Stone Virgin

by Barry Unsworth

  Later, when I had started on the stone, she spoke of others, and this is more to the point my lord. She made references to a protector, a rich man with an illustrious name, also to a pimp known as Strascino because he drags one leg as a result of syphilis. He took money from her perhaps for protection which she with her grand ideas called a fee, un onorario and she called him her mezzano as if he were a conversationalist and connoisseur instead of a leg-dragging syphilitic puttaniere but it was typical of her to call things always by higher names and this was not exactly lying because she persuaded herself of the truth of it, all this was mixed up with her ambitions, more like daydreams, she wanted to be thought of as a cortigiana, not a common whore. Also as I have said she liked to make mysteries about herself. She spoke of Strascino always with some fear and once she forgot he was supposed to be the mezzano and she told me he and another had broken a girl’s ankles and the bones never set properly. She did not give his real name but I think he is that Stefano Benintendi, described as trader, who has testified that he saw me with Bianca in the area of San Maurizio the night she was killed. A tissue of lies from beginning to end my lord. A common pimp and they take his word against me. Alone and unsupported he would not have dared. There is someone behind this Strascino and I think now it is the same one that Bianca spoke of, calling him usually her protector sometimes her uncle. I know this man visited her at regular times because she once had to leave me hastily when his visit was due. She was frightened on that occasion of being late, she was more afraid of him than of this miserable Strascino. Bianca’s fears were numerous but none of them deeply lodged or so it seemed, she could not hold things long in her mind, for example fear would quickly turn into something else some coquetry or private dream or gossip of the day and so I did not always pay attention.

  The weather was very hot and the smells of the canal came in with the low tide. I was sweating as I worked on the clay. I worked in shirt and drawers only and still I ran with sweat. Moulding clay is hot work my lord. She was standing at the window as usual in her vesti di madonna. She had been telling me that her mother was connected to a noble family, by birth she implied. The block stone was there where they had left it in the middle of the room. It cast a straight shadow between us. I did not believe what she said about her mother and in this I was right because later when we had got into the habit of fucking she told me her mother was a serving woman, she never spoke much of a father and I do not think she knew who he was but she once said he was a French officer, which also I did not believe. It is possible that her mother was a servant in a noble house and if so she may have procured Bianca for some member of the family and that would explain the apartment and so on but Bianca invented so much it was difficult to separate truth from lies and there was no reason then for making the effort. But I sometimes felt an impulse to shake her out of all this fantasy give her a sight of more important things by telling her about God’s favour that had been shown to me and about the light I carried within me and which sometimes shone from my skin though only certain people could see it.

  However I refrained which was a good thing because I did not need to boast, Bianca knew it all the time not perhaps as visible light, she was not able to see that but she was affected by the power which came from me, and this was proved before long. She had been telling me about these fictitious connections of her mother’s. I told her to be silent as I did not want her mouth to move. But after a while she exclaimed and made a groping gesture and then she slipped down on to the floor and her face was as white as her gown and her eyes were closed. I gave her some water, raising her head so she could drink, and I loosened the ribbon that held her gown together at the neck. Her eyes opened but they were not looking at anything and she began trying to sit up but she could not and made groping fumbling movements with her hands, then I suddenly saw that this feebleness was the result of my power that God had given me so I became excited at once and I began to kiss her. Her lips were cold. Her eyes were able now to look at things, they were on my face. I was myself unable to see properly because of the heat that had risen to my head. I lifted up her gown of the madonna and I was pulling her legs apart, they had no resistance, she gestured to me to wait I think to inspect her to see she was free from disease, the usual courtesy of whores, but I could not wait, I threw her back and mounted her at once her body was cold she cried out when I went into her – a cry of pain my lord – and I knew this was a certain sign from God that she had become a virgin again for me. After that we did it often. If she was cold that first time she was hot always afterwards, she was solis filia and calida if not callida. (You will remember the pun of Lipsius my lord.) Bianca had a gift for love. She was not clever, una cervellina, but she knew how to give pleasure. Always she would keep on her Madonna things because I wished it so. I never saw her naked when we fucked only when we washed each other afterwards from the bucket. And she took no money except for the time spent modelling.

  All this was afterwards. I had started on the stone then, I had made those first cuts that are so terrible. It was a good piece, freshly quarried, free from flaws, with no hard outer skin. A block should be set up and carved according to the lines of its bed otherwise it will split and break off. But this was a fine piece. All that summer I laboured to release the form contained in the block. I worked nearly naked but still the sweat came off me. I used an iron point for removing the spawl you must keep a steady rhythm of striking with the point because this is less tiring also by a regular stroke your life is moving at the same pace as the life of the stone your thoughts keep exact pace with your material as God’s did when he made the world and that is why men can have some understanding of the nature of God as is explained in the writings of Origen. So therefore carving is rhythm my lord, no man can carve well who has no rhythm in his strokes either with point or claw.

  The claw was no use for this hardest of stones. I used a granite axe, bouncing the blade on the surface of the stone, bruising the stone to give tooth for the chisel. Day after day striking at the stone. You must not cut too early with a fine tool, this closes the surface, takes life from the image. I would work with the sweat coming into my eyes and this tension of breaking the stone down to free the shape imprisoned within it because the stone resists it aspires to be itself always and this struggle I felt in my body through the shudder of the stone and the joy of it I discharged on her, on Bianca. She was there in her robes. I would feel my cock growing and this was a sin because I was shaping the Holy Virgin but I could not prevent it, the heat rose to my head, I could not see. My elements are not well mixed owing to the circumstances of my birth. I made her lie down with me in the dust of the floor.

  So in this way the work went on and by the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady I was within half a finger’s breadth of the final form and ready to begin with the narrow chisel. Bianca came almost every day. There was no need for her to come so often but she did. She would put on the vesti di madonna. Sometimes she brought things, Trebbiano wine, galantined meat, red musk melons from the Litto Maggior, almonds coated with sugar. Once a big basket of cherries. She would sweep up the room, bring a wet cloth for my face. Often she sang as she moved about. All that time she must have been frightened. They took me to see her drowned body, I saw the marks of the cord. I would not have hurt her, I needed her for my model. She

  Restoration 1

  * * *

  The Lower Draperies

  1

  SOME FEELING OF superstition prevented him from looking up at the Madonna as he approached, as if it might be unlucky to have a premature view of her. Even mounting the narrow ladder he did not look up, not until there were only three or four rungs left and his eyes were level with her knees. Here for a moment or two he stopped, obliging Steadman to stop also and below Steadman Signor Biagi, the contractor whose men had put up the scaffolding. These two stood on the middle rungs of the ladder, flapping slightly in the March breeze, while Raikes gazed up at the statue.

  Everything that wa
s known about her he knew; nevertheless her appearance at these close quarters came as a strong surprise, almost a shock. She was imposing, of course, even awesome, seen thus from below, but it was not mainly this, nor the appalling damage to her, the bemonstering accretions of time and chemical pollution – these he had expected from his study of the photographs: what he had not been prepared for was her unprotectedness, the licence of the air around her, something none of the photographs had conveyed. She stood clear of the façade, as subject to weather as any rock on the shore, but in a way that her human image made seem stoical, and which Raikes found unexpectedly moving. It was as if her disfigurement too, the blackened, blinded face, the crusted robes, were part of this patience and endurance.

  Becoming aware of the men waiting below him, with their own brand of patience and endurance, he started climbing again, leaving the ladder at last to set his feet on the wooden platform, no more than five feet square, bolted firmly to its scaffolding poles against the wall, too close, Raikes noted, too zealously flush with the façade – the boards had skimmed the brick, scraping a band of fresher pink. No point in mentioning it now of course: Biagi was a key figure in the enterprise and had to be kept well disposed.

  By now the others had climbed up on to the platform beside him. ‘Well, here she is,’ he said to Steadman. ‘Isn’t she terrific?’

  Steadman nodded with his usual gloomy sagacity and after a moment said, ‘Poor bloody cow, she’s had a pasting.’

  The deliberate impiety of this and the flat, non-committal tone irritated Raikes, seeming to accuse him of emotionalism. He had known Steadman for some years now but it continued to strike him as extraordinary that a man who at thirty-one – two years younger than himself – was an authority on Venetian Gothic should go on affecting this hard-boiled manner. You’ll be talking out of the corner of your mouth next, he felt like saying, almost said.

  He kept his eyes on the Madonna. Her face with its badger stripe of bleach was averted, glancing away across the rooftops to the pale rim of the Lagoon; but her body was inclined towards him, right arm laid across the breast, left held low and slightly extended inwards, as if to ward off some threat. She had turned her body, though not her eyes, from the vehement archangel who had come to her with the news. Gabriel would have been on the other side, presumably – one of the several mysteries about her was that her Gabriel was not known to exist anywhere. ‘I hadn’t realized’, he said, ‘how far her trunk turns from the plane. Unusual for the period.’

  The judicious tone of this had been intended as a rebuke, but he saw now that Steadman’s eyes were not on the statue at all; he was craning to look over the near corner of the campo below them. Down there among the café tables, pigeons were going through routine mating procedures, the males strutting and fluffing themselves out and trying to hop on to the females, who placidly side-stepped and foiled them. Both the fluffed and the unfluffed paused frequently to peck around for crumbs. Love and bread together, Raikes thought vaguely. Could it be the pigeons that Steadman was interested in? Then he saw one of the Tintoretto people, Miss Greenaway, whom they had met earlier, pass rapidly round the corner of the church, a whisk of plum-coloured pullover, jeans, short fair hair. She disappeared, presumably into the chapterhouse, which had been turned into a workshop since it was the only neighbouring building large enough to accommodate Tintoretto’s vast canvases. Restoring these was the main British project at the church – his affair a mere sideline.

  So Steadman had been craning his neck for that. He looked with some curiosity at his colleague, who returned the gaze seriously – Steadman almost never smiled. Behind him he heard Signor Biagi shifting his feet. He turned and said rather awkwardly, ‘Può scendere se vuole.’ He had been discourteous, he felt suddenly, in not speaking to the contractor before, in allowing himself to be so absorbed by the statue. ‘Va bene,’ he said, smiling. ‘Everything is fine.’

  Biagi smiled good-humouredly and began moving towards the ladder. ‘Oh, there is another thing,’ Raikes said, and he began in his careful Italian to explain that he would need material of some kind, tarpaulin or heavy plastic sheets, plastic would be better, it admitted more light, something that could be secured to the scaffolding to make an enclosure, thus affording privacy and also protection from the weather, especially in the early days. ‘Farà freddo qui,’ he said. ‘The wind comes across from the Lagoon.’

  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 elat
ed 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: