Stone Virgin

by Barry Unsworth

  We were sitting together in the arbour. I had kissed her earlier, but briefly and playfully, and she had evaded some kisses, allowed others. Now, however, when I returned to the assault, I found a warmer welcome. Far from evading, her lips sought mine. We began to kiss long and eagerly, myself in a seventh heaven of delight, still not quite daring to believe that the highest felicity would be vouchsafed, though now her mouth was opening to the kisses and her lips had assumed that softness of consistency that a man of the world will recognize as denoting readiness in women. Ziani my boy, I said to myself, the moment has come to sound the charge. I got my hand under the skirt of her gown, lost my way among her petticoats, found it again at the junction of hot flesh and stocking-top. She pressed her legs together at first, made some attempt to ward me off, push my hand lower, but the gesture was half-hearted and feeble; and when I moved the hand up between her legs and touched her cunt her own hand fell away, her thighs loosened, all resistance was at an end, she sighed, she was mine. By now I was vastly swollen in the nether part and impatient to make the breach, but held off a little longer, rubbing gently at the threshold and especially that little nipple they so love to have fondled, while we kissed and she panted and the milk of her pleasure wet my fingers. Then, when further delay threatened my own equilibrium, I knelt before her, a position more suitable for prayer, but it was the only way the thing could be done on that narrow bench against the wall. I was unbuttoned and my weapon was out, rearing up, huge. (I had a huge one in those days and always rearing up at moments opportune and otherwise but now most opportune.) Because of my position and the indistinct light I don’t think she was aware of this great spike that awaited her, she leaned murmuring to kiss me and I drew her downwards, holding her in my embrace, pulling her gently forward until she slipped from the edge of the bench and so transfixed herself on my braced and eager uccello. As she slid down I slid up, impaling her with one great resistless thrust.

  All this I had intended for our mutual pleasure; but I heard her exclaim in a startled way as she came down on to me and when our faces were level I saw hers twist with pain. My own spasms were not long delayed, but I realized in that moment that Donna Francesca, four months married, had just ceased to be a virgin, and that my versatile dagger, piercing her, had in the selfsame stroke wounded old Boccadoro more grievously even than I had intended.

  Ziani stopped, laid down his pen. He had grown excited, writing this; the ancient gristle between his legs had stirred; but that small heat soon died away, lost in the terrible doubts he had had since starting this section of his Mémoires. Had he simply been her instrument all along, a convenient length of piping? Such thoughts, the suspicion that he had been somehow a dupe – which of all things he most dreaded being – all this was difficult to endure. But there was more, much more: there was the thing she had done afterwards, the thing that had put him in thrall, subjugated his memory ever since, destroyed his whole vision of that evening, the moonlight, the roses, his masterful importunity, her sighing sacrifice of maidenhood. She had dispersed these sentimental wraiths for ever. She had shocked and frightened him.

  While he still knelt there, spent now, his pride limp and flaccid, she had sat back from him and in his full view lifted skirt and petticoats, with deliberate gesture and smiling face – a pagan smile – touched her own torn parts, raised her hand so he could see on it, in the dawn light, the glisten of blood and seed, and holding this hand extended before her had walked to the front of the statue – the Madonna! – and anointed her on the forehead, just below the crown of flowers.

  Restoration 2

  * * *

  All Below the Waist

  1

  ‘WHEN DID THE first attack occur?’ The doctor leaned forward with polite interest, placing the palms of his immaculate hands together and resting them on the desk.

  ‘About three weeks ago,’ Raikes said. ‘I wouldn’t call them attacks exactly,’ he added defensively. He had made the appointment on Wiseman’s recommendation. Vittorini was an eminent neurologist, with an international reputation, Wiseman had said, amiably glowing at being in a position, once again, to impart some special knowledge to his friend; tactfully forbearing to ask why that friend should be asking for a specialist in disorders of the nervous system. Moreover he spoke excellent English, another advantage – Raikes had not wanted to leave matters to the hazard of his Italian. ‘I suppose that’s what they are,’ he conceded now. He was wishing that he had not come. He felt ill at ease, sitting there without bodily ailment – or at least without feeling in any way ill. Vittorini’s calm, chestnut-coloured gaze made him feel afflicted and fraudulent at the same time.

  ‘How soon was it followed by the second?’

  ‘Quite soon – less than a week.’

  Vittorini made notes on the pad before him. After a moment he said, ‘So there have been four occurrences within the last month?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And all that has been since you began your work of restoring the statue?’

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘And you have had no recent accident or acute illness?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The hallucinatory content – you say that has been different, quite distinctly different, each time?’

  ‘Well,’ Raikes said, ‘the sensation is the same, more or less, and the auditory part of it, a kind of echoing silence if you understand what I mean, as if someone had just been laughing and the resonance of that was still in the air, but as silence rather than sound …’ He stopped in some confusion. ‘It is difficult to describe,’ he said.

  Vittorini sat back, rolling the pencil between his fingers. ‘Tell me again what you think you saw,’ he said. ‘Take your time. Try to include everything.’

  There had been some hint of scepticism in this, or perhaps merely professional reserve. Raikes did as he was asked, struggling with his own reluctance, taking things in order: the long, straight shadow, the wet bodies, the distant glimmering view of the Madonna, the arch of foliage … It was difficult not to embroider, as when telling one’s dreams; more difficult still to convey the sensation, that hush over things, the sense of exposure, the strange belated fear.

  He did his best with all this, glancing sometimes at the walls, sometimes at the floor, sometimes at Vittorini’s impassive face. When he came to the most recent of his ‘visions’ – for it was thus ironically he persisted in thinking of them – he experienced, quite unexpectedly, some return of the fear, enough to dry his throat. Only the day before, while at work on the Madonna, he had seen – and it was an experience more disturbing, more protracted, than any before – a girl’s drowned face, first looking up at him through clear water, then at a level with his own face, suspended in darker liquid, less distinct and smaller. He had had the impression of a necklace or band of some kind round the throat.

  ‘It seemed to be in some kind of container,’ he said. ‘The second one, I mean. Like a jar or a small tank. But I know it was the same face.’ He looked at Vittorini with embarrassment. This was the experience that had brought him here, led him to endure what he was enduring under the doctor’s attentive regard.

  When he had finished there was silence for some moments, while Vittorini wrote. If he had noticed Raikes’s trouble he gave no sign of it. ‘These things do not happen at any special time of day?’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But always so far in the vicinity of the statue, the immediate vicinity?’

  Raikes hesitated for a moment or two. Then he said, ‘Yes, always.’ Vittorini regarded him a moment. ‘Do you yourself know of any factor that would precipitate these attacks?’ he said.

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘And the only warning is the threat to balance and the sense of enveloping hush you speak of?’

  ‘Yes,’ Raikes said, ‘and that is quite brief, or at least it seems so.’

  ‘The attacks, are they followed by headaches or drowsiness or anything of that kind? N
o? Mr Raikes, is there anything you can think of in your family history that might help to account for them?’ Vittorini laid the pencil delicately on top of the pad. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it,’ he said, ‘is there any family history of fainting fits or mental disorders?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Raikes said. He felt affronted, absurdly enough, though whether at the imputation of fainting or madness he could not have said. Below this there was an obscure but definite alarm. ‘No, certainly not,’ he said after a moment.

  Vittorini was silent for a short while. Then he said, ‘It is interesting, it is unusual, this highly formed nature of the hallucinations, and the variety, as also that they occur always in the same place. Are you aware of any twitching of the limbs at the time?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Urinary incontinence?’

  ‘Good Lord, no.’

  ‘Is there a feeling of familiarity, as if you were reliving past experience?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Raikes said. ‘The impressions are very vivid but I don’t feel as if I have been involved personally. It’s not familiarity so much as a kind of certainty. Not complete, of course, but for example I know there is an object that is casting those straight shadow lines, even though I haven’t seen it, I know those two faces are the same face, even though one of them is indistinct. That’s not quite the same as familiarity, is it?’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ Vittorini said. ‘Well, Mr Raikes, it will be necessary to carry out some tests.’

  ‘Tests?’ He was taken by surprise rather. What had he been expecting? Pulse, blood pressure, some words of reassurance, awkward talk about the fee.

  ‘Nothing to worry about. Just a check-up really. An hour or so of your time will be enough. It would be necessary to come to my clinic.’

  ‘Very well,’ Raikes said, concealing a certain dismay.

  Vittorini stood up and extended his hand with a sudden and very charming smile. ‘You will make an appointment then, please, with the girl in the outer office. Do not worry meanwhile. Try not to remain standing in the same position for long periods and avoid sudden changes of posture.’

  Advice difficult to follow, Raikes thought to himself, emerging on to the street, peculiarly so, for a man engaged in restoring a life-size stone Madonna. Was it simply this then, a faintness caused by awkward position or sudden movement? But how could that account for the sensory disturbances? He had not been fully frank with the doctor and this bothered him now, like some sin of omission.

  Vittorini’s office was in Calle Mazzini not very far from where he lived, less than a mile in fact, as the crow flies, but a good half-hour’s walk in the labyrinth of Venetian streets. Still, there was no hurry. He had finished his work for the day. He was due at Lattimer’s house for a drink that evening, but not until later on, after dinner.

  His route brought him close to San Giovanni Crisostomo but he resisted the temptation to visit once again the tenement behind it, the green murk of the side canal, the hemmed-in, abandoned church. He had been back twice since that exciting moment in the silence of his room, when he had first realized the connection between the church and the house. There was no more for the moment to be found out there.

  It was late afternoon but the sun was hot still. Raikes took off his jacket as he walked. The streets between the Rialto and the church of the Apostoli were crowded, making it impossible to go at any pace other than the prevailing saunter. Many of these people were obviously tourists, slung with cameras, dressed in light-coloured holiday clothes – vanguard of the summer invasion. Stalls along the way were festooned with tokens of welcome – postcards, guidebooks, souvenirs.

  Raikes was glad to move into the comparative peace of the Santa Fosca district. Venice has her lines of demarcation, like all cities, and the San Felice canal is one of these – north of this there is what seems a resumption of quieter, more traditional life, hardly touched by tourist traffic. Gradually Raikes fell into that rhythm which is the great charm of walking in Venice, an alternation of enclosure and liberation constantly repeated, as one emerges from narrow streets into the sudden space of the campo or the levels of fondamenta and canal.

  Back at his apartment he at once got out his diary. The daily stint of words had become a necessity to him though he had departed considerably from the strict account at first envisaged. The diary now included speculations concerning Lattimer and the Litsovs, about whom – and especially about Chiara – he had thought frequently since his visit; and he had also taken to recording his ‘visions’ in as much detail as he could remember.

  He dated the entry as usual in the top right-hand corner: April 15th. Then at once, as though the incontrovertible fact of the date had released him, he began to write eagerly:

  Went to see Doctor Vittorini this afternoon. Wiseman was quite right – his English is impeccable. It was a relief to be able to speak easily and naturally. All the same I’m not sure if I managed to convey the extraordinary sense of certainty, not déjà vu at all, but a sense of conviction without deductive process, or only the very crudest. Anyway the good doctor did not seem unduly surprised by anything I said. Professional manner, I suppose. I dare say he has heard it all before. I lied to him once and I think he knew it. That was when he asked me if all my attacks, as he called them, had happened in the neighbourhood of the Madonna. I said yes, but of course, there was the incident at the Casa Fioret, which I have mentioned already in this diary. Next Tuesday I have to go for these famous tests he spoke about.

  There is absolutely no doubt in my own mind that the long converted yard behind the Casa Fioret, running alongside the canal, was once part of the property of the church on the other side of the alley, that the Madonna originally stood in the church cloister and that she became incorporated in the garden when the land – and the cloister with it – passed into private hands. There is no proof but there are now four links at least in this chain, and they strengthen one another. When coincidences multiply beyond a certain point they become implausible, we are obliged to look for a design. There is the notebook which I found in the baptistery of the Carità, the matter of the date, the name of Fornarini, the Casa Fioret. Now this abandoned church of the Supplicanti, which, thanks to Pardi’s Annals I have discovered was consecrated in 1432, a time almost certainly when my sculptor – whoever he was – would have been active in Venice.

  I haven’t been able to get into the church which is in any case just a shell of a building, ruinous and boarded up. But I have traced the line of the cloister and it continues dead straight on the other side of the alley, forming what is now the outer wall of the yard. That is strong evidence in itself. Then there is the other matter.

  Raikes paused. This was the matter he had not told Vittorini about. Why he did not quite know. Secrecy, the desire to preserve something, some scrap at least, from the doctor’s knowledge? Perhaps he had feared Vittorini’s scepticism. He himself experienced something like disbelief when he thought about it.

  He had retraced the steps of his former visit more or less exactly: the street door, the damp and echoing interior courtyard, the mild snarls of the lions. Everything had been the same, even to the gossiping women and the lines of washing hanging out. He had crossed the alley, tried the narrow iron gate in the opposite wall. There was a chain with a padlock but this lifted off – the chain simply served to prevent the gate from staying open. No more than twenty yards to the rounded wall of the apse. On either side of the doorway eroded reliefs, one of the Annunciation, one of Daniel in the Lions’ Den with a Greek inscription round the frame. Windows and doors all boarded up – there was no apparent means of entry. Through gaps in the boards a sense of darkness, a smell of damp masonry and the discharge of cats.

  On his return he had followed the line of the cloisters. The pavement was cracked but level enough. Parts of the roofing intact still, draped with ivy. Building materials had been left under here, bricks, gravel, some sacks of cement. The line of the cloister ended abruptly at the alley wall.
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  This time, by the merest chance, he had elected to return via the house. Just before passing from the yard into the dimness of the entrance hall he had stopped, on some impulse, and looked behind him. He had felt the warning hush that was now growing familiar. The section of the church visible from here – the roof of the apse and the upper part of the campanile – formed an ensemble he recognized: it was the background to the glimmering Madonna of his vision.

  Even when, that slight, swooning threat to balance over, he had continued to stand there looking, he had remained convinced; it was the same in every detail. Someone had stood where he was standing, while the Madonna was still there, in the garden, with leaves around her and the church buildings rising behind. He was still convinced of it. And he knew now why he had said nothing about it to Vittorini: it was his only defence against the fear that had been with him from the first and which his interview with the doctor had done nothing to relieve, the fear that somewhere inside his skull, beyond his control, a terrible process of derangement was taking place. It was with a sense of keeping this fear at bay that he began writing again:

  The church is, or was, named the Santissima Annunciata. It was the foundation in Venice of an order known as the Supplicanti. There is an account of these people in Pardi’s Annali Ecclesiastici and Romanin has something to say about them in his Storia Documenta (Volume 3). I have been able to refer to these books in the library of the British Consulate.

  The ground for the site was granted by Doge Jacopo Tiepolo in 1334 but it seems that the building was not finally finished until 1430, with the completion of the apse and cross vault. The Supplicanti were a flagellant order founded by one Matteo da Polenta in 1296, dedicated to poverty, with a rule of extreme harshness. By the early fourteenth century there were twelve communities in Italy. It seems to have been a numerous and successful order. Pardi says that in 1341, at its first general assembly, it numbered sixteen hundred brothers, with four hundred claimants for admission. The church of the Santissima Annunciata was consecrated in 1432. In 1494, before the end of that same century, within the lifetime almost certainly of some of the novice monks, the church had been suppressed and the Supplicanti, on the advice of the Maggior Consiglio, expelled bag and baggage from Venice by Pope Pius II. The grounds are not specified in either of my sources beyond the customary phrase used in both: rilassatezza di costumi, laxness of habits. Almost certainly sexual. But what can have caused such a rapid and presumably collective deterioration?