第18章 Giornata

There is a word in the trade for the unit of a fresco, and it is the oldest word she knew. A giornata is a day's work: the patch of fresh lime that a painter could cover between one sunrise and the next, before the plaster went hard and took the color no further. You can read a wall by its giornate the way you read a manuscript by its pages, the joins running invisibly through the finished picture, each one the exact length of a single human day. Aloisia thought about giornate on the morning after the feast, because she had come at last to the last unfinished passage of the wall, and she had to decide what a day's work could do. The cleaning was done, or all but done. Every figure on the Doom was legible now, from the judge to the mouth of hell, and the seven veils were gone from the fields she had opened, and what remained was the last passage at the head of the hidden company, where the tall figure stood with Notker's face and the place beside it where the sinopia had promised a figure and given none. That passage, she could clean in a day. What she could not do in a day, or a year, was decide what to put there. The abbot came to her in the church. He was thinner than he had been, and he moved like a man carrying something on his back, and he stood beside her before the wall and said, The prior is dead and Notker is dead and the house is six. Tell me what to do. She said, The wall will not accept the lime. She had tested it, secretly, the night of the feast: a patch of lime on the cleaned passage had not set. It had run and dried pale and then, in the morning, it had worried itself away from the plaster, leaving the figures as they had been, as though the wall had refused the veil the way skin refuses a dressing that does not fit. He said, Then we cannot hide it. She said, No. But hiding was never the choice. The choice was always between finishing the account and cutting it off. She took out the leaf of names, and the register, and she set them on the font and said, We have done the dead. We have written them in the book, all nineteen, and we have read them aloud, and the wall has given one of them back to us with a living face, and I do not know what that means and I am not going to pretend I do. But there is one thing left that the house has never done, and it is the reason the account has never closed. He asked what. She said, You have never counted the living. She opened the register to a fresh page and set her pen beside it. She said, Every brother who has died in this house in three hundred years is in this book, and every one of them is a figure in that wall, and not one living man has ever put his own name beside them. An account that counts the dead and not the living is a half-ledger, and it is why the ledger revises itself every night, hunting for the missing entry. Write your name. Write all your names, the six of you, beside the nineteen. Let it be one count, the way it was supposed to be in 1721, when the house hid forty-one people and then made them un-people so that it would not have to be counted with them. The abbot looked at the open page a long time. Then he took the pen and wrote his own name, Romuald, and the year, and beneath it he wrote the names of the dead of the house, and the names of the six living, and at the bottom he wrote the word Ursel with no surname, and below that he wrote, in a hand that shook, Aloisia Steindl, conservator, of the city. She said, I am not of the house. He said, You are the clerk. The clerk is counted. He set the pen down. He said, And if it is wrong, if what the prior believed is true, and the account closes over the living and takes them all, then let it be my sin and not yours, because I am the one who wrote my name first. That afternoon she finished the last giornata. She cleaned the final passage to the edge of the tall figure, and she came to the blank place beside it, the place the painter had left for a face and never given one, and she stood before it with the swab in her hand and did the only thing her trade allowed. She left it as it was. She would not paint a face into the place where the house had erased a person, and she would not tone it over, and she would not fill it with anything of her own, and she wrote in her report, in the language of the trade, the sentence she had been working toward for two months: Original loss, integral to the composition, intentionally unfinished. No intervention. The absence is the record. Giornata. A day's work. She had been given two months of days, and this was the last of them, and she stood on the ladder in the cold and thought about the painter who had come up the valley in the spring of 1722 and stayed the winter and left in the spring, and who had done what he was told and then, in the one act of conscience left to him, had put the face of the criminal in the center of the picture where the house would have to look at it every time it looked at the Doom. That man had known what she knew now: that a record is a record only when it is complete, and that a complete record is a judgment, and that no one can serve a wall and a lie at the same time. She cleaned the final passage, and left the blank place blank, and let the painter's small revenge stay where he had put it. She packed her lamp and her camera and her swabs, and left the ladder standing, and went to bed, and did not sleep, and waited for the morning to see what a finished account would do. ---