Stone Virgin

by Barry Unsworth

  Raikes was aware of hush below, a suspension of activity among the workmen. All sounds seemed to have stopped. Suddenly he felt a wave of pride; she was asking for him.

  ‘Vuole guardare il lavoro,’ Biagi shouted, continuing in his role of male herald of female desires.

  ‘Come up if you like,’ Raikes called. ‘It’s rather dirty up here. Be careful on the ladder. Va bene, può salire,’ he added to Biagi, feeling obliged to carry on the official, male side of the dialogue.

  He watched the contractor escort her towards the foot of the ladder. Then they were both lost to sight, cut off by the edge of the platform on which he was standing. Signor Biagi did not reappear: he would be intent on the Signora’s progress up the ladder; so would all the workmen who happened to be outside the church at the moment. Raikes tried to remember, or perhaps he had not noticed, what she had been wearing under the coat. He found himself hoping, in the moments of waiting that now followed, that it had not been a skirt. Then her head appeared above the edge of the planks and he went forward to help her.

  She needed little help, however, but was up on to the platform quickly and lightly, with a grasp of his outstretched hand that lasted a moment only. ‘So this is where you do your restoring,’ she said. ‘I was curious, after hearing you talk about it. I was in town and so I thought I would come and have a look.’

  This came all in a breath and somehow prematurely, or so it seemed to Raikes, as if she were eager to account for this uninvited visit, or at least as if she were conscious, in the silence of his regard, of needing to make some defence. This gave him pleasure, he could not have said exactly why. If she was warning him not to presume, he was glad she thought him worth warning.

  ‘I see you’re wearing trousers,’ he said, for want of other notions of what to say, and because, in the terrific hush of her approach up the ladder, it had been on his mind.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, rather vaguely. Then, perhaps catching some note of satisfaction in his voice, she smiled and said, ‘They are best when it comes to climbing ladders.’

  There was a pause while Raikes struggled to absorb this smile. Then he gestured towards the Madonna. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is my lady. She’s in a bit of a mess at present, I’m afraid. You may not be able to get a proper idea of her.’

  It was true that the Madonna was unsightly, with the speckled dust lying over her, powdering her encrusted face, caught like dirty pollen in her robes.

  ‘This is the bit I’ve done so far,’ Raikes said, pointing. ‘It is slow work.’

  She went nearer to inspect it. ‘There’s a huge difference,’ she said. ‘This is the pure stone again, isn’t it?’

  ‘As pure as it will ever be.’ Was she merely humouring him, showing polite interest? The suspicion conflicted with his proprietary enthusiasm. He said, ‘Something is always lost, you know.’

  This had a pompous sound, even to him, but she did not look up. She had crouched and was running a slim hand down the line of the Madonna’s right flank. ‘He knew what a leg looks like, didn’t he? How white the stone is.’ Her hand had a warm pallor, almost vivid against the cleaned stone.

  ‘It looks whiter by comparison, or so I am hoping. It should be a very pale cream colour. In its pristine state, I mean. That is one of the things that is bothering me, whether this blasting process will take the warmth from the stone. It’s Istrian stone, you know.’

  Somewhere in the midst of these words his feelings had quickened, changed course. Whether it was the sight of the woman’s living hand on the stone, or the angle of her head as she crouched there, the dark hair falling forward to reveal the pale skin of her nape above the coat collar, something childlike and wondering about her caressing of the ancient texture of the limestone – something of reverence too, as if she were paying her respects; somewhere among all this there was a factor not accidental, striking him with the sense of something foretold, fulfilled. She chose this moment to turn, throwing back her hair, and look at him; still not rising, however.

  ‘Istrian stone,’ he plunged, ‘as perhaps you know, is a very dense form of limestone. When I say dense … the capillaries are very close together, much closer than in marble, for example. Marble is more permeable …’

  He fell helplessly silent. In the pause that followed their eyes met. She seemed at first to be waiting for him to say more. Then her expression changed. She stood up and after a moment said, ‘I’d be really interested to see the work actually in progress. Would you mind very much?’

  This request changed the quality of his hesitation – as perhaps she had intended. To refuse her anything was scarcely conceivable. On the other hand, there was the shining hair, her lashes and eyes, the clear skin of her face, her narrow hands even; and then the coat, obviously of good quality. All this must be protected, down to the last pore, follicle and fibre.

  ‘It’s rather a messy operation,’ he said. ‘The dust, you know.’

  ‘I could wear something over my face.’

  ‘Perhaps we could find you something to put on. I keep a spare mask here. If you really want to, that is.’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  The tone of this made further discussion superfluous. He left her there and began clambering down the ladder, his heart beating in his ears. In certain states of disturbance one becomes self-conscious, pausing where one would not pause, noting the trivial as if it were significant; Raikes found himself registering the paint-flaked rungs of the ladder and his own momentous feet, in their shabby tennis shoes, descending.

  At ground level, however, consulting Signor Biagi, several of the workmen within earshot, dignity demanded a leisurely style, an attitude of good-humoured indulgence towards female caprice. He hoped this was what showed on his face.

  ‘They get these ideas,’ he said, smiling, trying to control his breathing. ‘Si mettono in testa queste idee …’

  This sentiment was deeply familiar to Biagi, who shrugged and nodded humorously. ‘Che ci possiamo fare?’ he said. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Strange creatures.’ A terrible impatience to be back up the ladder assailed Raikes. He shook his head, smiling indulgently. ‘Non si sa mai,’ he said. ‘You never know what they will get into their heads.’

  One or two of the nearby workmen laughed and exclaimed approvingly at this. ‘Non si sa mai,’ one of them echoed. Raikes became aware that his stock had gone up since Chiara’s visit – here at ground level at least.

  ‘Che ci possiamo fare?’ he repeated, smiling and shrugging at the workmen, united with them in resignation and indomitable logic.

  Biagi was so pleased with this that he went so far as to clap the Englishman on the shoulder. ‘Non si sa mai, eh?’ he said, chuckling. ‘Non si sa mai cosa gli salta in mente.’

  Raikes obtained some overalls and a reasonably clean-looking cap. Clutching these, calmed by social success, he began to climb back up the ladder.

  She was looking at the Madonna’s face when he returned, her own face held close. She was of a height with the statue and when she turned towards him the two faces were level, close together, flesh and stone, the one vivid with life, the other blurred and streaked with ancient lamentation. Once again a fugitive sense of recognition stirred in him. Then she moved away and the moment was lost.

  He helped her off with the coat, not touching her, aware of not touching her. The overalls were too large, slipping off at the shoulders, needing to be rolled up at the ankles. She pushed up her hair, bunching it under the cap with both hands, lowering her face at the same time, gestures hasty and careless, though piercing to Raikes. He gave her the spare mask and showed her how to put it on.

  In the shapeless overalls, with the cap covering her hair and the mask over her face, she was unrecognizable, a creature metamorphosed. He stared at her for a moment, then put on his own mask and cap. First shaking out the cable to keep it clear of the cutter, he crouched before the Madonna, Chiara crouching beside him – they were shoulder to shoulder, almost touching, like d
evotees at an altar. The faint drone of the machine filled the enclosure, followed a moment later by the hissing assault on the stone.

  Raikes resumed at a point slightly higher than where he had left off, so that she would be able to see the contrast. Here, where the robe was gathered up to the high girdle, the folds were intricate. He advanced the nozzle close to the surface, withdrew it as the encrustation thinned. Delicately, savagely, the glass crystals thrashed at the stone. Dust rose around them, glinting briefly in the light.

  When he stopped a narrow strip of perhaps three inches had been reclaimed. He turned his head to look at her. Through dust-thickened air and misted planes of plastic, her face seemed suspended, indistinct, as if seen through some slightly opaque medium. Raikes felt that sea-shell resonance in his ears, he experienced a sort of swooning tremor and instinctively clutched for balance at the Madonna’s knee. This passed at once. For a few seconds longer they crouched there, silent and motionless at the base of the statue. Then Chiara stood up, removed the cap and mask, shook out her hair. ‘That was really very interesting,’ she said. ‘Thank you for letting me watch.’

  Raikes got up slowly. ‘It’s a long job, as you see,’ he said. Retrieving her coat from its polythene wrapper, helping her on with it, he felt, though more faintly, the usual belated fear, as of danger recognized only after escape. ‘Still, we’re getting on,’ he said.

  She turned to face him. ‘You must be very patient,’ she said. She had smiled as she spoke, but now the smile faded and she looked rather attentively at him, though she said nothing more.

  ‘Yes … Well, I don’t know if it is patience. A kind of crab-like tenacity.’ In a few moments, he thought, if I don’t do something to prevent it, she will be climbing back down the ladder. I will go down too, of course. At the foot of the ladder she will thank me again, then she will walk away, back to home and husband. Better do nothing, let her go … ‘Do you fancy a cup of coffee or a drink or something?’ he said.

  ‘What a good idea. A drink would be nice. As a matter of fact, I’ve got one or two things to tell you. Nothing very much, I’m afraid. I’ve had a reply from my aunt – the one in Rome that I told you about. The guardian of the family secrets.’

  It was exactly what Lattimer had replied, and in exactly the same tone, when he had asked for whisky. What a good idea. ‘It was very good of you to bother,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we can talk about it over the drink.’

  7

  SUNLIGHT BELOW SEEMED stronger, dazzling almost. Pigeons fluttered round their feet as, watched by the workmen, they set off across the square. By unspoken consent they went past the café at the far corner, through the dimness of the covered passageway, out into the light of the campiello beyond. They crossed the Misericordia canal and turned left along the fondamenta. It was warm here, in the shelter of the wall, and they walked slowly. Only occasional remarks were exchanged between them but Raikes was not conscious of constraint, though he still felt a kind of astonishment at her presence; he had not succeeded yet in detaching her from the surroundings of their one previous meeting, so much had she seemed to be part of these, a captive almost, though a splendid one, confined there like the shining bronze fragments of herself.

  They were in the Rio Terra della Maddalena now, among what seemed a sudden density of people, tourists for the most part, thronging the way, clustered in thicker groups round stalls laid out with trinkets and souvenirs, Murano glassware, silk scarves, gondolier hats. He was again reminded, suddenly and disagreeably, of Lattimer. They are like flies. It was true, in a way: there seemed, in the contrast between the moving throng down the centre of the street and the fingering, exploratory stillness of the clusters at the stalls, some enactment of the pattern of insects. As if they had found some sweetness, or decay, and settled …

  ‘Crowded, isn’t it?’ he said. He was beginning to regret coming this way instead of making for the quiet backwaters of San Alvise, north of the church.

  ‘The season is beginning,’ she said. ‘But the area around the Maddalena is usually quiet. It is off the beaten way. People go straight through to Santa Fosca.’

  ‘You know the city well.’

  ‘Quite well, I think. But I have not spent so much time here, really. What you have to do in Venice is to get rid of all notions of order and logic and rely on a primitive sense of direction. That seems to suit me.’

  ‘Why, because you are primitive?’ Raikes said, smiling. ‘It’s probably genetic. The Fornarini family must have Venice printed on their chromosomes by this time.’

  In fact the campo was almost deserted. There was a small café with two wrought-iron tables, one on either side of the door, facing towards the elegant Renaissance well-head in the middle of the square, and the circular construction of the church beyond. One of the tables was occupied by an elderly couple, speaking German; the other one they took.

  Here in the sunshine, facing each other across the narrow table, they drank Carpano and talked for what was perhaps two hours, though the experience had no dimension of time in Raikes’s mind. Visual perspectives too were simplified or obliterated. Beyond their table, beyond Chiara’s face and the words and looks they exchanged, the near world and the far – buildings, people passing, the waiter, the couple at the next table – lost all distinction. There was only the talk and the small, momentous events that accompanied it, clink of ice, slide of sunlight on the glasses, her gestures, the changing expressions of her face.

  ‘My aunt,’ she said, ‘first of all, before I forget. I’m afraid there’s not much to tell. The Fornarini family never owned a house in San Giovanni Crisostomo, at least as far as she knows. The records are not complete it seems, far from it in fact, there aren’t any voting lists to go on or anything of that kind. So it’s just possible. Anyway it didn’t belong at any time to Piero Fornarini, who was Bishop of Venice when the Madonna was installed. He seems to have been a licentious character. Even my aunt admits that, and she is very protective about the family name. The only mention, again according to my aunt, is in a letter he wrote to his cousin. There’s a manuscript copy of this among the papers. It seems that the donor of the statue, presumably the original owner, had agreed to pay a fixed yearly sum to the church on condition his name was not mentioned. Piero suggests that since they can’t call the man by his proper name they could refer to him as Cornadoro, Golden Horns. He doesn’t say why.’

  ‘If he doesn’t say, the cousin must have known.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And nothing about these miraculous powers of hers?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. It’s difficult to think of Piero in connection with miracles. There’s a story in the family that he didn’t choke on a bone at all but died laughing at what my aunt calls una barzelletta sconcia, a scurrilous anecdote.’

  ‘I wonder if he was listening to it or telling it.’

  ‘I don’t know … I’m afraid this has not been much help.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Raikes said. ‘If I can garner enough details, perhaps it will all come together, sooner or later. I know more than I did. I know to my own satisfaction at least that the Madonna was commissioned in 1432 by a monastic order recently settled in Venice and carved in that same year by an obscure artist from northern Italy. The monks didn’t use her, I don’t know why.’ He looked away across the square. ‘The thing is like a great sponge,’ he said with sudden intensity. ‘Saturated with the facts. I just don’t know how to get hold of it, where to press.’ But he knew as he spoke that this was not it, it was not frustration he had felt but grief, a sense of loss, as if he had been cheated somehow of a dear possession.

  She was looking at him curiously. ‘Does it matter so much to you? To find out I mean.’

  She had herself, he realized, not shown much interest in these details. She had told him once that she did not greatly care about the past.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘I have undertaken it, you see. It would be like leaving the Madonn
a half-restored.’

  ‘And do you always do what you undertake?’

  He could see no hint of derision in her face, only sympathy and interest. ‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘I abandoned my biggest undertaking something like eight years ago.’

  ‘What was that?’

  Raikes hesitated again. Years of reticence made it difficult; but he had begun already, in a way; and the urge to bring her closer was very strong.

  ‘I wanted to be a sculptor at one time. I was at art school, you know, not university – I didn’t train as an art historian. St Martin’s, in London. I did sculpture there.’

  ‘What made you change your mind?’

  ‘I didn’t change my mind exactly. I mean I didn’t stop wanting to do it.’

  He looked away from her again, at the tall old houses lining the near side of the square, noting automatically the ogival door of the nearest one, with its reliefs of saints and angels above the arch. Late Gothic. ‘I realized that I wasn’t good enough,’ he said, and found that his lips had stiffened a bit with some residue of the old pain. ‘It took me several years. I was always slow to realize things. Very tenacious, you know.’

  When he looked back at her face he saw that it wore the slightly strained look of close attention which he had come to recognize as one of her expressions.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘No need. I got over it years ago.’

  ‘I don’t believe you were no good.’

  He smiled, touched by this obvious intention to please him. ‘It was a mental thing,’ he said, ‘like everything with me. I think I saw it too idealistically. I saw it in terms of making a contribution and so on. The wrong attitude. A real artist doesn’t think in those terms. The trouble is, or was, that I am bad at compromising, in that sort of situation anyway. When I went into museum work it seemed to me that I had made an absolute choice. I’ve never tried to sculpt since then. It was the kind of choice, you see … Not like other things. It was like choosing between two different ideas of oneself, two completely different modes of existence. What bothers me is that I defined myself. People shouldn’t have to do that.’