Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man

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.

A tourist has become trapped under the flower stall for the duration of the storm. ‘Hello’, Annette says to her. ‘Hello. The weather is bad. It is raining.’ The woman is German. She has a phrasebook. Perhaps she is making a tour of Piero and Fiorentino. Perhaps she is seeing the ruins or the misericords. She has been separated from her travel companions-they have all ducked into cafés and under awnings, or they have gone into San Lorenzo to see the unusual altarpiece. The woman makes a selection-irises, freesias, and two roses. It is a hasty transaction-clearly she feels she is obliged to pay for being kept dry. ‘Can you be able to make them?’ she asks. She has noticed Annette’s tilted face, her lost eyes. Annette smiles. She positions the flowers in complementary order, sorting through the leaves, pinching each stalk, and stacking the bouquet upwards, almost weightlessly.

‘Can you see my colours?’ the woman asks. ‘Is the smell?’ She is intrigued. Annette smiles again, and nods politely. She could tell the woman that the white iris of the Florentine has a scent identical to the violet. It is one of nature’s comedic little duplicities, Uncle Marcello says. She pulls the thorns off the rose stems with a thumbnail so they will not prick the German woman when she carries them back to the rented apartment or the hotel. She fastens the arrangement inside a paper cone. The woman takes Annette’s hand. Into her palm she presses three coins. ‘That is true.’

It’s easy for Annette to decipher the markings of currency. She can run her fingertip across the franks and the corrugated edges, or weigh the coins, or Elemme might be called over to supervise the payment. But it is not necessary to make these checks. Even though her mother warns her some people will try to take advantage of her, even though at night her mother counts the money from Annette’s soft purse, Annette trusts the customers. People seldom play tricks on the blind.

But the world of her mother’s imagining is full of jeopardy. At home she tells Annette not to go further than the courtyard garden. On Sundays she is permitted to walk to the church, alone or with her brothers, and afterwards to the cimitero di campagna where her father is at rest, his photograph framed in the niche. At the market she must wait for Maurizio to collect her and dismantle the stall. She can purchase game or fish from the vendors who know her; she can go to the growing plots where her uncle works, with a new order or to assist with the transfer of seeds between mossy cases. Beyond this sanctioned territory, there are untold hazards. There are traps and snares, like the hidden rabbit wires on the hillside. If she is not careful she will trip, or burn herself, or snag her skirt on a piece of wood, a door handle, a buckle, or under someone’s foot. She will become lost in the crowds, never to be found again. People will treat her with cruelty. They will corrupt her. There will be immorality.

Sometimes, as her mother braids Annette’s hair, she issues warnings. ‘Do you not see it? From a distance the boys will think you are attractive. They will whistle and flirt with you. Then when you come close they will see this,’ she taps the bone around Annette’s eyes, ‘and they will laugh at you. There are so many other pretty girls. And I could not bear such cruelty against my daughter.’ Her mother sighs. The braids are so tight that Annette feels the hairs breaking.

‘In which ways might they find me attractive, Mamma?’ she asks. She has outgrown the last edition of herself she was able to see. Eleven years old, flat-chested, with spurs of bone at her elbows and ankles. Now she is older she has curves that she can feel with her hands. She has soft breasts, which are very sensitive, and silky little hairs. Inside she also feels different. Her mother will not answer such immodest questions. Instead she continues with her defence of the limitations she has imposed. ‘In our home everything will always remain the same. Furniture will maintain its exact position-Marcello and the boys know better than to leave a chair out from the table. You can count the steps from the window to the cupboard and know there will always be this number of steps. Nothing will be rearranged. There. Doesn’t that make you feel safe?’

She is no longer allowed to go to school. She has proved with her bruises and her laddered stockings that it is impossible for her to continue learning. And she is of an age now when others around her are beginning to wake from the sleep of innocence, her mother says. Her reputation might be insulted without her ever knowing it. ‘Suppose you were to come home groped-how would we check? We would have to inspect you every night for marks, and take wire wool to you like a tarnished kettle.’ Annette wonders whether Maurizio is patched and discoloured when he arrives home from the cinema after watching The Sign of Satan, or whether his eyes have turned black. She wonders whether his tongue becomes mottled when he talks about the heavy bosoms and long legs of the actresses, and when he dances with her in the kitchen singing, ‘Sexy, sexy, yeah yeah, baby.’

If she protests, if she says that she would like to continue at school, or that she can still see the shapes of light and dark shadows, that she can hear traffic and can cross the street safely, her mother loses her temper. ‘But you cannot read from the blackboard or even the pages pushed up in front of your nose, Annett-a! We have been through this! The doctors can do no more for you.’ It is better for her to help with their family business. In this way she can be useful, and in this way protected. At the end of these discussions her mother takes hold of her hand and squeezes it hard. ‘Listen to me. You don’t know what is out there. You must resist succumbing to a wandering spirit, like that of the unfortunate Sicilians. Do you understand?’

Mauri often tells her that she is beautiful. He whispers to her across the table that she is the most beautiful girl outside of Paris. He kisses her cheek in the flower van, and when Annette asks Elemme if her cheek is black, Elemme says that it is not, and asks if Annette has been cooking squid or performing some other dirty occupation in the kitchen. The fish vendor and the butcher also call her pretty when she arrives for smoked eel and for pork. They often put aside the best cuts of meat for her family, or keep a handful of mussels on ice when they are delivered from the coast. At the fruit stall she presses fruit with a gentle thumb, smells the deep dimple at the stalk, or pulls out a leaf, and asks for a lower price if the fruit is not yet ripe. ‘Yes. Of course. Anything for you, beautiful Annette.’

As she listens to the racket of the market she imagines the dark world beyond. Buses with no brakes to slow down for sightless, perambulating girls. Railings as sharp as pikes to skewer the skirts of the unsuspecting, or disembowel them like the spears of the Crusaders. And the notorious open drains, into which she could fall, and in which a breed of violent Southern men live-they who emigrated north twenty years ago and found it too cold to live above ground. But she cannot picture the immoral acts her mother suggests are happening on filthy beds in the dark rooms of apartments and in the bars, behaviour her older brother understands and can be forgiven for, but she cannot. And though she tries so hard, she cannot picture the face of the Bestia as he leers at her from the gateway of the summer theatre.