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head like a priest raising the bread, cause this place is full of people who have eyes and choose to see nothing, who all talk into their hands as they peripatate and all carry these votives, somethe size of a hand, some the size of a face or a whole head, dedicated to saints perhaps or holy folk, and they look or talk to or pray to these tablets or icons all the while by holding them next to their heads or stroking them with fingers and staring only at them, signifying they must be heavy in their despairs to be so consistently looking away from their world and so devoted to their icons
.
    He holds it in the air : he is maybe saying a prayer.
    Ah! I see : cause a little image of the house and its door has appeared in the tablet : which makes these votive tablets perhaps similar to the box the great Alberti had and which he displayed in Florence (I once saw) whereby the eye looks through the tiniest of holes and sees a full distant landscape formed small and held inside it.
    Is it possible then that all the people of this place are painters going about their world with the painting tools of their time?
    Perhaps I have been placed in a specific painters’ purgatorium –
    but the boy slumps beside me again, his spirit in the gutter.
    No : cause these people have none of the spirit necessary for a lifelong making of pictures.
    Look, boy : cheerful thing : spring flowers in a sort of bucket hanging off the top of a metal pole stuck at the side of this roadway.
    Is there spring in purgatorium? Do they haveyears in purgatorium? Yes, surely : given that purgatorium holds in its nature a promise of an end to it, when its inmates are judged purged, then it must have some way by which time can be measured : but I’d’ve thought such a place would be full of the moans and the supplicatings of thousands : no, purgatorium could surely be worse, cause look, at least there are blackbirds in it : one comes out of a hedge right now and sits along on the wall with his beak a good Naples yellow and a ring of the same yellow round the black of the eye : he sees the boy there, twitches his tail and wings back into the hedge : in the hedge he starts a song : can it really be purgatorium and not the old earth when it is so
like
the earth in the song of the bird, its everlasting unchanging fineness? Hello bird : I’m a painter, dead (I think, though I remember no going), placed here for my many prideful sins in this cold place that has no horses to watch unseen unheard unknown the back of a boy in the kind of love that means nothing but despair.
    What kind of a world, though, that has no horses?
    What kind of a journey can you make with no creature to befriend you to let your going anywhere reveal itself as the matter of trust and faith going somewhere always is?
    Now, when I bought my horse, Mattone, he had a stupid name, Bedeverio? Ettore? something fromthe stories of kings all the rage and everyone naming their children Lancelotto, Artu, Zerbino, and their horses too, by God : I bought him from a woman who had fields outside Bologna, I had a pocketful of money from the job I’d done and hitched a ride in a cabbage cart out to her fields : I saw him and I pointed him out, that one, I said, the one the colour of excellent stone, can I maybe try him? Oh he’s unrideable, she said, a thrower, worse than useless to me, he’s never let anybody, and when the slaughterer or the gypsies come he’s the top of the list : then that’s the one I want, I said and I pulled the money in a bag out of my pocket, out came green leaves from the cart with it and fell all at my feet and it seemed a good omen : so she went into the field and caught him, it only took an hour and a half, and she brought him in, he’d good feet, was clean-haunched, most of all had a curve from his back round to his flank that moved the heart (cause the heart is, itself, a matter of curves) and when I went to look at his teeth he let me put my hand in his mouth, oh he’s never