The galleries in the Pinacoteca were mostly empty. Occasionally tourists, or a teenage couple, not letting go of one another’s hand, would appear and wander through at such speed that it was possible, without much discomfort, to hold one’s breath till they passed. The only permanent human presence was that of the museum guards. They were nearly all women and seemed to share something essential, as though they were part of the same mental body, connected by the same emotional thread. Maybe it was their solitude that made them seem this way, or perhaps all museum guards, no matter how quiet or busy their galleries may be, feel themselves to be alone, standing or sitting down, usually by a threshold, spending their working days observing rooms that are constantly emptying, where people come just before they go on to some other attraction or to lunch or simply to resume their lives. Has it not always seemed that these figures, and across national divides, in all the museums around the world, share the same private grievance, as though they have been let down by the rest of us? They strike me as spiritual beings, guardians standing at the gate of some nebulous but significant transition. And maybe this has allowed them access into what, to the rest of us, remains veiled, a truth that concerns the violent nature of our distractedness. Maybe this, regardless of the rising attendance figures that management keeps boasting about, and that the museum guards can see with their own eyes, has nonetheless convinced the guards that they are aboard a sinking ship. Their faces, their lethargic bodies, seem to belong to souls that have been burdened with an impossible task. They know, better than anyone else, that they could never fully protect the paintings, that we, the public, will steal them away not by literally taking them off the walls and running out with them, but rather through the most passive of gestures.
I had never before perceived this more acutely than in the Pinacoteca. My first afternoon there I simply did not know where to start and so went around quickly, spending a few seconds in front of paintings that took months and sometimes years to complete, and God knows how long to conceive, and have survived six, seven or eight centuries of human drama and natural disasters. I did not assume that the ladies who guarded the galleries had an interest in these pictures—they are certainly not obliged to—but at the very least they must have had a self-interested enthusiasm for them, not only because their livelihood depended on them but also because these paintings are their sole companions and so, whether aesthetically appreciated or not, must have become over time part of their lives, involved in their sense of worth and their experience of reality. Their relationship to the art may or may not be scholarly, but it is certainly practical. And I have a confidence in the physical presence of things—much more than in intellectual abstractions. I believe an object in a room can exact an influence that is not contingent on whether the inhabitants of that room engage with it or even pay it the slightest attention. Montaigne was right in believing that the mere presence of his books around him had an effect on his mind and character, that their patient availability made certain thoughts and modes of thinking possible or more likely. I had no doubt it was the same for the museum guards at the Pinacoteca.
I left there at mid-afternoon. It was a beautiful day, the sun out and the sky as open and clear as my childhood sea, the southern Mediterranean, used to be on calm days. I bought some frittelle from the baracca on Il Campo and walked. I wanted to hear birdsong, and so I thought to return to the cemetery, to watch the gentle motion of the cypresses and to visit the dead, the old folk of this city, strangers all.
Soon on entering the cemetery, when I thought I was the only one there, I spotted a family: a man, his wife and their daughter. They were bent over and working diligently, cleaning a headstone, watering the flowers around it. The daughter looked about twelve years old. I had perceived something of her quiet affection toward her parents. It was as though the shape of her posture were saying, “I know I’m doing the right thing and I’m glad I’m doing the right thing.” I saw all of this in a fraction of a second because the instant my eyes fell on them something made me look away. I felt, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s phrase, I had to take custody of my eyes. I hoped they did not see me, the mourner without a grave, heading to his secret bench that was tucked away but that had an open view of the valley, to sit for a few moments and listen to the birds. I knew then that I had come to Siena not only to look at paintings. I had also come to grieve alone, to consider the new terrain and to work out how I might continue from here.