Stone Virgin

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘But you think a northern Italian, who had worked in Tuscany?’

  ‘Not necessarily worked there. It would have been enough for him to come into contact with Tuscan artists, like the Lamberti, or Nanno di Bartolo, who are known to have been in Venice in the 1420s. There was a lot going on here at the time. Foscari was extending the Ducal Palace, an enormous building project. The republic was rich, the pay was good, people came flocking from all over the place.’

  ‘I wonder where the Gabriel is,’ Raikes said.

  ‘The messenger boy? Dismembered in some mason’s scrapyard or lurking about in a cloister somewhere. Perhaps he was never made. One thing’s certain though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Whoever the sculptor was, if he really intended that left arm to seem to be guarding the pudenda, which is certainly what it looks like, then it is unique among depictions of the Annunciation, she has a unique left arm.’

  Steadman paused, looking across the square. ‘That in itself would be profoundly original,’ he said. ‘Oh God, here come the Stakhanovites.’

  The Tintoretto people were trooping diagonally across the square towards them, in loose arrowhead formation, with their leader Barfield at the head. All were wearing navy-blue boiler suits.

  ‘Those things must be special issue,’ Steadman said. ‘Birmingham City Galleries, boiler suits navy, art restorers for the use of. They’ve had their sandwich in the sacristy, now they’re coming for their coffee.’

  There was a certain sourness in his tone. His efforts to detach Miss Greenaway from the tribal unit had not so far met with much success. None of the Tintoretto team was ever seen without the others, they conversed almost entirely among themselves and their days seemed to follow a pattern of ritual observances.

  Having reached the café enclosure they seemed to be about to make for a separate table, but Steadman called out a greeting and after slight hesitation they approached and began to commandeer chairs from the tables around. ‘How’s it going?’ Steadman said, when they were all seated.

  Miss Greenaway laughed briefly and mirthlessly, as if thereby hung a tale. She seemed, however, flushed, Raikes thought, and he wondered if she was more aware of Steadman’s interest, and more responsive, than her rather bluff and forthright style would indicate.

  For a while after this laugh there was silence among the group as if that might be thought sufficient response. Then Barfield, whose title was Scientific Officer, a neat, sallow man with a visionary way of widening his eyes, said, ‘You are not going to believe this.’

  ‘Try us,’ Steadman said.

  ‘It has taken us all this time just to get the paintings off the wall, I tell you no lie.’

  ‘It has been a rush,’ the other assistant said. She was older and grimmer than Miss Greenaway and had a perm and a wedding ring. ‘It has been a race against time,’ she said.

  ‘My God,’ Steadman compressed his lips and nodded slowly. ‘Racing to get them down,’ he said. ‘Who said the epic is defunct?’

  This sarcasm was so crude that Raikes immediately became hot with embarrassment, thinking how much it would wound the Tintoretto people; but to his surprise he saw that they all seemed to be taking the remarks at face value.

  ‘They started taking up the floor today,’ Owen, the fattish Art Consultant said, his glasses shining. ‘That didn’t help, I can tell you. It did not help, did it, Gerald?’

  The waiter, whose name was Angelo, came to take the order, and while this was going on Miss Greenaway, still looking flushed, began to undo the top buttons of her boiler suit. She was wearing a white T-shirt underneath.

  ‘Taking the floor up, were they?’ Steadman said. ‘My God. So your footing was threatened, was it?’ But his heart wasn’t in it now; he had been distracted by Miss Greenaway’s unbuttoning. Angelo too seemed interested, remaining at their table some time after the order had been given.

  ‘The workmen are in there now,’ Owen said. ‘The Soprintendenza alle Gallerie are doing it. Italian funds apparently.’

  ‘They are going to put in a completely new floor,’ Miss Greenaway said. ‘Christ, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ She slipped the upper part of her boiler suit off her shoulders and allowed it to fall over the back of her chair. Beneath the close-fitting T-shirt her breasts were outlined, beautifully large and round.

  ‘I hope the mains services won’t be affected,’ Raikes said. In the midst of these words, without warning and therefore without possibility of control, an intense and turgid interest in Miss Greenaway’s bosom invaded him – it seemed like an invasion, a quick-shooting spore of lechery, wafted on a resistless breeze from he knew not where, sprouting almost at once into speculation as to whether Miss Greenaway was wearing a bra and into the attendant impulse to slip a hand under the T-shirt to ascertain the matter. As before with his landlady it was not the thought so much that bothered him – such thoughts come and go – but the feverish intensity of it. Blood fluxed in his loins. He felt himself distending. He said desperately, ‘We shall need good pressure for the spraying.’

  ‘Well, you won’t get it,’ the other assistant said, with a slight snap of the lips. She seemed cross about something.

  ‘Yes,’ Barfield said, widening his visionary eyes. ‘Not one word of a lie do I tell. Just getting them off the wall has been the problem so far.’

  ‘Apart from anything else,’ Owen said, ‘the sacristan kept getting in the way, didn’t he, Gerald?’

  ‘And his language,’ Miss Greenaway said. ‘Considering we were in church. I know enough Italian for that. Oh, he was cursing us all right.’

  They were firm enough, there was no sag, but that softly mounded effect argued against an integument of any kind, however gossamer thin, as did the way in which the nipples, perfect and palpable, pricked against the cotton of the T-shirt … With a dangerous plunge of appetite Raikes found himself wondering how much of one of Miss Greenaway’s naked breasts he would be able to cram into his mouth. He felt constricted inside his trousers. Whose cannibal heat was this? Three other men at this table, he thought …

  It was Miss Greenaway herself who restored him, with her reference to papers. ‘Of course he was annoyed,’ she said, ‘because he had that clearing out to do. They promised to clear the place completely but there were still these two old cupboards in there full of odds and ends, files and so on.’

  ‘We need the space, you see,’ Owen said. ‘We can’t have bloody great cupboards in the way.’

  ‘Files?’ Raikes felt his agitated blood subside.

  ‘The smallest of the canvases is seven metres long, you know, isn’t it, Gerald?’

  ‘Seven point three,’ Barfield said.

  ‘Not as much as that surely,’ the other assistant said.

  ‘What did he do with them, with the stuff in the cupboard?’ Raikes said quietly to Owen, who was sitting next to him.

  ‘Carted it all off. What annoyed him, you see, was that he had to empty the cupboards before he could move them. He took it all through into the sacristy.’

  ‘They weigh half a ton each,’ Barfield said. ‘What am I saying? The Murder of Abel on its own weighs thirteen hundredweight.’

  ‘They’ll be a good bit lighter when we get the old lining off.’

  ‘Getting them off the stretchers is going to be the real sweat.’

  The Tintoretto people had reverted to their group identity, talking among themselves, sipping eagerly at their coffee as they did so – except for Miss Greenaway, he noted, who was having a separate low-voiced conversation with Steadman. He heard her utter again that brief, rather barking laugh.

  There might just be something there. The chapterhouse had been disused for ages, certainly for most of the century. Or even longer. A convenient dumping ground. Very damp though, some of the windows had no glass in them. Still, if the cupboards were reasonably airtight …

  ‘No, it’s a good six metres,’ he heard Owen say. ‘I’m talking about the Sacrifice of Isaac.’

/>   ‘So am I,’ Barfield said. ‘It is five point six five.’

  ‘You’re wrong there, Gerald.’

  ‘I have always thought it pointless’, Raikes said, ‘to argue about things that can easily be verified.’

  It was the sort of self-righteous remark that made him disliked. A certain resentful hush fell over the table. Raikes got to his feet. He had not really intended the words as a rebuke. ‘I’ll be on my way,’ he said. It would be a good time to investigate the sacristy. But regret at having offended the Tintoretto people made him linger. Fatally, he sought to make amends by expounding further. ‘All this measuring is a curse,’ he said. ‘It was Ruskin who began it, creeping about. Everyone says what a breakthrough, but I don’t think so at all. His slide-rule wasn’t much use to Effie, was it?’

  His own incoherence, and the total failure of his joke – none of the Tintoretto people seemed to know what he was talking about – distressed him further. ‘Measuring instead of pleasuring,’ he said. ‘All our excitement we reserve for matter. We are only interested in things. All of us here … If you measured a corpse do you think you would learn more about death? We’re all pygmies, that’s the trouble. One of Tintoretto’s working days would have flattened you,’ he said, looking at Barfield. ‘And he kept it up for years. Me too,’ he added hastily, ‘it would have flattened me.’

  Nobody said anything. ‘Well,’ Raikes said heavily, ‘I’ll be getting along.’ He left silence behind him. Going back across the campo he lingered some moments before the Palazzo Dorvin. This was one of the houses he could see from his cubicle and the details of the façade were now familiar enough to act as a sort of visual incantation, soothing and reassuring: the Donatellesque relief of Virgin and Child above the doorway, the round-headed windows, the clear carving of the foliation surmounting the pilasters, the porphyry discs so exquisitely placed. Late Quattrocento – same period as the church, more or less. Nothing special about it, in this city of exquisite houses …

  A mystery all the same, Raikes thought. Calm descended on him. The proportions of this house, the passion that drove Tintoretto, the presence of death. That’s what I was trying to say, that is what I meant.

  3

  HE WENT STRAIGHT into the church, eager to see the contents of the cupboards which the sacristan had been obliged to move. But it was evident at once that this would not be possible, at least not then: there were too many people about. The floor was being taken up, not in the perilous fashion the Tintoretto people, with their relish for crisis, had described, but a double row of marble slabs on the north side had been lifted out, there were planks across, and a number of workmen stood around in the main body of the church, with a young man in charge of them. Raikes stopped to pass the time of day and the young man introduced himself. He was an architect employed by the Commune and his name was Benedetti. There were a number of other people in different parts of the church who seemed to have no business there other than to observe the progress of the restoration. To crown everything, the sacristan himself was in attendance, hanging around the chancel with his inflamed nose and bad-tempered expression.

  A direct request to this man to be allowed to go through the papers might well be refused, Raikes thought: the sacristan gave that impression of morose self-importance often found in persons of small office; he might put obstacles in the way, insist on some time-consuming official procedure. It was not worth the risk.

  He sauntered up the south aisle past the two enormous canvases of Tintoretto resting against the wall and fenced off by chairs. It was a strange experience to find oneself on the same footing as these, eye to eye with the naked couple on the wrong side of the gates, and Cain aghast at what he had done. He paused beside the marble group of the Pietà at the entrance to the sacristy and looked inside. The floor was cluttered with various objects that seemed to have been dumped in the course of the restoration work, some planks of wood, metal buckets, a step-ladder, boxes. Down the centre was a long trestle table with an array of tubes, bottles, brushes of various shapes and sizes, a pile of what looked like metal brackets. This stuff belonged to the Tintoretto people presumably. The usual inhabitants of the sacristy surveyed the unsightly clutter from on high: the Virgin and Three Saints by Sebastiano del Piombo above the altar; the large canvas of the Visitation attributed to Palma il Giovane; the panels of women saints and martyrs. No sign at all of what he was looking for. Except the boxes …

  Picking his way, he advanced across the floor. But the boxes contained only chipped terracotta tiles. There was a chapel beyond, dedicated to St John the Almsgiver. Raikes stood at the entrance and peered in. The light was not good here, but almost at once he saw the two broad cupboards against the wall. Surmounting them and on the floor around was a miscellaneous debris of cardboard boxes and files. Finding the sacristy too crowded, the sacristan had lugged the things in here. No wonder he had cursed. As Raikes had hoped, he had not bothered, after such exertions, to lock the papers up again. Presumably he would, before long. Clearly, speed was of the essence. However, there was nothing to be done for the time being.

  Turning to retrace his steps he was disagreeably surprised to find the sacristan watching him, standing where he himself had stood before, beside the marble Pietà. Raikes nodded and said buon giorno, and with some confused idea of giving his activities a more natural look he stopped to talk again to Signor Benedetti on the way out. The architect was voluble and Raikes had difficulty in following the rapid Italian. It seemed that the task of re-laying the floor had been complicated by the discovery of an earlier floor in red and yellow terracotta, destroyed some time in the nineteenth century to make way for the marble slabs. There were of course, Benedetti explained, remains of still earlier floors, one of Venetian terrazza, crushed stone laid in concrete. Three floors at least, then, and the whole mass sinking as the tides go on scooping underneath. They would have to lay gravel down to a depth of some forty-five centimetres, to try to distribute the water evenly. It was going to be a long job, Benedetti said, smiling cheerfully.

  The sacristan was now nowhere to be seen. Presumably he had returned to his post near the chancel. Raikes returned Benedetti’s smile, wished him buon lavoro and made his way out of the church.

  It was not until early that evening that the obvious solution came to him. He had got back to the apartment fairly early and almost at once started on the day’s diary entry. Sitting at his table near the window, he wrote eagerly:

  The Madonna has had nearly three days’ spraying now – something like twenty hours of it. A very fine jet was used, and warm water – not too hot, about 25 degrees. Of course this must not be mixed with soap or detergents of any kind, the calcium carbonate would combine with it and you would get a water-resistant coating on the stone which would simply attract more dirt. Like covering the whole surface of the statue with fly-paper.

  Some particles of carbon came away, but the general appearance remains unchanged. It is unlikely that the spraying will do much to remove the corrosion – I never expected it to. The purpose is to soften the encrusted area, making things easier when it comes to the actual abrasion of the surface. I intend to make a start on this as soon as she is dried out. In fact I am aiming to begin on March 25th, the day after tomorrow. This is the date of the Feast of the Annunciation, so it seems appropriate – perhaps it will be a good augury. Just at present working hours are curtailed by loss of light in the early evening, a situation which has been made rather worse by the enclosure of plastic sheeting Signor Biagi installed for me – he is proving most co-operative. I am going to ask him if he can provide me with a good strong light to work by – perhaps he can take a cable up there.

  I was thinking again about what Steadman said about the artist. There is no reason to think he came from Lombardy except that there was an influx of Lombard artists in the early part of the fifteenth century. He could just as easily be a native Venetian who had spent periods of his life elsewhere. He was influenced by International Gothic, that
is certain, not so much in the draperies but in the setting of the Madonna’s hair and the headdress. Perhaps he worked in Milan at some time, on the Cathedral.

  Raikes paused. He felt physically tired as he sat there, after the hours of crouching and stretching. Voices came to him from outside, people calling to or shouting at one another, friendly or angry he could not determine. He leaned forward to look out but there was no one on the fondamenta immediately below. A small group of people crossed the bridge over the canal, at the furthest extent of his vision. A family group, father, mother, three children, dressed for some special occasion. He watched them mount the steps, the brickwork parapet for some moments concealing all but the heads of the parents. Then they were again in full view, crossing sedately.

  He had forgotten what an intensely processional city Venice was, how people were constantly offering profiles, parading across the line of sight, passing briefly before one, necessary but irrelevant too, somehow. It was a consequence of all the intersections of street and waterway – no other city made one realize quite so much how coincidental human beings are to another, or so encouraged nostalgia for more acquaintance, more knowledge, always frustrated.

  He continued looking for some time after the family had disappeared. On the brickwork, immediately above the arch of the bridge, were three stone heads set in a row, humanized lions or leonized men – salt and damp and chemical agents had eroded the differences. Or perhaps, he thought, the travesty was intentional, evidence of that taste for visual jokes the Venetians had always displayed.

  It was light still, but the sun was low, too low to reach the surface of the canal. This was dark green and almost motionless. Already on the water and on the damp-darkened brick of the lower walls opposite there was some thicker graining, approach of night; but the upper storeys of the houses were still in sunlight. A covered gondola, moored almost directly below him, was rocking very slowly in the thin shadow of the wall. The prow rail of its nearer side reared up, caught some faint light along the brass, dipped again. Raikes watched the slight pelvic jockeying, as if the boat were gathering itself, then the next strange blind upward motion – strange in effect where there was no sound and little apparent movement of the water.