The Second Sitting

by Athanasius of Alexandria, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

She brought it to me wrapped in a good cloth, which told me before she unwrapped it that it was ruined. Nobody wraps a sound thing so carefully.

This was in Phaophi, in the third year after the Cappadocian was brought into Alexandria with soldiers to sit in the bishop's chair, when the water was standing over the low fields below Karanis and the men were all out on the dykes. I am Hatres son of Ammonios. I have painted faces in this village for fifty-one years, and in Arsinoë before that, and I had painted the face she was holding. That is why she came to me and not to the young man in Philadelphia who paints with egg.

Tamystha set the board on my table and folded the cloth back from it, corner by corner.

The lamp in the niche had fallen. She told me this without my asking. The cat, or the wind through the door, or nothing at all; it fell, and the oil ran out along the shelf beneath the picture and burned there half the night, and nobody woke, because the house was empty of everyone but her and she was sleeping on the roof for the heat. In the morning the shelf was black and the picture above it had run.

Wax is wax. It does what wax does when it is warm. The brow had slid down into the eyes, and the eyes had gone down into the cheeks and drawn the cheeks after them, and the whole face had come away from its bones and settled at the bottom of the board in a fold, like a cloak dropped on a floor. The smoke had gone into it while it was soft and stayed there. Where the beard had been there was a grey crust. The ear was still good. The neck of the tunic was still good, and the stripe on the shoulder, because the heat had come from the side and not from below. One ear and a stripe.

"Kastor," I said.

"You remember him."

"I painted him."

"Then you can paint him again."

I said nothing to that for some time. She had been a girl when I painted it. Kastor had sat for it the year before they married, at his father's charge, because his father wanted the son's face in the house before the son took himself off to a house of his own; that was the custom of the old families here, and the old families are dying out, and so is the custom. Kastor was twenty-four or twenty-five. He laughed at me through the first sitting, and I told him that if he laughed I would paint him laughing and he would have to look at it for fifty years. He did not have to look at it for fifty years. He died in Pharmouthi of a fever that went through the houses on the canal side, and she had been looking at it since then, every evening, by that lamp.

"He is dead six months," I said.

"I know how long he is dead."

"I painted him from him. He sat there," and I showed her the stool by the door, where the light from the court comes in level in the morning. "Three mornings. I looked, and I put down what I saw, and then I looked again. That is the whole of the art. There is nothing else in it. Take away the looking and what is left is a man with a hot knife and some coloured wax."

"You have the board," she said. "You have the ear. You have the stripe. You knew him for thirty years. You saw him every day in the street. Paint him."

She paid in advance. Four artabas of wheat to come after the harvest and a jar of oil that her boy brought round that evening on his shoulder, and set down inside my door without a word, and went back to the dykes. I did not look at him. I was thinking about the board.

---

I will set down what I did, in order, because I have been asked since why it took me so long, and the answer is in the order.

First, I would not throw the board away. A man who does not know the trade would say: the picture is spoiled, take a new board, begin clean. But the board was lime wood, which does not grow here; I had bought it from a Greek in Arsinoë who had it from a ship, and there was not another piece like it in the nome. More than that, the board had been in the house. It had hung in that niche for twenty-six years. She had not brought me a picture to replace. She had brought me this, and wanted this back. If I gave her a new board with a face on it, I would be giving her a different thing which resembled the old thing, and she would know, as a woman knows when you bring her a different cup.

So the board would stay. The face would have to come off it.

Second, I would not touch the board until I was sure of the face. Wax can be lifted from wood, once, if the wood is sound and the man lifting it is patient. It cannot be lifted twice without taking the wood with it. I had one sitting on that board left, and I would not waste it on a guess.

Third, then, I would make the face first on something else. I took a board of sycamore fig, which is what we use for everything here, and planed it, and my granddaughter Thermouthis lit the brazier and set the wax pots on it to warm, the black and the white and the two ochres and the red. I set the cestrum in the coals. And I sat down in front of the empty stool by the door and tried to see Kastor on it.

I want to be exact about what happened next, because it is the reason for everything after.

My hand knew what to do. It knew the order: the dark ground, the shadow side of the face, the line of the brow, the eye sockets as two holes of brown before there is any eye in them, the light laid on last with the knife hot so that it drags. It did all this very well. I have done it some thousands of times. By noon there was a man on the sycamore board. He was a man of this country, of about forty, with a short beard and a straight nose and the eyes we paint here, which are large and dark and look a little past you. He was a good piece of work. I would have sold him in Arsinoë for a fair price to anyone who wanted a man on his wall.

He was not Kastor.

I could not tell you how he was not Kastor. Every part of him, taken by itself, I could have defended. Kastor had a straight nose. Kastor had dark eyes. Kastor wore his beard short. I had given him all of these, and what I had made was a list of Kastor and not Kastor. If you describe a man to a stranger well enough, the stranger may pick him out in a crowd; he will not know him. My hand had remembered the order of the work. It had not remembered the face, because the face had never been in my hand. It had been on the stool.

Tamystha came the next morning to look. She stood in front of the sycamore board with her arms folded inside her mantle.

"That is a man," she said.

"Yes."

"I would let him into the house if he came to the door. I would give him water." She looked at it longer. "He would be a cousin. One of the cousins from Bakchias."

She did not say anything harder than that, and she did not need to. I scraped the sycamore board that afternoon and put it back with the others.

---

On the first of the week I went to the church, as I have gone since the old priest baptised me in the canal at forty, late and against my father's gods, and stood at the back where the old men stand.

It was not the old priest. Ammonas had gone to the mountain at the beginning of summer, the same week that the soldiers came through asking at the granary for certain men from Alexandria, and nobody in Karanis had known anything about any men from Alexandria. The one who stood up in his place had come from the city with a letter from the Cappadocian. He was young and he spoke a careful Greek, and he read to us out of a letter that had come out of the emperor's councils, where the bishops had been kept together until they agreed.

I do not follow these things as well as I should. But I heard him say one sentence twice, because he said it slowly and looked up from the letter to say it, as a man does with the line he has been told to make sure of. The Son, he said, is like the Father. Like him, as the scriptures say.

The old men round me nodded, because it sounded well. I did not nod. I stood there with the smell of the lamps and thought about the cousin from Bakchias, whom I had made in one morning out of my long acquaintance with Kastor, and who was like him in every particular I could name, and whom his wife would have given water at the door.

That is all I thought. I am a painter. I came home and ate my bread.

---

The second attempt was worse than the first, and I will be short about it.

I tried to read the old face through the ruin. I thought: the wax has moved, but it has not gone; what was on the board is still on the board, only in the wrong place. If I study how it fell, I can work out where it fell from. So I sat with the lime board in the light for two days, turning it, and I made drawings in charcoal on a whitened tablet of where the eye must have been, if this smear was the lid, and where the mouth must have been, if this fold was the lip. I found the corner of the left eye. I was almost sure of it. I found the line of the jaw on the right side, which the heat had spared.

I put these on a fresh sycamore board, the eye and the jaw and the ear and the stripe, exactly where they had been, and built the rest round them. It took four days. When it was done, Thermouthis, who is eleven and has no manners, looked at it and said, "Why is he angry?"

He was angry. I had put back a true corner of an eye and a true line of a jaw and joined them with my own guesses, and the guesses did not agree with the true parts, and the face was pulling against itself. It was worse than the cousin. The cousin had at least been one man.

I scraped that board too. That was ten days gone and two boards scraped and the lime board untouched, and I had begun to think I would have to go to Tamystha and give her back the oil.

---

Her son Pekysis came on the eleventh day to ask, from his mother, when the picture would be finished.

He came straight from the dykes, with the mud dried pale to the knee and his tunic tied up, and he stood in my door with the morning light behind him, because he did not want to bring the mud into the house. Thermouthis was at the brazier. I was at the table with the lime board, doing nothing to it.

I looked up, and he was standing exactly where the stool is.

I did not see it at once. What I saw at once was a young man in a doorway with mud on his legs who was waiting for me to answer him and was not going to wait long, because he had to be back on the dyke before the overseer counted. What I saw next was his left ear. Then the neck of his tunic, where it was pushed back off the shoulder. Then I stood up, which I do not do quickly now, and said, "Sit down."

"I have to be at the dyke."

"Then I will speak to the overseer. Sit down."

"On that?"

"On that. And do not laugh."

He had no intention of laughing. He sat on the stool with his hands on his muddy knees and looked at me as if I had lost my wits, and he was the wrong age by a year, perhaps two, and his mouth was his mother's, and he had none of his father's ease. He was not Kastor. But there was the brow. There was the set of the eyes under it, and the way the bone of the cheek came forward under the eye and then turned. There were the things that I could not find in my memory and could not find in the ruin, because they had never been in either place. They had been in a face. Here was a face they were in.

I should explain, for those who do not know the trade, why this is not the same as what I had done before. It would be easy to say: he copied the son because he could not remember the father, and the son resembled the father, and so the picture resembled the father; it is the cousin from Bakchias again, by another road. It is not. The cousin I had made out of a description. This I was making out of a sitter, and there is no amount of describing that adds up to a sitter. A sitter does not resemble himself. He is himself. Everything that goes on the board from him comes from the thing itself, and so it all agrees, the way a man's left hand agrees with his right without anyone arranging it.

What I did not have, I could not get from the boy, and I did not try to. That is the other half of it.

---

I lifted the old face that afternoon. I warmed the knife and laid the board flat and took the ruin off it a little at a time, the grey crust of the beard and the slid brow and the fold at the bottom, and I scraped the smoke out of the grain where it had gone in, until there was clean wood from the hairline to the collar. I kept the ear. I kept the stripe on the shoulder and the neck of the tunic. Those had come through the fire whole, and I had painted them from Kastor himself, twenty-six years before, and there was nothing I could put there now that would be truer than they were.

Pekysis sat three mornings. I spoke to the overseer, who is my sister's grandson, and he let the boy off the dyke till noon for a promise of a portrait of his own daughter at a price I will regret.

The first morning I did the ground and the dark side of the face and the brow. I did them from the boy, looking, putting down, looking again. My hand did the order as it always does, but this time the order had something to work on.

The second morning I did the eyes, and something happened that I had not expected, though I should have. When I came to the corner of the left eye I found that the boy's eye, which I was painting, met the line of the old ear, which I had kept, exactly as it ought to. I had not measured it. I had not tried to make it. The new work and the old work agreed with each other along the edge where they touched, because they had both been taken from the same face; or from two faces, if you like, but there was no seam.

The third morning I did the mouth and the light. The mouth I did not take from the boy. His mouth was his mother's, and I knew that, and I did not need a sitter to tell me Kastor's: Kastor's mouth was the thing he had laughed with through the whole of the first sitting, and I had told him I would paint it laughing, and I had not. I painted it now as it would be just before a man begins to laugh, when he is trying not to. That I could do from memory, because I was not making a face out of it. I was putting one thing into a face that was already there.

And the scar. Kastor had a white nick through the left eyebrow where a donkey had kicked him when he was a boy, and the boy on the stool had no such scar, being a better judge of donkeys. I put it in last, with the point of the cestrum, a drag of white through the dark of the brow. It took no time at all.

Then I let it cool.

---

Tamystha came on the morning after, early, before the light was level. Pekysis came behind her, and stood in the door, because of the mud.

I had set the board up on the table against the wall. She went and stood in front of it with her arms inside her mantle, as she had stood in front of the cousin, and I went and sat on the stool by the door, because my legs were tired and because it is the place I have always sat to wait.

She did not say anything for a long time. Then she put her hand out of her mantle and touched the brow of the picture, the left brow, with one finger, where the white nick was. The wax was cool by then and did not take the mark.

She turned round. Her son was in the doorway, with the light coming up behind him now, and she looked at him; not long, and not as if she were comparing anything. Then she looked at the board again.

"It is him," she said.

I did not answer, because she was not asking me.

She paid the wheat at harvest, every artaba of it, and the overseer's daughter is still waiting for her picture. When I went past their house at the end of Hathyr the board was back up in its niche, cleaned of its smoke-mark, and the shelf beneath it had been scrubbed white. Tamystha was standing on a stool on the other side of the room, with the lamp in her two hands, finding a nail for it on the far wall.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Athanasiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Athanasius of Alexandria, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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