Heaven & Earth Holding Company

Upon Reading that a Noisy Cloth Factory Separated the Family Homesof Sandro Botticelli and Amerigo Vespucci

33 Upon reading that a noisy Cloth Factory Separated the Family Homes of Sandro Botticelli and Amerigo Vespucci Little Barrel, they called him, beautiful layabout, lazy angel, though Sandro was passive, dreamy, paintbrush thin. “Paints when he wants to,” his father proclaimed. “Why can’t you be more like Vespucci?” he cried, “Discover a country, get out of the house?” All night across the street Vespucci’s mad mother crying out for her son, all alone in his barrel-shaped boat, “Amerigo, Amerigo,” his name like a vine encircling the world. All day the cloth factory, the threading machines, wooden contraptions, clackety-clacketing, cocking, shuttling, warping, weaving. How could one sleep? What dreams would go there? When asked, years later, why he never married, Sandro said he dreamed about it once and grew so terrified that he left the house, sailed the drunken streets until morning arrived. Vespucci all this time on the palette of the ocean, the mainsails flapping like triptychs in the breeze, sudden America spread out before him, naked, silent, an odalisque continent. Back home Botticelli, writhing to the rhythm of the spreaders, the shuttles, his mind spinning out of control, Mars versus Venus, Jacob wresting his Angel to bless him, betides, until his own angels appeared at the touch of his hand, their rivers of hair threaded gold, his canvas their haven, their bright heaven on earth, stepping out of their half shells, their own little barrels, onto seas of shimmering paint, skeins of silent cloth, each woman the New World of his dreams. ...