Stone Virgin (28 page)

In the shapeless overalls, with the cap covering her hair and the mask over her face, she was unrecognizable, a creature metamorphosed. He stared at her for a moment, then put on his own mask and cap. First shaking out the cable to keep it clear of the cutter, he crouched before the Madonna, Chiara crouching beside him – they were shoulder to shoulder, almost touching, like devotees at an altar. The faint drone of the machine filled the enclosure, followed a moment later by the hissing assault on the stone.

Raikes resumed at a point slightly higher than where he had left off, so that she would be able to see the contrast. Here, where the robe was gathered up to the high girdle, the folds were intricate. He advanced the nozzle close to the surface, withdrew it as the encrustation thinned. Delicately, savagely, the glass crystals thrashed at the stone. Dust rose around them, glinting briefly in the light.

When he stopped a narrow strip of perhaps three inches had been reclaimed. He turned his head to look at her. Through dust-thickened air and misted planes of plastic, her face seemed suspended, indistinct, as if seen through some slightly opaque medium. Raikes felt that sea-shell resonance in his ears, he experienced a sort of swooning tremor and instinctively clutched for balance at the Madonna’s knee. This passed at once. For a few seconds longer they crouched there, silent and motionless at the base of the statue. Then Chiara stood up, removed the cap and mask, shook out her hair. ‘That was really very interesting,’ she said. ‘Thank you for letting me watch.’

Raikes got up slowly. ‘It’s a long job, as you see,’ he said. Retrieving her coat from its polythene wrapper, helping her on with it, he felt, though more faintly, the usual belated fear, as of danger recognized only after escape. ‘Still, we’re getting on,’ he said.

She turned to face him. ‘You must be very patient,’ she said. She had smiled as she spoke, but now the smile faded and she looked rather attentively at him, though she said nothing more.

‘Yes … Well, I don’t know if it is patience. A kind of crab-like tenacity.’ In a few moments, he thought, if I don’t do something to prevent it, she will be climbing back down the ladder. I will go down too, of course. At the foot of the ladder she will thank me again, then she will walk away, back to home and husband. Better do nothing, let her go … ‘Do you fancy a cup of coffee or a drink or something?’ he said.

‘What a good idea. A drink would be nice. As a matter of fact, I’ve got one or two things to tell you. Nothing very much, I’m afraid. I’ve had a reply from my aunt – the one in Rome that I told you about. The guardian of the family secrets.’

It was exactly what Lattimer had replied, and in exactly the same tone, when he had asked for whisky.
What a good idea
. ‘It was very good of you to bother,’ he said.

‘Well, we can talk about it over the drink.’

7

SUNLIGHT BELOW SEEMED
stronger, dazzling almost. Pigeons fluttered round their feet as, watched by the workmen, they set off across the square. By unspoken consent they went past the café at the far corner, through the dimness of the covered passageway, out into the light of the
campiello
beyond. They crossed the Misericordia canal and turned left along the
fondamenta
. It was warm here, in the shelter of the wall, and they walked slowly. Only occasional remarks were exchanged between them but Raikes was not conscious of constraint, though he still felt a kind of astonishment at her presence; he had not succeeded yet in detaching her from the surroundings of their one previous meeting, so much had she seemed to be part of these, a captive almost, though a splendid one, confined there like the shining bronze fragments of herself.

They were in the Rio Terra della Maddalena now, among what seemed a sudden density of people, tourists for the most part, thronging the way, clustered in thicker groups round stalls laid out with trinkets and souvenirs, Murano glassware, silk scarves, gondolier hats. He was again reminded, suddenly and disagreeably, of Lattimer.
They are like flies
. It was true, in a way: there seemed, in the contrast between the moving throng down the centre of the street and the fingering, exploratory stillness of the clusters at the stalls, some enactment of the pattern of insects. As if they had found some sweetness, or decay, and settled …

‘Crowded, isn’t it?’ he said. He was beginning to regret coming this way instead of making for the quiet backwaters of San Alvise, north of the church.

‘The season is beginning,’ she said. ‘But the area around the Maddalena is usually quiet. It is off the beaten way. People go straight through to Santa Fosca.’

‘You know the city well.’

‘Quite well, I think. But I have not spent so much time here, really. What you have to do in Venice is to get rid of all notions of order and logic and rely on a primitive sense of direction. That seems to suit me.’

‘Why, because you are primitive?’ Raikes said, smiling. ‘It’s probably genetic. The Fornarini family must have Venice printed on their chromosomes by this time.’

In fact the
campo
was almost deserted. There was a small café with two wrought-iron tables, one on either side of the door, facing towards the elegant Renaissance well-head in the middle of the square, and the circular construction of the church beyond. One of the tables was occupied by an elderly couple, speaking German; the other one they took.

Here in the sunshine, facing each other across the narrow table, they drank Carpano and talked for what was perhaps two hours, though the experience had no dimension of time in Raikes’s mind. Visual perspectives too were simplified or obliterated. Beyond their table, beyond Chiara’s face and the words and looks they exchanged, the near world and the far – buildings, people passing, the waiter, the couple at the next table – lost all distinction. There was only the talk and the small, momentous events that accompanied it, clink of ice, slide of sunlight on the glasses, her gestures, the changing expressions of her face.

‘My aunt,’ she said, ‘first of all, before I forget. I’m afraid there’s not much to tell. The Fornarini family never owned a house in San Giovanni Crisostomo, at least as far as she knows. The records are not complete it seems, far from it in fact, there aren’t any voting lists to go on or anything of that kind. So it’s just possible. Anyway it didn’t belong at any time to Piero Fornarini, who was Bishop of Venice when the Madonna was installed. He seems to have been a licentious character. Even my aunt admits that, and she is very protective about the family name. The only mention, again according to my aunt, is in a letter he wrote to his cousin. There’s a manuscript copy of this among the papers. It seems that the donor of the statue, presumably the original owner, had agreed to pay a fixed yearly sum to the church on condition his name was not mentioned. Piero suggests that since they can’t call the man by his proper name they could refer to him as
Cornadoro
, Golden Horns. He doesn’t say why.’

‘If he doesn’t say, the cousin must have known.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And nothing about these miraculous powers of hers?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. It’s difficult to think of Piero in connection with miracles. There’s a story in the family that he didn’t choke on a bone at all but died laughing at what my aunt calls
una barzelletta sconcia
, a scurrilous anecdote.’

‘I wonder if he was listening to it or telling it.’

‘I don’t know … I’m afraid this has not been much help.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Raikes said. ‘If I can garner enough details, perhaps it will all come together, sooner or later. I know more than I did. I know to my own satisfaction at least that the Madonna was commissioned in 1432 by a monastic order recently settled in Venice and carved in that same year by an obscure artist from northern Italy. The monks didn’t use her, I don’t know why.’ He looked away across the square. ‘The thing is like a great sponge,’ he said with sudden intensity. ‘Saturated with the facts. I just don’t know how to get hold of it, where to press.’ But he knew as he spoke that this was not it, it was not frustration he had felt but grief, a sense of loss, as if he had been cheated somehow of a dear possession.

She was looking at him curiously. ‘Does it matter so much to you? To find out I mean.’

She had herself, he realized, not shown much interest in these details. She had told him once that she did not greatly care about the past.

‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘I have undertaken it, you see. It would be like leaving the Madonna half-restored.’

‘And do you always do what you undertake?’

He could see no hint of derision in her face, only sympathy and interest. ‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘I abandoned my biggest undertaking something like eight years ago.’

‘What was that?’

Raikes hesitated again. Years of reticence made it difficult; but he had begun already, in a way; and the urge to bring her closer was very strong.

‘I wanted to be a sculptor at one time. I was at art school, you know, not university – I didn’t train as an art historian. St Martin’s, in London. I did sculpture there.’

‘What made you change your mind?’

‘I didn’t change my mind exactly. I mean I didn’t stop wanting to do it.’

He looked away from her again, at the tall old houses lining the near side of the square, noting automatically the ogival door of the nearest one, with its reliefs of saints and angels above the arch. Late Gothic. ‘I realized that I wasn’t good enough,’ he said, and found that his lips had stiffened a bit with some residue of the old pain. ‘It took me several years. I was always slow to realize things. Very tenacious, you know.’

When he looked back at her face he saw that it wore the slightly strained look of close attention which he had come to recognize as one of her expressions.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘No need. I got over it years ago.’

‘I don’t believe you were no good.’

He smiled, touched by this obvious intention to please him. ‘It was a mental thing,’ he said, ‘like everything with me. I think I saw it too idealistically. I saw it in terms of making a contribution and so on. The wrong attitude. A real artist doesn’t think in those terms. The trouble is, or was, that I am bad at compromising, in that sort of situation anyway. When I went into museum work it seemed to me that I had made an absolute choice. I’ve never tried to sculpt since then. It was the kind of choice, you see … Not like other things. It was like choosing between two different ideas of oneself, two completely different modes of existence. What bothers me is that I
defined
myself. People shouldn’t have to do that.’

He paused, looking directly at her. ‘I remember the day I put in for the post,’ he said. ‘I felt I had turned to stone.’

She was looking down at the table, the long dark lashes lowered over her eyes. ‘I don’t know much about it,’ she said slowly, ‘but I have a feeling that the choice is not so final as you have thought. You are young enough to do anything you want. Besides, the work you are doing now is important.’

Exalted by this, Raikes became unusually voluble. He told her about his work at the Madonna dell’Orto, four years previously – his first visit to Venice – how they had worked on the blackened cheeks of St Christopher with an ultra-sonic dental drill, the labour of it, the ridiculous slowness. ‘We had nothing else,’ he said. ‘It was like trying to paint Westminster Bridge with a toothbrush.’ He had known that something else must be found, had stumbled upon this air-abrasion technique which was much better, but still not fast enough – not if you considered how much there was to be done. In London, before he came away, he had been experimenting with a chemical mudpack based on magnesium silicate, which you could apply and seal in and leave for a month or more, set up a violent bacterial reaction, which would devour the sulphated crust. ‘You could get rid of 90 per cent of it like that,’ he told her eagerly. There was beauty in it, a kind of natural justice, harnessing the voracious bacteria, previously the very allies of decay.

All the enthusiasm of his nature came out. He talked to her as he had talked to no one for years. He told her about the Bologna Conference of 1969, the first of its kind ever to be held and one of the formative experiences of his life. It was there that he had heard the first full analysis of the chemical causes of stone decay, made by Giorgio Terraca, at that time Director of the Centre of Conservation and Restoration in Rome. Terraca had illustrated his talk with a set of pictures of stone samples, magnified five hundred times. These had shown the fibres that make up the stone, tightly knit at first, bursting apart under the pressure of calcium sulphate.

‘You saw the whole process,’ Raikes said. ‘I can’t tell you the effect it had on me. It was like watching Armageddon in slow motion, literally like seeing the big bang that will end the world – not a whimper but a bang. Decay is the wrong word for what happens. The stone is blown apart. I understood then that I wanted the world to go on even after I had ceased to be a part of it. Not for the sake of our children and all that stuff.’ He floundered a little. ‘Just to continue, that’s all,’ he said.

She was listening to him intently, that slight expression of strain back on her face. It was not to understand what he was saying, he suddenly saw, but to understand
him
. Me, he thought, incredulously. Me, Simon Raikes. Vaguely at first, only half-perceived, like some shift in music, he felt the humility of this thought change and quicken. He looked at her face, the clear lines of the temples and cheekbones, the curve of the mouth, the long, strange-coloured eyes. ‘I want it all to go on,’ he said.

After a moment or two she said, ‘I am not so interested in things if I am not there to see them. That is too abstract for me, that whole idea. I want to exist whether the world exists or not. Do you know the poetry of Biagio Marin? He lives in Grado, in the Lagoon. He sums it up for me. “
Che vaga pur a fondo le stelle e’ l’firmamento … me vogio êsse eterno
.” I have known that poem since I was a little girl.’