Stone Virgin

by Barry Unsworth

  Raikes had a sense that these words were improvised somehow, as if Lattimer had temporarily forgotten his lines. The whisky he had drunk was beginning to make him feel sleepy. It would be time to leave soon. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘speaking of surgeons, sometimes our work does resemble theirs, in a way.’

  He began to tell Lattimer about experiments he had been involved in some years earlier to consolidate very friable Carrara marble by forming new calcium carbonate in the pores. This was an attempt to reproduce the natural process, observable at San Filippo in Emilia, where the spring water, emerging saturated with calcium bicarbonate and carbon dioxide, deposits calcium carbonate – stone in other words – on contact with the air. They had drilled holes in the marble, inserted glass tubes, fed in a solution of calcium hydroxide.

  ‘You are injecting the marble with a sort of plasma,’ Raikes said, ‘designed to harden in the veins and reinforce the substance. It didn’t work too well, I remember – too many unknown factors. The mechanism by which calcium carbonate is dissolved under some conditions and precipitated under others is not yet fully understood.’

  ‘I’ve been to San Filippo,’ Lattimer said. ‘Fascinating place. The spray seems to turn to stone as it comes out. You leave something in the water for a while and it gets a crust of stone on it. As a matter of fact I brought back a souvenir from there.’

  He hesitated. An extraordinary smile came to his face, shy, secretive, painful-looking. He said, ‘Would you like to see it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Raikes said, surprised. ‘Very much.’ He had not somehow associated Lattimer with souvenirs.

  ‘We’ll just replenish our glasses.’ Lattimer was still smiling. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you.’

  Glass in hand Raikes followed his host into the recessed part of the room. There was a door leading into a passage, a flight of stairs, another door. They emerged into the night. A lamp above the door behind them cast a misty swathe over low bushes, the pale flowers of a wistaria, a gravel path, glinting faintly with mica. They were in what seemed a fairly sizeable garden – sizeable enough for Raikes, in this darkness at least, not to be aware of limiting walls. ‘You are lucky to have this,’ he said. The fragrance of the wistaria came to him mingled with some muskier scent, which he thought might be acacia flowers. What are we doing here? he wondered.

  ‘Another advantage of living in an unfashionable district,’ Lattimer said. ‘Luigi looks after all this. Hang on a minute.’ His voice held a quality of eagerness or anticipation.

  He disappeared along the path leaving Raikes standing there at the dim verge of the lamplight, clutching his glass, aware of the silence of the house behind him, the darkness into which Lattimer had vanished, the enclosing strangeness of the garden. He made out, in the direction Lattimer had taken, the long low shape of a building, a shed of some kind. Light from this suddenly spilled out and he saw Lattimer again, standing in the light, at the open door.

  ‘Over here,’ Lattimer said.

  Raikes advanced, paused at the door, looked inside. There were no windows in the place. A long strip overhead gave brilliant light. He stood blinking in the doorway, confused by the light and by the extraordinary clutter of objects here, displayed on stands, on the walls, in cases along the sides.

  ‘Come in,’ Lattimer said. ‘This is my museum.’

  Raikes stepped inside, speechless still, not with surprise really, but a kind of wonder. His first hasty glance revealed a polished human skull on a stand, a large and beautiful piece of stone, veined with green, lying on a table near the door, a framed banknote on the wall. He could see no order or principle among these things.

  Lattimer went some way into the room, picked something up from a table, returned. ‘This is what I brought back from San Filippo,’ he said.

  It looked at first merely like an irregular lump of pinkish-grey granite, about the size of a hen’s egg. But a human likeness could be discerned in it, there was a face beneath, with features half obliterated by the growth of stone.

  ‘That’s a terracotta head underneath,’ Lattimer said. ‘Head of a woman. I left it in the water for an hour while I had a drink and that’s how it came out. I have not shown this place to anyone else, you know.’

  This was obviously an attempt at a compliment. Lattimer’s mouth stretched in the same painful smile. ‘Everywhere I’ve been,’ he said, ‘I bring something back. These are only the Italian things.’

  Raikes had an impression of long secrecy suddenly broken. Again he wondered if something had happened to disturb Lattimer. The man seemed drunk now: his eyes showed nothing, but his speech had thickened. He had started moving about among his possessions, the light shining on the smooth hair, the handsome, taut-skinned face, as he held up now one object, now another, for Raikes’s inspection. He explained everything. There was the viper he had killed in the foothills of the Alps, near Torre Pellice; there were framed photographs of himself in various guises; there was a fencing-sword with which he had won some tournament – it suddenly seemed appropriate to Raikes that fencing should be Lattimer’s sport. On a table at the far end was a litter of military items, a forage cap, webbing gaiters, a pistol in a holster, a bayonet.

  ‘Come and look at these,’ Lattimer said. ‘I was in the army here, you know. Sicily, Monte Cassino, Rome. Right through it. That is getting on for thirty years ago now. Monte Cassino, there’s a perfect example of what I was saying before. A mutual massacre going on and they spent weeks agonizing over whether to bomb an empty monastery.’

  There was a gold wedding ring among the litter. ‘That belonged to a German once,’ Lattimer said. He held up the bayonet. ‘This could tell a tale,’ he said, ‘but I mustn’t boast.’

  The attempt at modesty – in the midst of these evidences of vanity and self-obsession – was crass enough to be ludicrous almost, but Raikes felt no inclination to smile. ‘I must be going, I’m afraid,’ he said. Turning towards the door he caught sight of a shallow tray with a glass lid, containing tufts of fibrous-looking hair tied up with ribbon. He peered at these and Lattimer, seeing this, raised the lid.

  ‘Trophies of war, old boy,’ he said. ‘A different kind.’

  Raikes looked down at the little bundles. He counted nine of them. There was not much range of colour – from black to dark brown, with one lighter coloured, reddish. The hair was very coarse, wiry-looking. It curled in all directions, not lying straight as a tress would have done. ‘It’s human hair, isn’t it?’ he said, doubtfully.

  Lattimer chuckled. ‘Human it certainly is,’ he said. ‘That is pubic hair, my boy. Every time I win through, I ask the lady for a token. All these are Italian specimens. The names are on the ribbons, but I know them without that. I could tell you the exact place and circumstances for every one of them. This one was in Rome.’ He held up the little fibrous bundle with its faded red ribbon. ‘She was hot stuff,’ he said.

  ‘So that is what is meant by tuft-hunter,’ Raikes said. ‘I’ve often wondered.’ He felt slightly sick. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘It’s twenty past one and I have a day’s work to do tomorrow.’ Without waiting for Lattimer’s response he moved out into the garden and along the path towards the door.

  Inside he refused offers of more whisky. Soon he was walking back through the deserted streets. The feeling of nausea lessened as he walked; but the cause remained, the thought that had pounced too swiftly to be anticipated or suppressed, the hideous possibility that one of those little bundles might be a sample taken from Chiara Litsov.

  3

  HE WORKED AT the statue in the failing light, straining to make sure that no square millimetre of her person was missed. He was kneeling before her on his little mat, involved in the intricate folds of her robe, as these clung to or fell away from her thighs. In fact he was working between her thighs now, in the region of mythic speculation. Here at this point, beneath the draperies, lay the gateway to the miraculous. The Logos entered here, he thought, wielding the quartz-c
utter with unremitting care and skill. As the brilliance of the sun fills and penetrates a glass window, in St Bernard’s simile. No damage to the membrane either on entrance or exit. It was a good image, apt both for conception and birth. Deriving of course from the beauty of medieval stained glass windows. Thus art replaces nature, he thought: the earlier symbols had been of rain or dew, penetrating and vivifying the earth. Before leaving England he had read everything he could find about the Annunciation.

  He knelt back, switching off the instrument and removing his mask. The light was not good enough now. For reasons he could not fathom his request for an electric cable to be laid up here had not so far been attended to. Biagi had been politely vague on the matter. The architect in charge of work on the church floor said he thought it was a matter for the Soprintendenza ai Monumenti. They had referred him to the Soprintendenza alle Gallerie, who said they would put the matter in hand. So far, however, nothing had happened. It seemed a simple enough thing, a good light to work by.

  This particular evening it didn’t matter; he would have had to stop soon in any case; it was the evening of the conference, when they were all due to congregate and report on progress under the auspices of Sir Hugo Templar. He would have to get back, change, collect his notes – he had agreed to say something about his work on the Madonna.

  He knelt there for a while longer, looking at her. All was pure and splendid now from mid-thigh downwards, her restored parts beginning to take on a faint, glimmering incandescence in this failing light. Above this was the coarse mottling of her corrosion, the blackened concave parts merging already with the slowly darkening air. He glanced up at the averted face, the badger stripe of bleach that ran from forehead to chin. He had a sense, not for the first time, that she was about to break into some movement or gesture. This hour of the changing light was the time the angel came to her, or so it was generally believed – no doubt why the church had enjoined the faithful to say an Ave Maria at the time of the eventide Angelus bells. By a coincidence in itself miraculous she had been reading Isaiah chapter seven, verse fourteen at the time: Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son …

  Remembering Vittorini’s advice, Raikes got to his feet slowly and carefully.

  He had allowed himself an hour to wash, change, have some dinner. But when he returned to his apartment the reply from Cambridge was waiting there and he could not resist taking the time to read it. His friend had been busy on his behalf. He had drawn a blank at the Fitzwilliam Library, and at first at the University Library too – mainly through the difficulty of categorizing the material. But then he had consulted an acquaintance at Pembroke, who taught Italian history.

  ‘You are lucky, really,’ he wrote. ‘Because the Supplicanti were only in Venice for something like seventy years, the episode has been a sort of focus of research – it’s not often, apparently, that you get such a tidy period, cut off at both ends. It was a chance for some academic sleuthing. Not much seems to have come of it. All the extant records of their dealings in Venice have been collated several times, most recently in 1949, by a man called Masters. It’s a perfectly ordinary record of day-to-day transactions such as were going on in religious foundations all over Italy at the time. There is nothing in them to show what went wrong. No one has ever been able to discover why the Supplicanti came to grief in Venice. The documents have never been traced and are now presumed lost. However, one thing I think will interest you. There is a record of the commissioning of a Madonna in 1432 – which lies in the period you asked about. I am enclosing a photostat copy of the English translation.’

  The rest of the letter, the friendly sentiments, the professions of readiness to be of further help, Raikes barely glanced at. He immediately began reading the document that had accompanied it, a single sheet, cast in the conventional form of a contract:

  In the name of God, 16 March, 1432

  Be it known to all who shall examine the present official instruments that the Prior and friars of the church and foundation of the Supplicanti in Venice were called together and assembled in chapter in the sacristy by order of the Prior and at the sound of the bell struck three times according to custom. There were present the pious friar Francesco di Niccolò of Rimini (Prior), friar Giuliano of Foligno (reader and preacher), friar Pietro Giovanni, and friar Giovanni di Alemania, constituting the chapter. Also present were the worthy Nunno Cischi and Ser Uguccio Toschi, operarii of the church. These on their own behalf and on behalf of their successors in the said church give to the stone-cutter known as Girolamo Piemontese, stipulating and receiving on his own behalf, and of his heirs etc., the making of an image of the Holy Virgin Annunciata in white stone of Istria, to be done by his own hand and no one else. He is held to the same and to work at and perfect the image with his own hands and with the utmost diligence, vigilance and perfection. And this is to be for the price of 60 gold ducats, in part payment of which the said master Girolamo, stone-cutter, acknowledges receipt of the said witnesses, and me, the below-named notary. And he promises to do the work and finish it within the next six months beginning today. And the said chapter promise to give the said master Girolamo bread, wine, oil and wood for his maintenance and he on the one hand and they on the other promise to observe all these conditions.

  The meeting had already started when he entered. It was being held in a building near the Accademia Bridge, not far from the offices of the Ministeria delle Acque, an ancient place, once the guildhall of the Venetian mask-makers.

  He was surprised, on entering, to find a diminutive Japanese occupying the platform, speaking fairly fluent but oddly accented English. ‘Due to humidity, hah, yes,’ Raikes heard him say. He saw Steadman sitting near the back and made his way towards him. Steadman looked up as he approached and grimaced in friendly fashion.

  ‘Hah, yes,’ the Japanese said. He had paused on Raikes’s entrance. In the curiously opaque light of this cavernous room he appeared due to humidity himself, with his gleaming spectacles, the unnatural shine of his pale, lightweight suit. The lamps were high up on the ceiling, milky globes whose light seemed to lose all force in the spaces of air below; and Raikes had the impression that there was a further attenuation of this already exhausted light by some mist or vapour in the room, some impalpable thickening of the atmosphere, as if the whole place, though warm enough, was not properly sealed off from the moist breath of the night outside.

  The eye-cases of the Japanese shone steadily through this and the high-pitched, crowing vowel-sounds continued. He was reading from a script but interjecting his own remarks from time to time. He must have been asked to speak as a sort of courtesy, Raikes thought – the Japanese were not engaged in any collective effort of restoration in Venice as far as he knew. Of course, Sir Hugo was a great believer in internationalism. There he was now, high-domed, nonchalant in black corduroy, seated to the right of the speaker. Perhaps he had simply lassoed the Japanese from a doorway? But no, listening further Raikes understood that the man was an official of the Tokyo Museum of Fine Arts, where they had recently been dismayed by the deterioration of certain medieval saddle cloths in transit between Tokyo and Los Angeles. Discoloration had occurred round some of the stitch holes, and a loosening of the weave itself, especially at the edges. A serious matter.

  ‘All you know the effect of humidity,’ the Japanese said, looking up briefly from his notes and making a small bow in deference to this knowledge on the part of his audience. ‘To stabilize atmosphere conditions in the galleries and museums, that is standard practice. But in world of today we must also consider art object in transit. There are two expression for humidity, there is absolute humidity expressed by water vapour contained in given quantity of air and relative humidity expressed as percentage rates of weight of water vapour in air to weight in same volume saturated air at same temperature. The effect of humidity on art object is related to relative humidity …’

  Raikes sat back in his chair. This was
really rather boring stuff and barely intelligible in any case, though he could appreciate the displeasure of the museum. A fourteenth-century decorated saddle cloth was in a sense more valuable than something like a Tintoretto painting, as there might not be more than two or three in existence whereas there was no shortage of Tintorettos … That was heresy, of course. All the same he thought with gratitude of his stone lady, delicate, hieratic, Gothic mysticism still implicit in her lines, drama in the contrapposto but no vulgar posturing, no sprawl, no baroque ‘dynamism’, thank God. Girolamo Piemontese, stone-cutter. That stillness, not inertia, the stillness of arrested motion, unmistakably the achievement of art. One saw the same quality in the work of other sculptors then or a little later, people like Donatello, Nanni di Bartolo, della Robbia, however different they were in other ways. A mistake of course to read meanings into the work of artists so remote but difficult not to see in that emblematic stillness some sort of metamorphosis from the breathing woman to the immobility of God’s lodging. Perhaps that was why stone seemed so much the medium for Madonnas. In effect the Annunciation took Mary’s humanity away as we would look at it now. Here was a young Hebrew woman, working class, probably illiterate, told abruptly that she was henceforth mere sanctified womb, that her body, her whole being, was no more than a nutrient chamber. Enough to cause that terrible stillness …

  He glanced round. Miss Greenaway was in front of him, with Owen beside her. He made out the unmistakable back of Wiseman’s head up near the front. At the end of the same row he caught sight of Lattimer’s fine-drawn, regular profile, felt some surprise at this, then remembered Wiseman telling him that Lattimer had been a substantial benefactor to Rescue Venice. An appropriate way for him to spend his money. What had he said? It is objects we really care about. And his own pleasure, at Lattimer’s praise for his work. Proof of original sin. He thought again, with a sort of wondering excitement, of the document, the contract, back in his apartment … to be done by his own hand and no one else.