“Perhaps.”
“Be careful; be very, very careful.”
Margot stands up. “You were going to show us your vault?”
“Another time, Signorina, another time. Sandro, mi dispiace, but you have a tiger by the tail. Let go now before it’s too late. And don’t forget, there’s the small matter of the French engravings I furnished you on credit. I’ll expect payment by the end of the month. Sixty thousand lire. A small sum, perhaps, but I can’t afford to overlook it. Thank you.”
That evening, en route to a Chinese restaurant Margot is inexplicably drawn to, the dottore suggests a stop at the French church, San Luigi dei francesi, to have a look at the Caravaggios. He has once again failed to achieve an erection, to say nothing of penetration and semination, and though he is too experienced a traveler on the pathways of love to panic simply because he has lost his way for the moment . . . even when his vulnerability is the occasion for such tenderness and generosity on Margot’s part . . . well, what man in his fifties will not see in such a failure an ominous sign of things to come?
He has never eaten in a Chinese restaurant, does not know anyone who has, and has no desire to do so himself. What he wants is not an exotic Oriental dish but a friendly plate of pasta or a comforting bowl of minestrone. Maybe the Caravaggios will change her mind.
The church is dark; a few candles burn here and there at an altar, but no one will accuse the sacristan of wasting electricity. They feel their way to the Contarelli Chapel and Dottor Postiglione locates the light box, hidden behind a pillar, and inserts a hundred-lire piece. Three minutes of light for one hundred lire, reasonable enough.
He watches Margot as she takes in the three large paintings in the chapel, which tell the story of Saint Matthew.
All his life, he thinks, he has been content to let his little boat drift wherever it would. He has been accustomed to smile at the frantic efforts of others whom he sees struggling against the current—their faces distorted by the strain, troubled, clearly unhappy—but now he himself has drifted too long and he realizes at last that he will have to exert himself if he is to arrive at his destination.
Behind the altar Saint Matthew, a dignified patriarch with a shining bald head and a long gray beard, takes dictation from an angel suspended in the air over his head. The angel is so foreshortened that you can see only the upper half of his body. The lateral paintings are more dramatic: on the left Matthew, counting money in a cavern, is summoned by Christ to become a disciple; on the right he is murdered by a gang of ruffians.
Dottor Postiglione keeps feeding the meter. Two, three times. Nine minutes. Most people can’t look at anything that long. Margot’s mother may not have succeeded in teaching her the principles of art history, but she did teach her something more important: not to fake her responses. He says nothing. He doesn’t believe in talking too much about art, especially while you’re looking at it. The pressure to appreciate is the great enemy of actual enjoyment. Most people don’t know what they like because they feel obligated to like so many different things. They feel they’re supposed to be overwhelmed, so instead of looking, they spend their time thinking up something so say, something intelligent, or at least clever.
While he is thinking these thoughts he is also, on another level, revising his speech, the things he must say to Margot before the evening is over: Margot, this has been one of the most difficult days of my life. I’ve been humiliated by the Sacra Rota, which has placed still another obstacle in my path, I’ve been humiliated by my own failure to make love to you, I’ve been humiliated by an old “buddy,” Volmaro Martelli. And what is more, I was—as you’ve probably guessed—intending to deceive you. I was cutting a deal with Volmaro. The Aretino is worth much more than eight million or twelve million. We were planning to disbind the book and sell the engravings separately. I won’t try to excuse myself, but I will say that I thought that without the money I could never ask you to be my wife. The Sacra Rota turns very slowly, and it takes a great deal of money to keep it turning at all. You have to keep feeding it just as I have to keep feeding this light box. My own investments have been unsuccessful, and though my wife could easily afford the expenses, she, too, wishes to humiliate me. But now I see that none of these things matter. What matters is that I love you, and I believe you love me too. If you can forgive me . . .
The light goes out and he inserts another hundred-lire piece, but Margot has had enough.
“Mama and I came here,” she says, “with all the students. It’s coming back to me. But the only thing I remember are the feet. The feet are superb.”
“Caravaggio had a fetish, you know.”
“No, really?”
The dottore laughs.
She takes his arm. “Say something clever,” she teases.
“I’m not feeling clever,” he says. “Do you really want to go to this Chinese restaurant? I’m not sure I’ll survive it. Those plastic replicas of the dishes didn’t look too tempting. And the names: ‘Plum Blossom and Snow Competing for Spring’ . . . What kind of a name is that?”
“You’re so provincial,” she says, “I can’t believe it. Your idea of foreign cooking is something from Naples.”
The restaurant has lots of smooth surfaces that are either red or black, lacquered and shiny. Instead of bread and wine the Chinese waiter—who, much to Dottor Postiglione’s surprise, speaks Italian—brings a pot of tea and two small cups, slightly larger than espresso cups, and thicker.
Margot pours for herself; Sandro declines.
“I can’t drink tea,” he says. “That’s all the British gave us in the prison camp. Tea, tea, tea. Morning, noon, night. Afternoon, too. They were mad about tea. That’s the only thing that wasn’t in short supply.”
“This is green tea,” she says. “It’s not the same at all. You could at least try it.”
“Margot,” he says, “this has been one of the most difficult days of my life . . .”
“Don’t be silly,” she says. “You’ll survive.”
She orders for both of them from a menu which is printed in Chinese, Italian, English, German, and French, in that order—each dish is numbered—and the waiter brings them some of the little bacchette the Chinese use instead of knives and forks. He doesn’t know the word for them. With a bacchetta, he thinks, a conductor directs an orchestra, a drummer strikes a drum, a magician causes pigeons to fly out of a hat, a rabdomante divines underground sources of water, a teacher whips a disobedient pupil.
“Chopstick,” she says in English, holding up a bacchetta.
“You liked the Caravaggios?” he asks, moving the conversation back to familiar territory.
“Very much. Did you notice,” she asks, “how the violence of the assassination is softened by the graceful S-curve that runs through the body of the angel and down his arm to the palm branch and then through Saint Matthew’s outstretched arm?”
“Beautiful.” He frowns, thinking, and then laughs. “You’ve got the hang of it,” he says. “Keep it up and they’ll make you a professor at I Tatti.”
“You know what I really noticed?”
“What?”
“Saint Matthew—in the altarpiece—looks just like you except for the beard. And the halo!”
“Definitely not the halo.” He laughs again. “But you know, that painting has always seemed rather tame to me, compared to the others. It’s not the original, you know. I mean it’s not the one Caravaggio originally intended for the altarpiece. The first one was rejected.”
“Why’s that?”
“Too shocking. Saint Matthew is an ugly old man—Caravaggio wasn’t afraid of ugliness; his Saint Matthew’s a laborer who doesn’t even know how to hold his pen properly. The angel has to lean over and guide his hand for him. And the angel is luscious, very definitely a she-angel.”
“Where’s the original?”
“It was snapped
up by the Marchese Giustiniani and stayed in the Villa Giustiniani till the Germans looted it during the war. I don’t know the whole story, but it wound up in Berlin and was destroyed in 1945.”
“Have you seen it?”
“I saw it when it was still in the Villa Giustiniani.”
The waiter brings two sausage-shaped things, evidently deep-fried, on small plates. On each plate are little bowls of sauce, mustard (probably) and something orange and translucent, like apricot marmalade.
“What are these?”
“They’re egg rolls”
“Egg rolls? How strange.”
“And this is hot mustard, and this is duck sauce.”
With two bacchette Margot lifts her egg roll—the entire thing—dips it in both sauces, raises it to her lips and takes a bite. He doesn’t know where to begin.
“Egg rolls are hard to eat this way,” she says. “The other dishes will be easier. But try it. Look: you lay the first one between your thumb and your first finger, like this.” She demonstrates. “And hold it firm against your fourth finger.” She reaches across the table and adjusts the bacchetta in his hand. “Then the second one you just hold like a pencil, see?” She holds up her hand with the two bacchette in them, clicking the tips together, like the pincers of a crab. He picks up a second bacchetta and tries to hold it like a pencil. He squeezes as tightly as he can, but the tips of the bacchette waver around helplessly, out of control, like an insect’s antennae. Once again she reaches across the table to guide his hand, and as she does so he suddenly sees himself as Caravaggio’s original Saint Matthew—not the dignified patriarch but a clumsy old man who doesn’t know how to hold his pen, and she the angel sent to help him, to guide him, to show him the way. This is how he must look to the other diners. He looks around him. No one is paying the slightest attention, and yet it is impossible to say what he wants to say under the circumstances.
“You know,” he says, “Caravaggio was the only one strong enough to stand against the convention of representing all biblical figures as uniformly handsome or beautiful.”
“What about Rembrandt?”
“Yes, Rembrandt, of course, later on.”
All along he’s been telling himself that the gap between them could be bridged. But now his instinct—the very instinct for happiness that has always guided his actions—sends him a sharp and distinct signal, a signal that is almost visceral.
He pushes her hands away and sets the bacchette down next to his plate. He eats his egg roll, and then the rest of the meal—thin strips of various meats mixed with vegetables—with a knife and fork. The duck sauce is sickly sweet, the mustard too hot; the different combinations of salt and sweet are offensive to his Italian palate; the soy sauce stuns the senses. He is relieved when the meal is over and the waiter brings them each a small dish of orange sherbet and a little twisted biscotto. The sherbet is cool and refreshing on his tongue.
Sandro is fifty-two, fifty-three in September. She’s twenty-nine. He’s December, she’s May. She’s in love with Italy, but so are a lot of American women. He’s seen it too many times. They fall in love with Italy, marry an Italian man, settle down to live an Italian life. For six or seven years everything is wonderful and then the novelty wears off. They start to get homesick. They have a child and realize that the child isn’t going to have an American childhood, isn’t going to have any of the important experiences that they recall so fondly from their own childhoods. American Christmases, Thanksgivings, Independence Days, he can’t begin to name them. Moreover, there won’t be enough money. And how hard she was with Volmaro.
The little biscotti are called fortune cookies, because each contains a fortune, a prediction, a warning. He breaks open his cookie and reads his fortune with some trepidation, not because he is superstitious but because, when he is in this peculiar frame of mind, even the slightest breeze can cause him suddenly to change tack. They read their fortunes in silence and then aloud.
‘“Some wives don’t get mad,” she reads. “They get even.’” Your turn.”
His is equally pointless: “‘Talent, like the gout, sometimes skips two generations.’”
“Idiotic,” he says, genuinely annoyed. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. It’s ridiculous. What nonsense. What a way to end a meal. Stupido. I can’t see what the point is of—”
“Piano, piano,” she says. “What’s the matter? It’s only a joke.”
He will explain later, he tells himself. In bed, with his arms around her, he will explain everything. But no, he knows it is too late now for explanations. The current is too strong. The moment he has been anticipating has passed. He has drifted past his destination, and in the twinkling of an eye his life has been changed. He is in the same boat, drifting down the same river, but he has turned around. The boat is still traveling in the same direction, but instead of standing in the bow, looking straight ahead to see where he’s going, he is standing in the stern, looking back at where he’s been, and this is where he will remain for the rest of the journey.
15
Mont Blanc
Preparations for detaching the frescoes in the Lodovici Chapel had been under way for several weeks. Every square inch of the chapel had been photographed by a documentation crew. Paint samples had been subjected to a variety of tests by the chemists and X-rayed by physicists. Humidity had been monitored by technicians. Scaffoldings constructed by carpenters.
The original plan had been to detach the frescoes along with the arriccio—the lower layer of plaster or ground on which the intonaco—the upper layer of plaster that holds the paint—had originally been applied. But this process, which is called stacco or “detachment,” is slow and costly and eventually proved to be unworkable because the paint itself was not attached firmly enough to the intonaco.
Sandro’s decision to remove the paint layer alone—to lift the paint right off the intonaco, a process called strappo from the Italian word for “to tear”—had been made before our trip to the Abruzzi and Rome, but he was never perfectly happy with it.
I’d begun working at the Certosa, the Carthusian monastery on the outskirts of town where many of the books from the Biblioteca Nazionale had been taken for treatment, but I followed the preparations for the strappo with great interest. Sandro could talk about nothing else. It was the only time I had seen him nervous, but I could understand why. Can you imagine ripping four of the world’s great frescoes off the wall on which they’d been painted six hundred years ago? I’d never seen it done myself and wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It made me nervous just to think about it, because it seemed so impossible, though the process, which was first used in the eighteenth century, is perfectly straightforward. After the painting is cleaned it is coated with a layer of animal glue and then a layer of a facing is applied: strips of lightweight cotton gauze that have been steeped in more glue. The gauze is then covered with more glue and two layers of hemp canvas. Then the glue is allowed to dry for two or three days and the whole thing is “torn” off the wall.
Sandro fretted about mold and worried that it was too damp for the glue to dry properly. He monitored the humidity constantly, turning on, or sometimes off, a battery of infrared lamps. He came home every two hours or so at night but then turned around and went straight back to the Badia (which is only a ten-minute walk from Santa Croce).
On the morning of the strappo itself I took the day off and went to the Badia. The Lodovici Chapel was full of people, not simply the technical crew but reporters and photographers who had no business being there but once there were not easily dislodged. The abbot, who loved publicity, had called all the newspapers. Sandro was furious. It was the only time I saw him angry, and frankly I was a little worried that his anger might cause him to make a mistake.
He began by making a long, clean cut, with what looked rather like a gold knife, around the perimeter of the lower left fresc
o, Saint Francis preaching to the birds. Then, without wasting any time, he gave a firm tug at the bottom corners, and with the help of two assistants the hemp canvas was slowly “torn” from the wall, taking the paint with it—paint that had been laid on wet plaster six hundred years ago.
There was no sound except the tearing of the paint. Then complete and absolute silence, and then a round of applause. Sandro was dripping with sweat as if he’d stuck his head in a bucket of water.
The detached painting was then rolled out on one of several large tables that had been placed in the nave of the church itself, facedown on clean paper. Parts of the back were still covered with a thin layer of intonaco. In other places you could see the paint itself, the back of the paint.
The other three frescoes were detached in the same way, without incident.
Later in the day I watched Sandro remove the intonaco from the back of the paint layer by hammering it lightly with a rubber mallet until nothing but the paint itself remained and you could see the frescoes from behind, as it were, their images reversed as in a mirror. On the following day these images would be transferred to tightly stretched canvases.
The reporters and photographers had gone. The technical crew had gone home for the night. The abbot and his monks were in the refectory. We were alone.
“You must be pleased,” I said. “The strappo was a great success. Your picture will be in all the papers tomorrow.”
“That fool of an abbot,” he exclaimed, “thinks the publicity will attract more tourists.”
“He’s probably right, don’t you think?”
Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tat-tat. “I suppose.”
I don’t think Sandro had a metaphysical bone in his body—he was a man who loved things rather than ideas, surfaces rather than essences—but now and then he’d lapse into a kind of metaphysical mood when talking about the art he loved best, painting, and could conjure up a vision of universal decay that would bring tears to the eye: pigments fade or change color over time, details are lost in deepening shadows, paint layers fracture and flake. No one has ever seen a single painting from classical Greece, and the same inevitable fate awaits every single painting in the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace and the Louvre and the Alte Pinakothek, and so on, the modern paintings as well as those of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, for most modern paintings are less stable, less firmly constructed as things, than the works of earlier ages.
The Sixteen Pleasures Page 23