Stone Virgin

by Barry Unsworth

  Ziani chuckled with delight and reached for his snuffbox. As was usual in moments of triumph or glee he took too much and his eyes smarted and watered. ‘Only I,’ he said, fumbling for his handkerchief, ‘Sigismondo Ziani, stand outside the pattern. And do you know why, Battistella?’

  Battistella, who was standing near him, seemed about to reply. At that moment they heard the heavy brass knocker of the street door sound loudly four times. It was a sound extremely rare these days. Battistella moved to the window, opened it and craned down at the street. This brought his ancient smell close and also his wizened, dark-eyed face. Ziani had not seen his servant’s face at such close range for a very long time. He now saw it change in a way that was quite inexplicable.

  ‘It is the lady and a blackamoor with her, they are coming in,’ Battistella said. All at once he was wheezing again. He began to move as fast as he was able across the room towards the door, but before he could reach it they heard sounds below, a woman’s voice on the stair. A moment later the door was thrown open and an old lady, in a black satin dress and an elaborately curled wig, came stepping briskly into the room, followed by a tall Negro footman in silver and blue – the livery of the Bembo family.

  She stood before them, holding in one gloved hand a silver cane, in the other a sheaf of written papers. ‘Retrieve these wretched scribblings, Jacopo,’ she said, pointing with the cane.

  Ziani sat gasping, open-mouthed, while the Negro stepped to his table, swept up the papers there and handed them respectfully to his mistress, who put them with the rest.

  ‘Do you not know me?’ she said. Her face was heavily powdered and rouged; age had thinned her mouth to a crooked line; but there was beauty still in the eyes and brows.

  Ziani’s heart stirred violently. He slipped a hand inside his robe to restrain it. Breath came from him in short gasps. ‘Those are my papers,’ he said with difficulty.

  She raised them. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘we have that section of your ill-written Mémoires purporting to deal with my early life and my first husband. I could have destroyed these sheets piecemeal as your man brought them to me, but I choose to have it done before your eyes. Watch carefully, Sigismondo.’

  While Battistella cowered back against the window and Ziani sat helpless and aghast in his chair, she handed the sheets one by one, gingerly, between finger and thumb, to the tall attentive Negro who with pleased smile and downcast eyes methodically tore them into minute pieces and scattered them about the floor.

  When all were destroyed she nodded briskly once. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I have dealt with you as you deserve. You were always a self-regarding fool, Sigismondo, I knew it from the first, from the first time we stood together, there at the well-head with the carved lions.’

  Ziani was dumb still. He saw her raise her head, saw or thought he saw, in this face that was so changed, the same look of exaltation, that dangerous and destructive light it had worn half a century before when they were deceiving Boccadoro together.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘with your talk of the commedia, your vain air of having understood me, I knew what shape you were making me into, I could see it on your face. As I was their victim so you were encouraged to think you could make me yours. I knew it but I needed someone. Besides, you did not succeed, I was always more than you thought me. All that is past. Now, after fifty years, you want this false shape revived, this product of your shallow brain and debased imagination, you want me installed in public view, a monument to your exploits, also largely imaginary – you were never much good, Sigismondo, were you? Did you really think I would leave my nature and my likeness in such care as yours? Would I consent to have my portrait made by an ape? You must be mad indeed to think it. Did you forget my mother’s name?’

  She fell silent and in the pause that followed a snatch of song in a man’s voice came up to them from the waterside below, ‘Venetia, Venetia, chi non ti vede non ti pretia.’ Then she nodded again, this time to Jacopo, who moved instantly to open the door for her.

  At the threshold she turned. ‘You won’t rewrite those pages,’ she said. ‘You are too old. Don’t blame your servant. His devotion is the only good thing in your miserable life.’

  In silence they heard the steps retreat down the stairs. Ziani fell back against his chair.

  ‘You betrayed me,’ he said.

  All trace of colour had gone from Battistella’s face. ‘May I sit?’ he said. ‘How could I know she would come here?’

  Ziani pressed his hands together in an attempt to stop their trembling. ‘You never took the sheets to the printers,’ he said slowly. ‘That was all lies. You gave them to her.’

  ‘I sold them, begging your pardon. We had no money.’

  ‘Sold them?’ Ziani gave him a palsied stare. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Not only to her. Various parties concerned was ready enough to buy them.’

  ‘Do you mean to say that you have been going around Venice selling parts of my Mémoires to different people?’

  ‘They wanted to avoid the scandals.’

  ‘And the rest? The sheets you couldn’t sell?’

  ‘I have them below stairs.’

  ‘But the gaps,’ Ziani said. ‘How could I remember? I would have to rewrite everything.’ He knew he could not do it. ‘You have betrayed me,’ he said again. His whole head now was trembling. Battistella, he saw, was weeping – his cheeks were wet. ‘You have destroyed my hopes,’ he said.

  ‘Where did you think the money was coming from?’ Battistella said. ‘You never thought about it, begging your pardon. Siamo su’n ponte. There was no more money. The good puddings, the ravioli, the game pie, the sauces, where do you think they came from? You would have starved.’

  ‘But don’t you see, Battistella?’ Shock made Ziani speak gently. ‘Don’t you see what you have done? You have turned me into a dupe. That woman will be laughing now, thinking of my face. I would rather have lived on polenta. I would rather have starved.’

  All strength now left him. His head fell back. ‘Please leave me,’ he managed to say. ‘Leave me to myself for a while.’

  They were the last words he spoke. He refused supper with a slight gesture of the head. When it began to get dark Battistella brought in the candelabra. He had lit all thirty candles as a special treat. But Ziani had slipped out of his chair on to the floor. The blaze was wasted on him.

  Restoration 3

  * * *

  The Form Entire

  1

  RAIKES WORKED STEADILY at the upper part of the Madonna’s body, uncovering centimetre by centimetre the pale, untouched stone beneath the corroded surface. He had reached the clasp that held her cloak together at the neck; within a few days, if all went well, he would be repairing the ravages of her face.

  The restored stone was clear, unblemished, without lustre, revealed in this morning light as totally alien matter. However close the human likeness, it was impossible to forget the elemental substance of which the Madonna was made. Not like marble, Raikes thought: time brought a glow to marble, as the cuts softened and the salts accumulated, an appearance of warmth, something that might be taken for the transpirations of flesh. It was a marble body Pygmalion fell in love with. Perfect material for the Greeks, who wanted to bring men and gods closer. But stone of this dense impermeable sort was different; it belonged to the crust of the earth; whatever shapes it assumed at the hands of man it would always revert to kinship when the masquerade was over. The Madonna too. It was this that moved him, this temporary grace and beauty the savage stone had somehow been persuaded to bear.

  From these thoughts he moved by a transition that seemed natural and inevitable to thoughts of Chiara Litsov, dwelling on her as patiently and lingeringly as the quartz-cutter on the stone, remembering expressions on her face, things she had said, imagining the life of her body. There was, however, a difference: whereas the quartz-cutter proceeded ant-like, concentrating on one small patch at a time, Raikes’s mind moved over Chiara in slow caressive
sweeps, worshipful and sensual together.

  Only discomfort brought him back from these thoughts to a sense of his present position, when some feeling of cramp or an aching muscle made him aware that he had been standing tensed for too long in the same place. Then he would straighten up, move away to the edge of the platform and look out, sometimes over the little square below, sometimes across the roofs to the Lagoon.

  He had to break off at eleven to keep his appointment with Doctor Vittorini; today he was due to learn the results of his tests. These awaited him at the doctor’s office, not the clinic, so he did not have so far to go. He arrived some minutes early but Vittorini saw him at once and after conventional greetings and some general remarks told him in his correct and careful English that he had an irregularity in the electrical impulses of his brain.

  This had been said casually almost, following upon remarks about the frequency of fog in Venice just then and the high degree of moisture in the atmosphere, so that Raikes for some moments did not fully take it in. ‘What does that mean?’ he said. He looked at Vittorini’s composed face and felt the clutch of alarm. ‘Are you saying I’ve got brain damage of some kind?’ he said.

  ‘No, no,’ Vittorini said. ‘At least, not in the serious sense we usually attach to this phrase.’

  He glanced down briefly into the gleaming pool of his desk top. When he raised his head and spoke it was as though to announce some curious fish glimpsed there.

  ‘None the less,’ he said, ‘we will have to suppose some lesion.’

  ‘Have to suppose?’ Raikes stared at him. ‘Can’t you see it?’

  ‘It is not detectable on the X-rays, no.’

  ‘Then how on earth do you know it is there?’

  ‘A kind of deduction.’ Vittorini smiled his charming smile. ‘We have also the charts from the EEG test. They show a characteristic pattern of disturbance.’

  ‘Have you got them there? I’d like to see them.’

  Vittorini’s smile diminished; it was clear that he would have preferred not to do this. Medical mystery again, Raikes thought. ‘It’s my brain, after all,’ he said.

  With the slight trace of a shrug Vittorini looked among the papers on his desk, passed one to Raikes, who found himself looking at a series of wave bands one below the other at intervals, the lower ones gently undulating, the upper three, however, agitated and spiky.

  ‘These waves register the electrical impulses of your brain,’ Vittorini said. ‘Their importance, of course, lies in the fact that such an abnormal record, obtained in the interval between attacks, establishes the diagnosis. Otherwise this might have been in doubt.’

  ‘The abnormal record being in this upper band, I suppose.’ Raikes traced with his finger the narrow, jagged crests. Behind his eyes and voice and senses this crazy agitation. It seemed incredible.

  ‘You see the alternation of focal point and slow wave in the right temporal region,’ Vittorini said. ‘Highly characteristic.’

  ‘What is my condition then?’

  ‘You have a neural discharge in the temporal lobe of your brain, Mr Raikes, giving rise to very minor seizures. There is absolutely no need for alarm. The brain is not impaired, the seizures, as I say, are minor. The treatment is with drugs and presents no problems.’

  ‘Why now?’ Raikes said. ‘I have never had anything of the sort before. Why now at the age of thirty-three?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Vittorini sat back, spreading his beautiful hands. ‘Pathological change can take place in the temporal lobes at any time. Birth damage, a previous injury, some infinitesimal scar on the brain suddenly activated.’

  ‘But activated how?’

  ‘Nobody can say, Mr Raikes. The brain still presents many problems. As we grow older things start to go a little wrong, only a little but it is enough. I do not know, I am guessing, but some very slight loss of efficiency in the blood supply to the brain would have been sufficient to irritate this little scar of yours.’

  ‘This scar which no one can see.’

  Vittorini looked at him steadily for a moment. ‘Focal discharge’, he said, ‘must always imply the presence of a localized lesion of the brain, even though the techniques available to us are not always adequate to demonstrate its nature.’

  ‘I see.’ Raikes compressed his lips with a sudden feeling of obstinacy. He had not liked this use of the word ‘must’. It sounded like a theological argument, reversed to prove the existence of matter. God’s presence in the Universe, the presence of this speck in his brain – the techniques available were inadequate to prove either. What had Vittorini to go on? A few marks on a sheet of paper. To argue from that to an invisible wound was like arguing from a flower to the Almighty.

  As if sensing these reservations on his patient’s part, Vittorini said, ‘I think I understand how you feel, Mr Raikes. You are perhaps offended because I am insisting on a material cause for these experiences of yours when you see them as significant in some other way. Incidentally, have you had any more since?’

  ‘No,’ Raikes said, ‘not since I last saw you.’

  ‘That too is surprising. The hallucinations are unusually complex and highly organized, also they have a kind of consistency about them, very interesting. But I have had a lot of patients through my hands. You would be surprised at the number of manifestations in cases of this type. They are legion, Mr Raikes. Depending of course on the physiological functions subserved by the temporal lobes.’

  Their eyes met. Vittorini’s were chestnut brown and shiny. ‘It is entirely a physiological matter,’ he said. ‘I would not like you to have ideas about it that might impede your treatment.’

  He paused as if inviting a denial, but Raikes remained silent. With something like a sigh, the doctor reached for the pad before him and began writing. ‘I generally prescribe phenobarbitone as the basic anti-convulsant,’ he said, without looking up. ‘Thirty milligrams twice daily to begin with. It will tend to make you rather drowsy, though this varies with the constitution of the patient. In any case I should like you to try for one week. If it proves to be too much of a soporific we can add an amphetamine derivative to control it.’

  ‘And if the attacks recur? Do you increase the dosage of phenobarbitone?’

  ‘No, no. We do not want to have you sleeping all the time. No, we would supplement with another drug, Epanutin for example, or Dilantin. That is a combination I have found successful. But I should like to see you again, a week from today, so that we can see how things are going.’

  ‘Very well,’ Raikes said.

  A certain kind of obstinacy about his condition and a need to conduct himself with dignity had occupied his mind during the interview. When he was out again, however, in the bright street, and as he walked slowly back towards the Apostoli, an obscure distress grew within him. He had been dubbed ill, an anti-convulsant had been prescribed for him, as if he were subject to fits; his visions had been dismissed as the result of a malfunction. He felt lonely in the crowded street and somehow stricken.

  Halfway down the Strada Nuova he found a chemist’s and obtained the phenobarbitone. He had already made a resolution not to start taking the stuff until, as he put it to himself, he had thought things out. One great advantage of this policy, only half-acknowledged, was that it might well require several days, making it therefore pointless to visit Vittorini again so soon.

  He had turned off to his left towards the Grand Canal with the vague idea of sitting near the water, having a drink somewhere, recovering morale. Almost at once, however, he was brought up short. In the window of a small gallery, among an expensive-looking clutter of objets trouvés in wood and stone, ceramic birds, structures of wire and metal, he saw a Litsov bronze, a fragment of Chiara.

  The gallery itself seemed not to have a name, but the name of the proprietor, Balbi, was in gilt lettering above the door. Raikes remembered suddenly that Wiseman had mentioned Balbi’s gallery as being one used by Lattimer. He entered and found a young woman at a desk. Of Balbi himse
lf there was no sign. He asked the price of the Litsov and the sum astonished him, amounting to more than five thousand pounds in the equivalent English currency. He asked if there were others and the young woman said no, this was the last. They had sold four Litsov bronzes in the last two months. They were in demand, this one would go soon. Signor Balbi was anxious to obtain more of the artist’s work, but it was difficult to get hold of it, in fact just now it was impossible, she did not know why exactly, Signor Balbi was complaining about it just the other day. It was not only in Italy that Litsov’s work was highly regarded, he had great critical success everywhere, his prices were going up all the time. Now would be an excellent time to buy. It was an investment, one the signore would not regret.

  Raikes explained that he was not rich enough to make investments. Exposed as a non-buyer, he felt obliged to leave. Once again outside, he looked closely at the gleaming object in the window. It had a quality he remembered from the other pieces he had seen at Litsov’s house, careful beauty of shape, an element of perversity in the mingling of forms.

  It was while looking at this half-metamorphosed fragment of Chiara Litsov, feeling the distress induced by his visit to Vittorini subside at thoughts of her, that the notion came to Raikes that he had been guided to this place somehow; with this came the instant resolve to go and see her, at once, as soon as possible, without delay.

  2

  HOWEVER, THERE WAS the work to be cleared up. Then it was time for lunch. It was early afternoon before he was able to set off for Chiara’s house. By this time his mood had changed from excited anticipation to a sort of nervous fatalism; he felt he was embarking on a doubtful venture, bound to it in fact, though appointment there was none, dread of refusal having prevented him from phoning the Litsovs. Part of his nervousness was caused by the thought that he might not after all be welcome.

  There was a corresponding change in the weather. Though brilliant in the earlier part of the day and during his visit to Vittorini, there had been a slow hazing of the sky in the interval. As he stood on the Fondamenta Nuova waiting for the Burano boat, mist was gathering already over the water, fluffing the sunshine.