Stone Virgin Read online

  Raikes nodded. Wiseman’s voice, the New York accent softened by travel and by the gentle temperament of its owner, was very soothing and lulling. The wine too had relaxed him. His eyes fell on two Italian women in early middle age, both slender and smartly dressed, sitting at a nearby table. One of them raised herself slightly in her chair, in order it seemed to smoothe her skirt against the back of her legs. This slight lunge of the woman’s pelvis gave Raikes an unexpected and poignant pang in the genitals. He felt his face and body go hot. He looked away hastily, nibbled some cheese, poured Wiseman and himself more wine. What would Wiseman say, he wondered, if I told him that since my arrival in this city, since starting work on my Madonna, I have had what seem to be hallucinations, my level of sexual awareness has been so topped up I have intimations of orgasm in everything I see, I cannot look at a fork in a tree without feelings of restlessness? It would only embarrass him, of course. It occurred to him that he did not really know what Wiseman’s sexual propensities were – or indeed if he had any.

  ‘They have the crest feathers of an eagle on their coat of arms,’ Wiseman said. ‘Only six Venetian families were allowed to display lilies or eagles on their arms. Seven if you count the eagle’s foot of the Malipieri. They called themselves the Case Vecchie, the twenty-four I mean, or their descendants at least. The old houses. They were a sort of caste within a caste. I’m planning a chapter on it, not on the history of the families, but some of the anecdotes about them.’

  Wiseman was in charge of the UNESCO office that had been established in Venice after the 1966 floods. In the time left over from official duties he was writing a book entitled Venetian Byways, a sort of compendium of historical gossip, exactly suited to his tastes and interests, which were antiquarian without being systematic. He was corpulent, and his rather full cheeks and small mouth gave him the general appearance of a cherub.

  ‘The fact is,’ he said now, blinking mild eyes in the pleasure of having things to impart, ‘there are gaps in our knowledge, enormous gaps. There is the Libro d’Oro, of course, which is still in existence – it’s in the state archives – but it only goes back to 1506 and in any case contains only certificates of marriages and legitimate births. No reference to origins, no pedigrees, no blazons. A lot of the ancient registers with details of titles were probably destroyed in 1797 at the time of Napoleon’s invasion of Venice. So really we have to rely mainly on the genealogical works compiled before 1797, based upon state papers that were afterwards destroyed. The best book on the subject is probably Marco Barbaro’s Origin and Descent of the Patrician Families.’

  ‘Where could I get hold of a copy?’

  ‘You could probably get one through the University here.’ Wiseman hesitated for a moment or two, then he said, ‘As a matter of fact I have a copy of the 1926 edition. You can borrow that if you like.’

  ‘That is really very good of you,’ Raikes said warmly. He had not failed to notice Wiseman’s struggle, and he was touched by this evidence of friendship. ‘I’ll take care of it,’ he promised.

  ‘Of course,’ Wiseman said, as if wishing to retract, ‘it wouldn’t be much good for the eighteenth century, you know. The Fornarini family had sadly declined by that time. There might have been twenty or thirty people with that name, very few of them possessing any money. No, they were at their peak in the fifteenth century, when your statue was carved.’

  ‘Still,’ Raikes said, ‘I’d like to have a look.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll drop round with it. Or I’ll send someone. Not where you’re working, though – it’s too messy there.’

  ‘I’m not working this afternoon. I’m making a start tomorrow, the twenty-fifth.’

  Raikes instantly regretted saying this. He did not want Wiseman to know that he had been waiting for the Feast Day of the Annunciation before beginning; it seemed to reveal too much of his own private rituals. Wiseman was kind and sensitive and sympathetic; but he looked always for quirks and oddities, he made everything into anecdote. It was why Raikes had not given the real reason for wanting to know about the Fornarini – the last thing he wanted was to see the Madonna featuring in Wiseman’s Byways. And it was why he had never talked much about personal feelings to the other man, distrusting the quality of the understanding that Wiseman would give him.

  However, he realized after a moment that Wiseman saw no significance in the date. No reason why he should, of course. I must stop attributing my own obsessions to other people, Raikes thought. ‘Shall we have some coffee?’ he said.

  ‘I suppose we’d better. I must be thinking about getting back. It’s pleasant here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very.’

  They were on the Riva degli Schiavoni, looking across to the marvellously fabricated shape of San Giorgio with its line of little boats along the front, like beading. Earlier, when he had been on his way to meet Wiseman, there had been a powdering of mist in the air, thicker on the broader water where the Giudecca Canal opened into the basin of San Marco, obscuring the lines of the church, softening the outline of dome and campanile. Now, something like two hours later, the light was clear and sparkling on the water, every detail of Palladio’s design was radiantly distinct, the whole thing, church and island together, seemed like a single artefact, resting improbably on its bed of mud and sand.

  There were a number of small boats out on the water. A motor launch went past at speed, its prow rising and dipping like the upper blade of scissors cutting horizontally. The surface seemed hardly disturbed by this, resuming its calm almost at once, cancelling the passage. However, just below them, under the planks of the landing platform, among the mooring posts of the gondola station, Raikes saw that the water was wild demonic green in the shadow of the timbers, swirling with a sort of secretive violence against the poles. He was struck by this clandestine, treacherous behaviour of the water, and was about to draw Wiseman’s attention to it, when the latter said, ‘As a matter of fact I know someone here in Venice called Fornarini.’

  ‘Do you really?’

  Wiseman was again looking immensely pleased. It always gave him innocent pleasure to be in possession of facts and able to impart them. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and chuckled slightly. ‘Met them a year or so ago. She is Chiara Litsov now, but she was Chiara Fornarini before her marriage.’

  ‘That is most interesting,’ Raikes said. Wiseman must have been saving this up all through lunch, he thought, waiting for the most effective moment to come out with it. ‘Of course, you know everybody,’ he said.

  ‘I think they would remember me. Would you like to meet them?’

  ‘Well … yes. Yes, I would.’

  Raikes’s hesitation had been caused by the fact that he had no real reason for thinking there was any connection at all between the Fornarini family and his Madonna. Mistaking its nature, Wiseman said, ‘They are an interesting couple. He is an artist, a sculptor, very talented, beginning to be successful. They don’t live in Venice itself, but on one of the islands in the Lagoon, rather remote. You have to get a boat from Burano. But they have a telephone. Litsov himself is something of a recluse, he doesn’t often leave the island. In fact he told me when I met him that he had only been away twice in the previous six months. She is more sociable. She is a remarkable woman, I think.’

  ‘I’d like to meet them very much,’ Raikes said, more firmly.

  ‘And so you shall, dear boy,’ Wiseman said. ‘Leave it all to uncle Alex.’

  On this amiable note they parted, Wiseman to return to his office off the Calle Larga San Marco, Raikes to carry out a purpose that had been on his mind since the previous evening, since first his wavering torchlight had settled on that page.

  He had been already that morning to the Central Post Office to check on the address and it was fortunate he had done so, as neither street nor number was now the same. There had been a reorganization of the whole system in the 1930s, and Calle Guanara did not now include the house, which was known as Casa Fioret and given as being on the Calle dei
Savi, number 6.

  It took him something like an hour to walk it, proceeding northwards from behind the Piazza San Marco, steering roughly by the glinting water of the Grand Canal, constantly glimpsed on his left and lost again. The street ran between the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo and the Malibran Theatre. It was narrow, with tall houses on either side, bounded by a green and malodorous canal. Casa Fioret was the last house on the right, with its doors opening on to the street and the canal running at the side, immediately below its walls. There was no bridge; the street ended at the stone steps that led down into the water. From the third-floor balcony of Casa Fioret to the corresponding balcony of the house opposite, there was a double line of washing.

  The street door was massive, six or eight feet across with a high rounded arch and stone pillars at the sides with acanthus-leaf decorations. On the facing of the arch, in the centre, there was a huge lion’s head with a snarl that had weathered into amiability; and set into the wall at one side, like guardian eyes, twenty-eight bell pushes in a rectangular panel – Raikes counted them as he stood there. Twenty-eight separate lots of people now lived in Casa Fioret.

  The promiscuous sheets and pyjamas and petticoats waving overhead, the evidence of multiple occupation staring Arguseyed at him, gave Raikes a chilling sense of anticlimax and futility. What could all this have to do with the Madonna? He had assumed at least some sort of continuous occupation, somebody he could question. He felt like a gambler who had suddenly run out of luck.

  The heavy door was not locked; it swung open to his push. He passed through and found himself in a large paved area like an interior courtyard, with a marble well-head in the centre and a flight of stone steps, leading presumably to the upper floors. The stairs had a carved banister, made of heavy dark wood, with large smooth bosses at intervals. There was a smell of damp and urine. A baby was crying from a room on his right and from somewhere above he could hear the sound of a radio. He stood for some moments examining the design of lions’ heads around the rim of the well-head. The manes had been blended with the triangular patterns of foliation between the heads in an original and attractive manner which he could not remember seeing before. A woman with a shopping basket came down the stairs and went past him without speaking. He noticed now that the bosses on the banister were in fact human heads worn almost featureless.

  At the far end of the courtyard there was a double door standing open, a sense of space beyond. Raikes passed through this into an area surrounded by brick walls, which he thought must once have been the garden of the house, though it had been levelled and cemented over. It was rectangular in shape and extensive for Venice, with a wrought-iron gate at the far end. Three very small boys were squatting over something near the wall that ran by the canal, and a little girl with bare feet swung a dishevelled doll. There were more lines of washing and two women standing talking together. It seemed to be a communal area used by the tenants. No one took any notice of Raikes at all. He stood for some moments, dismayed by the neglect and poverty visible everywhere: the rusty metal fire escapes clambering from floor to floor, the rotting eaves, the crumbling, discoloured brick. It must have been a beautiful house once, with all the space, that courtyard, the long garden running beside the canal. The design was visible still, of course, and the proportions, the spacing of the windows with their high rounded arches, the elegant stonework of the balconies, the exquisitely decorated campanella. There were so many houses like this now in Venice, hundreds upon hundreds of them, tenements for the poor, rotting away along obscure side canals. Few if any would ever be restored.

  Depressed by these thoughts Raikes walked to the gate at the end, which gave on to an alley running down to the canal. Immediately opposite, beyond the wall on that side, there was a church, ruinous and abandoned-looking; he could see the campanile, the dilapidated pantiled roof, the upper curve of the apse. Though sizeable enough, the church seemed to have no grounds or precincts. It was hemmed close by other buildings all around.

  He passed through the gate and turned down towards the canal, but there was no bridge across; the alley simply terminated at the water. He had to retrace his steps. Unwilling to go back the way he had come, he followed the alley, which he discovered came out after a few hundred yards on to the salizzada, close to the Fontego Canal. From here, disgruntled, disappointed, full of an obscure distress, he made his way to the Rialto boat station, and so home.

  Wiseman had been as good as his word. Marco Barbaro’s Origin and Descent of the Patrician Families was waiting for him. But he had no heart for it that evening.

  5

  SOME SORT OF humility, and a fear of his own clumsiness, kept Raikes off the Madonna’s face to begin with. All stone as she was, her face was more tender, it was here the human likeness was concentrated. It is no easy matter to bring a cutting instrument to the surface of a face, and such a one as he had in his hand now, with its steady pulse of power, its voracious hissing.

  So he crouched down, like any devotee, and began on the hem of her robe. At first he held the instrument too far away to be very effective, being nervous still about the result. It was the first time to his knowledge that he had used the quartz-cutter on stone of this antiquity, certainly the first time on an acknowledged work of art. He was inhibited to begin with, too, by his accoutrements, the cable which he had looped over his shoulder, the plastic face mask which he was obliged to wear, covering eyes and mouth – for the infected stone was reduced to powder immediately, at the first assault of the cutter, and the dust flew upward into his face.

  Gradually his confidence grew and he began controlling the distance better, aiming the cutter with more delicate precision, feeling its energy now allied with his own. All his doubts, and the discomfort of his crouching position, were forgotten in his delight at seeing the polluted crust thin out and disappear centimetre by centimetre as the microscopic grains of glass with which the cutter was loaded delicately blasted away the efflorescence of disease, leaving the uninfected stone intact. There was something in the nature of a continuous miracle about this transmutation; one moment there was the corroded stain, the next, as by the warm breath of a god, it fanned away, leaving the pale and pristine stone beneath. Raikes was lulled by the process into a mood of calm delight. He worked steadily, constantly adjusting the distance of the nozzle, holding the stern of the cutter between fingers and thumb like a fountain pen.

  As he worked his thoughts reverted to his strangely demoralizing experience the previous afternoon, the rotting tenement, the quarrelling children, the washing lines, the sense of a dead trail. He began deliberately to recall the details of his visit, as if in retrospect he might discover some clue not apparent at the time. The listless child with her dishevelled doll. The two women talking, indifferent to his presence, or so it seemed. The festooned washing, colours reflected in the dark green of the canal. Also reflected the symptoms of decay, the peeling intonaco, the dark red of the rotting brick – there had been a tide mark six feet up the wall on the canal side. Damp-course of Istrian stone far too low for present levels. The courtyard paved with terracotta. Stone lintels carved with diamond patterns. Then the lions’ heads in relief and that cunning pattern of foliation. Bumps that had once been heads. Another head somewhere he had seen … Most dispiriting of all that cemented enclosure, once a garden. And the cramped, deconsecrated church across the alley. Deconsecrated presumably, yes, but why that word? There had been no cross anywhere visible. Something else tugged at his mind, something he had registered but not yet described to himself, something about the church …

  He had switched off the cutter and straightened up. His mind was still on the church. Some combination of significance was seeking to engage his understanding. Suddenly, without preliminary warning, Raikes felt again that curiously piercing, swooning threat to his balance, not giddiness, a sort of dream fall that left him still standing in a hush, a resonant aftermath of voices, and he seemed to glimpse the Madonna, but white and clean, half hidden
among foliage, at a distance and somehow as if roofed over, so that she was half in light, half in shadow, and lustrous, as if with rain or dew. He recognized the pose, the hands, the angle of the head. There seemed to be a distant landscape beyond her with buildings of some kind on the crest of a hill. Then the plastic sheets were around him again, the corroded stone a foot from his eyes, dust still swirling in the enclosure. There was no disturbance to his breathing, but he was gripping the cutter tightly. As before, it was surprise, a slightly alarmed sense of escape, that possessed him now. It was as if he had stepped off the kerb without looking and something had swerved and just missed him, quite soundlessly.

  Slowly Raikes removed his mask. He would have some coffee from his flask, he decided – Signora Sapori had kindly made up a flask for him. Before he did so, however, he bent down and touched the part he had cleaned, running his fingers along it. An event this – the first reclaimed stone. It was smooth and cold to the touch. He could feel the slight sweat of the crystals under his fingertips. She had been under an arch of some kind, something constructed, not just vegetation, the shape had been too regular for that … The alarm persisted. It occurred to Raikes that he ought perhaps to go and see a doctor.

  By the time he got home that evening, a good start made on the lower draperies, he had, if not dismissed this thought, at least confidently distanced it. It was not as if he felt ill at all – on the contrary, he could not remember feeling better. He was conscious of his body, of an energy and a sort of voluptuous tension throughout his limbs. It would be absurd to go to a doctor. He would feel a fool.

  He was in a mood of confidence in any case when he returned to the apartment, having had a fair amount of Barbera with his dinner. He had dined with Steadman and an Italian couple who were friends of Steadman’s – the man an authority on Byzantine influences on early Venetian sculpture – and he had enjoyed the evening and the talk as people solitary by nature do enjoy such things.