Chapter 3 The Survey

Conservators do not begin with a hand on the wall. They begin with the record. That was the first thing her teacher had taught her, and it had outlasted everything else he said. Photograph before you touch. Measure before you photograph. Understand the layers beneath the surface before you commit to removing any of them, because the surface is the document and the removal is the crime. She worked the first four days on the record alone. She set up her tripod at a fixed station and shot the whole wall in overlapping frames, at the same hour each morning, before the light shifted. She charted every loss, every blister, every old retouching, on a drawing she made at scale on a sheet of drafting paper she taped to the warming-room wall. She measured the salts where the damp came through: high on the left, where the roof had failed, and low on the right, where the wall met the ground. She set out trays of silica gel and a hygrometer and logged the relative humidity morning and evening, and found that the church held its cold evenly, around four degrees, and that the wall itself was dry enough to work, if she was patient. The community let her work. That was its own strangeness. She had restored walls in churches where a priest would find a reason to stand in the doorway every hour, and libraries where a curator would call her twice a day to ask what she had uncovered; here, no one watched. Brother Gotthard, the porter, brought her a ladder and a second lamp and said nothing beyond what the task required. Brother Ansfrid, the archivist, an old man bent nearly double, appeared once with a cup of tea and stood a while in silence and then went away again. The cook, Vlasta, a widow from the valley who had kept the abbey's kitchen for thirty years and spoke more than all the brothers together, told her at supper that no one came up here in autumn, that the road would close within the month, that she should have come in summer like a sensible woman, and that in any case the abbot could not have waited for summer. Why not, Aloisia asked. Because the wall will not wait, Vlasta said, and laughed, and carried the pot away. She dismissed most of this as the ordinary talk of an isolated house, and set it aside, and returned to the record. On the fourth morning she raised the camera's infrared lamp and made her first reflectogram of the lower right quadrant—the plain field of plaster beside the blessed city, where something had been closed over. Infrared reflectography reveals what the eye cannot: the underdrawing, the sinopia, the red earth sketch that a fresco painter laid on the rough plaster before ever mixing his colors. If there had been a figure on that field once, the sketch beneath it would still be there, waiting under the white. She sat in the darkroom corner of her borrowed cell that evening and watched the image resolve on her screen, and the underdrawing came up out of the plaster as though surfacing from deep water. There had been a figure there. There had been several. Beneath the plain field, in the fine red line of the sinopia, a company of small figures had been drawn and then painted over—not whitewashed, not lost to damp, but deliberately covered by a layer of lime and then, above that, by the brown retouching of the last century. She could trace them: a group, perhaps eight or nine, standing close together with their hands bound or raised, and at their head a single figure with its face turned away from the judge. The painter had drawn them first, and then someone had ordered them covered. Aloisia sat back and pressed her palms against her eyes until colors bloomed. She was not frightened yet. She was interested, and interest is the conservator's trap, as her teacher had warned her more than once. A strange thing under the paint was still only a strange thing under the paint. Houses covered their scandals. A sixteenth-century abbot with a bad conscience could have an inconvenient company painted out as easily as a modern institution shreds a report; this was the kind of story the walls of old buildings told all the time, in every country, in every century, and it was her trade to read it without flinching. Still, she photographed the reflectogram carefully, logged it in her notebook, and labeled the folder with the date and the position and a neutral name. Field of loss: lower right. Underdrawing group, undetermined. She did not yet write the word that had come into her mind when she saw the averted face in the red line—the word for a company that has been drawn, then covered, then left under the paint of a wall that a house has kept for three hundred years. She would write it later, when she had evidence, and not before. That, too, was her teacher's rule: the finding is not the conclusion, and the conservator who reaches for the conclusion too soon will find it, whether it is there or not. On the sixth afternoon, Prior Hartwig came to the church. He was the second man of the house, older than the abbot and harder, a monk of the mountain villages who had buried two brothers with his own hands and had little patience for what he called the softness of the cities. He stood at the foot of her ladder and watched her clean a strip of the judge's robe, and he said, You are taking off the darkness. She said, I am taking off the soot and the old varnish. Under it is a wall, and the wall has a color, and the color is part of the record. He said, The darkness is a record too. He said it flatly, without heat, which made it worse. The house has kept this wall dark for three hundred years. That was a choice, and the choice had a reason, and a reason has its own right to be seen. She climbed down and stood beside him and said, with more patience than she felt, that she agreed with him in principle, that patina is evidence, that she had spent her life refusing to over-clean walls and would not begin a new habit here. But the darkness on this wall was not stable patina. It was a resin that had cracked, and soot that had eaten into the paint, and salt that was lifting the ground. Left alone it would take the picture down with it, and the argument about what the darkness meant would be settled by its being gone. He looked at her a long moment. Then he said, You are not wrong. And then he said, You are not the whole of it either. And he went out into the cloister and left her with the ladder and the wall. She returned to the record, and this time she examined the plain field at the lower right with more care than she had given it before. It was not, she found, a plaster repair of the ordinary kind. The edges were keyed, deliberately raked, so that the lime would bond to the older ground; the surface was flatter than the fields beside it; and the field had been washed over with a thin brown that matched the rest of the wall, as though whoever closed it had wanted the closure to be invisible. She measured it. One hundred and sixty centimeters wide, one hundred and ten high. Large enough for a company of people, standing at the foot of the blessed city, in the shadow of the gate. That night she woke at some hour before the office bell and lay listening to the rain on the roof, and she thought she heard, under the rain, a sound that did not belong to weather—a slow, regular sound, like a hand drawn across plaster, again and again, patient and unhurried, as though the wall were being smoothed by someone who had all the time in the world. She lay still a long while. Then the office bell rang, and the sound stopped, and she told herself it had been the pipes, or the wind, or the ordinary settling of an old house in the cold, and she got up and went to work. ---