Ali Smith - How to be both

Today when the old woman came out of her house she brought nothing but for the first time sat down on her own poorly made wall behind the girl in silence and companionable.

There are bees: there was a butterfly.

That blossom will smell good to those who can smell blossom.

How the air throws it into a dance.

I had a memory of my father from not long before he died that I could not bear: it shook me awake at nights even 10 years after his death: as I got older the memory got stronger: sometimes I could not see to paint cause it came between me and what I did and changed the nature of it: so Barto sat me at the table and put 2 cups in front of me: he filled 1 from the jug of water: he filled the other from the same jug of water.

Now, he said. This cup here has the Water of Forgetting in it. This cup here has the Water of Remembering. First you drink this. Then you wait a little. Then you drink the other.

But you poured them both out of the same jug, I said. They’re both the same water. How can this one be forgetting and this one be remembering?

Well, they’re in different cups, he said.

So it’s the cups of forgetting and remembering and nothing to do with the water? I said.

No, it’s the water, he said. You have to drink the water.

How can the same water be both? I said.

It’s a good question, he said. The kind of thing I’d expect you to ask. So. Ready? So first you drink —.

It would mean that forgetting and remembering are really both the same thing, I said.

Don’t split hairs with me, he said. This one first. The Water of Forgetting.

No, cause a minute ago you said that that one was the Water of Forgetting, I said.

No, no, it’s —, he said. Uh. No. Wait.

He looked at the 2 cups: he picked them both up and crossed the room with them: he threw the water in both of them out the open back door into the yard: he put the empty cups on the table and refilled them both from the jug again: he pointed to one, then the next.

Forgetting, he said. Remembering.

I nodded.

I was here cause Barto had come across town to see a Madonna I was painting for his friend who wanted to be painted in kneeling next to her and some saints for good money: Barto’d stared at it and shaken his head.

The people in your pictures these days, Francescho, he’d said. I mean, they’re still beautiful. But they’re strange. It’s like stone in their veins, where it used to be blood.

Canvas is different from wall, I said. Fresco is always much lighter looking. Materials can make things darker.

But it’s the same with the work you showed to Domenico, he said

(Barto found me and the pickpocket a lot of our work in those years).

Well, he gave me the job, I said. He liked it.

A bitterness was through it, Barto said. Not like you. Like you’re a different person.

I am a different person, I said.

Ha! Ercole said behind us (he was working). I wish you were. Then I’d be working for someone else.

Shut up, I said.

What’s wrong? Barto said.

Master Francescho is not sleeping much, the pickpocket said.

Why not? Barto said.

Be quiet, Ercole, I said.

Bad dreams, Ercole said.

I can help with bad dreams, Barto said.

If it were only dreams, it’d be easy, I said. I could deal with only dreams.

Barto was sure, he said, of a good way to rid oneself of bad dreams and painful memories both: you had to do a ritual in the name of the goddess of memory: you’d drink one water first and you’d forget everything: you’d drink the other water next and it’d give you a forceful remembering, everything crushed into 1 single huge memory boulder, a remembering the size of a mountainside.

Now I sat at the table with the 2 cups in front of me.

I don’t want all my memories falling on me like avalanche, I said.

You won’t know the first thing about it, Barto said. You won’t even know it’s happening. You’ll be protected. You’ll be in a trance. And then we lift you up and we carry you across the room and we put you in the special chair and you tell the oracle all the things the water’s made you remember and then you fall asleep from the effort of it all. And when you wake up you find that you remember in a whole new way. You remember without fear or discomfort. You remember only what you really need to remember. And after it your sleep at night will be deep and good and sound and also — best thing of all — you’ll find you’re able to laugh again.

What special chair? What oracle? I said.

We were down in the servant kitchen: it was empty, Barto had dismissed the serving girls and the cook for the hour it would take, he said, to change my demeanour: we could hear them sunning themselves in the yard lightly complaining about the interruption: but they were used to me there: they were kind to me too: there was always something to eat at Barto’s house if Barto was away from home cause the kitchen was where Barto habitually took me (to keep me out of sight of his wife, I think, who did not like me around the house too much: he’d promised me I’d always stand godparent to his boys, and to all his boys not just the first: and what about your girls? I’d asked, cause I knew I’d be a great patron to girls: ah but the girls are not so much my business, he’d said and I’d seen from the slant away of his eyes that I was permitted, but conditionally, to the parts of his life over which his wife had no jurisdiction: this was fine by me, I had more than enough grace by our friendship: though I’d have liked all the same to be guardian to his girls since girls got less attention when it came to colours and pictures, which meant the loss of many a good painter out of nothing but blind habit: but his wife did not want her girls to have the life of painters).

Barto leapt across to a larder, opened a corner cupboard inside it and brought out a wrapped honeycomb on a dish above which a small cloud of flies appeared and congregated: he put it on the table in front of me.

The oracle, he said.

Is there bread to go with it? I said.

He went back to the larder.

Would you prefer eggs as oracle? he said.

Can the oracle be both? I said. And can I take some of the oracle home with me?

My wife has been complaining there are never enough eggs, he said (cause she knew from her servants that I sent the pickpocket round here often: what neither of them knew was that her kitchen actually gained a lot for the eggs it happened to lose, cause the Garganelli cook had taken lessons from the pickpocket who was good with food when it came to both pictures and stomachs and who’d taught the cook how to hang and dry beef and pork in the way that enhances the flavours).

Barto set a bowl full of eggs on the table beside the honey.

And the special chair? I said (and while he looked round for a chair that would do I pocketed 5 of the eggs).

He was patting the crate of apples in the corner: he covered it with two dishcloths and patted the creases smooth.

Right, he said. Ready.

So. I drink this first, I said.

Yes, he said.

And then my memories fly off the top of me, I said, like someone putting a ladder against my walls if I were a house and climbing up on to the roof of me where all the things I remember are neatly laid like rooftiles, the first under the next under the next under the next. And then that someone jemmies each tile off, throws it down to the ground and doesn’t stop till the rafters are bare. Yes?

More or less, Barto said.

And when they come off, do they stack up neatly, my memories, or do they lie broken in a heap by their fall? I said.

I can’t say for sure, Barto said. I’ve never done this ritual before.