The Malacia Tapestry (39 page)

The artist gave it a shrugging shoulder and moved to a panel which was almost complete. The panel was narrow, fitting expertly into the space available between a doorway and an oriel window; it depicted soldiers with their tents behind them. They were shooting buglewings from a dark sky. A peasant boy stood watching them, wearing a large helmet and tottering under the weight of a shield. In the background rose a fantastic city, bright in painted sunshine.

‘The peasant child – he's a little comic masterpiece,' I said.

‘He's me. Longing to be a soldier, destined never to fight.'

‘Don't be so gloomy, Nicholas, though you relish it! The virtuosity in this panel alone is –'

He turned angrily on me. ‘Don't offend me with talk of personal virtuosity! It may be well enough on a stage, where you need but dazzle an audience for an hour. Here it has no place beside the disciplines. A virtuoso can bring death to art. The tradition ever since Albrecht has been lost because of show-offs, who kill necessary steady progression … There, you're right, I'm too gloomy – Malacia is for the
status quo
, not for progression.'

‘Do you know Otto Bengtsohn? He believes Malacia should progress.'

He glared at me from under his shaggy brows. ‘I'm a solitary man. I cannot help Bengtsohn nor he me. Yet I respect his ideas. They'll kill him, just as mine will kill me … No, no, Perian, you know I don't complain at my wretched lot, yet the truth is that I can do nothing, nothing! Outside, beyond these walls of mould and mouse-fart, stands the great burning world of triumphs and nobilities, while I'm stuck here immobile. Only by
art
, only through
painting
, can one master that burning world and its secrets! Seeing is not enough – we do not see until we have
copied
, until we have faithfully transcribed everything …
everything
… especially the divine light in all its variety, without which there is nothing.'

‘If you could only continue the work you would have something more than a transcription –'

‘Don't flatter me, Perian, or I'll send you packing as I do the others. You do flatter – it's an ill trait and I hate it. I'll take money, Minerva knows I'll take money, but not praise. Only God is worthy of praise, God and the Devil. There is no merit anywhere but God gives it. See the locks of that soldier's hair, the bloom on the peasant boy's cheek, the plumage of the bird as it flutters dying to the sward – do I have them exact? No I do not! I have
imitations
! You don't imagine – you are not deceived into believing there is no wall there, are you?

‘A wall is a wall, and all my ambition can only make it less than a wall. You look for mobility and light – I give you dust and statuary! It's blasphemy – life offered death! Vanity's at the bottom of it. Do you wonder I delay, hating vanity so?'

He stood completely still, fixing his gaze in loathing on the fantastic city.

Finally, he turned away and said, as if opening a new topic of conversation, ‘Only God is worthy of praise. He gives all things, and many gifts we are unable to accept. We run screaming with rage from his generosity. Malacia has entered a new age, Master Perian: the man you mention, the man from the north with his revolutionary ideas, is one token of it. I can feel the new age about me, cooped up though I am in this rat-riddled pile. Now at last – for the first time in a hundred thousand years – men open their eyes and look about them. For the first time, they construct engines to supplement their muscles and consult libraries to supplement their meagre brains – not here, perhaps, but elsewhere, elsewhere. And what do they find? Why, the vast, the God-given, continuity of the world!'

Pausing as if to digest his own words, he suddenly broke out again on a new approach, at the very moment that I had resolved to speak about my visitation in the forest.

‘For years – all my life – I've slaved to learn, to copy, to transcribe. Don't tell me I'm idle … Yet I have not the ability to do what a single beam of light does. Here, my friend, come with me! One moment. I'll show you how favourably one tick of God's work compares with a century of mine!'

Impulsively, he seized my tunic and drew me from the banqueting hall, leaving the door to slam behind us. Among its echoes, we hurried back through the court.

‘Why should I decorate this dump? Let what is dead die for ever …'

Gripping my arm, he led – or rather propelled – me back to the stable that housed him. His little children sprawled and played, calling out at his entry. Fatember brushed them aside. He climbed the ladder to his loft, pushing me up before him. The children cried merrily to entice him to join their play; he shouted at them to be silent.

The loft made a capacious workshop. Fatember had boarded off one end of it. The rest was filled with tables and materials, his endless pots and brushes of all sizes, with piles of unruly paper, with instruments of every description, with geometrical figures, and with a litter of objects which bespoke his intellectual preoccupations: an elk's foot, a shatterhorn tusk, skulls of grab-skeeters and dogs, piles of bones, a plaited hat of bark, a coconut, fir-cones, shells, branches of coral, dead insects, sections of armour like dismembered bodies, and lumps of rock, as well as books on fortifications and other subjects.

Fatember brushed through these inanimate children too. Flinging back a curtain at the rear of the workshop, he gestured me in, crying, ‘Here you can be in God's breeches-pocket and survey the universe! See what light can paint at the hand of the one true Master!'

We were in a stuffy, dark alcove. A table stood in the centre. On it was a startling picture painted in varied colours; so brightly did it glow that it seemed to light the room. One glance told me that Fatember had happened on some miraculous technique, far superior to Bengtsohn's mercurization process, which set him as far apart from other artists as men are from other animals.

Something moved in the picture.

In awe I went towards it. In disappointment, I saw that we were in the presence of an ordinary camera obscura. Above us was the little aperture through which light, directed by a lens, shone in from a small tower set in the stable roof.

Exclaiming with relish, Fatember rubbed his hands together.

‘Can our art counterfeit a picture as perfect as this? All achieved by one paltry passing beam of light! Why should a man – what
drives
a man – to compete against Nature itself? What a slave I am to my absurd vision!'

As he complained with gusto, I stared at the scene on the table. From the perspectives of the rooftops, we looked down on a stretch of road beyond the castle, where the Toi ran beside its dusty margins. The road branched as it climbed the hill, one way leading to an old cemetery, the other winding up to the castle gate. By the river, resting on boulders, sat a group of people as dusty as the road itself, their mules tethered nearby. I could see, very minutely, an elderly man who mopped his bald head with a kerchief, a widow woman in black who fanned her face with a hat, and so on. I identified them as a group of penitents, embarked on a pilgrimage and making life hard for themselves. Every tiny detail was perfect.

‘You perceive how they are diminished, my friend,' said Fatember. ‘We see them as through God's eye – or the Devil's, for his may be sharper than God's. We believe them real, yet in truth we are looking at marks on a table, light impressions that leave no stain! Look, here comes my wife, toiling back up the hill – yet it is not my wife, only a tiny mark which I identify with my wife. What is its relation to her?'

‘You don't know how recent experiences cause me to be frightened by such remarks as yours, Nicholas.'

He gestured at the table, ignoring me.

‘She has been copied by a master painter, who uses only light. Light here, flesh there. Reality there, the ideal here.'

‘Why do you believe that is reality down there?'

‘I know my wife when I see her.'

I watched as the figure of his wife, climbing towards the castle gate, traversed a centimetre or two of table top.

‘Shall we go down and greet your wife?'

‘She has nothing to say. She probably has nothing to eat either, poor jade!' To dismiss her, he stepped back and turned a handle, moving the lens. At once, the slowly climbing woman and the penitents were swept away. Rooftops and gables appeared in the enchanted circle, and then an inner court.

The steep perspective, the amazing brilliance of the scene, lent the buildings so novel an air that I uttered a cry of surprise on recognizing the scene.

Minute birds flittered across the table-top picture. They were images of the very cavorts my sister and I had watched an hour earlier. I could even see a haze of cat's fur, spread out like a web and stirred by the warm circulating breath of the courtyard. I looked for my bedroom window. Yes, it was there, and, on the open sill, there was Poseidon himself, staring out at the creatures making free with his abandoned coat! Although the entire window with its parched woodwork was less than half the size of my finger-nail, every detail of it and the cat showed to perfection.

With startling speed, the view was blotted out by a bird, which rose as if from the depths of the table until it covered it entirely. A scrabbling sounded overhead, and a cavort fluttered down between Fatember and me.

‘Wretched creatures, winged rodents!' Fatember said, lumbering about and striking at the bird, clouting me in the process. ‘This isn't the first time one has tumbled in here, making a mess over everything. Get out of the way while I kill it!'

As he rushed at it savagely, I stepped back and said, ‘Nicholas, I need to confide in you. I have undergone the most transforming experience of my life. I was in the forest –'

‘I'll get you, you pest!' He rushed by me, seizing up a long set-square, with which he swiped wildly at the terrified bird. I jumped out of his way.

‘Nicholas, I had a visitation in the forest, which has disturbed me profoundly.'

‘Like this damned bird!' He chased it into a corner but it skimmed away again, darting past my head. ‘You vermin, no you don't!'

‘To be brief, Nicholas, the visitation I'm talking about persuaded me that we may never be able to understand reality, owing to perhaps merciful limitations in our perceptive powers.'

‘Never mind understand –
master
!' he cried, bringing the set-square so savagely down against a wall that it broke. He rushed after the bird with his fists. ‘There's no place for you here – this is a sanctuary of art, you feathered turd!'

‘You devote your life to transcribing what you believe to be real. I fear that what we regard as real is itself a transcription, something sketched by Powers as much beyond us as we are beyond that luckless bird. That there are pentimento moments, when one layer shows through another. That art and life, fact and fiction, are linked transcriptions of each other –'

‘Here's one life I'll do away with! Nearly got it then!'

‘That all arts are an attempt to break down the … an imposed hallucination that we call –'

He blundered past me. ‘I'll give it break down! I'll kill the damned thing before it wrecks my place! Oh, how I'm cursed – now you see what I have to put up with. Out of my way, Perian, for Satan's sake, man!' He lunged again, furiously, striking at the bird with a wooden batten and nearly hitting me. He was beside himself with rage, cursing as the cavort mewled in terror. I ducked under his flailing arm and retreated to safety down the ladder.

In the rough living area, Fatember's ragged children were mewling with delight as their mother entered by the street door. She had materialized at almost the same time as the cavort. Besieged by little bodies, she leant for a moment against the door to recover her breath, and her great furled wings rustled against the woodwork. She greeted me wearily and sat down to rest, whereupon the children climbed all over her.

We had met before. She was a heavy woman, although not without grace. Her face was withered and had lost much of its former beauty, yet beauty there still was, especially about her mouth. Her name among men was Charity.

Laws governing flighted people were strict. But Charity's loveliness as a child and young girl had made her one of the favoured few permitted to nest on top of the St Marco campanile, and to perform before the Bishop Elect on saints' days. I could recall as a boy having my mother point her out, flying over the Arena with her sisters – a lovely sight, though the butt of lewd childish jokes, for flighted people scorn clothes.

Now Charity's white and brown pinions were kept folded. She had modelled for Fatember, who plagued her to marry him; after she gave in to him she never flew again. By this time, she would be too old to practise the art.

When she had recovered her strength, Charity rose and offered me her hand in welcome. The children tugged her robe so violently that she sat down again before pouring me a glass of red wine. I accepted it gladly; Nicholas had been too preoccupied to offer. The vintage was rough and bitter: very possibly from Heyst.

‘We hoped you would come to see us, Master Perian. Nicholas enjoys your company – and the company of few others, let me add. Your good sister told me you were recovered from your wounds.'

‘I would never visit Mantegan without visiting you and Nicholas. I have unbounded admiration for his work.'

‘How do you find Nicholas?'

‘As bursting with genius and ideas as ever!'

‘
And
as cranky?
And
as despairing?'

‘Melancholy, perhaps …'

‘
And
as unable to paint a square metre of wall?'

Picking up a couple of the children, she went to the water-bin and dipped in a ladle from which she drank. The children called out for a similar treat. She gave to each in turn, the boys first, then the girls. Over their clamour, she said, ‘Nicholas is too ambitious, and you see the results. Poverty, hunger, filth … I've been out washing for a wealthy family to earn enough to buy us bread. How we shall manage when winter comes, I don't know …'