Stone Virgin (32 page)

He came to the end of this one and I thought he would begin another; but there was a silence and then he began to pray on his own account and in more halting tones.

‘Blessed Mary,’ we heard him say, ‘Virgin and mother, please help me, Holy Virgin turn my wife towards me …’

As soon as she heard this Francesca began kissing me hastily and rubbing her hand down the front of my breeches. She was in a great hurry, she wanted to do it while he was praying. She went down on her back there and then among the bushes and pulled me down with her. I wasn’t ready and besides I felt some compunction and this constrained me, but she was determined, she wrapped her legs round me and squeezed me in somehow. Then I began to stiffen inside her and I felt excited. I put my mouth on Francesca’s to prevent her from making a noise.

Boccadoro was praying still: ‘Holy Virgin, help me to win my wife’s affections, I will honour you for ever, not only that, Blessed Madonna, I will vote a yearly sum of one hundred zecchini, I promise it. Make her love me and I will vote a sum of one hundred and twenty zecchini for the rest of my life …’

Francesca was terribly excited. I clasped her round the buttocks and raised her a little so as to penetrate deeply. My own pleasure was mounting. All the same, even then, I could not help thinking how typical it was of old Boccadoro to bargain with the Madonna.

‘Make her love me,’ we heard him say again and then we came together and I kept my mouth on hers to stifle the sounds. We lay there while he said some more Hail Marys. Then he took himself slowly off with his lantern.

He could have taken it into his head that same night to go to her room; he would have found her bed empty and known something was wrong. It was only a question of time before some such thing happened. We were set on a course that could only end in disaster. Though apprehensive, I must admit that I viewed this as a prospect of relief: my eyes were beginning to sink into my head rather; Francesca was insatiable.

In fact our luck ran out three nights later. As usual I had given him time to retire, seen his light extinguished, waited until I thought he would be sleeping, then made my way to Francesca’s room, which as I have said was not so far from his.

The time was around midnight. She was waiting for me eagerly. We embraced and kissed. It was hot and in our ardour we cast aside the sheets. We were naked. I turned Francesca over. Coquettishly she pressed her body against the mattress while I stroked her beautiful arse and persuaded the portals to part. She soon grew impatient for my prick and raised herself, enabling me to enter. We were in this position, possibly of all positions the most blatant, in the middle of the bed, without covering or concealment, when the door suddenly opened, Boccadoro’s voice said, ‘Are you awake, my love?’ and the next moment his face, surmounted by a nightcap, illuminated by the lantern he was holding up, came peering round the door.

What had driven him – loneliness, suspicion, desperation – I do not know. Perhaps he was hoping his prayers had taken effect. He stood there for perhaps ten seconds gaping at us, slack-jawed, the light ghastly on his features. Then he let out a roar of terrifying volume, and rushed towards the bed. Francesca sprang out on one side, I on the other. But it was I who was his object. He came rapidly round the bed, shouting like a man possessed. He seized me by the throat but the lantern impeded him and I struggled free. He was coming at me again. I saw Battistella in his nightshirt half-way into the room and Maria at the door. Francesca had put on her nightgown but I was naked still, having had no time. Boccadoro swung the lantern as if he would strike me with it. He had the face of one demented – congested and staring in the swinging light. Then an idea seemed to strike him. He shouted that he would kill me – his first coherent words – and rushed out of the room.

I could not see my nightshirt so I wrapped a sheet around me and made for the door. My first idea was to get back to my room but I met Battistella in the passage and he told me that Boccadoro was coming back with a sword he had taken from its place on the wall on the first landing. I could hear him shouting still. Francesca came out into the passage at this moment and together we ran down the back stairs and out into the garden.

There was a strange light out here, a sort of luminescence, though there was no moon. Even in my concern to escape Boccadoro’s sword I noticed it. It was one of those summer nights that never get really dark. The Madonna was clearly visible in her arbour, glimmering there with this strange light upon her, a radiance that seemed to come from nowhere.

Boccadoro was in the garden now, sword in one hand, lantern in the other, calling on me to show myself. This I declined to do. The whole household was out here, our white nightclothes were conspicuous but it was hard to tell who was wearing them: a fortunate circumstance for me, I think, as Boccadoro pursued now one, now another, tiring himself, while I kept down behind a hedge. He was threatening death still, but there was a tearful quality now in his rage.

Various neighbours, roused by Boccadoro’s shouts, had joined us, also in states of undress; and a boatload of people, out late on the canal, had come in to see what was happening. The garden was suddenly full of forms and shadows and shifting lamplight, with this strange pallid radiance hanging over all.

‘Come out, you coward!’ Boccadoro shouted. His voice was hoarse.

‘Have you thieves here?’ somebody asked, and it was this that gave me my idea, and the strange luminous quality of the summer night which made her seem to shine with her own radiance and perhaps too my memories of other light on her, moonlight, lantern light, and the way she seemed always to attend, to be intensely present, though no doubt this was the genius of her maker. Besides, he was after my blood and this sharpens invention, as is well known. Then I thought of that wretched carver and how some had believed they saw light shine from him.

I stepped out into the lantern light, only the bedsheet to cover my nakedness. Boccadoro raised his sword and began to make a rush. ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘I am not a thief, I am your secretary Ziani.’ I pointed at the Madonna. ‘We are witnessing a miracle,’ I said.

It was sufficient to stop him. They crowded round full of questions. ‘Can you not see it?’ I said. ‘That heavenly light she is clothed in? It is a little dimmer now. Before, when I saw her from my window, she was radiant, there was a bright halo of light round her head.’

‘I saw her too,’ Francesca said. ‘She was gleaming with unearthly radiance. I could not sleep, that is how I came to see her. I was intended to see her – else why could I not sleep? I usually sleep well enough.’ She looked at her husband. ‘Don’t I,
caro
?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Boccadoro said. ‘Yes.’ He was panting from his exertions.

‘My mistress rang for me,’ Maria said. ‘I went to her room and then I saw it too. A light on her such as you never saw in your life before.’

‘I heard the shouts,’ Battistella said. ‘I came out and I saw her. She was shining like a thousand candles.’

Booby Bobbino helped me more than anyone; in common with most brutish persons, he was highly suggestible. ‘I see it, I see it,’ he burst out suddenly, and he fell to crossing himself and mumbling prayers.

Boccadoro hesitated a long moment, the sword held down by his side. He had had time to think. There was a crowd of witnesses. Should they witness a miracle or should they witness his horns?

‘I thought it was thieves,’ he said at last. ‘Then I saw the Madonna shining.’

‘Put out your lamps,’ I said. ‘You will see her better.’

They did so. It is true she was shining; there was a glow on the stone like very pale fire, like the edge of flame where it whitens into air. Trick of the light, effect of the pale stone of which she was made – fortunate for me, in any case.

We looked at her, the raised head, faint dreaming smile, the half-unwilling turn of the body. There was a scent of roses. Bobbino’s mutterings continued somewhere behind me. On an inspired impulse I sank to my knees. One by one they followed suit – every single person there in the garden, Boccadoro included. It was a triumph: in forestalling the vengeance of that
cornuto
, I had saved my skin and created a miracle at the same time.

It was a miracle that became official. Francesca’s uncle on her mother’s side was Piero Fornarini, Bishop of Venice at that time, a man of extravagant habits. Partly no doubt for the sake of protecting the family, but more for the sake of Boccadoro’s money, he agreed that the event should be accepted as miraculous. That is how the Madonna came to be sanctified, that is how she came to be installed on the façade of the Carità.

With feelings of triumphant self-satisfaction Ziani picked up his handbell and gave it a prolonged ring. He was coming to the end of this episode now; not long afterwards he and Battistella had left for Naples. A couple of paragraphs remained to be done; in these he would enlarge a little on his own ingenuity and resource.

‘I have nearly finished,’ he said, when Battistella appeared. ‘Tomorrow I hope to make a start on that Naples business. All the same, it has a beautiful symmetry, this affair. Perhaps you don’t know the meaning of that word?’

Battistella made no reply, merely stood staring, breathing heavily.

‘Think of it,’ Ziani said. ‘The Fornarini family, for reasons of their own, prosecute the sculptor and cause the Madonna to be suppressed; three hundred years later a Fornarini sanctifies and elevates her. The friars who reject her because of the sculptor’s unsavoury life are themselves expelled in an odour even worse. The archdupe Boccadoro, to conceal his horns, erects a monument to cuckoldry that will last for centuries. The Madonna, symbol of all that is chaste and virtuous in women, is rescued from obscurity for her services to adultery.’

Ziani chuckled with delight and reached for his snuffbox. As was usual in moments of triumph or glee he took too much and his eyes smarted and watered. ‘Only I,’ he said, fumbling for his handkerchief, ‘Sigismondo Ziani, stand outside the pattern. And do you know why, Battistella?’

Battistella, who was standing near him, seemed about to reply. At that moment they heard the heavy brass knocker of the street door sound loudly four times. It was a sound extremely rare these days. Battistella moved to the window, opened it and craned down at the street. This brought his ancient smell close and also his wizened, dark-eyed face. Ziani had not seen his servant’s face at such close range for a very long time. He now saw it change in a way that was quite inexplicable.

‘It is the lady and a blackamoor with her, they are coming in,’ Battistella said. All at once he was wheezing again. He began to move as fast as he was able across the room towards the door, but before he could reach it they heard sounds below, a woman’s voice on the stair. A moment later the door was thrown open and an old lady, in a black satin dress and an elaborately curled wig, came stepping briskly into the room, followed by a tall Negro footman in silver and blue – the livery of the Bembo family.

She stood before them, holding in one gloved hand a silver cane, in the other a sheaf of written papers. ‘Retrieve these wretched scribblings, Jacopo,’ she said, pointing with the cane.

Ziani sat gasping, open-mouthed, while the Negro stepped to his table, swept up the papers there and handed them respectfully to his mistress, who put them with the rest.

‘Do you not know me?’ she said. Her face was heavily powdered and rouged; age had thinned her mouth to a crooked line; but there was beauty still in the eyes and brows.

Ziani’s heart stirred violently. He slipped a hand inside his robe to restrain it. Breath came from him in short gasps. ‘Those are my papers,’ he said with difficulty.

She raised them. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘we have that section of your ill-written
Mémoires
purporting to deal with my early life and my first husband. I could have destroyed these sheets piecemeal as your man brought them to me, but I choose to have it done before your eyes. Watch carefully, Sigismondo.’

While Battistella cowered back against the window and Ziani sat helpless and aghast in his chair, she handed the sheets one by one, gingerly, between finger and thumb, to the tall attentive Negro who with pleased smile and downcast eyes methodically tore them into minute pieces and scattered them about the floor.

When all were destroyed she nodded briskly once. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I have dealt with you as you deserve. You were always a self-regarding fool, Sigismondo, I knew it from the first, from the first time we stood together, there at the well-head with the carved lions.’

Ziani was dumb still. He saw her raise her head, saw or thought he saw, in this face that was so changed, the same look of exaltation, that dangerous and destructive light it had worn half a century before when they were deceiving Boccadoro together.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘with your talk of the
commedia
, your vain air of having understood me, I knew what shape you were making me into, I could see it on your face. As I was their victim so you were encouraged to think you could make me yours. I knew it but I needed someone. Besides, you did not succeed, I was always more than you thought me. All that is past. Now, after fifty years, you want this false shape revived, this product of your shallow brain and debased imagination, you want me installed in public view, a monument to your exploits, also largely imaginary – you were never much good, Sigismondo, were you? Did you really think I would leave my nature and my likeness in such care as yours? Would I consent to have my portrait made by an ape? You must be mad indeed to think it. Did you forget my mother’s name?’

She fell silent and in the pause that followed a snatch of song in a man’s voice came up to them from the waterside below, ‘
Venetia, Venetia, chi non ti vede non ti pretia
.’ Then she nodded again, this time to Jacopo, who moved instantly to open the door for her.