Stone Virgin

by Barry Unsworth

  She exhibits the blotchy black and white appearance typical of Istrian stone undergoing transformation through combined weathering and air pollution. The degree of transformation in her case is advanced because she is high up, carved in the round and in a very exposed position. As one would expect it is in the recessed areas that the calcium sulphate and carbon crust has formed. The exposed convexities show bleached white where magnesium carbonate has been lost, for example on the middle of the forehead, front of nose, upper-lip, chin – there is a roughly straight bleached stripe, about three inches wide, from brow to chin. Similar effects of sooty deposit in the recesses and bleach on the salient parts are apparent throughout the draperies of the whole figure. It is intended to start the spraying process tomorrow and we shall see what effect that has.

  In the afternoon went as arranged to the offices of the Soprintendenza for my interview with their representative, Signor Manatti. He was affable enough but I was surprised at one point to hear him express doubts about the wisdom of restoring stonework in Venice – or anywhere else either, I suppose he meant. Frammettersi was the verb he used, to tamper. Rather offensive. The beauty of time-worn objects and so on. This is an unenlightened view but unfortunately still common – though as I say I was surprised to find it here. He actually spoke as if the decay itself were in the nature of a protective covering, a patina del tempo, as he called it. Quite erroneous in the case of Istrian stone. It turns out he has not been to see the Madonna personally, though the scaffolding has been up for some weeks now and he could easily have done so. It isn’t a patina at all of course, it is a disease. Malattia del tempo, it should be called. You might as well say leprosy is a patina. All this was before we looked at the photographs together. He was impressed, as he was bound to be, by the details of the actual disfigurement, which are quite horrendous in close-up.

  The photographs were on the table beside him and he glanced at the top one now, as if to find confirmation in the streaked, encrusted draperies, the bemonstered face. It was outrageous, what had been done to her, this insensate pumping of SO2 into the atmosphere.

  He looked away, at the dark surface of the canal below his window. It was not very late, but the narrow fondamenta that ran alongside the canal was silent and deserted. The house was in Canareggio, a quiet district, with an air of sadness and abandonment about it, which Raikes found congenial. An American named Wiseman, whom he had met three years previously when working at the Madonna dell’Orto, had found the apartment for him and he had liked its high ceilings and sparse, sombre furniture from the first.

  Outside there was a thin vaporous mist in the air and light from some source he could not identify lay over a section of the canal. He watched the gleaming water lap against its containing wall, sidling at the wet brick, gently but at the same time urgently, lapping into light, falling back into mist, with a persistent rhythm.

  He felt obscurely disturbed by this rhythmic motion. Suddenly, unbidden and unwelcome, Steadman’s face came into his mind, and that craned head, awaiting Miss Greenaway’s return. Was it pigeons or sparrows that Aristotle said were addicted to venery? He must have seen her go or he would not have been expecting her to come back. She would probably have been to the public lavatory just off the campo: by great good fortune there was a well-kept one there. So all that time, he thought, while I was absorbed in the Madonna, Steadman was holding himself in readiness for a brief flash of Miss Greenaway returning from the loo; while I was contemplating damaged stone, his thoughts were centred on undamaged flesh, albeit engaged in lowly functions. Or virtually undamaged, I suppose. Was that why I found his presence there suddenly irksome, because he had debased my first communion with the Madonna, intruded thoughts of a carnal nature? No, not the intrusion itself but my vivid perception of it. I was invaded by his thought processes, as if my own mind had no walls. Miss Greenaway means nothing to me. Yet for those few moments Steadman’s yearning to get inside her knickers became my yearning. Was it repentance for this that led to my vow?

  It was his habit, when troubled or alarmed, to take refuge in intricate thoughts; and he did this now, thinking of the tugs and runs of the currents out in the Lagoon, the unimaginably complex motions that had resulted in this small eddying here, this lapping love of the water against the brick. The sea was like a preoccupied god, whose main concerns always lay elsewhere. He was calmed by this sense of an indifferent ocean, and after a moment took up his pen once more:

  As the statue is restored it should be possible to make further attempts at an accurate attribution. In the last fifty years she has been credited to a number of sculptors, among them artists as different as Arturo Rizzi and Pietro Lombardi. The best argued case is probably Memmer’s. He attributes the Madonna to Bartolomeo Bon, on grounds of stylistic analogy with the statue of Justice in the superstructure of the Porta della Carta, which is indubitably Bon’s. But his work is heavy and inert, to my mind at least, it has none of the tension of the Madonna. Of course he ran a big workshop and employed numerous assistants, some of them more gifted than their master. In Memmer’s day it was at least possible to see the statue. How terrible to think that all this havoc has been caused in little more than twenty-five years of industrial belching.

  In my view the main problem lies in determining the early history of the statue. I am convinced that if this were known it would lead us to the man who carved her. We know she was not intended for the place she occupies now. The church has clear early-Renaissance features and is fifty years later at least. So why was she put there? And in any case, why was she not installed at once, in 1496, when the church was consecrated? Why did she have to wait so long – more than 250 years? And where was she all that time? We know she was put there in 1743. Dalmedico is quite specific on the point in his Annals, and there are also references in Sanudo and Verci. Dalmedico’s account is the fullest but he does not say where she came from. Presumably he didn’t know. All three mention the fact that she was thought to have miraculous powers.

  Raikes paused again. He was consumed with eagerness to solve these problems. Dalmedico described the benefactor as a merchant of pious life and good repute, but this was a mere formula. He did not supply the man’s name; and there was no inscription anywhere inside the church. All the information available concerned the ceremony of installation, the Bishop of Venice officiating and several civic dignitaries present. It amounted to very little really. Of course he had been writing a hundred years or so after the events described; but he would have had access to ecclesiastical records. There was plenty of detail elsewhere in his monumental work. Why so little here?

  Raikes sat back. If the records had existed at all, there were only two possibilities: between 1743 and the time Dalmedico came to write this section of the Annals the relevant documents must have been either lost or suppressed …

  At this moment there came a light tap on the door and his landlady Signora Sapori entered and stood just inside the room asking him if he would care to have some coffee and a piece of apple pie. ‘Torta di mele,’ she repeated, thinking he had not understood. ‘È casalinga, it is home-made,’ she said, smiling in the doorway. She was a little wizened woman in her early seventies, quick in movement, with bright inquisitive eyes, like a squirrel’s; dressed always in black, with a brief, immaculate white apron across her meagre loins. ‘He will try it, the apple pie?’ she said.

  Raikes was touched by this kindness. Snacks in the evening were no part of the arrangement. Wiseman had said, in recommending the place, that Signora Sapori was a very kind and nice person. He was returning the smile and beginning to say that he would like some, yes, and how kind of her, when quite suddenly and unexpectedly, and in a way most uncharacteristic of his normal reticence, he was assailed by a strong impulse to put his hand up Signora Sapori’s skirt, worse than that, to throw skirt and apron up and over, to strip away whatever lay beneath, make free with her wasted delta. The eagerness of this impulse and the terrible tumescence that attended it he felt must
show in his face, but apparently not, for Signora Sapori’s expression did not change. ‘In a few minutes, then,’ she said, nodding, pleased that he wanted some.

  Good God, Raikes muttered to himself when she had gone. What on earth is the matter with me? He felt feverish. This grandmother with the little white apron. Was it some association with apple pie? He tried to retrace his mental steps. The apron had reminded him fleetingly of a girdle. Mary’s, that she had loosened and thrown off, on her Assumption?

  In the stress of these thoughts he moved again, sharply, and caught sight of his own head and shoulders lurking in the dark shine of the window beyond the table lamp. Light from this threw a pattern of broken loops and ovals over his reflection, like loose metallic ropes. Above these encumbrances he could make out his cheeks and nose and high, austere forehead; but his eyes were lost in shadow and the lower part of his face was gagged with light.

  For some moments Raikes regarded with distinct unease this masked, fettered, curiously watchful acquaintance. Then he looked back towards his diary but there seemed nothing for the moment to add. However, he had omitted the date and he entered it now at the top of the page: March 20th, 1972.

  2

  IT HAPPENED ON the third and final day of the spraying; though Raikes did not think of it as an event exactly, anyway not at first: rather as a protracted quiver of the optic nerves, strained after so much peering. That there were elements in it that could not be explained in this way he hardly realized at the time.

  He was standing inside his enclosure of plastic sheets – Biagi had been commendably prompt with this – aiming with a half-appalled sense of violation straight into the Madonna’s face, driving minute particles of water at point blank range and high velocity into her eyes and mouth. The water hissed as it issued from the nozzle, broke against her face with a flatter, softer sound and fugitive gleams of light, the two sounds fusing into a steady sibilance of assault. Water ran blurring over the temples and cheeks, brimmed the eye sockets, sowed pearls in the clogged mouth, clung in beads to the fungoid deposits below the chin. She was so wet it seemed the water must come from within her, vomited from the mouth, wept from the slits of eyes, dripping from folds in draperies saturated by long immersion, as if she were newly dredged up, still running with the waters that had drowned her.

  Raikes straightened and stood back, closing off the nozzle of the spray. Some of the carbon had come away, there was no doubt about it; when she was dry again it would be easier to see how much. In any case he did not intend to go on with the spraying much longer, just an hour or two after lunch, probably; she had had three days of it, quite long enough. He glanced at his watch. It was gone twelve. Steadman would be waiting for him – they had arranged to meet in the square for a drink before lunch.

  He moved close to the Madonna with the intention of leaning the metal tube against the wall alongside her. In fact he was beginning to bend forward to do this. His eyes were on the statue still but he was on the point of looking away to where he was intending to place the spray. His face was very near the folds of the Madonna’s robe, where they gathered at the waist, too near to see any form or human likeness, only the ancient enduring grain of the stone. It was then, at the moment he had relaxed attention, was on the point of looking away, perhaps had already begun to do so, that a sudden sense of being quite in the open, without protection, descended on him, accompanied by a strong sensation of space and silence, and a feeling of threatened balance which made him clutch for the rail. He had a fleeting impression of light but he was not in it, or not quite in it, a long straight shadow across the light, two human bodies, naked and gleaming wet, part in light and part in shadow, standing together, but not very close, and some sort of echo or resonance, perhaps of voices, but no words. The impression was a strangely piercing one, perhaps because of the hush that seemed to surround it, but it was over at once, before his own body had achieved a stiffening of surprise. He found himself holding tightly to the scaffold rail. The wet Madonna was again before him. With conscious care he leaned forward to place the spray against the wall.

  It was surprise he felt chiefly, mixed already with a sort of doubt, as he slipped out of his overalls, changed out of his wellingtons for gym shoes – the cubicle formed by the plastic sheets had become changing room and frequently eating place as well as workshop to him – and began to climb down the ladder. His first steps on firm ground were attended by a sense of insecurity, even a remote sort of panic. Then he became aware of people around him, saw pigeons fly up. Steadman was sitting alone at one of the outside tables and Raikes moved across the square towards him, remembering to smile only when he was almost there. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Forgot the time.’

  ‘You’re a dedicated fellow,’ Steadman said, in his flat laconic tone. ‘What are you having?’

  ‘Beer, I think.’ Raikes looked across the square. The impulse he had felt to tell Steadman about his experience died quietly. He had sensed something derisive in the other man’s brief words, not unkindly so but sufficiently to put him on the defensive. He had no gift for irony himself, and was highly vulnerable to it, his own nature tending always to enthusiasm. His usual defence was to assume a more distant air, and this sometimes made him seem cold or priggish. He knew Steadman regarded it as odd and excessive that he should have elected to do all the work himself from beginning to end, even these messy and laborious preliminaries, which he could easily have got an assistant to do. Steadman had no sympathy for more extreme natures, which was why sarcasm came so easily to him and why the two had never become very close.

  The beer came, and Raikes busied himself pouring out a glass. Of course, he thought, she was wet, running with water. Some association of memory had perhaps been responsible. Common enough, wet bodies, perhaps archetypal. Tired eyes, and some involuntary association. Perhaps he had straightened up too suddenly, just before. That would explain the feeling of vertigo … ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what have you been up to?’

  ‘Just pottering about,’ Steadman said. ‘I’ve been trying to get some good pictures for my book. It’s bloody amazing how few good photographs there are of Venetian sculptures. I’d like one of her, when she’s all cleaned up.’ He nodded in the direction of the church. ‘Odd creature, she is,’ he added after a moment. ‘Quite untypical.’

  ‘Typical, untypical,’ Raikes said. ‘That is all art historians seem to think about these days. No one makes value judgements any more.’

  ‘Safer not to. Preferable anyway.’

  ‘But why?’ Raikes felt the slight fluttering in his stomach which always preceded direct conflicts of opinion with others. ‘Why?’ he said again. ‘It is a human duty to make distinctions of value, it is one of the things that make us fully human.’

  ‘I should have thought’, Steadman said, ‘that we had all had enough of being fully human, for the time being. It would be better to simply be sensible instead, and not make so many judgements of any kind.’

  ‘Just because it’s risky,’ Raikes said excitedly, ‘we should steer clear of it. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Steadman seemed about to go on with the argument but checked himself, perhaps misliking Raikes’s combative manner, and after a moment said in different tones, ‘Anyway it’s not true of all of us. Take Sir Hugo Templar, for example. He’ll rattle off value judgements for you nineteen to the dozen. Have you met him?’

  ‘Not really. He has been to give lectures at the museum.’

  ‘Pleasure in store,’ Steadman said.

  Sir Hugo Templar was the chairman of Rescue Venice, the organization funding the British restoration project. He was also an authority on European Baroque. He was coming from London to preside over a working conference due shortly, combined progress report and pooling of information.

  ‘I’ll have to be there, I suppose.’ Steadman looked gloomily into his glass. ‘I’m not going back till two days later. Just my bleeding luck.’

  ‘What did you mean w
hen you said she wasn’t typical?’

  ‘Your Madonna? Not typical of the Venetian sculpture of the time, I meant. That was still fairly primitive, you know.’

  ‘Well, of course, I know that. But he could have trained somewhere else, couldn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t think there was a native Venetian capable of it, at the time. My guess is that he came from the north, Lombardy perhaps. There are Tuscan influences too. It’s not a flamboyant style, it’s a more naturalistic type of Gothic. If you look at the original shape of the block of stone, which you can see from the base, you’ll notice that it had no real effect on the composition of the figure. The knees and feet are more or less aligned with the block but the upper torso cuts across one corner. This is quite untypical of Venetian Gothic. I noticed it at once.’

  Launched on his subject, Steadman had forgotten that he was supposed to be a tough guy. His voice had taken on warmth, his tone had quickened, he was looking quite eagerly at Raikes. ‘Her arms, too,’ he said. ‘The right hand is conventional enough, pressed to her breast to show how unworthy she is. And of course the extended left hand is common in Romanesque and Gothic sculpture, but hers is held very low, and across the body. It gives a curiously sexual significance to the pose. That might be accidental, of course. Or one might be quite mistaken, simply a perverted modern. The trouble is, we don’t know enough, and we never will now. Artists were constantly on the move, a sculptor of the time might work in half-a-dozen cities in the course of his career, there was a lot of cross-fertilization going on. Most of the work has no documentation. The difficulties of attribution are enormous.’