Orbit 12 - [Anthology] Read online

  We entered the banqueting hall, with its pendant vaulting and splendid lattice window, fantastic with carved transoms, overlooking the River Toi. Dalembert’s unfinished frescoes took their orientation from this window, and their lighting schemes. The theme was the Activities of Man and the Prescience of God. Only one or two pastoral scenes and the dinosaur hunt were complete; for the rest, one or two isolated figures or details of background stood out in a melancholy way behind the scaffolding.

  As Dalembert plodded to and fro, expounding what he intended to do, I could see something of his vision, could see the entire hall as a sweet elegiac rhapsody of Youth, as he planned it to be. The cartoons scattered about showed that his wonderful phantasies, his glorious and ample figures, drawn together in grandiose colour orchestrations, opened new horizons of painting. In the marriage scene, sketched in and part painted, the wedding of an early Mantegan to Beatrice of Burgundy was commemorated. What delicacy and perception!

  “The secret is the light,” I said.

  For light seemed to linger on the princess with a serene if sad intimacy, and on her banners and followers with no less lucidity. The church with its galleries and the view beyond were carefully drawn in, proof of Dalembert’s marvellous command of perspective.

  The artist paused before a military scene, where soldiers were shooting birds and a peasant boy stood comically wearing a large helmet and holding a shield. In the background rose a small fantastic city, drawn and washed over.

  Dalembert dismissed it all with a curt wave of one hand.

  “That’s all I’ve done here since we last met. The whole task is impossible without adequate funds. Adequate talent, too.”

  “It’s beautiful, Nicholas. The city, with its ragged battlements, its towers, domes, and overhanging garde-robes—how well it’s set amid its surroundings!”

  “Well enough, perhaps, yet there’s nothing there which my master, Albrecht, could not have done thirty years ago—fifty years ago.”

  “Surely perfection is more important than progression?”

  He looked at me with his dark and burning eyes. “I didn’t take you for a man who preferred a stagnant pond to running water. Ah, I can do nothing, nothing! Outside beyond these crumbling walls is that great burning world of triumphs and mobilities, while I’m here immobile. Only by art, only through painting, can one master it and its secrets! Seeing is not enough—we do not see until we have copied it, until we have faithfully transcribed everything . . . everything . . . especially the divine light of heaven, without which there is nothing.”

  “You would have here, if you could only continue with your work, something more than a transcription—”

  “Don’t flatter me. I hate it sincerely. I’ll take money, God knows I’ll take money, but not praise. Only God is worthy of praise. There is no merit anywhere but He gives it. See the locks of that soldier’s hair, the bloom on the boy’s cheek, the bricks of the walls of the fortification, the plumage of the little bird as it flutters 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?”

  “But I expect the wall. Your accomplishment is that through perspective and colouring, you show us more than a wall.”

  “No, no, far less than a wall ... 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! Its blasphemy—life offered death!”

  I did not understand him, but I said nothing. He stood stock still, fixing his gaze in loathing on the fortified city he had depicted, and I was aware of the formidable solidity of him, as if he were constructed of condensed darkness inside his tattered cloak.

  Finally he turned away and said, as if opening a new topic of conversation, “Only God is worthy of praise. He gives and takes all things.”

  “He has also given us the power to create.”

  “He gives all things, and so many we are unable to accept. We stand in a new age, Master Prian. This is a new age—I can feel it all about me, cooped up though I am in this dreadful place. Now at last—for the first time in a 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. And what do they find? Why, the vast, the God-given continuity of the world! For the first time, we may see into the past and into the future. We find we are surrounded by the classical ruins of yesterday and the embryos of the future! And how can these signs from the Almighty be interpreted save by painting? Painting gives and therefore demands universal knowledge . . .”

  “And, surely, also the instincts are involved—”

  “Whereas I know nothing—nothing! For years and years—all my life I’ve slaved to learn, to copy, to transcribe, and yet I have not the ability to do what a single beam of light can do—here, my friend, come with me, and I’ll show you how favourably one moment of God’s work compares with a year of mine!”

  He seized my tunic and drew me from the hall, leaving the door to swing behind us. Again we retraced the court, which echoed to his grudging step. We returned to the stable that housed him. The little children sprawled and played. Dalembert brushed them aside. He climbed the ladder to his loft, pushing me before him. The children cried words of enticement to him to join their play; he shouted back to them to be silent.

  The loft was his workshop. One end was boarded off. The rest was filled with his tables and materials, with his endless pots and brushes of all sizes, with piles of unruly paper, with instruments of every description, with geometrical models, and with a litter of objects which bespoke his intellectual occupations: an elk’s foot, a buffalo horn, skulls of aurochs and hypsilophodon, piles of bones, a plaited hat of bark, a coconut, fir cones, shells, branches of coral, dead insects, and lumps of rock, as well as books on fortifications and other subjects.

  He 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 trouser pocket and survey the universe! See what light can paint at the hand of the one true Master!”

  The curtain fell back into place. We were in a small, stuffy and enclosed dark room. A round table stood in the centre of it. On the table was a startling picture painted in vivid colours. I took one glance at it and knew that Dalembert had happened on some miraculous technique, combining all arts and all knowledge, which set him as far apart from all other artists as men are apart from the other animals with which they share the globe. Then something moved in the picture. A second glance told me this was nothing but a camera obscura! Looking up, I saw a little aperture through which the light entered. Directed by a lens, it shone in through a small tower set in the roof of the stable.

  “Can our poor cobwebs of brains counterfeit a picture as vivid and perfect as this? Yet it is merely a passing beam of light! The lens in the roof has a better mastery of experience than I! Why should a man—what drives a man to compete against Nature itself? What a slave I am to my hopes!”

  As he bewailed his lot, I stared at the scene laid out so curiously and captivatingly on the table. From the perspectives of the rooftops, we looked down on a stretch of track outside the castle, where the Toi ran beside a dusty climbing road. By the river, resting on grass and boulders, sat a group of people as dusty as the road, their mules tethered nearby. So enchanted was I to observe them, and to overlook such details as an elderly man who mopped his bald head with a kerchief and a widow woman in black who fanned her face with a hat, that it was a minute before I identified them as a group of pilgrims or penitents—evidently embarked on a long journey and making life hard for themselves.

  “You see how they are diminished, my friend,” said Dalembert “We see them as through God’s eye. We believe them real, yet we are only 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 on the tabletop which I identify with my wife. What is its relation to her?”

  “If you knew that, you would hold the secret of the universe, I daresay.”

  His great brows drew together.

  “She has been copied by a master painter, who uses only light.”

  I watched as the small figure of his wife, in climbing up toward the castle gate, slowly traversed an inch or two of tabletop. I did not answer Dalembert, not having his religious convictions; but he never needed prompting to speak.

  “We stand—our generation, I mean—on the verge of some tremendous discovery. All things may be possible . . . And yet, what man can say if we aren’t ourselves little more than reflections of light-

  “Or shadows, as Plato says in the seventh book of his ‘Republic’ . . . As an actor, I’ve often thought it—I seem most substantial when I’m being a fictitious creature.”

  “Actors—they’re nothing, they leave no trace.”

  “If that is so, then they are like Plato’s shadows on the wall of his cave.”

  “Those that observed the shadows were captives, chained where they sat since childhood. That much at least is not allegory.”

  “Shall we go down to greet your wife?”

  “She has nothing to say. She probably has nothing to eat either, poor jade!” As if to dismiss her, he stepped back and turned a handle, causing the lens or mirror attached to it to be moved. At once, the labouring woman and the penitents were swept away. Rooftops and gables appeared in our enchanted circle, and then an inner court.

  The sharp diminution, the steep perspective, and the amazing brilliance of the scene gave the buildings so novel an air that at first I did not recognise where we were. Then I uttered a cry of surprise.

  All at once the whole panorama was known and interpreted. Minute birds flittered here and there. These were the very cavorts I had watched with my sister. I could even see a haze of cats fur, spread out like a web and stirred by the warm circulating breath of the courtyard. I looked for my bedroom window. Yes, there it was, and on the open sill Poseidon herself, glaring out at the creatures who were making so free with her abandoned coat! How bright and minute the colours were, like some living Schwabian miniature in enamel! The entire window with its parched woodwork was less than half the size of my little finger’s nail, yet I saw every detail of it, and the cat, to perfection. What images of peace! I was watching them still when—with startling speed—the whole view was blotted out by a rapidly growing bird, which rose and rose, as if from the depths of the table, until it blotted everything out A scrabbling sounded overhead, and a cavort fluttered down between Dalembert and me.

  “Wretched creatures! How clumsy they are!” Dalembert said, lumbering about and striking at the bird—nearly clouting me in the process. “This isn’t the first time one has tumbled in here. Get out of the way while I kill it!”

  I descended the ladder while he hit out at the luckless bird, circling round and round in the darkness.

  Below, the children were all crying in delight. Their mother had just entered by the street door. She greeted me wearily and sat down.

  She was a heavy woman. Her face was withered now and had lost much of its former beauty. Her name among men was Charity; she was, in fact, a flying woman. Our laws in Malaria governing the flying people were very strict, but Charity, as child and young girl, had been one of those favoured few allowed to nest on top of the campanile, on account of her great beauty. I could recall her being pointed out to me as a boy, flying with some of her sisters—a lovely and remarkable sight, though the subject of lewd boyish jokes, for the flying people scorned clothes.

  Now Charity kept her pinions folded. Since marrying her lover, Dalembert, for whom she had modelled, she never flew and had perhaps lost the art.

  Seeing me, she rose and offered a hand in welcome. The children tugged at her robe so vigorously that she sat down again before pouring me a glass of wine. I accepted gladly—her husband had been too mean to offer me one.

  “I hoped you would come to see us, Master Prian. Your good sister told me you were almost recovered from your fever.”

  “I would never come to Mantegan without visiting you and Nicholas. You know that. As ever, I have a great admiration for your husband’s work.”

  “How do you find Dalembert?”

  “As bursting with genius and ideas as ever!”

  “And as religious, and as despairing?”

  “A trifle melancholy, perhaps . . .”

  “And as unable to paint a wall!”

  Picking up a couple of the children, she went over to the water bin, dipped a ladle, and drank from it. The children then called out for a similar treat, and she gave to each in turn, the boys first and then the girls. Over their clamour, she said, “He is too ambitious, and you see the results. I’ve just been out washing for a wealthy family to earn enough to buy bread. How we shall manage when the winter comes, I don’t know. . . .”

  “Genius seldom cares to earn its bread.”

  “He thinks he will be famous in two hundred years’ time. What good will that do me or his poor children, I don’t know! Come, I must find them something to eat. ... I shouldn’t complain, Master Prian; it’s just that I don’t see matters in the same light as Dalembert, and the road up to the castle grows steeper week by week, I swear.”

  As I leaned against a wall, sipping the wine and watching how she managed to work while keeping the children entertained, I wondered if she still recalled the aerial views she had had of our city as a young girl—how enchanting it must have looked before she had to walk it! But I said nothing; it was best not to interfere.

  It seemed as if the artist had forgotten me. I heard him pacing overhead. He would be working again at his figures.

  Passing her the empty glass, I said to Charity, “I must go and rest now. Tell your husband that I hope to come and see him again before I leave the castle. And I’ll ask my sister if she can get Volpato to pay him a little more money.”

  She shook her head and gestured dismissively with her hands in a gesture reminiscent of her husband’s.

  “Let well alone! Don’t do that! You may not know it, but Volpato has threatened to throw us out, frescoes or no frescoes, if he is pestered ever again on the subject of money.”

  “As you wish, of course.”

  “It is not as I wish but as I must”

  I went to the door. She pulled a long grey feather from her wing and stooped to give it to the smallest baby to play with. I was out of the door before she straightened up again.

  The day was moving toward evening. The shadows were climbing the sides of the courtyard. As I crossed to my sister’s quarters, I noticed that the cavorts had all gone. High above my head, the panes of my window were still catching the eye of the sun, but Poseidon had vanished. All was still. The fur had sunk down at last to the ground—a dusty twist of it rolled across the flags under my feet Now only light filled the tranquil air.

  I was well again: tomorrow I would probably quit the castle.

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  * * * *

  Kate Wilhelm

  THE RED CANARY

  SOMETIMES the baby played with old blocks that Tillich had found. The blocks were worn almost smooth, so that the letters and numbers were hard to read. You had to turn them this way and that, catch the light just right. The corners were rounded; there was no paint on them. Tillich remembered blocks like them. He thought the old, worn ones were much nicer than the shiny, sharp-cornered new ones had been. He never watched the baby play, actually. He would see it on the floor, with the blocks at hand, and he would busy himself somewhere else, because there was the possibility that the baby’s movements with the blocks were completely random. In Tillich’s mind was an image of the baby playing with blocks. He was afraid of shattering the image.

  There had been another image. The baby sleeping peacefully, on its side after its morning bottle; its forefinger and index finger in its mouth. Till
ich glanced at it each morning before leaving for work, in case it had wriggled out from its covers, or was under them completely. Always, in the dim dawn light, the baby’s sleep had been peaceful and Tillich had left quietly. One morning, for no reason, Tillich entered the room, went to the other side of the bed to look at the infant. It wasn’t asleep. It was staring, not moving, hardly even blinking, just staring at nothing at all, the two fingers in its mouth. It shifted its gaze to Tillich and stared up at him in an unfathomable look that was uncanny, eerie, inhuman and somehow evil. Tillich backed away, out of its line of sight At the partition that separated that end of the bedroom from the rest of it, he paused to look back. The baby looked asleep, unmoving, peacefully asleep.

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