This seemed a curiously old-fashioned form of words to Raikes, as if Slingsby had been reading boys’ adventure stories. He was reminded suddenly of Lattimer’s remark about hemlock. ‘I’ll have a cognac,’ he said.
‘I’m having gin,’ Slingsby said. ‘Hey, scusi, waiter.’ His face looked pinker, moister; the small blue eyes, though still containing alarm, had lost that affrighted glancing. ‘I like gin,’ he said. ‘It’s clean.’
A graceful, olive-skinned youth came unhurriedly towards them; he was dressed in a red silk shirt and close-fitting black velvet trousers which held his genitals in a tight, neat pack.
‘Ah.’ Slingsby brightened visibly at the sight. ‘There you are. For mio amigo one cognac. He is a noted restorer of stone virgins.’ The youth smiled broadly, uncomprehending. ‘For me, doppio gin.’ Slingsby raised his large hands and made delicate, curiously irrelevant-seeming gestures in the air before him. ‘A double,’ he said.
Smiling, the boy made a gap between thumb and forefinger. ‘Così, Signore?’
‘Dead right,’ Slingsby said. He watched the waiter’s tight-sheathed retreat. ‘My, that boy has white teeth,’ he said. ‘Real white. You married, Mr Raikes?’
‘No,’ Raikes said. With an instinct of caution, he added, ‘Still playing the field.’
Slingsby brooded a moment. Then he said, ‘This evening was interesting, it was instructive. All those people come to save Venice from the elements. Totally forlorn quest. Germans, Italians, Americans, British, French. Has it struck you, Mr Raikes, that the same peoples were at one another’s throats just a generation ago on this same terrain? Were you in the war, Mr Raikes?’
‘I was nine months old when the war started.’
There was no change in Slingsby’s expression of shrewd, haunted baby. ‘I guess not,’ he said. ‘You must have been too young. I was younger then myself. Young firm bodies we had in those days. You married, Mr Raikes?’
‘Playing the field.’
‘None of them believes in God either. They have all come to restore works of art made to the greater glory of God, and none of them believes in Him.’
The boy returned with the drinks and Slingsby went through a pantomime of the gesture with finger and thumb. ‘Così, eh?’ he said. ‘Grazie, amigo. Say, what’s your name? Antonio, Benito, Ricardo?’
‘Giuseppe.’ The boy pointed a finger at his chest. He smiled from one to the other of them.
Slingsby followed his sinuous retreat. ‘Great sense of humour, that boy,’ he said.
‘I don’t think it’s a forlorn quest,’ Raikes said, reverting to Slingsby’s earlier remark. ‘Every single thing saved is a victory – I mean of course in the limited terms in which we can see it. Even just one thing … It’s an expression of belief in the future. It is the most pacific thing anyone could do.’
There was a drift of rain against the window. From where he was sitting he could see the row of triple-headed street lamps, their dark-pink panes making a long looping pattern down the riva. Over to his left he made out the neon Campari sign on the Lido, glowing hideous in the distance. Another waiter, older than Giuseppe, was stacking the red and white canvas chairs round the tables outside the Danieli. He had just uttered, he realized, a statement of faith. ‘If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t be doing it,’ he said.
If Slingsby felt this as a reproach he gave no sign of it. ‘That Japanese guy had the answer,’ he said. ‘It is the air. Did you see him make that karate chop? In that chop the man’s true nature stood revealed. I did not like to feel I shared my human nature with that chopper, Mr Raikes. But that is not what depressed me.’
Raikes said nothing. In the case of a man so prone to depression and dismay as Slingsby, he thought, particular causes could not add much in the way of illumination. Outside on the pavement, in the thin rain, two grave elderly men with umbrellas had stopped in conversation. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly midnight, high time he was making for home. There was no one but themselves there now. They would want to close the bar. Suddenly, disagreeably, he remembered again that tomorrow he had his appointment at Vittorini’s clinic.
‘That chop was the perfect illustration,’ Slingsby said obsessively. ‘The air is killing Venice. The air is a reservoir for aggressive impurities. The air is killing us. What is it your poet says?’
‘I think you’re exaggerating quite a bit,’ Raikes said.
‘Exaggerating? Mr Raikes, I am forty-eight years old. I have spent my working life looking at deteriorated stone in all sorts of places. I have just been in Austria looking at the aggressive effect of sulphate-rich water on their water tunnels over there – they used alkalic Portland cement in the concrete, fatal of course. Before that I was in Edinburgh looking at the headstones in some of your graveyards over there. Before that I was engaged in studying the weathering rates of basalt on Bohemian medieval castles. I have probably seen more decaying stone than any other man alive. It has affected me, Mr Raikes, I won’t deny it. It has played havoc with my life. Because, you see …’
Slingsby paused, making solemn plucking motions in the air before him. ‘I have realized that the same thing is happening to us,’ he said. ‘With every breath we draw. Inside we are the same, foul and pitted and polluted. And now I find myself in Venice, which is the most horrifying place of all. It is a nightmare. The place is stuck all over with images in the human form, doges and dignitaries, angels, saints, madonnas – all riddled with bacteria. There couldn’t’, he said gloomily, ‘be a worse place for a man like me. I have asked repeatedly for a transfer.’
Giuseppe had emerged from behind the bar and was wiping tables and arranging chairs. Slingsby’s harassed eye lingered on his lithe bendings and stretchings.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘there are areas still relatively untouched. Recently quarried, so to speak. After about the age of seventeen the rot sets in. There are just a few precious years.’
Raikes got up. ‘I must be on my way,’ he said. ‘Are you coming?’
‘No, I’ll stay on a while.’
Raikes left him there in the deserted bar. Outside on the pavement, setting off for home, he gave a last look behind him. He saw Slingsby’s hand raised in that pantomime gesture, signalling for another doppio.
5
VITTORINI’S CLINIC WAS on the Via Garibaldi. Light rain began to fall as Raikes was walking up towards it from the Arsenale stop.
He was apprehensive, talking to the girl in the small reception room and later to Vittorini; the latter, no doubt seeing this, took obvious care to reassure him, though without explaining much, compared at least to what an English doctor would have felt obliged to explain; it seemed that medical mysteries were more jealously guarded here.
It was not fear of discomfort or pain that troubled him but the feeling that he was somehow a suspect, a person under particular scrutiny. He had never had this feeling before, but he recognized it at once, in the affability with which he was treated, in the movements of the doctor’s manicured hands; he was an oddity, one whose behaviour might give rise to concern, who might need controlling. This unease persisted as he went through blood circulation tests and skull X-rays, not allayed by the spacious, well-appointed room or the deft and friendly sister; but it mounted to definite alarm only with the electro-encephalograph, which they gave him finally. Seated in the tall-backed chair, while the little steel cups were attached one by one to points of his skull, he felt truly in the grip of interrogators.
Some jelly-like substance was dabbed on his head before the electrodes were fixed in place. The sister perhaps sensed his tension for she smiled and said, ‘Non si preoccupi, è solo una pomata.’
Una pomata? he thought. Only a salve? That couldn’t be true. It must be something to conduct the electricity better. They were treating him like a baby. Indignation contended with his alarm. Eight slender wires now led from the eight plugs on his head to a console against the wall. He sat there, skull jellied and studded, wired to the gently hum
ming machine, while quite painlessly, without sensation on his part, the impulses of his brain were measured and recorded.
The apparatus was removed, the jelly sponged away – this last not by the sister but an ordinary nurse, summoned for the more menial task. She spoke to him cheerfully in the accents of the Veneto. He made an appointment for the forthcoming week, when the results would be made known to him. Within an hour of his arrival there, hair combed, umbrella remembered and retrieved, he was on his way back to the Arsenale.
It was not till much later in the day, with rain pricking the canal below his window, his diary on the table before him, that he thought in any conscious way about the business; and then it was with some return of that alarmed indignation. He remembered the lie about the pomata, the dab of the jelly, the wires trailing from his skull. He had been reduced to a mechanism, plugged-in. What could such a contraption possibly have to do with the swift and marvellous motions of his brain? Yet something irrevocable had happened there. Evidence had been extracted from him. Uneasily he took up his pen and drew the diary towards him; as usual he cast about for something of a factual nature to begin with; after some moments he found it:
Problems due to humidity still continue. There is a constant interaction of cold air from the Alps and warm air from the Adriatic and the two currents meet and contend over Venice. As I mentioned to Steadman, constant care is needed to prevent the glass particles from absorbing moisture and thereby clogging the machine. Time has been lost through the need to keep the beads dry. I have been wondering whether something less absorbent could be substituted for the glass. Aluminium oxide for example would not coagulate so easily. Must try this out when I return to England. The other main problem has been dealing with the dust. This is extremely dense and acrid and even with the full face mask I am using, which goes down well below the chin, some dust is inhaled. Apart from being disagreeable this is obviously dangerous to the health. Perhaps a larger mask could be used, though this would cause problems of air-supply. It should not be difficult to devise some sort of vacuum pipe that could suck up the dust while the work is going on. Presumably the nozzle of this could be attached to the abrasion instrument somehow. Some improvements will have to be made to the process. While the work remains so laborious and physically uncomfortable, recruiting local assistants will be difficult.
He paused. Perhaps a jet, fixed somehow to the nozzle, a cone of nebulized water playing round the point of impact … He thought of the Madonna, cleaned now to the waist. Another month, five weeks perhaps. There was regret in the thought of her completion, as well as eagerness. An intimate connection would be severed, and not with the Madonna only. He tried as he sat there to review his ‘attacks’, as Vittorini had called them, in the order in which they had come, but this was strangely difficult, he was impeded by memories of the accompanying sensations, the piercing light, the threat to balance, the intimate knowledge that attended the experiences. These, as objectively as possible, he had recorded in the diary already. But he had not so far attempted to interpret them. It was with the sense of taking a big step that he began writing again.
Could it be possible that I have really been seeing in this fragmentary and fleeting form true things about the past of the Madonna? That long straight shadow I saw lying across the room, on the first occasion, when I was just beginning … There were two people there, in a room of sunlight and shadow, it was hot, they were washing each other, naked, a man and a woman, lovers therefore, and the straight lines – were these cast by the stone, before she was made? The mystery is not in what I saw but what it means. And the face in the water, every feature was clear, she was smiling slightly, as if at some pleasing thought, a beautiful face, mouth full but well-shaped, level brows, delicate nostrils. There was a band of some kind round her neck.
Discounting all this, what do I really know? She was commissioned in the March of 1432 by the friars of the Supplicanti from a Piedmontese called Girolamo. If I am right she was delivered to them but not installed, remaining where she had been set down against the wall of the cloister until the church lands were sold. There she stayed, in what is now known as the Casa Fioret, through all its various owners, until 1743 when, in the belief that she had miraculous powers, she was installed on the façade of a completely different church by a benefactor unknown, under the auspices of one Piero Fornarini, Bishop of Venice, who subsequently choked on a chicken bone, or as some said, died laughing.
So the friars must have rejected her. On what grounds? Why would they reject a work of such outstanding quality? There is the position of the left hand, of course, which is unorthodox. This Girolamo was a Gothic man, at least in sensibility. He would see things in more extreme terms than they did in the later Renaissance. I have been wondering whether he was influenced by certain of the early Fathers who suggest that Mary’s first reaction to the Annunciation was fear of Gabriel’s magnificence. He came to her clothed in fire, after all. Could Girolamo have seen this as a sexual fear? The form below the draperies is very sensuously realized. I have mentioned already the moulding of the right leg, which looks almost unclothed, so closely does the drapery follow the contours of the limb – almost as if the stone had been abraded rather than cut. But it is not only the lower leg. The line of definition, and the same effect of abrading, is continued up the line of the right thigh, leading the eye straight to the pubic area. This too, the pubic triangle, is very carefully sculpted, the same effect of clinging drapery, due of course to the way the skirt of her robe is gathered up towards the high-waisted girdle, but the result is that we can trace the actual slope of the flesh between her legs, and this, in conjunction with the outstretched arm and the contrapposto, is erotic in effect. I don’t believe I am simply being ‘a perverted modern’, in Steadman’s words, to think this.
If she was rejected on those grounds, it is ironical that the Supplicanti themselves fell into disgrace within fifty or sixty years and for what must certainly have been sexual dereliction – probably institutionalized sodomy for them all to have been sent packing like that. Almost as if the good friars in their turn were corrupted by this image of the flesh dwelling in their midst.
Raikes stopped writing abruptly and after a moment or two got up and began walking about, prey to a sudden, inexplicable unrest. Not suspicion exactly, but the monstrous shadow of it, had fallen across his mind and he felt the kind of alarm that is experienced when associations form, almost with violence, beyond control, in a sort of mental spasming. Why that phrase? he thought. In their turn. He felt flushed and feverish, as he had on the occasion when his landlady, Signora Sapori, in her immaculate apron, had offered him some apple pie. In a further series of spasms he began to think of Chiara Litsov, the lonely figure in the red scarf standing above him, the beauty of her eyes and brows, her smiling mouth, the fingers pressing at the black earth round the roots of the seedlings, that strange, self-loving, self-protecting gesture, which had seemed so at odds with the openness of her manner … Had one of those trophy-tufts been hers? Was she the figure in the mist, waiting for Lattimer?
6
CROUCHED AGAINST THE Madonna’s pelvis, through the dust-mottled visor of his mask and the dust-filled space beyond it, Raikes watched the diseased encrustation of the stone clear, blur, clear again, the skin emerging white, millimetre by millimetre. The instrument seemed to attack the contaminated surface with an appetite of its own, stroking off the dross eagerly.
He worked with concentration. No single diseased grain would be allowed to survive. However uncontrollably murky his thoughts, this work of his hands would emerge pure; his hands alone would achieve it; restored she would be his creation, and his only. The faint hiss of impact, the hum of the compressed nitrogen feeding the cutter, signals of his own control and power. There was no sound in the enclosure, in the universe, but this, no sight but the slowly spreading whiteness – an absorption surely similar, he drifted into thinking, to that of the obscure artist who had made her, this shadowy Piedmontese. Yes
, surely similar – it was a consolation to think so, to think that he had not given up all share in the creative process when he had lost faith in his talents as a sculptor, settled for the safe hierarchy of the museum with its salary structure and pension scheme. Loss of nerve, acceptance of reality, he would never know now. He had not wanted to be second best.
There were differences of course, apart from the obvious one. It was difficult for modern man to feel at the heart of things, unless insane; but the man who had made this statue had seen himself, not as a random particle of matter, but as second only to the angels, in a world that was the centre of the universe, in a city that was the richest and strongest maritime power that world had ever seen. Marvellous to have that sense of centrality. The price of course was to be constantly in God’s eye. Signor Biagi’s words came back to him: la parte esposta, the exposed position. Strangely long ago that seemed now …
He was roused from these thoughts by shouts from below. He rose, moved rather stiffly to the edge of his small enclosure and peered down. He was wearing his mask still and the plastic visor was dusty, moreover tended to distort vision slightly at distances greater than a yard or two. He made out a small group of figures standing below him, a little way out into the square, several workmen in overalls, a dark-suited man, a woman in a light-coloured coat.
Even before removing the mask he had a certain breathless sense of who the woman might be. When he snatched it off it was as if his eyes were inundated with light. This flooding of the retinas, and the immediate recognition that the woman was indeed Chiara Litsov, combined somehow to impede his vision once again. He closed his eyes in a long blink, opened them, saw that the man in the suit was Biagi, that Chiara was smiling.
‘Can I come up and see what you’re doing?’ She had put her hands to the sides of her face, the better to wing these words to him.
Biagi, no doubt thinking that such a matter had to be discussed between men, acted as mediator. ‘Chiede se può salire,’ he shouted. ‘She asks if she may come up.’