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let anyone do that before, the woman said, he’s bitten them all : so she saddled him, there was a furore of kicking and snorting when she did (and it wasn’t all the horse) : but as soon as I was up and straddling him, and had got back on after he’d thrown me that first time in the woman’s yard, I sensed he heard what my hands and heels were saying and he understood I’dnot do him harm, also from that first moment not just that I’d be for him
a hostelry in a wilderness
but that I would trust him to be the same for me.
    So I bought him plus the tack he was wearing then and there, I hung on to his neck and leaned down without getting off (in case of difficulty of getting back on) and gave her the bag of coins, and on our way back to Bologna he only threw me the 3 or 4 times and always let me back on again without much disagreement, which was a civil thing in a horse unused to it : with my hands at the place in his neck where the warm skin folded and stretched as he walked (cause I couldn’t get him to go any faster than a walk unless he had a mind to canter, at which point he would canter as he wished and I’d let him, which is a trait I felt he liked in me) so by the end of our journey 2 things had happened, it had entered my head to change his name to a more workmanlike one that suited his colouring, and it had turned out he and I were friends, this horse whose eye was still clear, for all the ill-treatment at the hands of the woman or whoever had had him before (it did not say on his bill of sale and she would not sell me a guarantee and said she could not write to sign a paper) and I don’t, can’t recall, ever selling him on, so I must suppose I never had cause to.
    Dead, gone, bones, horsedust.
    In this particular ring of purgatorium I long right nowfor that smell of home, the smell of the horse I travelled the earth with and the horse who travelled it with me, with the dividing line of whiter hairs from his forehead down to the soft dark of his nostrils, cause he was a creature of symmetries and a reminder that nature is herself a bona fide artist of intent both dark and light.
    Cause there was the morning when I was with the daughter of a man who’d no idea I was in the barn and his daughter there too, or that we’d been in there in each other’s arms warm all the cold night, and Mattone let me know, by taking my shirt which I still had on me in his teeth and pulling it up to let the cold air in then lipping me hard in the back, not just that it was first light but that the man was up and breakfasting and his workers were in the yard, and I’d kissed the girl and was on his own back and off at a canter across the fields before the sun had the chance to melt any more of the frost, from which adventure I was left bruised, yes, but from the swift activities of our love and the biting of my own horse not from the wrath of or blows from any father or his workers, and so with dignity through the birdsong.
    The blackbird in the hedge now stops his song : he darts off out and up with a chirrup and flurry cause the boy shifts : he turns in towards me : he looks at me!
    No :he looks through me : it’s clear that he sees nothing.
    What I see for the first time is his face.
    Most I see that round his eyes is the blackness of sadness (burnt peachstone smudged in the curve of the bone at both sides of the top of the nose).
    It is as if he is a miniver that’s been dipped in shadow.
    Then I see that he looks very girl.
    It is often like this at this age.
    The great Alberti, who published in the year in which my mother birthed me the book for all picturemakers, and wrote in it the words
let the movements of a man (as opposed to a boy or young woman) be ornato with more firmness
, understands the bareness and the pliability it takes, ho, to be both.
    The great Cennini, though, in his handbook on colours and picturemaking, finds no worth and no beauty of proportion in girls, or in women of any age – except in the