1511 c/o Evar Globo

Guerrero replies to Aguilar: a first draft

Brother Aguilar,

So, you have asked me to leave. I am married and I have three infants. I hear only that Cortés is destroying beautiful cities, only massacres. I can not leave here, a beautiful place, sound when it has finished echoing and so on. And this is the place of the red wood. You know this. Imagine: I will climb a hill and stand and look out and feel only as if my wings had folded back into me. A place.

Brother, I know you also wake and feel like you are pinned, held, an axe raised above, your head pushed back. We are the only ones, yes. We cannot just leave. Tonight I watched my wife plait a basket from a dead wolf’s hair. I made a quiet howl. She was unmoved.

I miss olive oil, that at least. A joke: I tried to describe rice pudding to my wife. I miss weather, artichokes, yes, thistles, yes. They look on me as a gentleman here, and a captain in the time of the war. So, still. I hear only of dead infants. Does Cortés know they all call her ‘The Fucked One’, his woman? I am sorry

So my children must be healthy, that is all. You understand if I make a quiet noise while I write that. If they are beautiful. I must only help my children. If they are not beautiful then I will gladly tumble down stairs forever, I would gladly fall and be destroyed. It is a time of war, after all. Our war. We can not leave. My face is tattoo’d and my ears are pierced. You would not want me. What would the Spaniards find to say? What we have brought. So how could we leave?

I have wondered: how did you feel when we arrived? Those weeks of drifting. I want to laugh but only shiver and then try to spit. That wreck. Two weeks and last emerging to those spears. And so how could we leave? So. God blesses you always. Go and be powerful. Please. Pray and be powerful and grow tall and sprout antlers. You could not dilute a forest. Go but I ask of you: do not require me to leave. I am a warrior. I am a slave. Go. Go and God’s blessing be with you.

How many of us are dead? I only barely know. So. Wouldn’t you like to drown? To have drowned perhaps I mean. Aren’t we being squashed to death by boulders? I mean this generously. How could we arrive here and expect not to die? My mind is ants carrying the bodies of their comrades, again and again. Brother, listen: I hear that Cortés is a pale and sickly child. I can not fight for that. These men I am with are an unbreakable building, as true as a simmering pot. I will stay. I will not fight for that child. And that is all.

Yours,

As ever,

Only,

Guerrero

1510 c/o Kelly Schirmann

WE ARE VERY SMALL WE ARE ALIVE
STILL WE ARE NOT YET DEAD

Suddenly it is only the ships and their cargo. Her eyelids heavy as heavy sailing canvas. Wooden boats streaming down the ocean's cheek to London's mouth, letting us taste their salt. I carry a pouch of lavender, go shuffling along the dockboards in the tepid sun, where the shorewater greys like her lips and skin in the light. The sounds she makes upon waking, the sores on her white arms like wet open mouths. We shuffle in slight crowds, shirtcollars round our necks. Loud laughing men heft crates from the guts of ships and throw them to the docks below, their arms soothed with Spanish spices, the hands of dark healthy lovers. They squint at our boiled shapes. We watch them pitch their crates, minds elsewhere. Her cold, grey mouth. And then, at last, their strong brown bodies form a line. They heft their crates to each other to each other to the sunwarmed dock. Our grey tongues licking the bones of our lips. Suddenly the swoon of color, the audacity of something living. Sounds of lungs filling. Sounds. Oh. Knives are produced, boards ripped open to reveal. Their plaintive brown faces, gold petals brushing roughened cheeks. Sounds of mouths moving. Oh. There is no movement at first, then much. The grey tide of us rushing forward, hands on other cold bodies. We are so hungry. My coins smell of lavender, find a rough open palm. Palm finds her there, healthy. I wrest free of that sick tangle, the stench of hopelessness. To nothing. To the emptied streets home. Shuffle my feet along the sewery stones, eyeing the grey waves. Twirl its green stalk in my fingers. Pick off the petals one by one. Think of her red, red mouth.

1509 c/o Eric Beeny

SYNAPSE

My dearest Buonarroto,


I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written.

I hope Father is doing okay.

He’s an ass sometimes, I know.

But without him neither you nor I would be alive on this Earth to give him an outlet through which he can channel his anger.

Let us be thankful for that.

I have enclosed a shitload of ducats, more than enough for both of you to survive comfortably, for how long I’m not sure.

I wish it could be more, but Pope Julius II is really raping me on this job he got me started on over a year ago.

He’s got me standing on scaffolding suspended by ropes over 60 feet above the floor, painting this huge vaulted ceiling in this crazy-bananas chapel here in Rome.

You know how I hate heights—I’m scared shitless to come to work everyday.

Plus my neck hurts from craning it, my shoulders and my back, my goddamn arms.

My face is freckled with paint droppings, like birds pooping all over my face.

I’ve got the whole painting plotted, at least, and for the most part I’m refusing help.

I can do this myself.

The Pope won’t get off my ass about it, though.

He’s all, When are you going to finish? this and Why haven’t you finished? that.

Over a month ago, the prick even whacked me with his staff.

I ran off, refusing to return, especially since he still hadn’t paid me even a fraction of what he was contractually obligated to.

He eventually sent for me, his messenger carrying both a written apology (which really shocked the shit out of me) and a sum of 500 ducats, the full amount I was promised (I still think the work I'm doing is worth more—though I will admit this to no one—as I mentioned my feeling violated).

I reluctantly agreed to return, so here I am again at my task.

And though this isn’t my trade (I am after all a sculptor by nature), I will accomplish this feat no matter how long it takes.

Do you remember me telling you once how a statue sleeps in a block of stone, that the block of stone was a prison from which only the sculptor’s chisel could release it, bring it to life?

I’m only paraphrasing what I said, as I’m sure your memory is already doing as you read this, but I know it was something like that.

Well, rather than chiseling away what’s unnecessary in art, I’m here adding more and more paint to capture the image rather than release it.

I must always be vigilant and cautious to not fuck up, lest I should then be forced to paint over and over my errors, only to begin again at making further mistakes I hope will amount to something beautiful.

It’s a lot.

My whole body hurts.

But I will persist.

I’ve got this great idea for one of the painting’s focal points: On one cloud I will have Adam and on another I will have God.

They will stretch their arms toward one another, but they will be unable to reach far enough to touch, their fingertips less than an inch apart.

I feel this will symbolize much about man and his relation to the divine, and I hope that message will travel across that distance between Adam and God, and therefore from my painting on down to anyone who enters this crazy-bananas chapel to be struck on the head by the image like lightning.

I often wonder if God isn’t just the brain thinking about God.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, be well, Buonarroto, and be kind to Father, for he needs it.


All my love,

Michelangelo