Stone Virgin (5 page)

Biagi assented at once. ‘
È la parte esposta
,’ he said, inclining his narrow, handsome head. ‘It is the exposed position.’

These words of the contractor’s lingered with a curious resonance in Raikes’s mind. ‘You might as well go down too, if you like,’ he said after a moment to Steadman. ‘I’ll stay up here a bit longer.’ His sense of awkwardness persisted. Steadman was there in an advisory capacity, not in the least as a subordinate. But his presence had become somehow oppressive. With relief he watched the two disappear one after the other over the edge of the platform.

He waited for a few moments, then moved up close to the Madonna, obeying some obscure impulse to engage the eyes which had seemed to avoid him; but they were without direction or regard, blind with soot, gummed by the long process of sulfation to mere slits in the face. Not eyes to greet joyful news, certainly; and joyful the news was always said to have been. On the other hand, perhaps not. She had not applied for the job after all, presumably had not even known she was in the running … Signor Biagi’s words returned to him.
La parte esposta
, the exposed position. Perhaps that was why the blocked eyes distressed him so. In
la parte esposta
one would tend to keep the eyes wide open …

He turned to look over the square. The fact that he knew precisely where he was did not lessen the strangeness of being there. He knew he was standing at the dead centre of the façade, eight feet above the arch of the main portal, thirty-two feet above the ground. Across the square the rows of tall Renaissance houses closed off the view; but to the east he could see clear across the rooftops to the pale rose campanile of Madonna dell’Orto, the water of the Lagoon and the white walls of the island cemetery of San Michele. Below him the pigeons continued their ploys, undeterred by the few people now sitting at the tables. No sign of either Steadman or Biagi. A stout man in braces, wearing a large white apron, stood in the doorway of the
gelateria
opposite. Three men emerged from the
sotoportego
that led off the square towards the canal of the Misericordia and the Ghetto Nuovo. They were talking together gravely, in the way of Venetians. One looked up towards him, peering slightly in the mild sun. Raikes was glad to think that he would soon be screened off.

He took a final look at the polluted stone of the Madonna. Some of this damage of course was irreparable; corrosion as severe as this would soften the detail forever; no one would ever see her now as she had been when she left the sculptor’s hand. But he would restore her as well as it could be done.
I will give you back your face
, he thought, looking at her.
I will make you whole again
.

These last words, too portentous for his own habit of thought, seemed to have been uttered elsewhere and implanted by some agency in his mind. At the same time he felt the salt breeze from the Lagoon on his face and in his hair; and as in moments of high solemnity nothing seems accidental, so this sudden quickening of the breeze seemed not to be, and his ardent isolation. And the devastated stone itself seemed at that moment to take on some extra fixity of stillness, oddly like a tremor, as if here too his vow had been registered.

*

The sense of having made a promise stayed with him for the rest of the day and it was still there in the evening when he came to make the first entry in his diary. He was tired but he had resolved to keep detailed notes of his progress from day to day, and he was faithful to his own resolves almost always. The diary would constitute a full and complete record; provide material for his report when he came to write it; perhaps even, suitably edited, prove a seminal study for those who came after.

Sitting at the table, against the window of his small apartment, Raikes felt elated at the prospect before him. This would be pioneering work. He was proposing to use on the Madonna a type of air-abrasion instrument, which had not as far as he knew been tried on any stone sculpture
in situ
, certainly not in Venice. At the end of the sixties they had used ultra-sonic dental equipment on the face of St Christopher, who like his Madonna was of Istrian stone and who was also in an exposed position, being high on the façade of the Madonna dell’Orto; and this had been successful, removing the black tears from the saint’s cheeks without damage to the stone below. But it was equipment designed for human teeth, not stone surfaces; the process had been too laborious, it had taken too long. It would have taken decades at that rate just to deal with the most spectacular damage. And Venice did not have decades, time was running out – much of her exterior stonework was past saving already.

Then in 1971, quite by accident, he had heard that air-abrasion techniques were being used at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington to clean American Indian buckskins. He had followed this up, found a firm in Oxford who made the machines under licence. It was a jeweller’s instrument really, designed to cut quartz into pieces small enough to put into watches; but it could clean as well as cut, if used properly. He had tried it out in England, at the museum where he worked, on various fragments of corroded stone and he had been dazzled by the results. It was the thought of this miraculous quartz-cutter that excited him as he sat there. There was the hope too, which he had mentioned to nobody, of casting new light on the Madonna, concerning whose history and attribution there were certain unresolved and puzzling elements. He drew the diary – a stout, stiff-backed affair – towards him, and made the first marks on the first page:

She exhibits the blotchy black and white appearance typical of Istrian stone undergoing transformation through combined weathering and air pollution. The degree of transformation in her case is advanced because she is high up, carved in the round and in a very exposed position. As one would expect it is in the recessed areas that the calcium sulphate and carbon crust has formed. The exposed convexities show bleached white where magnesium carbonate has been lost, for example on the middle of the forehead, front of nose, upper-lip, chin – there is a roughly straight bleached stripe, about three inches wide, from brow to chin. Similar effects of sooty deposit in the recesses and bleach on the salient parts are apparent throughout the draperies of the whole figure. It is intended to start the spraying process tomorrow and we shall see what effect that has.

In the afternoon went as arranged to the offices of the
Soprintendenza
for my interview with their representative, Signor Manatti. He was affable enough but I was surprised at one point to hear him express doubts about the wisdom of restoring stonework in Venice – or anywhere else either, I suppose he meant.
Frammettersi
was the verb he used, to tamper. Rather offensive. The beauty of time-worn objects and so on. This is an unenlightened view but unfortunately still common – though as I say I was surprised to find it here. He actually spoke as if the decay itself were in the nature of a protective covering, a
patina del tempo
, as he called it. Quite erroneous in the case of Istrian stone. It turns out he has not been to see the Madonna personally, though the scaffolding has been up for some weeks now and he could easily have done so. It isn’t a patina at all of course, it is a disease.
Malattia del tempo
, it should be called. You might as well say leprosy is a patina. All this was before we looked at the photographs together. He was impressed, as he was bound to be, by the details of the actual disfigurement, which are quite horrendous in close-up.

The photographs were on the table beside him and he glanced at the top one now, as if to find confirmation in the streaked, encrusted draperies, the bemonstered face. It was outrageous, what had been done to her, this insensate pumping of SO
₂
into the atmosphere.

He looked away, at the dark surface of the canal below his window. It was not very late, but the narrow
fondamenta
that ran alongside the canal was silent and deserted. The house was in Canareggio, a quiet district, with an air of sadness and abandonment about it, which Raikes found congenial. An American named Wiseman, whom he had met three years previously when working at the Madonna dell’Orto, had found the apartment for him and he had liked its high ceilings and sparse, sombre furniture from the first.

Outside there was a thin vaporous mist in the air and light from some source he could not identify lay over a section of the canal. He watched the gleaming water lap against its containing wall, sidling at the wet brick, gently but at the same time urgently, lapping into light, falling back into mist, with a persistent rhythm.

He felt obscurely disturbed by this rhythmic motion. Suddenly, unbidden and unwelcome, Steadman’s face came into his mind, and that craned head, awaiting Miss Greenaway’s return. Was it pigeons or sparrows that Aristotle said were addicted to venery? He must have seen her go or he would not have been expecting her to come back. She would probably have been to the public lavatory just off the
campo
: by great good fortune there was a well-kept one there. So all that time, he thought, while I was absorbed in the Madonna, Steadman was holding himself in readiness for a brief flash of Miss Greenaway returning from the loo; while I was contemplating damaged stone, his thoughts were centred on undamaged flesh, albeit engaged in lowly functions. Or virtually undamaged, I suppose. Was that why I found his presence there suddenly irksome, because he had debased my first communion with the Madonna, intruded thoughts of a carnal nature? No, not the intrusion itself but my vivid perception of it. I was invaded by his thought processes, as if my own mind had no walls. Miss Greenaway means nothing to me. Yet for those few moments Steadman’s yearning to get inside her knickers became my yearning. Was it repentance for this that led to my vow?

It was his habit, when troubled or alarmed, to take refuge in intricate thoughts; and he did this now, thinking of the tugs and runs of the currents out in the Lagoon, the unimaginably complex motions that had resulted in this small eddying here, this lapping love of the water against the brick. The sea was like a preoccupied god, whose main concerns always lay elsewhere. He was calmed by this sense of an indifferent ocean, and after a moment took up his pen once more:

As the statue is restored it should be possible to make further attempts at an accurate attribution. In the last fifty years she has been credited to a number of sculptors, among them artists as different as Arturo Rizzi and Pietro Lombardi. The best argued case is probably Memmer’s. He attributes the Madonna to Bartolomeo Bon, on grounds of stylistic analogy with the statue of Justice in the superstructure of the Porta della Carta, which is indubitably Bon’s. But his work is heavy and inert, to my mind at least, it has none of the tension of the Madonna. Of course he ran a big workshop and employed numerous assistants, some of them more gifted than their master. In Memmer’s day it was at least possible to see the statue. How terrible to think that all this havoc has been caused in little more than twenty-five years of industrial belching.

In my view the main problem lies in determining the early history of the statue. I am convinced that if this were known it would lead us to the man who carved her. We know she was not intended for the place she occupies now. The church has clear early-Renaissance features and is fifty years later at least. So why was she put there? And in any case, why was she not installed at once, in 1496, when the church was consecrated? Why did she have to wait so long – more than 250 years? And where was she all that time? We know she was put there in 1743. Dalmedico is quite specific on the point in his
Annals
, and there are also references in Sanudo and Verci. Dalmedico’s account is the fullest but he does not say where she came from. Presumably he didn’t know. All three mention the fact that she was thought to have miraculous powers.

Raikes paused again. He was consumed with eagerness to solve these problems. Dalmedico described the benefactor as a merchant of pious life and good repute, but this was a mere formula. He did not supply the man’s name; and there was no inscription anywhere inside the church. All the information available concerned the ceremony of installation, the Bishop of Venice officiating and several civic dignitaries present. It amounted to very little really. Of course he had been writing a hundred years or so after the events described; but he would have had access to ecclesiastical records. There was plenty of detail elsewhere in his monumental work. Why so little here?

Raikes sat back. If the records had existed at all, there were only two possibilities: between 1743 and the time Dalmedico came to write this section of the
Annals
the relevant documents must have been either lost or suppressed …

At this moment there came a light tap on the door and his landlady Signora Sapori entered and stood just inside the room asking him if he would care to have some coffee and a piece of apple pie. ‘
Torta di mele
,’ she repeated, thinking he had not understood. ‘
È casalinga
, it is home-made,’ she said, smiling in the doorway. She was a little wizened woman in her early seventies, quick in movement, with bright inquisitive eyes, like a squirrel’s; dressed always in black, with a brief, immaculate white apron across her meagre loins. ‘He will try it, the apple pie?’ she said.

Raikes was touched by this kindness. Snacks in the evening were no part of the arrangement. Wiseman had said, in recommending the place, that Signora Sapori was a very kind and nice person. He was returning the smile and beginning to say that he would like some, yes, and how kind of her, when quite suddenly and unexpectedly, and in a way most uncharacteristic of his normal reticence, he was assailed by a strong impulse to put his hand up Signora Sapori’s skirt, worse than that, to throw skirt and apron up and over, to strip away whatever lay beneath, make free with her wasted delta. The eagerness of this impulse and the terrible tumescence that attended it he felt must show in his face, but apparently not, for Signora Sapori’s expression did not change. ‘In a few minutes, then,’ she said, nodding, pleased that he wanted some.