第10章 The Averted Face

The blank face at the head of the group was the center of the wall now, and however much she told herself otherwise, she worked as though it were. She had cleaned the whole group by the middle of the third week. The bound company stood beneath the gate of the blessed, ten or thirty-one figures depending on the hour and the light and her own eyes, their bodies drawn by the good hand and their faces all averted to the left. At their head stood the tallest, and the tallest had no face at all: an oval of pale ground, the painter's own intonaco, unpainted and unmarked, as clean as the day it was floated onto the wall. She did what a conservator does, which is to interrogate the material until it confesses. Under the ultraviolet lamp the oval did not flare like the later red cloak had flared, and did not quench like the original paint quenched. It sat between them. It was a ground prepared for a face and never given one. She put the magnifier to its edge and found the faint tooth of the brush that had laid the ground, and beneath the ground, in the sinopia, she found the red line of the neck and the shoulders and the small penciled curve where a jaw would have gone, and nothing above it. The painter had planned a face and had not made one. There was no abrasion, no loss, no later chisel. The blank was original. She had seen the like exactly once before, in a wall in the south, where a patron had died before his portrait could be finished and the painter had left the ground bare out of mourning. She had written about it in a paper. She had called it, in the paper, a courtesy of the brush. This was not a courtesy. This was a place kept open, the way a place is kept at a table for someone who is expected and has not come. She climbed down and stood before it and thought about faces, and about what a face is for. A face is what lets you be counted. A crowd can be counted as a crowd, but a person is counted as a face, and this person had been left without one for three hundred years, and the wall had held the place, and the place had begun to widen, and the line of a mouth had appeared at the bottom of the oval a week ago and had not closed into anything yet. She decided, that evening, on the one intervention she could think of that the code of her trade would permit. It is called toning in. Where a loss is disfiguring and cannot be recovered, a conservator may lay a neutral wash—reversible, distinguishable, never pretending to be the original—so that the eye is not stopped by the hole in the picture. She could tone in the blank oval with a pale, even, obviously later gray. She could give the face a neutral mask. It would fill the place. It would stop the place from widening. She sat with the decision all night and came down in the morning and did not do it. She could not. She had spent her life refusing to paint over a silence, and every instinct told her that to tone in this oval would be to answer a question the wall had been asking for three centuries, and that she had no business answering it with her own small pot of reversible gray. She left the face blank. That afternoon she went to the abbot and said she wanted the sealed chamber opened. He was in the chapter house, at the table where he wrote his letters, and he did not look up at once. He said, There is nothing in the chamber. She said, There is a door in the floor, bolted and mortared, and there is a place beneath it that has not been opened since Emmerich's time, and Brother Ansfrid has read the annals and told me what Emmerich did, and I am not going to go on working on a wall that is counting for a reason none of you will say. He set down his pen and looked at her, and she saw that he was not angry, which was worse. He said, I will show you the door. I will not open it. If I open it, one of two things happens, and I do not know which, and that is why it has stayed shut. Either the count finishes and the dead are released, and the house is forgiven, and all of this was merely a long darkness. Or the count finishes and the place that has been held open for the one who has no face is filled at last, and it is filled by the nearest living face, and I do not know whose that would be. I am the abbot. I do not get to gamble with a soul to find out which. She said, Then the wall gambles with it instead, every night, while you wait. He said, Yes. And now you understand why there are not many of us left. He took a candle and she followed him down the stone stair into the undercroft, along a passage she had not seen, to a small room beneath the chapter house where the floor was of flags, and in the center of the floor one flag was heavier than the rest and set with two iron staples, and between the staples an old bolt the width of her thumb, and around the flag the mortar had been smoothed and signed with a cross. The candle moved, and the iron caught the light, and Aloisia knelt and put her hand on the stone and felt, coming up through it, a small regular vibration, like a heartbeat heard through a wall, or like a hand moving slowly across a surface. She took her hand away. The abbot said, That is why it is mortared. She went back up to the church late, after Compline, when the house was silent, and she stood before the Doom with her lamp, and she looked at the blank face, and the blank face had a mouth now — a thin line at the bottom of the oval, and above it the faintest shadow where a nose might be, and the pale ground around them was very slightly warmer to the eye than it had been, as though something beneath it had begun, at last, to come up through the skin. ---