Even if I have no recollection whatsoever of ever having driven into Italy from the direction I am talking about.
Doubtless it is partly age, which blurs such distinctions.
When one comes down to it, I could actually be well past fifty.
Again, the mirror is of no real help. One would need some kind of yardstick, or a field of comparison.
There was a tiny, pocket sort of mirror on that same table beside my mother's bed, those final weeks.
You will never know how much it has meant to me that you are an artist, Kate, she said, one evening.
There are no painting materials in this house.
Actually there was one canvas on a wall, when I came. Directly above and to the side of where this typewriter is, in fact.
A painting of this very house, although it took me some days to recognize that.
Not because it was not a satisfactory representation, but because I had not happened to look at the house from that perspective, as yet.
I had already removed the painting into another room by the time I did so.
Still, I believed it was a painting of this house.
After I had concluded that it was, or that it appeared to be, I did not go back into the other room to verify my conclusion.
I go into those rooms infrequently, and have closed those doors.
There was nothing extraordinary in the fact of my closing them. Possibly I closed them only because I did not feel like sweeping.
Leaves blow in, and fluffy cottonwood seeds.
This room is quite large. There is a deck outside, constructed on two sides of the house so that it faces both the forest and the dunes.
Two of the five closed doors are upstairs.
None of this is counting the bathroom, where the mirror is.
In fact there could well be additional paintings in those other rooms. I could look.
There are no paintings in the closed rooms. Or at least not in the three closed rooms that are downstairs.
Though I have just replaced the painting of the house.
It is agreeable to have some art about.
In my mother's living room, in Bayonne, New Jersey, there were several of my own paintings. Two of those were portraits, of her and my father.
Never was I able to find the courage to ask her if she wished me to remove that mirror.
One afternoon the mirror was no longer there, however.
To tell the truth, I rarely did portraits.
Those of my mother and father are now at the Metropolitan Museum, in one of the main painting galleries on the second floor.
Well, all of my paintings are now in those galleries in the Metropolitan Museum.
What I did was stand them between various canvases in the permanent collection, wherever there was sufficient wall space.
Some few overlapped those others, but only at their lower corners, generally.
Very likely a certain amount of warp has occurred in mine since, however.
From having been leaning for so many years rather than being hung, that would be.
Well, and a number of them had never been framed, either.
Then again, when I say all of my paintings I am speaking only about the paintings I had not sold, naturally.
Though in fact some few were in group shows, or out on loan, also.
One of those I saw by sheer chance when I was in Rome, as a matter of fact.
Actually I had almost forgotten about it. And then in the window of a municipal gallery on a street near the Via Vittorio Veneto, there was my name on a poster.
To tell the truth, it was Louise Nevelson's name that caught my eye first. But still.
Sitting in an automobile with English license plates and a right-hand drive, only a day after that, I watched the Piazza Navona fill up with snow, which must surely be rare.
Early in the Renaissance, although also in Rome, Brunelleschi and Donatello went about measuring ruins with such industry that people believed they were mad.
But after that Brunelleschi returned home to Florence and put up the largest dome since antiquity.
Well, this being one of the reasons they named it the Renaissance, obviously.
It was Giotto who built the beautiful campanile next door to that same cathedral.
Once, being asked to submit a sample of his work, what Giotto submitted was a circle.
Well, the point being that it was a perfect circle.
And that Giotto had painted it freehand.
When my father died, less than a year after my mother, I came upon that same tiny mirror in a drawer full of old snapshots.
An authentic snow falls in Rome no more than once every seventy years or so, as a matter of fact.
Which is approximately how often the Arno overflows its banks too, at Florence. Though perhaps there is no connection there.
Yet it is not impossible that people like Leonardo da Vinci or Andrea del Sarto or Taddeo Gaddi went through their entire lives without ever watching boys throw snowballs.
Had they been born somewhat later they could have seen Bruegel's paintings of youngsters doing that, at least.
I happen to believe the story about Giotto and the circle, by the way. Certain stories being gratifying to believe.
I also believe I met William Gaddis once. He did not look Italian.
Conversely I do not believe one word of what I wrote, a few lines ago, about Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto and Taddeo Gaddi never seeing snow, which was ridiculous.
Nor can I remember, any longer, if I happened onto the poster with my name on it before or after I saw the cat at the Colosseum.
The cat at the Colosseum was orange, if I have not indicated, and had lost an eye.
In fact it was hardly your most appealing cat, for all that I was so anxious to see it again.
Simon had a cat, once. Which we could never seem to decide on a name for.
Cat, being all we ever called it.
Here, when the snows come, the trees write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness. The sky itself is often white, and the dunes are hidden, and the beach is white down to the water's edge, as well.
In a manner of speaking almost everything I am able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso.
Now and again I build fires along the beach, however.
Well, autumns, or in early spring, I am most apt to do that.
Once, after doing that, I tore the pages out of a book and lighted those too, tossing each page into the breeze to see if the breeze might make it fly.
Most of the pages fell right next to me.
The book was a life of Brahms, which had been standing askew on one of the shelves here and which the dampness had left permanently misshapen. Although it had been printed on extraordinarily cheap paper to begin with.
When I say that I sometimes hear music in my head, incidentally, I often even know whose voice I am hearing, if the music is vocal music.
I do not remember who it was yesterday for The Alto Rhapsody,however.
I had not read the life of Brahms. But I do believe there is one book in this house which I did read, since I came.
As a matter of fact one could say two books, since it was a two-volume edition of the ancient Greek plays.
Although where I actually read that book was in the other house, farther down the beach, which I burned to the ground. The only book I have looked into in this house is an atlas, wishing to remind myself where Savona is.
As a matter of fact I did that not ten minutes ago, when I decided to bring the painting of the house back out here.
Which I now cannot be positive is a painting of this house, or of a house that is simply very much like this house.
The atlas was on a shelf directly behind where the painting had been leaning.
And directly beside a life of Brahms, printed on extraordinarily cheap paper and standing askew in such a way that it has become permanently misshapen.