How to Be Both by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

they’re too bright with earwax which costs nothing.
    We need skins of sheep and goats, clippings of the muzzles, feet and sinews, skin strips, skin scrapings, and a source of clear water to boil them in.
    I think of all the sketches and dessins and paintings on panels and linens and crack-covered walls, all the colours and the willows and the hares and the goats and the sheep and the hoofs, all the eggs cracked open : ash, bones, dust, gone, the hundreds and hundreds, no, thousands.
    Cause that’s all the life of a painter is, the seen and gone disappearing into the air, rain, seasons, years, the ravenous beaks of the ravens. All we are is eyes looking for the unbroken or the edges where the broken bits might fit each other.
    I’ll tell him instead about the small boy who wished to see the Virgin,
    he prayed and he prayed, please let me see the Virgin : let Her appear here in the flesh before me : but an angel appeared instead and the angel said, yes you can see the Virgin, but I don’t want you to benaïve about it cause seeing Her is going to cost you one of your eyes.
    I would gladly pay an eye to see the Virgin, the boy replied.
    So the angel vanished and the Virgin appeared instead and the Virgin was so beautiful the boy burst into tears and then the Virgin vanished and when She did, just as the angel had said, the boy went blind in one eye, in fact when he put his hand up to feel his face with his hand there was no eye there, just a hole like a little cave in his face where the eye had been.
    But even though he’d lost the eye, he had loved seeing Her so much that he wanted nothing more than just to cast eye (not eyes, cause he only had the one) on Her one more time.
    Please let the Virgin appear to me again, he prayed and he prayed until the angel got fed up listening to him and arrived in a flashing of purple-gold-white wings and stood in front of him folding these wings with a graveness that meant business and said, yes you can see Her again but you have to know – I don’t want you entering into this contract naïvely – that if you do you will have to pay for it with the loss of your only remaining eye.
    I rocked up and down on my mother’s knees with the blatant unfairness of it, it was a story in the pamphlet of Vincenzo illustrated by the nuns, one of the stories Vincenzo liked to tell to themultitudes who could hear every word he spoke for miles regardless of whether they knew his tongue or not, and it wouldn’t be till I could read for myself, some time after my mother had gone, and I found the pamphlet, True Happenings From The Life Of Most Humble Servant Vincenzo Ferreri Including Countless Miracles That Came To Pass screwed up behind the bedhead and I unfolded it and sat and read it to myself the first time, that I found that my mother had never ever, in all her tellings of it, told me the end of the story where
    1. the Virgin appears again
    2. the angel takes the second eye
    3. then finally the Virgin gives the boy back both his eyes out of kindness,
    instead she had always left me twisting myself in her arms on her lap with the dilemma of it.
    Will he give away both his eyes? she said. What do you think? What should he do?
    I put my fists up to my own eyes and dug the heels of the hands in to see if my eyes were both still there, to torture myself and imagine them gone while I waited for her to turn the page over from the drawing of the boy with the black holes where his eyes had been to the drawing which did not scare me so, of Vincenzo curing the dumb woman : one day Vincenzo met a woman who could not speak : she had never been able to speak : he cured her, after which she could speak like everybody else.
    Butbefore she’d uttered a word, he held up his book and his hand and he said – Yes, it’s true, you can speak now. But it’s best if you don’t. And I’d like you to choose not to.
    So the woman said Thank you.
    After which she never spoke again.
    My mother always laughed hard at