Stone Virgin (10 page)

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.

It was late, but he conscientiously made his diary entry, recording his successful start. Afterwards he had a look at the book Wiseman had lent him.

He had not intended to read long, merely to find his way about in the book; but he was soon absorbed. The
Origin and Descent
was much more than an official account of the patrician families of Venice. It contained a good deal of gossip and anecdote and personal reflections of the author – which was why Wiseman liked it so much probably, though he had been wrong about one thing, Raikes soon discovered: the Fornarini traced their origins, not simply to the founders of Rome, but through eleven emperors of Constantinople right back to the founders of Athens, which was tantamount really to saying that there had always been Fornarinis, they were eternal. However, it seemed they could actually prove a progenitor in the eighth century, which was impressive enough.

Certainly they had had their ups and downs. In the year 1170 when Venice was at war with the Emperor Manuel I, the menfolk of the family followed their Doge to the Levant. While in winter quarters in Chios a fierce plague broke out among the fleet, the Doge returned with only sixteen ships out of a hundred and twenty, and the family was almost wiped out. But God, according to Barbaro, gave the surviving males such potency and fertility that their women conceived at a glance almost, the family was soon restocked: by the middle of the fifteenth century there were as many as fifty different branches of the Fornarini and two hundred nobles of Venice bore that name.

The political power of the family had been founded by Marcantonio Fornarini, Venetian Ambassador to the court of Naples in the early 1400s and afterwards State Inquisitor. In the period of their greatness the Fornarini produced two Doges, three Admirals, numerous high officials and one Saint – Francesco, first Patriarch of Venice, a man of irreproachable life, whose body had not been subject to putrefaction. In the sixteenth century they were prominent members of the celebrated Company of the Hose, so-called from the tight-fitting breeches which the Companions wore. The uniform of a certain Nicolò Fornarini was described by chroniclers of the time as, ‘having the left leg crimson and the right divided lengthwise in azure and violet, and embroidered with a cypress bough’.

This seemed to have been the high point. Thereafter the decline was steady. By the time Barbaro was writing only four branches of the family remained. The last appearance on the public stage was not edifying. Giorgio Fornarini collaborated with Napoleon and urged surrender on the Senate, a shame and a scandal in the opinion of Barbaro, for one of such lineage, particularly as it was not done out of any patriotic motive or desire to protect the Republic from the consequences of invasion but out of revenge for loss of office – he had been dismissed for what the author with tantalizing vagueness referred to as ‘shameless misconduct’.

This motive of revenge, a certain arrogant and implacable vindictiveness, ran like a dark thread through the history of the family. One Lorenzo Fornarini, arrested by the night constables in 1323 for brawling in the street, had refused to pay his fine, and when an official of the court came to his house for the money he had threatened the man’s life. Because of these menaces his fine had been increased by one hundred
lire di piccoli
. Six months later Lorenzo, aided by a runaway slave named Jacopo Saraceno, to whom he had promised money, waylaid the official and stabbed him to death. It says much for Venetian justice at the time that no distinction was made between patrician and slave: both were publicly garrotted. Then there was Andreolo, who in 1509 killed a lady’s steward, an elderly man quite unknown to him, because the lady had repelled his advances, and he knew she valued the man. And there was Naufosio who while campaigning in Lombardy against the Visconti put to the sword all the male citizens of Lodara because the town had held out against him – a usage most uncommon among Venetian commanders, and for which Naufosio had been recalled …

So Raikes read on, learning a good deal about the Fornarini family and something more about the past of Venice. But it was nearly two o’clock in the morning, and his eyes were heavy, when he stumbled on one small fact which seemed to him worth all the others put together, and irradiated his being with joy.

Barbaro had reverted to the sainted Patriarch Francesco, extolling his virtue, praising his life of austerity and chastity, which shone like a beacon amidst the turbulence of those days. The greater was the pity then that the only other Fornarini to hold high ecclesiastical office should have so signally failed to follow his illustrious forebear’s example, should indeed have so far failed as to have been notorious for his profligacy, and that in a licentious period.

There was a footnote to this and Raikes, looking down to the bottom of the page, discovered that the prelate referred to was a certain Piero Fornarini, Bishop of Venice from 1737 until 1752, when he had choked on a chicken bone and died.

6

IT WAS A
day of bright sunshine, clear enough, though the sun was softened by the remnants of the night’s mists. Once past San Michele and Murano they were in the open, the great expanse of the Lagoon before and all around them, a vast glimmering sheet, patterned by its shallows, streaked here and there with rippling flashes where mud flats broke the surface; elsewhere unblemished, pale blue, with a soft shine to it as though wiped with oil.

The boat steamed north-east towards Mazzorbo following the staked-out line of the deep-water channel. Raikes strained his eyes eastward across the shifting glimmers of the surface to where the brightness gathered and dazzled. He could make out the long shape of the Lido and the campanile of San Nicolò. Small islands, mere mudbanks tufted with vegetation, were discernible on both sides; others, more distant, were half lost in the haze, darker impurities in the clouded liquid of the horizon. To the east a mile or two away he thought he identified the island gardens of La Vignola and Sant’Erasmo which supply Venice with vegetables. He considered asking Wiseman about this, then decided against it, not wanting to accommodate the information that Wiseman, once asked, would undoubtedly pour forth – he had a chapter on the Lagoon in his
Byways
.

The boat passed close to an island he remembered, the sad, abandoned San Giacomo in the Marsh, with its broken walls, grassed-over mounds of rubble and listing birch trees. ‘Appropriate name,’ he said to Wiseman. ‘It looks like a marsh, doesn’t it? A marsh that someone was once foolish enough to build on.’

They were standing towards the stern, where it was roofed but open at the sides. Wiseman had turned up the collar of his light tweed overcoat. With his hair ruffled by the sea breeze and his cheeks rosy from the fresh air, he looked more than ever like an older-generation cherub, a worn cupid caught in some sportive billows aimed by Venus. ‘It had a population of several thousand at one time,’ he said. ‘Hard to believe now, isn’t it? The church was built by Carducci. They didn’t keep up the sea walls. Shortage of cash, or so they say – it’s the province of the Magistura alla Aqua. There are drowning islands all over the Lagoon, and quite a few underneath the water, of course, like Costanziaca for example, which was a flourishing place long before San Marco was thought of, with churches and monasteries – it was a place of pilgrimage famous throughout Italy. Then the tides just slowly made a marsh of it. The waters closed over it some time in the eighteenth century, I think.’