by Carmel Bird
‘Come, today we shall visit the Palazzo Barberini. We’ll find the darling, darling Fra Angelico, my favourite Last Judgement in all the whole wide world. You’ll see the angel in the centre – who would expect to find him there, the angel?’
Rosita is breathless with wonder as the unexpected grandeur whispers into her heart, but she rallies to deliver to Cora a fine lecture on the picture, unlike the rushing and gushing of Diana. There is a magnificent devil in black in the lower right, worthy of modern cinema. A Batman figure. And look at those fabulous Barberine bees in The Triumph of Divine Providence on the ceiling of the Grand Salon. They are so lovely.
Everything Edith and Dr Silver had murmured in their hopeful and somewhat desperate reflections about Cora’s ‘education’ seems to be coming true. In a city boarding school you can’t get even close to what you find in an art gallery in Rome (how true is that?). Is it some form of loss of innocence that you actually experience in the gallery, an access to truth maybe? Rosita the Innocent will never change – no wall of original Botticellis will ever really penetrate the rather dogged kind of comprehension and grasp of things that is Rosita’s practised stance.
A kind of dreaminess frequently clouds Cora’s gaze, for beneath the surface of everything she does and sees is her consciousness of the excitement in store when she gets to Venice. And somehow this real-life drama with its expectations and secretive sexy thrills is able to inform her as she studies the treasures of Rome. The vitality and beauty and seduction of the canvases sing sweetly with her mood. For in Venice she now fully expects to find Rufus the Virile himself. The frisson works like fermentation in her blood, sharpening her eyesight, ramping up her ability to analyse and ‘appreciate’ the pictures. There is a sweet and shining serpent keeping vigil in the cornucopia of flowers and fruit and flesh that moves before Cora’s dreamy eyes. A divine little smile plays frequently across her face, like soft and dappled sunlight, opening her naturally rosy lips to reveal her sweetly perfect teeth. You and I know where this pretty little mouth has been, and will be again.
Passers-by are captivated by her glow.
There were several Roman excursions, including one to St Peter’s for Mass during which Cora was sardine-pressed by the bodies of the worshipful crowd and mildly sexually assaulted in the process, at which she fainted. She had to be rushed out into the air, Diana and Rosita pushing and pulling her past reverent and devoted members of the congregation who were straining for a glimpse of the pontiff.
‘What happened, Cora darling?’
‘Oh, nothing. I just felt terrible. The crush. The heat.’
‘You were starving.’
‘That too.’
‘We go at once to Cacio e Pepe for the tonnarelli.’ Cora went even whiter at the thought. They gave her water.
The trio found their way, eventually, to the Aracoeli, Diana faithfully carrying Callianthe’s letter to the Bambinello in her ever-so-elegant shoulder bag. Up the incredible staircase of fortune they went, Cora noting aloud that nobody was that day ascending prayerfully on their knees, looking for a win in the lottery.
There he was, the sulky golden Boy, firmly planted in his bulletproof glass case, glittering with jewels, promising his own special answers to the prayers that swirled about him, prayers that drifted in clouds above his head, prayers to save the sinner, raise the dead, comfort the afflicted. Bless the infertile with issue. And of course not a few prayers to deliver the lottery millions to the needy but undeserving. There was the warm and hopeful flicker of votive candles sending thousands, millions of prayers big and small to various saints and to the Copy of the Bambinello.
It was a very busy place. A group of Dutch pilgrims was chanting a litany, long and mumbled, up and down a short efficient scale not far from the holy Boy. Even Diana could forget he was a copy, such was his power, his aura, his charisma. The intellect sometimes doesn’t have a hope when the heart and soul are calling the shots. She closed her eyes and prayed for Callianthe’s intention, gently kissed the envelope, and then placed it carefully in the first gold woven basket where it whispered in and slid itself down among the pile of mail. Diana simply never lost sight of the image of her own baby boy – he was there in her heart, alive and pink and smiling and perfect in her mind, her memory, her imagination – and she could, would, did transfer the loss of the wooden statue to the loss of the breathing child. So Diana wept, as many were weeping, before the gleaming Copy. It was something she willed, allowed, desired – this simple and powerful crossover between the Bambinello and baby Xavier.
‘He looks like the real thing to me,’ Cora said. She was being truthful and practical, but she spoke softly because she was in a church, although all around her there were tourists and pilgrims who were not particularly quiet.
Rosita, also whispering, said, ‘Yes, he does, doesn’t he?’
‘Ah, my dears,’ Diana said, ‘perhaps it does not matter. And perhaps after all he is the real thing.’
‘But he’s not,’ Cora said.
‘I suppose not, my darling.’ Diana’s voice was soft and dreamy.
‘Does it really matter, though?’ Cora persisted, an annoying whine in her voice.
‘I think perhaps it does not matter.’ Every syllable was placed on Diana’s lips, breathed into the air, with exquisite precision and care.
‘But it must matter – or why bother at all?’ Cora could be very irritating.
‘Ah, ah – some say that holy statues such as the Bambinello have a mind or a will of their own, so perhaps the mind of the statue has decided that the Copy will take over the tasks.’
Cora, not a particularly argumentative girl after all, decided to give up. She shrugged and fell silent.
‘I think all that matters is faith and beauty,’ Rosita said in her own dreamy tone of voice, her eyes shining with the joy and excitement of being in the Aracoeli, actually there. She had never in her life really imagined she would find herself on the other side of the world. She was walking on air, wonderful, magic air, and she was not about to question anything. Rosita was happier than she could ever remember being before.
‘Do you think they’ll ever find the real one?’ Cora said, not quite giving up.
‘Only if the little Bambinello fish-wishes to be found,’ said Diana, closing the matter. When her speech lapsed suddenly into its curious accents, Cora and Rosita knew better than to pursue a line of argument. And Diana the Manipulator knew how to manage her flock. ‘The angels who painted him will guard him always.’
With such statements she would close the discussion. In her heart of hearts (that place again) she wished somehow to be an instrument in the return of the True Child, but she would not speak of this. In the space round the statue, a greenish translucence, an otherworldly glow hung mysteriously. It was a light that might belong in some sad twilight of dreams.
For Rosita the matter of the statue’s whereabouts was not closed. Curiously enough – or perhaps not so curiously – it was Rosita who became obsessed with the idea of finding the original statue. There, that is a surprise, isn’t it? Something seemed to shift from Diana to Rosita so that a space opened up in Rosita’s heart and an urgent and unimagined love and desire rushed into the bright-red beating void. The sudden advocate for the True Boy turns out to be the dear old art teacher from the convent school at the end of nowhere, Rosita the Innocent. It is she who is going to drive the hunt, she who has been gripped by a remarkable cause, she who is sniffing the trail, which, I have to say, would appear to me to be pretty much stone cold. She is like the parent of the abducted child who will never give up hope, will never concede defeat, will follow every single lead, every gossamer thread of wild and wonderful non-evidence from here into the next world, over hill over dale, over those hills and faraway, into the twilight and the glory of Tir Nan Og where all the little children who have ever been spirited away by fairies and gipsies and old men in tweed overcoats romp and play forever in the fields of bliss.
Ah, but wait a
minute – we are talking here about a statue made from the wood of an olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane, a statue embellished and bejewelled by the angels, a statue with, apparently, a mind of its own. Well, such are the highways and byways of the human mind, imagination, spirit, that to Rosita the Bambinello has all the qualities (and more) of a human child, whether the child be in a poem by Yeats or on a poster pinned to a tree in a remote Portuguese cemetery. Face it, the Bambinello has become Rosita’s own baby, her lost child, her stolen darling, her sweet. I am not exactly suggesting that this is how Rosita’s mind worked. No, this is my own interpretation of the thing that stirred in Rosita and that drove her, inspired her determination to get to the bottom of the Bamb, so to speak. I mean to say the bottom of the mystery of the Bamb. Rosita was nothing if not, quite suddenly, ambitious in this matter.
Diana sent Callianthe three postcards from the Aracoeli, all pictures of the statue. Close up, side on, long shot with prayers printed on the back. Rosita, selecting more carefully and pleasing herself with the variety, sent one to Dr Silver, one to Roland and one to Callianthe. She became a tragic mother selecting the most winning pictures of her lost son to send to friends and relatives. She of course sent them joyfully and dutifully, having consciously little or none of the motives I ascribe to her. Cora sent a picture of a particularly sulky Bambinello to her mother and father. She could not begin to imagine the relief and joy this careless message would bring to the family on their flower farm at Woodpecker Point.
‘Cora is in Rome with Diana and she is well and happy and has been to Mass at St Peter’s,’ Edith announced at breakfast.
Cora’s mind was not on all this stuff, she was more or less dutifully going through the motions of being a tourist in Rome, an obedient niece, a willing art student, while she floated somewhere inside her own heart, her blood singing hot with the spirit of Rufus the Virile. Rosita was in seventh heaven, or on another planet, moving from one beloved work of art to another in childlike ecstasy, and carrying high her hopes for the Bambinello in her dear old heart. Diana was Diana, drifting about the place in her usual flurry of one sort of delicious business or another.
By a very old-fashioned custom, Diana had a letter of introduction from Roland the Good to Cosimo the Archivist. Rosita in her simple way, and because the matter was uppermost in her own mind, imagined Cosimo would immediately raise the issue of the theft of the Bambinello. But no, he spoke of the statue, when he spoke of it at all, as if the object in the glass case in the church were indeed the real thing. Rosita and Diana, in their wisdom, forbore to question him, but Cora, in her dreamy bouncing bold open youthful silliness said did he think they would ever find the real thing and when they did what were they planning to do with the Copy? You can guess what Cosimo did next. He rattled on about what was ‘ever real’ and what was truly a copy and where the heart is there is the truth of the matter.
‘But what would the angel think – the angel that painted the first one? Wouldn’t he be insulted by the imitation?’
‘Who can hope to fathom the heart of an angel, Cora?’
‘Well, if I was the angel, I wouldn’t like it.’
‘Forgive her, Father. She is a very modern and pragmatic girl.’
‘Ah, I see her point, I do. The Church needs fresh and youthful voices like Cora’s. It may be that the angel was simply waiting for Cora to put the question, and will choose to deliver the old gold miracle Boy home to his pedestal this very night. Even as we speak wings may be beating on the mountains of the moon. The Bambinello may be flying home to us in the arms of the painting angels.’
But Cora would not leave the thing alone.
‘That won’t happen,’ she said, her voice faintly irritated and sulky.
‘We cannot say, we just cannot say. Perhaps he needed sprucing up, topping up, recharging,’ Cosimo went on, dabbing the air with an invisible paintbrush.
‘Cora is very tired,’ Diana said. ‘She has not been well.’
‘Bless you, Cora. Father Roland tells me you are a gifted artist yourself. Touched by the very brushes of the angels.’
Cora smiled enigmatically but finally and fortunately saw the wisdom of saying nothing.
I am unsure what any of the people here might have really meant by all this talk of angels painting or not painting statues. Rosita seemed to take it all at face value – angels did this, statues did that; Diana, maybe half and half; Cosimo was working with metaphor a lot of the time; and Cora thought it was all stories, stories, stories and they sometimes irritated her and they sometimes made her laugh. Mind you, she loved the stories, and the strange narratives of saints and their wonders bound her to her beloved Aunt Diana, but she existed on a plane where sex ever after with Rufus Gigli had become the principal reality, so she demonstrated a certain impatience with the miraculous statues and the artistic angels of the conversation.
‘You are looking up at my pet picture here,’ Cosimo said, gesturing towards the painting on the wall of his study. Cora had been staring at it. It was not a sacred picture of any kind, not St Francis or the Virgin as she might have expected. ‘It is thought by some to be a genuine Bosch, although myself I prefer to think it was done by his assistants. Not by angels, certainly. I call it “Hocus-Pocus” – you can see why. “Humble-Bumble Hocus-Pocus Pudding-and-Pie”. Its official title is “The Conjurer”.’
He grinned up at Cora sideways, and Cora obligingly smiled weakly back, flicking a long lock of hair from her forehead with one thin finger and anchoring the lock in her tortoiseshell barrette.
‘Cora,’ Diana said, ‘is as you know a keen student of art.’
Displeased to be so characterised, she thought it made her sound so childish, Cora focused her eyes more sharply on the painting. It was wonderfully strange, and she was, after all, a keen student of art.
I have been in that room with Cosimo myself, and I have seen that painting. The thing that really draws me to it is the little green frog on the table, and the other little green frog about to hop out of the mouth of the central figure. But I am getting ahead of myself again. I get excited at the memory of the little frogs, being so very fond of amphibians.
I’ll describe it briefly. On the extreme right the conjurer stands alone in a red gown, a high black hat on his head, a basket containing either an owl or a monkey in his left hand. His hat is not unlike the hat of the groom in the Arnolfini wedding picture. He has a large hooked nose, very obvious because he is in profile, and his chin recedes and his eye is shifty. His grin is tight and smug. He’s playing the thimble-rig game with cups and balls, and has one of the balls held high in a pincer grip of the fingers on his left hand. His magic wand is on the table in front of him, and facing him is a figure, man or woman, in paler red, bending over the table. From this figure’s mouth comes the frog of which I spoke, and there is already one frog that has landed on the table. Such conjuring! And of course any frog is a member of the family that is forever a-breeding in my own Frog Hollow at home in LA.
The audience is looking every which-way – some at the conjurer, some at the frog-spitter, some at each other. But the key to the story is in the figure on the left, the conjurer’s mate – a Dominican priest who is looking up at the sky while snipping off the frog-spitter’s purse. I know exactly what this is like – I once had my purse stolen while being mesmerised by the action on the centre court at Wimbledon. Mesmerised by Rafael Nadal, my absolute hero.
Imagine first being made to cough up slimy little frogs, only to discover that the whole thing was for the purpose of being robbed. And by a Dominican – well, you can’t trust appearances. In the very centre there’s a child in red, standing almost underneath the frog-spitter, looking up, half knowing and half questioning. Well, that’s the one I think of as me. I identify with the child in red. For one thing, Avila had a great fondness for dressing me in red when I was a small child. I was the kid in the scarlet cashmere coat, the pillar-box cloak, the vermilion pinafore. I imagine Avila had a bit of a Red
Riding Hood fixation. I played along.
I still play along. Avila lives by miracles and signs large and small. When Abercrombie & Fitch produced an embroidered sundress and called it ‘Sydney’, Avila saw it as a sign for her to get me one. It’s okay – luckily it only came in white, or I might have had a whole closet full of pastel and primary colours to get through. I should explain that I am weirdly drawn to polka dots and stripes, and that Avila devotes a considerable amount of her time and energy to weaning me off my aesthetic. She’s fine with the L.A.M.B. babydoll sweater – the stripes here are for some reason acceptable. I sometimes choose my own jewellery. Being keen on ladybugs, I own a heap of jewellery of varying worth, fashioned in the likeness of the bug. My favourite is a gold bracelet from J.H. Breakell & Co – fourteen ladybugs all in a row. That’s the special shimmer you see at my wrist. Fashion of all kinds is central to life. In some ways my very existence is a response to fashion.
Getting back to Cosimo, tucked in between the edge of the painting and the wall of Cosimo’s study is a battered old card from the Visconti-Sforza Tarot – the Magician – who sits at the table with his thimble-rig cups and balls. A reminder perhaps that the narratives of the painting reach deep into mystery, alchemy and astrology, and also that Cosimo himself identifies to an extent with the Tarot. You never know, with Cosimo, quite what might not mean what. That’s part of the fun of him, I suppose. His old green language of the birds. Cora didn’t warm to him, and he seemed perhaps to have the power to see into her heart. Actually you didn’t have to be very smart to perceive that Cora was a lovesick heroine being grand-toured about by the Manipulator and the Innocent. I realise it seems rather obvious and heavy-handed to have The Magus on the wall behind Cosimo the Magus, but as I have explained, I am only the reporter of these matters, your Navigator, and, well, I have seen these things for myself. It is Cosimo who is being true to form, after all, Cosimo who has hung the picture, and presumably Cosimo who lets the Tarot card stay there tucked into the side. He revels in ambiguity.