Stone Virgin (14 page)

However, the pain of the snub stayed with him for the rest of the visit. And though he behaved with what he hoped was proper poise, he addressed no more remarks directly to Chiara Litsov, nor looked at her oftener than he had to.

8

WHEN, LATER ON
, in the silence of his room, he was bringing his diary up to date, he found he could remember very little of the conversation after Wiseman’s remark about art and celebration. It was as if he had been downed and counted out. Visual details he could remember: sunlight of late afternoon falling through the big, square window of the living room, where they had returned for their coffee; sunlight on the woman’s hands and the front of her dress and gleaming on the polished fragments that lay about the room like some marvellous wreckage. Only Lattimer had seemed somehow uninvolved in the sunshine, as if moving in a pallid luminescence of his own. Litsov had a nervous habit, only noticed now, of jigging a foot or tapping with lightly clenched fist against the side of his thigh.

At odds with that noble brow. Raikes experienced a faint return of animosity. Of course as far as she is concerned I am a mere mechanic, she made that clear enough. But there was an atmosphere there, a curious sort of tension, difficult to define. There had been no chance to compare notes with Wiseman; Lattimer, in a white cap and a beautiful grey anorak, had brought them the whole way back in his speedboat, which he handled expertly, an exhilarating experience. Why did her words hurt me so much? he wondered. Because she put to public use what I had told her privately? But one’s occupation is not such a great secret. And she could not have known that a sculptor was what I wanted more than anything else to be. No, it was because I had entered the lists for her and she knew it …

I must be mad, he thought. A complete stranger. She saw her husband being attacked and she defended him. What could be more natural? But that was not it either. Raikes sat back, obscurely puzzled, listening to the silence. Why did I take it upon me to defend her? His complacency of course antagonized me, but even then I was beginning to think that more apparent than real. It was the sight of her in the midst of all those metal versions of herself, trapped among them, only half-acknowledged by him, raw material for his abstractions, nothing else. And then this care to placate him …

Lattimer too had shown the same concern, and Lattimer did not seem conciliatory by nature, far from it. Even before the great man appeared, there had been some sense almost of apprehension between them. And in fact he had been out of temper at first. Why was it so important to keep Litsov in a good mood? That rubbish about art being a fruit of man, enough to make one cringe. She was just a good wife, then, keeping his vanity fed, cooking for him, modelling for him, mediating for him with the outside world, since he so rarely left the island. A paragon.

With the word came feelings of scepticism. Raikes drew the diary towards him as if for reassurance. About the Madonna there were questions too, but with patience one might answer them. It was Mrs Litsov’s beauty that made for doubts. Was it doubts or hopes he was experiencing? It was the virtuous nymphs, after all, who had to be saved by metamorphosis. Even her beauty had now become in a way questionable, something others might not acknowledge, so totally was her face and form to his own liking, not hitherto dreamed of, but instantly recognized … He looked down at the pages open before him. Here at least there was cause for satisfaction; he had kept to his intentions; the material was mounting up day by day. He paused for a moment or two to gather his thoughts, then embarked on the day’s entry:

Tomorrow, back to work on the Madonna. The lower folds of her robe have been done now, up to a level just above the knees. All this is white and splendid. I am nervous still about the upper parts, especially the hands and head. But the quartz-cutter is working wonderfully well. One must of course restrain the impulse to hurry. It is natural to want to get the whole form renewed. But any smallest area missed or skimped now will not absorb the conserver and that could jeopardize the whole value of the restoration. So patience is the order of the day.
She
has been patient enough, after all.
È la parte esposta
, as Signor Biagi said. No sickliness there about fruit. Christ of course the spiritual fruit of the Madonna’s womb. But she was not supposed to be an individual, merely a set of attributes for veneration.

Her right leg, the one that is advanced, is given a definite prominence against the drapery, and the limb itself is quite robust and substantial and moulded very plastically, almost as if it was done by abrasion rather than cutting. Great care has gone into the moulding of this right leg and the only significant movement of the drapery in the area is a long diagonal fold, not very deep – five or six inches – going from just below the kneecap to the beginning of the convex line of the calf, on the inside of the leg. This fold does nothing to conceal the details of the leg. In fact it rather sensuously emphasizes them. The left leg of course is masked by the drapery and not articulated.

The Gothic movement is implicit in this right leg and in the way the drapery is used not to enhance volume, as it was in the Venetian sculpture of the time, but to accentuate the line. Something of Nino Pisano there in the clinging lines of the robe? Certainly Pisano influenced the Dalle Masegne brothers and they worked in Bologna and Venice. Milan too, I think. So a line from Pisano through the Dalle Masegne to some northern Italian sculptor of the next generation?

Raikes paused and looked up, with a sudden feeling of discouragement. There were so many possible lines. Still, it was remarkable, and a kind of clue, that among the host of undistinguished monumental madonnas of the day this one should exist with its grace of feeling and movement. Made to a formula they had most often been: recipient of tidings, receptacle for the Holy Ghost, vehicle for Christ. Yet someone, whose name nobody knew, in early fifteenth-century Venice, had fashioned a woman like no other. She was there in the darkness now, he thought, looking across the roofs towards the dim expanse of the Lagoon, as she had done every night for the last two hundred and fifty years or so. And before that?

A mood of wondering speculation descended on Raikes, vague yet intense, absorbing, like the half-incredulous wonder we sometimes feel at the sheer fact of our existence in the world, when the details summoned as evidence, though true, seem somehow to make certainty less. He thought of Chiara Litsov and her gardening, the green shoots and black earth, the two figures glimpsed so fleetingly – the other man must have been Lattimer … He thought of the steps that had led to this visit, his discovery of the notebook, Barfield’s peevish request for five more degrees in the devotional gloom, the spidery outline of the name in its suffusion of light, the house by the canal with its damp and echoing courtyard, the hemmed-in, disconsolate building of the church. Hemmed-in. The steady pulse of recollection missed a beat, stayed.
More logical to look for a church
. This church was deconsecrated, had therefore been abandoned or suppressed at some time. The original precincts must have been much larger. That was it, of course: the church land had been sold to the house opposite, or acquired in some other way.

With peculiar deliberation Raikes found himself dwelling on that view from the gate across the narrow alley. The words of his conversation with Steadman came back to him.
Lurking about in a cloister somewhere
. Why had he so easily assumed the alley to be the true dividing line? It could have been made much later. Easy to see why the owners of the house would want to acquire the land – that long, rectangular piece running alongside the canal would make a beautiful garden and gardens were rare in Venice, gardens large enough actually to walk about in. Yes, easy to see … Steady now, he cautioned himself. Let us go step by step. Supposing the Madonna was made for this church and then for some reason never put in the intended place, supposing she was just left in the church precincts, and if then subsequently the church was deconsecrated … There would have been no means of retrieving her, or perhaps the priests did not want to, so when the land was sold …

In his excitement at these thoughts, he jumped up and began pacing back and forth across the room.

He was thirty-three years old, unmarried, physically strong, with an ardent, innocent nature and some tendency to hysteria. The Madonna was five hundred and forty.

First Interlude

Coronation

IN THE SPRING
of 1793, when Ziani began writing his boastful, scandalous
Mémoires
, the Madonna was three hundred and sixty-one. He was seventy-four and dying. The previous year a stroke had disabled him down one side and stretched a corner of his thin mouth. He could not walk far now, and had a permanent look of distaste. But his memory was clear as ever – clearer, as though distilled by the body’s decay. The airs of the past came to him, warm with malice, spiced with lechery, scented with self-congratulation.

Day after day he sat huddled at the card table he used for a desk in one corner of the vast apartment on the third floor of his mortgaged house, writing by the light of the window, though reflections from the canal below troubled his eyes and sometimes disturbed the vengeful and erotic flow of his thoughts. Apart from his own meagre person in its soiled blue satin robe, and his table and chair, and the couch he slept on, everything in the apartment was draped in dust sheets. Neither house nor furniture belonged properly to him; he lived on there by agreement with his creditors.

His eyes were failing, he could not see with any distinctness to the far end of the apartment, his gaze lost itself among the sheeted forms. All his energy went into the writing. When he came to the section of his
Mémoires
that dealt with the statue, the seduction of Donna Francesca and the cuckolding of skinflint Boccadoro, he wrote with more care than ever, wanting to lacerate his personae and stimulate his readers in equal measure:

In that April of 1743, having recently returned to Venice from Rome, where I had fallen out of favour, and penniless as a result of those speculations described in a previous chapter, I was obliged to seek temporary employment, and found after a short while, through the influence of my family, a post as secretary in the house of the merchant Tommaso Boccadoro who employed me because of my name and also because I had attended the University of Padua (though obliged, because of the unfortunate involvements related elsewhere in these
Mémoires
, to leave without obtaining a degree). Boccadoro also agreed to house and feed my faithful Battistella, who has been with me through so many vicissitudes and is with me still, in return for duties about the house, though he refused point-blank to pay him wages, thereby revealing early in our relationship his inability to rise to an occasion or make a generous gesture.

Though described as secretary, my main task was to restore to order the very considerable collection of books. Boccadoro had taken the house in part payment of debts, just as it stood, including the contents of the library, from a branch of the Longhi family. As the other part of the payment he had taken in marriage Francesca Longhi, a girl of eighteen. The Longhi had been spending more than they possessed for many years by that time, and they were desperate for money, otherwise they would never have agreed to marry her to him. The family live now, what is left of them, in San Barnabà.

So as I have said, my main duties concerned the library. Boccadoro, while scarce knowing one end of a book from the other, had aspirations to learning; but the books had been kept without particular system; those who had accumulated them no doubt knew where to find what they wanted, but my unlettered employer blundered about among them lost. I was to catalogue the books and make an index with brief summaries of their contents.

The work was not disagreeable, but the position of paid employee was galling to my pride, extremely so, and I found solace from the first, when dealing with Boccadoro, in a certain deliberate falseness of speech and manner. This took the form of praising virtue, but should not be thought of as hypocrisy as I had nothing to gain at that point, other than, by saying what I did not believe and seeing him agree, to mark the difference between us and feed my contempt.

So I smiled on Boccadoro and spoke in praise of virtue. He listened to me in spite of my comparative youth. For one thing, he was innocent; and then my lineage exercised charm on a man whose father, it was said, had humped crates of fish on the Zattere. What also weighed with him was the rumour that had got about somehow or other, and which I did nothing to confirm or deny, that I had been pursuing theological studies in Rome with a view to taking Holy Orders.

He listened to me, as I say; he even sought me out. His trouble was that frequent one which afflicts hot old men with cool young wives; though I did not understand this at first, and certainly not the extent of Francesca’s coolness.

Ziani stopped to wipe his eyes, peer across the apartment. He thought he had heard some sound there. These days he was haunted by small sounds and movements, most of them illusory. As always, his gaze grew perplexed among the whitish mounds. He caught a flicker as some loose fold of drapery stirred in a draught – the apartment was prey to a system of currents oceanic in complexity.

As his eyes strained, so did his mind, across the long interval of years, to the morning Boccadoro had confided in him. Sunlight caught and held in the enclosed space of the garden. May – the acacias were in flower. He had been there some weeks by that time. There was dew on the narrow leaves and the pebble walks were glistening. Early in the day then. Some shouting or singing from the direction of San Silvestre. Singing or shouting? A quarrelsome note in it. They were setting up the fruit barges along the
fondamenta
. The statue there in her arbour, modest and provocative, with that arm guarding herself. And the old man shambling towards him, long-shanked, powerful still, violent and ridiculous. No wig. He was not yet dressed for going out. He was in robe and skullcap. Ziani began to write again, every detail clear in his mind: