Seiobo There Below (11 page)

HELL REALLY EXISTS

and below which it was repeated that, according to Benedict, who had recently spoken at a convocation in a northern district of Rome, it was an error to think, as more and more people did, that hell was just a kind of metaphor, an emblem, an abstraction; because, reported Benedict, it has a physical reality — this, the article on the front page of the Corriere della Sera, was what came into his mind, what an impossible situation, he thought, sitting two hundred meters away from me is someone who has followed me, someone who is watching me, and here I am, beside the Frari, with this idiotic thing in my brain, I’ve lost my mind; he tried to pull himself together, but he couldn’t because it then came into his mind that while John Paul II was of the opinion, as the Corriere stated, that heaven and purgatory were not really extant, Benedict went so far, continued the reporter, as to state with full emphasis at this convocation in the north of Rome that it was possible that heaven and purgatory did not really exist, but that hell did, moreover in the concrete physical sense, where the word, that is to say physical, had been set in italics, there in the daily mail of the occupants of the house on the little marble table; but what could this possibly mean, he thought, but only this much: well, let’s just stop here, what is this, so there’s no heaven, no purgatory, that’s fine, to hell with the whole thing, that’s fine — but he did not continue the thought, as suddenly a feeling arose that he was flirting imprudently with danger, a danger that possibly didn’t have any basis, but if this were not the case, then he was, with complete utter carelessness, flirting with it; he jumped up suddenly and set off for the narrow alleyway that ran alongside the apse of the Frari, but just as suddenly regretted doing so, turning back to the Campo dei Frari, and quickly crossed the square on the near side — in opposition to his plan, that is to say, actually, contrary to his intended direction, he turned into a back alley just as narrow and dark and damp and chill, in order to draw attention away from where he was really going, but he nearly ruined it, it shot through him; he nearly revealed against his own will where he was going with those resounding steps of the black oxfords, he nearly betrayed to his pursuer his destination; he himself hardly understood how he could have been so rash, but it’s fine now, he thought, calming down a bit, there is no way anyone could now tell where he was headed, which, as senseless as that might have seemed, still could be the case; that is, not to reveal where he was headed, inasmuch as there was no question whatsoever of pursuit, inasmuch as it was, however, a question of pursuit; it will all soon come to light, he kept looking backward in the alleyway; and so, as to allow that chance to occur, he stopped, trying to discern if he heard steps in the quiet that suddenly sprang forth from the silencing of his own hard-soled shoes, but he didn’t hear anything, only a small breeze struck him, coming in both directions from the damp walls; in any case, because he had to know if that character was on his trail again, he slowly began to move backward in the alleyway, cautiously, on tiptoe lest the shoe taps betray him yet again, and hiding his body behind the wall, he leaned out, looking out onto the square, but there was no one sitting on the other side at the little table beneath the sun-umbrella, on the contrary, he was nowhere on the square, he had disappeared, had been absorbed, evaporated, he stated to himself, and stayed there for a few moments longer, until he could cut across the small intersections without his heart jumping into his mouth — as he reflected, for a while, Pink-Shirt could pop up in front of him at any moment, surprising him at any one of these little intersections — but as one intersection came right after the next, and nothing of the sort occurred, he slowly began to calm down; he stopped, he listened, then after he turned and went back toward the Campo dei Frari, he found the square in exactly the same state as before, that is to say completely deserted, he now had the courage to turn definitively into his own alleyway, so that taking it he could reach the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which was his goal, he went to the end of the Salizzada S. Rocco, which now did not seem as narrow as it had a moment ago, when no one at all was walking there, perhaps because now, as he turned into the alleyway, he caught sight of a few pedestrians who were already approaching from the opposite direction, from the San Rocco to the Frari, that is to say in the opposite direction to himself; in any event these few encounters, as each stray pedestrian passed by, felt as if someone were shaking him by the shoulders, saying wake up already, it’s all over, it was just a bad dream, don’t worry about it, that was his mood as he reached the Campo dei S. Rocco where nearly the whole of the little square was filled with sunlight, and there to the left stood the marvelous Scuola Grande di S. Rocco, for whose plan we can thank a certain master builder of the name of Bartolomeo Bon, although for the entire building itself — in other words the entirety of the San Rocco in all of its full glory — our thanks are due to Sante Lombardo and Antonio Scarpagnino, so that after 1549, Giangiacomo dei Grigi had nothing to do but finish it, that is to create the gestures still missing from the structure, so that it could stand in all of its beauty resplendent before the visitors, just as it stood today before him, who even at first went toward the iron gate of the plot of land facing the building and stood there, and turned around to gaze at this creation which in the opinion of all Venice-goers responds to the most exalted and perfect architectonic conception — simply to give himself over not only to the wonder, as he had already stumbled upon this, amazed, when he had been here for the first time, but to his memories as well, because it was, as a matter of speaking, about this too; it was for the sake of this that he had come to Venice, for the sake of this one single building, because once, when he had come here for the first time, he had been so overpowered there inside that in fact he had shuddered; he stood in the sunlight and looked at the elegant façade of the San Rocco, but his gaze strayed again and again to the entrance, where he himself would step inside, as he had stepped inside once before, but not now, he composed himself; now, for the time being, he had to catch his breath, free himself from the horrifying dream of just a few minutes before, to expel from his head this entire nightmarish pursuit, because really, looking at it from here, he thought — amid the smaller crowds of people that already, at the end of the siesta, were inundating here and there between the entrance and exit points of the tiny square — it seemed completely impossible that someone would start pursuing him as soon as he stepped out of the doorway of the pensione, some guy in a pink shirt, a ridiculous gangly sort with his strange S-shaped body, his collapsing knees, his head dangling forward, how could he even have imagined it, and even more so that this figure had targeted him, it was really totally absurd, he decided, because why the hell would anyone be looking for him in Venice, where he knew virtually no one, what reason could there possibly have been for anyone to trail him among the tens of thousands of tourists, especially him, who in the whole God-given world had no ties at all to Italy, let alone Venice, and moreover, he was not one of those who kept coming back here again and again, in pursuit of so-called illusory pleasures, giving himself over to the blank drift of superficial and frankly idiotic raptures — he was not in any way like one of them!? — actually he did not truly admire Venice: as far as he was concerned, Venice reminded him too much of a woman, for him, there was in Venice a kind of immoderate feminine delusion and fraudulence, no, this city was not his cup of tea, though of course he could not deny that it was truly beautiful, that there was in Venice an unparalleled beauty, this strange city — from the Ca’Doro to the San Giovanni e Paolo, from the San Marco to the Accademia, the Hotel Giorgione to La Fenice, and so on — but admiration was denied to him and he did not love Venice, he was instead afraid of it, the way he would be of a murderously cunning individual who ensnares his victims, dazing them, and finally sucking all the strength from them, taking everything away from them that they ever had, then tossing them away on the banks of a canal somewhere, like a rag; yes, this was how he now saw this laughable situation; he didn’t even come here very often, in the course of his long life this was the second time he had been here, and now, he thought, smiling at his own fears, what a crazy, terrifying, perhaps excessive, if he could put it that way, fantastical start, he was fortunate, he added to himself, completely relaxing now in the midst of the crowd, that he didn’t have to go to the Ca’Foscari or the Palazzo Ducale, nowhere at all, he didn’t have to budge from here, and a vaporetto wasn’t much so that he didn’t have to pay a lot; if he wanted, apart from the S. Rocco, he didn’t have to see anything of Venice — just the one single thing he had traveled here to see; the visitation of which was more important to him than his entire mediocre, senseless, barren, and superfluous life.

He began with Titian, because first of all Cavalcasalle had done so, then Fischel and Berenson decisively, then Suida with doubts, and finally in 1955, a certain Coletti reached the definite conclusion that the creator of the painting was none other than Titian, yet this attribution, if the word itself applies, can be accepted only with the same difficulty as that which followed afterward; above all, if we look at it from today, the principles employed were just as baseless as what was stated afterward; in any case Signor Pignatti came along and announced — twice to be exact, in 1955 and 1978 — that all of this Titian-attribution was a mistake, for the analysis of the painted surfaces as well as the dolcezza in the use of color made it clear that it was the circle of Giorgione that could be thanked for the canvas, a view as surprising as much as it was incomprehensible, for he, that is Giorgione, was at that time not considered a religious painter, no pictures of his on sacral themes have survived; the only one we know originating from him on any such motif, the “Castelfranco Madonna,” is a work commissioned to this mysterious genius by Amateo Constanzo for the burial of his son Matteo; in a word, utter confusion dominated the question of who painted the picture, a confusion that was finally crowned by the commencement in 1988 of a mutually reinforcing war of hypotheses, which was begun by Mauro Lucco, who stated: well, my honored ladies and gentlemen, please forgive me, but the painting almost certainly originated from the brush of Giovanni Bellini; let us place it side by side with the work entitled “The Drunkenness of Noah,” which can be seen in Besançon; and after this there was no stopping, Michel Laclotte came along, pointed his short index finger at the “Cristo morto nel sepolcro” and said “Bellini,” and then Anchise Tempestini stepped in, and finally Miss Goffen, and they said “Bellini,” just as did the postcards of scandalously poor quality displayed on the tables behind the ticket counter, unambiguously indicating with no discussion, with not even one tiny question mark at the end, the great Bellini, despite the fact that by then scholars had at their disposal the expert opinion of the distinguished Hans Belting, who considered the authorship of the given painting by Titian as self-evident, and moreover in such a fashion that he was the only one who did not make any argument but simply referred to “the painting by Titian” and that was it; so that the uncertainty could have been absolute had not the Confraternita — containing more than a few Bellini-proponents — closed the matter for once and for all, declaring Giovanni Bellini as the author of the picture, so that after this point no one raised the question again, the matter seemed to be closed and it very well could have remained so, in this atmosphere of mutually exclusive attributions, had not the art historian of the Confraternita, Dr. Agnese Chiari, been troubled by something about this valued treasure of S. Rocco, and not brought it to the attention of Dr. Fatima Terzo, who shortly before the turn of the millennium had paid a visit here from the Vicenza branch of Banca Intesa, that is from the Palazzo Leoni Montanori, she had said that there’s something else here, among all the sensational Tintorettos: a little picture, the whole thing no larger than 56 by 81 cm., clearly belonging to the imago pietatis tradition as posited by Belting and hence referring back to the Byzantine heritage; it was in such poor condition that it deserved a little attention; Dr. Chiari glanced meaningfully at Dr. Terzo, who was responsible for all cultural matters at the bank, while she arranged for her to see in more tranquil surroundings, in the little camarilla on the second floor to the right, what was at play here; it could, she repeated with an innocent face, do with a little repair, because it’s very beautiful, isn’t it, asked Agnesee Chiari, and let the protective brocade fall before her guest in the narrow space of the camarilla, beautiful, replied Dr. Terzo in astonishment upon seeing the picture, so that afterward, with no further discussion, the picture turned up in the hands of the master Egidio Arlango, and the always risky undertaking of restoration work began, the chief goal of which, for Agnese Chiari and the Scuola Grande Arciconfraternita di San Rocco, was to bring to a halt the evident disintegration of the picture, its physical stabilization, declared Dr. Chiari to the council members at the voting colloquium of the Confraternita, because truly, in the upper and lower sections of the work, where the canvas had been stretched onto its frame, and was thus at its tautest, serious damage was visible, even to the naked eye, so now, when Mr. Arlango examined it more carefully with his magnifying glass, to note in the inventory where exactly the most serious problems lay, and of what character they were, it became obvious that if no intervention were made, the work would begin to crack apart within a few years at these given spots, the paint would chip off, and hence the damage caused by the long delay would be irreparable; but in the restoration workshop of Mr. Arlango they found other problems as well, here a patch where the strength of the color had waned, there a crown of thorns that had lost its outline, then the faded Greek initial letters on both sides of the head, and the generally dark, seemingly homogeneous background itself, which already cried out with its countless fissures for the hand of Mr. Arlango; so that of course for all of them — the Banca Intesa, Mr. Arlango, and Dr. Agnese Chiari — the undeniable overriding intention was to repair the artwork and halt its further decay; thus, for all of them, but particularly the ambitious art historian, a much more deeply hidden goal was at work: to know, that is to decide through the means of restoration, who was in fact the true painter, and particularly so that they could say it was without doubt Tiziano, or without doubt Bellini, or without a doubt Giorgione, and the San Rocco collection would be enriched by a major artwork of clear attribution, so that Dr. Chiari came to look at the restorer’s workshop nearly every single day, to ask: Giorgione? Tiziano? Giovanni Bellini? — Mr. Arlango, though, did not reply for a long time; in addition, Mr. Arlango, with his squashed-together face, was a person of fairly disagreeable aspect, perhaps because of his physical deformity or perhaps because of something else, he was decidedly humorless, unfriendly, and taciturn, an individual who disliked strangers coming into his workshop; he didn’t even pause to answer if someone asked a question but only spoke when it was truly necessary, and in this case it was certainly not necessary one bit, because nothing had been determined, and how could anything have been determined anyway; when they had photographed the painting from all angles, with the greatest possible caution, and had begun to remove the canvas from the frame — even figuring out how to perform this task took a week to decide — then the examination of the frame itself followed, and Dr. Chiari realized that she had to deal with Mr. Arlango in an altogether different manner, that it would be better to let him work undisturbed, to reduce the number of her visits; indeed, she asked for his advice as to when it would be good to come back, to which of course the broadest smile possible appeared on Mr. Arlango’s sour face as he happily announced, Come back in a year’s time, then abruptly turning away from Dr. Chiari, he addressed himself to another painting, as he began to dig away with a tiny scraping knife at the joists of the frame, his back turned toward her, and the broad smile of a moment ago became a prolonged smile of satisfaction displaying his yellow teeth; this smile lasted for quite a while, this inimitable gaiety practically affixed to his sour face, so that the yellow teeth stinking of nicotine only disappeared beneath the chapped lips in Mr. Arlango’s squashed-together countenance when he heard, over the sounds of the knife scraping against the frame, someone leaving the studio and closing the door quietly behind herself.