Miro Petrović

Born in 1954 in Klobuk (B&H), lives in Mostar (B&H).

THE TWO OF THEM

(For Braco Dimitrijević)

In the same year in the same village whose name we do not know for now in the pure ozone of the renaissance two mothers bore each into her own progeny a son.

Together they grew as neighbours as olives grow and in their yards skinned their knees.

They suckled their mothers and waited for their tired fathers from the plough-lands and fields or from the Sunday hunt in the north of the Apennines.

When they grew up a bit you could see from Mars and Venus that in the painter's trade they were both equally and excellently skilled.

One of them thinks of a golden hill full of radiance, the other one is already spilling the sun from his hands above it. One of them floods the sea with blue the other listens to music from a shell.

And the village marvelled at the two fellows. Nobody knew which was the better painter.

At that time through the village came the duke of Milan going hunting with his posse.

Hounds, falcons and horsemen at the cross-roads took the path to the right and so the duke of Milan in the golden autumn of 1482 chanced to pass by the yard of one of those two painters.

Astonished the duke stood before the sight and in a moment invited the painter to his castle, which the impoverished painter readily accepted.

He was thirty years old at the time.

The village is called Vinca. The painter was called Leonardo da Vinci.

I am Miro Petrović.

The name of that other painter in the village, by whom the duke did not chance to pass to this day no one has discovered.

Translated by Ulvija Tanović