Stone Virgin Read online

  The Gothic movement is implicit in this right leg and in the way the drapery is used not to enhance volume, as it was in the Venetian sculpture of the time, but to accentuate the line. Something of Nino Pisano there in the clinging lines of the robe? Certainly Pisano influenced the Dalle Masegne brothers and they worked in Bologna and Venice. Milan too, I think. So a line from Pisano through the Dalle Masegne to some northern Italian sculptor of the next generation?

  Raikes paused and looked up, with a sudden feeling of discouragement. There were so many possible lines. Still, it was remarkable, and a kind of clue, that among the host of undistinguished monumental madonnas of the day this one should exist with its grace of feeling and movement. Made to a formula they had most often been: recipient of tidings, receptacle for the Holy Ghost, vehicle for Christ. Yet someone, whose name nobody knew, in early fifteenth-century Venice, had fashioned a woman like no other. She was there in the darkness now, he thought, looking across the roofs towards the dim expanse of the Lagoon, as she had done every night for the last two hundred and fifty years or so. And before that?

  A mood of wondering speculation descended on Raikes, vague yet intense, absorbing, like the half-incredulous wonder we sometimes feel at the sheer fact of our existence in the world, when the details summoned as evidence, though true, seem somehow to make certainty less. He thought of Chiara Litsov and her gardening, the green shoots and black earth, the two figures glimpsed so fleetingly – the other man must have been Lattimer … He thought of the steps that had led to this visit, his discovery of the notebook, Barfield’s peevish request for five more degrees in the devotional gloom, the spidery outline of the name in its suffusion of light, the house by the canal with its damp and echoing courtyard, the hemmed-in, disconsolate building of the church. Hemmed-in. The steady pulse of recollection missed a beat, stayed. More logical to look for a church. This church was deconsecrated, had therefore been abandoned or suppressed at some time. The original precincts must have been much larger. That was it, of course: the church land had been sold to the house opposite, or acquired in some other way.

  With peculiar deliberation Raikes found himself dwelling on that view from the gate across the narrow alley. The words of his conversation with Steadman came back to him. Lurking about in a cloister somewhere. Why had he so easily assumed the alley to be the true dividing line? It could have been made much later. Easy to see why the owners of the house would want to acquire the land – that long, rectangular piece running alongside the canal would make a beautiful garden and gardens were rare in Venice, gardens large enough actually to walk about in. Yes, easy to see … Steady now, he cautioned himself. Let us go step by step. Supposing the Madonna was made for this church and then for some reason never put in the intended place, supposing she was just left in the church precincts, and if then subsequently the church was deconsecrated … There would have been no means of retrieving her, or perhaps the priests did not want to, so when the land was sold …

  In his excitement at these thoughts, he jumped up and began pacing back and forth across the room.

  He was thirty-three years old, unmarried, physically strong, with an ardent, innocent nature and some tendency to hysteria. The Madonna was five hundred and forty.

  First Interlude

  * * *

  Coronation

  IN THE SPRING of 1793, when Ziani began writing his boastful, scandalous Mémoires, the Madonna was three hundred and sixty-one. He was seventy-four and dying. The previous year a stroke had disabled him down one side and stretched a corner of his thin mouth. He could not walk far now, and had a permanent look of distaste. But his memory was clear as ever – clearer, as though distilled by the body’s decay. The airs of the past came to him, warm with malice, spiced with lechery, scented with self-congratulation.

  Day after day he sat huddled at the card table he used for a desk in one corner of the vast apartment on the third floor of his mortgaged house, writing by the light of the window, though reflections from the canal below troubled his eyes and sometimes disturbed the vengeful and erotic flow of his thoughts. Apart from his own meagre person in its soiled blue satin robe, and his table and chair, and the couch he slept on, everything in the apartment was draped in dust sheets. Neither house nor furniture belonged properly to him; he lived on there by agreement with his creditors.

  His eyes were failing, he could not see with any distinctness to the far end of the apartment, his gaze lost itself among the sheeted forms. All his energy went into the writing. When he came to the section of his Mémoires that dealt with the statue, the seduction of Donna Francesca and the cuckolding of skinflint Boccadoro, he wrote with more care than ever, wanting to lacerate his personae and stimulate his readers in equal measure:

  In that April of 1743, having recently returned to Venice from Rome, where I had fallen out of favour, and penniless as a result of those speculations described in a previous chapter, I was obliged to seek temporary employment, and found after a short while, through the influence of my family, a post as secretary in the house of the merchant Tommaso Boccadoro who employed me because of my name and also because I had attended the University of Padua (though obliged, because of the unfortunate involvements related elsewhere in these Mémoires, to leave without obtaining a degree). Boccadoro also agreed to house and feed my faithful Battistella, who has been with me through so many vicissitudes and is with me still, in return for duties about the house, though he refused point-blank to pay him wages, thereby revealing early in our relationship his inability to rise to an occasion or make a generous gesture.

  Though described as secretary, my main task was to restore to order the very considerable collection of books. Boccadoro had taken the house in part payment of debts, just as it stood, including the contents of the library, from a branch of the Longhi family. As the other part of the payment he had taken in marriage Francesca Longhi, a girl of eighteen. The Longhi had been spending more than they possessed for many years by that time, and they were desperate for money, otherwise they would never have agreed to marry her to him. The family live now, what is left of them, in San Barnabà.

  So as I have said, my main duties concerned the library. Boccadoro, while scarce knowing one end of a book from the other, had aspirations to learning; but the books had been kept without particular system; those who had accumulated them no doubt knew where to find what they wanted, but my unlettered employer blundered about among them lost. I was to catalogue the books and make an index with brief summaries of their contents.

  The work was not disagreeable, but the position of paid employee was galling to my pride, extremely so, and I found solace from the first, when dealing with Boccadoro, in a certain deliberate falseness of speech and manner. This took the form of praising virtue, but should not be thought of as hypocrisy as I had nothing to gain at that point, other than, by saying what I did not believe and seeing him agree, to mark the difference between us and feed my contempt.

  So I smiled on Boccadoro and spoke in praise of virtue. He listened to me in spite of my comparative youth. For one thing, he was innocent; and then my lineage exercised charm on a man whose father, it was said, had humped crates of fish on the Zattere. What also weighed with him was the rumour that had got about somehow or other, and which I did nothing to confirm or deny, that I had been pursuing theological studies in Rome with a view to taking Holy Orders.

  He listened to me, as I say; he even sought me out. His trouble was that frequent one which afflicts hot old men with cool young wives; though I did not understand this at first, and certainly not the extent of Francesca’s coolness.

  Ziani stopped to wipe his eyes, peer across the apartment. He thought he had heard some sound there. These days he was haunted by small sounds and movements, most of them illusory. As always, his gaze grew perplexed among the whitish mounds. He caught a flicker as some loose fold of drapery stirred in a draught – the apartment was prey to a system of currents oceanic in complexity.

  As hi
s eyes strained, so did his mind, across the long interval of years, to the morning Boccadoro had confided in him. Sunlight caught and held in the enclosed space of the garden. May – the acacias were in flower. He had been there some weeks by that time. There was dew on the narrow leaves and the pebble walks were glistening. Early in the day then. Some shouting or singing from the direction of San Silvestre. Singing or shouting? A quarrelsome note in it. They were setting up the fruit barges along the fondamenta. The statue there in her arbour, modest and provocative, with that arm guarding herself. And the old man shambling towards him, long-shanked, powerful still, violent and ridiculous. No wig. He was not yet dressed for going out. He was in robe and skullcap. Ziani began to write again, every detail clear in his mind:

  It was in the garden that he first spoke to me about his situation, the banality of which naturally he did not see, as our misfortunes seem always to be uniquely ordained. At the moment he approached I was standing at the entrance to the arbour, looking at the statue; and it can therefore be truly said that this comedy begins and ends with her. I was wondering what she was intended to represent.

  The garden was large for Venice, running a good way behind the house, ending in a high wall with a gate set in it; beyond this there were the precincts of an abandoned church. On one side of the garden, back towards the wall, were the ruins of a stone arcade, three arches still standing; and it was within the last of these, the one farthest from the house, that the stone lady dwelt. At some time the former owners had planted roses here, white on one side, red on the other, and they grew up the shafts of the columns to the height of the arch, where they met and mingled colours very prettily; and a grape vine which looked old enough to be a cutting from Eden, lacing with the ruins of the masonry, formed rafters with its thick stems and a roof with its leaves, to make a bower for her. There was a wooden bench inside, where one could shelter from suns that were too burning. She was made of white stone but in the light of the vine leaves she had a faint hue of green and as always she was smiling, a slight smile difficult to interpret. At that time we had no idea what she was.

  Then Boccadoro came shambling towards me. He spent some time in preliminaries, glancing at me with his fierce little eyes. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘you are young, but you have a good head on your shoulders. I have often noted it. I am speaking to you because you are more nearly of an age with my wife, though of course there is some difference of years, the more so because of this fact, which, as I say, I have noted. Do you not think so?’

  ‘What fact is that?’ I said – he had lost me. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘to be sure, this very fact of this excellent head that you have on your shoulders. And then, you have attended one of our very best Universities … I have a deal of acquaintance, a great deal, but there are not many who are close to me, not many that I can call friend.’

  I did not see cause for astonishment in this, after his lifetime of usury. Now I tried to combine in one regard modest acknowledgement of this praise and respectful interest in what was to follow, with what success I do not know – but in any case nothing did follow, nothing more came from him; he began to stare about the garden; caution – or pride – had intervened.

  It was now that I took the first of many gambles in this affair. It was that species of gamble called a bluff by the practitioners of spigolo, the attempt to make your opponent think you are stronger than you are, the penalty for failing being full exposure of your weakness. ‘My dear sir,’ I said, ‘I understand what you are referring to. Believe me, you have my sympathy.’

  His face lost all expression for some moments through undiluted wonder at my words. I have often noted that when men are in distressful situations or situations of perplexity, however common these may be, however patent to view, yet will the smallest insights into them on the part of others seem wondrously perceptive to the one afflicted. So much is this the case that often, as now, the mere pretence of such an insight will suffice to unlock a man’s tongue. ‘What,’ he said, ‘you have sensed it then?’ ‘How could I not?’ I said. ‘How could I not?’ ‘She wants an increased allowance,’ he said. ‘She wants to rent an apartment of her own, a casino. She tells me she feels foolish among her friends through not having one.’

  ‘This fashion for casini is the curse of the age,’ I said. ‘It has been the ruin of many families, as I know for a fact.’ This was it then: having bought the merchandise he was now complaining at the price. But there was more. Encouraged by my nods, he came out with it. It seemed that the ordering of his house was not enough for Donna Francesca. She neglected to supervise the servants. She did not appear when he had guests.

  I thought of the lady as I had seen her first, on the day of my arrival in the house. I had stood waiting in the interior courtyard, where there was a circular well-head, decorated with lions’ heads round the rim. Their manes had been carved to resemble foliage and I was admiring the inventiveness of the carver when I heard the rustle of her clothes and looked up and saw her above me, descending the staircase in a pale-blue gown high at the collar and low-cut in front, in the fashion of those days, with the shining coils of her hair dressed high on her head, the gaze of a well-bred Venetian girl, equable, intrepid, without undue boldness however; and a figure whose shape and suppleness the stiff brocade could not conceal. I had not expected her to be so well-favoured – perhaps because beauty of any kind in conjunction with Boccadoro was not a thought easily entertained. I had seen her before, in the street with her brothers once, when I still lived in Venice; but she had been no more than a schoolgirl then. She was more now, certainly.

  These thoughts were in my mind as I looked at Boccadoro. It was all I could do to control my face. He was proposing to make this high-mettled creature, luxurious and wilful as all our Venetian ladies are, into an adjunct of the parlour, a devotee of the spinet, to soothe his unlovely brow when he returned from the counting-house, and serve grenadines to his grotesque cronies as they sprawled grossly, wigless and unbuttoned, after dinner! Truly those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad … Then it occurred to me: why did he not go to them, to these same farting cronies, for advice? The way to deal with an unruly wife, that would be within their scope and range. Why did he come to me?

  ‘It is the chief affliction of the age,’ I said, ‘and one to which our women are unfortunately all too prone, to think of pleasure as something to be sought outside the home rather than in it. This constitutes a reversal of all traditional values.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Exactly so. You are a very Cato. Or perhaps Cicero is the one I mean.’

  I replied that I would not scorn comparison with either of these signori. A kind of excited suspicion was beginning to stir in me.

  ‘Maria, her maid, grows insolent,’ he said, ‘and Donna Francesca refuses to check her.’

  ‘Refuses?’ I allowed myself a tone of gentle wonder. ‘Refuses?’

  That I stressed this word was no more than a fortunate accident. I had meant only to keep my ascendancy over him. He bridled and reddened and I thought I had gone too far; but then I saw how his eyes avoided mine: here was not anger, here was shame. Stronger, more definite came the scent of his misfortune, rising to my jubilant nostrils like a savoury steam. Where women are concerned there is only one refusal that matters. What if Francesca’s went further than the drawing room – higher, I should say – a flight of stairs higher?

  As I hope will have been apparent to the reader before this, I am a sensitive man, and an observant man and a man of acute perceptions; and now, as I talked to him, suspicion became conviction almost at once. This was why he had come to me. From colleagues he would fear derision – an old man with a young wife; but he was paying me for my services; and to Boccadoro’s primitive sense, that restored the balance.

  It would be difficult to exaggerate the pleasure this notion afforded me. I am willing to recognize that it was not, to speak strictly, Boccadoro’s fault that I had been reduced to taking wages. We were products bot
h of changing times. Half the great houses of Venice were owned by men like him, who had come from nothing. Nevertheless, by employing me he had demeaned me, imposed a slight on me, fixed me in an odious relationship. All this demanded redress. Hitherto, until this morning, I had found this in my deliberate insincerities. In all our conversations I was fencing with him, scoring off him all the time. However, it was less than satisfactory. He did not know it, for one thing; and then, a duel cannot be carried on by feints alone. Now, if I was right, not only had he exposed his vitals but also given me the means of delivering the thrust.

  ‘Why should you have this to contend with?’ I said. ‘A man does his work. He expects to find peace at home. They do not understand this.’

  ‘Everything is difficult,’ he said. ‘Everything requires argument. It is tiring and moreover it interferes with business.’

  ‘It is this endless quest for pleasure I have referred to, which undermines all our institutions. It is the ruin of the state. What is happening to all our fine and great traditions?’

  ‘What indeed?’ he said. ‘They are going to perdition.’

  ‘And it is the women who lead the way,’ I said. ‘We take our tone from them. They are the keepers of our morals, that is a well-known fact.’

  ‘By God, yes,’ he said with feeling. (If my nose told me rightly, his were being kept pretty well.)

  ‘That is the paradox of it,’ I said. ‘They are the keepers of our morals, but they must still be guided by us. Guided not coerced, as we are not barbarians.’

  ‘By God, no,’ he said.

  ‘True pleasure, for women,’ I said, ‘lies in the performance of their wifely duties, omitting no smallest thing that can add to their husbands’ comfort and pleasure. That is the secret of it.’