How to Paint a Dead Man (6 page)

Much has been made of this studio of mine, which is also my bedroom. There is talk of rustication and asceticism, the robes of the profession. Really I am no monk. It is simply that I favour the light and the space in here and I need room to stretch the canvases. If I enjoy the company of a visitor, or Antonio wishes to see the recent productions, they are welcome inside. After all, it is not a closed sanctuary where rare species live, or shrouds are kept. It is simply a room of manufacture and of rest. Theresa is permitted to clean only the sleeping quarter, so a line of dust several decades thick now exists between my bed and the work area. My footprints of dust in the rest of the house are a constant source of irritation to her. But I can always be found for you to scold me, I say to her–you can trap me like a wolf sneaking in from the Balkans. We do not always see eye to eye, but Theresa has never attempted to clean further into the room. She is an honest woman and has a respect for this occupation, and this is all that I require.

Theresa’s father, Corrado, was a carpenter and my dear friend for many years. I called him Graffio. He provided wood for the frames and the long trestles in the studio. He was a man always surrounded by shavings and chippings and he was deeply contented in his vocation. Little blond curls were always in his hair and on his clothing. He was also a skilled guitar maker and a very good player. To be in his presence was very fine, like opening a cedar box for a cigar. Often we would take a glass of limoncello into his workshop at the end the day while the resin dried. The fragrance of timber is beautifully stimulating, as if the sanguine humour of nature is released when the cord is cut open. When Graffio died there was no one left of my old friends with whom to listen to the football or sit in the shade of the square. Though the family has often invited me to eat with them during Festa de l’Unità, I have not imposed myself upon them as I did when he was alive.

It still surprises me the attention paid to this bare and simple room. To sleep with one’s working medium is not so unusual–the apprentices of the Renaissance often had no choice. But the head of an artist is always occupied by his craft, no matter where he sleeps. There is nothing extraordinary to speak of in here–I am not a collector of the macabre. There are three trestles of varying heights. The objects are kept underneath until called into duty. Sometimes the bottles seem to be huddled, like ceramic flocks sheltering from a storm, and I think of the old shepherds with their herds, moving like the shadows of clouds across the hills. I have not counted them but by now there must be about one hundred. Together they seem plain, like a chorus, but singly they are, of course, unique.

The tables are covered in rolls of brown paper bought from the postal union. I also use an unbleached linen screen behind the tables to mask their physical context. I admire the polished woods of the Dutch but I have no desire to reproduce them. The ceiling light has been here longer than I and I am in no position to remove it, but it is dismal to work with it lit, like being in the interrogation room. Our tremors, which unscrew sconces and ruin walls without discrimination, have not seen fit to remove the old chandelier. Sadly the cracks in the wall do not extend that far. There are some forms of light that do more harm than good. It is of interest, but ultimately of little importance, to know the work shifts of artists. It should simply be said that we are all governed by the sun. The writer might opt to be nocturnal–he with his dark pupils and his head full of owls. It is supposed that the sinister quality of paraffin lamps was reproduced exactly as it was in the old night surgeries, illuminating the grey sinews, but by the application of paint the artist is a magician of light.

The room has gained infamy with very little help from me. It is discussed and photographed. It is given unique status because it contains the future as undoubtedly as it does the past. The bottles are also painted, and into some I have poured coloured pigments. In this way they lose identification and gain a sense of the modern. Dust also dresses them, lying thickly on their rims and shoulders. Over the years they have travelled in many coats.

I am asked so often about them that I forget to be patient. They are an enigma, which lies beyond me, and is used by others to illustrate matters of superior concern: the health of our great arts, the political currents. These bottles are the castaways of this world. They have no value or purpose and they have no genre, but are simply the architecture of the visual world, its daily experience. Some see in them cities. Some see icons. They have been recovered from cellars and attics, from refuse sites and the markets of Europe. The tallest blue one was found in the ruined farmhouse at Via Lame, in a cracked sink, and there was no hope for it other than to collect drips. A hornet’s nest was woven on to the gable above the sink where my father once leant the handle of a flail and spat out feathers and dirt. Another two, formerly white, are inscribed in Arabic and originate from Persia. In addition there are decanters and jugs, coffee pots, latte bowls, vases, canisters, Bleriot’s oil pitcher, and so forth. Nautili, boxes. But it is the bottles which infuriate; it is the bottles which invite endless speculation. Recently I have felt compelled to give some away as gifts.

Theresa can sometimes be found looking at the studio tables from the room’s dusty meridian. After her chores she has been known to loiter. Her stance is the stance of a woman preparing to take the sacrament, rather than a woman standing behind the silk cordon of a museum. What are her thoughts about my bottles? What does she see in them? Though I know she considers herself inferior, I believe her country pragmatism might outweigh the convolutions of the academics. She stands at a distance with her hands clasped. I would like to ask her. Has she ever seen a sarcophagus or the masterpieces? Has she gone into the basilicas of the region without her prayer book, simply to observe the frescoes? Has she taken the bus to Monterchi to pray for the safe births of her grandchildren beneath the partitioned Madonna? And has she realised all the angels of Piero wear his own voluptuous mouth?

There is no embargo, I say to her, please approach further if you wish. Then she is startled and will not discuss her thoughts but retrieves her basket and locates her bicycle, and down the hill she goes.

So it is left to others to conclude that I am relativist, existentialist, totalitist, making of course good titles in the magazines and establishing bold reputations for themselves. The critics insist on labels. They put forward ideas of Fascism and Constructivism and now also ideas of the East. I try not to be impolite, but it is necessary to discredit such notions. There is much false association to overcome. There is still talk of Il Duce and collaboration, regardless of the tragedy, or perhaps because of it.

Wars do not end with flags and liberation, nor does aggrieved blood settle in the generations counted on one hand. Art is not of an administration simply because it is bought and hung in its corridors. The supreme leaders may extol the virtues of nationalism and instruct us in artistic loyalty, but the independence of the imagination prevails. I cannot account for the consciences and proclivities of my old acquaintances. I have no desire to defend my own early affiliation and belief in the system. But I know this: zealots beget zealots. Ultimately Fascism was the enemy of the still-life. It dismissed the grottoes and the dogs and the wild game of xenia, and became the despotic patron of the figurative. The ignorant Cinti would have made Botticelli imitators of us all had we not smuggled into Italy the inferior genre, had not the sympathy of a few brave admirers prevailed.

Once, several years ago, a commission came to me from a wealthy patron. He requested a display of instruments to celebrate his family of musicians. He provided me with an excellent lyre for the composition–its curves were two hundred years old and it was immensely beautiful. He received in return a painting containing a trumpet from the market with an injured bell and missing valve, having fallen from its case before it arrived at the stall. He accepted it graciously and there was no penalty.

I won no public commission early in my career. Then I was not among the favoured. I have worked despite every establishment and have known obstacles and ridicule before any favour. The names of those loyal individuals remain private and I will not exhibit them if they wish to remain so. How easy it would be to show my inquisitors the marked register I have kept all these years when they accuse me of deception, when they accuse me of emerging ennobled from extremis. How easy it would be to say to them: do you see whose name is printed here, do you know who this is, now, please tell me again about Mussolini. Yet so too are there names for whom the heavy boots might still come with papers for arrest. It is a paradox. These young journalists do not understand this country’s past. They broker factions, and they stir trouble, when we are already divided enough. Perhaps instead they should be setting Canario dogs in the pits.

They are as eager to mythologise this life. The retention. The reclusion. The obsession with position and form, creating and recreating. I was born in the last century. The days pass by and I am able and I am working-surely this is enough? The Salon of the Refused is long gone, I tell them, now we are all equal in our failures and successes, and without ceremony. They are not practitioners. They do not know the ingredients of tempera, nor the touch of a miniver brush against the finger.

In the pages of the journals I appear as another man, a man of uniforms and suspicions and oblique messages. I do not recognise this creation of theirs. He is not even a distant cousin. Antonio does not censor the clippings, and for this I am grateful, even as I am filled with dread. This week I have read that I am an untrained draughtsman who cannot draw a chair or the levelled horizon. I, who took the Academy medal for
ornato
, with distinction, with excellence!

Such accusations trouble the heart and leave me tired. Let them write what they will. Tomorrow when we wake the sun will amaze us all with its industry. Theresa will beat flat strips of the boar which Giancarlo has shot and hung. She will stir orange flowers into her salad. She will stand before the invisible rope in the studio and wonder which footprints in the dust lead towards the real bottles and which lead towards duplicity. She will come no closer to guessing, and neither will I.

The indifference of dust as it covers each cornice of glass. Yes! Give me the indifference of dust!

There’s nothing he can do about the cows on the road when they’re being herded in for milking. Full cows make way for no man. Nor are they bothered by the murderous shrieking of the car, not like the lolling and loping hares, which rise up, indignant for a moment, then catapult off into the ditches. Peter puts the Daf in neutral, winds down the window and inhales the moor. The hares seem bigger this year, bigger every year. Haunches, whiskers, paws: he’s sure they’re expanding. Maybe it’s Sellafield’s radiation, reaching inland. Maybe it was that lurid rain drifting over from Chernobyl, incubating the little buggers in their burrows with an alarming energy. Come the apocalypse it’ll be the super-size hare owning the country, with its lengthening backbone and its shrewd, alien face, of this he is certain. The cows’ days are numbered though. They’re such antiquated creations, relics of another era. He watches them plodding along, enslaved by their produce and oblivious to what is in front and behind. Their hooves clatter on the concrete as the car shrills.

The afternoon is hotter than it seemed inside the stone of the cottage, and its copper-green light is becoming gold. Perfect for a late series of sketches if he sets up soon, but all he can do is wait, large and tacky behind the steering wheel, and watch the big bovine arses wallowing, hipbones and shoulders hoisted high like masts, sails of flesh billowing out. The farm dogs sool between their legs. ‘Come along, ladies.’ On the wall top a couple of rooks have the look of factory masters, monitoring their workers, ready to crack the whip.

Rob Robertson nods to Peter as he tromps past the car behind his cattle. ‘How-do, Wilse. Bonny afternoon.’ His wellies are lathered in wet, mustard-coloured turd, and his wool shirt is buttoned down over his big sprouting chest. ‘Mr Robertson, sir.’ Peter doffs two fingers off his forehead. ‘Isn’t it just bloody gorgeous!’ ‘Aye. Grand day for a drive. Got a picnic?’

Cordial as ever, his neighbour. But implicit in this exchange is the fact that Peter Caldicutt is not out ‘working’ like the rest of them. He is not fetching his animals from their paddocks to the pump sheds; he is not punching in and out at the biscuit factory; he is not even, frankly, creasing the crotch of a cheap suit in an office in town. He is in fact doing nothing. Well, he’s doing something alternative, something un-listable. He is sitting in his runt of a car, in his colourful overalls and gender-neutral smock, with a shoe-caddy of brushes and pencils on the passenger seat. He is somehow playing hooky from the proper daily business.

But that’s OK. That’s manageable. They like him all the same, this affable eccentric, this entertaining, be-hatted fellow, who is often in the pub of an evening, who helps out come bailing or mending time, who might have negligible income, or might in fact be a millionaire-there’s just no telling. ‘How’s the painting, Wilse? Pretty colour on the fell today. Heard you on the radio.
Cumberland News
says you’ve gotta picture in The National.’ He does know his lifestyle is something of a confusion, with its unusual hours and occasional celebrity. But he’s been here long enough to be, almost, just and so, a local. One of them. An acceptable, topographical feature.

And, let’s face it, it is exempting–self-employment. Very nice to have time and freedom, and yes, all right, money. Nice to enjoy what you do for a living, and not be dreaming of murder or arson every day in a municipal cubicle. Trips out at milking time on a whim, to an exhibition, to the pipe shop, the matinee, or to see a skull-cluster of stones in a pool at low tide on the coast, are very agreeable. He doesn’t have to get a wash until mid-afternoon if he doesn’t want to. He can read in bed when he wakes up, or listen to
Woman’s Hour.
Bloody hell-he could wear sling-back, leopard-skin stilettos and arse-jewellery in the studio if he so desired!

Not that there isn’t any order. It isn’t professional anarchy. But from the outside the perks certainly look good-mobility at his own discretion, the absence of a twattish boss, a punch-card, and a starchy uniform. Stovetop espresso five times a day instead of thin metallic tea pissing out of a machine into a plastic cup. Might as well make the most of such privilege. Might as well appreciate it and say he’s lucky. ‘I’m a lucky man,’ he says in interview, ‘getting to do what I do. Don’t think I don’t know that.’ No. He doesn’t have to rush pell-mell round the supermarket after ten hours in a polystyrene office, or be ruthless towards other drivers in rush-hour queues. There might be unusual exchanges with the taxman, there might be days when the Muse is off banging some other artist, but once you’ve got the hang of the credit system, once you realise Miss Mnemosyne will come back after her dirty little affair, things do get a lot easier.

Yes. It is a pleasure, putting on a coat, midday, mid-week, and walking to the cairn at the summit of the old corpse road. It’s a joy, being in his workable home, with its mismatched, notched crockery and under-door draughts, the brisk accessible kettle and the sagey deodorant of Lydia lingering if she’s just passed through the room. But he’s earned the bastard lot! He’s earned it with dedication, long hours, lost weekends, rejections, ridicule, out-of-voguery, and taking an enormous bloody punt and being nifty with a brush and sticking at it. Dues have been paid. He’s risked a risky profession, and it’s paid off. And for that he is proud, and for that he doesn’t mind Rob Robertson’s playful rebuke. It’s not like he hasn’t worked a million shitty jobs before the only one he ever wanted eventually became his. Barkeep, road sweeper, sausage packer, cleaner, fly and lure seller, bastard rent collector, toyboy. Not like he hasn’t been skint as a rag-and-bone man. Not like he isn’t intimately acquainted with the fag end of the country’s social order-the weak broth, the pneumoconiosis, the booze, the glory-hole of working class solidarity.

But. He’s not complaining. Not today anyway. Not with this gilding, long summer light, and the promise of severe, photogenic shadows in the ravine. Sitting behind a sloppy armada of cows is not much to have to contend with really. He is a patient man. He is accustomed. He’s groovy.

Fed up with itself, the car stalls. He turns the engine over a couple of times until it fires. A dirty tubercular cough splutters from the exhaust pipe. Rob Robertson looks back over his shoulder and the wall-top rooks swivel their beaky faces to admonish the disgraceful noise. Haughty buggers–they’d have his eyes out too given half a chance! On the moor, foxgloves are rising from the charred ruins of the bushes that have been burnt back, and the whin smells sweet. Cuckoo-pint is growing along the slopes of the vallum. He wonders if the nettles are too tough now to make a pudding–he’s had a recipe stuffed in a drawer in the studio for years that he’d like to try. So many things still to do, eh Peter. ‘There’s no such thing as ennui, except for the lobotomised,’ he tells Susan and Danny when they complain about being bored. He’s never bored. Although these cows are beginning to test his chipper reserves.

Lydia’s red VW is trundling back over the road in the distance. At a fair old lick is how his wife drives. Round the corner by the farmyard she comes, over the cattle-grid with a loud metal thrum, over that bump where the concrete kinks–the car pitches sharply up, and quickly nods down. ‘Oooh, the suspension! Careful, love!’ There’s the whingeing of brakes, and then she’s lost from sight on the other side of the black-and-white herd.

Lydia accompanies him on trips out sometimes, now the kids are self-sufficient and mostly elsewhere. Together they travel light, carrying small rucksacks of equipment instead of papooses. If he’s walking up a fell, she’ll sometimes join him, or she’ll cut down to the nearest waterway in search of rarities, taking her camera with her. Other days he leaves her to her own machinations at home, carried out under the cover of chores, behind the tent of bright cottons on the washing line or in amongst the jams. ‘I think I’ll mooch about at home today’, she’ll say, her grey eyes already mulching paper in a bucket or stripping varnish from a salvaged bureau as they look up at him. ‘Right-o, cheerio, love, good luck with the japanning,’ he’ll say, planting a big clumsy kiss on her face that misses her lips and squashes her nose.

When he gets back she’ll have developed a roll of photographs in the pantry; they’ll be dripping chemicals on to the floor, drumming the wax-paper lids of jars. The vegetable patch will be dark with freshly turned sods, carrots left clarty in the sink for him to scrub. She’ll have added denim patchwork pieces to his holey dungarees, or expanded the quilt hanging in the little upstairs room that used to be Susan’s, and is Susan’s again until she moves, along with prosaically blacking the hearth and splitting kindling. He never knows where she finds the time for everything.

He suspects, no, let’s be honest, he knows, that it’s not him Susan gets her organising skills from–her tidiness and productivity–and her natural instinct for dark rooms. He and Danny can’t stand that whole thing–the claustrophobia, the shrewy optics, the tortuous pong. But the Caldicutt women seem immune. Already their daughter is attracting attention with her work, has walked straight into the best art school in the country, has received a decent amateur prize with which she has bought a classy camera. Clever lass. She is what her brother calls the brains of the operation. Why is it then he worries most about her? Why doesn’t he stress so much about Danny, who is, like his old man, a drop-out, who has been in gentle trouble with the law for possession and distribution of the herb, who is as flaky as chocolate and has decided to steward the summer music festivals and live like a pauper for the rest of the year? She’s the one on the fast track, off to Goldsmiths any day now. She’s the one with ambition, the gumption, the get-up-and-go. Why then does he worry about the pull of her strings?

Movement. Suddenly the road up ahead is visible. The cows have docked in the corrugated shed. There’s Lydia in her scarlet bug, revving it up, spinning grit. He puts the car into sticky forward gear and pulls away with a squeal. The doomsday hares, having returned to the road like the plague, scarper again. His wife, sitting with plenty of air between her spine and the seat, holds her hand up and zips by him. ‘How was yoga?’ he calls.

Five o’clock at the Gelt ravine. He parks on the verge above, skirts round the edge of the crags and sets his caddy down on a shelf of rock. This time of year the darkness in the crevices has the consistency of creosote as shadows spool into the valley below. The face of the gorge is like a gothic portrait, like the Sargent painting of Stevenson. It makes him think about Donald, with his long hair worn over his face to cover the scars from the accident on the roof with the bitumen. He’s often wondered how it must have felt, to have his skin scalded off like that. Terrible. Medieval. Poor old Donald. It took years for him to start going out in public again, and then he insisted on using his brown locks to mask the damage. Even longer for him to start doing readings again. The burn has healed well over the years; when he tucks his hair behind his ear, Peter can see the slow, yellow recovery. But the damage is vast. Donald doesn’t drive, not because he’s a woolly poet, but because his right eye is missing, and he has no depth perception.

Maybe he’ll phone him later to see if he and Caron want a pint in the Jerry. It’ll be a nice night to sit out and get mildly loaded and shoot the breeze. Maybe Lydia and the kids will come too and they can all roll home and have a nightcap. He’ll open a new bottle of elderflower. Yeah, he could fancy a pint or two after this. The charcoal’s feeling nice in his hand, fast and loose, and it’s leaving true lines. The wind along the crag ripples the page, and he reaches for a clip from the caddy to hold it down.

Sing once again with me, our strange duet.

Phantom of the bloody Opera. The funny thing is, Donald’s never written about any of it, and this has always surprised Peter. You would expect a writer to draw from such an experience. You’d expect there to be some kind of formal quarrel with what happened, a step into the hazelled ground. At the readings, Peter watches the audience, wonders what they think about that avalanched cheek and inflexible glass orb; whether they have any idea what his scalp looks like under his hair. They never ask. They applaud the ones about snooker and sex. He signs their copies.

Such stark light. He’s caught it on the page–in the slashed fissures and pockmarks, in the crags. Yes. It is a strange profession, the seduction of stone, the attempt to relocate a mountain on to canvas. ‘It’s all geology, Petie,’ is what his old man would probably say. ‘It might not be dollying coal up on conveyors, but the principle’s the same.’ His levelling, lucid father. With the cough that would seem to last for ever, but would cut the man down in a year, halfway through his fifth decade. God bless the black-lunged, shafted miners.

Now the light is tilting. Maybe there’s a better angle to be had. He pockets the charcoal stick and slips the sketchpad inside his shirt, snug against his belly. He leaves the caddy tucked into the alcove of the shelf. Down in the crevice might be best, looking up at the giant. He begins to climb down, dropping over the outcrops, his boot tips slotting into the ledges. It’s a nice feeling in his muscles–the hold, the stretch–though he can feel the morning’s run in his legs. But he could probably make this descent blindfolded, he’s done it so many times. Down, down, twenty feet, thirty. Not too taxing a climb. Not really as sheer as it looks. Soon the grade becomes flatter, opening out into a tumbled skirt of scree and big shingle. He jumps from rock to rock in the bottom of the gorge.

Manoeuvres like this would make Lydia twitchy if she found out about them. ‘You’re not a young buck any more, darling,’ she’d say. ‘What if you lost your balance? What if you slipped and fell and broke your back?’ But heights have never bothered him; if they had, he wouldn’t have managed to fashion the extreme landscapes he has. Clambering about on the summits and ridges feels like second nature–you can’t explain this to someone for whom it’s just plain hairy. He doesn’t have the phobic urge to topple over into the rushing chasm. He doesn’t get the fear. And if he slipped and fell and broke his back, well, it’d be a damn sight preferable to being rear-ended by cancer, or making that long, map-less walk into dementia. In fact, it’s how he’d like to go, given the choice. Not something your cautious wife wants to hear of course. It’s better to let her see a safely finished painting rather than reveal exactly where he made the studies from; which heavenly, inaccessible pinnacle; which granite eyrie.