On the bank, the pale, thin painter waits with the cart beside another man, broad across the shoulders, a butcher in a rough coat who earns coin through his discreet cooperation. Without a word they throw a rope which lands at my feet. I loop it under the arms, step back, and together we heave the body toward the softness of waterside earth and then to the solidity of the stone path above. The painter keeps his hands clean for the longest time, until eventually, he grips the ankles and guides them to the plank. He doesn’t look at the face. He looks at the lines of the shoulders and the twist of the spine, and I can tell he’s already in the studio, adjusting the light.

Except for distant dog barks, and the occasional shutter opens closing with a goodnight click, the city sleeps. In the alleys the smell drifts between wet stone, garlic and the rank rot behind taverns. I walk beside the wheel and hold the dead man’s foot in place, even though it negs to fall free. The painter walks ahead and never stumbles. The brim of his hat cuts through the night like a dart. 

I watch as he lifts the bar to the door, there’s a ritual to it even if it’s routine to him, in me it ignites an anticipation I can only describe as spiritual, it’s like living scripture, he is God, I’m Moses and as we cross the threshold he reveals a little more of himself to me. I know the room before the candle finds it, it’s a confluence of shadow and light, just like art. Two other bodies wait under linen, their feet showing, toes like shells softened and bent by the sea. The table holds wine and a wedge of bread for me and nothing for them, of course. He has the butcher pull the new body out of the sackcloth and place him, down on the boards and starts to see, that is what he calls it. seeing. The butcher leaves with his coins in his satchel. Now it’s only us, and the dead, a strange communion. He lifts the body onto a chair, gently, almost respectfully, and steps back, he tells me to tilt the head, so the tendon at the throat stands, to raise the right arm and let the left fall as if the weight of something unseen had become too much for it to hold. I do as he says, and he rewards me with a small sound, not quite praise, but a soft breath through his teeth that means yes, this is good.

He sleeps on a bench beside the dead models, until the dawn comes in a thin grey of cloud, sun just beginning to weave its way through. Then he wakes as if he has been struck by an invisible hand. There’s no drawing, no under painting. He takes up the brush and cuts straight into the linen. The first touch is blunt, dark, fast. Then light appears in the dark, it’s not a gentle light, it’s the shimmer of sun on a blade, it reflects into my eyes, blinding me to the movement of his hand, as it blends with the brush. He drops the tiniest dot of white in the perfect spot, he burnsfaces into life. He waits for the sun to move and as the it grows stronger, he manipulates the cloth over the window sothe beam can uncover the angle he wants, the mouths and eyes arrive as if they had been waiting all along, hidden underneath the air, revealed rather than created.

I watch and think of the first time I saw him, and even though my eyes remain fixed, my body and soul still in this room, a part of my mind drifts off, dreamily, into that memory. I was under a bridge with a crust I’d stolen, careful to eat it in pieces, not allowing a crumb to fall from my mouth. My father had thrown me out when his temper charged like a bull towards an unattractive answer I’d given, my mother was behind him, gripping his arm with a strength she usually hid, begging him to leave me be. The last thing I remember is the look in her eye as he bellowed, I was no longer his son. I learned to look for coins in the gutters where the drunks pissed, and for comfort in the secretstrength of saints nailed above doorways. He came down the steps with his hat in his hand because he liked the breeze from the river. I looked at him like a child might look in awe as a peacock spread open its train. He smiled at the bottom of the stairs, gave a gentle nod in my direction, turned and walked away. I followed him.

Money came first. Bread and wine followed, and a bed, mine for a while until he sold it to pay a debt, money didn’t come again but it didn’t matter, this was a home. Praise was rare but felt like gold; at last, someone noticed what I did, and how. When I set a shoulder right or found a knot of rope that made a hand seem alive, he gave me his yes, and it warmed me against the lack of a real fire. Talk between us seemed like talk between friends, between two people who were, almost, equals. He spoke about Rome as if he himself had built it, but not the churches, not the monuments or memories of an older time, but the dark corridors, the places where the dangerous people dwelled, the underbelly which had always existed for those who dared to look for it. He told me the saints were just men like us, flawed and often faithless, until the light took them. I held back from telling him I wasn’t faithless, and I didn’t comment that I sensed neither was he.

I sat for him. He asked and I said yes before the words had finished leaving his lips. He set a shallow bowl in front of me; told me to lean and look into the water with a question in my eye only it could answer. He placed my hand close to the surface and told me to hold it there as if I were about to touch a secret. When the painting was carried away it felt like a part of me had gone, a face I could now only meet in dark water, bound for a room I would not be allowed to enter.

The city doesn’t really know him yet; they call him stubborn, rude. They say he fights too much and whisper of how he takes his sword on evening walks. I’ve seen a side of him they haven’t. I’ve seen him laugh like a boy and dance like a star. But I’ve also seen him break a bowl for no reason. He can turn cold in a breath; I’ve felt it linger in the air like the smell of smoke after a candle is snuffed. I won’t pretend I’m not afraid when his eyes harden. He has never struck me, but the thought of his anger, or perhaps my father’s, lives in the room and keeps me wherever he puts me.

Still, when he paints, the fear fades. I watch him hold the brush as if it were at a throat he chose not to slash. He paints as if somebody else were pushing his hand, and when it goes right, he smiles at the canvas. When it goes wrong, he wipes away faces with the back of his hand. He works until the skin of his fingers splits. He forgets to eat but drinks wine without looking. He speaks while he paints, not only to me but to the dead. He asks them for patience; he tells them to hold the pose. He prays to the river to give him one more, this time with a mark on the shoulder he’s been thinking of. He doesn’t thank the river when it answers, he thinks he and the river are locked in a conversation in which thankyous are unnecessary. 

By noon the room is a chapel, not for praying out loud, but for eucharistic adoration, his vision is the host and the bodies, the scene are the monstrance that holds it. From this he makes a world on linen where the dead rise. The skin, that brushed against me in the river, sings with life. The face I tried to avoid turns toward me, ready to speak. I stand with my mouth open; he tells me to close it. I smile. He doesn’t.

I suppose I love him, not the way the poets sing, not romantically. I love him because he was the first man not to treat me like a stain. He saw I could do small things with care; he saw my silence had shape. He told me to stand here, and I am still standing. If he becomes as great as the fire that emanates from him, I fear he won’t look back at a boy from the street, a boy who wades through the river, pulling the corpses now replaced by a line of living models, desperate to be rendered by his hand. I tell myself I will be happy to watch him pass in a crowd, happy to know I helped place the light on a shoulder people will admire, or at the very least, I once watched him place such light. 

He startles at dusk and steps away from the canvas, he doesn’t need to tell me he is finished, I can see it. He opens the window and lets the street enter the room. Voices climb the stairs before sinking again into the night until they’re almost completely faded. He looks at the bodies and looks at me. The cart squeaks its old complaint as we tilt it to the lane, and the butcher appears from the shadow, he nods once but we don’t speak. 

The air tastes of old smoke as we move through walkways that avoid eyes. Together we lower the first body, the sheet slips, and the face shows for a heartbeat. The river speaks in its low tongue, hungry. We carry each body to the edge. The painter holds the ankles, he always does. The bodies accept their old home without a word, and the current takes them in. The last one bumps a stone and turns, and for a moment it seems he is looking back, singling me out with eyes open wide, although I’m certain we closed them.

I stand there, mud gripping my soles, the painter steadies himself with a hand on my shoulder. Warm. The butcher lifts the empty sheets and folds them like blankets. The painter thanks no one, he touches his hat, and we start up the path. By the time we reach the studio the candle has died, but the room holds on to the smell of oil and the quiet of a church after the people have gone. The painting leans against the wall and watches us come in. He sits on the bench and shuts his eyes. I lie on the floor and listen to his breath.

I dream of light, but not the sun nor some holy thing, just the light that lets a face be seen and I’m the one who moves it where it is needed. Early in the morning, before the noise of the city starts again, I’ll go back to the river and ask for another gift. If I find one, I’ll offer it to him, without asking for anything but his yes, the small breath, the sound that tells me he sees what I’ve done; a cat dropping a mouse at her master’s feet. I think again of the day he no longer needs me, but I will still know where the light should fall, and that will be enough.