How to Paint a Dead Man (7 page)

He retrieves the pad from his smock, now a little damp at the edges with perspiration. A few more quick sketches, then that’ll be him. A good day’s work. The sun sinks on the horizon, crowning the upper striation of the gorge with fierce light.

He removes the clip, flicks back through images. Perfect. Enough. Time to head home now for a nice tea and then a few pints. He stows the pad inside his shirt, makes his way back over the scree. There’s nothing like it, this demob pleasure that comes after accomplishing a task. The giddy satisfaction, feelings of affection for the world. Probably just as good as moving the cows, eh, Mr Robertson. Yeah. They can think he’s nutty. They can think he’s a slacker. This is what it boils down to: knowing you’ve done something useful. Feeling elated and useful, feeling spritely and sure-footed. Feeling the ground beneath you is just.

Then again, the ground beneath him right now feels quite the opposite. It feels infirm; it feels loose. There is a strange sensation, of movement, of motion. The big, lichen-backed stone under his left foot is shifting, rotating. He can hear it grinding rubble as it rolls, tipping him sideways. Given that no one is around to attend to his reaction, it feels absurdly unnecessary when he hears himself say, ‘Woah.’ Time seems bizarrely roomy while this stone-back rodeo is in progress. There is time enough to register a few thoughts. The idea of an earthquake. The striking of flint in the gorge. Lydia, that day she held her finger to her lips and pointed to a stag by the river with bloody velvets. ‘Do you see it, Peter?’ He tries to jump, but the rock has already moved too far. His boot slips. He feels a grazing sting, hears a crack.

It takes an additional epic second for his mind to process the results.

His left leg has been fed into a slim channel between two boulders. The roller has come to a halt above his ankle, no, against his ankle. He has been cast awkwardly to the side and is half kneeling. There is the painful realisation that the accident is bad, then just pain–not ordinary pain, but something vivid and coruscating, as first his shocked silence, then his nauseous whimper, then his primal bellowing attests to. And though an instinctual physiological directive is telling him to get out of the trench, to extract himself pronto from the bite of the rock jaws, he cannot. Because after another deranged few moments of slapping the leg, and yanking it, and trying to lever the raw shin this way and that, excruciatingly, ball-witheringly, it is apparent these are
objets d’occlusion,
it is apparent that he is, well and truly, trapped. Peter, Peter, Peter.

The strongest perfume of all the flowers on the market stall is that of the lilies. The scent has something lush and unsteadying about it. Uncle Marcello prides himself on the successful hot-housing of such flora. He has strains that are very difficult to raise in the soil here. Annette must be careful when handling the lilies–their pollen is worn tremulously and the smallest knock or brush could dislodge it and stain her clothing or the clothing of customers. The strokes of orange and yellow are impossible to remove. When they are in season the lilies have a curious effect. They breathe their scent over everything, their long dusted tongues panting the aroma. The perfume is insistent, a soprano pitch, which lifts above the rest of the bouquets. It tingles the bridge of Annette’s nose when she leans close, making her hands and neck feel soft, like the time Uncle Marcello gave her a tumbler of
nocino
to sip.

Those who buy lilies behave in a way that suggests dreaminess. They sigh. They sing and hum under their breath. They make unwitting noises, as if enjoying a delicious plate of food. They flirt. All around them are the notes of a peculiar kind of love. Perhaps, if flowers are blessings of God as her mother suggests, the lily serves a different function to the virtuous rose. White lilies are for annunciation and grace, such as the angel offered to the Madonna. But the stargazers and the tigers are vivid and exotic, their shapes and colours voluptuous, and their fragrances intoxicating.

Her mother does not keep lilies in Castrabecco, as she keeps cuttings of other flowers. She finds them extravagant and inappropriate. She says they are too expensive to waste. The white ones are for church, and the others are suitable only for the bordello. Her mother has opinions about the inappropriateness of many things. She has opinions about Annette’s unruly hair braids, about the scandalous price of renting their stall, and the money-raking of the cooperatives, the council and the government. She has things to say about the attire of President Saragat, and the political mistresses. Her firmest opinions are always about what is moral and what is not. And yet she does not often leave the house. She does not investigate for herself the corruptions of Italy, but prefers to read about them at the kitchen table.

Maurizio brings her newspapers and fashion magazines, which she tuts over. Annette will often asks her mother to read to her, but she prefers not to read things out loud, only to comment on the terrible state of things, on the infidelities, the actresses and lipsticks, and the hundreds and thousands of refrigerators leaving the country versus the lack of refrigeration in their own house. ‘We are perfectly cool,’ Uncle Marcello says. ‘The flowers do not suffer, why should we? Wouldn’t you rather have a television, Rosaria?’

Uncle Marcello spends approximately three-quarters of his life at the greenhouses and the growing plots, according to Tommaso, who has recently begun to calculate fractions in his schoolbook. Sometimes Uncle Marcello sleeps in the gardens, on a low wooden pallet between trellises, and other times he sleeps at Castrabecco. He arrives at mealtimes with dirty fingernails, which Annette’s mother does not like, and shares his ideas for new strains of flowers he hopes to create. Frequently he arrives with sample sketches of crosspollinations to show them, and Annette wishes she could see the drawings, the lavish hypothetical hybrids that Uncle Marcello will attempt to engineer with medical depressors and cookery utensils; the colours of the bells and the petals he will try to reverse. ‘Can you imagine what would happen,’ he asks, ‘if the fuchsia was released from its red and purple collar? How beautiful it would be if it were the colour of an English primrose. So light. A little angel or a fairy.’

He owns many books on the subject, and he also owns a scientific microscope, which he keeps in the small brick office of the greenhouses, which Maurizio is not allowed to use, because he is bullish, but Annette may adjust if Uncle Marcello is present to assist. While Mauri shovels clods of earth and prepares troughs, Annette and her uncle sometimes examine the secret infinitesimal beauty of plants, their heads close together over the device, Uncle Marcello’s hair resting crisply against Annette’s cheek. She cannot see exactly what is clipped to the stage under the objective lenses. The details are too small and precise, and the iris diaphragm arranges the light too intensely for her pupils. But her uncle will describe the specimen, putting his eye to the ocular piece and his warm calloused hand over hers on the coarse focus. His long middle finger gently revolves the fine focus. On the glass plate, he tells her, are delicate filaments and farina, pollens like star clusters and intimate tissues, blushing pigments and freckled crevices. These are descriptions which sound to Annette like the alien creatures in the space films Mauri watches, like those moist, tendrilled, protuberant things, programmed to find humans, breed with them and build new colonies, according to Hollywood.

When they have finished, Uncle Marcello cleans the aperture, the lenses, and the stage, with a special cloth kept in the microscope case. Then the device is lifted away and stowed below the desk.

Uncle Marcello speaks with reverence about the early English gardeners who experimented with reproduction using hazel catkins and cabbages, carnations and tulips. To Annette the English surnames seem as unusual as the experiments conducted two hundred years ago: Fairchild, Dobbs, Wentworth, Miller, Morland. To make her uncle happy, she recites the list and adds ‘Marcello Tambroni’. Pinned to the wall of the office are drawings of English garden fairies, and photographs of fairies that are hoaxes. Uncle Marcello tells her he has seen fairies hiding in the grass heaps, but when Mauri sings pop songs loudly they are frightened away.

His hands are precise and slow whenever he fixes the end of Annette’s braids with a ribbon. Just as carefully he scrapes powder from the stamen of one varietal and transfers it to the organs of a different species altogether. He re-pots. He waits. He waters. He hopes. In one of the small glass conservatories he has a laboratory of attempted fusions. They are his garden children, he tells Annette, and he loves them as a father. It is very sad when they fail.

Over lunch or dinner, Annette’s mother sometimes makes wild breeding suggestions, many of which Marcello declares immediately impossible, like the marriage of marigolds and cyclamen, apples and limes, pumpkins and zucchini. ‘Rosaria, if you come to the nursery I will show you the correct procedure,’ he tells her. ‘You have not been for a very long time. Did you not use to visit my brother there every day?’ When he says this, the room becomes quiet, except for Tommaso popping his mouth and Mauri scraping up the last of the soup from the tureen. ‘You don’t understand what it is I am suggesting,’ she says. ‘You are mistaking me for someone else, Marcello.’ Then Uncle Marcello says quietly, almost in a whisper, ‘Sometimes we must put away our sadness and remember what fortune offers us. You are not a nun.’ ‘God gives me no options. He is the only choice,’ she replies, her voice as bitter as radicchio.

Arguments such as this are difficult for Annette to follow. There seem to be strange currents at work when her mother and her uncle speak. They might be playing chess or a card game. When she asks Mauri why they can never agree, Mauri tells her it is a question of frustration. He says one day it will all explode, then maybe they will have another little brother or sister. ‘A half-breed!’ he laughs, pleased with his joke. Annette giggles, though she does not know exactly what he means. In her mind’s eye she pictures Tommaso as a baby, mixed with a tropical flower. There are green shoots growing underneath his toenails and in his navel. His tongue, when he cries, is a blue spotted tube, sticky with sap.

Rosaria Tambroni prays every day at the foot of her bed, or beneath the coral rosary in the kitchen, which was her grandmother’s. She prays with intensity, forgetting Tommaso’s milk, which burns in the pan, and the coffee on the stove, which spits dryly. She prays frequently, but seldom goes to mass. She does not attend the festivals or the parades. She does not help prepare
mosto
under the piazza trees, or join in the October celebrations with the other women. She does not leave the house unless it is for a particular reason–a religious expedition of some kind, a feeling that comes upon her like a fever and will not leave her until she has put on her shawl and prepared herself to face whatever it is that she must face. Then she will march out, her arms swinging, her knuckles swelling and whitening, as if the skin might burst open, to see Father Mencaroni, or to inform the vendor of magazines and books that he must stop selling profane material to her second youngest son, or to the house of her sister, or to stare at the road leading to the cimitero di campagna. Until these purposeful moods arrive, she prepares tall cascading sprays for weddings in the stone room of Castrabecco, cuts silks, which she sells to dressmakers, and weaves funeral wreaths. Sometimes Annette wishes her mother would march to the church of San Lorenzo and, with her extraordinary, livid piety, which withers all its recipients, demand that the Bestia stop leering at her daughter. She imagines her taking an axe to the panel of the Deposition and extracting the evil face, then burning it. But this event is unlikely.

Once her mother was more sociable. There is a photograph in a frame on her dresser, in which she is dancing with Annette’s father. She is wearing a bolero jacket and a skirt now out of fashion. Her hair is long and loose. They are linked severely by the hands, their expressions fierce and amorous. There is another photograph beside it, in which she is practising ballet. Behind her is a row of diplomats or honoured guests in dark suits and tall hats. Once, when she was very little, Annette’s father said that before their engagement, her mother had been to Austria and Germany and had danced before royalty. Annette wishes she had seen her mother dancing. Often she goes into the bedroom and lifts the photographs and brings each in turn close to her face. From the wardrobe comes the smell of her mother’s old clothes and her petticoats, the smell of vinegar and lace. On the table is her gold-edged Bible.

Annette wonders if her mother will ever recover from such loss. She still wears the long black dresses that cover her ankles and fall in a gather, like a curate’s hood, at the shoulders. She communicates feverishly with God about her past misfortune, and finds no joy in living. Uncle Marcello says it is a shame for such a young woman to continue to wear such dresses. That she wears them to hide herself.

Annette’s mother’s eyes are only a little short-sighted. She does not wear glasses, not even on the fine chain around her neck, but she has seen things. She has seen that there are great oceans of darkness in which her daughter might be swept away. There are daily assaults her daughter might encounter. An avalanche of aubergines rolling towards her in the market, or a hole in the pavement with Southerners inside, or a lascivious kiss from a stranger. She will not tolerate her daughter’s curiosity about these subjects. ‘Enough of this inquisition!’ she cries, when Annette asks how the aubergines would get loose, or why the hole has not been filled by street workers, or when she asks whether the Bestia can climb from the heavy gilt frame and move unnoticed through the street, and whether he wears the crimson wattle of a cockerel, or has sallow haunted eyes like the wolf of Saint Francis. ‘Just promise me you will be vigilant and good. That is all I ask!’

Annette promises, and tries to do her best. But if she brings home fish with fingermarks on the scales her mother will always notice. ‘You should be more careful not to grope at things,’ she says. ‘It gives you away.’ When Mauri dances with Annette in the courtyard holding her hips and swaying her like a bell, she will rap on the window, or fling it open, and say, ‘How many more times must I tell you.’ When she suffers headaches the whole house must muffle itself, and tiptoe and whisper. Annette must go to the cupboard in the kitchen and find the tin of camomile flowers with which to make an infusion. She must soak a cotton napkin in the grassy tonic while her mother lies on the crocheted cover of her bed. She drapes the towel over her mother’s forehead and presses it gently. She hears her mother weeping. ‘I am so tired,’ she whispers. ‘I have been left alone with too many reminders. Other mothers have daughters who are able to help them. Other women have husbands who fell poplars for their daughter’s wedding. What hope is there?’

‘Let me help more,’ Annette suggests, stirring the bowl of dusty yellow flowers and floating stalks. ‘I know where the flour is kept, and the eggs.’ But her mother continues to weep; she is inconsolable. ‘It’s OK. Leave me alone now. Go to mass. Take flowers to Papa’s grave and tell him we miss him.’

Before her vision deteriorated completely, Annette would look at her mother sitting at the dresser, anointing herself with oils. She would watch her brushing her hair and smoothing her eyebrows, plucking them in the centre so they became separate, and she would think her most beautiful. Before the final sickness, the blizzard that descended from nowhere and severed the nerves, there were still tunnels of sight. She could move her head around and find the cameo of this sombre, elegant woman. At the table when they sat for meals, if she looked up and to the right, she could see her mother’s crucifix, lying in the milky hollow of her breasts. The sunlight would glimmer and flash against it, like a match flaring inside Annette’s head. ‘It makes you seem simple,’ her mother commented, ‘when you dip and tip your head like that. Are things getting worse, Annette? Should we go back to the doctor and see if he can provide some dark glasses?’ ‘Yeah. Then she can sing the Blues,’ said Mauri.

When she was ten years old, warm drops were sprinkled into her eyes from a pipette every night. Annette imagined that the solution melted the frost creeping around her pupils, like the ice on the windowpanes of Castrabecco in winter. She would stay very still while her mother held her chin and administered the prescription, trying not to blink just at the moment the splash landed on each eye. She always did blink and her lashes would squeeze out the fluid and it would trickle over her cheeks. And they would try again, Annette looking up, her neck stretched long and her eyes wide, like a baby bird.