Remembering Light and Stone

by Deirdre Madden

  I think perhaps other people thought I couldn’t see the difference that there was between me and them: people in Italy, Ted, or Bill, the man I’d known in Paris. They could certainly see it, and I think that such friends as I had liked me for that difference, which they saw as an old-worldliness, which looked eccentric, and at times more than slightly ridiculous. It shows itself in small but significant ways. Sometimes when I go to visit people, I bake a cake and bring it to them. When I have dinner at someone’s house, I always write them a thank-you note afterwards. It took me years to get over the idea of having good clothes set aside for special occasions, a hangover from the ‘Sunday best’ mentality. In Paris once, someone I knew had a baby, and I knitted a little jumper for it. She was so staggered when I gave it to her, that I’ve never dared to do it again, not even for Jimmy’s kids. As I say, these things are small, but I know better than anybody that they indicate a mind-set far from the common run in the late twentieth century.

  I suppose it would have been funny, if it hadn’t been so painful, and finding out that everyone was playing life by different rules than the ones I’d been told were valid was very painful. I’ve never been promiscuous. That American I knew in Paris was the first man I’d been to bed with, and when he left me, I found it hard not to think that the lacerating pain and the rage I felt were not divine retribution for my sin, even though I knew that this was a reprehensible and cowardly attitude. One thing I really admired in contemporary society was the attempt to develop an adult morality, that is, a desire to do right for its own sake, rather than from fear of being punished by God. If I had ever seen this new mature morality working in practice rather than just in theory, I’m sure I would have admired it even more.

  I’ve always believed that the big difference was that Ireland hadn’t been involved in the Second World War, so that we didn’t undergo that necessary period of nihilism; a loss of faith not just in God but in all authority. To some extent we also missed out on that rampant materialism that had spread all over Europe, and which still astounded me, even after having lived in the middle of it for years. While Ted stood rapt before the paintings I eyed the other people wandering around the gallery. There was a young couple beside us with a video camera and a guidebook, comfortable shoes, and expensive, bright casual clothes. They looked indistinguishable from any number of people I’d seen in the past, tourists in Florence, S. Giorgio, Rome. The woman’s face wore a slightly puzzled, slightly anxious expression. The man’s face was blank. I wondered what on earth they saw in all these gilt Madonnas, stern saints and stiffly holy angels. When we went into the next room, the only other person there was a gallery attendant, slumped in his chair asleep, and snoring unashamedly.

  ‘What have you got against contemporary painting, anyway?’ I said peevishly all of a sudden. Ted was a bit taken aback at both the question and the tone, but he answered immediately, ‘It won’t last. It’s incoherent.’

  ‘And you think the twentieth century isn’t?’

  ‘It is, of course. That’s the problem. The art being made now is completely unlike the art of any other period in the whole history of humanity, because everything is different now. There’s never been a period like this.’

  ‘And don’t you think that’s exciting?’ I said.

  ‘No, Aisling, I don’t, I think it’s depressing. There’s a sort of madness now. Look, if you take say, this painting here,’ and he indicated Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s tiny picture of a walled town by the sea, ‘and, say, a Vermeer, an African Mask and a Japanese print, even though they’re all from such different eras and cultures you can see at once that they have something in common. The same things have always mattered to people, things like love and death, and though they may use completely different forms to express them, the fears and desires are the same, which is why the meaning of a work of art can transcend its own period and place. But if you look at the things being made now, well, I truly believe that they will be interesting in the future only to show how crazy a time this was. It’ll be beyond belief, Aisling. They’ll wonder what ever possessed us. What we call art will only look ugly and stupid.’

  ‘So you mean they won’t last because they’re not pleasant to look at? Because they’re not decorative?’

  ‘No, because they’re not beautiful.’

  ‘Lots of them are beautiful.’

  ‘Well then, because they’re not sublime.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by sublime.’

  ‘Oh Aisling,’ he said, and he looked at me shrewdly, in a way he’d never looked at me before, ‘I think that you do.’

  I still wasn’t convinced. ‘There used to be a sense of wholeness,’ he said. ‘That’s gone now.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’

  I was tempted to dismiss Ted as a philistine with a sentimental streak and a fondness for paintings that looked like what they were supposed to be, but as soon as this thought came to my mind, I had to dismiss it. I knew it was unfair and untrue. Rather, he could somehow reach beyond things he didn’t believe in, and get at their truth. I found that hard to understand.

  On leaving the gallery, we walked back towards the centre of town, went up Banche di Sopra, and had a glass of Chianti and a ham roll for lunch in Nannini’s. Ted commented on the extraordinary prices of the bottles of vintage Brunello di Montalcino displayed on the mirrored shelves behind the bar, and I bought a slab of white nougat studded with pistachios to take back to Franca. All the time we were in the bar, though, I was still pursuing the same line of thought from the morning in the gallery. I was more conscious than ever before of the difference – and the distance – between Ted and me. I looked across at him as he tried to engage a frosty waitress in conversation as she made him a coffee. He didn’t seem to mind that she wasn’t responding. Sometimes when I looked at him in a public situation like this I saw him as someone I knew and to whom I felt very close, and then when I looked again, he was a stranger. When that happened, I was particularly aware of his being from an anonymous society. That made him as he was, and I wasn’t like that at all. I remembered how we talked about our childhoods one night, and then we had talked about religion. He said his parents had taken him to church now and then when he was a child, but he had always known that their hearts weren’t in it. They were doing it because they felt they ought to, not out of any sort of belief. They had all been glad when they’d been able to drop the pretence and stop going.

  ‘Anyway,’ Ted had said to me, ‘we were Lutheran, and I’ve really grown to dislike that. I think Protestantism misses the whole point of Christianity completely. There are lots of things I don’t like about Catholicism either, but from having lived in Italy I understand it more and I like it more. Here, Catholicism fits because it’s a Mediterranean religion. All that talk in the Bible about olive groves and vineyards and fish, that makes sense to me here. You drink a good wine in Italy, and you see why Christ wanted to make a sacrament out of it. Then you have these churches in the north of Europe and America and they’re so afraid of life, they give you a thimbleful of grape juice, and then pride themselves on their own self-righteousness. Religion interests me in terms of its relation to a given society, and of course above all in its connections with art, but that’s as far as it goes, and as far as I want it to go. The idea of faith doesn’t interest me at all.’

  My own experience had been so different. I couldn’t think of my childhood without thinking of the religion which had been an integral part of it. Everything about it caught my imagination, from the idea that I had a guardian angel (whom I longed to catch unawares and therefore visible) to our parish church with its fake grotto. I had a little plastic shrine I was particularly fond of, because the statue was in a niche behind a pair of tiny gates, and I liked the secretness of that, liked how you could close over the gates, and then the statue would be hidden. Every spring, the nuns at school encouraged us to make a May altar: not that I needed any encouragement. I loved going through the fields to
gather flowers at dusk, and then I’d put them in two jars and set up my plastic shrine on a clean cloth, with a candle before it. I made the mistake of telling Ted about it, trying to describe how much the final effect had pleased me, with the scent of the flowers and the soft light of the candle. He thought this was the strangest thing: if I’d told this anecdote in connection with my grandmother I think he’d have coped with that, but he couldn’t believe that my own childhood had been so antediluvian. Half charmed and half shocked, he had wanted to know more, but I had quickly changed the subject.

  Again I wondered what it was we had in common, and why we were together. The following month we would go to the States together, and even though I was looking forward to it, there were also moments when I dreaded it. We were to stay some of the time with his family, and I was afraid of what I would know there, about him and about myself. Yet I was still so old-fashioned that I couldn’t stop believing that this self-knowledge was one of the most important things you could have in life.

  As he was finishing his coffee Ted said, ‘Let’s go see the Maestà in the cathedral museum after lunch, then go over the road to the cathedral itself. Is that OK?’ I said that was fine.

  When we left Nannini’s, it was raining. On our way to the museum, we passed a gap between two buildings on the left, where a flight of steps led down to Piazza Del Campo. ‘It’s funny if you’re here in the summer,’ I said, ‘you can hardly get down those steps because of the crowds of people that are always standing there taking photos of the square. It’s strange to see.’

  I had seen Duccio’s Maestà several times before. When we went into the room in the museum where it is exhibited, there were about twenty people sitting before the main panel. A guide was talking to them in French, and I idly listened in as she told them how the painting had originally been above the main altar of Siena cathedral. I thought it a pity that it wasn’t still there. In the room where it now hung temperature and humidity could be controlled, but I always think you lose so much when you can’t see a painting in its original context. Even the best lose something when they’re moved, and minor works gain too from being seen where they belong. Ted and I were standing at the back of the room, where the paintings of the predella were displayed. Ted whispered to me, ‘You know that the whole thing isn’t here, don’t you? Some of the panels are in the States, Maybe you’ll get to see them when we go to Washington.’

  I looked across the room again, and tried to imagine how the whole thing would look if it were to be put together again, and replaced above the main altar of the cathedral: the tiny exquisite panels showing scenes from the life of Christ under and around the vast central panel, with its lovely Madonna and child, and the ranks of angels which surrounded them. I tried to imagine the effect of candlelight on all that gold, and how the eyes of the angels would look. The guide was telling the group of how the painting had been broken up, and they gasped lightly when she pointed out where the main panel had been sawn into pieces. I turned back to the predella, and looked at one scene in particular, showing ‘The Washing of The Feet’. I looked deep into it, and I tried to see it as it was when it was made. I was trying now not to re-create in my mind the form of the original, but to see the meaning of it, to enter as fully as possible into its original spirit. And then I realized that I couldn’t do it, any more than Ted could. I was conscious of the huge construction of theology and iconography which no longer had any relevance for me, but which informed every inch of the Maestà. The Madonna was beautiful, as beautiful as Aphrodite. I thought of the paintings I’d seen that morning in the gallery, and now I saw them all in the same way, like magnificent images painted on doors to the past that were shut and locked. I thought of the plastic shrine I’d had as a child. The memory of it still meant something to me, because it was ugly but simple, and what I had lost while looking at the Maestà was faith in all things that weren’t simple. I couldn’t relate the painting to faith any more, and I couldn’t relate the shrine to anything else.

  When we were on the train to Florence that evening, I looked at the sky and thought of being in the cathedral some hours earlier. I’d seen a young man there chewing gum and blowing it into pink, sticky bubbles as he looked, unmoved, at the pulpit. Suddenly I realized how much I was looking forward to going to America, because I longed to be away, if only a while, from the weight of the past.

  14

  Ted and I left for America early one morning in February. I felt excited and nervous as we waited with our luggage to check in for the flight: excited because I like travelling, nervous because it’s as if airports are custom built to make you feel that way. Say what you like, flying is deeply unnatural, and everybody knows that, from the heads of airlines down to people who won’t set foot on a plane.

  As if he were reading my thoughts, Ted suddenly remarked, ‘Airports are weird,’ as we walked away from the check-in desk. ‘I can never figure out why they have to feel so different to train stations.’ The departure area was so crowded that we decided to go straight through passport control and security, and wait on the other side until it was time to board our flight. When all the formalities were over, Ted bought himself a coffee and sat down to read the paper, while I wandered off to have a look at the shops. I hadn’t the slightest interest in doing so, but we were going to be cooped up beside each other the whole way across the Atlantic, so I thought it would be good if we had at least half an hour on our own before the journey began.

  I was glad to see that Ted was so relaxed and happy, and looking forward to being back in America for a while. He didn’t seem unduly troubled about having me as a travelling companion, although I had tried to warn him that I might be difficult. He had heard me out, then said mildly, ‘Oh, I know that, Aisling. You can be hell in your own apartment, never mind at thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic. I don’t expect you to be any worse or better than you usually are,’ which didn’t please me as much as I think he thought it would. ‘What about your parents?’ I asked, and he said, ‘Oh, they’ll think you’re just as sweet as you can be.’ Ted’s more ironic than your average American. I let the matter drop at that.

  This trip to America would be the longest period of time we’d ever spent together, and travel can strain a relationship like nothing else. I really had done my best to warn him beforehand, and recounted a couple of new, gruesome dreams, to which he listened with interest, but without comment. Anyway, I thought, if I did crack up completely while I was away, at least he couldn’t say that I’d deceived him about how things were.

  I mooched about the Duty Free area for a while, but I didn’t buy anything. I never do when I’m flying. I’m always put off by the excess, the greed you see in Duty Free shops; all the bottles and packets and even the bars of chocolate on sale are much bigger than normal. It’s like the airlines want you to wallow in greed while you’re waiting, to take your mind off the fact that you might never get to where you’re going. They make these big glittery shops, and then fill them with things that give you the most stereotypical view of the country: blue and white delft in Amsterdam; linen in Dublin. This being Italy, there was high fashion on sale, and a lot of food: wine, hams and expensive coloured pasta. It was still too soon to go back to Ted, so I walked up and down looking at the departure gates, and the groups of people waiting at each one. There was a flight due to leave for Ankara, and I noticed a particular Turkish family group who were waiting for it. They were sitting on the floor, probably because the wire benches in the departure lounge of Fiumicino are so uncomfortable, and they were eating a meal of large, crudely made sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. People were looking at them with open contempt and suspicion, because they were Turkish and poor, because they didn’t blend in with their slick surroundings, and they didn’t seem to care.

  When I got back to Ted, he had finished his coffee, and was folding up his newspaper. We went together to the departure gate, and went down a tube, into the plane. As in the airport, there was that same feeling of induced ali
enation that makes me feel so uneasy. The stewardesses went through the usual charade with the lifejackets and the oxygen masks, to which no one paid the slightest attention. We taxied into line behind three other planes, and then we saw each of them in turn speed down the runway. Our turn came, and as we gathered speed, they played a quick blast of bland music. The flat yellow and brown fields fell away below us. The music was cut off as abruptly as it had been started, and a few moments later, the seatbelt signs blipped off.

  We were flying to New York and from there we were to get a connection down to Washington, where Ted’s family lived, and where we were to spend the first week. The cabin crew brought us a meal as we crossed the Alps. Looking down we could see the snow on the tops of the serene, inhuman mountains, and the tiny villages strung out along the bottom of the deep valleys. I found it hard to imagine people down there, as the inhabitants of the villages no doubt found it hard to believe that there were over a hundred people having breakfast in the speck of silver that they could see moving across a bare sky.