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On a piece of stone, Bartolomeo de Bartolai imitates the way the rib cage of the shepherd's dog is visible through its skin, the way the goat's hoof splays as it steps down the side of a cliff.

————

When Bartolomeo de Bartolai looks around, he sees that all the young people have gone down out of the mountains. One, whom he called friend, Martín de Martinelli, patted him on the head, and then was gone like the rest. He last heard that Martín was in Fiorenza preparing walls for frescoes.

When he left, Martín de Martinelli did not look back or sideways; he had always been preparing to leave. Those who move away carry off what they wish and remake in their minds those who have stayed, while the ones who remain behind are left to wonder what has become of those who depart. Some who stay in the mountains close their hearts tight to forget the ones who have left; some turn the departed into heroes, making them more than they are. And if those who have ventured out should return, the ones who have remained lose voice in their presence because the returning emigrants claim the expertise of the world.

As a child, Bartolomeo de Bartolai followed after this friend, imitating him. He was intrigued, intimidated. It was excessive adoration. His heart is hardened, and yet he still hopes for a single message. Like a puppy dog. Then he wishes to kick himself for this suppliance, but does not. He turns back into himself and makes marks on stones.

————

Why was he so dazzled by Martín de Martinelli, a person who treated others like servants? Finally he understands what he had refused to see for so long: Martín de Martinelli is the earth and everyone else is a planet circling.

Martín de Martinelli would occasionally glance over his shoulder as he sat bent over a panel of wood, commenting upon his progress. Bartolomeo de Bartolai wants to know if noteworthiness is like this? Others watching to see if you might be recognized, if you are the one who will go to work in the shop of a master. They watch, afraid of approaching too close lest you remain forever hunched over, eccentric and obscure. It was an infatuation, he decides, a kind of being in love with Martín de Martinelli, with a person incapable of listening. How do you comprehend the world if you see only
yourself, over and over and over? Do you see yourself finally as a spectre? As spectre, you then consume the air around you like a flame. And while some pull up cushions to sit at your feet, you fail to notice that others have wandered off, neglected and stung. One person in town called Martín de Martinelli a trinket maker of worthless things, spoiled, and Bartolomeo de Bartolai said, No, there is genius, wait. I was young, he thinks now. Spellbound. But the truth is, I wanted his way of being for myself, his ease and his boldness. Now I see that these thoughts were a form of Envy, and that this elaborate infatuation was Covetousness, and that I coveted his signature.

————

He blames others for his timidity:

His great-grandmother who was once a lioness and now does not know her own daughter.

His grandmother who must tend to her and grips his wrist when he passes by.

His mother who drinks a bitter liquid made from distilled walnuts, each time the great-grandmother wails.

His father who leaves the house and wanders into the woods to escape. Bartolomeo de Bartolai stays in the corner waiting to see if his mother will call out for him; when he leaves, his father pats him on the head, and calls him his favorite child, though he knows his favorite child is the one who has stayed, the one who is huddled in the kitchen with a wrist being gripped.

He stays. He waits. He holds his great-grandmother's hand in the dim light while she moans. His grandmother begs him to tell her what is beyond the threshold and he describes the garb of the pilgrims. The painted cart of the book merchant and the books laden onto the back of a mule. Bartolomeo de Bartolai puts a cool cloth on his mother's forehead after she has fallen asleep. He unbolts the door for his father when he comes back home. They all grow old.

It is a new era, the ones who left have said. The old order is gone. Be bold, be deferential no more.

————

There is calm as his hand moves across a flat, polished stone. He draws, draws, draws, and on his way back from the fields into the house he tosses
the stone into a pile in a corner of the threshing floor. The literate call the threshing floor an
aia
. Aye-a. Like a scream. From all the being beaten down. The peasants like him call it an
ara
, which also means
altar.

————

Before they go off, when the journey is still before them, do they feel the twinge of misgiving? In the months before they leave, the impending journey has already changed them. Every encounter becomes a question: Will this be the final encounter? So that in the future you will say, The last time I saw Martín, he was at the fountain in town. But if you should see him once more, this is how he is remembered: The last time I saw Martín, he was in the tavern, playing
tresette
and winning. Once he announced his desire to leave, he could never be Martín in the same way again; he became Martín-who-will-leave-in-September. Once he revealed his intention to leave, he ceased to be part of the daily flow of mundane activity, bodies leaning into plows, planting, training vines against a trellis, harvesting, threshing, butchering a hog, coming into a stone house silently from the snow. He could not be part of the winter's circle around the hearth, or, when the sun emerged in the spring, he was no longer one who replaced slate tiles upon a roof or gathered early berries. At the moment he said he was leaving, Martín de Martinelli placed himself outside all this. It was irreversible. Even if he had changed his mind at the last instant, others would have thought, This year he stayed, but next year? He was no longer part of day-to-day movement, taking tools to the blacksmith or standing against the side of the mountain at the mill as grain was being ground, talking loudly above the roar of the cascade. When the wax of candles dripped onto the stone floor of the church at midnight on Christmas, he was not part of the chanting.

————

But wasn't it always so, the leaving? Is not the Holy Book that is read on Sunday the story of departure, one after another after another? Were not these mountains populated by nomads with tents and sheep? The Etrurian people coming up from the plains, some of whom buried the bones of their dead, some of whom buried their ashes in urns. They were followed by Christians who prayed in caves and, then, by Roman soldiers deserting, who were followed by the red-haired, blue-eyed ones with their bagpipes
made of sheep gut who built stone huts here, warriors from the north with massive beards and long, consonant-filled words. Then the descendants of Esther fleeing the walled cities on the plains, accused of killing infants. They all fled into the mountains, staggering up here, burying their dead along the way. Trying to outrun war and pestilence. For centuries and centuries, they came up into the mountains. Bartolomeo de Bartolai is all of them. Who can say where he began, and who was the one who begat the person who begat him, who begat that person, all the way back to the beginning? Back to the gods of the northmen. Back to Job.

A man who came back from the Orient with Marco Polo was beaten in Venezia; they beat him on the stone floor under an alcove in the calle dell'Arco. And this man made his way southward to Ravenna, from which he was driven to other cities, Forlì, ĺmola, Bologna, skirting the edge of the mountains, persecuted the entire way, until he was driven into a blind alley in Modena by thugs, nearly set afire, and he fled upward, up, up, up, into the mountains. He ran to the highest point, until he could go no farther without descending. He begged for mercy at the feet of the oldest woman of the village who stared down at this man with pitch-black hair. He did not want to go back down onto the plains; he begged her in his native tongue, and because he had a wide smile like her last-born son who had fallen off the mountain, she said to him, You may stay and be safe. As she spoke, the others dropped their clubs; one man gave him a massive shepherd's coat, a coat made of skins. He showed the others how to weave reeds into mats of intricate patterns. He built a strange, stringed instrument. He married, and his wife bore twelve children, six of whom survived. Scattered stone houses hold altars dedicated to a forgotten god whose name means immeasurable light.

————

The ancestors, yes, were nomads and people in flight, but, once here, they stayed put and lived their lives according to the rhythm of the bell, resounding morning, noon and night; and the seasons, summer, autumn, winter, spring; and all the rituals and holy days that are repeated in order, in an endless variation. His ancestors of long, long ago were people in motion, but they were followed by people, he believes, who should remain in this same place, immovable and bound to this soil.

————

He crosses the
ara
in the fading light of autumn. He sits on straw in a corner of the stable. He picks up a stone and draws. When he is exhausted, he returns to the house and lays his head on a mattress filled with wood shavings and scented with thyme to keep away insects. He dreams of a tap on the shoulder. He dreams about forms, a dog's paw, the curve of an angel's chin. A scaffold. He sees his hand move across a piece of stone, leaving identifiable marks, a sparrow, a lamb that looks as if it could bleat for its mother. He dreams of drawing pictures whole.

————

At the church of San Pellegrino, he once saw ten angels in a storm-blue sky, and they were all lamenting what occurred below. One threw its head backward, open arms and palms outstretched downward as if pushing away the air. One scratched and tore the skin of its cheeks with its fingernails; another pulled golden strands of hair outward from its scalp. One held a pale yellow cloth up close to its open eyes, as if wanting to conceal the view. The bodies of these angels tapered, then disappeared like flames.

The fresco in the pilgrims' church was a copy, painted by someone who had imitated a fresco down lower in the mountains, which was in turn an imitation of one in the foothills, which was a copy of one from down lower still, an imitation of a fresco in a town on the river, which was a modified version of a fresco farther downriver, a fresco which was an imitation of one in the city. The first one to copy it was called a follower of Giotto, and even after all these copies, the fresco in the mountains at the pilgrims' church site bears the great man's name.

————

He dreams of drawing pictures whole, but whenever he begins, he falters.

Martín de Martinelli said, Once silenced, we have been unsilenced.

But Bartolomeo de Bartolai sits there knowing that he still stutters, tentative, trepid, trembling.

Tiresome, he knows, and reminds himself he possesses worldly goods: he has a pallet with blankets. He has spiritual wealth. He has all of his fingers and teeth.

When he opens his mouth to say he is timid and weak, to say he cannot speak, a voice behind him says, What, then, is the sound coming from your mouth?

————

Do you remember how in our youth we rebelled? Martín de Martinelli had said before he left. Do you not recall?

Bartolomeo de Bartolai had replied,
Yes
. But all he remembered were words half-formed in his mouth.

Do you remember how we added our names to the list of demands signed by Iacomo de Petro, Lorenzo de Contro, Rolandino de Berton?

Yes, he said. But in truth he could not write his name.

Boldly, they took down the banner of the duke, and hoisted up another at night in the dark. They fled deep into the woods and sang songs around a fire, and when the sun rose in the morning, the people in the village of Ardonlà woke to find the sky-blue herald of the dissidents suspended from an arch.

Certain reproaches still clang in his ears: The hierarchy has crumbled; we are no longer serfs.

————

When, on the mule path above, a handbell is rung six times but not at the sixth hour, it means travellers are passing through and are looking for food to purchase. Itinerant merchants, soldiers. Or pilgrims en route to holy places:

San Pellegrino dell'Alpe
, they chant,

scendete un po' più giù

abbiam rotto le scarpe

non ne possiamo più.

The penitent traveller says this aloud walking toward the relics of San Pellegrino, the hermit who lived in a hollowed-out beech tree.

San Pellegrino, they mumble aloud,

come down a bit lower,

we have broken our shoes

and cannot go any farther.

Once, eleven years ago, when he heard the bell ringing, Bartolomeo de Bartolai carried up a wooden pail filled with milk; he had no cheese to sell He climbed the footpath up the side of the mountain, the branches of the hedges brushing his arm, the saw-toothed canes of blackberries pricking through his leggings, the sun beating down on his back.

He arrived at the road out of breath. It was July and pilgrims were travelling south and west toward the mountain pass on their way to the monastery of San Pellegrino. A pilgrim gestured to him. Bartolomeo de Bartolai saw that despite her simple garb of hazel-colored wool, despite her display of poverty, she was privileged; she wore a thick gold ring on a golden chain around her neck. Her alms purse was bulging. Bartolomeo de Bartolai stood in front of her, holding his pail, looking at the ground, waiting to be spoken to.

Mid-conversation, she spoke to another pilgrim. She was not going to the pilgrimage site of San Pellegrino, like the rest, she said, but rather to the south and east, toward the city of Fiorenza. Then she began speaking of the master Giotto:

Giotto apprenticed with Cimabue for ten years.

Bartolomeo de Bartolai stared at the ground, listening.

The Pope called him to Rome for the Jubilee in
1300,
and Giotto worked on the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterno.

Bartolomeo de Bartolai offered her the pail of milk. She batted him away and called her lady-in-waiting.