5

VITTORINI’S CLINIC WAS on the Via Garibaldi. Light rain began to fall as Raikes was walking up towards it from the Arsenale stop.

He was apprehensive, talking to the girl in the small reception room and later to Vittorini; the latter, no doubt seeing this, took obvious care to reassure him, though without explaining much, compared at least to what an English doctor would have felt obliged to explain; it seemed that medical mysteries were more jealously guarded here.

It was not fear of discomfort or pain that troubled him but the feeling that he was somehow a suspect, a person under particular scrutiny. He had never had this feeling before, but he recognized it at once, in the affability with which he was treated, in the movements of the doctor’s manicured hands; he was an oddity, one whose behaviour might give rise to concern, who might need controlling. This unease persisted as he went through blood circulation tests and skull X-rays, not allayed by the spacious, well-appointed room or the deft and friendly sister; but it mounted to definite alarm only with the electro-encephalograph, which they gave him finally. Seated in the tall-backed chair, while the little steel cups were attached one by one to points of his skull, he felt truly in the grip of interrogators.

Some jelly-like substance was dabbed on his head before the electrodes were fixed in place. The sister perhaps sensed his tension for she smiled and said, ‘Non si preoccupi, è solo una pomata.’

Una pomata? he thought. Only a salve? That couldn’t be true. It must be something to conduct the electricity better. They were treating him like a baby. Indignation contended with his alarm. Eight slender wires now led from the eight plugs on his head to a console against the wall. He sat there, skull jellied and studded, wired to the gently humming machine, while quite painlessly, without sensation on his part, the impulses of his brain were measured and recorded.

The apparatus was removed, the jelly sponged away – this last not by the sister but an ordinary nurse, summoned for the more menial task. She spoke to him cheerfully in the accents of the Veneto. He made an appointment for the forthcoming week, when the results would be made known to him. Within an hour of his arrival there, hair combed, umbrella remembered and retrieved, he was on his way back to the Arsenale.

It was not till much later in the day, with rain pricking the canal below his window, his diary on the table before him, that he thought in any conscious way about the business; and then it was with some return of that alarmed indignation. He remembered the lie about the pomata, the dab of the jelly, the wires trailing from his skull. He had been reduced to a mechanism, plugged-in. What could such a contraption possibly have to do with the swift and marvellous motions of his brain? Yet something irrevocable had happened there. Evidence had been extracted from him. Uneasily he took up his pen and drew the diary towards him; as usual he cast about for something of a factual nature to begin with; after some moments he found it:

Problems due to humidity still continue. There is a constant interaction of cold air from the Alps and warm air from the Adriatic and the two currents meet and contend over Venice. As I mentioned to Steadman, constant care is needed to prevent the glass particles from absorbing moisture and thereby clogging the machine. Time has been lost through the need to keep the beads dry. I have been wondering whether something less absorbent could be substituted for the glass. Aluminium oxide for example would not coagulate so easily. Must try this out when I return to England. The other main problem has been dealing with the dust. This is extremely dense and acrid and even with the full face mask I am using, which goes down well below the chin, some dust is inhaled. Apart from being disagreeable this is obviously dangerous to the health. Perhaps a larger mask could be used, though this would cause problems of air-supply. It should not be difficult to devise some sort of vacuum pipe that could suck up the dust while the work is going on. Presumably the nozzle of this could be attached to the abrasion instrument somehow. Some improvements will have to be made to the process. While the work remains so laborious and physically uncomfortable, recruiting local assistants will be difficult.

He paused. Perhaps a jet, fixed somehow to the nozzle, a cone of nebulized water playing round the point of impact … He thought of the Madonna, cleaned now to the waist. Another month, five weeks perhaps. There was regret in the thought of her completion, as well as eagerness. An intimate connection would be severed, and not with the Madonna only. He tried as he sat there to review his ‘attacks’, as Vittorini had called them, in the order in which they had come, but this was strangely difficult, he was impeded by memories of the accompanying sensations, the piercing light, the threat to balance, the intimate knowledge that attended the experiences. These, as objectively as possible, he had recorded in the diary already. But he had not so far attempted to interpret them. It was with the sense of taking a big step that he began writing again.

Could it be possible that I have really been seeing in this fragmentary and fleeting form true things about the past of the Madonna? That long straight shadow I saw lying across the room, on the first occasion, when I was just beginning … There were two people there, in a room of sunlight and shadow, it was hot, they were washing each other, naked, a man and a woman, lovers therefore, and the straight lines – were these cast by the stone, before she was made? The mystery is not in what I saw but what it means. And the face in the water, every feature was clear, she was smiling slightly, as if at some pleasing thought, a beautiful face, mouth full but well-shaped, level brows, delicate nostrils. There was a band of some kind round her neck.

Discounting all this, what do I really know? She was commissioned in the March of 1432 by the friars of the Supplicanti from a Piedmontese called Girolamo. If I am right she was delivered to them but not installed, remaining where she had been set down against the wall of the cloister until the church lands were sold. There she stayed, in what is now known as the Casa Fioret, through all its various owners, until 1743 when, in the belief that she had miraculous powers, she was installed on the façade of a completely different church by a benefactor unknown, under the auspices of one Piero Fornarini, Bishop of Venice, who subsequently choked on a chicken bone, or as some said, died laughing.

So the friars must have rejected her. On what grounds? Why would they reject a work of such outstanding quality? There is the position of the left hand, of course, which is unorthodox. This Girolamo was a Gothic man, at least in sensibility. He would see things in more extreme terms than they did in the later Renaissance. I have been wondering whether he was influenced by certain of the early Fathers who suggest that Mary’s first reaction to the Annunciation was fear of Gabriel’s magnificence. He came to her clothed in fire, after all. Could Girolamo have seen this as a sexual fear? The form below the draperies is very sensuously realized. I have mentioned already the moulding of the right leg, which looks almost unclothed, so closely does the drapery follow the contours of the limb – almost as if the stone had been abraded rather than cut. But it is not only the lower leg. The line of definition, and the same effect of abrading, is continued up the line of the right thigh, leading the eye straight to the pubic area. This too, the pubic triangle, is very carefully sculpted, the same effect of clinging drapery, due of course to the way the skirt of her robe is gathered up towards the high-waisted girdle, but the result is that we can trace the actual slope of the flesh between her legs, and this, in conjunction with the outstretched arm and the contrapposto, is erotic in effect. I don’t believe I am simply being ‘a perverted modern’, in Steadman’s words, to think this.

If she was rejected on those grounds, it is ironical that the Supplicanti themselves fell into disgrace within fifty or sixty years and for what must certainly have been sexual dereliction – probably institutionalized sodomy for them all to have been sent packing like that. Almost as if the good friars in their turn were corrupted by this image of the flesh dwelling in their midst.

Raikes stopped writing abruptly and after a moment or two got up and began walking about, prey to a sudden, inexplicable unrest. Not suspicion exactly, but the monstrous shadow of it, had fallen across his mind and he felt the kind of alarm that is experienced when associations form, almost with violence, beyond control, in a sort of mental spasming. Why that phrase? he thought. In their turn. He felt flushed and feverish, as he had on the occasion when his landlady, Signora Sapori, in her immaculate apron, had offered him some apple pie. In a further series of spasms he began to think of Chiara Litsov, the lonely figure in the red scarf standing above him, the beauty of her eyes and brows, her smiling mouth, the fingers pressing at the black earth round the roots of the seedlings, that strange, self-loving, self-protecting gesture, which had seemed so at odds with the openness of her manner … Had one of those trophy-tufts been hers? Was she the figure in the mist, waiting for Lattimer?