4.
I have no way to measure it, but I am certain the weather here is very nearly constant. Seasons have perhaps come and gone since I arrived, but I have no experience of them. The sun is quite dead to me.
It is all too masculine, here in the swallowed ship. And in such a place, one’s mind naturally turns, how could it not, to the women.
I was once, by accident, a prodigy in the matter. At first I was shy of females, observing at distances, avoiding contact. Until.
A list of the small connections I had before at last—at my advanced age, in my unusual way—I became a father.
Agnese
Sylvestra
Jacopa
Antonella
(Laura)
That is the list. No Don Juan then? No, perhaps not. Nor exactly a Casanova.
Here, in my dark place, I do my best to remember my lost loves. Dances of mine. Small intimacies. But to have them down as they should be. I shall struggle at this, in paint a little—not from life, alas, but from what I can pluck from memory.
Inside the cavern of my predicament, floating here and there upon the surface, are to be found small pieces of wood that have been pebbled by the sea. Has the cruel water chewed at my son now, have the waves worn him down, is he still lost in the seas? Thrown by tempest so many miles? Or has he come home at last and waits for me in the old four corners? I cannot say. But these wooden crumbs are not him. These small bits have been spun and thrown, heaved and dropped, sucked and gobbed by oceans, until all the edge has been licked off them, leaving them most pleasing in shape and feel. Upon five of these sea lozenges, I have affixed with brush my history of love. For I did love before the wooden prodigal, yes, I did. And this is a story of love, is it not?
I am, by nature, somewhat timid. I crept about in the background of life, quietly breathing the shadows, avoiding the taste of stronger light. I supposed my life would be one of observation only, of taking notes of the smaller events, events that other people should never even consider events. I was in the business of finding the mundane marvelous. I praised the sparrow and the daisy. A pigeon’s coo: a thunderclap. My odyssey was to the greengrocer’s, my famous battle a visit to the butcher. My king was the local policeman. But I took all I saw, all the little things, and carried them home with me; I nibbled at human relationships; a brief nod would sustain me all day. A slap on the back would keep me smiling for weeks.
I was so deeply retiring, in short, that I might have disappeared altogether, were it not that I am—despite my father’s deepest wishes—a carpenter. My art is bolder than I. It sends messages of me out into the world. When I am with wood and we work together, things come out of me that I should never have thought possible.
From the start, I have found it easier to be brave with wood. As a young man, I busied myself constantly making little things, small fancies: a tiny house, dodos, lizards, dolphins, porpoises, krakens, hydras, dragons, all kinds of beasts in wood. Unlikely worlds come to me through pine. I do see fairies in wood where, I think, other people see just kindling. And so I was compelled to bring the fairy out so that all, at last, may see it. There are strange creatures everywhere; I summoned them in whittling in the privacy of my bedroom. What fancy I had in my childhood, what openness for the unlikely, I redden at it now. Such wonderments I shunned from my adult life. Casting all away, embracing the only true life, the real and austere. It was better that way: I was full-grown.
Short of funds—as my father refused me even pocket money until I had mastered the pattern—and deep in distress, as a youth I took these small oddities I had made, my first children, to the Collodi market. At the far edge of the throng, and nigh-on invisible in the shadow of a large bronze horseman, I cautiously sold my wares. The statue was of Ottavio Garzoni, patriarch of the wealthiest family in this region: a fine model of a mounted gentleman, the ideal human on the ideal horse. The same figure is to be found in several of our local squares; indeed, for many years I thought it was mandatory that all town squares possess one. It was here, in the gloom cast by the huge horseman, that I found my place.
I would lay out my large handkerchief, position my small wooden suggestions upon it, and so sit without ever calling for attention. I did not boast like the chicken-sellers, for example; I did not scream on behalf of roasted chestnuts; and oh, the vendors of olives and cheese are a loud breed. I sat on in silence, quiet beneath the statue, hoping a little that none should come by, that I might take my makings home again and keep their company a little longer.
It was one day, as I was thus situated, that the occasion occasioned.
Agnese.
Oh, Agnese.
She was small and she was very fair. Her hair was almost white, her eyelashes too, and her eyes were blue. A mole upon her chin. Small freckles around her nose. She was a butcher’s daughter. She wore big boots; I believe they had belonged to her brother, who had lost his life tumbling down a dry well. (How we tumble, we humans.)
I was gazing down at my works, when suddenly her boot was on my handkerchief.
“What’s all this, then?” says she.
I could not but be silent; I feared that I should cry.
“Are you having a picnic?”
“N-n-n-n-o. No indeed.”
“They do not look comestible.”
“No, and are not, surely.”
“What then?”
“They are, so please you, little people,” I ventured. “Small creatures of science and imagination. Made of wood.”
“Yes, they are! Did you make them? Are they your fault?”
“I did, yes. All my own.”
“May I pick one up?”
“Oh, truly! Will you be careful?”
She scooped up a creature.
“What devil is this one then?”
“It is an elephant seal.”
“You thought this up?”
“No, so please you, it is a real thing to be found in the ocean.”
“You saw one?”
“No, I never. Not in life, but in a book at school, when I went to school, there was one. I saw that.”
“It makes me smile.”
“It does? Does it?”
“I’ll buy it, I think. I don’t know what to do with it, mind. It’s not what you would call useful.” How sharp her words. Not what you would call useful. “But there’s something to it. I tell you what: it has a spirit.”
“Oh. Yes. Well. I do thank you for noticing that. I am made very glad by it.”
“What a strange creature you are. I can’t see you properly there in the shadow, come out a bit. Let me have a good look.”
“Oh. Ah.”
“Come on, shift.”
“Here I am.”
“Yes, there you are at last.”
She stood staring at me out in the light. Until it grew too much.
“Can I go back now? If you don’t mind.”
“No, no, you may not. Stay where you are.”
“Oh, dear.”
“There’s not much to you, is there?”
“Barely anything at all, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Tell you what, I like you well enough.”
“Oh. Thank you!”
“You should eat more meat. How much do you eat, then?”
“Oh, not very much at all.”
“I knew it. You should eat more.”
“I am to have more meat once I have mastered the pattern—our family business, that is. Meat, you see, is, on the whole, costly.”
“It is. Well, I’ll cut you some meat. Some meat for the creature. What do you say? Shall we shake on it?”
We shook on it. Her hand in mine. So many Sundays all at once. That was how it began. With a little wooden figure of an elephant seal and some cuts of pig.
Over time, one market day after another—I measured my life then in market days—she bought the lot.
We would meet up, it was her suggestion I need hardly say, at the local cemetery, very near to the Collodi church of Saint Bartolomeo, who is the patron saint of butchers and tanners and bookbinders and who was flayed alive. There she would give me, wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper, small trinkets of meat.
“Here,” she would say, “pork chop.”
On another day she might say “Tenderloin,” tenderly.
Or, less formally, “Rump.”
I took these wrapped payments and placed them beside me.
She smelt a little of her meat, did Agnese, of the butcher’s business. I didn’t mind, no, I liked it. There was not much courting, not much talking, not in the beginning. After only a few such meetings, I suddenly found her lips upon mine. It was a little surprising to me, but I liked it very much. She laid me down in the graveyard grass with all the dead beneath us, and with some cut of animal wrapped in paper beside us, and she put her lips to mine. Her lips to these lips. I was shaking, rather, though it was not cold.
“I mean to kiss you,” she said.
!
“Oy, now kiss back, won’t you? It’s not good if I’m the only one at it.”
So.
How’s that? Was that all right? Oh, what does she think of it?
“Better. You haven’t done much of this, have you?”
“Not oft, I must allow.”
“No, me neither, in truth. But I’m interested and want to learn. And I thought, you know, I thought of you, you’re there and here I am.”
I was there!
Only this cry: I am still here!
We were found out. It was the undertaker’s son Alberto Crespi who saw us, saw us on the graveyard ground with dear Agnese beneath me. A little loving parcel of sweetbreads beside us. We heard a gasp. But did not see him. And he told: ran with the story to his father, the undertaker, and that undertaker undertook the story to my father, and also to Agnese’s father, the Collodi butcher, and what butchering there was then. What spillage of porcelain, how like a butcher to break my father’s work in his fury. What a fortune was lost that day. So much destruction that my father’s business was in peril. My fault, I must own that.
From that point forward, I was forbidden to see her. I was forbidden to leave the house, for that matter, forced to stay inside within pottery limits. Never to go to market. Never to whittle no more. I was specifically warned to cast aside all thought of woodcarving—for surely, he raged, this was the cause of my straying and straining. And in the churchyard! he bellowed. Sin upon sin!
And Agnese? Oh, Agnese. I read later, in the newspaper, that she married the son of an abattoir from the nearby city of Pescia. Listen to me: No child is born from an abattoir! For that place takes life, not creates it. No, no, I mean the abattoir owner’s son, one Ludovico Donati. In his blood did she mix, with his meat.
She was my first love. We were famous explorers, we two. But we were separated and dragged back to our separate family terrains, each a distant island one from the other. The space between us, a no-man’s-land.
Then came Sylvestra. I was never equal to Sylvestra. She appeared in my life after she had had a personal fall, otherwise I would not have known her.
She was, for a term, Father’s secretary. She was imprisoned inside our house, poor girl, on account of some business concerning a mustachioed lieutenant.
So, for a short term, we were both at gaol in my home, I for Agnese and she for her lieutenant. And even as I strove to repeat the family pattern—and there was an urgency to it then, so much inventory had been lost—so did Sylvestra worry over the ledgers in the family office. Her days were all numbers, and this gave her no pleasure; the numbers dried up her skin and made her look lopsided. She slept in the little office; I toiled nearby in the workroom, struggling with the glaze. And at times she came to me, and sat beside me very close, strangely close, and looked at me. And talked a little of what life there was beyond our closed walls. She longed to run out, she said. What shall we do? she wondered to me. Sometimes, in her frustration, she would let me touch her and admire her. She was, perhaps, ten years my senior. She was, I think, not at all happy. Later she chose a different worker to talk to, the last of the strong young men Father employed after letting the others go, and she did not sit by me again. Sometimes, when she talked to Father, I saw her touch his elbow. And once he leaned out to touch her and she smiled at him. Finally, one day, her mother came to collect her, and Father was in a hot temper and she was gone. I never quite knew what to make of her, nor what Father had done to provoke her departure.
So then, in due time, Jacopa. Ah, Jacopa. There you are now. I am sorry that you look so ill again. It would have been kinder to portrait you looking well, though it would be a lie. I could have cured you with watercolor paint. But I was unable to do it. And you come out again on this curved driftwood, yellow of skin, pale, smelling, my darling, of your disease. What a character that disease was, how it tried to assert itself over you. But you would not stand for it! In your wrestling, you would come out on top, outdoing it with your good spirits. Jacopa, I am so sorry at your going. In paint and ink, let me tell you of you.
Jacopa, taller than me. Jacopie, oh, Jacopie, such length and sorrow.
We worked together, Jacopa and I. After Father had died, and the business was ruined, I found work with the Capuchin monks in distant Palermo. I crossed—how it horrified me then, though I laugh at it now—the little Strait of Messina, which seemed to me such an eternity, though it took not quite an hour of passage. From there I trekked to Palermo, where I took work that all others shunned, carving niches for the dead. I was with death then a great deal.
Jacopa loved the dead. She was a mother to them.
In the monastery, beneath the ground where most people are buried, in the great cellar, was kept the city’s great pride: the resting places of the expensive dead. This may sound no different from anywhere else, but let me make clear: these dead were stored vertically, not horizontally, and not within boxes, but out for all to see. These dead stood in their Sunday clothes, upright. I was the person who carved their niches and strapped them in to keep them standing. Jacopa was the one who helped preserve the bodies, so that even though they were dead they might look less so. Thousands of the dead were kept there, for the living to visit. And the dead were sorted: there were rooms for monks, rooms for doctors, rooms for women, rooms for the children. There were two methods for dealing with the dead people. The first was to stand them up in the cellar in a closed chamber and let them drain naturally, and then, after a year, to wash them in vinegar and thence to dress them and have them displayed. The second method—and here my Jacopa was especially attentive—was to bathe the dead in arsenic. And in this way, do you see, she was too intimate with them. They got to her, in the end, the dead did. They were too numerous, and she was too close.
I would not say Jacopa’s dead looked alive, exactly. I do know the difference between alive and dead. Rather, they looked somewhere in between. Like dolls, perhaps. But very individual dolls. In that place, it was a great privilege to be buried standing up in such smart clothes. People used to come and see these dead all the time, and others who were shortly to die, or thought they were, would come along and stand in the niches—to practice, I suppose, for the afterlife. How still the dead were, after I had strapped them in so well.
I made other repairs about the monastery, I fixed pews and carved new faces on them, replacing old rotten wood, but mostly it was the dead cellar I liked to be in, on account of Jacopa. It did smell a little down there, and was rather cold. The cold came from the stone floor, but also from the dead, I do think. The smell was from the chemicals that Jacopa and her fellows worked upon. The treated muslin that was put inside the dead in place of their organs, which would putrefy and cause us so many problems.
Jacopa was a marvel at her profession. She had a passion for it that, I think, offended other men and made them nervous of her, but I found her fascinating and it bothered me little that she chose such extinct companions. Only later did I realize how her work with those chemicals—the arsenic, you see—was causing Jacopa to ail. We spent all our lunchtimes together. We went together to see the puppets in the theater. Such life there, such battles among the strung people. Paladins and Turks, they hacked each other apart—how we gasped at that. We did love the puppets, Jacopa and I. We were going to marry. But then, you see, the arsenic.
I come now, steady my heart, to Antonella. When I turn over the wood and try to summon her in paint, I start by placing the lozenge portrait of Jacopa nearby, for Jacopa and Antonella were sisters. Not twins, Antonella being the older by some two years, but there was definite family in their faces.
It was there that we met, at Jacopa’s funeral, and both missing the same body we found that we had that body in common. We began to visit each other, then, because no other human being understood our grief as we did each other’s. And there was Antonella, like her sister: a vision of her, only slightly older. We talked, and Jacopa was our great subject. Thus we kept her breathing some months after her death. We told each other tales, intimate tales of secret moments; we sculpted the very image of her out of words. Sometimes it was too painful a thing, as if we were opening the coffin and looking in, wounding each other with love. We kept calling her back, trying to make her solid, but increasingly, as the months went on, she grew dimmer. And we entwined ourselves around each other by the spell of our mourning until, not exactly knowing it, we had become knotted one to the other.
To show my gratitude and my sympathy, I carved a small goat for Antonella. I don’t know why a goat and not some other creature; it was where the wood led me. I resolved to paint it in lapis lazuli—which is, I will entertain no arguments here, the most beautiful color of them all, and therefore expensive. How I miss that color. I had none of the magic hue myself, so I raised the cost of a small pot by selling a coat. (Which left me with one—what need had I for two coats?) Yes, I carved and blued the goat and gave it her. And that goat, dreadful beast, changed everything. She took it with trembling hands. Why such nerves, I wondered, ’tis only a goat! No, no, that was no everyday goat. Not to Antonella. Goat in hand, she grew tears and proceeded to weep upon the goat. She wept, as they say, uncontrollably. Such great heaving sobs! Such wailing, all caused by a goat. And then, ah, she fled. She fled me. All for a goat. What an unfortunate goat that was. For a time I most regretted that goat. I hadn’t meant anything by it. Had I? What can the meaning of a goat be, other than goat? But that goat, I see it now, had meaning, I had meant something by it. It was a little blue messenger.
She came back, ten days afterward. No words then. We pulled each other’s clothing off and tugged and held and loved every piece of each other with more longing and need than I had ever had before, or should ever after. What a needing, grasping, what a yearning, what afternoon beds, what flesh, what feeling. What need it was! And needs must.
Then, the breath recovered, head by head, length by length, come the words. They must: we came together by words and words were always around us.
She: We cannot.
I: No, no, we must not. For it is wrong, you do see?
But we did, again and more. And always after there was the guilt. The words curdling and ruining and the wrong of it all.
She: She is splitting us apart.
I: Let us not talk of her.
She: She’s here with us! In this very room. She will always be with us!
Always there in our loving, the ghost. We did trespass upon each other. And, over time, my Antonella, she could not do it. To her, it seemed the worst wrong. And the knowledge and pain wormed in her, it made her sick, until the bed was not the bed it had been before. And so then, she left. I could not find her—the first of my great searches, how my people do flee—and no one would tell me where to look. I never saw her again.
In distress I returned to the wood. I carved monsters then, for a period, monsters of land, monsters of sea, and painted them all with lampblack. And after, I burned them, every one. Antonella, I heard later, found work in a hospital as far away as she could, in Messina. And there, too early, she went out to walk with her sister. Cholera morbus. She was buried with the blue goat, I learned from a note sent by a Sister of Mercy who worked at the hospital. I could tell by the note that the sister did not like me and was unhappily following instructions.
I went home again back across the waves of the Strait of Messina. The long march up-country, back to the small town of my birth. They laughed to see me brought so low, such a sorry remainder of a porcelain empire. This spectacle: a scarecrow come home to Collodi. Goodbye, Antonella. Goodbye, my Nell. Goodbye, love.
