Ali Smith - How to be both

Behind me I heard him get back on the ladder: when I turned I saw him waiting, just his eyes and the top of his head above the platform: it was comic and sad both: but the fear I saw in his eyes let me see there was something I might do.

I’ll have a bet with you, Ercole, I said.

You will? he said.

His eyes looked relieved.

I crouched down near his head.

I bet you the worth of 5 square feet of this fresco that if I write to him and ask him direct he’ll give me what I ask, I said.

Okay, but if I lose that bet, the pickpocket said coming back up to sit on the platform. Though I know full well I won’t, but just in case. If I do. Can we agree that I’ll pay at the assistant rate? And if I win, that you’ll pay at the Master Francescho rate?

Go down and grind me some black, I said, just in case I find I’ll need it.

(Cause black has great power and its presence is meaningful.)

Black? the pickpocket said. No. It’s New Year. It’s holiday. I’m on holiday. Anyway, I’m sacked.

Make it deeper than sable, I said. Get it as deep as a lightless night.

I wrote on the Friday: I delivered the letter myself by hand to the doorman of the palace.

On the morning of the first Sunday, 2 days into the new year, the palace was cold and near-empty: I came up the stairs to the month room alone and I took the knife to March.

I peeled off the wall a small portion under the arch between the garland and Borse giving out justice to an aging infidel : it came away complete like marzapane off a cake.

I layered on the thin new undercoat: I went home to bed cause I planned to be working all night.

That afternoon I packed my things into my satchels except my tools, my colours and a good piece of my mirror.

That evening, alone again in the long room, I lit the torch: the faces round me flickered their hello: I climbed to the lower level by the garland and the cupids.

I layered the second skin over the hole in the picture below.

I replaced the lunette of Borse with a profile portrait like the one on the Justice medal: haec te unum : but I turned him so everyone who’d seen the medal would see he was looking the other way.

I placed next to the figure of Borse at the heart of the crowd waiting for justice a hand — with nothing in it.

Under the word JUSTICE written in the stone where the Est colours were I used black.

Above the black I whited out the letters till all you could read was ICE.

I held the mirror up to my own eyes.

Then it’s down off the scaffolding and out of the palace of not being bored, out on to the street and up on to the back of Mattone and off on the hoof at speed down the streets past the smoky ghetto, under the palace tower, past the half-made castle and through the town gates for the last time cause I’d never be back and such leaving takes only a matter of minutes when the town of your birth is a small one easily passed through.

(Just a year and a half after that, as it happened, and just 6 days after the Pope made him Duke of Ferara at last, Borse would turn, blink, fall down dead, dead as an arrowed bird, the months of his year still circling regardless the walls of his palace of not being bored.)

When the town was as distant over my shoulder as the far towers in the landscapes in the work I’d just covered that wall with

(for not enough money to pay for the blues and the golds, never mind other colours)

when the morning light was up, when I’d reached the first rise of land to let the plain lie down behind me, I stopped.

I calculated my loss.

My pockets were near-empty.

I would have to hope for work.

A bird sang above me when I thought it.

I’d be fine: my arms and hands were good: I would go to Bologna where I’d friends and patrons, where there was no laughable court.

I heard through the birdsong something behind me and turned and saw a raising of dust on the line of road in the flat land: there was a horse far back, the only horse in the whole morning: no, not a horse, a pony, grey, and when it got near enough I saw someone on its back with his too-long legs sticking out at the sides: when the pickpocket drew up level with me the pony he was on was so small I looked down from a godheight.

Master Francescho, he said over the cough of the pony all out of breath from the speed it’d been made to go and the bags on its back full of all the pickpocket’s worldly.

I waited till he’d got his own breath himself, as covered in dust as the pony: he wiped his face with his sleeve: he readied himself to speak.

That’s 5 square feet you owe me, he said. To be paid at the higher rate.

Here I am again: me and a girl and a wall.

We are outside the house of the girl’s beloved and sitting by the poorly made wall: this time she is not sitting on it: she is sitting on the ground on the paving.

We have been here now many times.

I am not so sure it is a love though any more cause one of the times we were here the girl, staring with a face full of hostility, almost so that I believed she might spit like a snake, was approached direct by the woman we saw in the picture palace who came out of her house and crossed the road: and although the woman spoke to her the girl simply sat on the paving stones and looked, saying nothing, though her face was all irony, at the beautiful face of the woman: then quick as a magic trick she took out her tablet and made a study of the woman with it: the woman put her hands up over her face: she did not want a study made: she turned like that and went back inside the house: a minute later though the woman stood looking out her window at the girl across the road: at which the girl held up her tablet again and took a study of the woman in the window: the woman drew a curtain down: then the girl took a study of her doing this too, and then one of the blinded window: then the girl stayed cross-legged on the ground watching the house until the dark came down: only then she stood up, shook her limbs which will have been cold and stiff from the sitting and went.

And the next day, back again, she and I and the paving stones.

We have done this visit many days now: so many that the north wall of the room she sleeps in is covered in these small tablet studies: each study is the size of a hand and the girl has arranged them in the shape of a star, going towards its points the lighter of the pictures and the darker ones going to the centre.

The pictures are all of the house, or of the woman coming and going from it, or of other people who come and go: they are all from the same view, from in front of the poorly made wall: there are differences in the hedge leaves and tree leaves and as the season has shifted she has caught the differences in light and weather in the street from day to day.

The much older woman, the one the years have bent, who lives in the house to which the poorly made wall belongs, came out every day at first to shout things at the girl.

The girl said nothing, but on the third day simply moved from sitting on the wall to sitting on the paving stones in front of it.

The much older woman shouted then too: but the girl folded her arms over her skinniness and looked up from the ground with such calm and resolve that this older woman stopped shouting and left her in peace to sit where she chose.

One day instead the old woman said kind words to her and gave her an awning on a stick to keep rain off (there has been much rain in purgatorium): that same day she brought a drink with steam coming off it and refreshments made of biscuit for the girl: on another colder day a woollen blanket and a large throw-over of a coat.

Today there will be blossom in the study the girl will make cause the trees in the street round this house she is looking so hard at have the beginnings in them of some of the several possible greens and some, the blossoming ones, have opened their flowers overnight, some pink along the branches, some loaded with white.