Chapter 6 Under the Paint

The tool that mattered now was not the scalpel but the lamp. Infrared reflectography, ultraviolet fluorescence, raking light—each one told the wall's layers the truth in a different language, and Aloisia spent two days of the second week translating. She set the camera on its tripod and made reflectograms of the whole left half of the Doom, frame by frame, and assembled them on her laptop into a single image, and looked at it until her eyes ached. The underdrawing told a story the paint did not. In the sinopia, the red earth sketch beneath the finished surface, the composition had been laid out differently. The ranks of the risen were denser. The mouth of hell was larger and lower. And in the left quadrant, in the field she had been cleaning, the painter had drawn a figure that the finished paint did not show—a figure standing among the blessed with its back turned, its face hidden from both the judge and the viewer. She could trace the red line of the shoulders, the curve of the neck, the small space where a face would have gone and had been left, in the underdrawing, blank. That was the first time she felt it as fear and not as interest. Because a painter does not draw a figure and then decide not to paint it. A painter lays the sinopia, and then, day by day, covers the rough plaster with the fine intonaco and paints into it while it is fresh, and the sinopia disappears under the finished surface forever. If a figure is in the underdrawing and not in the paint, then someone, later, working on the fresh plaster of a day's work, chose to leave it out—or chose to put something else there. And here there was something else there. The finished paint showed, in that exact place, a conventional saint in a red cloak, facing the judge, his face fully turned and fully painted, and the face was not a face but a pattern, the sort of face a copyist makes when he has been told to fill a space and has no sitter and no memory. She ran the ultraviolet lamp across the passage, and under it the red cloak glowed like a stain. UV fluorescence is unforgiving. Original paint quenches it; later retouching lights up. And the entire saint in the red cloak lit up, edge to edge, brighter than anything else on the wall—not a sixteenth-century overpaint, not a nineteenth-century one, but one continuous later hand, laid over the place where the sinopia had a figure with no face. She sat back. So. Someone had erased the averted figure from the painter's plan and put a saint there instead, and then, later still, someone else had veiled the whole wall with lime, and then another had cleaned the lime away, and then the nineteenth century had darkened it with brown retouching, and through all of it the wall had held its secret like a swallowed stone. She began to clean the passage. It took her three days to bring the red cloak back to the surface, and in those three days she learned the rhythm of the house in a way she had not before. Mornings were for the cold, unheated hour after Lauds, before the brothers came to the church for Prime; she worked then with her breath visible and her fingers stiff, because the paint woke slowly and answered best when the day was new. Afternoons were for the office of the light, when the high window gave her three or four hours of honest grey and she could see the difference between a shadow and a stain. Evenings she did not work on the wall at all. The rule of the house was that the wall was not to be read after dark, and though she did not share the belief, she had come to respect the reason for it, which was that after dark she could not trust her eyes, and the wall had begun to require her trust. On the third afternoon she lifted the last of the brown from the cloak, and beneath it was not the saint. Beneath it was the head and shoulders of a figure in a plain robe, its face turned away, painted in a style older and finer than the cloak that had covered it—painted, she saw at once, by the same hand that had made the green sleeve. There was no red cloak. There had never been a red cloak. The cloak was a lie laid over the truth, and now the truth was on the surface: a figure standing among the blessed with its face turned from the judge, its hands together, its back half-turned, exactly where the sinopia had promised a figure with no face. And where the face should have been, the painter had painted nothing at all. A blank oval, the color of the plaster beneath, as though the face had been left for someone else to finish, or as though it had been taken away by someone who was finished with it. Aloisia stood on the ladder with the swab still in her hand and looked at the blank face, and the blank face looked, as well as a face can, away. Over the following days she did the comparison she had been avoiding. She laid the first reflectogram of the left quadrant, made on the fifth day, beside a new one, made on the tenth, at the same station and the same lamp strength, and she looked at them until the difference was undeniable. The underdrawing had more figures in it than it had had before. Not many. Two, perhaps three, drawn in the same fine red line as the rest, standing in the rank of the blessed with their small heads bowed. She checked the lamp. She checked the card, the time stamp, the station, the frame number. She made a third image an hour later, and the figures were still there, and this time there was a fourth among them, taller than the rest and standing a little apart. She sat in her cell with the three images open on her screen and went through her trade in her head, the way she went through a solvent list before touching a wall. A conservator sees what she expects to see, and a wall under a single failing lamp will present a thousand faces to a tired eye. She had made that mistake once, in a chapel in the south, and had nearly taken a genuine retouching for an original because she wanted the commission to go well. She knew the shape of her own wish. She did not want to have found what she was finding. But the images were the images. She could not wish them into congruence. The red line of the tall figure ran through a passage where the first image showed plain ground, and the line was of the same age, of the same hand, of the same pressure as everything around it, and no lamp makes a new line where the plaster holds none. She thought of Brother Notker and his counting, and she wrote down the number of the blessed as she could see them, and then she closed the laptop and put it in its case and locked the case, as though locking the machine would lock what it held. Behind her, from the direction of the cloister, came the sound of the office bell, and the scrape of chairs, and the brothers gathering for Vespers, and she did not go. She stayed on the ladder until the light failed, and she did not write in her notebook that night, and she did not sleep. She had spent her working life learning to distinguish what the wall had been painted to say from what it had been painted to hide, and she had never, in nineteen years, seen a wall that seemed so plainly to be hiding something it had decided, at last, to show. ---