Stone Virgin (29 page)

‘It’s dialect, isn’t it?’

‘The Veneto dialect, yes. Did you understand it?
Vaga
is
vadano
, you see. “Let the stars and the firmament sink … I want to be eternal.”’

She looked at him, smiling slightly. ‘
Me vogio êsse eterna
,’ she said again.

Their eyes met. Time and the world stood still for Raikes. ‘But you are,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know that?’

Her smile deepened with some quality of self-deprecation. Then as she continued to meet his gaze she grew serious again. ‘We are getting metaphysical,’ she said. ‘Never my strong point. Litsov is the one for that.’

Perhaps by some instinct of retreat she began to speak of her husband’s taste for Platonic speculation, realms in which she soon ceased trying to follow him; and from this to some of the places they had lived in before they found the island in the Lagoon. There had been spells in Greece and Paris and a suburb of London. ‘South-east twenty-seven,’ she said with a comical shudder. They had not had much money. She had taught Italian, private lessons, badly paid. Things had got better since Lattimer took a hand. He had been the first to see Litsov’s talent, she said. Saying this, speaking of Lattimer, she repeated the gesture he had seen before, passing a hand slowly down from her shoulder along the outer arm, a gesture at once consolatory and self-loving. It disturbed him now, as it had done before.

‘Have you known him long, Lattimer I mean?’

‘No, not so long …’

He had organized exhibitions for Litsov in London, Rome, New York. He had made sure the right people saw them, the right things got into the papers. He had built Litsov up. Seeing how he was with money he had arranged all that side of things too, so that a regular monthly sum came in. ‘Like a salary,’ she said. ‘Of course he handles all Litsov’s work too. My husband is glad to be free of these bothersome things. He does not like business. He hardly ever goes off the island, you know. He hates telephones even.’

Raikes nodded. This portrait was becoming familiar. She had the habit, rather unusual, of referring to her husband by his surname only, and in a tone that one might have used for an institution. The tone she used for Lattimer was different; it made him uneasy yet at the same time had a sort of unreality about it; he was ready to discount it as not really relevant. The stirrings of love are both slavish and obstinate; for Raikes the reality was the woman he saw before him, her movements and glances, the way she touched objects on the table with fostering gentleness, the look of sudden, almost painful attention that would come to her face.

He walked with her as far as the Misericordia – she had decided to walk to the Fondamenta Nuove and take the Burano–Torcello
motoscafo
from there. At the junction of the canals they stood for a few minutes longer before parting. They had talked away the afternoon. The first flush of sunset was in the sky now, faint and diffused but unmistakable; it was the time of day when the sun loses silver tone and begins to take fire, more ardent as the air darkens, like some blossoming of survival. The water had in it already that sobering of lead-rose which infuses melancholy into the sensuality of the city.

‘I wanted to say I was sorry,’ she said.

‘I can’t imagine what for.’

‘For what I said that day you came to lunch. You remember, don’t you?’

Pride struggled briefly and subsided. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I felt sorry as soon as I’d said it, for quite complicated reasons. When you told me you had wanted to be a sculptor, it made it seem worse.’

‘No need,’ he said. ‘You could not have known.’

‘Litsov is highly strung,’ she said. ‘He’s an invalid in a way.’

Taking this to refer to Litsov’s nerves, Raikes nodded. ‘That’s not why you came, is it?’ he said. He smiled and said rather teasingly, ‘You haven’t gone to all this trouble, choked yourself with dust, bored yourself with my conversation, just for an opportunity to say you were sorry?’

It was a tone he could not have used before this afternoon. And the look she gave him in reply, steady, conscious of power, this too could have come only after what they had said to each other.

‘Is that what you think?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

He watched her walk away, watched till her figure was lost among the moving forms of others in the dazzle of light at the entrance to the canal.

Later, back at work on the Madonna for what remained of the daylight, he was thinking how strange it was, how extremely strange, that he should be up here at all, engaged in this obsessively meticulous work. What could there be in the circumstances of his life hitherto, the Cambridge suburb where he had grown up, loving parents still there, still the same, school, college, the world of the museum, friends, sweethearts, ambitions, dreams, what could have led to it? Nothing in it seemed likely to provide clues as to why he was where he was now, high above the ground, enclosed by sheets of plastic, involved in dust, harassed by visions and speculations, occupied by thoughts of two ladies, one of stone and one of flesh.

He was over the half-way mark, though head and torso still remained. It had been those voluminous folds of cloak and gown that had taken up the time. Another month at most. Sealing the surface against further infection, another few days. And then …

In sudden distress he straightened up, switched off the cutter, hooked it over the scaffolding, pulled off his mask. He turned from the Madonna with some instinct of flight or revulsion. A couple of steps brought him to the edge of his enclosure. He was able to look down over the square at the usual mild activity of early evening. He saw the proprietor of the
gelateria
, in new and resplendent braces, standing in his doorway. Pigeons puffed out their breast feathers in the hazy sunshine. Directly below him two of the workmen were talking together, discussing football – their voices came clearly to him. Work for the day had finished. A party of small chattering girls in black and white, a young woman at their head, crossed the square in a straggling group.

Raikes felt a vague surprise at how quickly pain, or the prospect of pain, had followed upon that charmed talk in the sunshine. He looked over the weather-faded tiles of the roofs, the thickets of bulbous chimneys, the tall campanile of the Madonna dell’Orto, to the milky lilac of the Lagoon. With the sight of this encircling water it came to him again that he was after all on an island; Venice was an island, and within her there were others; he was in his plastic cell, in the enclosure of the
campo
; and the buildings that enclosed the
campo
were islanded in their turn. She too … She would be back at home again now. Three miles or so to the north-west, in a room, in a house, on an island, in the waste of the Lagoon – itself trapped there by the greater sea outside. She would be touching things, moving about. Pain at the thought of leaving merged with the wonder of her existence. Three miles of shallow water. Standing there, like a navigator seeking haven, he took a conscious and deliberate bearing on that luminous point.

Second Interlude

Sanctification

ZIANI PEERED AT
the blurred pink form of his manservant standing just inside the room. ‘Have the sheets come back from the printers?’ he said. ‘Come closer, I cannot see you. Why are you lurking there? Where are the sheets from the printers?’

Battistella advanced slowly. ‘They are not ready yet,’ he said. The thin wheeze of his breathing was audible in the quiet room. His ancient dusty wig was set straight by some chance this morning, giving him a look of unexpected severity.

‘Not ready yet?’ Although this was the answer he had been expecting, Ziani felt an emotion of rage too pure and justified for caution. ‘Not ready?’ His voice rose and cracked. ‘They have had more than two hundred pages.’

Frustration at having no one but Battistella to upbraid increased his fury. ‘Blockhead,’ he said loudly. ‘Have you no more to say than that?’ He slipped a hand under his robe and laid it over his heart; the violence he found there frightened him. ‘I will go elsewhere,’ he said, in a more subdued tone. ‘There are other printers in Venice. You think I cannot go myself, but I will surprise you, Battistella, I will get out my stick. The Ziani family has produced men of action for a thousand years, we have furnished the state with admirals and ambassadors. Do you think that I, last of the line, am incapable of telling this rogue of a printer to go and fuck himself?’

‘The master printer is ill, that is the reason,’ Battistella said slowly. ‘He has a fever.’

‘Ah.’ Ziani considered this. ‘Has he not assistants?’ he said after a moment or two. ‘The best printer in Venice, so you say, and he has no assistants?’

Battistella paused for so long that Ziani began to think that he had not heard. Finally he said, ‘He wants to do the work himself, he doesn’t want nothing going wrong with it, he won’t give it over to other hands. Don’t you want to know what is for lunch?’

‘Never mind lunch.’ Whether it was the long pause or this garrulous outburst – always a sign of disturbed feelings in Battistella – or the sudden change of subject, Ziani could not have said; but something here struck him as odd. This zeal of the printer came too close to what he wanted to believe; his appetite for flattery could not take such a gulp.

However, as he struggled with this, his agitated heart still not subsiding, Battistella began once more to speak about lunch and in particular a white sauce he had made.

‘White sauce, white sauce?’ Ziani said sharply, distracted by greed from his anxieties. ‘And what is it made of, this white sauce?’

‘It is made of sugar and sour sherry.’ Battistella paused a long moment. ‘And cinnamon,’ he added slowly. ‘And cloves. And oil of almonds.’

This soothed Ziani, his heart settled. Puzzlement remained, however, long after Battistella had been dismissed, there in the background of his mind as he resumed the story of Francesca and old Boccadoro and the Madonna. His narrative was going more smoothly now that the awful night of the Madonna’s coronation had been dealt with; unwillingness to arrive at this had held him back, as he now believed, imposed those loops and meanders on his style.

He paused to gather his thoughts and concentrate his forces. White sauce and printer’s fever alike receded. With calm and measured movements, he took up his pen, dipped it in the ink, and began to write.

My man Battistella and Francesca’s Maria between them distracted booby Bobbino, the watchdog Boccadoro had left behind, one plying him with wine while the other smiled on him – he was asleep and snoring long before Francesca and I returned. After our success at the tables we were able to bribe him to keep silent. He had no real loyalty to his master, merely a jealous sense of his own position in the household. Reassured on this score, encouraged in his lecherous hopes by Maria’s brilliant glances, bribed lavishly by us from our winnings, Bobbino ceased altogether to be a problem; in fact he was an asset to us, as Boccadoro, quite the poorest judge of human nature I have ever known, trusted him completely.

I must deal at this point with the comedy of his return from Verona. That same day, in the evening, he spoke to me. We were like characters in a play, acting a small scene but crucial to the plot, he red-faced after dinner, unbuttoned, his blunt head freed from the hot confinement of his wig, Pantalone complete; I the studious secretary at the desk, taking letters to his uncouth dictation. Suddenly he breaks off, looks over his spectacles at me and says:

‘Your medicine is working.’

‘Sir?’

‘Donna Francesca declares herself impressed.’

‘I am glad to hear that, believe me.’

‘She had thought you a hypocrite and a time-server.’

‘Had she so? That serves to show the danger of hasty conclusions.’

‘Indeed yes. Now she has come to admire your mind, though I must tell you that she does not find you physically prepossessing. I say this not to wound you but so that you should understand her feelings. Still, that only increases your moral authority. My dear fellow, you have worked wonders already. She has come to me today and she has said that she no longer considers it important to have her own apartment in town. That is a step in the right direction, to say nothing of the savings. I congratulate you.’

‘It is nothing. She is disposed to virtue and needs only to be counselled well.’

Pantalone scratches his bald pate with his thumb and pauses in momentary hesitation. ‘Use your influence,’ he says. ‘Follow this up.’

He pauses again. His little reddish eyes glance here and there like those of a haunted ferret. I see now that the moment has come for some further avowal. He is an innocent in matters of feeling, as I have said before, having spent his life amassing money; his nature is trusting, outside the world of finance; but he is a passionate man, with violence in his nature, and strong, though old – I am surprised he has not tried to force her, but such is the case.

After a moment he says, ‘I have every confidence in you.’

‘I shall study to deserve it.’ The raised head, the steadfast gaze.

‘Try to bring her closer to a sense of wifely duty. That is where you must aim.’

I know where to aim, I have hit the target already, dead centre, and it is not her duty, unless that is the name for what lies between her legs. But of course it is, for this Pantalone at least, it precisely does lie there. He is appealing to me. The moment has come.

‘I have hesitated to speak of this,’ I say, ‘out of delicacy and my respect for you. Believe me, I understand your situation, which is in no way your fault but springs from the perversity of this age, which brings discord and division even to the marriage bed. You need speak no further of it. Be assured that I have understood.’

He is listening to me with all his soul, his eyes at last stayed from their roaming, fixed in wonder at my powers of divination.