Free Changing Heaven by Jane Urquhart

that keeps the dancing, sentimental Italian element severely under control. His father’s stiff repression. His father’s almost military fear of emotion. His father’s withdrawal to cold neutral places after a day involved with the heat of cleaning other people’s soiled belongings. And so, even while Arthur adores his mother, he shrinks from the intimacy of the moment, in love and in terror, speechless and removed. In mid-adolescence the battle is over. His father’s blood has won.
    To overcome this rush of love and fear he jokes with his weeping mother. “Look, Mama, look at Christ with his apron on and that big tub. Maybe he isn’t washing the disciples’ feet at all. Maybe he is dyeing the disciples’ socks. Maybe Tintoretto made Christ a tintoretto!”
    His mother weeps with laughter. Arthur stands apart from her, smiling vaguely, attempting to enter the cold marble of the painted room.
    By the time he is eighteen, preparing to enter the University of Toronto as a scholarship student, his destiny has been determined by his obsession. His father, suspecting a scholar, perhaps even an artist, in their midst, has given him a small room behind the laundry, for a study. More like a hallway than a room, it contains one window, through which Arthur can never see because of the steamthat continually coats it. Still, the room seems cool and clear compared to the laundry itself, and Arthur withdraws there in the evenings after lectures and on weekends after several perspiring hours on the pressing machine.
    For the first few months he makes repeated attempts to wipe the fog from the window with a borrowed piece of laundry. He tries all fabrics from rayon to terrycloth. The only result of this small task is that the world outside is changed to a blur of smeared colours. Then gradually, gradually, the window returns to its original state of opacity. There is something satisfying, something comforting about this – this useless attempt to let his vision out and let the light in, and Arthur experiences a mild delight while engaged in the activity. He watches, with pleasure, as the sharp edges of Lee Wong’s Groceteria and Schendell’s Used Furniture become blurred, dissolving into soft, abstract, pastel shapes. Believing that he wants to be a painter, he attempts to store visual experiences of this nature in his memory. After a few months, however, he leaves the window alone, resigns himself to the moist, close environment, and forgets altogether that the colours and shapes of the outside world ever held his attention at all.
    By now he has learned, by borrowing the cumbersome art books from the Central Library on College Street, an enormous amount about Tintoretto; about his ceilings and scuoli and about his life; about the art and the art world of sixteenth-century Venice, its rivalries and vendettas.
    On the wall of the steamy little room he paints the words “Il disegno di Michelangelo e’l colorito de Titiano,” words he has learned that Tintoretto had inscribed on the walls of his sixteenth-century studio. But Arthur hates Titian–colour or no colour-imagining him a wildly jealous man, unable to cope with Tintoretto’s superior talent. Arthur believes, utterly, the legend that states that Titian expelled Tintoretto from his Venetian studio upon discovering the extent of his young pupil’s genius.
    It is Tintoretto’s character that Arthur is beginning to admire at this point, even more than his achievements. He loves the concept of the passionate inner man combined with the practical outer one, who even as a boy could undergo such an unjust dismissal and still admire the man who carried it out. A man who in an era of studio-trained artists was himself, of necessity, self-taught. The son of a simple dyer of cloth.
    Many of the Tintorettos that Arthur sees in the books he has borrowed are filled with wild activity. Cloth and weather, cloth and wind. This is interesting, because nothing at all appears to disturb