fucking disaster. There are some memories that won’t leave, no matter how hard he coaxes them.

The mirror has disappeared under steam so a beard trim is out of the question. He’ll just have to be a woolly old man for a while longer-wild man of the moors. He looks at his leg hairs swaying in the bath’s current, like the manes of the fell ponies in the wind at the top of the valley. His cock hairs are turning grey, like the strands of fireweed caught in the elm trees in the garth. Crab ladder. Hernia scar. Patch of rabbit-skin glue. He twists the plug chain round his toe and lifts. The muddy drink begins to gurgle away. Jesus Christ, there were some casualties! Poor Brautigan. The man literally set the muzzle of the gun against his temple and blew his brains out.