Child of the Twilight

by Carmel Bird

  Diana told Cosimo, that day in Rome, of her own great project – to complete Federico’s work on the history of the images of the Black Virgins of Spain, Italy and France. Few people ever believed that she was serious, but Cosimo believed, and this belief forged a bond between the two of them.

  ‘I met your late husband once long ago at Banyuls. You have visited the Black Virgin at Banyuls?’

  Diana had never been there. It was somehow strange for her to think that Cosimo and Federico had been in Banyuls, in that tiny place in the far south-east of France, together.

  ‘Federico was most interested in the motif of the bees on this image,’ Cosimo said. ‘The bees are a clear link with all the ancient goddesses – Persephone, Artemis, Cybele, Venus and so on – and this link is often overlooked. The shrines to Our Lady, particularly of the black variety, so often are to be found in the location of old altars to the goddesses, and are sometimes marked by hives of bees. Of course the bee also signifies the Merovingian connection to this lovely old black statue at Banyuls. She is very important, historically, but is not particularly visible in the literature or even in tourist information. Parish priests all over Europe are inclined to play down the blackness, you know, to separate the Virgin Mary from all those wily wicked goddess women. So there’s no real emphasis on the black images. There is a distinct attempt in many cases to eliminate the blackness and to emphasise the pure and shining whiteness of Mary.’

  ‘Except in places like Montserrat, perhaps,’ Diana said.

  Cosimo was speaking in sober academic tones, sometimes making his puns and his rhymes, his voice trilling and singing.

  ‘There are inescapable exceptions. But the emphasis throughout the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was on the pure white virgin, at the expense of the black. You will have noticed how apparitions in modern times have all been of lovely delicate white, pink and golden women. This was what Federico was working with, Diana, the idea that long long ago the Virgin made a habit of manifesting in spots where the goddesses had been, showing herself in the colours of darkness, mystery and the night.’

  ‘Yes, he would tell me this,’ Diana said.

  It was clear to Cosimo that Cora was about to explode with boredom and frustration, so he created a final diversion with some storytelling.

  ‘If you do go to Banyuls-sur-Mer in your travels, you will pass through the station at Perpignan. Now the great Salvador Dalí identified this railway station as being the centre of the universe. Apparently he had his best ideas in the waiting room, and believed he had received a message from the angels identifying the very spot as the centre of the universe. For this reason I have sometimes sat there myself hoping to receive inspiration, or to perhaps commune with Dalí. It is certainly a part of the world where signs and wonders have always been to a certain extent, if I can put it this way, commonplace.’

  He had Cora’s attention.

  ‘Now, Cora,’ he said, ‘I wish I could give you a souvenir of Perpignan or Banyuls, but alas, I have no such object in my possession. However – however – I think you would like this little Black Virgin from Paris.’

  He took from the narrow shelf above his desk a tiny primitive statue carved from cherry wood. It was dark and mysterious, a woman standing, her arms arranged in the position of a cradle, empty arms, arms awaiting the gift of an absent child. At her feet, peeping from beneath her robe was a tiny mouse. Cora felt the honour implied in being given the priest’s own statue from his sparse collection of objects on the shelf. And she liked the image, she saw its ancient contours, its playful sadness, admired it also as a work of art. Diana was moved by the gesture. Rosita in her usual generosity was delighted for her student.

  ‘She comes from the church of Le Sourire de l’Enfant Jésus. She is known as Le Sourire, the Smile – but also as La Souris – the Mouse. The missing child we believe was smiling-dimpling – hence the first name. He has been lost and gone for a century of centuries. When the figure was found floating in the spring – discovered by a hurrying huntsman who was following a deer – the child was in her arms, and beaming bright. But by the time she had been elevated up-up-up to the altar of the church that was built on the spot, the sunny-smiling infant with his roly-poly legs and arms had gone. Pouf! And here you have the cradle-arms of the mother who is not sad, you can see, for it is for her quite as if the child is smiling there. The sisters pray across the fervent centuries for the wellbeing of the baby-bunting, wherever he may be.’

  ‘Don’t they ever pray for him to come back? Like, they could pray to St Anthony, for starters,’ Cora said. Out of the mouths of babes.

  ‘These Sisters of the Holy Smile believe it was simply his choice to leave, and they understand that their role is to pray for his happiness; they are praying, you see, for his smile.’

  ‘Just that? His smile?’

  ‘You will notice that we are all smiling at the thought,’ Cosimo said, his own eyes glittering with their bright weird spark. ‘Their work entails caring for orphans, and finding homes for them. You can see the clear-as-water connection.’ He turned to Diana. ‘Your late husband documented Le Sourire, I know.’

  But Diana was not thinking of Federico and Black Virgins at all, she was lost, deeply lost in an effort to pray silently for the happiness and wellbeing of Xavier. Her eyes glittered a little too – glittered with the hint of her tears. It was at this point that Diana’s desire to discover the lost statue of the Bambinello shifted, it shifted from Diana to Rosita, who probably had more time and space for such a project.

  It was Rosita the Spinster who responded with unusual vigour to Cosimo’s stories.

  ‘So was the smiling baby stolen, Father?’ she said.

  ‘Stolen? Ah, that we will never know. He went. He was, we are told, just quite suddenly not there. He flew, he danced, he crept, he skipped away, over the hills and faraway.’

  And Cosimo the Trickster began to play a tune on an imaginary keyboard across the surface of his desk. But Rosita would not be put off.

  ‘So in a way he was like the Bambinello, then? But the Bambinello was stolen, wasn’t he?’

  ‘It is possible, probable, yes, he was probably stolen. But we must not discount the fact that he may have willed his disappearance. We can pray for his return – or we can pray for his wellbeing. Perhaps we could emulate the Sisters of Le Sourire, perhaps we could do as they do and begin a collection of images of the Infant Jesus. Theirs is quite remarkable. It makes the devil weep, that collection of holy Boys, some of whom are smiling like the summer sun.’ Then he played more vigorously on the desk, and sang a few bars of ‘The Bear Went over the Mountain to See What He Could See’.

  Clearly this chant marked the end of that discussion. Cosimo, taking up the thread of the word ‘Mountain’ like a hyperlink, moved on to tell them an old Cathar story. He fixed his gaze on Cora.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ he said in a low voice, ‘two wandering friars were making their way over a mountain in the sunny landscape of Provence, when they came to rest on the bank of a little river. One friar fell into a gentle slumber, and as the other watched he was astonished to observe a creature emerging from the sleeper’s sleepy mouth.’ And he made a quick gesture. ‘It was a bright darting salamander which flicked its way a short distance to the water’s edge, and – using a piece of straw as a bridge – it made its way to the opposite bank of the river to where there lay the dry skull of a donkey. Skull. Of a donkey.

  ‘Like quicksilver the salamander whipped in and out of the eye-sockets, the mouth, the base of the skull, exploring the cavities as it went. Flick whip slither. An expedition it was, around the donkey’s old dead head. Then it came flitting back across the water on the straw, and disappeared back into the snoring sleeper’s open toothy mouth.

  ‘Then out it came again. Yet again it set off to cross the river and do the rounds of the dry old skull.

  ‘Now the watchful friar is something of a trickster, and with a twitch of his holy hand he pulls
the straw aside, destroying the salamander’s pathway across the water. Up and down on the opposite bank the salamander darts, back and forth, hither and thither, bewildered and distressed. Sorry sorry sad and sorry salamander.

  ‘And now, strange to say, as the salamander zigzags and wigwags desperately along beside the edge of the water, the body of the sleeping friar begins to arch and thrash and plunge about. Ker-bish, ker-bash! In some alarm his fellow friar clutches him by the shoulders in an attempt to wake him up, but the sleeper will not be roused. No, ma’am. In some wonderment and fear the fellow replaces the straw so that it stretches from one bank to the other, and, light as air, the salamander dances flittery flittery across, and leaps back into the mouth-scape of the sleeper. No sooner has this happened than the sleeper awakes and begins to recount to his friend the details of his dreams.

  ‘“I dreamed that I came to a river, and when I had crossed it by means of a long thin branch I came to a palace where there were many fine towers and many elegant rooms through which I wandered for joyous happy hours. The floors were like glass and the walls were hung with intricate tapestries of silk and wool, pink and gold and jade and burgundy. Finally I decided to return whence I had come, and I set out for the river. But alas, the branch had disappeared, and I feared I would be drowned. After a time, during which I was in a state of great distress, the branch mysteriously reappeared, and in great joy I skipped across to the other side.”

  ‘In some trepidation now, the other friar explained the appearance of the salamander, and confessed in shame his part in the episode. Whereupon his friend laughed in a good-natured way and said that what had happened was a demonstration of the truth that the salamander of the mind’s imagination is free to go in and out of the body when the circumstances are right. And he thanked his fellow friar heartily for replacing the piece of straw. And so they continued on their way through the highways and byways of sunny Provence. Both of them refreshed and renewed in faith.

  ‘So you liked the story? The Cathars were fond of the skull of the donkey, you know, the skull of the donkey-wonk. Always going on about the skull of the donkey they were. I often think of that particular story, for some reason, in season.

  ‘A good fellow I used to know told me that in every story one must seek to find oneself.

  ‘Now, am I friar one or friar two or am I the salamander? I am not sure I truly go along with my old friend there. Not sure. It is complicated, is it not? Could I be the piece of straw – or the mansion of the skull? The river? Perhaps I am not in the story; perhaps you are not in the story either, after all.’

  ‘That is a very charming story, Father,’ Diana said.

  ‘And I am most interested in the Cathars, I have read quite a deal on the subject,’ Rosita said.

  Cora said nothing. The friars and the donkey skull were of absolutely no interest to her.

  They all drank a glass of Chartreuse from a motley collection of cheap old glasses covered in blue stars, one glass bearing a little picture of Dumbo and another a picture of Bambi. Diana and Rosita recognised them as Australian peanut-butter jars. Who knows how they got there?

  The three visitors eventually took their leave and emerged from the intense atmosphere of Cosimo’s study. Rosita insisted on going back into the church where she made a silent promise to the Copy. You see how convoluted and complicated this stuff is? She is promising the Copy that she will devote herself to seeking out the missing original. She doesn’t know how she is going to do this, but she plans to keep the mental image of the Bambinello in the forefront of her poor old mind. She’s rather sweet in a mad sort of way, although as I have said I don’t really warm to her. She has no real expectations of fulfilling her quest, but like a mediaeval pilgrim, so she thinks, she will proceed in faith and goodness and charity and so on.

  So it has come down to this. The cold trail of the Bambinello is about to be hotted up by the spiritual exercises of Rosita the Innocent. Does an electrical current of prayerful thought begin to leap and spark through the cellars of foreign auction houses as the spiritual hunt for the Boy in gold picks up speed? Yes! Amazing! I must say I have wondered about St Anthony’s possible role in finding the lost statue. Of course, the thing to do when you invoke St Anthony is to forget you are searching. Only then will the lost object reveal its location. Avila in particular has a very high success rate with her prayers to St Anthony in the quest for lost things. But maybe the Bamb is just too big for St Anthony – I hadn’t thought anything was too big before, but this could be the test case.

  The heart and mind that constitute the engine of this force that is going after the Bambinello reside within the body of the woman who is now off to Venice with the sad and slightly tearful Diana and the dreamy and agitated and romantically expectant Corazón. It does not matter to Rosita exactly where she finds herself now, since she is confident that if she just keeps praying, and if she is meant to discover the Bamb, she will do so. What she will do after that, how she will restore him to his place in the Aracoeli, she leaves to fate, to the future, to the grace of God, whatever. And that is about all she can do, in the circumstances.

  Chapter Nine

  Sex in Venice

  Rufus has been going about his business on the lagoon. There he is on a dredge in the Malamocco inlet just a few centimetres above sea level, with his video camera and his winning smile, although it will be two more years before the lagoon project has official government approval. The city is sinking, the sea is rising, the tides are getting higher all the time, and this will be the biggest public works project ever undertaken in the history of the city. His video captures the current stage of planning, exploration and preparation for the great MOdulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico Project that will put seventy-nine mobile inflatable barriers onto the seabed. These barriers will be inflated when storms are approaching and will block the entrance of the sea, protecting the lagoon and the city itself. Much of the work Rufus is doing originates back in the offices at FIAT where he photographs some of the hundreds of plans and some of the detailed and intricate scale models. His father has been involved with this project for as long as Rufus can remember – it is in fact part of the fabric of his own life.

  Out on the water he photographs the blue-brown reaches of the saltmarsh and the shiny sheets of mudflats, with hundreds of waterbirds in motion or still as stones. Seeking out shots that will not register his work as average travel pictures, he takes footage of the orchards and vegetable gardens on the Isola di Sant’ Erasmo. He also works on images of stalls selling masks and on pictures of the glass-blowers on Murano and the lacemaking on Burano, along with rows of brightly painted little houses there. And he takes plenty of footage of the exterior of St Mark’s in different lights, different moods, from different angles. He photographs the gondola yard at San Trovaso with its rough sheds on stilts and its boat-building workshops. What he does not want are images of tourists, although he has the sense to realise that without the tourists Venice would not be Venice.

  The only figures Rufus wants in the montages of his film are those of his father and late mother in their youth, when they fell in love in Venice. He is not only romantic, but also deeply sentimental, and sad too, deep down. Rufus sometimes longs to know his lost mother. The picture – a traditional and highly romantic full-colour picture – of the pair of them, Anna and Salvatore, laughing and leaning back in a gondola, is in his father’s study at home. It will flash in and out of the other images in his film.

  He works harder than he has ever imagined working, and his project is unlike anything he has undertaken in the classroom. He is completely absorbed, obsessed, meticulous, painstaking, inspired. Tom-Tom will be pleased – yet Rufus hardly gives Tom-Tom a thought. Rufus has been overtaken by his own creative work.

  Then Corazón arrives and everything changes again, as the project is as good as done, and because this Romeo is a romantic. By the time she meets him in Venice Corazón gives the appearance of being shy and sweet, although just ben
eath the surface she is crazy with joy and excitement. Her face glows with youthful beauty and a deep desire. From their apartment near the Rialto, Diana and Rosita sally forth as the experienced Diana shows Rosita the Spinster the sights. Diana is in fact completely taken up with her education of Rosita. And Rosita is ecstatic at the sight of the canals and the gondolas and the piazza, and she falls in love with the great glowing golden statue in San Nicolo in Mendicoli. Diana and Rosita almost neglect to attend to Corazón. Is that not a shocking state of affairs? They purport to think that it is nice for Corazón to have the company of Rufus, the company of someone her own age. Quite so.

  The charm of Rufus the Virile is such that he has no trouble at all extending it to two dear old ladies, and he can whenever he chooses whisk his beloved away from under their gaze. To be fair, he does accompany the trio on ferry and gondola rides and on tours of the Accademia and the Guggenheim and St Mark’s. Rosita in her turn, strangely enough, is able to charm him with her ecstatic yet seriously academic discussions of the paintings. The Madonna with the Cloak by Jacobello del Fiore, a picture with which she is familiar from a reproduction in her grandparents’ home long long ago, renders her almost speechless with admiration and joy – the child in the oval, tucked into an egg, seemed always to her to be suspended on a magical swing. And here she is, actually face to face with the brushstrokes, witness to the artist’s very materials. Her promise to seek the Bambinello is never far from the surface of her thoughts, but she moves on in confidence that this will be taken care of, that her prayers are at work somewhere in the ether, or in the recesses of an auction room in London or maybe Paris.

  So you can leave Rosita in ecstasy in front of the Madonna, leave Diana as she wanders happily, and follow Rufus and Corazón as they embrace in gondolas up and down canals, sit in cafés staring deep into each other’s eyes, hold hands and kiss on the Bridge of Sighs – but enough – what they really do in the afternoons is trip swiftly into the bedroom at the Montale apartment, and slip eagerly into Rufus’s bed. The bed is a vast walnut thing with a great carving of a peacock at the head and a tumble of big cushions and feather quilts. Long peach silk curtains drift across the windows which look out onto a small balcony, a Juliet balcony – but as you know Romeo and Juliet are safely together in the bedroom. They drink white wine and smoke those small cigars. Is there a CD of a Vivaldi violin concerto playing softly? Yes, actually, that is the case.