The Tailor, by Jo Mazelis

The Tailor, by Giovanni Battista Moroni (Italy) 1565-1570

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The Tailor
 
I hardly know why I came here today. I had been walking. Walking and walking. From the tube station at Holborn, down Great Queen Street, averting my eyes from the hulking edifice that is the Freemason’s Hall. I do not like to look at it. It scares me – as I’m certain it is meant to do. I cross Drury Lane and my heart stops beating so wildly. On Long Acre I can breathe more easily. 
 
Where am I going? Ask me and I can’t say. Conduit Street. Floral Street. The Strand. In a doorway the hunched shape of a man in a blue nylon sleeping bag. His face is half hidden. How can he sleep there? The noise, the traffic, the tramping feet, the rattling wheels of suitcases. His body soft and vulnerable, lost in sleep. He had a name once. I could stop and ask him his name. I could, but I don’t. I barely look at him. 
 
The sky is overcast; the light everywhere is diffuse, banal.
 
Today, I think, is the last day.
 
I head to the National Gallery. 
 
Bag search. Tourists. Children. Turn left. Room twelve. I look for room thirteen but it eludes me. 
 
I am not looking at the pictures. Not really. For a few minutes I am the only visitor in this room.
 
I lost my job last week. Tomorrow my rent is due. I’m overdrawn in the bank. No savings. Nothing to save. Nothing to save me. No one. I could cry, but if I did I might never stop. Thinking that, I almost do, but choke it back.
 
Then I sense someone watching me. I turn. There is no one there.  No living person anyway, but the room is like a room of mirrors and each mirror is occupied by a man or woman or a group of people. I notice their hands first. They are hands doing what hands will do. They gesture, they hang from the wrist, they hold things; a fan, a glove, a letter, books, a distaff, a cross, a child. One hand, Christ’s, reaches out as if to grasp someone or fend off a blow. The trickery of these artists is diluted when all of their works are seen together. I look down at the floor. Then up at the ceiling. 
 
The room is still empty, but again I have the sensation that I am not alone. I turn my face, eyes gliding over the painted silk and satin, rose-coloured, blue, orange, green, the earth and sky and grey stone, until at last, I see him - the tailor.
 
And he sees me. This is why I am here. I know it now. Everything suddenly makes sense.
 
I go closer, stand directly before him, breathe him in.
 
He has soft eyes, this man. He stands at his work table. He holds a piece of black cloth by its corner. Yes it is cloth, but the longer I look the more it seems it might be a scrap of moonless sky. In his other hand he holds a pair of shears.

Soft his eyes. Standing at his table, night sky and shears in either hand about to make a daylight raid upon her heart.
 
Read that expression. Read the language of his body. Mystery will acquit itself in the starched white curls of lace at his neck, his wrists.
 
His clothes are patterned with slashes. Meant to suggest the outcome of a swordfight, his hose must have been ruinous to health if the result of violence. Pumpkin pants of rusty orange-red cloth with green showing through the fine razor lines.
 
His eyes are soft. He looks up with an expression of gentle enquiry. He seems to speak to me. 
 
Yes? Sì?
 
Gold ring on his pinky. Winter light in the north of Italy. Snip snip. 
 
There were no stars before I cut them; pinpricks in black velvet.
 
Yes? Sì?
 
It’s me, I say. Here. Now.
 
His doublet of padded silk is pinked with short dashes. The pattern looks like rain falling vertically.
 
You are an atom, I think. I am an atom.
 
Snip snip.
 
He sharpens his blades at the grinder.
 
The tip of the shears is in the region of his elaborate groin with its modest, mouse-like codpiece.
 
Look closer. Look at the lace on his cuffs.
 
Small waves of stiffened linen fringed by tiny pearl-like knots of silk thread or…
 
Or… who cares?
 
Those waves are made by a heated iron.
 
I notice the shadow of the lead-coloured scissors. The light is falling from high overhead. Falling above his right shoulder. The wall behind him is the flank of an elephant.
 
He makes a good picture, this tailor. I stand watching him, willing him to move or give a hint of something.
 
Ashes and atoms you are, I think.
 
Yes? Sì?
 
Atoms.
 
Time-traveling tailor, somewhere here in London are his children’s children’s children. The stitched-in lines of his descendants roil and tumble under a different sun. Some cut, some slashed by history. Darts in eternity.
 
Where did it go? My everything? he says.
 
And why am I here? Waiting and watching. Caught with the night in my fingers. I was about to cut the cloth, but something stopped me. So I have rested my head; stopped in the movement of lifting it, or letting go. 
 
You heard a skylark this morning and a beggar you thought was asleep in a doorway was really dead. Such things happen. Later you knelt by your bed and gave thanks for good fortune. Your prayers seeped into the cloth were cutting. Chalk lines guided you to this. Even in that moment you were dying and taking me with you.
 
I saw a beggar too.
 
Yes? Sì?
 
Your eye takes someone’s measure, I think.
 
The more I look, the more I question the mystery of that expression.
 
Soft? Kind? Or calculating?
 
It is the look of one who is waiting. It’s the tilt of the head that lends him sympathy; a sort of quiet humility.
 
The more I look the more I see paint. Mostly in the pattern on the doublet, the brush marks, dark on light and light on dark, sometimes almost slapdash, sloppy. There again, not so.
 
Shall we run away together?
 
Shall we?
 
Yes? Sì?
 
I do not see the paint that creates his face. I see skin. I see a soft, fine beard, dark hair cut close to the scalp. Brown eyes. Pink flesh where it is sculpted by the complex cartilage of his ear. 
 
If we ran away what would your wife say?
 
She knew that I was haunted by something. Ghosts, she thought. 
 
Did she?
 
Sì.
 
What are you doing, Georgio? Standing there in a daydream! There are two mourning gowns to be done for that funeral before the feast of Santa Lucia as well as the butcher’s slops to be sewn.  Georgio, do you hear me? What are looking at? There’s nothing there.
 
Painted inside the lid of their cassoni is a picture of the mythical Daphne running naked across a meadow towards a laurel tree. She represents purity. A woman’s purity that he will pollute in the getting of sons.
 
Now I see sadness. Stare long enough and you will think that he’s been crying. That spot of pink in the corner of his eye, the liquid highlight on the iris. The silvery trail, a salt trace by the side of his nose gives him away. And the mouth just slightly downturned, slightly tight. The lower lip is pale and might be trembling. A spot of colour on his cheek, a bruised look beneath the eye. 
 
There’s nothing there really.
 
Yes. Sì.
 
Only paint. Ground pigment; Red Ochre, Yellow Ochre, Carbon Black, Lead White, Vermilion.
 
What are looking at?
 
Sorrow.
 
The sorrows of the Virgin.
 
In the church of the martyred San Giuliano he kneels and with no work materials or tools for his busy hands, he turns the gold ring on his little finger around and around. Then stepping outside he looks at the mountains that swell like mothering breasts around the town. Under the red tiled eaves, he sees the fragile mud nests of the little birds who are yet to return.
 
Those nests will turn to dust. Mineral fragments. Earth tones. Pigment. 
 
A bird in the house is very unlucky. Even a painted bird. 
 
Let’s run away, I think. The world out there, beyond that window, will amaze you… though it sickens me.
 
You promised me something better.
 
Ghosts can’t make promises.
 
Don’t cry, he says and only then do I feel the warm trickle on my cheek, the tiny pool that settles in the corner of my mouth. Licking my lips, I taste salt.
 
I sense the world calling me.
 
One last time, I will the painted man to live.
 
He waits, head still tilted in enquiry.
 
I’m going now, I whisper.
 
Sì, he says.
 
Still sorrowful. Same as yesterday. 
 
And tomorrow.
 
Tomorrow, a laurel tree.
 
Jo Mazelis
 
Novelist, poet, and short story writer, Jo Mazelis lives in Swansea. Her novel Significance won the Jerwood Prize 2015. Her first collection of short stories, Diving Girls was shortlisted for Commonwealth Best First Book. Circle Games was long-listed for Wales Book of the Year. Ritual, 1969 was long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year in 2017. Blister and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Rubery Award in 2023. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, The Screech Owl, Bad Lilies, Abridged, Pomegranate and Visual Verse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Mazelis