Free How to Be Both by Ali Smith Page B

spending as little time as possible with women, who will waste the energies of a picturemaker.
    I can honestly say, then, that in my training I spent what always transformed into
no time at all
with women in that pleasure house in the years of my youth.
    The Mistress of the house, though, caught at me one morning by the elbow : she was more than 75 years old and she walked with 2 sticks and a helper, but precious stones caught light all over her white clothes like she’d just been out hobbling through a rainshower of them, one of which shining little stones she detached from its place sewn on to her sleeve with her canny old fingers unpicking the stitch and pressed into my hand, saying :
    You. I’ve had 5 women leave here cause of your pictures. What’s your name? That’s you.
Francescho
. Well, listen, little
Francescho, whose name I hear whispered up and down my stairs and whose pictures I see being passed around and fussed over all through my house. That’s 5 girls and women you owe me.
    I protested that there was no way a set of picturesdone by me and given as fair payment to her girls meant I owed her anything.
    The old woman pressed the jewel harder into my hand so its edges near cut me.
    You little idiot, she said. Have you no idea? They look at your pictures. They get airs and graces. They come to my rooms and they ask me for more of a cut. Or they look at your pictures. They get all prowessy. They decide to choose a different life. And all the ones who’ve gone have left by the front door, unprecedented in this house which has never seen girls go by anything but the back. Don’t you understand anything? I can’t have that. You’re costing me. So, it follows. I must ask you to stop frequenting my house. Or at least to stop drawing my girls.
    She left a space for me to speak : I shrugged : she nodded, grave.
    Good. But before you go, she said. This jewel. The one in your hand. It’s yours. If you’ll do me.
    So I did her picture,
    after which she gave me the jewel as agreed, and the next time I came to the house she took me aside and gave me a front door key she’d had her locksmith make for me.
    In all these ways I gained yet more understanding of what the great Alberti, who published the book that matters most to us picturemakers, calls the function and the measure of the body, and also ofthe truth of the great Alberti’s notion that beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body.
    But I also learned to disagree with my masters.
    Cause even the great Alberti was wrong when he wrote in disapproving terms that
it would not be suitable to dress Venus or Minerva in the rough wool cloak of a soldier, it would be the same as dressing Mars or Jove in the clothes of a woman.
    Cause I met many female Marses and Joves in the house and many Venuses and Minervas in and out of all sorts of clothes.
    None of them earned anywhere near her true worth in money : all of them suffered misuse, at the very least the kind of everyday misuse you hear any night through the walls of such a house, and though these women and girls were the closest thing alive I ever met to gods and goddesses, the work they did would first pock them on the surface like illness then break them easy as you break dry twigs then burn them up faster than kindling.
    Ginevra I heard died in one of the blue sicknesses.
    Isotta, my darling one, vanished.
    I liked to think she went by her own choice.
    I liked, after I heard she’d gone, to see her in my head fine and hearty in a small town or village, living in a house that was strong at the roof undervines and figs and lemon trees in a noise of the good unruliness of a mob of her own children : most of all I liked to think her smiling with her eyes and mouth both (which means love) at a lover or friend or at least at someone whose money she shared equally.
    Agnola I heard years later was found in the river tied at the hands and